Operation Caribe

32

Naval Command Center

Norfolk, Virginia

ADMIRAL J.L. BROWN sat in front of the communications console, nervous, mouth dry, barely able to stay still.

He was in a large, spare, windowless office known as the Rubber Room. Located in the basement of the main administration building for the vast NS Norfolk complex, it was the nickname for the base’s blast-proof intelligence bunker. The occupants of the floors above him—the hundreds of officers, sailors and civilians of the Fleet Forces Command—were responsible for watching over all U.S. Navy ships operating between America’s East Coast and the Indian Ocean.

That number included roughly half of the country’s forty-plus nuclear submarines.

And now one of them was missing.

* * *

BROWN WAS FLEET Forces Command’s top security officer. In his early sixties, with the look of a college English professor, he was charged with making sure all the ships under NS Norfolk’s control stayed safe while at sea and were protected whenever they were in port.

Arriving at work shortly after 0900 hours, Brown learned there’d been a disturbance on the submarine USS Wyoming. The first report said a sailor on board had either gone berserk or had tried to lead some kind of insurrection. Brown knew the Wyoming had made an unscheduled stop at Gitmo Bay the day before to offload about two-thirds of its crew due to extreme medical issues. At first he was sure this trouble report was related to the sub’s unusual situation and had nothing to do with the ongoing, highly classified Operation Caribe.

The good news, though, learned in a follow-up report, was that the unpleasantness aboard the Wyoming had been quelled almost immediately. This was thanks to the quick intervention of a SEAL team that had gained entry to the sub by enacting a new, still obscure security drill known as Plan 6S-S.

Even Brown had to go to his operations codebook to see what Plan 6S-S was all about. But at that moment, he was grateful that it had worked. And he was confident that the Navy could keep the whole incident under wraps until the inevitable follow-up investigation.

In fact, the first call Brown made after hearing about the SEAL team’s heroics was to the Navy Personnel Office at the Pentagon, asking how fast he could propose the SEALs for some kind of commendation.

But then, shortly before noon, Brown received an unexpected FedEx package. Inside, he found some disturbing video footage, apparently shot by the same SEAL team that had boarded the Wyoming. It showed them doing things in connection with Operation Caribe that they simply had no business doing. Boarding a Russian container ship in Havana Harbor. Intercepting a Yemeni LNG carrier off the coast of Florida. Surreptitiously going aboard the gigantic cruise liner, the Queen of the Seas.

At the end of the footage was a message, typed on a piece of yellow classified action paper that read: “Now you know what we can do.”

That’s when Admiral Brown realized something might still be wrong aboard the USS Wyoming.

* * *

NS NORFOLK HAD been trying to establish communications with the Wyoming most of the morning. But other than that one brief message, sent by the SEAL team stating that the problem had been resolved, there had been nothing else.

Then, at exactly noon, a communiqué from the sub arrived via a VLF text message. It asked if Admiral Brown wanted to speak to the SEAL team leader by sat phone. A reply message was quickly sent to the sub confirming Brown was standing by and providing the number of his personal secure phone.

That’s why Brown was now in the Rubber Room. He was anxiously awaiting the call from the sub.

It came at 1400 hours. Brown was amazed the communication line was so clear. He knew he was talking over the Wyoming’s new Narrowband IP phone system, but it sounded like he was talking to someone in the next room.

The caller identified himself as Seal Team 616 leader, Commander Dogg Beaux. He explained that he was speaking from the Wyoming’s CAAC, the control and attack center, and transmitting with help from the sub’s communication specialist.

Brown bluntly asked the condition of the submarine.

“Everything is fine, sir,” was Beaux’s reply. His voice was calm, polite. “No problems at all.”

“Are you able to continue to King’s Bay?” Brown asked him.

“We are,” came the reply.

Brown was immediately relieved. “It’s probably best not to discuss the ‘internal situation’ until then, is it?” he asked.

But there was no reply to this.

“When do you expect to arrive in King’s Bay?” Brown went on.

There was a short silence. Then Commander Beaux spoke again: “We will arrive after a few requests of ours are met.”

Brown chuckled loud enough to be heard over the phone. It was common practice when one branch of the Navy did a favor for another, that an exchange of something such as ice cream was obligatory.

“How much Rocky Road do you and your men want?” Brown asked, hoping it was that simple.

But there was another brief silence.

Then Commander Beaux replied, “About a hundred million dollars worth should do it.”

* * *

THE CONVERSATION FOR the next five minutes was one-sided and bizarre.

Commander Beaux did all the talking. He explained, calmly and rationally, that the Wyoming was in his hands temporarily and that he and his men had seized it to prove a point: A U.S. Navy nuclear sub could be hijacked by real pirates with just a little know-how and the right equipment. Beaux said his team was looking at the situation as an opportunity, a “teachable moment”—a way the Navy could learn how to prevent a real submarine hijacking. And their payment for providing this service would be $100 million, plus full immunity from prosecution, as well as exclusive rights to any TV or movie deals resulting from their actions. Beaux insisted the price was a bargain. In return, his team would give back the sub, release the crew and tell Naval Command exactly how they did it. At that point, they would become private contractors for the Navy, to which Beaux added that he knew how the Navy had no problem hiring ex-special ops guys these days.

But then Beaux went on to tell Brown that all of the sub’s defensive systems were operating, and he claimed he would be able to see and hear everything Naval Command did regarding the situation. He said he could detect any U.S. Navy search aircraft that might be dispatched to look for them. He also stated that, while he considered playing a little cat and mouse with the Navy all part of the exercise, if he discovered any special ops teams were activated, or called back to deal with him, he would have to escalate the matter.

With all this in mind, he suggested the admiral promptly reach a decision on his demands.

Brown was stunned. Despite all the bullshit and blather, the fact was the Wyoming had been taken over and was being held for ransom, no different from what the Somali pirates were doing a half a world away.

So the threat of a pirate action off the U.S. East Coast had been real, he thought. It’s just that the phantom pirates were some of the Navy’s own.

Brown was not alone in the Rubber Room. There were a dozen people with him, doing their best to stay quiet and undetected. They were from NCIS, the JAG’s office and the FBI. Most notable for their absence was anyone from ONI.

The two FBI men had been rushed up from Operation Caribe’s Land Mission office in Miami in anticipation of the hijackers getting in touch with NS Norfolk. Upon arriving, they’d told Brown that three ships connected to Operation Caribe had been torpedoed that morning in the Bahamas and that the hijacking of the Wyoming was most likely a related event. This only ratcheted up the tension in the Rubber Room.

The FBI agents were experts in hostage negotiations, and all during Brown’s conversation with Commander Beaux, they kept slipping him notes containing messages such as Keep him talking. Keep him on the line. Get him to talk about his family.

And, of course, the entire exchange was being recorded and piped through a speaker phone. All this so everyone in the Rubber Room could do their best to measure the gravity of the situation and listen for any clues that might resolve it.

Noises detected in the background on Beaux’s side of the conversation were key. The voices of the crew, what machinery was running and what was not. These things could tell a lot about conditions aboard the sub.

After listening in for a few minutes and hearing a lot of background clatter in between Beaux’s sound bites, one naval officer scribbled a note to Brown that read: “The sub is definitely submerged and underway.”

To which Brown scribbled back that, despite Beaux’s warning, every available antisubmarine asset on the East Coast should start looking for the Wyoming immediately.

But everyone in the Rubber Room also knew finding the sub would be a tall order. The U.S. Navy had spent billions of dollars over the years making its nuclear submarines super quiet. Specialized rubber gaskets separated every one of the millions of nuts and bolts aboard every sub. Every moving part within every machine on board was coated with top-secret sound-damping sealants, rendering them silent. Every member of the crew wore special sneakers. Hundreds of sensors inside and outside the boat’s hull made sure everything on the sub stayed quiet. U.S. subs were designed to fool the anti-submarine forces of Russia and China at the very least. They were built so well that even U.S. forces would have a hard time locating one. A U.S. sub on the loose could hide just about anywhere in the millions of square miles of ocean and, because it was nuclear powered, it could stay under water for weeks or even months at a time, if necessary.

But, as Brown finally said to Beaux: “You know we’ll find you eventually. Your supplies are already low, you’ll need food at some point and you’ll have to surface. What happens then?”

“I intend to get this done way before that,” was Beaux’s enigmatic reply. “So, let’s all profit from this situation. Because if we go down that negative path and draw this thing out, the circumstances could be dire.”

The experts were now silently pleading with Brown to keep Beaux on the line. But Beaux was too smart for that.

“Can you define ‘dire’ for me, commander?” Brown asked him. “Are you thinking of harming the crew, things of that nature?”

Beaux never lost his cool. “The only difference between this sub and the majority of the Navy’s other ballistic boats,” he said, “is that we only have twenty-two Trident missiles on board and the rest have twenty-four.”

With that, Beaux ended the conversation.

But not necessarily the transmission.



Aboard the Wyoming

“ARE YOU SURE they can still hear us?” Beaux whispered to the sub’s communications specialist.

“I’m sure they can,” the sailor replied quietly. He pointed to the switch on his communications console that showed the Narrowband IP’s phone line to NS Norfolk was still open.

Beaux said to the sailor: “Stand by.”

There were about twenty other crewmen crowded on the sub’s control deck. Each was at his station or watching over someone performing their duties. Another twenty or so sailors were being held in the passageway nearby. All of them were under the eye of a SEAL holding a gun.

Just as they had been during Beaux’s phone conversation, the two sailors who were working the sub’s steering yokes nearby were verbally counting out their depth numbers: “We are at nine hundred feet and holding steady…”

The helmsman was calling out his numbers: “Seventeen knots, true…”

The electrical officer was checking his equipment and announcing minor fluctuations in power. Sonar men were calling out contacts: “Range—three miles off port.” The electronic warfare officer was keeping track of his equipment, as was the weapons officer. In effect, more than a half-dozen conversations were going on at once, the normal chatter of a submarine making its way through the ocean depths.

Through it all, Beaux remained seated at the communications suite. He had a prepared script in front of him.

It contained all the talking points he’d wanted to get across to NS Norfolk: The sub was under his control. This was a teachable moment. The payment demand. The circumstances of escalation. The blanket immunity and the worldwide TV and movie rights.

He put a check mark next to all these things.

Unchecked, though, was a section that began with: “If you doubt our resolve, look for three holes in Blue Moon Bay.”

Beaux scratched out the comment. “Better I left that unsaid,” he whispered to himself.

Beneath it was another section left unchecked. It read, “We regret the loss of Commander Shepherd.”

He crossed out that section, too, as well as one that read, “We regret the loss of the torpedo officer.”

He looked at his watch. The Narrowband IP phone line had been open without any direct communication from him for about a minute. He decided that was enough. He nodded to the communications specialist, who reached over and flipped the switch, finally ending the transmission.

Ghost was standing nearby, M4 assault rifle in hand. Beaux looked up at him and nodded.

Ghost yelled, “All quiet!”

Every sailor at his station immediately stopped what he was doing. Some slumped forward in their seats. Others simply collapsed.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Beaux said, not bothering to look up from his notes. “Your group performance was worthy of an Oscar.”

Beaux then said to Elvis, “Check around up top, will you? We haven’t done that in a while.”

Elvis walked past the sub’s periscope and out of the control room altogether. He climbed the ladder up through the sub’s massive conning tower to the bridge above. He stopped before he reached the main hatch, though. What was the last depth reading that had been called out? Nine hundred feet below the surface? And what had the helmsmen said was their speed? Seventeen knots?

Elvis smiled and finally opened the main hatch. Not a drop of water came in on him.

He poked his head outside—and felt only the warm breeze on his face.

What he saw was not the rolling waves of the Atlantic, but many overhanging branches belonging to dozens of strangler fig trees. And around him were the waters of a large rectangular lake, much of it hidden from view by these same dangling tree branches, suggesting a thick Louisiana bayou. The underside of the sub was resting on the lake’s smooth, muddy bottom. The lake water covered the remainder of the hull to a point about five feet up to the conning tower, and again, the overhanging strangler fig branches hid the rest.

The sub’s ballast tanks were full. If the Wyoming had to move, all they had to do was blow these tanks and the sub would gently come off the bottom. Then they could turn it around and be on their way.

Not that they were planning on leaving anytime soon.

Not when they were in the perfect hiding place.

Elvis had to hand it to Commander Beaux. He’d found them the ideal spot to stash the Wyoming. Totally isolated, absolutely uninhabited. Few people even knew this place existed or paid attention to it if they did. And, anyone who might have visited here recently was long gone by now.

Big Hole Cay.

No way it could have a better name than that.

* * *

DESPITE HIS CALM performance on the phone with Admiral Brown, Commander Beaux knew he had an unexpected problem on his hands.

Almost all of the Wyoming’s remaining crew members, the people he was counting on to run the sub’s critical functions, were sick. In fact, many were deathly sick.

It had taken Beaux nearly two years to plan this undertaking. Absorbing everything he could get his hands on about ballistic subs, including stolen classified material, he knew what was needed to make them run. Depth limits, speed limits, communications arcs, tolerances to ocean temperature layers, even how many meals the galley could serve in a day. He knew how to keep the secondary battery power on. He knew how the reactor worked. He knew the basics of how the Trident missiles were fired.

But never did he think, when the day came that they finally hijacked the sub, it would have only a bare-bones crew aboard, with most of them so sick they could hardly stand.

It almost seemed like a blessing in disguise at first—that was the ironic thing. Watching over forty sailors was much easier than watching over 150. In fact, the Wyoming’s entire skeleton crew could fit on the control deck, or in the passageway nearby, which greatly helped the 616 team keep an eye on them. Getting the sub to Big Hole Cay, and before that, using selective brutality to force the weapons crew to show him how to fire the torpedoes—all of it had gone like clockwork for Beaux.

But in the time since arriving here, nearly half the remaining crew had been taken to sick bay, ravaged by the flu. And the other half, those twenty-odd sailors still performing their duties, were getting increasingly ill. Wearing flu masks and sometimes coughing so hard they lost their breath, they were at their stations only because the SEALs were holding M4 assault rifles on them. While being in a sort of a collective state of shock, the sailors were soldiering on, hoping the Navy could somehow get them out of this bizarre blue-on-blue hostage situation before they all died. But many had trouble just keeping their heads up.

The result was that Beaux and his men were forced to run a lot of the boat’s operations themselves. The nuclear reactor had been taken off-line because all the sailors normally on duty to service it were sick. But, there were other critical areas that had to keep functioning for the plan to work: environmental systems, communications, secondary electrical units and the ballast tanks. And, to keep the threat alive, 616 had to maintain the Trident missile launch console and keep enough power in reserve should things really deteriorate and they be forced to use it.

Beaux was no fool. He knew this endeavor wasn’t going to be easy. He knew some blood would have to be spilled and that he would run into unanticipated problems.

But again, never did he think he’d wind up stealing a submarine full of sick sailors.

* * *

THIS SITUATION BECAME critical several hours after breaking off communications with NS Norfolk.

Beaux was down to sixteen sailors still at their posts by that point, way below the minimum required. In an effort to fix the problem, he made his way down to the Wyoming’s sick bay, carrying his M4 assault rifle with him.

The sub’s only corpsman was helping a sailor onto a cot when Beaux arrived. The sick bay was packed with men on bunks or fold-out cots or, in some cases, on blankets stretched out on the cold deck. The place reeked of illness.

“I need more people to get back to work,” Beaux told the corpsman directly. “There’s got to be some in here who aren’t as bad off as the others.”

The corpsman just shrugged. He’d probably gotten over the shock of the hijacking sooner than everyone else simply because he was so busy treating the sick.

“You’re looking for malingerers, then?” he asked Beaux.

“I’m sure there’s a few,” Beaux replied.

The corpsman just shrugged again. “There is only one member of this crew who hasn’t shown full-blown flu symptoms yet,” he said. “And that person is me. I doubled the dose of vaccine I took before I came on board, plus I’m the only one walking around with surgical gloves, and that makes a difference, probably more than the flu masks. But I’ll be honest with you—I’m feeling fatigued and weak. My throat is sore, and my stomach is beginning to act up. So, it’s only a matter of time for me, too.”

The corpsman had a hot plate on his desk. A small pot of coffee was heating on it, enough for one cup. Beaux nonchalantly poured it for himself—he had to stay awake, and the team had no more amphetamine pills. He started to walk into the infirmary, intent on finding one or two able bodies, but the corpsman stopped him.

“Can’t go in there with any airborne irritants,” he told Beaux, pointing to the steam rising out of the coffee.

Beaux begrudgingly surrendered the cup. “Make sure I pick it up on the way out,” he grumbled, finally disappearing into the sick bay.

Once he was out of sight, the corpsman cleared his throat, retrieved a mouthful of phlegm and spit it into the coffee.

“Will do, a*shole,” he said.