Hunter Killer (52 page)

Ramshawe pulled up the photocopy of Colonel Gamoudi’s birth certificate and read off: “Born Asni, Morocco, June twelve, 1964…Father Abdul Gamoudi, mountain guide…”

“Beautiful,” said the voice from Langley.

“You guys got a lead?” asked the Lt. Commander.

“Sure have. The Colonel’s right now in a Boeing 737 owned by the King of Saudi Arabia, and he’s heading for Marrakesh, non-stop.”

“My boss will want to alert the Navy about that, but…wait just a minute. I have some extra data on Asni that may help.”

Jimmy Ramshawe’s fingers hit the computer keyboard like shafts of light, until Jacques Gamoudi’s early military record came up: “He worked as a mountain guide with his father in the High Atlas Range around his home village…He also worked in the local hotel and…this is interesting…the owner of that hotel, a former Major in the French Parachute Regiment named Laforge, sponsored him in his application to join the Foreign Legion…”

“Hey, that’s great, Lt. Commander.”

“Guess you guys think Jacques Gamoudi’s going home, right?”

“We’re thinking if the French Secret Service are trying to kill him, the Atlas Mountains are not a bad place to take cover. Christ, you’d never find him up there, not in those high peaks, where he knows the territory backward, and where he probably still has friends.”

“That’d be a tough one,” replied Ramshawe. “But we’re not trying to kill him, and we’ve got two damn good leads in Asni—his dad and his old boss at the hotel. If one of them’s still there, we might be in good shape.”

He rang off and headed immediately to see Admiral Morris, who listened to the latest twist in the saga of Le Chasseur. When Ramshawe was through, Admiral Morris pulled up Morocco on a computerized wall map, four feet wide.

“Let me just get my bearings, Jimmy,” he said. “Right, now here’s Marrakesh. Where the hell’s Asni? Is it close?”

“Yeah, right here, sir.”

“Ah, yes. Right astride the old mountain road between Marrakesh and Agadir, on the Atlantic coast…see this place here…where it says Toubkal? That’s one of the highest mountains in Africa. Guess that’s why Asni became a major mountaineering village. That’s where Jacques Gamoudi’s dad made his living.”

“So did Jacques, for a while.”

“Hell, those French killers have their work cut out. Can you imagine chasing a professional mountain guide through that range? You’d never find him.”

“You been there, sir?”

“I’ve been to Agadir. That’s how I remember Mount Toubkal. A bunch of our guys had shore leave for a week and they were going to climb it. It’s damned high and extremely steep—something like thirteen thousand feet.”

“You didn’t go yourself, sir?”

“Jimmy,” said George Morris. “I might look kinda stupid, but I’ve never been crazy.”

Ramshawe laughed. “So what do we tell the Big Man?”

“We tell him both the CIA and the NSA consider Le Chasseur is going home to the Atlas Mountains, to hide out from the French assassins. And we tell him it’s going to happen fast, and it looks like our best bet to grab him might be off the dock in Agadir.”

“We’re assuming he wants to be grabbed.”

“Jimmy, we’ve rescued his wife and family, his money’s safe in the U.S.A., and the French are trying to kill him. He’ll come, and he’ll do as we ask. He has no choice. Because if we don’t get him, the French will eventually take him out.”

“But how are we going to find him?” asked Ramshawe.

“Why don’t you call Admiral Morgan and see what he says?”

“Okay, sir. I’ll do that right away.”

He marched back down to his office and went through on the direct line to the White House at a particularly bad time. Admiral Morgan was wrestling with a statement from the United Nations condemning the action of the United States of America in sinking at least two, maybe three, and possibly four French ships. The statement was withering for the UN, which spent a certain amount of time each year expressing “dismay,” a small amount of time being “disappointed,” and considerable time finding things “incomprehensible.”

But, essentially, the UN did not “condemn.” As a word, it was too inflammatory, too likely to make a bad situation worse, and too difficult a word from which to retreat.

Today, however, the United Nations not only condemned, it issued a paralyzing anti-American statement that read,
The probable actions of the U.S. Navy in the Strait of Hormuz represented bullying on a scale totally unacceptable to the rest of the world.

It added that the Security Council intended to summon the United States representatives to appear before the General Assembly, the main debating chamber of the UN. And there, every Member State, all 191 of them, would be invited to cast a vote in favor of the severest censure the UN had issued in a quarter of a century.

There was no state of war existing between France and the United States,
the statement said.
Therefore the action of the U.S. Navy must fall under the heading of, at best, a reckless and careless attack or, at worst, cold-blooded murder of innocent seamen.”

Either way the UN could not condone the actions of the U.S.A. The General Assembly would also be asked to decide whether substantial damages, possibly $1 billion, ought now to be paid in reparations to the French government.

When he read it, President Bedford shuddered at the enormity of the ramifications. Not many U.S. Presidents have been accused of “murder” by the UN. And Paul Bedford was not much enjoying his place in that particular spotlight.

Since Admiral Morgan had masterminded the entire exercise, he asked him to come into the Oval Office. And that’s exactly where they were when the phone rang with Lt. Commander Ramshawe on the line from Fort Meade.

Arnold Morgan just growled, “We got him yet?”

“No, sir. But we’re in better shape than we were yesterday. We know where he is, and we think we know where he’s going.” He outlined to the Admiral the developments of the day and the new significance of Morocco, and then posed the question he had asked Admiral Morris.

“If we want to pick him up in Agadir, sir, how the hell do we find him?”

“Jimmy,” rasped Morgan, “we got to get him a cell phone, one of those little bastards with a GPS system attached. That way we can hook him up with his wife onboard the
Shiloh
, and he can show us where he is. Do the guys at Langley think the French are in hot pursuit?”

“They don’t know whether Paris understands yet that Gamoudi is on his way to Marrakesh. But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

“Right. Meanwhile you better get Langley to deliver one of those phones to Le Chasseur.”

“How and where, sir?”

“If the CIA can’t get a telephone to a guy who’s trying his damnedest to get into the U.S.A., they might as well close the fucking place down,” snapped Morgan, slamming down the phone.

President Bedford was extremely relieved to see that his main man had not lost his nerve in the face of a frontal assault by the UN. “This is very serious, Arnie, don’t you think?” he said.

“Serious!” growled Morgan. “You think we ought to be nervous about some half-assed, know-nothing Security Council that contains among its fifteen members the Philippines, Romania, Angola, Benin, and Algeria. Jesus! These guys are pressed to feed themselves and plant fucking soybeans, never mind have a hand in running the goddamn world.”

Even President Bedford, in the darkest moment of his presidency, was compelled to laugh.

“And I don’t want you to lose your nerve, Mr. President,” added Admiral Morgan. “Remember what we know has happened: the French, in partnership with some kind of a robed nutcase, have forced the world into its worst economical crisis since World War Two. With reckless disregard for any other nation’s plight, they cold-bloodedly smashed the Saudi oil industry with naval explosive, and then provided two Supreme Commanders to force the surrender of the Saudi armed forces and then assault the royal government in Riyadh.

“Now half the world’s without oil, and not everyone realizes, yet, that the French did it, for some sleazy financial deal with this Nasir character…that’s a guy dressed in a fucking bed sheet.

“And
we
have to get the industrial world out of this. And if that means sinking a handful of French ships, that’s the way it’s gotta be. They’re goddamn lucky we haven’t sunk ’em all.”

“But, Arnie, what about this United Nations censure?”

“Sir, this is a momentous chain of events. It’s something history will judge in the fullness of time. Ignore the short-term rantings of a few nitwits who only know about a tenth of the facts. Sit tight, don’t crack, and we’ll win this. Probably in the next week.”

“You mean if we can get this Colonel Gamoudi to testify at the General Assembly for us?”

“Absolutely. And he will, because his own land has turned against him, he’s been betrayed, and he only has one set of friends in the world—that’s us. We’ve rescued his family and his money, and we’ll save him. And when we’ve done it, he’ll sing—that curly-haired little French Moroccan will sing like Frank Sinatra.”

“You’ve only seen a picture of him in his Arab kit,” said the President. “How do you know he’s got curly hair?”

“North African, sir. All North Africans have curly hair. Christ, most of them live in the Sahara Desert. If they didn’t have thick, curly hair for protection, their heads would blow up.”

“Which of Darwin’s theories of evolution are you currently studying, Arnie?” asked Paul Bedford wryly.

“Right now I’m concentrating on the bit about the ever-evolving diabolically devious nature of the French,” retorted Morgan. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll just call Alan Dickson, we’ll have a couple of cups of coffee, and we’ll hear more. This is hotting up, and I’m darned sure we’re out in front.”

FRIDAY, APRIL
16, 1730 (
LOCAL
)
ROYAL NAVY DOCKYARD, GIBRALTAR

The eight-man U.S. Navy SEAL team, which had been airlifted from a joint exercise with twenty-two SAS in Hereford, England, arrived in a red-painted Royal Navy Dauphin 2 helicopter in the great sprawling British base that stands guard over the gateway to the Mediterranean.

Moored alongside, on the North Mole, the great breakwater that protects the strategically important harbor, was the 10,000-ton Ticonderoga-class cruiser U.S.S.
Shiloh
, fresh from a 900-mile run down the Portuguese coast from the outer reaches of the Bay of Biscay.

Back in Norfolk, Virginia, Adm. Frank Doran had reasoned that if they were going to haul Le Chasseur out of some Middle Eastern banana republic, they were going to need a big U.S. warship on hand to deal with the problems. The middle of the Mediterranean, somewhere east of the Italian peninsula, seemed as good a place as any to set up shop.

However, the way things were now moving, there had been a major change of direction.
Shiloh
, complete with the Gamoudi family and the SEAL team, would leave the Med within two hours, heading 428 miles south down the Atlantic, along the long sand-swept coast of Morocco. Latest orders, direct from the Pentagon, recommended that the SEAL team go in and grab the French Colonel sometime in the next three or four days.

Capt. Tony Pickard had been ordered to make all speed from Gibraltar to an ops area 100 miles off the Moroccan seaport of Agadir. When SEAL Team Number Four, home base Little Creek, Virginia, was safely aboard, U.S.S.
Shiloh
would cast her lines and leave immediately.

The SEAL’s team leader was Lt. Cdr. Brad Taylor, the Virginia garrison’s resident iron man, one of those SEALs who pins the Trident on his pajamas before he goes to bed. A veteran of the Iraq war, thirty-one-year-old Brad Taylor was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, and leading classman in the SEALs’ brutal indoctrination course BUD/S, known in the trade as “The Grinder.”

His father was a U.S. naval Captain from Seattle, Washington, and his mother, a former actress who had spent much of her life wondering how she could possibly have given birth to this miniature King Kong.

Brad was six foot two, but every stride he took looked as if he were just out of the gym and on his way to a world heavyweight title fight. To complement that natural-born swagger, he had wide shoulders, massive forearms and wrists, and thighs like mature oaks. He seemed shorter, but he looked like a young John Wayne, with slightly floppy brown hair worn longer than the standard SEAL hard-trimmed buzz cut.

Brad Taylor had won collegiate swimming championships, over 100 yards, a half mile, and one mile. He also won a U.S. Navy cruiserweight boxing championship, flattening all three of his opponents in the quarterfinal, semifinal, and final. Only injury had prevented him from playing free safety for the cadets in the Army-Navy game.

Brad Taylor was one of those people born to service in the U.S. Navy, born to lead a combat SEAL team, born to carry out SPECWARCOM’s orders, no matter how difficult. And today his orders were short and succinct, straight from the White House, via the Pentagon:
Get the French Army Colonel Jacques Gamoudi out of Morocco.

The U.S. guided-missile warship cleared Gibraltar at 1930 (local) and made all speed through the Strait and into the Atlantic, turning south on a course that would keep her 100 miles off the Moroccan coast, steaming past Tangier, Rabat, and Casablanca.

At thirty knots, it took the
Shiloh
five and a half hours to cover the 165 miles to a position off the capital city of Rabat—which was where the first activity of the night took place. At midnight (local) one of the two boarded helicopters, the SH-60B Seahawk LAMPS III, took off into the night, and headed directly into Rabat.

Clasped in the first officer’s hand was a cardboard box containing the cell phone Admiral Morgan had ordered. It was satellite-programmed to connect with the comms room of U.S.S.
Shiloh
from any point on the globe. It also had a built-in GPS system, operational via satellite, that would pinpoint its user’s position accurate to thirty yards.

Furthermore, that position could be relayed to the
Shiloh
without the user’s even speaking. With the phone held in the open, one touch on one button would automatically inform the warship’s ops room precisely where the caller was standing.