Plausible Deniability_The explosive Lex Harper novella by Stephen Leather

Author:Stephen Leather [Leather, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Later that afternoon, Harper was taken direct to the Saudi black ops team’s base at Tabuk, close to the Red Sea and the borders of Jordan and Israel. Laiya had already set up a planning meeting for him with the members of her special operations team who had been chosen for the op. The men all seemed to have developed the ingrained self-confidence shared by Special Forces the world over, and were quite willing to fight their corner against their senior officers and NCOs when necessary. The only concession to their military background was to throw in an occasional ‘Sidi’ - ‘Sir’ in Arabic - when they were making a point quite forcibly to someone of more senior rank.

Laiya then briefed them on the pirates SOPs: Standard Operating Procedures. ‘Their preferred method is to use small, armed, fast attack craft to force target vessels of high value to stop,’ she said. ‘They are then boarded and taken close to the Somali coast, near the pirates’ home villages, where the crew are taken ashore and kept in the sort of conditions that I’m sure you can imagine, until a ransom is paid. Each attack craft has a two-man crew, one overseeing the high-powered outboard engines while the other crew member is a weapons man, in charge of either rocket propelled grenades, medium machine guns or even just an AK 47. The target vessels are almost invariably unarmed and the threat from these weapons is usually enough to force the crews to surrender. The actions on target used by the pirates are to circle the chosen vessel and order it to stop. If it does not immediately comply, the weapons man will fire a couple of warning shots and if this still does not have the desired effect, he will put rounds onto the target. The whole operation is overseen from a mother-ship, usually a previously captured trawler or merchant ship, which waits further out in the Indian Ocean, watching everything on radar and directing the attack craft by radio, thus ensuring that the pirate leaders are well out of harm’s way if the attack goes wrong or the attack craft are intercepted by warships.’

‘One other thing,’ Harper said. ‘There is a NATO task force in the area but rather than enforcing the law of the sea, they appear to be operating a no-arrest, no-kill policy with regards to the Somali pirates. If the warship crews encounter them, they merely disarm them and even make sure they have enough water, food and fuel to make it back to the coast safely. So no one should be very surprised if the same crews then re-arm and return to the sea to carry out further hijackings.’

After intense discussions, they eventually came up with what seemed to Harper to be an eminently workable plan. It was vital that it had come from the shop floor; the final plan had to be theirs, not one that had been foisted on them, because if it was their own, they would buy into it much more readily and strive even harder to make it succeed.

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