Operation Caribe

18

A NAVY SEAHAWK helicopter finally got Team Whiskey to Denny Cay.

It seemed like a long time ago when they were last here; actually, it had been less than two weeks.

Nothing had changed, despite the mini-hurricane that had blown through the islands not long before. The half-mile-long cay, looking like a quarter moon laid on its side, still had its shimmering flora, its pure white-sand beach, its handful of huts and small finger dock. The Dustboat was rolling in the gentle waves just off the island. Anchored about a half mile farther out was the Georgia June, as always ready to watch over them like a big brother.

In other words, for Whiskey, this place was paradise.

But they were staying for only a few minutes.

The CIA briefing officer had given the team three things: a set of coordinates to reach the Secure Ocean Base, or SOB; an order that it was necessary to take down the Dustboat’s cargo masts; and a very tight timetable.

The team had to get to the SOB in exactly five hours, just as night was falling. It was about a 220-mile trip to the semi-secret location, which was somewhere west of Denny Cay between the Berry and Bimini Islands and identified on civilian maps as Blue Moon Bay. The team had little time to do more than throw their gear aboard the Dustboat and get under way.

Having arrived here earlier, the Senegals had the ship ready to go. Whiskey climbed on and the Senegals revved up the ship’s diesel engines and its gas turbine-assisted water jets.

Within a minute of leaving Denny Cay, the small coastal freighter was making forty-two knots, heading west.

* * *

THERE WAS A problem, though. The team was still utterly exhausted.

From the time they pulled off the fake hijacking of the Ocean Song, to the entire Shanghai adventure, to their escape from China, their hopscotch flight back to Aden, to their fourteen-hour flight back to the Bahamas, none of them had gotten more than a few hours’ sleep. Now they were about to take on yet another mission. So, the idea was that the members would get as much rest as possible while the ship was making its way to the SOB.

But Nolan especially found sleep unattainable. He’d collapsed on his bunk as soon as they were under way, hoping sweet slumber would come. But his psyche would just not allow it. The upcoming gig was strange enough. But he had another problem he hadn’t told anyone about: He was still having flashbacks from his night in Shanghai.

They started back on the long flight to Aden aboard the Arado. Jammed into one of the seaplane’s tiny passenger seats, he was just nodding off when he had a vision that he was back in Shanghai, being chased, being shot at, being butchered alive with a meat cleaver. The flashback lasted only a few seconds, but he was startled awake, and afterward, he found it impossible to fall back to sleep.

The same thing had happened to him a half-dozen times since, and it happened again shortly after the Dustboat left Denny Cay. He’d dropped off but was jolted awake just a few minutes later, again after seeing a flash of him and Twitch in the back of the horrible meat wagon. He knew better than to try to sleep after that. So he grabbed a six-pack from his cabin’s tiny refrigerator and climbed up on deck.

The Dustboat was moving through the calm clear water like a speedboat on steroids. The Senegals had just finished the process of lowering the cargo masts—though they still didn’t know why the CIA briefing officer asked the team to do this. The weather was perfect, although way off to the east sat a line of very dark clouds. Nolan got a chill just looking at them.

He took up a spot up on the bow, away from everything else. He drank his beer and looked off to the west and was soon filled with a melancholy feeling. Just as he could see dark storm clouds on the eastern horizon, in the opposite direction, he saw a sky full of magnificent cumulus, gigantic, billowing white formations, bathed in the warm afternoon sunlight.

While studying these clouds, Nolan thought he could also see, way off in the distance, after the water fell off, the edge of another world. He imagined this thin line on the horizon to be the coast of the United States.

The place from which he was banned for life.

He spent the longest time looking at it. Was it real, or was it just a mirage, a fata morgana, his overtired mind playing another cruel joke on him?

He didn’t know, but as he tried to figure it out, one thought kept coming back to him: What if he jumped off the boat right now and just started swimming. Would he make it? Could he swim twenty miles? How about 200 miles?

If he could, then he would indeed step foot on U.S. soil again—and there would be no one to stop him.

* * *

ON THE OTHER hand, Batman had no trouble getting to sleep.

Soon after they left Denny Cay, he went into a deep slumber and stayed that way for four solid hours, positively Rip Van Winkle-like compared to what the team had gone through in the past couple weeks.

He credited his talent for sleeping to his ability to relax when the time called for it. But, of course, he also had a secret weapon.

Now, he rose from his bunk, refreshed, and went up on deck.

The air was warm and the Dustboat was roaring along, closing in on its semi-secret destination. He walked back to the stern near where the team kept its pair of helicopters. He wanted to take a few puffs of a joint in peace.

But he found Gunner and Crash sitting back here. Instead of sleeping, they had dropped a couple speed pills and had polished the team’s pair of helicopters. Now they were lounging on the helipad deck.

Batman took his couple puffs then pinched out the joint and walked over to them. They were hovering over a small paperback book, reading it, unusual in itself. They were so engrossed, Batman was sure it was pornography.

But then he saw its title: Mysterious Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle, and just groaned. “Jesus, not again.”

Gunner and Crash had a past when it came to things like this. During the team’s campaign against Zeek the Pirate, Batman, Gunner and Crash had landed in a huge Indonesian graveyard to collect funeral flowers they needed to work a psy-op mission against Zeek’s confederates. Batman had previously read a book on the numerous superstitions of the Indonesian people. The trouble was, Gunner and Crash had read the book as well, and had become obsessed with the many ghosts, gremlins and goblins of Indonesian lore. That night in the graveyard, both men were in a near panic whenever the wind blew or a dog barked, and especially when the clock began ticking off the minutes to midnight, which, in Indonesia, was when the nastiest demons came out to play. It was all Batman could do to get them to complete the mission.

Now they were reading again, this time about all the supposed paranormal mysteries pervading the Bermuda Triangle.

“Where did you get this?” Batman asked them.

“From the Senegals,” Gunner replied. “They believe all this stuff.”

Batman laughed. “Yeah, maybe when they’re drinking mooch they do. Anything seems possible on that stuff.”

“But there’s got to be something to it,” Crash insisted. “It can’t all be bullshit. Take a look.”

Batman leafed through the book. Not only did it document supposed disappearances of boats, planes and people in the so-called Triangle, it claimed the huge area of ocean was also a convergence site for UFOs, sea monsters, massive rogue tsunamis, electromagnetic time warps, and wormholes to other dimensions.

Even worse, according to the author, the points of the triangle were Bermuda, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico. This put the Bahamas, the very seas the team had been operating in, right in the middle of the accursed area.

Batman just groaned again. “Please, guys—don’t start this crap again.”

But they just laughed at him. “Like you didn’t see this stuff in action back in Indonesia?”

Batman said nothing.

He just tossed the book back to them and headed amidships again to smoke the rest of his joint.

* * *

THE DUSTBOAT REACHED the SOB’s coordinates just after sunset, right on schedule.

The entire team had convened on the bridge, curious as to what the so-called Secure Ocean Base really was—especially since it wasn’t technically even in the ocean, but rather in a large bay. The betting was it would be another nameless island, similar to the one where the crisis meeting had been held earlier in the day.

So they were surprised to find nothing at the coordinates but a huge, if unremarkable, ship.

It wasn’t a cargo vessel—not exactly. Though the ship was festooned with cranes and lifts and winches, its deck was crowded not with cargo containers, but with sonar buoys, service boats and what appeared to be scientific equipment of various shapes and sizes. The vessel was about 800 feet long and perhaps ninety feet wide. While outsized, it seemed as plain as could be, right down to its fading blue paint job.

“Oceanographic ship, maybe?” Batman guessed.

“Oil exploration vessel,” Nolan opined.

“A spook ship in disguise,” Twitch said, his words barely audible.

The Dustboat’s radio crackled to life. An eerie voice began transmitting instructions to them on how to rendezvous with the odd ship. They were told to maneuver behind it and await further instructions.

On the OK from Nolan, the Senegals followed the instructions and within a couple minutes, the Dustboat had lined up behind the slow-moving ship, bobbing gently in its low-level wake.

That’s when the back of the ship suddenly started to open.

Twitch’s guess had been correct. This vessel was a modified LSD. The rather unfortunate U.S. Navy abbreviation came from its hull designation, Landing Ship (Dock). In other words, it could flood its rear compartment and allow smaller vessels to float inside.

The Navy used LSDs in its so-called Gator Navy, those small fleets of ships whose duty was to put U.S. Marines on shore, invasion-style. The back of such a ship would open up and discharge air-cushioned landing craft that could carry to shore anything from tanks to artillery to Humvees to the Marines themselves.

But this ship looked much larger than any Navy LSD the team had seen.

The Dustboat’s radio crackled again, telling them to stand by. The back of the ship was suddenly lit by a bank of searchlights. The team could now see the vessel’s internal dock, which was big enough to accept at least two good-sized vessels.

An instant later, the radio came to life a third time. The same voice, now with a ghostly quality, started relaying instructions on how to dock inside the huge ship.

“Now I know why they wanted us to take down the cargo masts,” Batman said.

The closer they got, the smaller the floating dock seemed, especially since another vessel was already tied up within.

“Are we really going to fit?” Crash asked.

Nolan turned to the Senegals. They were the experts.

“Est-il trop serré?” he asked them in their native language. “Is it too tight?”

The man at the controls grimaced and replied: “Nous saurons bien assez tôt,” as in “We will know soon enough.”

What followed was five minutes of nail-biting as the Senegals fought the ship’s suddenly rolling wake to slip into the confines of the LSD’s interior dock.

They made it, somehow—but with only a few inches to spare. As soon as the Dustboat was inside, the ship’s aft hatch closed behind them. They floated up to the dock, where men in unmarked Navy work clothes helped tie up the boat. The other ship was bobbing on the other side of the dock parallel to them, but the team couldn’t tell what kind of vessel it was because it was draped in loose plastic similar to shrink-wrap.

Agent Harry was waiting for them on the dock.

“Welcome aboard the USS Mothership,” he said, with a straight face. “This is a Security 5 vessel, so I don’t have to remind you, if anyone ever asks, you were never here.”

“But what is this ship?” Nolan asked him. “There’s nothing this big in the Gator Navy.”

“I guess you’d call it a super LSD,” Harry replied. “We built it for the Israelis years ago, so they could move their nuclear-armed submarines through the Suez Canal. We intentionally made it look like an oceanographic survey ship. They’d put their subs inside here at one of their Mediterranean ports and then they’d sail down the canal, to the Red Sea and then into the Persian Gulf, right under the eyes of the Egyptians and everyone else, without anyone knowing what was going on. The Israelis built their own a few years ago, so they gave this one back to us.”

Nolan was amazed by the story. They all were.

“Freaking Israelis,” Nolan said. “Always thinking…”

* * *

TEAM WHISKEY FOLLOWED Harry up a series of ladders to the top deck of the strange ship.

From there, they were escorted to the vessel’s Combat Information Center, or CIC. The ship might have looked innocuous on the outside, but inside it rivaled the U.S. Navy’s most modern vessels. Its design and equipment was universally high tech and the crew, all of whom were dressed in sharp but unadorned combat suits, exuded confidence and élan.

They walked into the CIC to find SEAL Team 616 already there, the five doppelgangers taking all the good seats up front. Nolan wondered if they owned the plastic-wrapped boat they’d seen tied up below.

A SEAL team with its own ship? he thought. That might be a first.

They had a quick round of introductions, something the two groups weren’t able to do properly in the rush after the briefing on Bunker Island. It was mostly an exchange of grunts and nicknames. Snake, Batman, Crash, Gunner and Twitch meet Bowdog, Smash, Monkey, Elvis and Ghost. Whiskey was wearing its old-fashioned blue battle suits, a gift from the Russian mob before the team took on the cruise liner security gig. The suits were poorly made, thick, and fairly uncomfortable, but they were all they had. The SEALs, on the other hand, were wearing what looked to be brand-new black camouflage battle fatigues—a slick, very stylish modern design. In the fashion war, the SEALs definitely had Whiskey beat.

The CIC had room for only about a dozen people, so it was a tight squeeze. Much of the space was taken up by literally tons of futuristic surveillance and spy gear: There were twenty-two VDT screens jammed in here, each one monitoring some trouble spot around the world. It was obvious the ship was heavily tied into the U.S. intelligence services’ galaxy of spy satellites, as many of the monitors were marked NRO—for the National Reconnaissance Office, possibly the most secretive of all of America’s spy agencies.

Three uniformed Navy officers stood on a slightly raised platform in front of a Plexiglas situation board. Devoid of any rank insignia or nameplates, each man wore a gold crucifix on a chain around his neck. They were all in their mid-50s, all looked extremely serious and determined—and, in a strange way, they all looked alike, too. Buzz cuts, slightly windburned faces, tough as nails, and well aware of it. It was clear from the start that they would be running the show.

Nolan knew that for reasons of security, there’d probably be no formal introductions, so he had no idea what to call these people. Sensing this, Agent Harry leaned over to him and whispered: “These three guys are the superstars of the new ONI surface warfare special ops division. They’re experts in kissing the right asses, from every big shot in the Pentagon, and right up to the Joint Chiefs. People either call them ‘The Three Kings’ or ‘The Three Stooges.’ Take your pick.”

Whatever their handle, they started off the briefing with a bang.

“Everyone here knows the situation,” the officer in the middle said, beginning the briefing. “So there’s no need to read you the Bible again.

“But I will tell you this: This mission ain’t for those chicken-shit civilian types. This ship is all about finding things, sometimes things that no one even knows are there. And I promise you, we’re gonna find these pirate a*sholes before those civilian pansies move into their luxury suites in Miami. Any questions?”

The SEALs let out their version of ‘hoo-rah!’ ”

Whiskey remained silent. Except for Crash, who whispered to Gunner: “Hey, we’re civilians, aren’t we?”

Nolan just groaned under his breath. He already missed the spooks on Bunker Island.

“This will be an exercise in sharing,” the King went on. “We will all have total access to all intelligence concerning shipping activity in the Caribbean and southern East Coast area for the next three days. We are lucky in this regard because, except for the USS Carl Vincent due in Norfolk in two days and the boomer sub, USS Wyoming arriving about the same time in Kings Bay, Georgia, we are free of any major U.S. Navy ship movements within the crisis time frame. Everything else is routine commercial shipping: LNG ships, supertankers, cruise ships, probably thirty potential targets in all.

“All we have to do is identify, through the use of good, solid intelligence, which of these ships is the target, and how the pirates plan to get aboard. If we achieve these two objectives, we got this bitch in the sack before she can get her panty hose off. Any questions?”

There were none.

“Now, if it gets hairy, we have the authority to reroute any shipping from Cuba up to Virginia in accordance to this mission. In other words, if we need a clear area of open sea to make some noise, we can make that so.

“We will also have support from Naval Air Stations from Jacksonville to Norfolk. This will include P-3 maritime patrol planes, C-130s on loan from the Coast Guard, and I’m told, TR-1 high-altitude recon platforms. Plus the usual array of recon satellites. We also have a total of thirty non-capital surface ships at our disposal up and down the entire East Coast.

“And finally, we will be launching small drones from this ship, while larger Predator and Reaper drones will be launching from McDill, Langley and Charleston air force bases.

“So, we will have a lot of eyes in the sky and feet in the water. Believe me, once we spot them, these pirates won’t have a chance.”

He produced two folders. He handed one to Commander Beaux and the other to Nolan.

“What we need from your two teams is HUMINT—good old-fashioned human intelligence. These folders contain your mission points; we believe these are good places for you to start. Hopefully, they will provide leads that will produce results. But just like the fairy ground team in Miami, it’s paramount that any intelligence you come across is passed on to us here as quickly as possible, so we can disseminate it to all interested parties.

“In conclusion, if there is a successful pirate action so close to the United States, just in future resource allocations alone—for anti-pirate patrols up and down the East Coast and things of that nature—it will break the Pentagon’s piggy bank. And the fact that we have those three other hot spots happening around the world all at the same time makes this entire matter that much more pressing. Whenever it rains, it tends to pour, but I’m sure everyone in this room knows that already.”

He looked up at both groups.

“Are there any questions?”

Nolan was already looking through his file. It contained the coordinates of a Bahamian island where a resident claimed to have intelligence on the possible pirate hijacking of a large vessel off the East Coast. It appeared the team’s mission was to find him and get the information from him. It seemed simple. Almost too simple.

“Nothing here,” he finally replied.

The SEALs, meanwhile, had been furiously taking notes, writing down just about everything the King had said. They also appeared to be surreptitiously recording the meeting with their video camera.

Commander Beaux was still going through his team folder, which appeared bigger, thicker and more detailed than the one for Team Whiskey.

“Everything is nominal here,” he finally said.

The King was about to wrap up the meeting when he stopped and said: “There’s just one more thing. It occurred to us that Whiskey has more experience in finding and fighting pirates than SEAL 616. So, we’re recommending that one of the Whiskey members accompany the SEAL team. This person would jump over and join 616, and keep Whiskey informed of what they are doing.”

The room fell silent. Nolan never expected anything like this—and looking over at the SEALs, he could tell that neither had they.

Before anyone could say anything, Crash spoke up: “I’d be glad to do it.”

Crash was a former SEAL. He’d spent two years with them before joining up with Delta Force and Team Whiskey. After the misadventure at Tora Bora played out, he was drummed out of the service along with the rest of them and had been doing private mercenary work until Whiskey got back together. But he’d never made any secret of the fact that the SEALs had been his first love.

“Sounds good,” the King said.

He turned to Commander Beaux. “That square with you, Commander?”

To his credit, Beaux didn’t hesitate.

“Great idea, sir,” he said. “We’d love to have him along. He’ll be an asset—and we’ll learn from him, for certain. Plus, he can work our camera.”

And just like that, Crash got up, walked to the front of the CIC, shook hands again with his new mates, and then went out the door with them.

As he was leaving, he looked over his shoulder to Whiskey.

“See you in the movies,” he said.