Operation Caribe

PART SIX

The End of Whiskey Justice


35

TEAM WHISKEY KNEW the SEALs would come to Big Hole Cay.

It was the final piece of the puzzle. The last bit of mystery to fall in place.

The SEAL team’s perplexing behavior in the last few months all made sense now. Sneaking in and out of the Bahamas, cruising these strange waters in the dead of night. All the planning, the subterfuge, the machinations. The murders. All of it, just to make this weird little island the center of their universe.

Their plan was simple. They’d stalked then hijacked the Wyoming, and instead of hiding in the ocean where they knew they would eventually have to surface and be spotted, they found this place and hid it here, among the outer islands of the Abaco Bahamas, where no one would ever think to look for it.

Except Whiskey.

* * *

THE TEAM WAS here long before the sub arrived—and in that time they’d come up with a plan of their own.

It wouldn’t be easy. There would be hurdles. Their sat phones were fading, a combination of weak batteries and the massive oncoming storm. No one in the team had slept or eaten in almost two days, meaning they were all running on pure adrenaline. And their copters were so low on fuel, they barely had thirty minutes flying time left between them. Maybe just enough to go for help, but not much more.

But that was OK—Whiskey didn’t want any help. It would have taken hours to get anyone to believe their story anyway, and they had no desire to wend their way through the bureaucratic minefield of U.S. military intelligence. They’d just gone through that bullshit exercise with The Three Kings. They weren’t about to make that mistake again.

No, this one they wanted to do themselves. On this little island, out in the middle of nowhere. With their limited resources, no sleep, in the middle of a hurricane.

They wanted to do it this way because, if their plan worked, they’d be able to spring a trap that even the uber-devious 616 would find impossible to get out of.

And once their enemy was ensnared, Whiskey planned to get its revenge in spades. Not just because the traitorous SEALs had stolen the Wyoming or killed scores of people on the Mothership, the Blackwater vessel, the Russian sub and God knew where else—

Whiskey wanted retribution because the 616 had killed one of their own. Their friend. The guy who’d put Whiskey back together. The guy who’d saved their lives many times over.

This was personal.

They were doing this one for Crash.

* * *

WHISKEY KNEW EARLY on that once here, attacking the Wyoming directly would not work. Forcing their way inside the sub and fighting amongst the cramped cabins and compartments would be like the worst kind of urban warfare. Plus, as the Wyoming cost more than $1 billion, the Navy probably wouldn’t appreciate Whiskey shooting it to pieces.

More important, though, the team had to think about the sub crew’s safety, plus the twenty-two nuclear-tipped missiles onboard. They also had a time element hanging over their heads. Whiskey knew they had to execute their plan quickly—and not just because everything they intended to do would work better under inclement conditions, and eventually the cover of darkness. It was because once the weather cleared, there was no telling what might transpire, including the possibility of the Navy finding the sub on its own.

Whiskey did not want that to happen—at least not until they were able to get their hands on the SEALs themselves and mete out their own brand of justice.

* * *

WHISKEY HAD ESTABLISHED their gun positions while it was still daylight, long before the sub arrived—and as it turned out, they’d placed them perfectly. There was a particularly thick grove of strangler fig trees near the lake’s north embankment, about a hundred feet away from where the sub would eventually come to rest. Thick vines ran horizontally along this bank, many entangled with patches of green moss. There was so much vegetation, it turned out to be the ideal spot to hide two of the team’s portable .50-caliber machine guns.

Farther down the lake’s embankment, close to where the sub’s bow would eventually be, was a trench that ran off into a small cavern. This cavern, in turn, housed one of the island’s mysterious blue holes. The trench and the cavern were almost impossible to see from the middle of the lake, a weird topographic trick.

This also made it difficult to detect the 30mm cannon that had been taken from Bad Dawg One and relocated here.

* * *

HIDING IN THE forest that afternoon, the team watched as the sub squeezed itself through the widened channel opening, stopping under the overhanging strangler figs and then sinking to the lake bottom, leaving only half its sail poking above the surface. The team waited until the skies began to darken in earnest, a combination of the approaching hurricane and the coming of night. Only then did they move to spring their trap.

The rusty tools left by the twenty day laborers on the beach nearby had turned out to be godsends. Once the sub had hidden itself and the first rain began to fall, the team had taken a 300-foot, half-inch-diameter cable from one of the copter’s emergency winches and had strung it back and forth across the channel mouth, wrapping it around posts they’d pounded into either side of the opening. They pulled this cable tight, then placed any tree or branch of substantial size they could find against it, upright at first. When enough trees were impaled vertically, the team had added more horizontally. With the pressure of the water flow keeping the trees in place against the cable, the weave they created slowly began to resemble a wall.

They’d next added mud, sand, and beach debris washed up by the coming storm. The more stuff thrown on the blockage, the less water came through the channel. Within an hour, all water flowing into the lake had stopped. And about two-thirds of whatever water was left in the lake had gone out the much narrower opening on the other side of the island.

It didn’t seem like it should have worked—but it did. That’s because the idea had come from the Senegals, residents of a country where water could be so scarce, people learned how to use everything at their disposal to quickly capture it or, when need be, control it.

That’s why the team had dubbed the dam Senegals’ Bridge.

* * *

THE HURRICANE HIT full force shortly after the sub was trapped.

The winds arrived first, then the rain, the thunder and lightning. Hiding in the forest, Whiskey was quickly soaked, as was all their gear, including their copters. But they’d pressed on because the next step was a major one: preventing the SEALs from launching the sub’s nuclear-tipped missiles.

Having Agent Harry along had come in handy here. He wasn’t the same person as before. He’d snapped after the SEALs sank the Mothership, and he’d yet to snap back. He wanted revenge on the SEALs now as much as Whiskey did. This had become personal for him, too.

Because of his position in the ONI, Harry knew about sub-launched nuclear missiles. They worked in a curious way. Generally speaking, once the firing sequence had been initiated through a series of keys being turned and codes being inputted into the launch computer, tanks on either side of each missile tube were filled with water. Controlled explosions beneath these tanks quickly turned this water into steam. The steam was so powerful when shot into the confined area of the tube that it forced the missile out, literally expelling it into the air for a dozen feet or so. The moment the missile started falling back to earth, its own rocket engine ignited, sending it on its way.

The bad news here was that even though Whiskey had drastically lowered the water level of the lake, the SEALs could still launch a missile if they wanted to. They could still flood the missile tube side tanks with water and set off the explosion to create the steam and push the weapon out of its silo. As soon as the missile fell even one iota, its engine would light and off it would go.

So, how could Whiskey prevent this?

Harry had come up with the answer. To avoid accidents, the hatches above any ballistic sub’s missile tubes were designed so if there were any resistance to opening, the missiles would not fire. If Whiskey could somehow keep the missile hatches shut, the world would be spared a possible nuclear catastrophe.

Ideas such as piling rocks atop the sub were discounted as impractical; because the island was mostly coral, few rocks here were bigger than a pebble. Besides, Harry claimed all that was really needed was a shim welded into the right spot on each missile hatch hinge. If done correctly, the shim would create enough resistance to prevent the hatch from opening and thus a missile from launching.

That’s where Ramon came in.

Batman had used about half the team’s remaining gas to fly to North Gin Cay, stir Ramon out of a pot-induced slumber, explain the situation as best he could to him, and then make him an honorary member of Team Whiskey. Ramon had gathered his welding supplies and they’d flown back to Big Hole Cay at top speed just before the weather became really bad.

As soon as the water went down Batman had delivered Ramon and his gear to the submarine’s stern and he started welding the half-dollar-size shims onto the missile hatch hinges, sealing them in place. Once discovered, the only spot from which the SEALs could fire on him was the open bridge, and Whiskey and Ramon’s two Senegal bodyguards had that covered, blasting the SEALs whenever they showed their faces.

It had taken a few of these one-sided battles before Ramon felt safe doing his work. But after a while, and a little bit of inspiration, he’d ceased to notice the gunfire going on around him.

* * *

ONCE PART TWO of their plan was in motion, Whiskey had concentrated on part three: rescuing the sub’s crew.

Harry was very helpful here, too. Again, he knew about the inner workings of ballistic submarines and especially how cramped they were, despite their size. He also knew that if the reactor were taken offline, the SEALs would have to rely on power stored in their batteries for electricity. Should that source be interrupted, the hijackers would be forced to use a handful of small maintenance generators to work all their environmental systems, including the emergency lights and the air circulators. While, in theory, these generators could supply enough electricity to work the nuclear weapons too, in this scenario, the SEALs would find themselves prisoners of their own prize—enclosed in a dark, congested space, running on ten percent power, with foul air and little illumination. Under those conditions, it was hoped 616 would become so distracted, they’d let down their guard on the crew.

But this still meant someone had to sneak aboard the Wyoming to work a bit of sabotage on its electrical supply and then organize the evacuation.

Nolan was the first to volunteer for the job, but was voted down because he had only one good eye and moving inside a darkened, now off-kilter sub would be too time consuming for him. Batman couldn’t be the infiltrator either because he had only one hand. And Gunner was too large to move stealthily around the confined areas of the sub, as was the stocky Agent Harry.

That left Twitch.

* * *

BUT HOW COULD he get onboard?

Harry had that answer, too. The ideal portal would have been through one of the Wyoming’s two lockout chambers, the same means of entry the SEALs had used to take over the sub. But the lockout chambers’ close proximity to the conning tower made going through one of them too dangerous.

That left only one other place of access: the torpedo tubes.

The tubes were basically horizontal lockout chambers. Each had a muzzle door that opened outward to allow the torpedo to go on its way before closing again. This door was attached to the hull by a hinge, but it had no locking mechanism, so getting into it from the outside would not be a problem.

It was at the other end, the place the torpedo was loaded, where it got dicey. There was a breech door here and once Twitch went in, there was no way Whiskey could know if this door would be open or closed, locked or not locked. And if it was open, who would be on the other side? Friend or foe?

It had been a risky proposition, but they all agreed it had to be done. And unstable as he was, Twitch was raring to go.

So shortly after Ramon started his work at one end of the sub, Twitch went in at the other.

* * *

BY THE TIME Twitch set out, the lake was nearly drained. But, because of the sub’s slant, the starboard torpedo tube was still below the water’s surface.

Armed with a .45 automatic, a knife, two hand grenades and his night vision goggles all wrapped in a waterproof bag, the diminutive team member had slowly made his way to the front of the sub, using the darkness and the horrific weather as his cover.

Diving into the water, he’d gone under, found the starboard torpedo tube and opened its muzzle door with a tug. The rush of water filling the void actually sucked him into the tube, but just as they thought it would, the water drained away through a flood valve as soon as the muzzle door closed behind him.

From there, he’d faced a forty-two-foot crawl. The torpedo tube was dark, greasy and horribly claustrophobic, definitely not a place for Twitch’s troubled psyche. At one point he’d become so disoriented, he wasn’t sure which way was up or down.

He’d pressed on by pushing with his elbows and his knees in a painfully slow wormlike motion. However, the effort took a toll on his artificial leg. He did everything he could to keep the prosthetic attached, but by about halfway in, the brace that held it in place had snapped in two.

Still, he’d reached the breech door somehow. But then came the ultimate question: The door was closed, but was it locked? Twitch gave it a slight push, but it didn’t move. He tried again—still nothing. He’d fumbled around for some kind of latch or internal opening device, but there was none.

He’d faced a huge problem then: If he couldn’t get into the sub, how the hell could he get out? It had been hard enough crawling headfirst into the tube. He couldn’t possibly crawl out backward, push out the muzzle door and fight against the resulting rush of lake water coming in.

He’d tried to listen for any noises on the other side of the breech. Harry had told him that, because of its size, the torpedo room was sometimes used as an overflow sick bay. But Twitch had heard nothing, as the hatch was made of thick steel. So, he’d done the only thing he thought he could do. He pulled out his long, razor-sharp combat knife and banged on the breech door with its blunt end, praying someone friendly on the other side would investigate.

And someone did open the door.

But it was not a sailor, and he was not a friendly.

It was the SEAL named Elvis.

There was a weird moment when their eyes met and Elvis realized he’d seen this person before—at the Bunker briefing and later inside the Mothership’s CIC.

Elvis had exclaimed: “What the hell are you doing here?”

Woozy from his head injury, Elvis had assumed anyone knocking on the other side of the breech door was an enemy trying to get aboard the sub. But along with the shock of seeing someone he knew, he just didn’t have enough time to raise his assault rifle, point it inside the tube and pull the trigger. There were just too many moving parts required for that.

Twitch had been quicker. He’d lunged forward with his knife and caught Elvis just under the jaw, twisting it twice. Elvis went to the deck immediately, dropping his weapon. Twitch fell out of the tube, landed on top of his victim, and stabbed him twice in the chest, brutally but not fatally.

It was only then that Twitch noticed the renegade SEAL was missing his ear. This caused him to flash back to the night when Whiskey raided the Muy Capaz’s camp. All the pirates had had one of their ears lopped off by the SEALs before they were killed.

The same SEALs who had just killed the guy who had saved Twitch’s life less than a year ago.

Though Elvis had begged for his life, Twitch cut off his other ear and stuffed it deep into his mouth to prevent the SEAL from alerting others.

And though he would have preferred drowning him, the same way his friend Crash had died, Twitch had used his combat knife to finish the job.

* * *

TEN MINUTES AFTER hanging Elvis’s body in the equipment locker, Twitch found himself on the sub’s lower level, inside its electrical locker. Agent Harry had told him where he could find it, but the journey was almost unbearable. His artificial leg kept falling off and no matter what he did, he couldn’t get it to stay back on. As a result, he’d been forced to use Elvis’s purloined assault weapon as a crutch. Luckily, he neither saw nor heard anyone while making his way below.

Twitch had done a double up to blow the power cable, placing two grenades together, then pulling the pin on one. The power locker was made of reinforced steel, so he’d been well protected from the blast, and the sound of the double explosion had been muffled somewhat. He allowed himself a fist pump of triumph when all the lights on the sub went out.

But he also knew someone from 616 would soon come down and investigate the problem and he did not want to run into that person on his way out, especially with his balky leg. So he’d hidden in the shadows nearby and waited.

Two figures arrived at the power locker about ten minutes later. One was a member of the crew, an electrician. The other was one of the rogue SEALs, the one they called Smash. It was all Twitch could do to not attack the traitor. True, it would have meant one less a*shole to deal with later, but after having already killed one SEAL, doing in another would have surely alerted the rest of 616 before Twitch had fulfilled his most important mission: the crew’s escape.

So he’d waited in the murk until the two men departed. Then he’d begun making his way back up to the sub’s higher levels. But that’s when things really started to go awry.

Bold as it was, Whiskey’s plan had been hastily conceived. For one, no one ever took into account that night vision goggles didn’t work well in complete darkness, the prevailing condition on most of the sub once the main power cable had been blown. A victim of his own success, Twitch had a hard time in the pitch-black passageways, limping mightily, with no clue what was around the next corner.

He was supposed to get to the sick bay next, as the thinking was that a lot of flu-ravaged crew members would be located here. But it was just too dark to find it. So, again falling back on his Delta training, after every few steps, Twitch had come to a halt and started sniffing the air.

And after a few minutes, he detected the unmistakable smell of antiseptics.

Then he just followed his nose.

* * *

THERE WERE TWENTY-SIX sailors in the Wyoming’s sick bay, a place built to hold a dozen.

Many had not eaten in days due to flu-induced vomiting and diarrhea. Others had severe sore throats and swollen necks. Some had so much fluid in their lungs they were slowly drowning. With the lights out almost everywhere, the deplorable conditions in the sick bay had only gotten worse.

Commander Beaux had left the infirmary not too long before, telling the corpsman not to give the sailors any more medication. It had been a moot order, though, because the sick bay had already run out of medicine.

That was the lowest point for the Navy medic. He knew then none of the sailors would survive. All of them in the infirmary and still on duty up on the CAAC would continue to get sicker by the minute until they finally dropped dead. And there was nothing the corpsman could do about it.

Into this swirl of misery limped the small, compact Hawaiian man whose name the corpsman would later learn was Twitch Kapula.

He was covered in grease and blood, was carrying a prosthetic leg under one arm and using a bayoneted M4 assault rifle as a crutch under the other. He looked quite sick himself, especially the way he practically fell into the darkened sick bay.

The corpsman was startled to see him.

“Who the hell are you?” the corpsman had asked him.

“I’m here to get you out,” Twitch announced in reply.

The medic was floored. It had never occurred to him that someone might actually come to rescue them.

“How many of you are onboard?” he’d asked Twitch anxiously.

“Just me,” was the reply. “I’m it.”

The corpsman laughed at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

The greasy, bloody little man had looked him straight in the eye and asked: “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

The corpsman pulled him to the back of the sick bay, out of sight of the passageway. He let Twitch quickly explain who he was. The corpsman soon realized that their rescue force wasn’t exactly the 82nd Airborne.

“Do you have a plan, at least?” the corpsman asked.

Twitch said he did. “I’m going to move all of these guys down to the torpedo room and they’re going out the starboard torpedo tube, one at a time.”

The corpsman was floored. “That’s the plan?”

Twitch just nodded again. He asked: “How often do the SEALs check on you?”

“That a*shole Beaux was here a while ago,” the corpsman told him. “You probably came close to passing him on your way. But besides him, no one else lately. I think most of them are up on the bridge, in the middle of a gunfight. I treated one for a gunshot wound and put him in—well, in the torpedo room.”

“Consider that guy out of the equation,” Twitch replied sharply. “And my friends outside are keeping the others busy up top. So this is our window of opportunity. We got to take it.”

The corpsman then examined Twitch’s prosthetic leg.

“What happened to your appliance?” he asked.

“I tore the brace sneaking in,” Twitch explained. “I’ll have to leave it here for the time being.”

Then Twitch looked around the darkened infirmary again and said, “Show me the sickest guys.”

The corpsman just shrugged. “They’re all really, really sick.”

Twitch took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“OK, you’ll have to stay here,” he instructed the corpsman. “And if anyone comes down here checking on you, you’ll just have to fake it somehow, at least until we get most of them out.”

Then, without another word, Twitch picked up the nearest sick sailor, draped him over his shoulder and staggered away, once again using the M4 as a crutch.

And this he did, one man at a time, for the next hour, until all of the sick sailors had been moved.