Chapter 7

Three months after breaking into Gesima's house the house made a boom big enough to leave a five metre deep crater. Not only was it said that there were nobody injured, there were no remains at all found and almost nothing left of the house worth discussing, so police and the bomb squad was mystified. Nobody knows that we have the complete Crab Bait file so they think I am good enough to pull the job off on the partial file, I should feel honoured at the amount of respect they have shown for my abilities.

The only people who would know this version of my plans have passed this info onto their superiors, and he/they are within our small group and within the newest male members. Management house inhabitants, including Gesima, have been told another slightly different version which would have had the Yanks almost paying us to visit them. Pat's initial kneejerk reaction was: he wished he could pick Lotto numbers as well as he read the outcome of his machinations.

He spent two months bringing the newest members fitness up to working level with Eric making daily trips to the safe house to organise the exercises and leaking the misinformation on in dribs and drabs. The extra time brought on because the target had been sent to visit an old enemy on short notice with no public announcement. Our true opponent must be very high up as that is some trick requiring unique influence and responsibility.

The imbedded spies don't know me so they think I am not being secure within the group. The management house changed base house twice a week and previous houses have been raided three times by ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) and the AFP (Australian Federal Police) but the house with the newest employees remained untouched, even though it was never changed. Gesima under the name of Rose Raft accompanied Sal to the house as an observer for three of the sessions as she and Sal had skills of which they had to be aware, so they could use them during the operation.

The basis of Pat's plan is: ASIO and the CIA believe we are incompetent idiots and they don't believe our record, but we'll show them otherwise in the fullness of time. However, the CIA knows that certain members of our team have been terminated so this might strike them as a kink in our armour leading to mistakes. It's all in the plan, ah, all in Pat's plan.

It is a fact that the two athletics committee members from Pwllhell, Wales, who have a marathon runner with the eighth fastest time in West Wales, would have little to no contact with the eighty-five year old member from the Eyemouth, Scotland subcommittee who is rightly and chauvinistically proud of his shot putt and caber thrower, named amazingly enough, Jock. Between the three of them, they can barely share intelligent intercourse without translators.

So when a small team of officials from West Devon, who are subsidising their own participation independently whilst en route to a sister city meet in Brainerd, Minnesota are suddenly included in their list, they could give a shit? Sal and her father drop their Australian accent so fast it would make your eyes water, Pat became one of the athletes with an IQ of twenty five who can run like the wind and Gesima is part of the experienced organising committee from Exeter being readied to retire due to her pregnancy.

None of the rest of the consortium members has any idea who they are and hasn't queried the single email from their head office telling them of their inclusion, as long as they don't have to pay their way.

The boys from the other house are infiltrated in from Northern Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand and Canada arriving into the States via five different airlines into four different airports on different days.

The boys pick up their arms from a shop in Dallas, Texas, using their Texas drivers licences and wait the requisite week, the only thing they had to learn was to use a Texan accent and then only in the shop. Yanks love 'Ossies', they just wouldn't know one if they fell over one. The only difference between an 'Ossie' and a Yank is the accent with which they speak, otherwise they are indistinguishable.

The target is a US Naval Fleet Admiral who is in charge of a carrier fleet and has begun his own private marine detachment of highly dedicated and intensely loyal ex-servicemen. When on foreign soil his private army spends its time eliminating anti US agitators and insurgents then appearing back in the carrier as part of the ship based marine detachment. The CIA know it's happening, they just can't prove it sufficiently to remove him from his post.

The Admiral is a Vietnam vet with two silver stars and a spray of purple hearts from being a young naval attaché to the old Vietnamese Government near the very end of the engagement. He barely escaped on a stretcher on the last helicopter out. Okay, he was once a hero, and he was also a Naval Intel puke so has some knowledge of 'them assholes from the CIA'. He is protected twenty four seven by troops without Naval credentials and they do everything including sleep with him. He even has his own food taster.

The timing is also governed by the fact that the death will have to occur on US soil. If he is discovered to have died from an act of violence caused by foreign assailants on foreign soil, it could well start WW III. His carrier task force had just docked after a tour which included stops in Durban, South Africa, then through the Suez Canal to allied ports on the Mediterranean, including an unplanned refit in Roma (where his people had come peripherally in contact with Pat), a surprise PR visit up to Helsinki and finally to Leningrad, which added an unwelcome six weeks onto the tour before he arrived back to, what is nominally, his home port in Norfolk, Virginia.

Pat is wearing a summer naval officer's dress uniform and being sent on board of his newest berth by his pregnant wife and his pregnant girlfriend who are wearing amazingly little for their 'condition'. Hundreds of shipboard personnel lined the rails, cheering from the decks at the semi-naked, pregnant girls. Gesima led through dock security and was only peripherally searched by the security then Sal was gone over even less but Pat was thoroughly body searched in a sign of utter jealousy. The Homeland Security people didn't see the point of searching two pregnant women wearing transparent clothing, "look at the nipples on her would ya, and their pubes, a landing strip for my tongue to follow when navy boy is out of the way, yo bro!"

Pat was showing his pass at the bottom of the gangway when a navy jeep pulled up in front of the girls. Four naval crewmen piled out, and headed for the gangway, gunnysacks over one shoulder and heavy armaments hanging hidden down their backs. The pretty girls saw the guns and put on a screaming act that would have raised the dead so the four sailors looked back confused and started hitting the ship with heavy machine guns and anti-personnel rockets. Pat was almost at the top of the gangway ready to show his papers to the MPs and both sides of him were sprayed with intense machine gun fire.

The MPs ducked for cover. Pat dived passed them and rolled until he was under cover too. An ordinary seaman gave him a hand up and said, "He's in his cabin, directly above I-4." The two of them used a hand held computer showing where I-4 was in the scheme of their plan. Pozywio kept an eye out and Pat placed a directional heavy explosive device, known as a dead head, directly below the cabin and wheelhouse in a vacant cabin, then walked to the opposite side of the ship. They placed rebreathing devices into their mouths and leaped, hitting the water feet first. Riley was operating a five man nonmagnetic underwater vehicle and was waiting for them three meters underwater.

On the side of the ship people were taking notice of, the two girls hit the ground beside the Naval Jeep and pulled light foldable fully automatic machine guns from Sal's fake stomach. From behind the Jeep they fired into the backs of the four Australians who were still firing on the ship. The girls were then driven away by Eric who had remained completely unnoticed in the driver's seat of the Jeep. The four attackers were lying chopped to pieces all over the concrete wharf. Security first thought they had been killed by the ships guards.

Pat, and the officially deceased Corporals, body surfed onto the yellow sand beach and walked up to a minibus with two bikini clad girls, one heavily pregnant, and an elderly driver. Pat got that idea out of a James Bond movie.

The explosion which hit the USS Hopetown during this confusion took out the complete wheelhouse and the Admiral's cabin below it, leaving little but a smoking hole and lethal falling metal debris. The late admiral was in bed with his adjutant at the time and they would be lucky if they find his false teeth and her padded bra. The dead dockside attackers had assorted papers showing them to be local terrorists but all of their documentation was found to be false under even the most casual inspection. No final decision was made about their identities but it was established that the fatal gunfire emanated from behind them and that the shipside bombardment simply tore the dead bodies apart.

Pat had deduced that at least two of the new team were US agents. He thought that it would have been Blue and Kyle because they were always having little private meetings (and the two idiots had the intelligence of the mould on a wet sponge). He used the expedient of letting God sort out the innocent from the guilty. Sal had already removed all traces of the four dead servicemen from Army and ASIO records, "a bit of a doddle, really," she said.

Naval Investigators are not the CIA who knew for a fact who the main perpetrators were; they even accepted that three of the attackers were their own operatives. Their major problem was that, of the old team, their overseers were MIA. One was presumed dead; the other was a turncoat, possibly even a case of Stockholm syndrome as gate security said that she was pregnant and wharf-side surveillance footage confirmed this. The two man comprising the hit team sent to remove the Australian Army corporals from the original team are dead or missing. Two skeletons were found in the barracks where they were based but there was no DNA left in the skeletons that were found, due to the thermal igniters that had caused such an intense fire.