Chapter 54: The Tiger, the Bear, and Al Queda

Early morning business hours found the streets surrounding the Masi’shen Embassy crowded, bumper to bumper, barely moving. A small delivery van inched along in the traffic. When it reached the intersection of a side street it turned, went to the next street, and turned again to come up to the Embassy’s rear delivery gate.

A second delivery van continued down the front street until it approached the Embassy’s front pedestrian gate. It slowed, turned, inched up onto the sidewalk and stopped.

Two helmeted Ranger guards approached the van, motioning the driver to back off the sidewalk, their hands on their holstered stun pistols.

Behind the Embassy, the first van turned hard and crashed through the chained gate. Two hooded men jumped out, each with a machine pistol in one hand. Each grasped a spring-loaded dead man’s switch in their opposite hand, held low and close to their leg. They paused, listening, watching the angry guards coming at them.

A rocket-propelled grenade streaking a spreading plume of exhaust burst from a fourth floor window across the front street. It blew the Embassy doors open. The blast and its shrapnel tore through the people, the staff and visitors inside. It blew the double doors away and knocked the outside Rangers off their feet. Two hooded men leaped from the van and fired machine pistol bursts between the fallen Ranger’s helmets and body armor into their exposed necks. A third hooded man waited in the van. All clenched their dead-man’s switches in a tight grip.

The sounds of the RPG explosion and gunfire cued the attackers in the rear to raise their weapons and knock down the approaching guards. Their driver moved the van up against the delivery ramp. One gunman slapped a charge on the rear entrance door, backed away, and blew it, shattering the door inward. He charged inside, firing as he went, sweeping his fire from side to side. The other gunman came close behind, killing any survivor found moving. They ran through the delivery stock room into an open hallway and beyond. They kicked office doors open as they charged along, shooting anyone they found. Their driver waited outside, in the van.

All of them kept a tight grip on their detonator switches. Heavy wires led to bulky wrap-around explosive vests.

Two gunmen charged through the ruined front doors. They ran past the bodies scattered behind desks, jumped those fallen on the floor, and swerved around two laying in the open hallway. They ran for the stairway and charged upward, leaping two and three steps at a time, looking up past the overhead railings. One frightened secretary looked down in fear; a burst of fire knocked her backwards. They charged out onto the second floor. The attackers split in different directions. They sprayed short bursts down the hallways; they kicked in office doors and shot everyone.

“We’re under attack!” co-pilot Kim screamed at her pilot, frantically motioning downward with her hand, fingers pointing down. Pilot Adams swung the nose of the over-watch Interdictor down, horrified to see smoke and dust billowing out from the Embassy’s main entrance. A second RPG streaked across the street to explode into the Embassy’s third floor. Flame, shattered glass, and debris blew out of the upper story windows and rained into the street below. Panicked drivers tried to back away. Their cars rammed into others packed behind them. Horns sounded, doors flew open, and frightened, screaming people ran for safety.

“Stun, stun, STUN the whole building!” Adams screamed at Kim. He swung their craft down, as close as he dare, sweeping its nose from side to side, hoping their stun beam would stop the attackers.

It did. No one anticipated what followed.

Scattered about the building, the four attackers staggered and fell unconscious. Their hands relaxed. The dead-man switches triggered. Four suicide vests packed with outer layers of shrapnel—ball bearings, nuts, and nails—exploded. Anyone within range of the fallen attackers was cut to pieces. Office walls were shredded; people hidden inside were killed.

Outside, front and back, the van drivers slumped in their seats. Their hands relaxed, the switches triggered their cargo of military-grade explosives. The force of the blasts, front and back, crushed the Embassy building between them. It came crashing down. Everyone trapped on the side streets died, their cars and themselves lifted and thrown into the building fronts. The impact and the blast wave shattered the walls. They collapsed in dust and rubble.

The hovering Interdictor cockpit blew inward and killed both pilots. It was thrown upward in a high arc and crashed three blocks away, punching down through a two-story office complex. Most inside died.

Moans and cries of pain cut through the near-silent aftermath. Flames burst out in the rubble. They grew and spread, threatening those trapped under it. A few brave rescuers came running; others stared, some fled.

The wail of sirens grew in the distance; the pounding throb of a Swiss Police helicopter led them.

An attacker lay bleeding out on the floor behind the fourth story window across the street. His RPG launcher lay empty beside him, his face and throat slashed open by the spray of glass blasted from the window he’d partially raised for his firing position.

Never Mind the Impossible

“There is no point using the word impossible to
describe something that has clearly happened.”
Douglas Adams,
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

The Libyan-flagged freighter slipped almost unnoticed into the northern Yemen port of Al Hudaydah to discharge its cargo of machine parts, construction materials and other trade goods destined for overland shipment to Sana’a, the capital city. Even less attention was given to a ragged band of seamen who dispersed into the port city’s brothels and back-room gambling dens.

Scattered among the men coming down the ship’s brow were men of somewhat better dress, disciplined and watchful, never bunching up, moving along with the others. Once into the port city congestion, they slipped away to a small hotel a few blocks north of city center. Before the day was over eighteen men had taken six rooms on the hotel’s third floor. They took meals in groups of three and four at a time in a cafe adjoining the hotel’s ground floor. They lay down prayer rugs in their room and prayed while bowing towards Mecca; their prayers said, they sat back and waited.

The unnamed Varshavyanka-class submarine B-277 slipped swiftly along in company with a Russian frigate, two submarine-chaser gunboats, an oiler, and a rescue tug, transiting the Suez Canal into the Red Sea as part of a continuing anti-piracy sweep off the Horn of Africa. Five nights later, long left behind by the faster Russian surface vessels, the B-277 lay awash, her diesel engines ticking over at idle some twenty-five kilometers north of Al Hudaydah, laying hidden in a small group of islands off the tip of a peninsula on Yemen’s north coast.

B-277 was the latest model of a specialized super-silent diesel-electric class, well-suited for her role as a shallow-water torpedo and missile attack boat. She was nothing like the stinking U-boats of World War II; this boat could run at twenty knots submerged, was exceptionally silent, with a proven operational range of four hundred miles at three knots underwater, or six thousand miles on the surface at twelve knots. This boat had legs and stealth. US naval authorities call it a black hole in the sea for its stealth qualities.

During the next afternoon eighteen men carrying seabags arrived at different times by taxi to a group of fishing boats tied up near the town’s famed fish market. One by one they boarded a blue-hulled wooden dhow lying hull-to at the pier’s end. A belching puff of black diesel smoke from the sixty-five foot craft and a throbbing thump-thump of her powerful engine warned nearby skippers that she was getting under way. Two native deck hands coiled mooring lines; a third manned the helm. A rectangular radar antenna on the pilothouse roof began rotating, telling anyone savvy to such things that this was no poor Yemeni fishing boat. Within moments the dhow trailed a high-crested wake, her powerful engine pushing her at ten knots. She took a southerly course away from Al Hudaydah and any curious eyes. Twelve miles later, beyond the horizon’s curve and the watchers, she turned north. Seventeen Iranian naval crewmen and their commanding submarine captain emerged on deck for fresh air and cigarettes.

The transfer went quickly. A row of old tires, the working boat’s indestructible fenders hung to protect topsides from piers and other boats, scrubbed roughly against B-277’s steel hull. Eighteen Iranian sailors scrambled over the rail and took positions along the submarine’s tower. Eighteen Russian crewmen emerged from below decks through a topside hatch, and lined up on the foredeck. A moment later the Russian commander appeared high above, peering over the tower bridge. He called down to the Iranian commander, who saluted and climbed the steel-runged ladder up the tower. After shaking hands and exchanging greetings, the two skippers barked orders to their men waiting below. The Russian sailors scrambled over the rail onto the waiting dhow; the Iranian sailors hurriedly climbed down the hatch ladder. The last man dropped and dogged the cover behind him. The dhow belched another series of black smoke puffs as it pulled away, thump-thumping into the night on a southerly course, returning to Al Hudaydah. The Russian sailors within her would change into civilian seaman’s clothing and return on the freighter that had brought the Iranian crewmen.

“Only I and my second have the launch codes,” Captain Gregorsky informed his Iranian counterpart. “This is necessary for security. Please do not ask for them. I have been instructed by my superiors that any attempt by you or your crewmen to gain access to the codes will be severely punished. Everything else, including the navigational programming of the missiles, the launch procedures—the loading and reloading and the launches—all are to be revealed. As agreed, you will be thoroughly instructed in the procedures. Only the arming codes for the warheads are not for you to know. Is there any question, Captain Abu-Fadavi?”

“No, none. We were thoroughly briefed at Bandar Lengeh. We welcome this rare demonstration of our new submarine’s capability, sir. That is sufficient. We have no desire to interfere with the security of the nuclear warheads on your missiles.”

“Very well. I have instructed our technicians to partner with your men to begin instruction. By the time we arrive at our launch point in two days, they should be well drilled in this vessel’s operations and missile launch procedures. I trust there has been no change in our departure orders?”

“No, Captain Gregorsky. After launch, we go south. We transit Bab el Mendab, turn eastward into the gulf. There we will meet two of our frigates who will escort us from Aden eastward up the coast to our home waters. My superiors wish to welcome you and your crew at Bandar Abbas.”

“Good. Very good. You should see to your men, Captain. Berths and a hot meal are ready for them. We need to get underway. After you’ve refreshed yourself, feel free to join me back here. We have an interesting course to run before we’re at our launch point.”

The course northwestward from the Yemen islands rendezvous to the northeast corner of the Dahlak archipeligo off the Eritreya coast ran only one hundred-sixty nautical miles. Captains Gregorsky and Abu-Fadavi agreed that a night surface run until just before dawn would do; one hour before first light they would dive the boat and run on batteries to their launch point, an eighteen hour total run.

Captain Gregorsky laid out a series of Russian-issue navigation charts of the region. “We are fortunate, Captain, that for some years we had shore facilities in the Dahlak Islands. We enjoyed excellent relations with the Ethiopians in those years, and we used the opportunity to chart their waters. Now, the Eritreyans control those islands so we go there, not so much. But we have the charts and I seriously doubt they do. So, we go here...” He pointed to mid-sized Harmil Island on the northeast corner of the Dahlak group. It is unoccupied. We will move just off its east shore; that will shield us from any Eritrean radar or inshore patrols. We’ll be well out of range of Saudi coastal detection from the east. We’ll be in place and ready to launch at 0400 local time.”

Distance from position east of Harmil Island in the Dahlak group: 900 nautical miles, bearing WSW, 254 degrees true. Missile speed: Mach 2.5 (1,600 kts). 50-kiloton tactical nuclear warheads. Time from launch to impact at Masi’shen main base: thirty-four minutes.

Submarine escape route: submerged, south from Dahlek Archipelago to Strait of Bab el Mandab, into Gulf of Aden. Distance: 320 nautical miles. Course: SSE, 142 degrees true. Speed: twelve knots submerged with snorkel.

“Interdictor base, Guardian. Bogies, bogies, bogies, code red alpha. Four inbound, speed Mach two-point-five, bearing zero-seven-four degrees true. Estimate ETA thirty, I say again, thirty minutes!

“Guardian, Interdictor base. Acknowledge. Confirm eta Mach two-point-five, bearing zero-seven-four degrees true?”

“Affirmative. Scramble ‘em, base. These look like ground-hugging cruise missiles.”

“Guardian, you’ve got guidance on Patrol Three-three-six?”

“Affirmative. Moving four to intercept now. Their ETA in ten, standard zap and grab orders in effect.”

“Acknowledge that, Guardian. Can you get a launch point?”

“Back-tracking now. We’re patching in to satellite telemetry. Be advised, bogies running in two groups of two, I say again, two groups of two, thirty nautical miles separation. Flight level estimated one-hundred-fifty meters above ground level. I say again, flight level one-hundred-fifty meters above ground level.”

Holy crap! the Base watch officer mumbled to himself, punching the alert button. Alert alarms sounded in the flight ready room and in the flight line-crew earpieces. Pilots and line crew were already scrambling to launch the Interdictor back-up flight to run secondary intercept against the in-coming missiles.

“Interdictor base, Guardian. We have the launch point at fifty nautical miles east of Harmil Island, Red Sea, offshore in Dahlak group. Satellite camera reports negative sighting of launch vehicle.”

“Acknowledge that. Advisory?”

“Scramble two additional for launch vehicle search. Satellite telemetry and our data both suggest missiles are Sizzler three-em dash fifty-four Kalibr type, possible submarine launch. Russian missiles, base.”

“Acknowledge. Warheads?”

“Possible five-hundred kilos conventional, or tactical nukes. Unknown which at this time.”