Fenix (2 page)

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T
he small fishing boat heaved with the waves, struggling to maintain its course. The frothing sea water of the Arabian sea splashed against the wooden hull as the vessel cut through the waves. Afridi flinched as a spray of water headed for his eyes. He tasted the salty water and spat it out, turning away from the railing he had been holding on to.

“Cursed weather!” He straggled to what constituted as the bridge on this small ship. He grabbed the ladder leading up to the small room and looked around. The entire boat was awash and all surfaces were slippery. Waves were breaking above the bows of the ship now, engulfing the tarpaulin covers on their cargo containers. He glanced at the ropes keeping the containers tied down and satisfied himself that they were going to hold. Then he started to climb up the ladder.

“Can’t you make this thing go any faster?” He blared as he lifted himself off the ladder and on to the floor of the small room. The two men there turned to look at him.

“If we go any faster, we will break the boat’s back!” The captain of the boat replied in his frail voice. He was the owner of this boat and had been for many years. The boat heaved again and fell over the crest of a large wave. Water splashed high enough to hit the glass of the bridge. Afridi looked at the old man’s eyes and saw the fear. But not of the waves or the weather. The old man had been through countless storms over his long life. No, this fear stemmed from something that scared the old man even more.

Afridi smiled cruelly and removed the AK-47 hanging off his shoulders. He put the weapon on the small map table and looked at the old man.

“Are you afraid of this?” He pointed to the rifle laying on the table. Both men in the room beside him remained silent. He nodded appreciatively.
Good. Fear was always useful.

“Today you will accomplish what Allah has wished from you devout Muslims. You will accomplish what he desires and will find a place by his side when the time comes,” Afridi said grandly. He was prone to hyperbole. Especially when he held the power to make people listen. His rifle ensured that power.

And his mission ensured the afterlife.

He looked around and saw the overcast clouds and the drizzle hitting the windows. Flashes of thunder followed intermittently, lighting up the bridge in a flood of bluish-white light. The glass vibrated a few seconds later as the thunder crackled through the skies.

Filthy weather
…he thought as the ship heaved again, following the motion of yet another of the never-ending waves. Afridi struggled to hold on and maintain his balance. He was not a sailor. Never had been and never thought about it. But apparently Allah had other plans, as it had turned out. Given the nature of the job he had been given, however, the discomfort on the high seas was irrelevant.

This “ship” was barely deserving of the term. But it was a decades-old veteran of the Arabian sea. It had survived countless storms and had always made it back to port. And that kind of security was what Afridi and his men needed on their journey from the beaches west of Karachi.

Security
and
anonymity
…Afridi reminded himself. For all its glorious years on the seas off the Pakistani and Indian coasts, this ship and its crew were well known to authorities on both sides. And
that
was important. The last thing he needed now was to be caught off the coast, away from his objective, by Indian naval and coastal security forces.

Which is where the weather came in
…He thought as he put his hand out of the windows to feel the drizzling rain.

This bad weather made his job easier. There would be little chance of detection from low flying patrol aircraft with these clouds and rolling waves. There would be no moonlight to assist in visual acquisition and the undulating surface of the water coupled with the extremely small thermal signature of this low-tech vessel would ensure that sensory detection threat was low.

At least that’s what they told us…
he shrugged off the rain water and again shouldered his rifle behind his back. The eyes of the two crewmen were focused on his actions.

“Look at the sea where we are going!” he shouted with a brash wave of his arm. “If we get lost out here, I will personally chop and throw your heads off this boat for the sharks to feast on! I want to be at our objective within the next few hours before this storm dies away! Understand?!”

The two men nodded in quick successions but said nothing. Afridi moved to the old man and grabbed him by the throat, nearly choking him.

“You have been very quiet ever since I came up here. You are not having second thoughts about the task God has given you, do you?” He pressed his fingers tighter around the old man’s neck, causing him to gasp for breath. “Speak up, you old bastard!”

              A few seconds later Afridi relaxed his grip around the man’s throat. The captain instantly fell on his knees gasping for air.

              “Bah. You miserable villagers are not worthy to be leading this task!” Afridi turned to a hatch nearby that led into the belly of the ship. That was where the rest of his men were. There was a small orange-yellow glow of light coming from down there. Afridi bent over the hatch and was met down the ladder by one of his men, sitting with his rifle next to the base of the ladder.

              “Rashid!” Afridi shouted. Rashid looked up and smiled.

              “Wake everybody up. We are getting close to the destination. I want the
cargo
checked and primed. Understand?” Rashid nodded and threw his cigarette away, getting up with the help of the ladder. Afridi looked back at the bridge once Rashid was on his way. He could hear the voices of other men now. The captain’s assistant had helped the captain get up and take a seat near the steering column. The latter’s face was red and he was still struggling for breath.

              “
You!
” Afridi pointed at the assistant. “Get back to the control! Leave him or I will shoot you
right here and now!
”

              As the petrified man promptly got up to get to the controls, Afridi looked out the glass and saw the drizzle dying down. He could even see some break in the cloud cover…

              “How far are we from the coast?”

              “Probably two dozen kilometers.”

             
Not  a good time to lose weather cover…
Afridi thought. They were entering one of the busiest commercial shipping areas. He could even make out the lights of at least half a dozen large container ships on the horizon.

              Afridi turned as he heard noise behind him and saw Rashid climbing up the stairs to the bridge, his rifle slinging over his shoulders. He kicked the captain blocking his way on the floor and walked past the writhing man. Afridi had taken the binoculars from the bridge and was actively scanning the horizon.

              “Problems?” Rashid asked.

              “Not yet,” Afridi replied without taking his eyes off the optics. “But the weather is starting to clear and we still have some distance to go before we are in range of the dinghies.”

              “Inshallah, we
will
deliver as promised!” Rashid proclaimed confidently. Afridi grunted and smiled.

              “Indeed, my friend! I…” Afridi’s voice died off as both men overheard droning aircraft noise. A warning from the assistant made them look just as an Indian coast-guard Dorner-228 aircraft broke cloud cover about a kilometer away from their location. The aircraft was on a path away from the boat and was moving on…

              “Maybe they didn’t see us!” Rashid offered. Afridi continued to watch the departing aircraft through his binoculars as it drifted in and out of the low hanging clouds and the early morning mist. The aircraft noise was dying down now and Afridi was almost agreed with Rashid when the aircraft banked to port and began to turn.

              “The infidels have spotted us!” Afridi lowered his binoculars and let out some heart-felt expletives. He then turned to Rashid as the aircraft noise began to rise: “Get everybody up
now!
Tell Ahmed to open up the containers we have for just this emergency!
Go!
”

              As Rashid leapt to the ladder and began climbing down, Afridi kept his eyes on the twin-engined propeller aircraft as it swung by the ship, this time within a few hundred meters of the bow. Afridi saw the logo of the Indian coast-guard against the flicker of a lightening flash. He thought he also saw light flashing from some small dome-shaped optical pod lens…

             
There’s no hiding it now
...he looked on as Rashid and two other men of his team brought up a pair of wooden containers through the hatch. Rashid slid one of the containers over the floor of the bridge and cracked open the lid. He removed the thin cover of foam on top to reveal a long green tube with optics on one end. It had painted on it “
ANZA MK-II
”. Rashid put his rifle down and hefted the loaded surface-to-air missile launcher in his hands. He removed the lid off its optics and slid the batteries in. The optics lit up. He looked to Afridi:

              “Ready when you are!”

              Afridi frowned. This was to have been their last resort. But given the nature of the mission at hand, they were armed for any eventuality. He held no assumptions that the Indians would be unaware of the threat posed by this weapon or even the weapon’s characteristics. After all, they had faced versions of the same weapon many years ago during the Kargil war. No, the issue here was not the weapon itself but its use. Deniability doesn’t work very well if one advertises the source of one’s weaponry…

              “Not yet,” he replied finally. “Let’s make sure they are on to us. For all they know, we are just another fishing vessel lost in the storm.” He got a wicked smile from Rashid on that one just as the aircraft made another low pass over the vessel, drowning the bridge in propeller noise.

              “They are hailing us on the radio!” The captain’s assistant shouted.

              “Tell them what they want to hear!” Afridi shouted back. “And stick to what we told you to say. One word besides it and your sentence dies with you! Understand?” The assistant nodded in fear and began to respond to the radio hails. All the while the ship continued towards the coast. All they needed to do was to buy time.

              “The aircraft is armed!” Rashid said as the aircraft banked around the bow of the ship again, scrutinizing it with its infra-red optics. Afridi saw what Rashid was pointing to: there were a pair of rocket pods underneath each wing of the small patrol aircraft. Each pod carried four fin-stabilized unguided rockets. Enough firepower to sink this vessel without too much trouble…

              “Take it easy, now.” Afridi ordered. “Let them keep talking. And keep that launcher stowed away. The more they talk, they closer we get!”

              The assistant turned from the radio to face the men behind him: “The Indians are ordering us to shut off our engines and stay where we are. They are ordering us not to come any closer to the coast!”

              “How far are we now?” Rashid asked.

              “About eighteen kilometers away,” Afridi replied, looking at the GPS tracker in his hands and the paper map laid out on the chart table. He shook his head. “Still too far!”

              “No choice then!” Rashid said as he flicked open the optics of his launcher. Afridi realized that his colleague was correct. There was no other option. He turned to the assistant: “You! Do what the Indians are asking.”

Rashid let out a derisive laugh.              “Get them complacent! I like it!”

A few minutes later the ship was dead in the water. It rolled and pitched with the waves, helplessly. The flight crew of the Dornier-228 overflew the docile and obedient target, observing them via night-vision goggles. Behind them, the systems operators continued their task of observing the Pakistani ship through the infra-red and near-infrared optical pods. One of them spotted a man on the railing outside the bridge elevating a long tube at them and realized what that was. He shouted the warning to the pilots and zoomed his optics on the tube just as the optics flashed white. Then smoke drifted away from the pipe. The operator zoomed the optical scope back out and saw the rising thermal plume coming up towards them. The pilot banked his aircraft hard and prepared to punch out flares, but he and his crew had been caught completely off guard against such an unexpected anti-air threat. A second later it was already too late.

Afridi saw from inside the bridge as the Anza missile climbed into the Indian aircraft and slammed into its engines just as the pilot had released flares. The explosion tore apart the small aircraft’s starboard wing amidst a flurry of flames. The aircraft splashed into the waves a couple seconds later.

“There is no hiding it now!” Rashid said as he threw the discarded launcher off the ship and walked inside, wiping the smut of the missile exhaust off his face. Afridi turned to the captain’s assistant: