Operation Caribe

21

Aboard the Dustboat

DRIFTING …

But for how long?

They couldn’t tell.

Gunner was the only one onboard with a watch, and it had stopped the moment of the unexplained collision.

They were still moving eastward, though, toward open water, amazed that whatever happened to them was violent enough to knock them in an entirely different direction.

Down below, in the darkened engine room, Batman was banging a huge hammer fiercely on the side of the diesel engine compartment.

He didn’t know what else to do. Nothing was jammed in the engine or transmission stations. Nothing was overheated; the temperature gauges all read normal. There was no smell of smoke, at least not down here.

Everything in the engine room seemed in working order—except, nothing was working.

Gunner was holding the trouble light for him. “My old man used to say, it’s not how hard you hit it, it’s knowing where to hit.”

“But this just doesn’t make sense,” Batman said as he pounded away. “I’ve had gremlins in aircraft, but on a boat?”

Just as those words came out of his mouth, the diesels exploded back to life.

Batman was so surprised, he was knocked back on his ass. The lights blinked back on. The generators started humming, and electronics started popping back to life all over the ship.

Batman stared at Gunner and then at the hammer.

“Did I do that?” he asked in astonishment.

He and Gunner ran back up to the bridge to find the Senegals flipping switches and getting the controls back in order.

Everything was suddenly working again—and most important, the steering controls were back on line. They ran a diagnostic through the control panel and everything came back green. It was as if nothing had happened at all. Yet they’d lost at least an hour’s time, and they knew this only because Gunner’s digital watch was working again, and when it blinked back on, it wasn’t zeroed out. Rather, it showed that more than an hour had passed since it had blinked off.

* * *

NOLAN AND TWITCH had spent all this time out on the bow, looking for other submerged objects they might be in danger of hitting. But they had barely spoken a word between them.

Now that the ship had come back to life, they hustled back up to the bridge.

“Who found the ‘On’ switch?” Nolan asked Batman.

“That’s the big mystery,” Batman replied. “Everything seems to be working OK now, but the diagnostics said nothing was broken in the first place. Yet the GPS says we drifted more than twenty miles out into the Atlantic.”

Nolan looked at the Senegals and just shrugged. The African seafarers all shrugged back.

“The sea is a strange place,” one said in broken English.

“Especially this sea,” Twitch said under his breath.

At Nolan’s request, the Senegals re-engaged the engines and the Dustboat started moving forward again.

They reoriented themselves, turning the small freighter 180 degrees to a westerly heading, back toward the Bahamas.

They had hoped to reach North Gin Cay before daybreak, but the unexpected stoppage had thrown that schedule out of whack.

“Just lay it on,” Nolan told the Senegals. “We’ll worry about the fuel situation later.”

They immediately pushed the diesels and the gas turbine water jets to full power. Suddenly, the Dustboat was back to roaring along at more than forty knots.

And everything seemed to return to normal—for about thirty seconds.

That’s when one of the Senegals directed Nolan’s attention to their sea surface radar screen.

Though they were supposed to be out in the middle of nowhere, with no land anywhere near them, the surface radar was showing a large land mass not a quarter mile dead ahead.

“What the hell is that?” Nolan asked, incredulous.

They all tried to look straight ahead of them, but even with night vision gear, a sudden mist was preventing them from seeing much beyond a few hundred feet.

“This is crazy,” Gunner said, looking at the GPS physical map. “We’re still out in the ocean. There’s not supposed to be anything out here.”

“Unless the GPS is f*cked up,” Batman said.

Nolan ordered, “All engines stop!”

He closed his eyes and could envision them running up onto some rocky beach or reef and wrecking the Dustboat for good.

The Senegals complied immediately, killing all power and disengaging the engines.

They came to a dead stop in the water.

But no sooner was this done than the land mass they’d detected on the sea surface radar screen faded away.

“What the f*ck?” Batman cried. “That was just there, solid as rock—and now…”

Nolan couldn’t believe it. None of them could.

“Now it’s gone,” Twitch said.

That’s when the lights went out again.

* * *

CRASH WAS STILL shaking with excitement when the SDV returned to the Sea Shadow.

The stealth ship had been sailing in figure-eights for the past hour about fifteen miles off Havana, staying hidden in the darkness and fog.

Commander Beaux reattached the SDV to the Sea Shadow via the special brace located between the submerged hulls. Smash lowered a ladder from the vessel’s main compartment, and the team climbed back up into the stealth ship.

They were ecstatic. Commander Beaux declared the mission a success and very well done. Crash was extremely impressed by 616’s professionalism. They appeared uncannily smooth throughout. None of the bumps that Whiskey seemed to encounter anytime they went out to do a job.

Crash rarely felt nostalgic—but at that moment, climbing out of his diving suit, toweling off, he once again felt a pang of loss that he was no longer part of the SEAL brotherhood. Looking back on it, pre-9/11, pre-Tora Bora, he realized that’s when he’d been the happiest.

The IX-529 was quickly out of Cuban waters, using its high-powered propulsion system to put a lot of distance between itself and the hostile island.

They soon had the coffee percolating and broke out some freeze-dried chow. As Crash listened in and Ghost drove the boat, the SEAL team discussed the mission in all aspects, critiquing themselves on the minutest details.

When the post-mission analysis was over, Beaux turned to Crash and asked, “Just like the old days?”

Crash laughed out loud.

“Hardly,” he said.



Aboard the Dustboat

THEY COULD SEE nothing around them but water.

None of the onboard interior lights were working. Their trouble lights were few in number and quickly getting dim.

The Dustboat’s main engines were still working, but the ship could only crawl along, because they had no idea where they were going.

The GPS was out, as was the sea surface radar. Their steering worked, though they weren’t sure why. And while the diesels were running, the gas turbine-powered water jets were not.

No one had a clue as to what was going on. Even the star patterns above them looked out of place.

Nolan returned to the bow and shined his failing flashlight in all directions, trying to make sure they didn’t hit anything again.

One of the Senegals was with him now, scanning the water as best he could, too.

At one point, Nolan spotted a series of circular waves breaking right in front of them. He quickly handed the trouble light to the Senegal, then leaned out over the bow railing to make sure these waves weren’t being caused by rocks or a reef.

Stretching out as far as he could possibly go, Nolan looked down at the water … and saw an enormous eye looking back up at him.

He staggered backward.

“Jesus!” he started yelling. “Jesus!”

He unstrapped his pistol and began firing into the water.

The Senegal grabbed his arm.

“C’est une baleine,” he was saying. “Baleine…”

Nolan stopped shooting.

Baleine.

A whale.

He collapsed to his knees and dragged his hands over his head.

A f*cking whale?

Is that what they’d hit earlier?

Batman was suddenly beside him, alarmed by the gunshots.

He saw Nolan was in a bad way, so he hastily lit up a joint and passed it to him.

“Take a puff, man,” Batman told him. “You gotta calm down.”

Nolan did so, but only because Batman insisted.

“Now, listen to me,” Batman said to him. “I think the worst thing that could have happened was those guys bringing that freaking Bermuda Triangle book on board.”

Batman took a long drag on the joint.

Then he went on. “But I read some of it. And all this stuff can be explained.”

He looked out at the water.

“We hit a whale,” Batman said. “There’s hundreds of them out here. And the mysterious landmass that disappeared? A fluke of electronics. Losing the electricity? Could have happened anytime, anywhere.”

“How about the f*cking green light I saw underwater right after we hit whatever we hit?” Nolan asked.

Batman shrugged, hearing this for the first time. “A formation of luminous fish,” he said. “We’re in the f*cking tropics, dude. They got schools of fish down here that are brighter than Times Square.”

Nolan finally let out a long breath. He felt his whole body droop. Batman gave him a friendly tap on his shoulder.

“Everything has an explanation, Snake,” he told Nolan. “An earthly explanation.”

But suddenly Nolan wasn’t listening to him anymore.

He was looking at a spot up the night sky, directly off the port bow.

“Then, tell me something,” he said. “What the hell is that?”

Batman followed his gaze, and then swore softly.

Two bright white objects were flying toward them about 100 feet above the surface of the water. They were bathed in an eerie glow.

They weren’t missiles—they were moving too slowly. But they weren’t aircraft, either. They had no wings, no tails, no sign of any propulsion equipment.

But they were flying side by side, in a perfect formation. That was the weirdest thing.

They looked like torpedoes.

Flying torpedoes.

Everyone on the ship saw them. They watched as they went right past the bow, no more than twenty feet away, before finally disappearing over the eastern horizon.

“Please explain that?” Nolan groaned.

Batman was stumped—but only for a moment.

“It’s that place,” he said. “AUTEC or something. It’s where the Navy tests its new torpedoes—that kind of stuff.”

He pulled out the Bermuda Triangle book.

“It says here it’s on Andros Island,” he said. “They call it the ‘Underwater Area 51.’ They test new torpedoes and God knows what else. We must be near it or near one of their outlying ranges.”

Nolan laughed nervously. “They test flying torpedoes?” he asked.

Batman thought about that a moment. Then he tore the book in two and threw it overboard.

An instant later, all the lights on the ship blinked back on.