Up to that point, it had all gone more or less as Richter and Moloch had expected. And then suddenly the plan fell off the rails.
The Iranians had reacted far faster and far more competently than the SEALs had expected. Although the weaponry the two sides possessed was similar, the American troops were outnumbered and, in any conflict, numbers matter. On the main deck, the Iranians were perceptibly gaining the upper hand because there were enough of them for one to provide covering fire while his companion moved, and they were starting to out-flank the SEALs, trying to catch them in a cross-fire. And it looked to Richter as if they were going to succeed.
He stepped out onto the bridge wing, aimed his Heckler & Koch MP5 towards a couple of the Iranians who were looking for targets and looking for trouble, and squeezed off a short burst. Firing at targets that are much higher or lower than the shooter is something of an art, an art that Richter had never really mastered. So he wasn’t entirely surprised that his shots missed. Both Iranians ducked to one side, moving in opposite directions to present two targets.
If he had managed to hit them, it would have been a bonus, but what he was actually trying to do was draw their attention. And in that he succeeded.
Almost instantly, the two soldiers opened up with their Kalashnikovs, aiming at the bridge, and were immediately joined by at least two other men. On the bridge, Richter was immune to the barrage, the steel plating of the ship and the armoured glass of the windows – strengthened against the worst of the weather rather than the impact of bullets, though the result was much the same – deflecting their rounds without any problems. But what he’d done meant that they were looking in the wrong direction when two of the SEALs popped up from behind one of the two half-sized steel shipping containers on the deck and started picking them off.
Then the tide of battle started to turn the other way.
The four soldiers who’d entered the accommodation section were getting nowhere. Every cabin and space they entered, weapons at the ready, was deserted. The ship’s crew had to be hiding somewhere, obviously, but they’d neither seen nor heard anything of them since they’d cautiously filed in through the outer steel door.
Then they did hear something – footsteps from the deck above – and instantly tensed, aiming their AK-47s up the stairs as they prepared to move.
Then they heard something else. A kind of rhythmic metallic thumping, getting closer, followed by the unmistakable sound of a door slamming shut.
And then they realised their luck had just run out. A grenade dropped the last few steel steps towards them, followed about a second later by another one. The weapons bounced to a stop side-by-side on the steel plating of the deck, and before any of them could react – not that there was anything they could do, because they were completely exposed with nowhere to hide – they both detonated virtually simultaneously.
Those four Iranians were the lucky ones.
A full-scale firefight was still raging on the deck. The Iranians, less the three soldiers who’d been taken down in the first barrage, had taken shelter wherever they could – and there were countless heavy steel structures they could use as shields, including the deck crane and the cargo of steel drums they’d trans-shipped – while the SEALs were still using the shipping containers as defensive positions.
Both groups were well protected, so firing was sporadic because there was no point in shooting at a man you couldn’t see behind a wall of steel. The other problem was directly related to that one: whenever a weapon was fired, it wasn’t just the bullet both sides had to worry about, but the ricochets. A copper-jacketed round slamming into a steel plate sent needle-sharp shards of metal flying in all directions, and getting hit by them was just as painful, and could be almost as dangerous, as a wound caused directly by a bullet.
Both the Iranians and the SEALs were taking casualties, but the Iranians now had to cope with their enemies on the deck as well as firing from the bridge, and Richter’s actions had managed to fatally divert their attention. He could see that a couple of the SEALs had been wounded, but were still firing, while at least half a dozen of the Iranian soldiers lay unmoving on the deck, the dark pools of blood beneath their bodies telling the tale.
Inside the accommodation section, two SEALs ran down the staircase a couple of seconds after the grenades had detonated, only carrying their SiG P226 pistols.
The scene that greeted them was more or less what they’d expected. No blood and guts and dead bodies, just four shocked and incapacitated men trying to recover from the near-simultaneous explosions of two stun grenades, their effect grossly magnified by the confined space in which the detonations had taken place.
The SEALs quickly removed the pistols and Kalashnikovs from the men, and then used their ubiquitous plastic cable ties to secure their wrists and ankles, making sure they weren’t going to be able to move when they finally came round.
Ragged volleys of shots sounded at both ends of the ship as the two snipers and the Iranians sent to kill them exchanged fire. The advantage was with the snipers, because their attackers didn’t know where the SEALs had taken up position, and there was no proper cover the Iranians could use to get close to them.
The result was never in doubt, and that just magnified the problems the Iranians faced because the snipers had another plan.
The two ships were still tied together, side-by-side and, as soon as the SEAL snipers had disposed of the men sent after them, they both hopped over onto the other ship, found themselves vantage points in the superstructure and then began picking off targets on the Muttrah the moment they had clear shots.
Despite being outnumbered roughly two-to-one, fifteen minutes after the first shots had been fired it was all over. The element of surprise, and the fact that the SEALs had been expecting the Iranians but the Iranians hadn’t been expecting the SEALs, made a huge and crucial difference.
Of the eighteen Iranians in the group, seven, including the one calling himself Abdul, were alive and trussed up like turkeys. One of them – Abdul again – was nursing a blinding headache after his encounter with the butt of Richter’s Glock, while the others were still suffering from the blasts of the stun grenades. Nine of the remaining eleven were dead, and two had suffered debilitating but not life-threatening wounds. Five of the SEALs had minor injuries caused by shrapnel from the ricochets, as had Richard Moore, and two of them had also taken bullets, in both cases in the left arm. Again, these were painful but not serious, and they were given immediate medical treatment by their colleagues as soon as the shooting stopped.
‘It worked, then,’ John Moloch said to Richter when he walked onto the bridge. Moloch’s combat uniform was smeared with blood, but he appeared to be unhurt.
‘It did. This character—’ Richter pointed at Abdul lying against the front bulkhead of the bridge ‘—appears to have been in charge of the shambles. He might have some useful information to give us, if we ask him nicely. Or if we ask him nastily, come to that.’
‘Something I noticed while I was on the deck,’ Moloch said.
‘Yes?’
‘On the drums. They all have that name Zeolite on them, but there are another three words underneath, written in much smaller letters. It says “Produce of Jordan” in English, so I guess that’s just a bit of disinformation.’
‘I think Jordan does produce Zeolite,’ Richter said, ‘so that would make sense and start the Israelis looking in the wrong direction when the pandemic hit them.’
‘So what do we do about that?’ Moloch asked, nodding towards the ship alongside them.
‘I don’t know. I suppose it all depends on whether or not it is sinking, or if the watertight compartments can keep it afloat. We do know it’s going nowhere under its own steam because we fucked up its rudder and propeller. We’ll need to talk to Zebari, see what he thinks. I’ll go and get him.’
Richter walked all the way down to the bottom of the accommodation section, and then made his way below decks. He approached what looked like a steel bulkhead and rapped sharply on it three times, then twice, and then twice more. He heard the sound of a substantial bolt being moved, and then the steel door, for that’s what it was, swung slowly open. The door was thick enough to deflect any missile fired at it short of an armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade.
Inside the small hidden compartment sat or stood the entire crew of the Muttrah, all completely unharmed. Because of the routes the ship took around Oman and that part of the Middle East, it had frequently passed south of the notorious pirate coast of Yemen, and the owners of the vessel had insisted on having a citadel installed so that if pirates did board the ship they would be unable to hold the crew hostage. The installation also routed the engine and steering controls to the citadel as well as providing an emergency radio.
The procedure, which the crew had practiced on several occasions, would be for them all to enter the citadel, lock the door – which could not be opened from the outside – and to then set the ship sailing in a tight circle at minimum speed so that it would hold the same position. And at the same time they would broadcast an emergency message giving the navigational position and details of the hijacking. Rescue forces could then storm the ship without having to worry about the crew, who would all be safely tucked away below decks in the citadel. Since the Yemeni and Somali pirates had begun operating, that had been a standard safety measure employed by many shipping lines.
The presence of the citadel had been the final specific factor that Richter had needed to ensure that the plan would work safely.
Two hours later, the ships separated.
Zebari had discussed the situation with the other captain, and although the Egyptian vessel was dead in the water in terms of propulsion, the generators were still running and the bilge pumps were just about coping with the inflow of water. Three compartments had been flooded, but the watertight doors were doing their job and there was no immediate danger of the ship sinking. A tug had been requested from Port Sudan, the closest harbour, and it was already on its way.
As for the Muttrah, it was heading back to Salalah, but first it had an additional unscheduled stop to make. A substantial number of diplomatic strings had been pulled and favours granted, mainly by the American State Department, and clearance had been obtained for the Muttrah to call in at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.
At the Jeddah King Abdul Aziz International Airport an American heavy-lift transport aircraft would be waiting to collect the steel drums containing the contaminated Zeolite, which would be examined and the contents analysed – carefully but as a matter of urgency – at Fort Detrick and the Centers for Disease Control back in the States. The SEALs, Moore and Masters would be passengers on the same aircraft. The surviving Iranians would travel the same route, though the identity of their ultimate destination was somewhat murky. Richter was prepared to put money on at least Abdul ending up in a black site somewhere, possibly in Poland, and maybe some of the others as well.
There would, Simpson had assured him, also be a rather smaller Hercules C-130 from the Royal Air Force waiting at Jeddah to collect four of the drums plus Richter himself. A couple of the scientists at Dstl at Porton Down were already prepping one of the BSL4 laboratories to examine the Zeolite and the lethal bacteria that were believed to be contaminating it.
The dead bodies of the Iranian soldiers were more of a problem, but one that could quite easily be solved. Trying to land them in Jeddah would inevitably result in a whole raft of awkward questions being asked, questions that nobody involved would really feel much like answering. So the corpses, already zipped into black body bags, would be weighed down with chains and dropped into the sea in deep water well before the ship reached Jeddah. That wasn’t in accordance with Islamic practice but it was the best they could do. And, in the circumstances, nobody really cared very much about the surviving Iranians, and a whole lot less about the dead ones.
And that really only left two matters to be dealt with.