Baniyas

Description

Baniyas – The Adventures of Ole Sparky – Volume Two

Ole Sparky has finally reached the sharp end of the game.

In Something Else Entirely, he was recruited, trained, licensed, and pointed at his first ship. In Baniyas, he steps aboard SS Sealand Galloway and SS Alamo Bay—and quietly crosses the line from apprentice to operative.

This second volume in the Ole Sparky series follows him through:

• Life on the SL‑7 greyhound Sealand Galloway: union‑proud speed, a chief radio officer with Pueblo scars and a taste for Key West Specials, and a young cadet whose presence reminds us Sparky is still human, young, and learning.
• The “Becoming RO” seat‑swap, as he moves from WCC Chatham’s land‑side consoles to the ship’s own radio shack, burning up the airwaves with former coworkers who now hear him from the far end of the circuit.
• Galveston Radio (KLC), an apparently ordinary Gulf Coast coast station that turns out to be a hybrid lab and listening post—and the birthplace of a twin transceiver system built for clandestine CW within a mile.
• SS Alamo Bay, a rusted gasoline carrier no senior radioman would touch, re‑flagged and discretely wired for a mission that never appears on any union job board.
• Baniyas Bay, Syria, where a leaking cargo tank, environmental officers, port captains, and six gallons of white paint create the cover and timing Sparky needs to hold his geometry for a 0407 transmission window tied to a summit up the coast.

At the heart of Baniyas is Sparky’s first mission: a field agent in a hotel room, seventy‑plus five‑letter groups sent over a hidden twin, and a shipboard radioman who copies, acknowledges, and passes the message onward through a secure channel—serious work that leaves almost no trace beyond a few lines in a logbook and memories he can never share.

By the time Alamo Bay limps into Rota, Spain, Ole Sparky has:

• Completed all indoctrination and technical training.
• Proven he can carry a secret game inside ordinary merchant‑marine radio work.
• Finished his first real mission as a relay point inside a much larger intelligence machine.

Baniyas closes the loop on Ole Sparky’s origin story and sets the stage for what comes next: not classroom drills or qualification exams, but the stories of a quiet professional working at the edge of SIGINT and sea‑going life, where steel, salt water, and code all share the same horizon.