by David Poyer
A minute. More than enough time to remember another time he’d waited, encapsulated, with the carapace bolted down over fear. That had been in the Gulf. He’d had his doubts about those guys, a mixed bag of electron pushers, computer wonks, and retirees, headed up by a skinny bastard name of Lenson. Not what you’d call tier-one operators. But to Teddy’s astonishment, K-79 had made it out.
He’d checked out of the Teams after that one. Tried to make The Movie. And almost had it. German financing. Liki Dittrich and Hanneline Muruzawa producing. Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, and Russell Crowe reading the script.
9/11 had derailed it, and he’d gotten back in. To Afghanistan. The Tora Bora assault, followed by the fucked-up Echo Platoon mission into the White Mountains. In the Safed Koh, the Ghilzai route across the Pak border. A shot-down helo. An old man, frozen rigid where he sat. A captured Dragunov, after Teddy’d lost his SR-25 falling down a fucking cliff. And one shot at the shadow in the fog that had to have been OBL himself.
He’d thought that was fade-out and credits. Dropping away into the oatmeal dark, the bitter snow. But a skinny, limp-dicked newbie had hiked back for him. Swager had manhandled him fifteen hundred feet back down to the extract LZ. Petty Officer First Class Swager now, in the chamber with him. Still kind of a limp dick, but one Teddy owed his life to.
That was where he’d gotten fucked up. His Achilles tendon, shredded in the fall down the mountainside. They’d had to graft in tendons from his shinbone, then fight some stubborn cipro-resistant Afghani infection. Three months in a cast, six months of physio. And limited duty since.
Until this. Probably his Last Fucking Hurrah. Then it’d be back to Salena. She’d stuck while his leg healed. He was almost forty. Too old for a top-tier operator. Time, maybe, to tackle LA again …
He was checking his watch again when the intercom came on.
“Opening,” it said.
* * *
DAYS before, he’d leaned against an equipment cabinet as a gray-haired buzzcut in slacks and a polo shirt introduced himself. Retired Colonel Somebody, from the Marine Corps history office, had unrolled a topo to give the team a once-over of a curved small island, its beaches and lagoon, interior and relief. Then dimmed the lights, and brought up a PowerPoint slide.
“Early 1942. The Japanese controlled the western Pacific. Their next goal was Australia. We planned to stop them by seizing the airfield they’d built on Guadalcanal. But a distraction was needed before the First Marine Division landed.
“The target was Makin Island. Well placed as a seaplane and reconnaissance base, on the eastern edge of the newly expanded empire. An attack here would divert the enemy and confuse him as to Allied intentions. Additional objectives were to collect intelligence, capture prisoners, and do all the damage possible to the installation.
“Evans Carlson’s Second Marine Raider Battalion trained on mock-ups on Oahu. Intel predicted two hundred fifty defenders and a shore battery covering the lagoon. So the marines decided to land on the ocean side of the island.”
A photo of a very old diesel submarine. Teddy had fidgeted, glancing at Knobby beside him. Whispered, “What is this, ancient history? We got rebreathers to rebuild.”
The prof said, “The raiders embarked on two subs for the trip from Hawaii. The plan envisioned disembarking into rubber rafts at 0300, hitting the beach before dawn, and withdrawing no later than 2100 that same day.
“The weather was bad when they reached Makin, but they went ahead anyway. Unfortunately, heavy swells drowned the motors on the boats. The tide set the subs toward the reef. Carlson decided to abandon a simultaneous assault and began paddling toward the beach, ordering his men to follow.
“They made it ashore, but the boats landed scattered across a mile. Also, one man fired his rifle accidentally, losing the element of surprise.”
Teddy caught Swager’s eye. His buddy inclined his head slightly. They both frowned back at the screen, which now showed movement arrows and tactical symbols.
“The marines moved inland to the coastal road. The defenders, now alerted, engaged them in a fierce firefight near the hospital. They had machine guns, flamethrowers, and snipers.
“When dawn broke things got even worse. A troop transport and a patrol boat were coming in to the wharf. Carlson managed to pass this to the submarines. Fortunately, the subs managed to sink both ships with their deck guns.
“For the rest of the morning Carlson’s men were pinned down by machine guns and snipers. That afternoon the Japanese bombed and strafed them, and landed reinforcements by seaplane. Though fighting hard, and holding against a banzai attack, Carlson had to pull back. He buried his dead and, as dark fell, withdrew to the beach to extract.
“This was when luck really turned against them. The heavy surf dumped the boats as they tried to paddle out. They lost nearly all their weapons and equipment, and finally gave up trying and established a perimeter just off the beach.
“Carlson called a meeting at midnight. His determination to fight on, even without adequate weapons or ammunition, meant most of his men might die in battle. But they accepted it.
“At dawn, some of the unwounded raiders fought through the surf and made it back to the subs, which had stayed despite Japanese air superiority. With the ocean-side surf still too high to get his wounded out, Carlson decided to try to escape via the lagoon side. After a terrific struggle, he managed to get his wounded and most of his men to the subs, using the remaining boats and a native outrigger canoe. Nine men were left behind, however. They were captured and beheaded.”
The colonel looked at the overhead. “The Raiders destroyed a radio transmitter, gasoline, and other stores. The Japanese landed a thousand reinforcements on Makin, so the diversion worked. There was a PR bonus, too. Makin was the first offensive action by American forces. But there wasn’t much gained for such heavy losses.”
The colonel turned the projector off. “To summarize the lessons of the operation: The intel’s probably going to be wrong. Surprise won’t always work. Luck can cut both ways. And leadership is all-important.”
He paused, then seemed to shrink, to lose his classroom confidence. “I’m not sure why I was asked to give you this briefing. And probably it’s best I don’t know. But I can guess. So can you, probably. Thanks for your attention.”
* * *
THE light in the trunk turned green, then went out. A clunk, Teddy’s ears popped, and the hatch unsealed. “All right, let’s go,” he said into his throat mike, and unplugged. One after the other, the team uncoiled. A black circle appeared above as the hatch powered open.
The open sea pulsed and flashed with light. They were surrounded, enmeshed in a coldly glowing net. Green and blue, it shaded off into a shimmering glow, as if they hovered high in the ionosphere, among the northern lights. The gossamer illumination snaked and swirled, like snow in the White Mountains.
Levering his fins, wincing at a flash of pain from the leg, Teddy rotated slowly, hanging in ultraviolet space.
A hundred yards away, a black whale-shape was emerging from the second sub. The swimmer delivery vehicle. Battery-driven, with its own sonar. Only one sub in the Pacific could transport it. But they needed more than the six SEALs it could carry to accomplish whatever their objective was.
Whatever that was. He still didn’t know. Echo had been given a warning order, which let them gather equipment, conduct training, then do a rehearsal—this one, in fact. A Patrol Leader’s Order would follow, to detail individual responsibilities. But nothing had specified their objective, beyond the generic “hostile beach” and that it involved sabotage, demolition, and intelligence collection. Maybe Commander Laughland knew. But he wasn’t saying.
All Teddy had to go on was the briefing about Makin. That, and the fact that his investments had been wiped out.
His broker had called before they left Hawaii. An immense tide of short-selling. The markets had closed, but not before he’d lost everything his grandmother had left him. Si
nce then, the snippets of news they got aboard the sub had made clear that things had gotten even worse. Shit, he’d never expected to have to live on his Navy retirement. In LA, that would be a grim prospect.
Snap out of it, Obie! Shaking his head, he sucked gas from the Dräger, mainlining oxygen until his bloodstream sang.
The beach gradient was shallow, and they figured the sand would be laced with listening devices and mines. The subs would have to stand off. The delivery vehicle would make two runs, dropping the first team, along with a homing sounder, at sixty feet, then going back for the second team. Once assembled, the force would power the last miles in to shore with prop-driven scooters, towing weapons and equipment. After that …
He hovered, waiting, until the hatch cycled again with a thud that echoed through the sea. When it powered up he reached in.
The Package was five feet long, black, vaguely torpedo shaped, but with an annular bump or ring around its midpoint. Definitely not the usual satchels he’d gotten all too familiar with in Afghanistan, blowing down walls and doors.
He beckoned, and Swager got the other side—there were handles on it, to make it easier to maneuver, but even in water it was heavy as a bomb—and working together, they got it up and onto the curving steel hull. He secured the lift saddle on it and inflated it with gas from a bottle that dangled on a hose. It rose from the hull and he valved a little off, until it floated weightless, massive but balanced in the sea.
Another hand signal, and he and Swager swam it out into the void. The lights swirled around them. He saw now what they were. A massive tide of coelenterates, flashing like pulsars in the dark. A spiral of argon light rotated slowly, a blue galaxy in interstellar blackness. He put out a hand; the glow passed through his fingers without resistance, intangible, like smoke. Another cloud succeeded it, passing like snowflakes in utter silence.
A touch on his arm. Swager looked puzzled behind the flat plate of the mask. What the fuck? he gestured. Clanks and thuds echoed through the water as the SEALs clambered into the vehicle, stowed gear, and switched to the onboard breathing supply.
As the motors whirred into life, Teddy glanced toward the surface. Only sixty feet up, but totally black. No moon. No stars. Only the weird shimmer of that cold luminescence surrounded them, appearing, created, sweeping past, then vanishing forever, back into the void.
* * *
AN hour later, crouched behind his carbine, he rose slowly from the sea. Facemask first, the fold-down backup sight of the SOP-modd’d M4 flipped up in front of his eye. For whatever reason, they’d been told to use only iron sights, to leave anything electronic (aside from night-vision devices, and the controllers in the rebreathers) on the sub.
Sand crunched as he waded forward. The shore ahead was black dark. Until he flipped down the goggles and powered them on. Then he made out the curved boles of palms. The slowly wavering fringe of leaves, caressed by a night wind. To their left, the solid ebony of impenetrable mangrove.
Exactly where they’d planned to land. Fallen trees lay scattered across the beach. The sand sloped upward and he leaned into it, ignoring the pain in his calf. Suddenly one of the logs stirred. He swung without thought and centered it in the sights as a shape heaved up and shook itself, then lumbered into a heavy, belly-swaying run.
He blew out and lowered the weapon, thumbing the safety back on. A hog, roused from slumber, making tracks away from the intruders who’d waded up out of the surf like Lovecraftian aliens.
Fading snorts and the muffled thunder of hooves on sand signaled the departure of other livestock. He swept the green-and-black field of view left to right. Aside from the pigs, and smaller shadows that were probably sand crabs, the beach was deserted. He raised an arm and pointed forward. Around him other silhouettes grew from the surf, took on human shapes, and became armed men, wading forward, bent under burdens of gear.
A dark figure emerged from the palms and strolled down to meet them. “All accounted for?” Commander Laughland snapped.
“First team, all present.”
“Second, all here.”
“Package one?”
“Over here,” the first team leader called from down the beach.
“Package two here.” Teddy and Swager leaned into the braided nylon yoked over their shoulders. The dark seal-bulk emerged behind them, the sea parting as it shouldered up.
The officer knelt, and a shielded flash glowed for a moment. He glanced up. “Any problems on the way in? Did Sandia get the buoyancy right?”
Sandia, Teddy thought. So it was nuclear. But, Jesus, couldn’t they figure a better way to deliver a nuclear warhead than having fucking SEALs swim it ashore? And how long would the team have to get clear before it went off? He cleared his throat. “Maybe a tad light, but we can stick some of those wheel weights on it. Uh, not that I personally care, but are we gonna get any radiation exposure from this thing, Commander?”
Laughland frowned. “Radiation?”
Teddy coughed. Some officers never seemed to think enlisted, even master chiefs, were capable of thinking. But what was this black turd squeezed from the asshole of DoD? His only clue was a shipping tag, with a cryptology of bar codes and what might be a serial number: TA-III No. 12. “Uh, sir? Could be helpful down the road, if you’d share a little about what we’re escorting, here.”
“Once we’re sealed, Teddy, I assure you, there’ll be a full brief. Just can’t do it now.” Laughland stood, dusting sand off his knees. “All right, move inland. We’ve got an exercise area set up for a sandbox drill.”
“Bury the gear, sir? The rebreathers? In case we need it again?”
“Right now we’re thinking not. Destroy them. Render inoperable. The extraction will be by boat.”
“Yessir, just trying to think ahead. And … mines?”
Laughland halted in the dark. “Sea mines, Master Chief?”
“No sir. Land mines. Will the beach be swept before we land? Or do we need to build in the capability?”
Laughland looked away. “No need to worry, Master Chief. Just lock tight. Adapt and overcome. Hoo-ah?”
“Uh, yessir. Hoo-ah. But it’s my job to worry. About what can go wrong. Like at Makin. Or Tora Bora.”
“This isn’t going to be like Makin.”
“Hope not, sir. About the gear, again. If things happen to go to shit, we need to—”
“Just follow the plan, Master Chief.” The commander’s tone meant end of discussion. Teddy stared after him as he strode away up the beach.
Swager coalesced out of the dark. “What was that all about, Obie? He getting in your pants, or what?”
Teddy was spitting on the sand, trying to formulate some kind of smart-ass comeback, but none surfaced. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like the feel of the mission, didn’t like whatever this black weight he towed was, didn’t like being kept in the dark. It wasn’t the SEAL way.
“Obie?” Swager muttered again.
“Ah, fuck it. Never mind.” Teddy tightened up his harness gear. “Pile the gear on the beach. Simulate a demo charge on it. Then round ’em up, move ’em out, get ’em headed inland.”
He turned the NVGs off. For a moment his dazzled gaze registered nothing.
Then, rising behind the palms … the stars. The banded radiance of the Milky Way, vibrating up there in the night like a billion glowing jellies tiding past.
His leg ached like a dying tooth. Makin had been a disaster, with heavy casualties. And was he going to be able to hack it, with a bad leg, his other injuries? He wasn’t forty. Yet. But in the world of the Teams, that was getting to be past it.
But there wasn’t much choice, it seemed like. The other Teams were in the spreading wildfire of the Mideast, back in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or fighting the spreading Islamist nightmare in Africa.
But his worries seemed to recede as he blinked up at the distant lights wheeling in the sky. Not moving. Not even, really, thinking. Just being there.
Until at last he slung his ca
rbine, and followed his men up the beach.
3
Washington, DC
TRAFFIC was light on 66. Probably not a good sign, despite the rain. It was still early enough to be darkish, a little after six on a Tuesday. The wipers whipped back and forth. The gauge was down to a quarter tank; the gas stations had been closed for days. She touched the pedal, and the engine purred as she nudged another few yards ahead. Two roadblocks and vehicle checks so far, and the red strobes of yet another glared off wet asphalt ahead, at the entrance to the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge.
Blair Titus tapped manicured nails on the wheel and sighed. It usually took half an hour to the Pentagon this time of the morning. An hour to the Capitol and, for much of the past two years, forty-five minutes to SAIC headquarters in McLean, Virginia. That was from the house in Arlington, a redbrick colonial with three bedrooms and a family room in the basement. Her husband, Dan, had lined it with shelves, to turn it into a library and home office.
Its back window looked out over a garden planted in terraces down a steep slope, ending in pine forest. She’d planned to get things in order out there, once she’d left the Pentagon, but somehow never found the time. Now overgrown beds of rhododendrons and azaleas shadowed the Christmas ferns and trilliums and dogtooth violets. They blocked the broad stone steps littered with fallen twigs and rotting leaves.
On NPR, the commentator was retailing the financial news in funereal tones. The Dow had begun faltering weeks before, as the Indo-Pak war began. Then a system crash had taken down Wall Street, closing trading. The panic had spread. The president had closed the banks, a step not taken since 1933, and called an emergency meeting of the Federal Reserve. Parallel cyberattacks had shut down much of the power grid, Internet, credit card accounts, cell phones, and the central servers that processed transactions for gas stations, sending prices over fourteen dollars a gallon—payable only in cash. A fire had shut down a smokeless propellant plant in St. Marks, Florida, one that supplied over 90 percent of the Army’s needs.
Yesterday the markets had reopened. But to the worst one-day loss in history. A Treasury bailout had summoned a brief rally, but when the House blocked further action, the bloodbath resumed. Even money market funds had lost over two hundred billion dollars as investors converted everything they could to cash.