CHAPTER 6 – POURING GASOLINE ON THE FIRE
01:06 (Rome Time)
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Bow storage compartment, MV Heraklion
190 nautical miles west of Cyprus, Eastern Mediterranean
Farah, who had trouble sleeping, woke up on hearing a few light noises inside the compartment. Getting up from behind the drums that hid her improvised mattress, she cautiously stuck her head out, her pistol ready in her right hand. What she saw was Erik and Dean seemingly getting ready for some kind of fight, with their black balaclavas down over their faces, black thin gloves on their hands and tactical vests around their torsos. They also had impressive-looking night vision goggles with four light intensification tubes set at angles to give a wider field of view. Each of them were armed with their silenced FN 90 carbines, pistols, knives and even grenades.
‘’Uh, has something new come up, guys?’’
‘’Not really, but we are going to change that, Farah.’’ Replied Dean, serious. ‘’Basically, we will go cut down on the number of armed men we will eventually have to face.’’
‘’But, that will alert these bastards to our presence on the ship.’’ Objected at once the Iranian, to which Erik shook his head.
‘’Not if they appeared to have killed each other. I will have to ask you not to venture outside of the compartment while we are out: bullets may fly thick in the hour to come.’’
‘’You are sure that I can’t help you?’’ Insisted Farah, getting fully up and showing her silenced pistol. Erik looked at her in silence for a moment, giving her points for gutsiness.
‘’Thanks for the offer, Farah, but this is the kind of job me and my partner have been doing for years now. You will be able to help us fully once we are in Turkey.’’
The two men then left the compartment after checking on their surveillance cameras that no Russian or ISIS fighter was out in their area of the ship. Farah debated for a moment about following them anyway but finally decided against it. She was realistic enough to know her limits, while the two Americans certainly looked like they could handle about anything. She however decided to use that chance to go sift through the equipment bags left behind by the CIA agents. Going first to the pack belonging to ‘Sparrow’, the one who appeared to be the leader of the duo, she undid quickly the top flap and opened it wide. She heard a very faint noise then but didn’t think anything of it until her head started turning and her eyes lost their focus a few seconds later. She then understood with a flash of fear that the American must have booby-trapped his pack with some kind of gas release mechanism. It was however too late for her and she fell unconscious in a heap over the opened equipment pack.
Cautiously making their way out of the bow section and onto the open weather deck, Dean and Erik used to the maximum the cover afforded by the covered piles of crates and boxes stowed on the deck, moving as silently as cats while scanning the night with their goggles. The first man they saw was a crewmember, standing on the port open bridge wing and smoking a cigarette while contemplating the sea and the night sky. The second one was armed and also stood on the open bridge, slowly and methodically scanning the deck forward of the bridge superstructure. Erik saw a third man, also armed, standing on the starboard open wing. He silently pointed that man to Dean, who then split up from his partner to make his way towards that sentry. On his part, Erik got as close from the bridge superstructure as he could and, at the first moment the other sentry looked into another direction, leaped forward silently to cover the remaining few yards and go hide in a dark corner of the structure. A radio message from Dean came in a few minutes later through his radio earpiece.
‘’Starboard side sentry down and hidden from sight. The way is clear.’’
‘’I copy that.’’ Replied in a whisper Erik, who then moved alongside the forward bulkhead of the bridge superstructure, turning its starboard corner and getting to the starboard side access hatch, where he found Dean waiting for him, crouched beside the hatch and a combat knife in his right hand. The blade was covered with blood.
‘’After you, Erik.’’
Erik opened the hatch as quietly as he could, but still could not help some screeching noise coming from the poorly lubricated hinges. Thankfully, nobody seemed to hear or react to that and the two agents went inside a lit passageway before closing back the hatch behind them. From the ship’s blueprints they had studied in Rota, they knew that they were now in the section containing the passenger cabins. Since the ISIS fighters were lodged in the bow section and since the crewmembers slept one deck lower, the occupants of the cabin giving on this passageway had to be Russian Spetsnaz soldiers. The two agents didn’t care much about who they would kill tonight, as long as enough Russians were left alive afterwards to launch a retaliatory attack on the ISIS fighters. Going to the door of the nearest cabin, a standard wooden model with a door knob, instead of a steel hatch, Erik gently tried to turn the handle but found it locked. That could only mean that someone was inside, probably sleeping. Taking out a set of lock picking tools, Erik quietly worked on the door lock for a moment, until a small metallic ‘clic’ told him that he had unlocked the door. Before slowly pushing the door open, though, he pointed the overhead lights of the passageway.
‘’Shut those lights off: they could wake up whoever is inside when I will open the door.’’
‘’Right away!’’ Replied Dean before walking softly to the light switch a few yards away and turning it off. With the passageway now pitch black, Erik activated the small infrared light that was part of his night goggles, allowing him to see again despite the total absence of white light. Only then did he push the door and stepped inside the cabin, with Dean ready to back him up with his silenced FN 90. He found only one man sleeping in the cabin, despite having a double bunk bed in it. The black coverall of a Spetsnaz soldier, suspended alongside a black tactical vest to wall hooks, confirmed the identity of the sleeper, who was snoring lightly. Approaching the man silently, Erik studied his face for a moment as he stood over him, his combat knife out and ready. He smiled on recognizing the sleeper as being the leader of the Spetsnaz squad. Then, without saying a word, he brutally covered the man’s mouth with his left hand at the same time as he pressed his razor-sharp blade hard against the man’s throat and pulled the knife across it, severing the right carotid artery and the trachea in one swift move. Erik kept his left hand in place as the sleeper opened his eyes, abject horror in them. The Russian tried to get Erik off him, but he bled out quickly, while he also drowned in the blood now flowing down his trachea and filling his lungs. The man thrashed in his bed for a few seconds while emitting gurgling sounds, then became inert, his eyes fixed and unfocused. The odor of urine, coming out of the dead man’s bladder and soaking his underwear as his muscles relaxed, followed next. Withdrawing his hand, Erik contemplated for a couple of seconds the man he had just killed. He didn’t feel some kind of sick joy at having killed this man, who had done nothing personally against him, nor did he regret his action: it had simply been a necessary act made in order to help accomplish his mission. He next went to the dead man’s uniform while speaking softly to Dean.
‘’That guy was their leader. I’m going to see if he had anything of interest for us with him. Watch the door in the meantime.’’
Searching the man’s uniform, then his equipment pack, took Erik about four minutes, but those minutes paid off, as he found a small notebook with writing in Russian in a pocket of the uniform. Reading quickly the words and numbers inside the notebook, Erik smiled while looking up at Dean.
‘’I think that I have the name and phone number of at least one intermediary in Turkey, possibly two. We will be able to have Ian run them through his databases and find out who they are. With luck, we may now have the last link to this weapons deal.’’
‘’Great! If that pans out, we won’t need any more to enter Turkey and follow these weapons all the way to the Syrian border.’’
‘’Don’t be too fast about that, partner: we still need to run that info here and see what it really is. Until we know for sure who is the Turkish facilitator, we will continue to follow the shipment, up to its final destination if need be. Mister Moore would not be satisfied with less and I also hate unfinished business.’’
‘’Alright, I get it. Now, how many more Russians do you want us to kill tonight?’’
‘’Two or three more should do: we want enough of these Russians to survive to take on those ISIS bastards.’’
‘’Two or three it will be.’’ Replied Dean in the same tone he would take to say that he was going to get a few beers.
Fifty-two minutes after leaving their storage compartment, Dean and Erik returned to it, their job done and both of their knives bloodied. Dean smiled on seeing an unconscious Farah crumpled over Erik’s equipment pack.
‘’I told you that she would try to search through our things.’’
‘’Of course she would! Why would I booby-trap my pack otherwise? Our sleeping princess should be waking up in about twenty minutes. Put her back on her improvised mattress in the meantime while I send an urgent update to Ian and Langley.’’
Taking first the time to disconnect and remove the gas pill mechanism he had fixed to his own equipment pack, Dean then went to Farah and gently lifted her inert body in his arms, transporting her a few yards to her improvised mattress and putting her down softly on it. He sighed in regret as he contemplated her beautiful face: she would have made a nice date, if not for the fact that she was basically an agent for an enemy of the United States.
When Farah woke up, her throat parched and her mind foggy, she had trouble at first to remember what had happened to her. Then, details came back to her as her eyes started to focus. She nearly recoiled when she saw that ‘Stryker’ was sitting beside her, watching her while smiling to her. Was he going to kill her now that he knew that she had tried to search through the kit of his partner? For one thing, she was surprised to be still alive. Her confusion only grew when she saw her pistol nearby, its magazine pulled out and simply left still full of bullets beside the weapon. They had not even disarmed her!
‘’You could have killed me for trying to search through your packs. Why didn’t you?’’
Dean grinned to her, apparently genuinely amused.
‘’My dear Farah, we would actually have been disappointed if you had not tried to search our things. In your place, we would have done the exact same thing, except that we would have checked first for booby-traps. However, I will caution you not to try this again. If you do, there will be consequences.’’
‘’And my pistol? You are not going to disarm me?’’
Dean’s grin was then replaced by a serious look.
‘’No, because you may well need it to help defend this compartment in the next few hours. We just killed a few of the Russians in a manner that will point to those ISIS bastards. With any luck, the Russians and the ISIS men will kill each other soon, after the remaining Russians wake up and find their comrades dead, their throats cut open. We then expect bullets to fly liberally around this ship.’’
Farah, still somewhat disoriented and shocked, had to give points to the Americans then: while ruthless, their plan actually had good chances of succeeding, thus literally clearing the deck for them and her.
‘’And if they do kill each other, then what? We still don’t know who the intermediary is in Turkey.’’
‘’Well, such a massacre could well prompt someone important to show up in Iskenderun to clean up this mess and send the weapons on their way. There is nothing like a few dead bodies to shake up the barrack, right?’’
‘’When I think that I believed American agents to be soft and sentimental…’’
Those words made Dean laugh briefly.
‘’We can be…when we want to be.’’
On this he returned to his own corner of the compartment, leaving Farah to wonder what else she would learn from those two American men during this trip.
05:29 (Rome Time)
Passenger cabins’ section, MV Heraklion
‘’Sir!...SIR! WAKE UP! WE FOUND ZAITSEV DEAD, MURDERED! SIR!’’
Senior Sergeant Fedukin finally decided to forcibly open the door to Major Koslov’s cabin and furiously rammed it with his left shoulder, breaking it open after two hits. The scene he found inside both horrified and enraged him.
‘’THOSE FUCKING RAG HEADS! I’M GOING TO KILL THEM ALL!’’
Another Spetsnaz soldier then entered the cabin, his face pale.
‘’Sergeant, we found Vishenko and Kallinin dead, their throats cut while they slept.’’
The man then saw the body of his officer and reeled back in shock. Still furious, Fedukin grabbed him by the front of his coverall and forced him to look up in his eyes.
‘’GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF, DUBROV! WE NEED TO AVENGE THEM AND KILL THOSE ISIS BASTARDS. GATHER OUR SURVIVING MEN AT ONCE AND TELL THEM TO JOIN ME HERE, READY FOR COMBAT.’’
‘’Uh, yes, Sergeant!’’
Only four minutes later, he had his remaining seven men facing him in the passageway. Their faces were hard, with more than a hint of lust for revenge in their eyes. Fedukin gave the tone by arming his AKSU-74 assault carbine.
‘’Let’s kill those ISIS bastards to the last! Be careful: they are probably waiting for us. We will thus try to surprise them by going in from further forward of their compartment in the bow: I have noticed a hatch leading down to the anchor chain wells. From there, we will have access to the bow accommodations compartment. Follow me!’’
Farah could not help jump nervously when the first burst of automatic fire echoed around the bow section, followed closely by more bursts and a few grenade explosions. Dean listened to the starting battle for a moment, smiling.
‘’Nice little battle we have here now. We better get ready, in case one rat tries to hide in our compartment to fight it out.’’
Her heart beating faster now, Farah took a firing position behind the barrels hiding her improvised mattress of folded canvas tarps, her CZ 2075 9mm pistol pointed at the access hatch of their compartment. While she had been part of the Revolutionary Guards Corps Intelligence Bureau for four years now and had already conducted a number of missions in hostile territory, she had yet to fire a weapon in real combat. Up to now, she had been used mostly in a surveillance role or as a courier, carrying sensitive information or documents into hostile countries, helped in that by her linguistic abilities and her polished education about foreign cultures. However, she had trained extensively with weapons and was a more than decent pistol shot, thus felt ready for this fight. Her two involuntary companions also took firing positions behind their barrels on the other side of the compartment, their FN 90 carbines at the ready. However, Erik also monitored closely the images and sounds recorded by their surveillance cameras planted on the deck above them. After maybe two minutes of intense fighting punctuated by nearly non-stop series of automatic weapons bursts, three ISIS fighters appeared on the camera placed in the passageway of the upper deck, firing their weapons while retreating by leaps and bounds under fire. One ISIS fighter was seen on camera falling, hit in the chest, with the two remaining fighters retreating further down the passageway. Erik then saw the first of the Spetsnaz pursuing them appear and the end of the passageway, sticking his head and torso out from behind a corner long enough to fire a burst from his AKSU-74 carbine. Dean, who was also watching the action on the tablet’s screen, gave Erik a questioning look.
‘’Should we let some of those guys survive, or should we finish off what’s left once this battle is over?’’
Erik thought that over for a moment: both options had advantages and disadvantages to them.
‘’I think that we better let a few of them survive, preferably Russians. If they all die, the captain of this ship could well panic and decide to abort the delivery of the weapons, in which case we would be unable to identify the Turkish intermediaries in this affair.’’
Erik then turned his head to look at Farah.
‘’What do you think about that, Farah?’’
She hesitated for a moment before responding, stunned to see him ask for her opinion. What she didn’t understand was that his question to her was mostly to test her and make her feel more trusting of him and Dean, something that could be useful later.
‘’Uh, I would tend to agree with you: if that captain panics, he is liable to call for the help of the Greek or Cypriot Coast Guard, in which case we may be eventually discovered. Explaining our presence on this ship could then be a bit difficult.’’
‘’A good point. We will thus let the Russians clean up those ISIS bastards without showing ourselves. If the captain of this ship has any brains, he will then do his best to avoid a close inspection of his ship on arrival in Limassol, probably by cleaning up and covering the damage from this fight as much as he can. The surviving Russians will anyway probably tell him to do so. The last thing they would want would be for the Cypriot customs to find and seize the shipment of weapons in Limassol.’’
‘’So, they will have to walk on eggs in Limassol.’’ Said Farah. ‘’I wonder what that bastard Graschev will think about this fight, once he learns about it.’’
That made Erik smile as he imagined the face of the Russian arms dealer then.
‘’He will be positively thrilled, I bet.’’
Senior Sergeant Fedukin was the one who killed the last remaining ISIS fighter on the ship, cornering him in a dead-end passageway and then throwing a grenade in. He gave a hateful look at what was left of the Islamist, already knowing that this victory had come at a cost: only three of his men were still alive by now, with one of them being slightly wounded. Those ISIS bastards had proved a tougher nut to crack than he had expected after all. Turning around, he joined his remaining men, who were busy ensuring that the ISIS men were all truly dead, using their knives to finish off the ones still breathing. He went first to his wounded man, who had been hit in his upper left arm, and examined quickly his wound.
‘’Sit down on this bunk bed, Vasilie: I will have to disinfect and bandage that wound.’’
As he took out his field bandage and a wrapped alcohol swabbing cloth from a pouch of his tactical vest, he looked at his two other men.
‘’Misha, Boris, you start getting rid of the bodies of these bastards. Throw them overboard: the sharks will take care of them.’’
‘’With pleasure, Sergeant.’’ Replied Junior Sergeant Misha Markov. ‘’Uh, what about our own dead men?’’
Fedukin thought that question over for a moment, undecided at first. Ideally, he would preserve the bodies of his comrades, so that they could be returned later to their families, but keeping them on the ship may cause many difficult questions from various authorities if found.
‘’We will bury them at sea with full honors tonight. For the time being, we will put their bodies away in a secondary storage compartment. First, though, we get rid of those pieces of shit.’’
Misha and Boris nodded their heads at that, then grabbed the feet and arms of a dead ISIS fighter and started on their way to the open weather deck, from which they would be able to throw the body overboard.
As the Russians were cleaning up the mess on the upper deck, watched by their surveillance camera at that level, Erik saw that an encrypted message was arriving via satellite on his tablet. Hoping that it was what he was thinking, he processed the message through the decoding program contained in his tablet computer, then projected the message in clear on the screen, reading it quickly.
‘’Good news, guys: that name and telephone number we found in that Spetsnaz officer’s notebook have been traced and identified. That Izmeth Pasha is actually a high-level member of the governing AKP Party in Turkey and is also a close aide of President Erdogan. Farah, feel free to inform Tehran of this tonight: the more hounds we get after this guy, the more chances we will be able to expose more members of this conspiracy.’’
‘’Thank you!’’ Said Farah from her corner, truly grateful. So, the Turkish government, or at least members of it and of the AKP Party, was truly involved in this. That actually didn’t surprise her much: Erdogan and his AKP Party had become more and more openly supportive of Wahabi extremists in the last few years as it did its best to impose stricter Islamic rules and laws in Turkey, an officially secular country for over a century. She wondered how much more of this the Turkish Army would stand for, especially if this affair became known publicly, before deciding that the AKP Party had to go. Erdogan had done his best in the last years to weaken the leadership of the Turkish Army by arresting a number of top generals on charges of conspiracy but, sooner or later, the remaining senior army leadership was going to say ‘enough’ and finally act decisively. That would not be by far the first time that the Turkish Army would have conducted a coup in order to protect the secular system in Turkey and this time it would be more than justified to act, in Farah’s opinion. The fact that the CIA agents were still showing some confidence in her and kept passing information to her agreeably surprised her, but also made her feel bad: she may just have to betray that confidence soon.