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 American satellites passed on their predictable schedules overhead, the real modifications would begin: the addition of advanced SS-N-2D Styx ship-to-ship missile launchers. Vastly improved over the early model fired from the Yemen missile boat, the missiles had a forty-six-mile range and included an infrared backup, allowing them to find their targets even if jammed by an electronic countermeasure system. The missiles would allow Ali to attack Satan’s Tail from a distance without having a good ‘lock’ from the radar, which he suspected would be impossible. While the odds on a single or even double shot succeeding were high, Ali believed from his training that a barrage firing in two or more waves of missiles would succeed. An anti-ECM unit built by the Indians to update the missile confused NATO close-in ship protection systems, such as those that typically used a Phalanx gun to shoot down cruise missiles. Whether the units – or even the missiles, which had been purchased from North Korea – worked would only be determined in combat. But Ali intended to find out as soon as possible.
The missiles would be camouflaged as crates on the ship’s deck. The 30mm cannons and a large 140mm gun designed for land bombardment had been stripped years before, something Ali thought would now be in his favor, since even if the vessel were properly identified, she would appear toothless.
The two men guarding the door to Ali’s headquarters snapped to attention as the commander approached. One had been a lifelong friend of his son’s; Ali remembered carrying both boys on his back when they were five. He paused, placing his hand on the young man’s shoulder. ‘My son has gone tonight to Paradise,’ he told the young man.
The guard’s face remained blank, not comprehending.
Inside the office, Ali knelt to the floor and bent his head in silent prayer, as was his custom. But his body shook and the words wouldn’t come. He began to sob, wracked by grief.
‘It is a terrible thing to lose a son.’
Ali looked across the darkened room. Sitting in the corner was the Saudi. It had been months since they had spoken in person; Osama bin Laden’s beard seemed whiter even in the darkness.
‘How did you know?’ asked Ali.
‘If you were a superstitious man I would tell you a lie, and you would believe, wouldn’t you, because your emotion is so great?’ The Saudi rose from the chair and came toward him. He seemed much thinner than the last time they had met, more worn by the weight of his mission to free the faithful from their chains. But there was strong energy in his walk, and when he touched Ali on the shoulder, it was as if that energy sparked into his body. The pain of losing his son retreated, and Ali rose and clasped the older man’s hand.
‘Thank you for your comfort,’ he told him.
‘My comfort is nothing. Allah’s comfort is all. We will have much need of it before our war is over.’ He stepped back and looked at Ali, nodding. ‘You have done well with your fleet. The large vessel has
