Satan’s Tail. Dale Brown
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had been fired, and then were picked up promptly, but seven good men had been in the patrol craft the Americans had blown out of the water.
One was his son, Abu Qaed.
Surely Abu was at God’s bosom now, enjoying the promise of Paradise. But this was of small consolation to a father, even one so devout and committed to the cause of Islamic justice as Ali.
He remembered teaching the boy math when he was only three; he recalled bringing him to the mosque for the first time; he saw him now with the proud smile on his face as they made the Hajj, the great pilgrimage to Mecca that all devout Muslims must undertake once in their lives.
Was that not the proudest day of Ali’s life? To toss the stone at the Satan pillar with his strapping son at his side? He had thrown his stone and turned to watch Abu throw his.
There could be no prouder moment. There had been no moment more perfect in his life.
They had made the pilgrimage together only a year ago. Ali had gone twice before; the third was like a special gift from God.
He would trade it to have Abu. Surely he would trade his own life.
Ali gazed to the west. An ancient fishing village sat on the port side as he came toward shore. Just to the right of it a group of rocky crags leaned over the water. A weathered cement platform, now three-quarters covered by rubble, gave the only clue that the rocks had not been put there by nature. Italian and German engineers had begun establishing a large base here during the early part of World War II. Though abandoned before it could become operational, their work provided several good hiding places, most important of which was a cave that had been intended as a submarine pen. Most of Ali’s smaller craft could squeeze under the opening, making it possible to hide them completely from overhead satellites and aircraft.
A second facility sat a half mile to the west – just on the starboard side of the prow as Ali had the helmsman adjust his heading. This was a dredged mooring area of more recent vintage, though it too had been abandoned to the elements. Several rusting tankers and small merchant ships sat at permanent anchorage, everything useful long ago stripped from the hulks. Some rode high in the water, empty; others rested just below the surface, the elements having won their relentless onslaught against the metal hulls. In the early 1970s the facility had been a metal and materials salvage operation owned by a group of Somalis with connections to the government. A Marxist revolution led to a government takeover of the operation, which had more to do with the failure of the principals to pay bribes than political philosophy. The men were slaughtered and the ships soon forgotten, left to stare at the rocks. The buildings beyond had been abandoned, until Ali had set up shop here a year before. He rarely visited – the key to his success was to move constantly – but tonight he had returned to examine his prize: the dark shadow on his right, sitting well above his vessel.
So at least Abu and the others had not died in vain, Ali thought, even if it was not a trade he would have freely made.
The helmsman turned the boat to port, bringing it around toward its berth. Ali waited stoically, thinking of his son one last time. The scent of the midnight storm that had helped them escape the Americans hung in the air, a reminder of God’s beneficence in the midst of struggle. The rain had been fierce but lasted only an hour; long enough, however, to confuse their enemy.
‘Captain!’ said the man on the pier as he jumped off the boat. ‘I have brought the ship in.’
‘Saed?’ Ali asked.
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Why is the vessel not being camouflaged?’
‘They only just arrived,’ said Saed. ‘The captain wanted food for his crew.’
‘Find him and tell him that if the ship is not properly fitted so that it looks like the other wrecks before the Russian satellite passes overhead at ten, I shall cut him into a dozen pieces with my knife. It is to take the place of the one that was destroyed yesterday. It must be as close as possible. The Russians may miss it, but the Americans will not.’
The pilot nodded, then ran off.
Zeid, Ali’s second-in-command, was waiting on shore. ‘All of the American ships are near the Yemen coast,’ he said. ‘Our people have been quite active – they make not a move without us seeing.’
‘Yes.’ Ali did not pause, but walked directly toward the building he used as both command post and personal quarters.
‘The torpedoes nearly struck the American ship,’ said Zeid, catching up. ‘That would have been quite a blow.’
Ali didn’t answer.
‘I would like to be the one to sink Satan’s Tail,’ said Zeid, using the nickname they had given to the shadowy warship that had hunted them for the past two weeks. ‘It would be a moment of glory for all time.’
‘Yes,’ said Ali softly.
The American ship and its three smaller brethren had surprised him the first night it appeared, and only God had managed to save him – God and a timely distress call from the ship they’d tried to attack, saying that a man had gone overboard. Ali watched from Yemen waters as the American vessel, roughly the size of a frigate but much lower in the water, turned its daggerlike bow toward the tanker. For a moment the moonlight framed it against the waves. It had two wedge-shaped gun turrets on the forward deck; behind the superstructure, its topside looked like a piece of wood planed flat. The stern had a slot, as if it were a barracuda’s tail, flapping against the waves.
Satan’s Tail.
And like the devil, it slipped into the shadows and was gone.
Ali almost believed it had been an apparition, but the next day the ship and one of its smaller cousins chased the patrol boat he had taken to transport some of the Egyptian brothers to Djibouti, where they could help the movement there. Satan’s Tail made the journey almost impossible, and Ali nearly had to confront a Djibouti gunboat before finding a way to slip past and take his passengers to an alternative landing point north of the capital. This stretched his fuel reserves, and he was forced to appropriate some at a marina. He did not regret taking it, but it was a troublesome complication.
Since that time, Ali had worked with the knowledge that the American ships might be just over the horizon. He had mobilized his army of spies – mostly fishermen and coast watchers – to help, but reports were difficult once they were far from shore. Simple detectors in his fleet could detect the powerful radars American ships usually used, giving an hour of warning, if not more, of their approach. But these ships did not use those radars. In fact, the only radar they seemed to use was an older Italian-made radar that Ali had learned of many years before, during a long apprenticeship as a junior officer with the Italian navy. It was clearly not their only means of searching for him, but he had not been able to detect any aircraft operating with them, let alone the radars that such craft would field. It was possible that they were using a very sophisticated acoustical device, though if so, it was far superior to any he had seen in the NATO or Egyptian navies. The heavy traffic of the channel and shallow waters of the coast gave them some amount of protection, but Satan’s Tail was a difficult adversary. He had found out tonight its guns were even more dangerous than he had feared, their salvos unlike anything he had ever seen at sea before. Like all demons, the American vessel would not be easily exorcized.
The answer, he hoped, had arrived that evening, sneaking into port during his diversionary action two hundred miles away. In itself, the vessel wasn’t much. A member of the Russian Polnocny class, she had been built many years before in Poland to support landings by amphibious forces. Her upturned bow could be beached and the doors opened, allowing vehicles to roll off the large tank deck that ran through the center of the ship. But Ali wasn’t interested in its ability as an amphibious warfare vessel; he had no tanks and no desire to fight on land. Indeed, the work he had spoken of to his man included modifying the deck to make the ship appear from the air as much as possible like an old junker, a local merchant ship a few months from the scrap heap.
Once the Russian and