Operation Caribe

31

THE TWO COPTERS split up.

Flying Bad Dawg One, Batman pushed the throttles to full power and headed north.

Nolan turned south.

They had the rough coordinates of Crash’s text messages. Plus, Nolan knew the range of a U.S. Navy MK-48 torpedo was about twenty miles. Because of the warm, clear water of Blue Moon Bay, traces of the bubble trails caused by the five torpedoes were still visible.

“Follow those freaking things,” Harry told Nolan, yelling from the backseat again. “They’re like jet contrails. They’ll point us to where those torpedoes came from.”

And that’s what they did.

“Crash is a SEAL,” Nolan kept saying as they streaked southward, trying to give himself and the others on board some hope where none really existed. “He knows how to swim, how to maintain himself until help arrives.”

“But he also knows how to type,” Twitch said grimly.

The top speed of the OH-6 was 170 mph. Within a minute of leaving the devastation of Blue Moon Bay, Nolan had the copter booted up to more than 200 mph, causing the engine to absolutely scream in protest. But he didn’t care. All he cared about was getting to the spot where Crash was last heard from and finding him.

* * *

IT TOOK JUST five minutes to travel the twenty miles to the end of the fading bubble trails.

The sub was long gone, of course, but Harry spotted something about one mile to the east.

“Right there,” he yelled in Nolan’s ear, pointing over his shoulder.

And there it was. The abandoned Sea Shadow. It was listing heavily to starboard and emitting a thin trail of smoke. It was the first time Nolan had seen it without its shrink-wrap covering. But it was unmistakably the famous stealth boat.

They continued south for about a half-mile when they saw something else. Also listing heavily and riding atop the waves, it was the SEALs’ mini-sub.

And about a half-mile south of that, they finally saw him. He was facedown, his bright blue battle suit sticking out from the greenish-white Caribbean waters.

It was Crash.

“God damn,” Nolan whispered as he dove toward the floating body.

He pulled the copter up just above the waves and circled once. This was now a recovery operation—that much was clear.

But just as Nolan was about to go right down to the surface, without warning, Twitch opened the copter’s door and jumped out.

At first, Nolan thought he had fallen out. But then he saw Twitch hit the water and start swimming madly against the prop wash toward Crash’s body.

“What the hell is he doing?” Harry yelled.

Nolan was furious. What was the point of this? That two of them get killed today?

Twitch reached Crash’s body and, incredibly, he flipped him over and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, even as he was fighting the sea’s rotor-induced waves.

Nolan had never seen anything like it. He turned to the Senegals, who were just as astounded.

“Fou homme,” one said.

Crazy man.

But in a split second, Nolan recalled how it was Crash who’d saved Twitch from the rough seas off an Indonesian island after Twitch had just completed his dangerous undercover mission against Zeek the Pirate. It was also Crash who had pulled Twitch out of the hellhole of the Walter Reed Army Hospital, just seconds before Twitch was about to take his own life.

Maybe this was Twitch’s way of finally paying Crash back.

Nolan maneuvered the copter down far enough so Harry and the Senegals could grab Twitch and Crash and drag them into the passenger compartment. Twitch never missed a beat. He continued giving Crash mouth to mouth, even though his colleague’s face was blue and his eyes had rolled back into his head.

Whether his own fragile mental state had finally caused him to snap, or he just refused to give up on a friend who never gave up on him, Twitch never broke the rhythm of blowing into Crash’s mouth, stopping, giving him a series of chest compressions, and then listening for a breath, before starting all over again.

Nolan pulled up off the water and put them in a slow orbit about 200 feet high. He was devastated; they all were. But on his mind at the moment was just giving Twitch a respectful amount of time before signaling the Senegals to gently pull him away and convince him that their friend was really gone.

So Nolan orbited for a minute, during which Twitch did not slow his frantic pace one bit.

Finally, Nolan nodded to the Senegals, who quietly urged Twitch to stop.

But Twitch pushed them away.

Another half-minute went by, Nolan did a few more orbits, and the Senegals tried again.

But again, Twitch resisted—with a little more anger this time.

The Senegals. They immediately tried again—and were startled when Twitch pulled out his service revolver and aimed it at them.

“No f*cking way I’m giving up!” he screamed at them.

“It’s over, Twitch!” Nolan yelled back at him.

But Twitch just ignored him and kept up with the heartbreaking resuscitation procedure.

Nolan was at a loss what to do.

He yelled back at Twitch again—gave him a direct order, but again was ignored.

“Your friend is dead!” one of the Senegals finally yelled in Twitch’s ear. “Let him go peacefully.”

That’s when Twitch finally did stop, but only long enough to say, in perfect French, which Nolan had never heard him speak before: “Nous sommes Whiskey. On ne mort pas!”

We are Whiskey. No one dies.

But he was wrong.

Crash was dead.

And it was at that moment that Twitch finally realized it. He just fell away from the body and buried his head in his hands. Harry took off his jacket and used it to cover Crash’s face.

They would never know exactly how Crash drowned, how he got out of the sub’s lock-out chamber, or how the flooded SDV became detached from the Wyoming.

But it didn’t make any difference. At least not to Nolan.

He turned the helicopter sharply and screamed, “Someone’s going to pay for this!”

Then he lined up the SDV mini-sub within his gun sights and opened up with the copter’s twin 50s. The two long streams of bullets tore into the vessel with fiery accuracy, blowing it to pieces.

Then the Sea Shadow appeared in his sights. He opened up on it, too. It took only a five-second burst before the hundred-million-dollar ship blew up, scattering debris for hundreds of feet in all directions.

Then Nolan turned again, this time toward the north, angrily pushing his throttle to full forward.

Behind him, on the horizon, a line of black swirling clouds was growing steadily.

Another storm was coming.