Operation Caribe (29 page)

“Can you get our friend up top please?” Nolan asked Gunner and Twitch.

They immediately took Ramon by the arms and hustled him out of the cabin.

“We’re going back to the
Mothership
toot sweet,” Batman told the Senegals. The African sailors were already in motion. They ran up to the bridge and started the engines.

Only then did Batman take off his crash helmet and rub his weary head.

“Man, this is one
very
fucked-up situation,” he said to Nolan. “What happened to those Russians? Before the storm? After the storm? Were they shipwrecked and then killed? Or were they killed and then shipwrecked?”

Nolan just shook his head. “Whatever happened to them, with the slashed throats and the cut-off ears, they died
just like
those Muy Capaz guys. And that doesn’t make an ounce of sense.”

He looked over at Batman. He’d never seen his friend so worried before. “What
the hell
is going on here, Bob?” Nolan asked him.

Batman began nervously pulling on his beard.

“I don’t know, Snake,” he said. “But I say, let’s drive Beevis home and then we go find out.”

They hurried back up to the main deck and headed for the helipad.

But just as they were about to climb aboard the helicopter, Nolan’s sat-phone began vibrating. He took it out and stared at it for a moment. Someone was sending him a text, something that
never
happened.

“What the fuck is this?” he said.

He opened the phone and called up the message on the small screen.

It was from Crash.

He read it out loud:

“Hey Dudes. Wish you were here. Having lotsa fun. Infilled Russian cargo ship in Havana, looking for bad guys; didn’t find any but blew off ship’s ass anyway. Went aboard raghead LNG carrier, looking for same. No dice, but found/dumped ton of smack to the fishes. Just returned from largest fucking cruise liner ever. We wired it for TV; if bad guys move on it, we’re on them like white on rice. SEALs rule. Peace out. Crash.”

Nolan could hardly believe what he was reading. Neither could Batman.

“Cargo ship? Cruise liner? LNG carrier?” Batman said. “Those are our kind of gigs. How come
they’re
doing them?”

28

Aboard the
Sea Shadow

IT WAS PROBABLY the most unusual mission Crash had even been asked to do.

It all started when Commander Beaux came to him shortly after Crash had sent the text to Nolan.

The ex-SEAL was in his bunk, trying to get some rest. The only sleep he’d had in the past forty-eight hours was the nap on the beach prior to the
Queen of the Seas
mission. He’d been running on pure adrenaline the rest of the time.

Beaux said he was looking for volunteers. The
Sea Shadow
was back at the small, remote, unnamed cay, hidden under the strangler figs in the island’s deep inlet. But it would be leaving again soon for a more populated island nearby called Turnip Cay.

Turnip Cay, as Commander Beaux described it, was an entirely unexceptional place. A few thousand people. A few hotels. A small airport—and, of course, lots of sport fishing businesses. It was just like many of the hundreds of small islands found throughout the Bahamas.

Except it had one thing a lot of them didn’t.

It had a FedEx box. A very unusual one.

And 616 had to send something that absolutely, positively had to get there overnight.

Could Crash handle it?

*   *   *

HE WENT ALONG with it, of course.

The package was going to Admiral J.L. Brown up in Naval Station Norfolk. Inside was a CD containing all the video footage Crash had shot in the past forty-eight hours. Commander Beaux said it was crucial the CD reach the admiral by noon later that day.

For security reasons, e-mailing or text messaging it was out of the question; sending it FedEx was the only other way 616 could think of. But it wasn’t like they could just tie up the
Sea Shadow
at some fishing dock and arrange a pickup.

So Crash’s covert mission was to bring the package ashore, walk into Turnip’s main village and send it to Admiral Brown, who just happened to be in charge of all naval security systems at NS Norfolk, which meant for all of U.S. Navy Fleet Forces Command.

If Crash made it there before midnight, the package would be on the last plane out, and would be on the admiral’s desk by lunchtime tomorrow.

*   *   *

THE MISSION, SUCH as it was, took less than thirty minutes.

It was 3:30
A.M.
when Crash left. He was back in the same clothes he’d worn for the
Queen of the Seas
mission. The
Sea Shadow
sailed to a point about a quarter mile off Turnip Cay’s isolated north side. Crash jumped into their rubber life raft and paddled to shore as the
Sea Shadow
headed for deeper water. He double-timed it to town and dropped the pre-marked, pre-addressed package into the special FedEx overnight box at precisely ten minutes to four. Then, as part of a smaller mission, he went into the twenty-four-hour drugstore nearby and bought a dozen blank CDs for downloading further footage from the video camera. He raced back to the beach, paddled back out and waited until the
Sea Shadow
came along and picked him up again.

It all went like clockwork.

Until Crash got back aboard the stealth ship—and he knew immediately that something had changed.

*   *   *

AS SOON AS he crawled in through the bottom hatch, Crash could feel a different vibe. The rest of 616 were rushing around the
Sea Shadow
. Equipment was beeping; combat weapons and battle suits were being laid out. The vessel was picking up speed fast.

Crash deflated the rubber raft and then joined the team up on the control deck. The SEALs were in crisis mode. None of the usual laughing and good-natured joking. Ghost and Monkey were piloting the ship, while Beaux, Smash and Elvis were poring over a document laid out on the control room’s lighted map table. They all looked supremely serious.

“What happened?” Crash asked them.

They turned as one; for a moment, it was almost as if they were surprised to see him.

“The package?” Beaux asked him.

“All set and on its way,” Crash told him.

“And were you able to buy the blank CDs?”

Crash took out the pack of compact discs and laid them on the map table. Then he asked again: “What’s happened?”

“Some very serious shit,” Beaux finally said.

Crash became excited. “Is it what we’ve been waiting for?” he asked. “The phantom pirates?”

Beaux looked especially grim. He didn’t answer at first, glancing at the other 616 members instead.

So Crash asked again. “Are we on them? Do we know where they are?”

Finally, Beaux replied: “Yes—we sure do.”

Aboard the USS
Wyoming

U.S. NAVY COMMANDER Micas Shepherd felt a chill coming on.

He sneezed, and his eyes began watering. He felt his forehead—it seemed warm. And now, suddenly, his nose started to run.

This was not good.

He checked his watch. “Just twelve more hours,” he thought aloud. “Then you can stay in bed for a week.”

Shepherd was commanding officer of the USS
Wyoming,
a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, one of the largest in the world. The
Wyoming
carried twenty-two Trident II missiles, each with eight independently targeted nuclear warheads within. This meant the
Wyoming
carried more than
700
times the destructive force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This awesome power was in the hands of the sub’s 155-man crew, 15 officers and 140 sailors, and was always their number one priority.

That is, when they didn’t have the flu.

Shepherd was very anxious to get back to his home port at King’s Bay, Georgia. The
Wyoming
had been out for almost a hundred days, on an extended cruise that had taken them first to the Arctic Circle, then down to the South Atlantic, and finally through the Caribbean.

Crew members had begun to get sick about a week before. A flu went through the boat like wildfire; this was not H1N1, but judging from the symptoms, something very similar. The boat’s medical personnel were overwhelmed to the point that the sub had to make an unscheduled stop at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—of all places—to offload 113 sick people: 106 sailors and seven officers. Forty-two men stayed onboard, the bare minimum needed to get the sub back to King’s Bay. But a lot of them were feeling ill as well.

That’s why Shepherd was fully expecting a Navy medical emergency team would be standing by once they arrived home. There was even a good chance the entire crew would have to be quarantined upon arrival.

At present, they were about sixty miles off Miami, skirting the sea lane between Florida and the Bahamas. They were sailing just below the surface, as the sub could move faster that way.

If all went well, they were just a half-day from reaching King’s Bay.

*   *   *

AFTER GETTING A couple aspirins from sick bay, Shepherd retired to his cabin to start writing his mission reports. He was not a minute into this when his personal communications suite started beeping. A text message was coming in on the sub’s Very Low Frequency band. This was surprising because the
Wyoming
was one of a handful of Navy subs equipped with a new, highly classified communications system called Narrowband IP, which allowed submerged submarines to communicate with Navy Systems Command, the Pentagon, the White House, or with just about anyone else, simply by punching in a coded number and typing out an e-mail.

For security reasons, U.S. nuclear submarines rarely spoke to anyone while out on patrol. Usually the first communication between a sub and its home base would come an hour before its scheduled arrival and would involve information like tide checks and how many tugs the boat would require to safely come into harbor.

Shepherd was sure, though, that this incoming message was about the ship’s medical situation; he knew it was important to keep the whole flu thing quiet, which was probably why the communiqué was coming in on the old but secure VLF network.

He punched in his communication code and turned the engage key to establish the connection. But instead of seeing a sequence of security codes that proceeded any classified communication, he saw instead a one-line message: “Enacting Plan 6S-S Drill.”

“What the hell is Plan 6S-S?” Shepherd thought aloud.

He reached for his operations codebook and rapidly flipped through the pages, and there it was, in a recent addendum: Plan 6S-S.

If a U.S. Navy submarine should experience or be suspected of experiencing a hostile takeover, such as a mutiny or any other kind of anomalous situation, under Plan 6S-S, a SEAL team will attempt to board the vessel in question and restore order. In cases when Plan 6S-S is a training exercise, the captain will be made aware of such an exercise in advance. But for security reasons, he may not use any communications systems to check the authenticity of the drill until the SEAL team arrives on station.

Because the command was written in typically opaque Navy-speak, Shepherd had to read it three times before he understood it.

And slowly, it began to make sense. During a recent overhaul, two of the
Wyoming
’s missile tubes had been remade into lockout chambers for just such an exercise. These chambers worked on the same principle as an airlock on a spaceship. The SEALs would attach their mini-sub to the top of the chamber, which would then be flooded with water. Donning scuba gear, the SEALs would enter the flooded chamber, close the top hatch and make their way to the bottom. The water would then be pumped out, allowing them to come aboard. To leave the sub, the procedure was reversed. It could even be done while the sub was underway, as long as it was going no faster than ten knots.

It was simple enough, Shepherd thought. Someone wanted to make sure these SEAL entry ports worked. What else could it be? But why order this exercise now? he wondered. With two-thirds of his crew flat on their backs at Gitmo and many of those still on board, including him, feeling sick?

He couldn’t imagine a worse time to do it.

“I just hope these SEALs had their flu shots,” he thought.

Aboard the
Sea Shadow

THEY WERE GOING full throttle.

At fifty knots, the
Sea Shadow
was rocking so violently waves were splashing off both sides of the windscreen of its forward-facing bridge.

Crash felt like he was on some kind of elaborate amusement park ride—he had to hold on to something at all times so he wouldn’t fall over. But he imagined this was how the police felt when chasing a stolen car.

He never took his eyes off the document spread out on the map table; the one that Beaux was studying when he told him they were finally on the trail of the phantom pirates.

He knew it would be strictly
verboten
to ask where the document came from, who sent it and why. But he
could
tell the document had been printed out on yellow paper—and yellow was always a sign of high priority in the special ops world. Crash was also sure the ship’s onboard Level 3 secure computer, the place where any classified messages would come from, had generated it.

But what did it say, exactly?

Commander Beaux had slid over to the control panel to check some navigation points in this mad dash; Ghost was actually driving the ship. Crash tried to hold his tongue, taking in all the drama and wondering how it would end.

But when Beaux finally returned to the map table, he summoned the gumption to ask him more questions.

“What are the details, sir?” he asked him. “Am I cleared to know?”

Beaux went back to reading the document.

“It’s called Plan 6S-S,” he finally explained. “They just installed it in our advanced SEALs training. It’s part of what we call the TFW package.”

“ ‘TFW?’ ”

“Unofficially, TFW means ‘threat from within,’ ” Beaux said. “It was written after that asshole went crazy down at Fort Hood and shot all those people. It’s part of the new regs to prevent that sort of thing from happening again. In regard to us, if a Navy ship has been a victim of hostile takeover, or some kind of incident, someone has to go aboard and take it back. And that someone usually means SEALs.”