Chapter 5

I suppose I was lucky that by ducking and spinning, the heavy ebony wood bludgeon hadn't quite completely crushed in my skull, but it had received a really decent dent and maybe some fractures. When I opened my eyes they just saw flame and about three of everything in the room, including the back end of a pair of feet just inches in front of me. By the look of the shoes, these belonged to the second mate I'd met upstairs, who was now discussing the situation in Arabic with another officer, either the captain or another senior mate. So far the voting was for leaving me right where I was until they were safely out in the Channel and then they could more safely dump my body into the sea.

Mistake #1 for Hadji. The mate was absolutely sure that he'd pulped my skull right into my brain. It had certainly sounded like that to him the three times he'd struck me. He didn't know that I'd inherited a really thick skull, and I'd been knocked silly before in my career a time or two, but I really hoped this would be the last time.

I shut my eyes again and worked on concentrating on a Zen exercise I'd been taught years ago to focus my thoughts in my mind and make them clear, especially if the body was no longer on speaking terms with it. I wanted to concentrate on a hostage rescue exercise I had done many years go where I had to carefully shoot multiple badguys in near darkness, while they held hostages. Not a high percentage play. Only once had I succeeded in just merely wounding a hostage while taking out the bad guys, and I'd been tops of my team. The official strategy scorecard for this play was '50% casualties for the hostages and no one in their right mind would have considered it. Alright, I blame the concussion for even considering this!

Gathering my thoughts, I decided that for the record, and for my eventual 'after action report', I'd plead two very extenuating circumstances. First, that now my playful terrorists considered their planned play session with their captives to be a bad risk. They weren't at all sure where I'd come from, or if I was part of any sort of law enforcement agency (they didn't think so, but weren't going to take the chance. The girls, in a matter of moments were to 'go below and join the others'.

"I'll tell the captain to have his eye on the jettison button, if police arrive on the docks or if any of the crew now on alert on the decks see a helicopter approaching." The second mate said.

My other problem was that the second mate did have a gun in hand, some sort of revolver, and he was about to put two slugs into the back of my head ... just to make sure about me. Sodding Bastard!

I waited for as long as I dared and then willed my eyes to open in their zen trance to perforate with my still concealed P90 everything in the room that wasn't either naked or female. I was now only seeing double, which was an acceptable improvement, so I just aimed in-between the blurry figures ... micro short bursts, first three into the figure looming above me just as he was pointing his own pistol down towards me, and then another three shot burst into the only figure that was moving, and hoped that at least one of the girls hadn't been released.

I'd only heard two voices so I trusted to fate to shut my eyes for another moment or seven so that I could gather enough ambition to haul myself back up to my feet. Three women were loudly screaming inside my head, which hurt worse than any migraine I'd ever heard even rumored about. No one was shooting back, or worse shuffling close to me, so I cautiously assumed I'd put down my two targets. My head hurt too badly to focus my hearing so I just shouted as loudly as I could for the girls to all shut up, or they'd bring down more company ... and for a wonder, they did exactly that.

I'm not sure how long it took for me to stand –and open my eyes at the same time. It didn't work the first two times I tried. I either couldn't make it all the way vertical or else I blacked out just when I thought I made it to my feet. Not a good escape plan! The natives were getting restless. I didn't have my headset radio, a cell phone, or even a hidden wire to get any messages to Ed that the CIA wunderkid had bollocked this rescue up good, and frankly really needed a rescue himself instead. I thought about mentioning this to the women, who were still tied up to their overhead pipes nice and securely, but decided that they didn't need any more depressing news.

The rescue plan was for Ed to wait for me to appear on-deck and either give the 'Go' signal or else come out running with captives. If the ship left without me, it was up to the SAS team in their helicopters, and like the bumfuck operation in the Red Sea a few years ago, a cargo of terrorist weapons ... and/or a group of chained women were soon going to go glub-glub into the Channel, without a trace the second the assault began. Like it or not, it was up to me, and I thought I could now hear the ships engines start to rev up. I had at most five minutes to affect a rescue or several dozen kidnap victims, and all of our best evidence against this terrorist group, was going to depart for the sea ... beyond the hope of rescue.

I grit my teeth and concentrated on leaning hard against the captain's writing desk before I dared to open my eyes again. Then I held myself there tightly until the world mostly stopped swirling. I was still seeing two of everything and everyone, but once I was on my feet more or less securely I risked taking a close examination of everything in the room. The women were fine and without any high velocity bullet holes in them.

Proper planning and practice will (sometimes) prevent piss poor performance!

It was then, after I verified that my two Hadji targets were indeed on the floor, that I realized that I actually first needed to bend down to check their pockets for a knife, to cut the rope restraints. I decided I wasn't at all up to it, and I smashed a large family photograph that was on the table and selected the largest shard of glass that I could find. It wasn't perfect for cutting rope, and it was actually much better at cutting into my fingers and palm as I sawed away at PC Johnson's rope. She was nearest to me, and I was actually rather clinging too much of my weight onto her when the final strands of rope snapped, freeing her, as the pair of us crashed again to the floor.

"Cut down the others, or better yet check the downed men for knives and make sure they'll stay down before you do anything else. If we're all not out of this room in about five minutes some very bad things will probably happen." She was sensible enough to not argue with me, and she had Annie and Leslie cut down before I managed to get my eyes open again and my lips sort of working.

"Gals, this is your old pal Leo ... or Leonard. Yeah it doesn't look like me, but we don't have time to argue. I was supposed to get you out of here before the cavalry came charging in but that plan is already fucked and isn't going to work now. Constable, check both men for weapons and arm yourself. If you see an AK or anything else bigger around here, grab it. No shooting anything or anyone unless I say so! Get me somehow, upstairs to the bridge or a bunch of women are about to take a swim into the Thames wearing concrete overshoes!"

PC Johnson completed her search in a flash and she found an AK sitting on a corner gunshelf, loaded with two extra clips next to it. She grabbed them while Annie and Leslie more or less grabbed me and began moving me forward. I kept my P90 in hand as it was (barely) the quietest of our guns, and as I directed my wards to the sets of stairs leading upwards to the bridge, I began the climb one step at a time.

Still dressed in disguise with my beard and mustache, my emergency plan was to still pretend that I was one of the crew. Maybe the word had gotten out that someone had tried to infiltrate the ship, or not, but seeing me, a near mirror image of themselves, I hoped that they'd delay their trigger fingers for at least a moment after seeing me, not to mention the girls. I actually needed those two full seconds when I met another officer on the way down the stairs and I just barely had the time to draw and fire first. Two rounds right straight into his chest.

You can't pull off that show-off – 'boom, headshot!' stuff in a real 'life or death' situation. You're trained to aim for center-mass, every time – even in your sleep or under disability. Training gives your fingers the muscle memory repetition to succeed when your head doesn't have a clue what you're doing. With the engines now cycling a bit harder and with the heavy vibration, I though my shot had a good 85% chance of going undetected, and this decreased the number of likely armed Hadji up on the bridge.

In the interest of fairness I need to admit that by this point I was having a lot of trouble putting one step in front of the other, as the two women now needed to virtually drag me up the last couple of sets of metal stairs. PC Johnson was out in front with her AK and I can honestly admit that my brain was paying utterly no attention to her bare ass that was out in front of me at all. Ogling my equally nude pair of attendants was completely out as well, but they'd never believe it.

When Emilie reached the top she risked a quick peak inside the bridge and reported three men inside. One older man, probably the captain had a sidearm only, holstered at the moment, but two other crewmen were each armed, one with an AK and another with a scoped hunting rifle. I didn't like the odds much.

"How lucky do you feel?" I asked the young constable.

"Pretty froggy actually!" She replied. She'd even fired an AK once before while in training and she thought she could still remember the basic important stuff.

"Ok, you're 'Bonnie at the point' and you've got an AK, for when you've absolutely got to kill every single Hadji motherfucker in the room! The door opens out from the right? Let me crawl to just to the right of the doorway so when you burst open the door maybe we can both then cover the room. Shoot in short controlled threeround bursts, sweeping from left to right and try and keep the barrel down as it might try and swing wide right and up on you!"

I slithered slowly into place and forced my eyes open and grunted that I was ready. I'm sure she was nervous and probably was trying to concentrate on thinking what she needed to do rather than just doing it. The first burst looked pretty much on target, but as she swung the assault rifle around she went full spray and pray and the gun's compensator did little to keep the track of bullets on target. About three seconds later the clip was empty and there were more bullet holes in the bulletproof glass and the slightly less bullet resistant roof than there were in the bad guys. Spread out on the stairwell in the prone position, my P90 could and did fill in the gaps. I plugged the guard with the AK to my right first, who had been missed entirely, and then focused my three shot spread into the chest of the wounded ship's captain.

I'd sort of wanted him alive but I didn't like where his hands were reaching towards when we barged in. One of those innocent looking buttons was the purge the secret cargo hold one, and I didn't want to take the chance of anyone getting to it. I hoped that the captains safe, or something hidden smartly in his smugglers hold would give us all the information on the Falcon Shipping company operations, and their customers, that we needed.

"Ok, gals, all of you stay inside here, and grab some guns and shoot anyone other than me that comes up either of these side sets of stairs. I'm going to get that scoped hunting rifle and clear the decks of Hadji and try to get Ed's attention ... Fuck! The ship's now moving into the Thames current! Someone just try and keep the helm steady until you can crash the boat into a mud flat or anyplace that doesn't already have a ship docked in it!

There was a weather deck surrounding the bridge, where the officers could walk around the edge of the bridge outside and see everything happening, at sea or on deck. Using just one eye to focus wasn't so bad and I soon shot down every ship's hand that I saw up on deck. They thought at first that the shots were coming from onshore and they fired back blindly with their AK's. Five body shots and five downed terrorist crewmen. I heard a brief blast from one of the P90's, full auto from the sound of it, so I assumed that whomever had been creeping up the stairs had been firmly discouraged, hopefully fatally.

Annie, who was manning, or rather serving the helm seemed to be having trouble compensating for the delay in the old slow ship's engines. After a two minute rather erratic cruise, our voyage into the unknown ended abruptly, nose first into a fortunately empty dock. The engines were howling now, churning dead water in place just forcing the boat deeper into the docks. Finding the emergency flares wasn't difficult and we fired them off over the ship gleefully, so that even the slowest dullard of our response units would mosey on down our way ... eventually.

No one was getting off via the gangplank at the moment, and rather than being brave and going hunting for more crewmembers below decks I kept the girls inside the bridge and they stayed nicely away from any control buttons until the SAS boys and girls arrived, repelling down from their assault helicopter as I waved a white rag from my rifle. Just to avoid further confusion and friendly fire, I tried to wipe away most of my makeup and removed the false mustache and beard, along with my desert robes. If the gals could stand to be nude for a little while further, then I could tolerate a similar period in just my boxer shorts.

Ed showed up toot-suite down on the docks next to the wrecked prow and we shouted for a bit at each other until someone found a rope ladder to start bringing the dockside officers slowly on board while we let the SAS folks do what they do best, go shoot hiding terrorists. They bagged another ten KIA and another eight surrendered rather than seeking martyrdom. Then they completed a rather thorough search of the entire ship that did not reveal the main weapons storage hold, or the main smuggling hold where I suspected that the kidnapped women were being held.

For quickness and simplicity, they relieved me of my fair rescued maidens and hauled the three gals up into one of the waiting rescue helicopters while one of the SAS medics stitched me up and gave me a shot of something that almost, but didn't quite clear my skull splitting headache. I'd need x-rays but for now that could wait, the spook community VIP's were starting to show up and now it was time for my final act in this circus.

Now that Ed was also on board with me, along with his boss, and even his boss, and a few attaché spooks from my Embassy, I just couldn't resist the urge to show off now bloody smart I was.

I started with the secret weapons locker. On that other Liberty ship we'd suspected of smuggling, we'd been pretty pissed off to find that the cargo we'd been hunting for had gone right to the bottom of the Red Sea, and since we'd taken quite a few of their smug over-confident crew alive, we chose some rather unfriendly ways to question our guests. If they'd thought that we'd politely leave after finding nothing, they picked the wrong black-bag team to smugly smirk at. Our strike team leader then, a gal who shall remain nameless, was more than willing to creatively question the crew with the caveat that the first crewman to squeal might get to live. She was kidding of course, but she was a world-class liar and spoke Arabic nearly as well as I did. The second mate quickly decided that he wasn't quite ready for martyrdom and sang like a canary, revealing every secret the ship had ... and the knowledge that a certain small Egyptian dockyard was making similar conversions of other antique ships used by the faithful. We'd kept that dock under surveillance, but ship names changed regularly like the tide.

Tonight, or rather now this early morning, I demonstrated my superior knowledge and intuition for the folks that all reported to the top bigwigs with either Sir or Lord in their names. My bosses back home would know before breakfast that we'd broken the first significant lead in our investigation of the Falcon Shipping shell company, and now some real meaty data was about to hit the secure intel pipeline channels. Or rather most of it. I'd let Ed's folks open the captains safe which I was sure had lots of nice paperwork, giving us data that we needed to know like names and places, so I let him have his moment of glory. He was just a few years from retirement and this raid was hopefully going to get him a promotion to a nice safe quiet desk with a suitable civil service pay hike. I was fairly sure that I'd be in for the same sort of rewards!

The secret armory revealed its hidden goodies, chock full of nasty military grade stuff that we didn't want Hadji to have at all. Cases of stolen British Army SA80's, squeaky new HK417's, and lots of modern top shelf anti-armor and anti-air missiles that were probably heading right straight to places where they would do our uniformed lads the most harm. This looking like a light shipment, if so, heaven forbid what was loaded into one of their big ones! Even the big bosses got the idea pretty fast into their heads, and of their own accords, that the rest of the Falcon fleet, especially the Dutch based ones, needed some fast unfriendly inspection. Hands soon snatched up cell phones and started the wheels grinding to get SAS, SEAL and other special ops teams ready to strike ... and as quickly in unison as could be arranged before the ships could be warned.

The larger smuggler's hold contained the rest of the kidnapped women, thirty-seven in number, all in ankle chains fastened to heavy cinder blocks. If the purge button had been pressed not a single woman would have survived. Some had been held captive for up to two months by gangs like Alfie's and all funneled eventually through Ollie's outfit. They had been held in fairly small numbers scattered around various safe hideouts in or near London until just before delivery time to the ship. Now that Ollie was on the run, the Met folks could interview all of the former captives and probably nail down the location of a few of these hideouts and put them under surveillance. As the women had been expect to disappear into the Middle East, mostly into remote rural harems, the local criminal gangs had not always maintained good communications security, and now MI:5 would have names of many of the minor street organization blokes and means of tracking them down.

The captain of the Haytham-Afra had not managed to send out any alarm or distress signal but it wasn't every day a ship crashes into the London docks. While it was still dark, Ed got the rather bright idea of getting a crew over the side to give the ship another new painted name ... and quickly, before the tabloid press showed up. With a false name, and other misleading info, the real nature of tonights events had a decent chance of remaining quiet, at least until all of the respective spec-ops strike teams were ready to pounce, together all at once. The press did show up just before dawn after the deed was done and for now they judged it to be just a simple mechanical failure. They took their token photos and soon got bored seeing that nothing really seemed to be happening.

The women had been rescued, and the dead seamen's bodies had long been taken off by the SAS folks to some quiet MI:5 forensics lab, and all of the blood had been hosed away. Really the only semi-obvious sign that a gun fight had occurred here was the spiderweb fractures of the bridge safety glass caused by the AK bullets. Already a Met team was dismantling this glass and by dawn the entire ship would be sanitized enough to survive a media inspection – assuming they cared. Most didn't.

No death, no major destruction, no tragedy = no story. Even the tabloids ran the story of the wreck buried deep inside their papers and none ran any sort of investigation or follow-up story. For now, the secrets of the Falcon were safe.

Now that all of the fun was over the big boys handed over the rest of the investigation to the menials and they all left together in their chauffeur driven cars quite exhausted from all of the back-patting and self-congratulations that they'd given themselves. Ed and I might have broken the biggest terror case in several years but it was obvious that all of the real credit was going to stay up on the executive levels. Oh, I'd get another gold star added to my personnel folder, but my bosses would get nicer offices with plush carpeting while I'd stay in my cubical farm with my small team. Ed knew the score as well, and muttered a fairly audible 'Wankers!" at their backs as his own MI:5 superiors eventually departed.

With all of the women, including Anne, Leslie and PC Johnson all at Scotland Yard being interviewed, Ed and I decided that our particular part of this campaign of the war on terror was done and we wearily trudged back to his car. Ed found a small bottle of whisky from under the seat of his car that wasn't particularly either aged or distinguished, and the two of us sipped it sparingly as we both contented ourselves with bitching about government administrators and decided that the political game-playing parasites were about the same everywhere in the world.