“L
ike to begin by welcoming Commander Hawke and Mr. Brock aboard the
Kamehameha
,” Stokely Jones said. They were in the sub’s SPECWAR wardroom. Stoke stood in front of a blackboard. On the wall beside him were blown-up pictures of the hijacked airship from every possible angle. The men around the table included Hawke and Brock plus two fourteen-man platoons of SEAL counterterrorist commandos.
The hand-picked members of the U.S. Navy’s elite counterterrorist group and hostage-rescue team, SEAL Team Six, had begun training for this mission ten minutes after the president had learned of the hijacking. Training normally consisted of lessons learned from experience. But no one had ever assaulted an airship before.
No one. Ever.
The sub had been steaming submerged for more than an hour since they’d picked up Hawke and Brock. They were positioned directly beneath the airship now, at a depth of two thousand feet, immobile. A tiny video camera mounted on an invisible needle-thin antenna from the sub’s conning tower provided a continuous live feed of the airship. The ship was dark for the most part, very few lights aboard as the sun set and darkness fell.
“The situation is this,” Stoke said, offering a quick summary for the two new arrivals. “We’ve got four hundred terrified passengers aboard this damn zeppelin. We think they’re still being held here, in a large ballroom on the promenade deck. Guarding the hostages are approximately twenty heavily armed terrorists, highly trained members of OMON, the Russian special forces. There is also the possibility that a Russian-American assassin named Strelnikov has brought poison gas aboard the
Pushkin
, an incapacitating narcotic based on the drug fentanyl, administered accidentally at a lethal dosage level in the Moscow theater siege. Any questions so far?”
“What the hell do they want?” Hawke asked. “The Russians?”
“They want the U.S. and its European allies to butt out of their business, basically. While the new Tsar reclaims all the territory they lost when the Soviet Union dissolved.”
“Have troops crossed any sovereign borders yet?” Hawke wanted to know. Obviously, he hadn’t seen any news in days. No CNN in Energetika.
“Not yet. But the Russian Army’s got ninety divisions massed on the various borders, from the Baltics to East Ukraine. Washington thinks Estonia is where they’ll move first. Close the border bridge over the Narva River to anything but military traffic. Jam the whole country’s Internet there like they did a while back, fake a Russian citizens’ protest and then shoot a few Russian citizens to create a false crisis for the ethnic Russian population living there, start moving tanks and troops across the bridge to ‘rescue’ them.”
“And if the West responds?”
“They start to kill all the airship hostages. Throw them out. One by one, including the wife of the U.S. vice president, until the West backs off. Any more questions?”
“Just one,” Brock said. “How the hell do you guys plan to get those people out of there safely?”
Stoke smiled. He’d known Harry Brock for years. Harry liked to cut to the chase.
“These OMON guys have ordered a no-fly zone, fifty-mile radius around the airship. Any aircraft violates it, they start tossing hostages out the door. Same thing with surface vessels.”
“What altitude is the damn thing?” Hawke asked.
“Hovering at five hundred feet.”
“Stationary?”
“Last time we looked.”
“Look, I’ve been aboard an identical but smaller version of this thing called
Tsar.
From that underside picture there, it seems there’s an identical circular hatch in the floor of the control pod. Looks like no exterior handle, no access from outside. So, what’s our point of entry?”
“We’ve got a couple of options, including that hatch,” Stoke said, moving his laser pointer. “Here, here, and maybe here.”
“They all look bad,” Brock observed.
There was a lot of eyeball rolling from the SEALs around the table. One of them piped up and said, “I’m sure you have a better idea, sir.”
“Damn right,” Brock said. “And I’ll tell you what it is as soon as I think of it.”
Stokely frowned. “Look. Enough of this shit. We all know this isn’t going to be easy. But we got two things working for us here. One, surprise. They don’t know we’re down here. Not a fucking clue. Two, we got someone inside the ship. We got a hostage aboard with a sat phone.”
“Really?” Hawke said, seeing the first ray of hope. “Someone inside? How’d you pull that off?”
“She was invited,” Stoke said evenly, looking straight at Hawke. “Friend of mine.”
“Oh,” Hawke said, instantly realizing the world of hurt Stokely had to be in. Fancha, his fiancée, that’s who was on the inside. For Stoke, the already incredibly high stakes of this rescue operation were right through the sub’s roof.
It was personal for Stoke, and that was not good.
Hawke checked his watch. The commando team would commence rescue operations in six hours. At midnight. There was no moon, few stars. At least some of the hostages would be asleep. Maybe only a skeleton OMON crew standing guard, if they were really lucky.
Luck? Luck was for losers. They were six hours out, and they didn’t have a goddamn plan.
Hawke needed to talk to Stoke alone, and fast.
“D
oesn’t feel good, Stoke, none of this,” Hawke said from his perch on the upper bunk, his legs dangling near Stokely stretched out on the bunk directly below.
“No shit, boss.”
They were in Stoke’s tiny cabin, just aft of the forward torpedo room, the only place on the sub where they could find any privacy. Putin had given Hawke a pack of smokes, and he shook one out and lit it now.
“Oh, great. Now you’re smoking,” Stoke said. “Good thinking.”
“I might well be dead in a few hours. Perfect time to start smoking.”
“Now, that’s what I call inspirational leadership. Shit, I’m feeling better about this whole mess already. I’m psyched. Happy, you and Urine better watch your asses up there. Man coming after you got himself a death wish.”
“Urine?” Hawke said, puzzled like everybody else about that confusing Russian name.
“With a Y. Yurin. He’s the one I told you about who was training these OMON guys down in Miami. Big blond muscle-boy type. Badass, though. Probably killed a couple thousand Chechen children when he was there.”
“You think he’s running the show up there?”
“I know he’s running the show. Total professional killer. They’ve been training for this for months, out there in the Everglades. One of the many reasons I’m feeling down on my luck.”
Hawke nodded and took a deep drag on his smoke. He couldn’t remember a time in his career when he’d felt such apprehension over an impending operation. SEAL Team Six, now officially known by the less harmonious DEVGRU, was about as good as it got. One of their first deployments had been the hijacked cruise ship
Achille Lauro.
Boats and oil rigs were common fare for Six. But they’d never mounted a maritime combat boarding operation with situational parameters remotely like this one.
A bloody airship!
Enough to make any rational man start smoking, he thought, taking another puff and blowing it at the ceiling. He’d been thinking about this rescue attempt until his head hurt, the whole flight from Ramstein. The Russian ploy was brilliant. A dirigible presented huge logistical problems, insurmountable problems, maybe, to any hostage-rescue operation. There had to be a way, though. There always was. But damned if he could think of one.
“Damn right it doesn’t feel good,” Stoke said after a long silence. “Hell! I never should have let the girl go on the damn zeppelin in the first place. She didn’t want to go, you know. I made her go. Anything happens to her now, hell, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Stoke, I’m just as worried about Fancha as you are. But I mean this operation doesn’t feel good.”
“You think I don’t know that, boss? It sucks, is what it does. SEAL Team Six? The best HRT on the planet. You get a hostage situation on a goddamn cruise ship or a 747 sitting out on a runway? Team in, team out, in a heartbeat, tangos dead, freed hostages not even scratched. But this shit? A fucking zeppelin suspended in midair? Nobody on the planet is trained for that.”
“Exactly why he chose it,” Hawke said.
“Why who chose it?”
“Korsakov. The new Russian Tsar. He built the goddamn airship, maybe with this eventuality in mind. No, make that
probably
with this in mind.”
“Smart man. So, how the hell are we going to do this without getting our asses kicked and taking a couple hundred hostages down with us?”
“I have a thought on that. You’re not going to like it.”
“Yeah? Try me. I’d like anything better than what we’ve got.
We’ve been sitting out here submerged in this old boat going crazy with this for two days. We could use some fresh ideas. SEALs don’t get discouraged easily. That team in there? They are discouraged.”
“You’ve got to call Fancha, Stoke. I hate to say it. She’s our only chance.”
“I’m listening.”
“That hatch in the floor of the control pod. It’s the only good way for us to insert. The rear staircase doesn’t work. The fore, aft, and midships emergency egress doors in the fuselage don’t work. All bad. Right?”
“Right. You’d have to use choppers and fast-roping down to the airship from above, and you do that, invade their no-fly zone, they start heaving elderly geniuses out the door from five hundred feet. Water’s like concrete from that height.”
“So we go up through the control-pod hatch. But it’s locked from the inside. How do you plan to get in?”
“Blow it. Charges on the hinges only way.”
“Might as well ring the doorbell, Stoke. Hey, Yurin, you got company! Start heaving hostages out the door.”
“Think I don’t know that?”
“Hostages will be tossed out, shot, or gassed before we get even three guys through that hatch.”
“Yeah. So tell me your idea before I kill myself.”
“Fancha has to open the hatch.”
“What? How the hell is she going to do that without getting herself killed? Her cabin is two decks up and half the damn ship away from the bridge. I think you forgot the part about the twenty-some-odd armed killers wandering around that ship looking for trouble.”
“I don’t know how she does it yet. I wish I did. But she’s got to try, Stoke, she’s got to. It’s the only way to do this. Believe me, if I had a better idea, I wouldn’t even suggest this.”
There was a long silence from the bunk below.
“She’s got a gun,” Stoke said softly.
“She does? Well, hell, man, that’s great. What kind of gun?”
“My H & K nine. Two extra mags of hollow-point meatpackers.”
“Silencer?”
“Yeah.”
“Perfect. How’d that happen?”
“I left my gun bag in the stateroom closet by mistake. Thank God I did.”
“Can she shoot?”
“A little. Took her out to Gator Guns a few times. Just range shit. But she knows the gun.”
“So, bloody hell, she’s got a chance, Stoke. The ship is mostly dark. With any luck at all, she’ll make it down to the control pod without even being seen. There’ll be someone down in the pod, but maybe not. The ship’s not moving, so you don’t need a pilot. Not much to do down there, just monitor the radar looking for bogies inside the no-fly, check the airship’s elevation, and adjust for windage, right? Maybe one guy down there? Two max?”
“Yeah. Maybe two. Certainly not expecting anybody currently aboard to make a move on the damn bridge. Hell, most of the passengers are in their seventies. All of them with IQs in the thousands. The whole bunch way too smart to do anything as stupid as what we’re talking about.”
“Listen. I’ve been down in an identical pod. She’ll have a clear shot from the circular hatch at the top of the ladder. So she takes them out before she even goes down. Then she opens the hatch for us. That’s it. Done. We’re in. The best HRT team in the world with the element of total surprise. A walk in the bloody park, Stoke.”
“Sounds so easy a child could do it, doesn’t it? I don’t even know what I’m so worried about.”
“Stoke, look. I know you love this woman. I know it’s dangerous as hell, what I’m asking her to do. But it’s the only chance we’ve got, man. Not only to save four hundred people’s lives but to counter Russian aggression that could trigger a world war. You know that, don’t you?”
“Fancha saves the world. Man, shit I get myself into hanging around with you.”
Stoke got up and picked up the sat phone lying on the tiny grey desk, punched in a number, sat down on a corner of the desk, a look of pained concern in his big brown eyes.
“Hey, baby. How you doing? I know, I know. But we’re coming to get you, okay? Soon, that’s when. That’s what I’m calling about. Now, calm down and listen. I’ve got a way maybe you can help us out…”
Hawke dropped lightly to the floor and slipped out of the cabin, quietly pulling Stoke’s door shut. He didn’t want to hear this conversation. If things upstairs went badly, as they frequently did, there’d be only one person to blame, and he didn’t have time to think about that right now. He sprinted aft along the narrow companionway. It led to where Brock and Captain Jack Stiglmeier, XO of SEAL Team Six, were meeting in the sub’s NAVPSPECWAR wardroom, where all the missiles used to be.
He had to get to Brock and the SEAL Team Six exec officer, work out some kind of operation that had even a minute chance of actually working. Before any SEAL mission, the assault force plans routes that will be used to gain control of the target. On surface vessels where hostages are held, the bridge is usually the assault-and-rescue team’s first objective, since it’s the nerve center of the vessel. Movements are conducted in a “bounding overwatch” mode, where one part of the team is always covering the other. Any enemy sighted can be taken under immediate fire without others having to move and shoot at the same time.
Having an armed hostage aboard willing and capable of neutralizing the bridge and give the boarding team a viable insertion point was critical to the plan the three men now worked out. The success of this assault, Hawke knew, would be immeasurably more problematic should Fancha fail to reach the bridge alive.
A long, sweat-soaked hour later, Hawke shoved his chair back, put his feet up on the table, lit another of Putin’s cigarettes, and smiled at Brock and Stiglmeier.
“Yeah, okay,” Hawke said. “God help us, I think we’re finally good to go. You guys good? Everyone ready?”
“Good,” Harry said, looking down at a diagram of the pod he’d drawn on a legal pad, outlining the two teams’ plans of action. Harry would be going up with Stoke’s squad, acting as his second in command.
Stiglmeier said, “I’m good. And ready.”
“Let’s go to work,” Hawke said, looking at his watch. “You want to call a time, Jack?”
“I still like midnight.”
“Then we ride at midnight,” Hawke said, smiling at the team.