The room did not erupt into noise, but it just slowly built up in volume. When Richard thought that he had let them vent enough spleen he took back control of the meeting. “It will only be two days of no diving, and that is to make sure that we are not attacked again with divers in the water. Now you are all thinking, why are we not heading home? Well, that is thanks to the good captain of this boat and yours truly.”
This got a mix of groans and laughs from the group, just like Richard had been hoping for and then he dropped his bombshell on their heads. “High Command is sending a second group of ships out this way. They are to help with finishing pulling out what we have discovered. We are ordered to stay on sight until relieved by the second force coming out of Mombasa. After they arrive on station, in about three days or so? We then will fall under the escort and new mission commander’s orders, so some of you real navy people can relax. What do they have in mind when the new mission commander gets here?...... I was not told, so I’m as in the dark as the rest of you. But if I was a betting man? Then we will be pulling everything, but the galley sinks off that wrecked ship.” Richard pointed to the deck towards the area that the sunken cargo ship was laying under them.
Richard looked around the room as the meeting broke up. He caught a few side long looks from those in “a real” uniform. But if these Navy “combat” personnel could not handle the job of combat? Well, that was not his problem to have to fix. And he knew someone that he would be talking to about reporting that little issue. Richard suddenly rocked forward as he was slapped on the back and a tall man in marine field dress walked past him before he turned around a little. As Richard tried to suck in air to refill his lungs the Marine was giving him a thumbs up and a devil may care smile as he cleared the cabin they had been using as a briefing room.
“Well at least the Marines know what their job is,” thought Richard.
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On the side of the mountain overlooking the American “Fleet” Fatiha Mejjati was having a full blown hissy fit. Well, it was as much of a visible hissy fit as she allowed herself were so many of “her” men could see her. She had high hopes that the Fleet of Mohammad would have swept these American ships from the seas. Before the attack, she had had time to view the American weapons mounted on those vessels, and they had not seemed that impressive to her. To her they looked like little more than “normal” civilian ships before the attack had started. And they seemed to have been not unlike the ones she had ridden in on to reach the holy land. Then the Americans had opened fire, and things that she had not thought of as weapons turned out to be very effective weapons against the attacking true believers.
She knew that the Fleet of Mohammad had chosen the wrong tactics to attack as soon as the large ship with the ramp hanging off its nose started to turn its back toward the attacking small craft. “Her” people had come to attack Americans like a pack of pigs and fired their weapons in the air like they were in some movie or something. After the second or third of the prophet’s boats had started to burn. She thought that the local commander was going to at least swarm around and take out one of the smaller American vessels. But then one of those smaller American boats had turned out to be armed to the teeth like something out of a nightmare.
From her point of view of the battle. That one small American boat fitted with what seemed like a dozen heavy automatic weapons had been the one that had broken the attack of the Fleet of God. But it had not pursued the remaining boats that had fled the area seemingly claimed by the Americans. She had watched the American ships for another hour before having a member of her group keep tabs on them. That was while she went to find out some needed information from the nearest local that she could lay her hands on. She wanted to know where the local fleet was going now that the battle was over. At least it was over for the time being.
Fatiha had an idea on how to stop and hurt these Americans, all she needed to do was find out what was left of any local assets not blown out of the water already. The key was not the grey American ships, it was what they were recovering from the ocean. She needed to find this group of boaters and get them to be more effective in the use of their resources to hurt The Great Shaitan and not just wasting them and the lives of the crews in more pointless attacks.
It was when night had fully fallen over the island, when Fatiha leads most of her group to the port that the fleeing ships took cover in. After so many years working with a certain type of person in this part of the world. Fatiha had no problem finding the true key leaders of this “town” after only a dozen minutes of observations. She might have “only” been a woman in the eyes of the faith, but Fatiha had a lot of armed men behind her who would follow her orders if she phrased them just right. It also helped with the locals that she had a reputation of fighting in the holy land. That carried a lot of weight, even if it might have been exaggerated on some points in the stories that were told to the dumb locals. She also had done the Hajj, twice, were as none of the locals had done that journey even once as the profit demanded.
All of this let her metaphorically blast through the port village like a Category 5 typhoon on steroids. Her people “only” had to shoot one person to get the idea across that they would talk to her….. or else. She would have to shoot three more of the locals during or right after that meeting that she had called that night. However, how many of these surviving people that would be shot over the next few days, as Fatiha worked on supporting the plan that she had come up with is not known. In the days of a working international press service and the internet, maybe someone would have found out about the actions of her organization. But this was the start of the new Dark Age for more than just this part of the world and so murders like this were happening in the “dark” all over the place, every day, and twice on Sunday.
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