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 assholes. 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, “Fucking amazing. Fucking ridiculous.”
Fucking 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
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
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 fuckups. But even fuckups 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 assholes. They were probably sleeping off a big khat chew. But as Chet said, even fuckups 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.
