Operation Caribe

20

“WANT A PEEK?”

Crash drained the last of his coffee and climbed up to the control deck. There was a periscope here, similar to those found on modern submarines.

But the SEALs’ mysterious vessel was not a U-boat.

Commander Beaux adjusted the periscope to Crash’s height and stepped aside. Crash pressed his eyes against the focal piece and saw the faint outline of a city twinkling in the distance.

“Is that Miami?” he asked.

Commander Beaux laughed.

“You’re off by about ninety miles,” he said. He pushed the periscope’s zoom button, made another adjustment, and let Crash look again. This time the scope was focused on a sign painted on a beach wall. It read: BIENVENIDO A LA HABANA.

Welcome to Havana.

Crash was astounded.

“You can get this close?” he asked Beaux. “Don’t they have a twelve-mile limit? Or military sea patrols?”

“I’m sure they do,” Commander Beaux replied. “But what difference does that make when you’re invisible?”

This was no idle boast.

The SEALs’ vessel was invisible. At least to radar. And at night, under the right circumstances, it was pretty much invisible to the naked eye as well.

Its official name was the IX-529; it was later christened the Sea Shadow. Simply put, it was a seagoing version of a stealth fighter jet.

About 160 feet long and almost half that wide, it shared some design features with the F-117 Nighthawk. It was all angles, with no curves and no vertical surfaces, an overall shape that tended to make radar signals slide off instead of bouncing back to a receiver. Under optimal conditions, the Sea Shadow presented a radar signature no bigger than a seagull.

Technically, it was a catamaran. It had twin submerged hulls, each with a propeller, a stabilizer and a hydrofoil. The hulls were connected to the rest of the ship by two angled struts. With a draft of fifteen feet, it sat so low that it looked like it should have sunk the first time it hit the water. But this odd design actually made the IX-529 highly stable even under the worst conditions at sea.

Inside, the stealth vessel was tight but not uncomfortable. There was enough room to support a crew of six. It had a head, a shower, a small galley, six bunks and a fairly elaborate control deck—but that was about it. It carried no weapons—no torpedoes, no deck guns, no missiles.

But it didn’t need any. The IX-529 Sea Shadow was not built to be a warship. It started out as an experimental platform to prove the basics of seaborne stealth. After its life as an experimental craft was over, it bounced around a bit and was put in storage until the Navy finally turned it over to the SEALs, who then turned it over to Section 616. The first thing they did was boost its power plants. The result was that the odd vessel could now travel close to fifty knots.

The 616 guys referred to it as “the bus,” a way to get them to places where they could really do their thing.

And at the moment, it had brought them very close to Havana Harbor.

* * *

THIS WAS WHERE the SEALs’ “taxi” came in.

It was called the Advanced SDV, as in the SEALs Delivery Vehicle. It was carried by a special brace above the Sea Shadow’s twin hulls. Essentially a mini-submarine, sixty-five feet long and eight feet high, it looked like a pregnant torpedo with a steering cockpit in the front. It could carry as many as a dozen SEALs to a target in a pressurized dry compartment. A sixty-horsepower motor could move it along at almost ten knots.

It had its own periscope, communications mast and GPS navigation system, plus SONAR and terrain mapping gear for spotting mines. It was, by far, the coolest piece of special ops equipment Crash had ever seen.

This was the plan: While the SEAL nicknamed Smash remained on the Sea Shadow, Commander Beaux would lead the rest of his team on a mission right into the heart of the Cuban capital’s harbor.

The reason? Docked in Havana at the moment was an old Russian container ship that, according to intelligence reports Commander Beaux said he had secured for Team 616, was under the control of people other than its original crew.

The ship, the Deshovshi, had a shady past. It had been involved in various smuggling schemes over the years, and had been caught carrying contraband weapons, drugs, and stolen items including luxury cars and big-screen TVs. It had left the Russian port of Murmansk five weeks earlier and skirted the coast of England, France and the west coast of Africa before turning west and heading for the Caribbean.

Turning up in Havana the week before, somewhere along the way, its original Lithuanian crew had either left the ship voluntarily or had been thrown overboard. In any case, another crew had taken over.

According to Commander Beaux, the people on the Mothership believed this new crew could be harboring the phantom pirates—perhaps Africans, or possibly Eastern Europeans, or even Muslim terrorists—who were planning the big strike.

It was up to the SEALs to find out who was crewing the Deshovshi and what they might be up to.

* * *

BEAUX HAD NO problem with Crash going with them. Although he’d left the SEALs and the U.S. military nearly ten years before, he was still in good shape, had maintained his skills, and was itching to go back into action with his old outfit. Besides, as Commander Beaux said, they needed someone to work the video camera.

When the time came, Crash happily climbed into a wet suit and, trailing the others, slipped out of the Sea Shadow’s bottom hatch and into the small SDV submarine it carried below.

Once he was sealed inside, the SDV was dropped into the water, dove to a depth of thirty feet and was on its way.

* * *

THE RIDE INTO Havana Harbor filled Crash with an excitement that almost bordered on sexual. Commander Beaux sat up front, steering the tiny sub, while Ghost acted as the navigator. Crash sat in the watertight compartment in back with Elvis and Monkey. It seemed odd to him, but they passed the time telling him about some of the 616’s previous exploits, keeping him entertained. It was the stuff of movies or a TV show. With each tale, Crash felt something unexpected welling up inside him. It was at this moment, traveling under the water toward Havana Harbor, that he realized how much he’d missed being part of the SEALs.

It was 5 A.M., and morning fog was gathering when the SDV arrived in the harbor. There weren’t many legitimate cargo ships present, but there were many Cuban naval craft in evidence, as well as a broken-down Russian Navy cruiser that was supposed to be leading the search for the missing submarine, the Irktisk. The SDV glided beneath them with ease.

Commander Beaux steered the tiny sub up to the mysterious Deshovshi. At that point, Crash, Elvis and Monkey put on their scuba hoods and masks, checked their air tanks and waited as their compartment was flooded. Then they swam outside.

They met up with Commander Beaux, also in full scuba gear and carrying a waterproof satchel. On his instructions, Crash started recording with the team’s underwater video camera.

With the SEALs and Crash swimming about fifteen feet below the surface, Commander Beaux reached inside his waterproof bag of tricks. He took out what looked like an electronic stethoscope and attached it to the hull of the container ship. He hooked up a set of earphones for himself and the rest of his team, and in seconds they were listening in on conversations taking place inside the vessel, this while Crash videotaped it all.

By manipulating various dials on his stethoscope, Commander Beaux was able to go from one conversation to another. Using sign language, he indicated to Crash that the people on board were speaking a variety of languages: Russian, Spanish, and a lot of English. From this, Beaux pantomimed for the camera, he counted a dozen people on the ship, either on the bridge or in a cabin just beneath it.

Now came the hard part.

Commander Beaux signaled the others that their recon was complete—they were now going aboard. While Ghost kept the sub close to the side of the Russian ship, Beaux, Monkey, Elvis and Crash swam up to the surface, next to the vessel’s stern.

Beaux threw a hook rope up to the railing and rappelled up to the back of the old container ship. Once on deck, he motioned for the others to follow. Crash was the last to climb aboard, making sure he got the others doing their thing on video before he went up himself.

Fortunately, it was dark on this part of the ship, and the growing fog was helping hide them as well. Lucky for them, the 616’s video camera was equipped with an infrared night vision lens.

Commander Beaux explained to Crash that they’d decided to plant an explosive in the ship’s engine room and detonate it with a time-delay fuse. That way, if this was the pirates’ attack ship, it would be disabled and marooned here in Havana Harbor. And even if it wasn’t, then at least there would be one less shadowy ship sailing the world’s oceans. It was a win-win situation.

On hearing this, Crash again became tremendously excited. He was armed, as they all were, with an M4 that had been encased in waterproofing.

“Can you secure this end?” Commander Beaux asked him.

“Absolutely,” Crash responded.

“Just keep the camera running,” Beaux reminded him.

Then the three SEALs disappeared into the gloom.

The minutes went by. Crash found himself shaking, but in the most pleasant way. Adrenaline was rushing through his body like a succession of tidal waves. It wasn’t a foreign feeling, because he’d done some pretty hairy things with Delta and the pirate-busting Team Whiskey.

But he recognized this particular sensation as the same one he used to get when he started his special ops career with the SEALs, nearly a decade before.

Shaking … but liking it.

At last, Crash spotted the trio of SEALs moving back toward him. He finally exhaled. The team had been gone for just five minutes, but it seemed like five hours. Beaux told him they’d installed ten pounds of plastic explosive in the ship’s engine room with a timed fuse. This meant it was time to make their getaway—quick.

They hurried back down the hook rope, dove underwater, scrambled back inside the SDV and then raced out of Havana Harbor. They were about a quarter-mile away when they heard the timed explosion blow off the back end of the container ship. There were high fives all round.

Success …

SEAL Team 616 had put the mystery vessel out of action for at least the foreseeable future. And Crash was very impressed.

These guys are good, he thought. Really good.