Call to kill, p.19
Call to Kill, page 19
‘Gentlemen,’ she began, ‘what you’re seeing here is a meeting between General Ruak Shahlai and Al-Qaeda operatives.’
Since Redford had received the intel about Shahlai’s planned attack, she had identified his likely base as being somewhere in the area surrounding Sa’dah. The eyes in the sky had been busy combing the area until they eventually established that Shahlai was using an old market north of the city. Since then, she’d had Langley run twenty-four-hour surveillance, following all the vehicles that came and went, tracking them across vast areas of desert until, nearly two days earlier, they had made an important discovery.
‘We believe the man leading the Al-Qaeda convoy to be Farook al-Rimi.’ She called up a US Army mugshot of Farook on the screen. ‘Farook is known to us as a former commander of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, known associate of Osama bin Laden and until his escape in 2015, was residing at the Parwan Detention Facility outside of Bagram.’
‘What is Al-Qaeda doing meeting an Iranian general?’ Parry asked. ‘Aren’t they meant to hate each other’s guts?’
Redford was quietly dismayed by the general’s reply. For the last three years she had been filing report after report from Yemen alerting her superiors to the growing evidence that covert deals were being struck between opposing factions. There were an overwhelming number of anecdotal examples of US-made military equipment, legally traded with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, falling into the hands of Houthi fighters. The official response had always been that weapons caches must have been abducted or recovered following skirmishes or withdrawals from battle: Certainly there were cases of UAE fighters leaving weapons behind which were discovered by advancing Houthi divisions, but she’d long suspected that something more coordinated was at play. Now she finally had the hard evidence that vindicated everything that she’d previously said, but it was important not to ram that fact down her superiors’ throats.
‘We believe some sort of deal was being struck, General,’ she explained.
‘Excuse me, Agent Redford,’ interrupted Strous, ‘but do we know who’s buying what?’
Redford allowed the video to play, zooming in on Shahlai’s men loading several crates on to the back of their trucks. She froze the tape as the men climbed back into their vehicles to drive away.
‘I’d say it’s clear that Shahlai is the buyer. We can’t get a close enough look at this resolution to see exactly what is in those crates, but our best estimate is that they contain small arms, possibly artillery.’
‘Chinese?’ Parry was again first to chime in. ‘Or Russian?’
‘American,’ Redford replied.
‘Bullshit.’ Parry wasn’t a man to mince his words.
‘I wish it was, General.’ Redford fast-forwarded the tape, following Shahlai’s trucks to his munitions factory in Sa’dah. She blew up an image of the buildings. ‘We now believe that Shahlai has been using this location to develop and adapt weapons for some time. We are concerned that could have long-term impact on our R&D, but our immediate fear is that he is planning to use US weapons in an attack against the Saudis.’
There was a collective draw of breath from every screen in the room. Redford didn’t pause to acknowledge it, instead she drew up the next tape. She played the tape showing a solitary truck leaving the market building and then fast forwarded to show it reaching the checkpoint on the road to Midi.
‘This vehicle left Shahlai’s base at 17:00 today, reaching the loyalist checkpoint outside of Midi at approximately 21:00 hours.’
‘Saudi-controlled territory?’
‘Correct. It’s what happens next that concerns us.’
She played the tape, just in from the spooks, so new that even Mason hadn’t seen it. The video clearly depicted the scene that had played out at the Midi checkpoint, the flash of the gun was clear for all to see. She froze the action and zoomed in on the grainy image until they could see the shooter’s face.
‘We’ve been able to make a positive ID from the image on Faisal Ahadi, one of Shahlai’s closest associates. It would seem they have accessed Midi.’ She ran the tape again, describing to the room what they were watching. ‘The vehicle doesn’t stop in the town but continues to the port, where it disappears into this track that leads to the beach. They kill the headlights here, so after that we don’t have pictures.’
The screen went dark for a moment as Redford stopped the tape and the faces appeared again.
‘What’s your assessment, Agent Redford?’
Redford was surprised to see that the question had come from Matt Mason sitting next to her. He’d ignored her when they’d had the chance to take Shahlai in Sana’a and Shahlai had escaped. She’d been so angry after that that she’d shut herself down to him in return. That had been a mistake. His assessment of what Shahlai was doing on the coast would now seem to have been accurate and it had been pig-headed of her to ignore him. They had lost valuable time as a result.
‘I… we believe that Ruak Shahlai is planning to use Midi port as a base from which to use US weapons in an attack against our ally, Saudi Arabia. I personally believe that is because it appeals to his sense of irony and because it gives Iran plausible deniability when the international community inevitably point the finger. But make no bones about it, gentlemen, he intends to create an environmental holocaust in the Red Sea.’
‘So, what exactly are we talking?’ Parry asked.
‘An oil spill five times the size of Exxon Valdez, which, due to the geography of the Red Sea, would result in losing the entire ecosystem of marine life, sea birds, fish stocks, dolphins, you name it—all gone, totally destroyed.’
‘Dolphins?’ The general rubbed his hand wearily over his eyes. ‘Agent Redford, can I remind you of Deepwater Horizon? Our own little oil spill right here in America not so long ago, which precisely zero people give one single fuck about any more. If Americans don’t give a fuck about American dolphins, Agent Redford, then you can be sure as shit they don’t give a fuck about Saudi ones.’
Redford bit her tongue and zoomed in on the map of the region, highlighting the coast north of Midi. She traced a line showing that the northern refineries were clustered around the city of Rabigh, a full six hundred miles north of the border.
‘Maybe they’ll care more about the economic impact,’ she said, highlighting all the Saudi refineries and ports along the coast. ‘This attack will take out every single Saudi oil-exporting port for a minimum of six months. Given Saudi’s central role in the international supply, you’re looking at hitting an oil price of two, three, maybe four hundred dollars in days. And if they retaliate against Iran, which they certainly will, then you can go north of eight hundred with that estimate. Do you know what an eight-hundred-dollar oil price would do to the US economy, General? It would mean deep structural damage to supply lines and industry, unemployment lines like we haven’t seen since the 1930s. In fact, you can take the Great Depression, throw in Lehman’s and the coronavirus, then triple it.’
‘Stop! Okay, I get it. Shit, you’ve got me thinking of buying a wind farm over here all of a sudden.’
‘It’s too late for that now, General.’ She addressed him directly. ‘At least, it is unless we stop this.’
‘Look, this is still conjecture, and we all know what the technological capabilities of the Houthis are,’ Dominic Strous finally chimed in, and not in a helpful way. ‘That’s way beyond their range.’
He was right, all previous attempts by the Houthis had proven that there was no way they could hit a ship in the sea from that kind of range.
‘But what if Shahlai’s found a way to strike in the north?’ Redford replied.
‘That’s rather a large assumption. I think we need to proceed with extreme caution,’ Strous said.
‘Agreed, we cannot afford another mistake,’ said one of Redford’s bosses.
‘How about we continue to run satellite observation for now and monitor how things progress?’ said Blandford.
There was a murmur of agreement in the room. Redford, on the other hand, heard the words and slowly felt her message start to disappear in a fog of political buck-passing. Neither side wanted to be the one to sanction another sortie into Yemeni sovereign territory so soon after the last fiasco. It dawned on her that another chance to stop Shahlai might be slipping through her grip, only this time the consequences would be catastrophic.
Langley had not listened to her before. They had underestimated Shahlai time and again, assuming him to be an agitator, a petty-minded thug whose ambitions stretched only to beheading a heathen or two on YouTube. Nobody but her had expected him to actually create real damage. But now there was a very real danger that he would seriously damage the whole planet. The monster that had been allowed to grow in Yemen was going to become the rest of the world’s very own nightmare unless they did something about it fast.
‘We could take a small team,’ Mason said finally, interrupting the politicians. ‘If there’s nothing there, then we pull back. If there is, then we take them out.’
‘Aren’t you the guy who got us into this mess?’ asked Parry.
‘Staff Sergeant Mason was hardly—’ Redford began, but Mason cut across her.
‘Yes I am, General. And I lost one of my best men, so I want to sort this out more than anyone.’
‘I appreciate that, Staff Sergeant,’ Parry said, ‘not easy losing a guy on your watch.’
‘No, sir.’
The room waited for the general to speak again. Whatever power dynamic they’d all come into the room with, it was clear who they were expecting to make the final call. The general rubbed his eyes again and let out a snort.
‘Okay, well look. Here’s my play,’ he said. ‘A small operational team. We go in under cover. Get eyes on whatever these guys are up to in the port, and if we need to, then we take him out. Otherwise we’re out of there fast as we came in. Can we agree?’
Another general murmur of agreement. The British pair stayed particularly quiet, happy that the US were seen to be making the call. Redford’s boss shrugged to indicate that it wouldn’t have been the call that she would have made, but she could live with it.
‘Okay. So we’re go. Godspeed.’ The general hung up the call.
Redford looked round to Mason and without anyone else in the room noticing, she mouthed, ‘Thank you’.
Mason nodded back. They had finally developed some kind of an understanding. They’d both fucked up once and there couldn’t be a next time. They officially had to work together, but unofficially, they knew that they had to make sure that whatever Shahlai was planning, they stopped it before it was too late. After that, they could focus on bringing him in.
Thirty-Four
Midi, Yemen
The old port of Midi could be better described these days as a graveyard. What once had been the epicentre of a flourishing community of fishermen and traders was now nothing more than a bombed-out scrapyard of decommissioned ships and hollowed-out fishing boats. The sea wall that once protected the boats from storms, reinforced with local stone, was now littered with the debris of shattered hulls and rusty containers. The dockside, which had once teemed with dockers landing food and goods from boats around the world, and later served as a landing site for arms from Iran, was now just a pock-marked crater, destroyed systematically by relentless aerial bombardment from Saudi planes.
In the last year since the town had fallen to forces loyal to Hadi and the House of Saud, the Houthi forces had fled back to the safety of the desert and some hope had slowly returned. The Saudis had donated new fishing boats to several families in the town and offered them safe passage through the heavily mined waters to the north, into their own fishing grounds, where they could operate in safety under the cover of the Saudi Navy. Steadily, life had returned to Midi’s shoreline.
Faisal Ahadi had made it his mission to study the area and also what had gone wrong on previous attempts by the Houthis to strike at Saudi targets in the sea. A keen student, he had been intrigued to discover that the use of suicide boats could be traced all the way back to the American Civil War, when Confederate forces used semi-submersible crafts packed with explosives against Union forces. Later, during World War Two, the Italians, Japanese and even the Germans had used suicide boats with success. Al-Qaeda had brought the technique into the twenty-first century when they had used a suicide boat to destroy the USS Cole, killing dozens of US marines. But the prospect of success for the Houthis repeating such a feat had diminished with each failure. The Saudi coalition had learned quickly and had strengthened the naval blockade around Yemen, using its huge superiority on the seas to maintain calm.
Both coasts of the Red Sea were of major commercial interest to the Saudis. On the East African coast, there were several important Emirati and Saudi naval and military bases in Eritrea and Djibouti, which played an important role in the war in Yemen, serving as logistical staging areas for Saudi operations and for the control of the sea lanes. It was Faisals ambition that, if he could refine the suicide boats and make them more successful, then one day even those bases would become legitimate targets.
But for now, he was focused on something closer to home. He believed that the previous attempts to use the fast boats had been scuppered because they were too obvious. The strategy in the past had been only to go fast, without considering that the Saudis would always go faster. When the general had set him the task of getting past the Saudis, he had decided that sacrificing speed was worth it if, in return, the boats could remain unseen. Faisal had seen that was a much smarter way to approach the problem and so his solution was to get to the target using boats that nobody would suspect.
With the port in tatters, Midi’s fishermen had instead started to pull their new fishing boats up on to the sandy beach to the south at the end of each day. The beach ran a clear mile south of the marina and the fishermen had built a collection of single-storey mud-brick shacks along its length to house their equipment and engines.
By the time Faisal Ahadi and his men had arrived at the beach, they had already acquired a detailed knowledge of every one of the boats along it from their owners, the men that Ruak Shahlai had kidnapped and tortured in Al Hudaydah over the previous two weeks. Four of the fishermen who owned the new Saudi boats had eventually been very forthcoming in sharing the details of their day-to-day lives. They had explained not only where their boats were positioned on the beach, but also their routes and in which shack their equipment was stored.
Faisal had been able to easily access one of the mud-brick shacks, and once inside, he and his comrades began carefully unpacking the contents of their truck. Once everything was unloaded, they had hidden the truck among the sand dunes, locked themselves in the shack and got to work.
The four men set themselves up in opposite corners of the building and began carefully unpacking the contents of four of five wooden crates from the truck, laying their contents out on blankets on the ground. Once all the crates were empty, they each began placing the items according to the schematic drawings that they had downloaded on their phones.
The explosives from the munitions factory in Sa’dah were arranged in paired sets of armaments, each allocated to their appropriate mechanism. They had been developed expertly, adapted by the craftsmen in Sa’dah so that each man had four charges to be matched with the stripped-out contents of four fin-stabilised Ml20 mortar rounds. The warheads from each mortar had been stripped from their casings and repurposed, so that they could be set with an impact fuse. Once in place, the fuse allowed the pin to come directly into contact with its target, upon which the percussion cap would create a small spark that fired down into the detonator and caused the main explosion.
It was essential to have no distance between the explosion and the boat to get the full impact. The first set of charges would be placed on the bow and set to explode on impact, while the two placed port and starboard were set with a half-second delay. Once the first bombs had done the damage and penetrated the steel outer skin on the tanker, the second pair of bombs would do the same to the inner skin.
As well as the four warheads, they had a quantity of plastic explosive to strap to each device. The warhead explosion alone would almost certainly do enough damage, but the plastic explosives were there to be doubly sure. Once the whole lot went up, there wasn’t much it wouldn’t take with it.
The icing on the cake came from four jerrycans full of petrol and a sack of washing powder. Faisal shared the washing powder out in smaller bags, strapping each one to each can of fuel. When the explosives went off, the petrol would go up like the American Fourth of July, and the sticky washing powder would ensure that the flames attached to the hull, turning each boat into a devastating incendiary device.
Faisal surveilled the assembled parts that lay in front of him, marvelling at how not a single piece would be traceable back to Iran. In fact, other than the jerrycans which were Yemeni, everything was labelled with US manufacturers’ serial codes. The scheme devised by General Shahlai was brilliant; striking at the heart of their enemy while exposing the corruption and hypocrisy that typified their regime.
Once he had all the components set, Faisal began connecting each part together just as he had been told, following the instructions that he had memorised before leaving the munitions factory. He moved slowly and methodically first, wiring the warheads to the fuses and then packing the plastic explosives. He thought to himself how there really was nothing that they could not do now, even from a base in the northern regions of the Yemeni desert. Everything was at their fingertips. The domination of smaller powers by their larger neighbours would soon be a thing of the past. War had been democratised, even if the people had not.
When he was satisfied that he had finished, he placed the four explosive devices to one side and returned to the last remaining crate. The last thing each man had to do was to put together a radio-controlled kit. The engineers had designed four sets of servos with electric fuses and motors stripped from car windshield wipers and had adapted them to fit to the throttle and tiller inside of the boats. Using a simple remote-control joystick, an operator could remotely control the speed and direction of the boat from up to half a mile away. It would be enough to get the boat through the minefields and the Saudi blockade and into the open waters of the Red Sea. From there, they could set the boats on a specific heading for the point of impact and later adjustments could be made using GPS technology adapted from the US drones they had shot down over the desert.
