He was just going to have to be creative.
‘Tango down!’ Lt. Commander Jake Navarone called out after making the shot, his suppressed H&K MP-10 submachine gun tracking across the room in front of him, his partner Duke Kleiner covering him as they cleared the ship room by room.
They’d already been through countless drills since arriving in Subic Bay — dry firing drills, range drills, practicing approaching the Navy boats via covert insertion, boat handling and night swimming — and had now been granted permission to use a full-size cargo ship loaned to the US Navy by Storm Shipping, an American company who’d had a ship at dock in the nearby Port of Batangas.
‘Clear!’ he heard Kleiner announce, followed by more pronouncements by other members of his squad.
‘Upper deck all clear!’ Navarone said through his throat mike.
Navarone and Kleiner swept out of the room and headed for the bridge where they were to regroup with the other SEALs, hearing muffled shots as they moved.
Before they reached their rendezvous, Navarone heard Commander Treyborne over his earpiece. ‘Hostages secured, all tangos down.’
Navarone smiled. Even though it was only an exercise, the people playing the pirates were no pushovers — they were all operators from SEAL Team Four who were stationed at Subic Bay. But DEVGRU were the best of the best, and trial runs like this were what made them so effective. Practice didn’t make perfect on its own; perfect practice made perfect, and that is what DEVGRU constantly strived for.
This latest exercise was only part of the puzzle; a piece of the mission broken down so that it could be perfected. They hadn’t inserted via boat or clandestine underwater swimming, and they wouldn’t be going through fully securing the ship and the extraction of the hostages. These skills would again be practiced separately, each man’s performance analyzed so that mistakes could be corrected and ironed out. And then it would all come together in a full mock-up of the operation — or as near as they could manage without detailed information such as the exact location of the vessel and the numbers and armaments of enemy personnel.
Once the vessel was located, thorough recon would have to be performed so that such questions could be answered, and then they would have to go through all their exercises again before committing to the real thing.
But when they did, Navarone knew that the pirates wouldn’t stand a chance.
Amir Al-Hazmi watched the volunteers as they went about their daily business in the compound. Men and women both, they had no work to do here, no chores as such, but each of them was an earnest true-believer and spent their time in deep prayer and meditation on what was to come.
They had been selected by The Lion — Al-Hazmi was one of only a selected handful of people who knew his leader’s true identity as Abd al-Aziz Quraishi, Assistant Minister for Internal Affairs at the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Interior — a long time ago, chosen for their backgrounds, their religious zealotry, and their absolute trust in Quraishi and the ideals of Arabian Islamic Jihad.
Al-Hazmi had known Quraishi for many years and had nothing but the highest regard for his master’s divine skills as a freedom-fighting mastermind. As he played with the curved, heavily-inscribed blade of his janbiya, the Arabic dagger characterized by both its curved short blade and its rhinoceros horn handle, Al-Hazmi thought back to how he and Quraishi had first met.
Al-Hazmi had only been a young man at the time, but had already been fighting with Al-Qaida fi Jazirat al-'Arab — al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — for years, and was a hardened veteran of many violent campaigns.
He had entered the life after his family had been killed during a botched raid on their home by Saudi Arabian security forces. Al-Hazmi had been a young boy when it happened, and had been forced onto the streets to take care of himself. And he had — his innate abilities with the janbiya, used against the criminals and street toughs who threatened him, soon brought him to the attention of the AQAP leadership. They took him in and provided him with a home, food, and religious education.
It was at the madrassa where he had learnt about the true greatness of Allah and the corrupt perversions of the United States and her puppet, the House of Saud. He had been a willing student, and as well as his studies of the Qur’an, he soon excelled at the paramilitary training camps of Yemen and Syria.
In his early teens he was a part of several successful operations, fighting against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the US troops had soon come to fear his janbiya, which he used to hack off souvenirs from dead soldiers and take them home for his grisly collection. But then his chance came to attack the heart of Saudi Arabia itself, a full-on assault of the Interior Ministry.
At just nineteen years old, he had led the attack himself.
But Allah, in His great wisdom, had decreed that the attack should fail, and Al-Hazmi and all of his colleagues had been captured and taken to the interrogation chambers below the government buildings of Riyadh.
It was there that he saw Quraishi for the first time; but instead of torturing him, Quraishi instead lectured him about why AQAP’s attacks were doomed to failure; poor leadership, poor training and — most importantly, according to Quraishi — poor intelligence.
Quraishi explained to Al-Hazmi that he wanted to use his power, his position, to lead a new jihad against the West and her allies; a jihad which would accomplish finally what all others had not — the annihilation of the Great Satan.
Al-Hazmi had been impressed with the man’s arguments, and found himself inspired by Quraishi’s leadership.
He had asked to join Quraishi’s fledgling organization then and there, and was accepted instantly, which made him one of the founding members of Arabian Islamic Jihad, and The Lion’s right-hand man.
Over the intervening years, as the membership and reach of the secretive group grew and grew, Al-Hazmi acted as Quraishi’s enforcer and executioner, tasks which soon earned him his own title of respect in the organization — Matraqat al-Kafir, the Hammer of the Infidel.
As one of the AIJ’s most senior operational leaders, Al-Hazmi had been entrusted by his master to secure and protect this all-important compound and to ensure that the upcoming operation went smoothly, including making sure that each and every volunteer boarded the correct planes at the correct time, and proceeded on to their destinations unhindered.
One of the resident medical personnel at the compound would see to the technical requirements of the mission; even now they were hard at work examining the contents which had just arrived by private jet from Medan in northern Sumatra. Without direct access to the scientists who developed it, they would have to spend some time experimenting to know exactly how to use it in the most effective manner. But that was work which would occur in the underground laboratory, and Al-Hazmi found that he didn’t really want to know too much about it. He had been there once, and had no yearning to go back.
Al-Hazmi knew that part of his job was to make sure that the volunteers didn’t have any second thoughts about what they were about to do, and so he had given clear instructions for them never to speak to the medical personnel, or to venture underground. Better for their motivation if they didn’t see what it was they had to do before the time was upon them.
Not that Al-Hazmi had much to worry about; they had been chosen just as he had been chosen himself. All of the volunteers were true believers, religious warriors who would do anything for the cause. Like Al-Hazmi, most of their families had been raped, tortured and executed by Saudi or US troops, or else killed by indiscriminate bombings, ‘collateral damage’ which provided a never-ending supply of fresh blood to the cause.