The surface of the Red Sea was choppy, the waves bigger than they had appeared from the deck of the Muttrah, but that was normal and exactly what Groves and Whelan had expected: the sea state always looked calmer from the deck of a ship than from a tiny boat bouncing along on the surface. It wasn’t especially rough, but it was uncomfortable, certainly, the bow of the skiff powering into the waves and sending sprays of salt water out to each side, and quite a lot of it into the skiff itself.
As a complication, in order to overtake the target vessel the skiff could only be steered within a fairly narrow range of headings and that direction was not, predictably enough, the direction from which the waves were approaching the boat. That was from fine on the port beam, which meant the bouncing motion was overlaid with a pronounced rolling every time the skiff slid down into a trough between the waves. All that reduced their forward progress rather more than they had expected, but the two men were experienced SEALs, at home on or in the water, and they were used to it. All it really meant was that they couldn’t go quite as fast as they had expected to which, in turn, meant they were overhauling the target ship a little slower than they’d planned. The fact that the Muttrah had taken quite a distance to reduce speed before it was travelling slowly enough to launch the skiff had factored in a further delay.
But none of this appeared to matter, because the skiff was travelling at about twenty knots and would still pass the target within around ten minutes of the planned time. And time wasn’t even particularly critical. The only other factor was that they’d checked the radar display before they prepared to launch the skiff, looking for a sizeable gap in the constant ship traffic up and down the Red Sea, and the two SEALs knew they had about thirty minutes before the ships would encounter more vessels heading south.
While Groves steered the skiff, Whelan began his final preps on the improvised weapon. The biggest part of the fabricated device consisted of the buoyancy aid, the black-painted plastic container, which had been half-filled with water so that it would float just below the surface, only the very top of it – in fact the bottom of the container because it would be floating upside down – visible in the waves. A rope had been tied around the handle of the container, and about a metre below that was the explosive itself.
C4 – Composition 4 – is remarkably stable and is unaffected by water, and the biggest problem they’d had was devising some kind of container that would hold the plastic explosive securely and be rigid enough to protect the fuses when the device was flung against the side of the ship. The worst case scenario, obviously, would be for the impact with the target’s hull to knock the detonators out of the C4, which would reduce the explosive to nothing more than a lump of harmless putty.
They’d been limited, obviously, by what they had been able to find in the ship’s storerooms, but they had cobbled together something that they thought should work. In the cubical box on deck was the equipment they would have needed if they were going to board the target ship from the skiffs, including grappling irons, climbing ropes, rope ladders and so on, and Moloch was hopefully peering inside the box when he realised that a couple of the grappling hooks would do the job. He picked out two of them, but they needed something else.
The best they could do was line the inner part of the grappling hooks with aluminium foil from the ship’s galley to create a kind of rudimentary container. Then his men wrapped and moulded the C4 into the cavity, pressing it down hard so that it would stay in place. But they needed something else to make sure the device remained intact, and again the ship’s stores helped out. They took a couple of small plastic buckets, drilled half a dozen holes in their bottoms so that they wouldn’t float, and then placed one of the grappling hook charges in each of them. The bucket would serve to protect the device when it hit the side of the target ship. Or that was what they hoped, anyway.
They both saw the cargo ship in the distance as they cleared the port side of the Muttrah, and Groves steered towards it, but a couple of times he brought the skiff to almost a complete standstill in the water as he approached, as if he and his companion were checking lobster pots or fishing nets, which he hoped would make the vessel look innocent and, more importantly, establish a pattern in the minds of the men he was sure would be watching the boat’s approach from the bridge and the deck of the freighter, which they could now see clearly.
‘Can’t make out the name,’ Whelan said, staring at the ship’s stern, ‘but it’s registered in Valletta, Malta.’
‘Probably not Maltese, then,’ Groves replied. ‘That’s a flag of convenience, nothing more. Could be pretty much any nationality.’
Groves steered the skiff past the freighter, keeping about three hundred yards clear of its port side, and steering a straight course. He again brought the skiff to a halt when it was almost abeam the cargo ship, and the two men bent over the side of the boat, pretending to fiddle with something in the water, before resuming the northerly course.
‘Reckon that’s about a mile and a quarter right now,’ Whelan said.
Then they both checked the alignment. Groves had steered the skiff over to starboard, so that it was now fine on the starboard bow of the target ship, pretty much where they wanted it to be.
Groves nodded and closed the throttle.
Whelan inserted the fuse into the compacted C4 and triggered it, and did the same for the other explosive device. Then he and Whelan lifted one end of the weapon and lowered it over the side of the skiff, the side opposite the approaching ship, and both watched critically as it settled into the choppy water. It floated as they had expected, the black-painted bottom of the partly-filled plastic container projecting only three or four inches above the surface. It would be virtually invisible in the gathering darkness.
‘Looks good,’ Whelan said, and began paying out the linking rope as Groves steered the skiff across the Red Sea towards the Egyptian shore.
Less than a minute later, the two men lowered the other end into the sea and Groves started to steer the skiff west again. They’d gone maybe a couple of hundred yards when Whelan’s radio crackled into life.
‘Golf Whisky, this is Hotel Bravo. Tango course change, over.’
‘What the fuck?’ Whelan muttered.
‘Golf Whisky’ was the callsign of the skiff – just the initial letters of the surnames of the two SEALs – ‘Hotel Bravo’ was the Muttrah – ‘home base’, and ‘Tango’ was the universal designator for a target or member of the opposition or enemy.
‘Clarify, over,’ Whelan responded.
‘Five degrees to port, over.’
‘Roger, out.’
Nobody in the military ever, under any circumstances, says ‘over and out’ because it’s completely meaningless and internally contradictory. ‘Over’ means ‘I have finished what I was saying, now over to you to reply’, while ‘out’ means ‘That is the end of my transmission.’
Groves swung the skiff around in a tight circle until it was directly in line with the bow of the freighter.
Whelan was staring back the way they’d come, his set of NVGs now on his head.
‘They’re right,’ he said. ‘The fucking ship’s turned.’
‘You reckon they’ve seen the IED?’
Groves pulled on his NVGs as well, the ship instantly visible in the greenish glow the device produced.
‘No clue,’ Whelan replied. ‘But I’m buggered if I can see the float and I’m only about twenty yards away from it.’
Then Whelan’s radio crackled again.
‘Golf Whisky from Hotel Bravo, suspect routine course change. Out.’
And then both men guessed the reason. Looking around, they could see a slight kink in the coastline of the Red Sea in the vicinity of Yanbu: the eastern shore to the north of them was slightly differently aligned than the shore to the south. If the coaster hadn’t turned and had maintained the same heading as previously, it would have run aground a few miles to the north. The new course would keep the ship parallel to the eastern shoreline. That was good news – they presumably hadn’t been spotted – but also bad news, as Groves immediately realised.
‘It’s going to miss the rope,’ he said. ‘Shit.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Pretty much, yeah. Might just catch it, but I doubt it.’
The clock was ticking. The detonators had been armed and inserted, and if they did nothing about it – and quickly – the ship would pass the device and the two charges would detonate harmlessly a few minutes later, and well behind the vessel. If that happened, they were back to ramming or boarding it, and the explosions would have alerted everybody on board the freighter because they would assume, correctly, that it was some kind of enemy action, so either option would be difficult at best.
They had to make their plan work.
In low light conditions it is essential for one person to keep his eyes fixed on a floating object, because if you lose sight of it even for a few seconds, it may be impossible to ever find it again. Inevitably, in the fading light both men had lost sight of the floating container they’d deposited minutes earlier, but in this case that wasn’t too big a problem. Groves steered the skiff south-east, towards the shore, and in less than two minutes the bow had snagged on the floating rope that linked the two explosive devices.
‘Do we start again?’ he asked as he turned the vessel west again to follow the rope. ‘Pull out the detonators and dump them, then reposition it?’
‘Yes, as long as we do it real fast.’
Groves kept the outboard motor running, but at low revs as they followed the floating rope west, and in about a minute Whelan raised his hand to tell him to stop. Together, they hauled the floating container and the explosive device below it out of the water and into the skiff.
Whelan reached into the plastic bucket holding the C4 charge, his fingers searching for the end of the pencil detonator.
‘Got it,’ he said, pulling out and holding it so that Groves could see it – a basic rule in dealing with military explosives of all types. You always let your partner see exactly what you’re doing. One man does, the second man checks. Simple, basic and infallible as long as you do it right.
Whelan lifted his arm to drop the detonator over the side of the skiff, but as he did so Groves grabbed his arm.
‘What?’
‘It’s not going to work,’ Groves said urgently. ‘That’s a fifteen-minute fuse and by my watch you armed it six minutes ago so it’ll go bang in nine minutes. That’s not enough time to get to the other end of the floating rope and disarm the other weapon before that fucking ship is right on top of us. Stick the detonator back in. We’ll just drag the thing into the right location.’
Whelan looped the rope around one of the seats. When it was secure he gave a thumbs up. Groves opened the throttle on the outboard and the skiff began tracking west, moving slowly because of the dragging effect of the rope and the other IED.
Whelan was watching the steadily approaching cargo ship and raised his hand again when he reckoned they were in about the right spot.
The skiff stopped almost immediately. Together, they manhandled the device over the side. Both men looked back at the freighter, assessing its speed, and more importantly its heading. They obviously couldn’t see the far end of the floating rope, but knew it had to be directly astern of them.
‘That should do it,’ Groves said. ‘You happy with that?’
‘I’ll be a fuck sight happier when we’re somewhere else,’ Whelan replied, ‘but I think that’s a good line-up. Those fuses are running, so let’s get the hell out of here.’
Groves nodded, opened the throttle and steered the boat towards the distant western shore of the Red Sea. Both men had seen the effects of a blast of C4 explosive before and didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when either of the devices blew.
‘Maybe four or five minutes to go now, maximum,’ Whelan said, looking at the dial of his watch as Groves kept the speed of the skiff at around twenty-five knots, bouncing and crashing over the waves. They wanted to put at least a couple of miles between them and the freighter.
Whelan looked back, using his NVGs to study the ship.
‘Should be getting close to the rope right about now,’ he said.
Two minutes later, as Groves swung the skiff in a wide circle to head back towards the Muttrah, the relative silence of the dark waters was broken by the sudden bark of an explosion, only slightly muffled by the underwater detonation.
‘That’s number one,’ Whelan said, and then they waited.
But there was no second detonation.
‘Maybe the fuse got knocked out of the plastic when it hit the side of the ship,’ Groves suggested, keeping the speed up.
Before Whelan could reply, they both heard a second explosion, but this one was clearly some way behind the target ship. Through their NVGs both men could see the spray of water perhaps a couple of hundred yards astern of the vessel.
‘Makes sense,’ Groves said. ‘When the first charge blew, that would have released most of the pressure on the rope, and maybe the drag of the other charge pulled the rope around the bow and behind the ship.’
‘Maybe,’ Whelan agreed. ‘So let’s hope one was enough.’
Groves closed the throttle, allowing the skiff to come to a stop, though it was far from stationary, bobbing and rolling in the waves. Both men stared at the ship, which appeared to be steaming forward at about the same speed as previously. That wasn’t necessarily significant: any ship is a big and heavy chunk of metal and machinery, and the momentum would keep it going forward for some distance even if the hull had been holed or the engines had stopped.
‘Okay,’ Groves said. ‘We’ve done our bit. Let’s get out of here and see what the score really is.’
‘Hotel Bravo, this is Golf Whisky,’ Whelan said into his radio. ‘We’re Romeo Tango Bravo. Out.’
They might have been Romeo Tango Bravo – RTB or return to base – but both men knew what they’d done was only the first step of the operation. The dangerous bit was about to start.