by Fritz Galt
He left the office, never having felt so stupid in his life.
After Alec ambled out of the office, Admiral Busby picked up his secure line to the Pentagon’s Operations Center in Washington. Within seconds, he was connected directly with Park Bunker, the secretary of defense.
“Mr. Bunker, I’ve had a change of heart,” he began. “I think we ought to brief a wider circle on Operation Fatal Sting. Who knows what kind of trouble we might get ourselves into over here. I would like the Commander of NAVCENT in Bahrain notified, more naval reinforcements sent to our Area of Operation, some strategic targets for our guided missiles, and the Air Force on high alert.”
“Okay. You want to brief a wider circle. I’ll bring it up with Vic,” Park said, referring to Vic Padesco, the president’s national security advisor. “I’ll keep you informed of our decision.”
“Hey Crapface, you’ve got your regulator on upside down.”
Alec stared at the hardened, grease-painted faces joking across from him on the plane. Some of the commandos were young and some, like Captain Savage, were in their forties, older than he was. Handpicked from the regular seaman’s corps to join the Special Operations force, they each looked fit, capable and smart.
“Oops, I forgot the ammo cartridges.”
“I don’t have them. Do you?”
“I thought you were bringing them, Slugbreath.”
He tried to visualize them in tourist getup at the resort hotel. As he mentally removed their wetsuits, rebreathers, weapons, parachute and stomach packs bulging with equipment, he saw a group of doctors or computer engineers in civilian clothes jovially stabbing pieces of mutton curry at the restaurant’s buffet table. They would blend in.
“Hey toots, wanna take a swim with me?”
Seated beside him, Camille laughed. In the red light of the compartment, her face was flushed with excitement.
“Naw, she’s already taken. Get your mitts off the commander’s girl.”
“I don’t know. She looks available to me.”
He wondered if the jocular mood was too light. Perhaps he should take the opportunity to warn them of the gravity of the situation: the enormity of the epidemic, the terrorist ring involved, the dangerous repercussions of invading Indian soil, the medical mission to rescue a vial of malaria vaccine, the geopolitical game they were ordained to squash.
“Okay, listen up,” he said. “Here’s our malaria prevention bottle. I want everyone to pop a pill every twelve hours. It’s like jungle juice and wards off mosquitoes.”
“Does it ward off women, too?”
“Yeah,” one of the men said. “You’re in luck, Beluga. It attracts all the men you could ask for.”
When the guffaws died down, Captain Savage addressed the group at large, “Are you ready for the big one?”
Everyone gave him the thumbs up.
Then Alec knew that their good humor stemmed from enthusiasm for finally being allowed to do their job. They were happy, like fish being released into the sea.
Captain Savage wore earphones and listened to the cockpit. He held a hand up to hear better, then whipped the cups off.
“We’re slowing our air speed and descending to one thousand feet to avoid radar. I don’t want you men to pull your ripcords until a hundred feet, just above the water. You’ll know you’re at a hundred feet by counting out twenty seconds after departing the aircraft. We’ll splash down approximately five hundred yards from shore. Mr. Pierce, do you have any final thoughts to add?”
Alec cleared his throat. “Watch out for each other. If someone has trouble during the jump, set off your beacon and SOAR will send in a rescue helicopter. But we need each and every one of you. As soon as you hit the water, sink your parachutes, start your rebreathers, submerge and disappear immediately. Swim due east where you’ll wash up on a sandy beach. There’s a four-mile long beach and a steep cliff at the southern end. That’s where you’ll come ashore. Mick Pierce will guide you to a footpath up into the resort cottage area. He’ll take command from there.”
Savage was listening to his earphones again. “Okay. We got the signal. We jump in two minutes. Gentlemen, get your asses off the bench.”
The twelve men, Camille and Alec stood up heavily and formed a line. Camille and Alec were just before Captain Savage at the end.
A cargo door on the side of the fuselage slid open and wind whipped through the compartment. The engines were loud and the ocean water, black. Alec already felt an adrenaline rush.
A horn let out a series of blasts. A red light blinked urgently.
“Let’s rock and roll,” Savage roared from behind.
The line shuffled toward the cargo door at the back of the plane. Alec saw the flash of forms hurtling out the door. Then it was Camille’s turn. She leaned forward and shot her hands overhead in a graceful swan dive. Alec felt Savage pushing him to the edge. He squared his feet several inches from the white line and sucked in his breath. Wind stung his face.
Damn the mosquitoes. With the image of a mosquito biting his skin and injecting venomous malaria, he dove into the inky, rushing air. One, two, three, he said through his teeth.
A moment later, he spread out on a cushion of air, arms and legs spread wide, the plane roaring on. Four, five, six.
Wind ripped in his ears. He had no sensation of falling. He could not see a horizon, so, to keep from slipping into a vertical position, he concentrated on maintaining an equal upward pressure on each arm and leg. Seven, eight, nine, ten.
He reached for the ripcord by his shoulder. He couldn’t find it. Clawing at his chest, his fingers finally felt the plastic handle spinning in the wind. Then he had it. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
He couldn’t tell how accurate his counting was, because he couldn’t see the water. He did hear a voice drifting up from below him.
“Quit farting in my face.”
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
He lowered his feet, his hands directing the airflow so that he didn’t spin out of control. Then he was vertical. Snap, snap. He heard parachutes opening below him.
“I am a beautiful butterfly.”
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
He pulled the ripcord smoothly and yanked at the last moment. The end of the chute flew past his face. The lightweight, black fabric caught the upward flow of air and billowed open. He grabbed the taut nylon lines just as his body jerked upward.
Suddenly the rushing sound disappeared, like someone turning off a waterfall.
Now voices talked calmly in the warm and humid blackness.
“What kind of babes can you find here in India?”
“You’ll never know, Dickhead, They’ll be sticking to me like flies on flypaper.”
“Ah, that’s because you don’t use deodorant.”
Alec’s body rocked gently, and he reached up for the lines and tried to nudge the parachute in one direction. There wasn’t much control.
“Camille, are you there?” he called.
“Alive and quite well,” her excited voice drifted up.
Then he heard a series of splashes, neatly timed at the same intervals that the men had jumped from the plane. He counted.
Eleven splashes.
Then Camille.
He tugged on his lines, his feet lifting up, his body forming a V.
The ocean hit his rear end and rebreather unit with a hard whack. Salty ocean waves enveloped him momentarily.
He was in a completely different element.
He kicked out and broke the surface. There, he tried to hold his head above the rippling crowns of water. His parachute collapsed behind him.
“Camille, are you okay?” he shouted hoarsely.
“Of course,” she chirped.
He disengaged his harness.
“Remember to sink your parachute,” he called.
“I’m doing it,” Camille answered.
Alec tugged in the lines, wrapping them around the weighted harness. The chute had trapped an enormous bubble of air, a
nd he couldn’t wind it in. He reached for the dagger in his weight belt and slashed in the darkness at the rubbery sound coming from the fabric. It flattened against the water, and he could reel it in. It remained a baggy, wet parcel, as he taped the loose edges with a small roll of duct tape.
He felt the weight sink under the surface.
Next, he illuminated his compass board to get his bearings.
“Do you know which way to go?” he called out, testing the others.
Camille answered, “To the east.”
“That’s right. Do you want to swim together by rope?”
“No. That’s too difficult,” she said. “I’ll meet you on shore.”
Alec hesitated. He wanted to keep her under tight surveillance, and now was the perfect opportunity for her to slip away. But there wasn’t much he could do under the circumstances.
The rest of the team had already plunged under the surface.
“Let’s go,” he said. He pulled his SCUBA mask over his face, took a few experimental breaths of the cold oxygen/hydrogen mixture and lowered his head into the warm water.
Wide flippers and his weight belt helped him remain under the surface and moving briskly through the water. Pellets in the rebreather unit eliminated harmful carbon dioxide from his air supply and recirculated the mixture so that he didn’t leave behind a trail of bubbles.
Captain Savage had said that they would splash down five hundred yards from shore, but Alec had no way of judging his progress. To him, five hundred yards on land was nothing like five hundred yards at sea. He pretended that he was in the Olympic-sized swimming pool at Hotel St. Jacques. It was fifty meters across, one hundred meters per lap. It would be the same as swimming five laps.
Except there was no sun to bronze his back, nor was there a Camille in a bikini waiting for him at the other end of the pool. Instead, somewhere in the murky shark-infested bath water, she wore a wetsuit and carried a watertight bag with a collapsible-stock M4 Carbine assault rifle with a laser sight, smoke and fragmentation grenades, infrared night scope, water filtration kit, field surgical equipment and combat boots.
All in all, a very sexy getup.
Like dull buoys, black caps began to surface between the gentle waves. Mick stood up from a rock where he was sitting and looked warily up and down the shoreline.
Daybreak was just beginning to illuminate the sky behind him. Fishing boats were still beached to the north. No hotel guards patrolled the cliffs. The rocky face was devoid of people. It was the perfect time and place to begin Operation Fatal Sting.
He aimed a flashlight toward the somewhat dispersed pod of divers. As he had prearranged with Alec, he clicked on the light in a three-flash burst, then waited a full sixty seconds and repeated the three flashes.
By the time he repeated the flashes a second time, the black caps had congregated and closed in rapidly on his position.
The well-trained divers rose out of the water at the last moment, their flippers already removed from their feet. With barely a splash, they walked briskly across the sharp rocks on tough diving booties. Their bodies were bulky with equipment, bags, backpacks and belly packs.
Wordlessly, he whisked them into a stand of coconut palms and pink bougainvillea. Beside them, a footpath followed a wire fence straight up the cliff to the hotel’s grounds.
“Welcome to India,” he said. “Pass this way for Immigration and Customs. Please have your passports and landing cards ready.”
“I don’t need a passport,” one voice said. “You already know me.”
The man pulled off his black diving cap to reveal a shock of blond hair. It was Alec.
Mick grasped his hand and pumped it. “You look like a regular commando,” he said.
“You look like a wreck.”
“Yeah, well it’s been a tough few weeks.”
“This is Camille Dinad,” Alec said, and put his arm around one of the smaller commandos.
“Glad you could join us,” Mick said with a friendly smile.
She looked back and forth between the two men.
“Don’t worry,” Alec said. “We don’t have to look alike. We’re only half-brothers.”
Their different mothers seemed to dominate their appearance and build. Mick could attribute his Pueblo Indian complexion, hair color and sturdy stature to his mother, while Alec’s nearly colorless blond hair, great tan and tall frame came from his Swedish mother.
“Awesome cliff,” one man said staring up at the black shadow under the stars.
“Goa’s original fort is at the top,” Mick said. “Our hotel is on this side of the cliff.”
The man extended his hand for Mick to shake. “I’m Captain Savage, Detachment Commander.”
The square hand matched Mick’s powerful grip. Savage looked at him with some surprise, and perhaps respect. “Your brother here, is team leader,” he said with a dubious tone.
“Christ, Mick,” Alec said. “You’re the leader from this point on. I don’t have the vaguest idea where we are.”
Savage looked at Mick encouragingly, but said nothing.
Mick squinted in the dark at the expectant circle of grease-painted faces. Like a classroom full of eager new students, they would do whatever he said.
They were asking him to assume a new role. Up until then, he had mostly acted out of desperation and anger. Yet these men were looking for a cool head to guide them. Could he give them that?
Beneath Camille’s painted face, he saw a trace of Mariah. The little girl lay immobile, her head turned toward him. In the blue morning light, an ivory tooth gleamed. She trusted him, and she expected his best effort.
He closed his eyes and nodded. “Okay. I’ll take over from here.”
Two NCOs were already setting up and testing their communications equipment.
“Don’t set up yet,” Mick said. “I’ll have you to your cottages in a few minutes.”
“This will only take a moment,” the communications NCO said. “Washington needs to know our movements.”
Great. He was leader, but Washington was still in charge.
The radio whistled and snowed. The equipment was dry and had survived the wet landing.
“This is radio operator Alpha,” the sergeant first class whispered into his microphone. “The needle has penetrated.”
Chapter 38
The National Security Council met in a late afternoon session.
President Charles Damon rocked back on his conference chair. The group had little formality since they had met each day for the past seven days.
“I’m sure you will note with satisfaction and relief that Lucius Ford has rejoined our group,” Charles said. “He’s been on assignment, with a twist, for the past week.”
“I’ll say a twist,” Lucius said. “The Afghan regime kidnapped me off the streets of Kabul and kept me in a stinking prison for thirty-one hours. I didn’t have a toilet in my cell or even light. They treated me like an animal.”
Charles interrupted him. “So a fond word of thanks to Adam and Bronson and the diplomatic corps for pushing the right buttons to set Lucius free.”
Vic scratched some hair behind his ear. “We didn’t give up anything, did we?”
Adam looked at Bronson and spread his fingers on the table. “Only lies and threats. We fabricated a story that bin Laden is behind the malaria epidemic in India and that he instigated the military coups in the Indian Ocean. Then we told them that we’d send troops into Afghanistan. So the Taliban took away bin Laden’s phone, assigned troops to watch him and released Mr. Ford.” He stared back at Lucius.
Bronson stirred uncomfortably in his seat.
Lucius’ jaw nearly hit the table. “That woman did all that?”
Charles nearly choked laughing. As he was personally dubious of the entire United Nations concept, he had elevated the UN ambassadorship to a Cabinet-level position merely to keep tabs on the shenanigans in New York. As Lucius reported directly to him rather than to Trimble, it often rammed
Ambassador Ford head-on into Secretary of State Trimble, a collision Charles rather enjoyed watching.
“Welcome back, Lucius,” Charles said. “Now, Park, we’re here for the Defense Department’s update on Operation Fatal Sting.”
“We have a twelve-man Navy Special Operations team in place in Goa, India,” Park Bunker began immediately. “In addition to the twelve, there is one CIA operative and one counter-agent who is there to infiltrate Abu Khan’s network.”
Charles looked around the room. General Wolf Kessler, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nodded with enthusiastic confirmation.
“The landing went smoothly. It was assisted by the Air Force’s 160th SOAR, the Special Operations Air Regiment. The team parachuted into the waters off of Goa, then made landfall. They are awaiting Congressman Butler’s word as to where the ransom money will be delivered.”
“Thank you,” Charles said. “Let’s wish our men well. Now Vic, you look like you’re chomping at the bit. What do you have to offer?”
Vic wrenched his tie looser around his unbuttoned collar. “We’ve received a request from the Special Ops force that they may need backup assistance at any time. I would like the president to authorize a larger communication loop on this operation in order to make additional resources available.”
Charles heard a grumbling from the opposite end of the table.
Hugh Gutman said, “This is a Top Secret operation. Read my lips: Top Secret.”
Park Bunker seemed to agree with Gutman. “Personally, I think my men can handle the operation just fine. I don’t see any need to risk further exposure.”
“Aye, aye.” To Park’s left, General Kessler seconded the motion.
“I’m not trying to jeopardize the operation,” Vic said. “Understand my reasoning. If we are unable to extract our men and India finds them on her soil, New Delhi would see it as an act of interference at best, foreign aggression at worst.”
Adam Trimble, the secretary of state, looked sharply at Bronson to keep quiet, and proceeded to concur. “I agree with what Vic has proposed, but for a different reason. I see an opportunity. A large-scale effort will show India the extent to which we’re willing to help her combat her problems. It’ll give us leverage when it comes to negotiating the nuclear test ban treaty. In fact, I wouldn’t be displeased if Operation Fatal Sting did fail and we had to send in more boys.”