Ritter nodded and picked up the Korean’s pistol. It looked like a knockoff Makarov, the face of a chubby Asian man with a bad perm and thick-rimmed glasses embossed on the handle. He put the weapon on safe and shoved it into a cargo pocket on his thigh.
“Need to know” be damned, he thought. I want answers when this is all over.
Chapter 8
Their dhow, theirs now that the former owner was dead somewhere on that Socotran beach, stretched the limits of what could be considered seaworthy. Rust and barnacles ran down its fifty-foot length, and the engine burned oil as they cut across the choppy water. Mike sat on top of the nuke, spitting tobacco dip into a decapitated water bottle. Ritter stayed in the wheelhouse and double-checked the GPS with the coordinates Shannon had sent them as they broke anchor. A looming hulk of a cargo ship was on the horizon. Ritter had thought they’d make way to some secure spot on the Somali coast where they’d transfer the nuke to the military. Rendezvous with a merchant ship was unexpected.
Ritter made out a helipad jutting from the back of the super castle housing the bridge as they approached. Razor wire wreathed the ship, and he saw water cannons mounted along the deck, the kind used to dissuade Greenpeace from interfering with whaling operations. The ship had as big a no solicitors sign as he’d ever seen.
“Moshe. You worried the security team on the boat might think we’re pirates?” Ritter said to the lead Israeli.
“They’re expecting us. But I have an idea.” Moshe switched to Hebrew, and all the Israelis took off their armor and uniform tops, exposing olive and pale skin. Shlomo, the sole team member of African descent, shrugged and stayed dressed.
“Somali pirates look the part. Don’t be shy,” Moshe said.
“You think this will work?” Ritter asked.
“You want to find a sign that says, ‘We’re not pirates — don’t shoot us’ in eight languages?”
Ritter pulled his shirt off; a jagged scar ran down his side, a gift from a Chechen terrorist many years ago. The pectoral cut he’d earned in Aden was still healing. Bruises the color of a stormy night blotted his left shoulder and his neck. His head still ached, and his slashed face had swollen during their trek from the Socotra coast.
Mike went topless, a tattoo of a black scroll with the words “75 RANGER RGT” on his right deltoid. The word Mogadishu was under the scroll along with tic and slash marks that must have counted into the fifties.
Water cannons on the cargo ship erupted into a palisade of seawater as they approached. Ritter spied at least three men armed with rifles racing around the deck as they approached. An Israeli climbed to the top of the wheelhouse on the dhow and waved to the ship, slapping at his fish-belly-white skin.
The water cannons subsided, and the dhow came alongside the ship after it cut its engines.
A burly man with an AK-47 looked down on the dhow from a gap in the razor wire ringing the ship.
“You need help up?” the man said, his English thick with a Russian accent. Ritter looked down the hull and saw rungs of a ladder running up the ship, all covered in razor wire.
“We have wounded and”— Moshe pointed to the nuke case on the deck—“and something very heavy.”
“Have net. You wait.”
The deck had a field of cargo containers, only a single level in depth. Ritter and three Israelis carried the nuke behind the trio of the Russian security guard, Mike and Moshe ahead of them.
“Anyone else getting sick of carrying this damn thing?” Ritter said. The rest of his crew muttered and added their own curses. The Russian led them to a container halfway down the line and unlocked a blue cargo container.
“This one, da?”
Mike glanced at his satellite phone, at the numbers stenciled on the container, and nodded.
The door swung open, and they carried the nuke inside. The inside was bare. The only feature inside was a steel door and a keypad on the opposite end. They set the nuke down halfway inside.
“We need to tie it down?” Ritter asked. The seas were calm, but trying to calm the loose cannon of several hundred pounds of the nuclear weapon sliding around the container didn’t appeal to him.
Mike shook his head.
“I let crew out now? They thought you pirate. They in safe room,” the Russian said.
“Shlomo, the rest of you, go with him.” Moshe cracked the knuckles on both his hands.
Shlomo nodded and repeated the gesture.
Something nagged at the back of Ritter’s mind as the Israelis and the Russian left. Repeating a gesture usually meant good report in a conversation. What Moshe and Shlomo had done struck Ritter as more of a signal than something innocent.
“Time for you to deliver,” Moshe said to Mike.
Mike nodded and went to the door. The door wasn’t on the back of the container as Ritter had first thought; it was on the next container, one rank deeper in the field of containers. The back of the container they were in had been removed to provide access to the door.
Mike tapped out a code on the keypad, and a light pulsed green. They heard a whirring noise followed by a clunk. Mike mashed down on the door’s handle and pulled it open. Steel rods on the door frame made it look like they were about to enter a bank vault.
Ritter stepped into the container, and his jaw dropped.
A computer workstation flashed to life, a satellite photo of their location in the middle of the ocean on the screen. Russian script was on the keyboard and on the monitor. Beyond the computer was a hydraulic system attached to the roof and a metal tube that ran the remaining length of the container. It was a meter in diameter and covered in stenciled Russian.
Ritter moved to a metal panel bolted to the tube and shined a small penlight onto the writing. His ability to recognize advanced weapon systems learned from his brief time as a military intelligence officer was a bit rusty, but there was no way that what the panel said could be correct.
“Mike, is this a… Sizzler cruise missile?” Ritter asked, using the NATO designation for the Russian weapon.
“That’s right,” Moshe said. “A cruise missile hidden inside a standard forty-foot cargo container. Perfect concealment, wouldn’t you say? We input the target coordinates right here”—he tapped the side of the computer console— “and get the hell out of the way. The Russians have some unimaginative name for the system, but everyone else calls it the Club K.”
Ritter’s mind raced with the implications of what the Israelis could do with the weapon. The Club K could be hidden anywhere a ship or truck could transport it. They could load it onto a truck, drive it into the middle of a country, and hit a target within two hundred miles. It was the ultimate weapon for a first strike — and a strike that couldn’t be blamed on Israel if it had originated outside its borders.
“Why does Israel want this?” Ritter asked.
Moshe huffed, and a sneer rose on his face. “Why did you want this?” The Israeli looked at Mike. “Launch codes.”
“Need more bandwidth than this can give us,” Mike said as he gave the satellite phone a quick shake.
Moshe shrugged. “Fine, there should be something on the bridge. Ritter, why don’t you go find the medic? Get that cut looked at.”
He’s trying to separate us, Ritter thought. Ritter locked eyes with Mike, then tapped his watch four times. Signaling danger through the subtle sign language the team had developed over years. .
Mike shook his head and followed Moshe out.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid, Ritter thought.
He walked past the nuke case and did some quick math. Could someone mount the nuke on the Club K? He stopped and looked hard at the case.