Zebari stared out at the bridge wing to make sure he had time, that Abdul was still out there, then stepped off the bridge into his day cabin, quickly opened the safe and took out a nine-millimetre Browning semi-automatic pistol. He checked that the magazine was loaded, pulled back the slide to chamber a round and stuffed the weapon into the rear waistband of his trousers, checking first that the safety catch was on. He hadn’t been lying to Abdul, because there was another pistol – a Berretta – in the safe as well. He’d just been economical with the truth. He had two pistols, not just one.
Then he stepped off the bridge and made his way cautiously but as fast as he could down the internal staircase, the pistol now in his hand and the safety catch released.
He was heading for a place he had hoped he would never, ever have to use in his career as a seaman officer, but now it really was the only space on the ship he could go.
There are a surprisingly large number of spaces where a man can be concealed on even a fairly small ship: not just cabins but machinery spaces, kitchens, pantries, cold stores, mess rooms, bathrooms, lavatories, general store rooms, equipment lockers, voids, holds, passageways and staircases and all the rest. Finding suitable nooks and crannies where a dozen people could hide themselves from view hadn’t been that difficult.
In their various hiding places, the SEALs had prepped their assault rifles, checked their spare magazines and their handguns, and then just waited for the go signal, a noise they knew they’d hear wherever they were on board the vessel.
The moment the fog horn sounded, nine SEALs and two CIA officers eased themselves out of concealment and began making their way towards their pre-briefed positions. Two of them didn’t have that far to go. One emerged from a closed steel door on the back of the accommodation section, while the second stepped out of a much smaller locker near the bow. Both men took up concealed positions from which they could see down the starboard side of the Muttrah where it was secured to the port side of the other ship. Then they aimed their Heckler & Koch 416 assault rifles at the group of Iranians and let their fellow soldiers know where they were.
‘Sierra One in position.’
‘Sierra Two in position.’
Moloch double-clicked his transmit button in acknowledgement.
Richter didn’t have far to go either. He had tucked himself away in Zebari’s tiny sea cabin or, to be accurate, in the adjacent and even smaller shower room-cum-lavatory and stepped back into the sea cabin less than a second after the captain had sounded the fog horn. He’d waited there while Zebari had collected his weapon.
‘They’re going to kill the crew of the other ship,’ the captain whispered as he opened the safe and then left the bridge.
Richter stayed in the shower room, his Heckler & Koch tucked behind the door, and listened intently to the exchanges of radio calls through the earpiece Moloch had supplied. Then he made a transmission once he knew the snipers were in position.
‘Sierras from Richter. They intend killing the crew of the other ship. Take out anyone who tries it.’
‘Roger.’
Moments later, Abdul stepped back onto the bridge.
‘Zebari?’ he demanded, looking around at the deserted command position. ‘Zebari? Where are you?’
Richter waited until the Iranian had turned his back to the sea cabin door, then stepped out.
Whether he made a noise or if the other man somehow sensed that he was no longer alone Richter would never know, but as he closed to a distance of about four or five feet the Iranian swung round, the muzzle of the pistol in his right hand looking for a target.
Richter could have shot him there and then but he wanted the man alive and talking, not dead, so he took his finger off the trigger of his Glock and powered straight into him as he turned, slamming into the man. He smashed the Iranian back against the bridge windows and swung his own pistol at the side of the man’s head like a club.
But Abdul had obviously learned his trade as a street fighter, saw it coming and ducked under the blow. At the same instant, he pulled the trigger of his weapon, but Richter was so close to him that the bullet passed harmlessly a few inches behind his back.
Before he could adjust his aim, Richter continued the swing with his right hand and smashed the butt of his Glock into Abdul’s right forearm.
The Iranian howled with pain and his pistol clattered to the floor of the bridge. But he recovered instantly, ignoring the fallen weapon and driving his left arm, the edge of his hand held rigid, straight towards Richter’s throat. If the blow had connected that would have been the end of it, because it would have smashed his windpipe.
But that wasn’t Richter’s first rodeo either, and he blocked the Iranian’s attack with his own left hand, deflecting the blow to one side. And then he reversed the direction his right hand was moving in and swung it with as much force as he could, aiming his Glock at the right side of Abdul’s face.
This time, the Iranian couldn’t duck.
The butt of the pistol slammed into his jaw and he toppled sideways, unconscious.
‘Bastard,’ Richter muttered, bending down to pick up the pistol Abdul had dropped and tucking it into his waist band. It was a Glock 17, the kind of steady and reliable workhorse pistol found almost everywhere these days. Even the British police carried Glocks.
He reached down and pressed his fingers against the carotid artery in the man’s neck. The pulse was good and strong, which was what he had hoped.
He rolled the unconscious Iranian onto his front, pulled his arms behind him and secured his wrists with two cable ties that he pulled tight and repeated the treatment on the man’s ankles. Then he turned him round and lay him against the bulkhead at the front of the bridge.
Moments later, as Richter stood a few feet away, watching the activity below, the Iranian began to come around, and within about half a minute his eyes were fully open. He visibly tested his bonds, then stopped moving and stared balefully at Richter.
‘The captain had to step out for a moment,’ Richter said in English. ‘And now he’s tucked himself away where you’ll never get to him. You do speak English, don’t you? If you don’t, I’m just going to have to kill you right now.’
‘I do speak English,’ Abdul said, his words slightly slurred due to the effects of the blow he’d taken to his jaw. He spat out a gobbet of blood and what was probably a piece of tooth. ‘Who are you?’
‘Who I am doesn’t matter,’ Richter said.
‘No, it probably doesn’t, because there are almost twenty of us and only one of you. So no matter who you are or what you do, you’ve just signed your own death warrant.’
‘That’s not necessarily true,’ Richter said, ‘because I brought a few friends along with me.’
On the deck below, the three Iranian soldiers walked over towards the gunwale, their Kalashnikovs at the ready, looking forward to taking out some easy targets that wouldn’t be able to shoot back.
Richter heard the radio exchange which meant that wasn’t going to happen.
‘Sierra One from Two. I’ll take the first and third. The other one’s yours. Okay?’
‘Roger.’
A couple of crewmen from the crippled ship were on deck, probably doing something essentially pointless bearing in mind it was probably sinking, a task as fruitless as re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. One of the Iranian soldiers pointed at them and said something, and his two companions laughed.
Then he moved the fire selector lever on the right-hand side of the Kalashnikov all the way down, to the semi-automatic position, and raised the weapon to his shoulder.
As he did so, and his two companions mirrored his action, lifting their own weapons to take aim, two shots ripped through the quiet of the evening, so close together they sounded like a single report. He collapsed sideways, dead even before his head smashed into the deck. At the same time, the second of the soldiers fell in the opposite direction, again killed instantly. The last soldier stood there by the gunwale for a bare half-second, his world instantly ripped apart by the totally unexpected shots and by shock, and then Sierra One’s second bullet tore his heart to pieces.
On the other ship, the crewmen ran for cover.
Down on the deck, the Iranian soldiers had reacted almost immediately as the echoes of the shots died away. They knew they were under attack, obviously, but they didn’t know who by, where from or why. The Iranians, professional soldiers to a man and all of whom had been in active combat many times before, ducked down into cover. As they began looking for targets they knew one thing for certain: they weren’t facing a couple of crew members armed with revolvers or rifles. The shots had been too accurately placed and too fast for that. Whoever had pulled the triggers – and there had to have been at least two of them – were professionals. They were troops of some sort.
They also knew that the shots had come from two different directions, simply because of the way the bodies of their fellow soldiers lay sprawled on the deck. That meant two snipers, one near the bow and the other at the stern of the ship.
In the absence of their officer – he was still up on the bridge – the senior Non-Commissioned Officer took charge, urgently issuing crisp orders. Two men were to make their way to the bow to find and eliminate the sniper there, while two others headed for the stern, around the back of the accommodation section to do the same thing to the other man.
Almost for the first time, the NCO noticed that none of the ship’s crew members were visible anywhere on deck, He hadn’t seen where they went, but they must have headed into the vessel’s superstructure. He called out the names of four of his men.
‘Find the crew,’ he ordered. ‘They must be hiding in the accommodation section. Find some of them, drag them out here and stick your pistols in their faces. We need hostages, human shields, and we need them right now. The rest of you, spread out and check every centimetre of this ship. Move it.’