The Panther

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT


The guy flicked his cigarette into the surf, then began walking toward us.

He looked to be in his mid-thirties, medium height and very lean, though I had the impression he’d once carried more weight. He was barefoot, wearing white cotton pants and a green flowered tropical shirt, which was unbuttoned.

His hair was long and straight, and it was bleached almost white by the same Saudi sun that had burned his skin almost black. His eyebrows, too, were sun-bleached, and as he got closer I saw that his eyes were a weird, almost unnatural blue.

At first glance, you’d say beach bum or surfer dude. But if you looked closer, you’d see a man who’d been here too long; a Westerner who had not gone native, but had gone somewhere else.

Buck met him halfway and they shook hands. I heard the guy say, “Good to see you again.” His voice was flat as was his whole affect, but he did force a smile.

Brenner, Kate, and I joined Buck, who introduced us to Chet Morgan. He knew who we were, of course, and now we knew our CIA guy, though Buck hadn’t mentioned Mr. Morgan’s affiliation.

He shook hands with Kate first, saying, “Glad you could come,” then with Brenner, saying, “Good job on the road.”

Brenner responded, “Thanks for the Hellfires.”

He didn’t acknowledge that, and as I shook his hand, he said, “Thank you for coming here.”

Weird. And for the record, his handshake was more of a jerk than a shake, and his skin was cold. Maybe he was dead.

Chet, as he wanted to be called, suggested a walk on the beach, so we walked toward Elephant Rock.

Chet hadn’t said walk and talk, so we walked in silence, like we were old buds just enjoying the moment together.

I glanced at Buck, who seemed subdued, which is not like Buck.

Chet lit another cigarette.

I didn’t give a shit if this guy never said another word, but Brenner broke the silence and asked Chet the standard question, “How long have you been here?”

Chet replied, “Since the Cole.”

So that was about three and a half years. No wonder the guy was buggy. But Buck had been in Yemen on and off for a lot longer, and he was okay. Maybe if I stayed here another six months I’d think Chet was okay, too.

As a cop, I can spot someone who is indulging in a controlled substance, and I had the thought that Chet was on something, maybe khat. So maybe the A-team had a junkie on board. Terrific. Takes the pressure off me.

Brenner, a man of few words himself, was apparently uncomfortable with a man of no words, and he asked Chet, “Any chance our target was KIA in the ambush?”

Chet drew on his cigarette and replied, “I don’t think so.” He added, “Chatter puts him in Marib.”

Well, I guess we were going to Marib to end the chatter.

Buck asked Chet, “Do you or your people think that this attack on our convoy in any way compromises our mission?”

Chet replied, “I’m not hearing anything. But it’s a good question.” He added, “I think we need to move fast before somebody in Washington starts asking the same question.”

Right. As always, it came down to the age-old clash between the hawks and the doves—the ballsy and the ball-less—just like during the Cold War. The Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence establishment, and the White House all had different agendas. The only people who had a clear agenda were the terrorists.

Kate asked, “Why would anyone in Washington not want to go ahead with apprehending The Panther?”

“There are legal issues,” Chet replied, “and diplomatic issues.”

Right. The Yemenis had this silly idea that their soil was sovereign. Plus there was Mommy and Daddy’s lawsuit. Also, there was a chance we’d be kicked out of Yemen for using the Hellfires today. I asked Chet, “How fast do we need to move?”

“Maybe tonight.” He added, “It may not be safe here.”

When was it safe here?

We continued our walk along the beach, past a Marine patrol, and reached Elephant Rock, which jutted into the gulf.

There were about a dozen fishing boats moored or anchored in the shallows, and Chet waded into the water toward one of them, so I guess we were supposed to follow.

He pulled himself into an open twenty-foot wooden boat with an outboard engine, and Buck followed. Kate and I and Brenner glanced at one another, then climbed aboard.

Chet unfastened the mooring line, put a key in the ignition, set the throttle, and pulled on the starter cord. The engine caught, and off we went. But where were we going?

The only seat in the open boat was in the stern near the engine, and that’s where Chet sat and steered. The rest of us sat on overturned white plastic buckets. The boat smelled fishy, and our bare feet were submerged in about four inches of nasty bilgewater.

Also, not to complain, but the sun was starting to burn my exposed skin, and I could see that Buck, Kate, and Brenner were getting a little lobsterish as well. A more immediate concern was that our guns and commo were back on the beach.

Chet Morgan, I concluded, was crazy. And we were following him. That didn’t make us crazy; it made us stupid.

There were a few rocks sticking out of the water, and on one of the rocks stood a large black-and-white gull. As we got within fifty feet of the rock, Chet reached under his shirt into the small of his back, pulled a .40 caliber Glock, took aim, and popped off a round at the big bird. Kate, who hadn’t seen Chet pull his gun, was startled; the rest of us were astonished, and Chet was annoyed because he missed. The bird flew away.

To make him feel better, I said, “To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.”

Chet ignored that and informed us, “That was a masked booby gull.” He assured us, “Not endangered.”

I remarked, “And never will be with shooting like that.”

I thought Chet was going to shoot me, but he laughed—a real laugh, which almost made me think he wasn’t nuts. He said, “I’d never shoot a white-eyed gull. They’re endangered. And they bring good luck.”

Whatever you say, Chet. Now put the gun away.

But he put it on the seat beside him. Well, at least one of us had a gun. Unfortunately, it was the crazy guy.

Chet glanced up at Elephant Rock, and I followed his gaze. The Yemeni Army guys in the pickup truck had swung their heavy machine gun toward us, and one of the soldiers was looking at us with binoculars.

Chet commented, “They get jumpy when they hear gunfire.”

Me, too.

He said to us, “If we have time, I’ll take you shark fishing. I have good luck nearly every time I go out.” He smiled and said to me and Brenner, “The sharks almost got lucky when you went out.” He laughed.

So, here we were on a small boat with an armed psychopath. How do I get myself in these situations? I need to check my contract.

I glanced at Brenner, who I knew was thinking what I was thinking. Kate, too, seemed a bit unsure about Mr. Morgan, but she has a history of giving CIA nut jobs the benefit of the doubt. Up to a point. Then she shoots them. Well… only one so far.

Buck had a dopey smile on his face, and I knew he had a lot of tolerance for screwy behavior as long as the screwball was a colleague and a peer. I mean, I had the feeling, based partly on their preppy accents, that Buck and Chet had gone to the same schools or similar schools and came from the same social stratum. Chet was the bad-boy frat brother who was always on double-secret probation, and everyone loved him as long as he didn’t actually get anyone killed. Later in life, however, what had been funny and zany behavior progressed into something less entertaining.

Also, with these CIA guys, they all cultivated eccentric behavior, which became part of their self-created legend. They wanted their peers to tell stories about them and to spread the word of their unique flamboyance.

Kate’s aforementioned pal, Ted Nash, was a good example of all this. Plus Ted was an arrogant prick. But now he was dead, and you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. Even if they were a*sholes. Which brought me to another thought: Did Chet Morgan know Ted Nash? Probably. But this wasn’t the time to ask.

Anyway, Chet Morgan had set the stage for his entry into the show, and as they say in the theater world, if you show a gun in the first act, you need to use it in the final act.

We rounded the peninsula and Chet set a course for the middle of Aden Harbor. I knew where we were going.

We sailed into the setting sun for about ten minutes, then Chet killed the engine but didn’t drop anchor, and the boat drifted out with the tide.

Chet said, “This is where the Cole was moored.”

I informed him, “I’ve been here.”

He nodded.

In fact, nearly everyone who worked this case had been taken out to this spot where seventeen American sailors had been murdered.

Chet lit another cigarette and stared into the blue water. He said, “The USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, under the command of Commander Kirk Lippold, sailed into Aden Harbor for a routine refueling. The mooring was completed at nine-thirty A.M., and refueling started at ten-thirty.”

Everyone knew this, but this is the way you begin—at the beginning.

Chet continued, “At around eleven-twenty, a small craft, like this one, with two men aboard—two suicide bombers—approached the port side of the destroyer. A minute or two later, the small craft exploded, putting a forty-by-forty-foot hole in the side of the armored hull.” He added, “It’s estimated that four to seven hundred pounds of TNT and RDX were used.” He asked rhetorically, “Where the hell did they get that much high-grade explosive?”

The answer was, just about anywhere these days. The real question had to do with the two Al Qaeda guys who woke up that morning knowing they were going to die. They worked hard to load the boat with the explosives that were going to kill them, then sailed the boat into the sunny harbor. I sort of pictured them watching the gulls flying overhead, and I wondered what they said to each other or what they were thinking in the last few minutes of their lives.

“Asymmetric warfare,” Chet said. “A small boat like this one, worth maybe a few hundred dollars, two guys who probably had no military training, and they crippled a billion-dollar, sixty-eight-hundred-ton state-of-the-art warship, built to take on any enemy warship in the world. Except the boat that attacked them.” He flipped his cigarette over the side and said, “F*cking amazing. F*cking ridiculous.”

F*cking right.

“And how were they able to do this?” asked Chet, and answered his own question. “Because the Navy’s Rules of Engagement were rewritten by some committee of politically correct, ball-less wonders in the bowels of the Pentagon.”

Right. Worse yet, the Cole’s crew and commander actually followed the new Rules of Engagement. I wouldn’t have. But I’m not military.

Chet informed us, “For hundreds of years, naval rules called for challenging an approaching ship by voice or signal to identify itself. If the ship keeps coming, you sound the alarm for battle stations and fire a shot across its bow. And if it still keeps coming, you blow it the hell out of the water.” He reminded us, “The Cole did none of that, even though this is known as a potentially hostile port. They let an unidentified ship come alongside, right here, and blow them up.” He added, “Because internationally recognized rules of the sea had been changed, for no reason except political correctness.”

The only good news is that the Navy has re-evaluated its new, sensitive Rules of Engagement after seventeen men died on the Cole, and we’ve all re-evaluated the rules of war after 9/11. As for poor Commander Lippold, he was officially exonerated of any fault—he was just following stupid rules—but unofficially his career was finished and he was passed over for promotion and retired. I’ll bet he wished he had that ten minutes to live over again.

Chet continued, “To make this attack even more incomprehensible, Al Qaeda had tried the very same thing nine months earlier in January of 2000 as part of the millennium attack plots.” He reminded us, “The USS The Sullivans, right here in Aden Harbor. A refueling stop, just like the Cole. A boat approached The Sullivans, but it was so overloaded with explosives that it sank before it reached the ship.”

Right. In my former business, that’s a clue that somebody wants to kill you, and you know they’ll try again. Same with the February 1993 truck bombing at the World Trade Center. A cop on the street can see the pattern, but the geniuses in Washington were whistling in the dark through the graveyard with their heads up their asses. Well, we all woke up after we lost three thousand people on 9/11. But that wasn’t going to bring back the dead.

Chet continued, “The enemy are not the brightest bulbs in the room, but they only have to get it right once. We have to get it right every time.”

Chet lit another cigarette and looked toward Aden. “See that brown apartment building on the hill? Five Al Qaeda operatives were in there on the morning of the attack and they were supposed to get over to the Al-Tawahi clock tower and videotape the explosion.”

I looked at the clock tower, a tall Victorian structure built by the British over a hundred years ago. I’d been in the top of the tower, and from there you had a good view of the harbor. But the videotape guys never saw that view.

Chet continued, “Unfortunately, the idiots were asleep in the apartment and missed the whole show.” He commented, “Total f*ckups. But even f*ckups get lucky once in a while.”

I’d also been in that apartment, which had been sealed off as a crime scene when I was here and maybe it still was. Hard to believe that five jihadists had slept through the big moment. I mean, total a*sholes. They were probably sleeping off a big khat chew. But as Chet said, even f*ckups get lucky, and the two guys in the boat got very lucky that day—if lucky is the right word for blowing yourself up—helped a bit by the Pentagon.

We were drifting with the outgoing tide and a small land breeze had come up and was pushing us farther out into the open gulf. Around us were a few dozen fishing boats, and like most men in Yemen, including fishermen, the guys on board were probably packing AK-47s. I mean, I wasn’t concerned per se, but I don’t like to get myself in exposed situations for no good reason. Chet, however, seemed unconcerned or unaware, so maybe he had some backup out here on the water. Or he was, as I suspected, crazy. Maybe arrogant, too.

Chet said to us, “The place on the hull where the jihadists detonated the explosives was the ship’s galley where crew members were lining up for lunch, which is why there were seventeen dead and thirty-nine injured.” He thought a moment and continued, “So it would seem that Al Qaeda knew the location of the galley and knew it was the first lunch shift.”

I thought about that. A hundred or more crew members clustered in the galley for lunch. And right on the other side of the armored hull was a boat filled with maybe seven hundred pounds of explosives. The question was, Did Al Qaeda know—or did The Panther know—where and when to detonate those explosives? Or, like most of their successes, was it just dumb luck?

Chet concluded his briefing, “The crew fought the flooding and had the damage under control by nightfall. Divers on board inspected the hull and reported that the keel was not damaged, so the billion-dollar ship was salvageable.” He continued, “Because we have no military base in this part of the world, the Cole was on its own for a while. But there was a Royal Navy frigate in the area, the HMS Marlborough, that proceeded at top speed and provided medical and other assistance. Eleven of the most injured sailors were flown by medevac to the French military hospital in Djibouti for surgery before being flown to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. The rest of the injured—and the dead—were flown directly to Landstuhl.” He added, “Fortunately, none of the thirty-nine injured died, but many are disabled for life.”

No one had anything to say, but then Chet surprised us by suggesting, “Let’s say a silent prayer for the dead and injured.” He bowed his head, so we all did the same and said a silent prayer.

I’m not good at this, but I did pray that the two suicide bombers were burning in hell with their dicks blown off and not getting any wine or sex in Paradise. Amen.

“Amen,” said Chet, then he started the engine and we headed back.

I looked at Chet Morgan, who was staring off into space with those glassy blue eyes. This guy was either very good at what he did, or very nuts. Maybe both. In any case, he needed close watching.