The Dhofar Redemption: Chapter VII

I’m jumping forward in the story a bit to keep it a little mysterious and to therefore get you to buy the book when it releases someday. You can get caught up on previous chapters here. I will probably jump forward frequently, and from the looks of things, this book might be quite a long one when I do finish it. At this point in the novel, Lieutenant Harrigan has traveled covertly across the globe and arrived at a clandestine training facility run by the British and the Omani army in preparation for a future operation. As your Valentine’s Day present to me, you should check out the shop  to snag some sick merch, like a shirt and/or a book. You can buy some stuff and give it to a loved one.

The ancient DC-3 taxied near a cluster of aircraft parked on the apron adjacent to an unmarked series of buildings, where a fuel truck ambled out to meet them. Al-Ibrahim, Birmingham, and Harrigan gathered their belongings and deplaned as soon as the propellers stopped turning and the Omani crewmember popped the door open.

Through the stifling heat the three walked through a packed parking apron. To the left was a smattering of helicopters, mostly British Wessex helicopters with their strange, bulbous appearance, and a Harrigan noticed a smattering of familiar UH-1 “Huey” towards the far end of the apron. On the right side as they walked to the squat, tan-and-brown building in front of them were a half a dozen boxy cargo planes, all painted in mottled tan-and-brown like the buildings that grew nearer with each step.

Birmingham reached the door first, yanking it open and ushering Harrigan and al-Ibrahim inside. A blast of air conditioning rushed over them, causing Harrigan to briefly shiver as the cooled air washed over the sweat that had gathered all over his body. The inside of the building was surprisingly bland. White painted walls, with signs in Arabic stenciled on, and a lone man in a bright blue uniform with his dusty, black boots propped up.

Birmingham turned to Harrigan as they drew closer to the man at the desk, “We have to get through customs,” the Brit whispered, “Give him the British passport.”

Harrigan nodded and fished the fake passport out of his pocket. He had assumed he would be using the British one after leaving the United States, and had packed his real passport away carefully after leaving Mexico.

The trio approached the customs agent at the desk, who waved them through to the next room without even looking at them, intently focusing on the tiny television in front of him.

“That passport was a bloody waste of money,” Birmingham grumbled as they exited the building and stepped out into the bright sunlight yet again.

“Our berthing is over here,” al-Ibrahim turned to his companions, “in the headquarters building.”

Now through the customs building and on the other side of the airfield, Harrigan could see rows of squat, long buildings that looked like human-sized chicken coops, with narrow windows spaced relatively evenly on the sides. As they crossed the two hundred yards between the customs shack and the barracks, Harrigan felt the sweat pool on his forehead, under his knees, and at the small of his back. The tan-and-brown color pervaded these buildings as well, blending in slightly with the scorching sand under Harrigan’s boots.

The sun was blinding, defeating even Harrigan’s trusted pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, and he was relieved when al-Ibrahim led them back indoors upon reaching the headquarters building. Much like the customs office, the air conditioning was cranking, but unlike the customs building, there was a buzz of activity as men hovered over desks, talked on phones, and pointed at maps pinned to corkboard fastened to the wall.

Conversations in English, Arabic, and other languages that Harrigan couldn’t identify bombarded his tired ears, immediately overwhelming him as he tried to make sense of what was going on. Taking a last glimpse around the bustling room, he followed al-Ibrahim through a set of doors into a long, dimly lit hallway with doors lining both sides.

“Your bunk is in this room,” al-Ibrahim motioned to a room halfway down the hall, “and Birmingham and I are across the hall.”

Despite having slept for much of the last several legs of his trip, at the mention of his bunk, exhaustion spread rapidly throughout Harrigan’s body. He opened the door to reveal a small barracks room, with a bed on each side, each with their own wooden, green footlocker. There were two small desks pushed up against the far wall, and a small wooden chair for each desk. The front of the room had a set of heavy-duty coat hooks and a simple, metal wall lockers on each side of the door.

The right side of the room had clearly been claimed already. The bed was sloppily made, with white sheets and a wool blanket simply draped over it, and there were clothes draped over the chair at the far end of the room. Harrigan dropped his bags on the left side bed and began unpacking his meager belongings.

Harrigan had unpacked all of his belongings and stashed them in his footlocker and wall locker, and was making his bed with the provided sheets when the door cracked open behind him and a familiar voice greeted him.

“Took you long enough,” Ryan Kelly said, grinning coyly from ear to ear, “I thought maybe you sunk in the Gulf of Mexico, or maybe crashed somewhere over Africa.”

Kelly was dressed in a tan drab utility uniform, with baggy sleeves rolled up and a pistol belt on his waist. He was holding a stack of folded uniforms in his arms, and he set them on the bed next to Harrigan before sticking out his hand.

“What are you doing here?” Harrigan asked as they shook hands.

“Same as you,” Kelly replied with a chuckle, dropping the handshake and motioning to the coat hooks on his side of the wall, “lending my services.” Kelly had his small personal arsenal hanging from the hooks by their slings. A scoped Winchester Model 70 with a thick, black silencer attached to the muzzle, a suppressed Smith & Wesson Model 76 submachine gun, and a set of high-powered binoculars on individual hooks.

“I see,” Harrigan replied, looking through the stack of uniforms, “I guess it is nice to see another friendly face.”

“Aww,” Kelly’s shit-eating grin spread even wider across his face, “I love you too, Harrigan. Did I get your size right?”

“Yeah,” Harrigan said as he hung the uniforms in his wall locker.

“Great,” Kelly said, his tone changing to serious, “I suppose you need to rack out for a bit. We have a lot of work to do here before we are ready to move forward.”

With that, Kelly turned and flicked the lights off as he left the room. Harrigan stretched out in his small bed and was asleep in moments.

The next several weeks were incredibly draining for Harrigan. Captain al-Ibrahim was in command of two platoons of twenty-four contracted foreign, Omani, and Baluchi soldiers, in addition to what Nas referred to as his “Command element.” Harrigan, Kelly, a Rhodesian NCO and two Omani NCOs were assigned to the command element. The unit spent their mornings going on formation runs and exercising until the heat set in.

Captain al-Ibrahim’s unit was kept secluded from the rest of the soldiers training at the desert base. They had their own barracks, their own individualized training, ate lunch at separate times from the rest of the soldiers, and used the rifle range at different times as well. By Harrigan’s casual estimation, there were close to a thousand soldiers and support staff on the base, a whole battalion’s worth of clandestine trainees. Most of the soldiers outside of Captain al-Ibrahim’s unit appeared to Harrigan to be Omani, or at least from somewhere else in the Middle East.

During the hottest part of the day, all the non-Arabic speaking soldiers in Captain al-Ibrahim’s unit went into the classroom and received language lessons from the Arabic speaking Omani NCOs. As the heat of the day began to decline to a more reasonable level, the unit conducted various military training from basic infantry tactics and marksmanship to tracking, counter-tracking, and surveillance.

Captain al-Ibrahim’s first platoon leader was a former British SAS trooper, Mason Ramsey, who towered above most of the unit. He had a shock of alarmingly red hair, and within a week the sun had freckled his pale skin beyond recognition. Lieutenant Ramsey was easy going, and an extremely capable leader. He had been forced out of the SAS after a demolition accident had left him partially blind in his left eye and missing the middle finger on his left hand.

The second platoon leader creeped Harrigan out. Jakub Nowak had been fighting communists for years, first in Europe and then in Africa. Nowak was a capable fighter, but a vicious leader, who frequently screamed obscenities at his Omani and Baluchi troops. He was incredibly arrogant and spurred the ire of everyone in the unit.

Several weeks into their training cycle, the regular Omani army troops were called to formation at the edge of the Tarmac while al-Ibrahim and his unit waited hidden in the command building, watching from the windows as a lumbering, grey cargo plane landed. After coming to a stop near the hangars, the ramp dropped and a pair of Land Rovers drove off the cargo ramp.

“The man of the hour,” Kelly said, standing next to Harrigan in the second-floor conference room and staring out the window with his pair of binoculars, “Sultan-to-be Qaboos bin Said al Said.”

Harrigan watched a slight man dressed in an army uniform dismount the lead Land Rover and walk around the troop formation, receiving salutes from the officers as he passed. After just a few minutes in the late-May Abu Dhabi sun, the Sultan gave a final salute, re-mounted his Land Rover, and sped towards the headquarters building.

Captain al-Ibrahim started directing his troops into a loose formation spanning the length of the room. Lieutenant Nowak kicked a Baluchi man in the knee to get him to stand up straighter, cursing him for his posture.

“Quiet!” al-Ibrahim hissed as footsteps grew louder on the tiled hallway outside the conference room. A moment later, Birmingham strode into the room, followed by the Sultan’s six Zanzibarian bodyguards, wielding Thompson submachine guns outfitted with massive drum magazines, and finally by Sultan Qaboos himself. The men stood at attention as the Sultan walked around the room, shaking hands and introducing himself. Out of the corner of his eye, Harrigan could feel Nowak shifting around, and groaning as one of his less-literate soldiers explained where he was from to the Sultan.

Harrigan turned slightly and glared at Nowak behind him, careful not to alert the Sultan or al-Ibrahim. Nowak just shrugged his shoulders and mouthed “moron.” Harrigan shook his head slightly and turned back around.

Sultan Qaboos finished his rounds of Captain al-Ibrahim’s unit, said a few motivational words, and then ushered the enlisted men out of the room to address the officers.

“Gentlemen,” Sultan Qaboos said, “thank you for being here. Thank you for being willing to serve a cause that affects all of us, despite how little the rest of the world appears to care.”

“You men are not a part of what will become my regular Army. You will not be responsible for the recapture of Omani territory. You are to become my special operations unit. You are to hunt down, close with, and destroy the enemies of Oman, both inside and outside our borders.”

“In order to do this,” Sultan Qaboos paused for a moment, “we must first overthrow my father.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, as the men in the room shuffled their feet and looked at each other.

“My father tried his best,” the Sultan continued, “but his worldview is antiquated and dangerous. I must take his place if we are to win this war and force the communists out of the country. My first assignment for you will be this: Seize the airfield at Nizwa.”

One of the bodyguards opened a leather satchel, withdrew a folded map, and handed it to the Sultan. Unfolding the map and laying it upon the table, the Sultan motioned everyone in the room closer.

“Most of the commanders in my father’s military are British,” Sultan Qaboos explained, “they are, therefore, not as loyal to my father as they are to the mission of liberating Oman.” Sultan Qaboos indicated to several bases scattered across the country, “the Regular Army units training here will attend to those, inform them that they are now under new leadership.”

Sultan Qaboos looked up at the soldiers surrounding the table, “but the Commander at Nizwa is General Mohammed Ghattas, an old friend of my father’s and fiercely loyal to him.” Sultan Qaboos took a deep breath before continuing, “It is my sincerest hope that we will be able to stage this coup with as little bloodshed as possible, but I do not believe that General Ghattas will join us, nor do I believe that he will retire peacefully.”

There was a palpable tension in the room as the men surrounding the conference table contemplated the task the Sultan was asking of them.

Captain al-Ibrahim brook the silence by clearing his throat, “Sir, do you have a timeline for our first operation? And how are we going to be arriving at the airfield?”

“I do not have an exact date,” Sultan Qaboos said, “but it will happen within weeks.” Sultan Qaboos grinned a little bit, “as for how you will be arriving in Nizwa, we brought you gentlemen some gifts that should help with that.”

“What did you bring us, Sir?” Captain al-Ibrahim asked cautiously.

“Parachutes, Captain.” Sultan Qaboos said cheerfully. Lieutenant Harrigan felt a pool of sweat build on his lower back.

“What’s wrong, Yankee?” Mason Ramsey whispered while the Sultan pointed out landing zones for the intended operation, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I hate parachuting,” Harrigan whispered back, “can’t stand heights.”

“Well,” Ramsey whispered with a chuckle, “how do you think those poor bastards feel?”

Harrigan followed Ramsey’s nod and looked over the table at the Omani troopers. Most of them were sharing anxious looks, and several had the color noticeably drain from their faces. Harrigan felt for them.

“Now gentlemen,” Sultan Qaboos clapped his hands together, and one of his bodyguards stepped forward to roll up the map and put it back in his satchel, “let’s get to it. Time is of the essence.”

Now, go buy a gift from my shop to give to your crush. Giving them a signed copy of Retrograde Absolution is a surefire way to make them love you forever.