Chapter Two Thousand Two Hundred Nineteen
4th June 1973
Atlantic Ocean off El Marsa, Western Sahara (Disputed Region)
“The situation is fluid and there have been substantial difficulties” The BND Officer who had been assigned to Laayoune had said. As if Louis Ferdinand Junior couldn’t see that for himself just by looking around El Marsa or Laayoune. For decades, there had been jokes about Wilhelm Station in Antarctica being the dumping ground of the various service branches of those who were incompetent, stupid, or unlucky, but not to the extent that they should have been cashiered. That was true to an extent, but that was only if the High Command wanted someone kept far from the press so they wouldn’t create an embarrassing scene. What was far more likely to happen was the offending individual would be sent off to a lovely garden spot like the disputed territories in the Western Sahara. It was a place that few nations were actually interested in, but trouble here tended to spill into other regions of far greater importance.
That fed directly into the second problem, which was that many of those from the outside who did business in the Western Sahara were either wildly optimistic or absolutely insane. Either way, they were not sort who were too likely to heed an evacuation order. Into this Louis found that an old friend, Major Ehud “Udi” Brog from the Marine Infantry had been tasked with tracking as many of them down as he could. He also couldn’t help but notice that there was a palatable tension in the air when he came ashore. It didn’t take a genius to understand that things were about to take a real bad turn.
Leaning on the rail outside the bridge of the Grindwal, Louis looked at the few electric lights in El Marsa. There were more lights among the ships from the various Naval powers gathered in these waters offshore. It was telling that the Fleet had sent Louis orders telling him that he needed to maintain double watches and to employ the Sperber devices that he had aboard. It was easy to read between the lines when Louis received orders like that. The High Command was concerned that someone on the other side of whatever this was, would engage in some sort of guerrilla warfare. It was hardly a surprise, there was no way that anyone ashore could take on the gathered flotilla directly.
Increasingly, Louis was reminded of something he had read at the Naval Academy but couldn’t remember the author. How there were difficult tasks which were not glorious, no medals or orders would be awarded, and the history books would hardly record what had happened. All that was left was duty. He figured that this was going to be one of those tasks, it just remained to be seen just how difficult this was going to be.
Los Angeles, California
The weather was mild as they drove down the freeway, the fact that all the midday traffic was slowing down as Frankenstein came into view behind them was a bit of an annoyance. Normally, people drove as fast as they could get away with, at least eighty, even in bumper-to-bumper traffic. The thing was that Ritchie wasn’t in the least bit interested in doing any traffic stops, not after the morning that he had just had. Spending the day in Court while under oath, fending off questions from an over-zealous Defense Attorney who Daddy could afford.
“The Defense was trying to argue that you coerced his client?” Mike asked, by a happy coincidence, Big Mike had been in the hospital dealing with one of his daughter’s bouts with what had turned out to be Sickle Cell Anemia on the day in question and had missed all the fun. There was particular concern in that Mike’s daughter had apparently been born with this condition though neither Mike nor his wife Clair had a family history of that disease.
“It was the best he could do because the defendant is such a flaming moron” Ritchie said as he pulled off the freeway.
It was one of those stories that people didn’t think happened in real life. The moron had called in reporting a burglary and Ritchie had gotten dispatched to take the report. When he got there, he found that he had the moron telling him all about the large amounts of various narcotics that he had had stashed in his apartment, and he knew exactly who had broken into the place. With considerable disbelief, Ritchie had taken his statement and then applied for a search warrant based on the statement to toss the home of the man who he said had broken into his apartment. Sure enough, he had found the drugs in question and arrested the resident for burglary and possession. Where it had taken a turn to the absurd, was that the moron had demanded his property be returned to him. He had even gone so far as to sign an affidavit saying that the drugs belonged to him.
Ritchie had done everything he could to warn the moron off, but he was determined to get his drugs back and had ended up getting himself arrested too. His drugs had remained in the evidence locker. Later, when Ritchie had tried to explain exactly what had happened, the Captain had told him to just write it up as plainly as possible and had concluded with just one simple turn a phrase; “Why do you think they call it dope?”