RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  The boat veered hard to port. The Cuban who’d been at the wheel lost his balance and fell to the deck. But the other man, heftier, landed a haymaker on the side of Junior’s head.

  Junior fell to the deck. He froze for a second. But this time, underneath the thick layer of ice a volcano exploded. He threw himself back in the direction of the punch, landing full on the Cuban. How many blows he struck—three, four, twenty—he couldn’t say later. But however many it was, the other Cuban fell dazed on the deck.

  The other man had risen and grabbed the helm again. He tried to fend Junior off, but he had no chance. A pop to the nose and a hard smash to his cheek took the Cuban down.

  Junior grabbed the wheel. He started to spin it toward land, then realized that everyone in the flotilla was infected; just turning his little boat around would have almost no effect. He had to get everyone to turn back.

  He steered back toward the front of the pack and put his hand on the throttle, jamming it wide open.

  Most times, the easiest way to figure out what’s going on is to ask someone. And since the patients had gone, the only people left to ask were the staff.

  With the patients gone, the security staff stood down from alert, leaving only a small token guard. There was one person near the rear of the building; it took Trace all of perhaps two seconds to knock him out using one of her karate moves.

  By then, Shotgun was already through the door and into the administration office, the same one where Junior had sent the message that launched a thousand boats.43 The administrator was in his inner office on the phone. Shotgun, with his usual sensitivity to good manners, knocked and then entered.

  Or maybe he knocked after he entered. The fact is he did knock, even if it was on the side of the administrator’s head.

  And with the barrel of his pistol.

  “Hang up,” said Shotgun.

  Crusty, coming in with Trace, repeated the words in Spanish. Trace didn’t bother translating—realizing actions spoke louder than words, she pulled the phone off the desk, tearing out the cord.

  “What the hell is this?” asked the administrator.

  He tried to stand. Shotgun pushed him down in his seat.

  “Is Castro dead or not?” blubbered the man. “What is going on?”

  “What is going on?” asked Trace. “Where are the boats going?”

  Crusty began talking to him. The administrator—the word he used in Spanish technically means president, but administrator seems more appropriate—was a bit reluctant to be candid, but the barrel of Shotgun’s pistol persuaded him to be loquacious. He said that the operation had been set in motion erroneously, but after checking with his superiors via radio—which had been mysteriously jammed until just a few minutes ago—the decision had been made to let it proceed.

  In dribs and drabs, he explained the mission—the prisoners were being allowed to escape to America.

  “Why?” asked Crusty.

  No amount of prompting from Shotgun would convince him to say anything else.

  Trace, wanting to make sure that Junior had in fact left on a boat, took a quick tour of the facility while they were talking. She walked down the hall, sidearm tucked close to her body. Three or four of the offices were still occupied, the workers clearing up whatever paperwork the launch of the operation required. But they were very relaxed, and if they noticed the strange woman passing their doors, they didn’t sound any alarms.

  The second floor of the facility was similar to the floor that Junior had been on, with a large common room at the far end. When she got there, Trace noticed that a tray of hypodermic needles had been left on one of the tables, along with some gloves and masks. There was no serum, but she took a few of the setups with her before going up to the third floor. When she didn’t find anyone there, she returned to the administrator’s office.

  The administrator looked a little worse for wear, but refused to talk.

  Until Trace took the needle from her pocket and approached him with it.

  Then they couldn’t get him to stop screaming.

  ( VII )

  When the Seahawk took off from the command ship, we were roughly 120 miles north of Cuba. The Seahawk is many things, but fast is not among them. Even with a tail wind, no cargo, and a minimal crew, the helo had trouble making 150 knots.

  You can do the math if you want. As far as I was concerned, each mile seemed to take an entire year.

  We were roughly halfway there when Trace called in from Cuba. Threatened with being “inoculated” himself, the director had told her exactly what was going on.

  “They’ve been working on a strain of Ebola. It’s a virus that causes hemorrhagic fever,” she explained. “The symptoms won’t appear until seventy-two hours after inoculation. By then, it’s too late.”

  Hemorrhagic fever isn’t a common disease in the Western world, and that’s a damn good thing. Go to the Sudan or Zaire, and you’ll find a different story. The illness starts with a fever and, usually, diarrhea. There are cramps, vomiting—your typical flulike array of symptoms.

  But within a few hours, it starts getting worse. A day or two later, and the fever’s higher. By that time there’s little hope that you can do anything except let it run its course. At least half the people who get it die from it, and once it starts spreading, it’s pretty hard to deal with. There are no known cures to the natural strains of the disease, and quarantining sick populations seems to be the only answer.

  Nature has its own way of dealing with it in Africa. The disease spreads very quickly in villages that are small and isolated. Once sick, the people tend to move around even less. They all die in a week or so, limiting the spread of the disease.

  Put it in a developed country, where people move around a lot . . . different story. Except for the death part.

  “Ask him about the ship,” I told Trace. “What are they planning? Another way to infect people?”

  I took the test tube from my pocket. Suddenly it seemed a hell of a lot more fragile than it had before.

  “He says he doesn’t know anything about a ship,” reported Trace.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Trace?”

  I heard the sound of gunfire in the background, then the phone fell to the ground and the line went dead.

  Trace had been interrupted by a pair of security guards, who’d come up to the reception area to get their overtime chits signed. Finding the facility’s administrator being questioned by a bunch of gringos was about the last thing they expected.

  For a second or two, everyone froze. Surprisingly, it was Crusty who made the first move.

  “Can’t you see we’re busy?” he growled.

  He emphasized his annoyance by taking the heavy ashtray from the edge of the administrator’s desk and flinging it like a Frisbee at the first guard’s head. He hit him squarely, and the man fell straight back.

  His comrade, however, did what security guards are supposed to do—he pulled his gun out to fire.

  He was a little too late. Shotgun put two bullets through his temple before he could raise it to aim.

  The shots alerted one of the Cubans’ comrades in the hall, he charged in and got off a burst before Shotgun dispensed him as well. Meanwhile, someone sounded an alarm down the hall.

  “Out the window,” said Trace.

  “I ain’t going out no goddamn window,” said Crusty. “It’s undignified.”

  “You want to be dignified, or you want to be alive?” asked Shotgun.

  “Both.”

  “We’ll dress you in a tux when we stuff you into your coffin,” Trace told him. Then she grabbed the hospital administrator, threw him over her back, and led them out.

  The Cuban must have weighed close to two hundred pounds, but Trace kept pace with the others as they ran around the rear lawn toward the dock. A motorized whaleboat was tied up at the near end, and they jumped in. Trace dumped the administrator and grabbed the wheel. The engin
e seemed to start even before she touched the panel; maybe it was as anxious as anyone to get the hell out from under Fidel’s thumb.

  “Well, you could at least wait for me to cast off, damn it,” growled Crusty as the boat strained its lines. He undid them, then went to leap in—and missed.

  Shotgun hauled him up with one hand, depositing him with very little dignity on the deck. Spitting out water, Crusty rose.

  “I can tell you ain’t never been in the navy, girlie,” he sputtered. “Order of the day is to wait for your goddamn crew before shoving off.”

  “Keep your head down,” she warned as bullets began flying from the docks. “You better pray those assholes are terrible shots.”

  “Screw prayer,” said Crusty. He reached down and took the pistol from her belt. “The Lord helps he who helps himself.”

  And with that, the chief plugged the two soldiers on the dock who were shooting at them.

  ( VIII )

  A few miles to the northwest, Junior had his throttle nailed to the max, racing toward the head of the flotilla. The moon had fought its way through the cloud cover, and he could now see fairly well, at least well enough to make out where the other boats were.

  He still didn’t have a radio, or even a firm plan on what he was going to do. He only knew that he was going to somehow get the boats to turn around.

  Nearing the lead vessels, he spotted a boat two or three times the size of the others to his east. This was one of the Cuban patrol boats that had come out to escort the smaller craft in the direction of Miami.

  Junior didn’t know that. He just figured that something that big would have a radio and a PA system that he could use to communicate to the others. He pointed his bow in the patrol boat’s direction, nearly swamping his own craft with the sudden turn.

  Roughly sixty seconds later, Junior was close enough to see one of the crewmen on the patrol boat watching him from behind the large tube of one of the missile launchers. The man did nothing as he approached, apparently unsure what was going on. Finally, with Junior twenty yards away, the man turned and ran toward the wheelhouse, apparently to alert his skipper.

  Junior backed off the throttle, but his timing was poor and his seamanship worse. He surged sideways toward the patrol boat, no longer under control. Junior braced himself as the port side of his little cruiser smacked up against the side of the large navy vessel. The impact shook him, but he managed to throw himself onto the other boat, grabbing one of the metal bracing wires near the mortar and dangling over the side as the craft separated.

  Jolted by the impact of the collision, the two crewmen fell to the deck. Then they scrambled to get away from the crazy man who’d just jumped aboard their ship—the crews had been warned that the patients on the small boats were highly contagious.

  As warships go, the Cuban Osa patrols boats aren’t very ferocious. They’re notoriously unstable in heavy seas and have engines crankier than a ’68 Olds Vista Cruiser. The missiles on most if not all of Cuba’s versions have been taken off the boats because of various problems associated with them, though in this case the launch tubes were left in place.

  Still, they’re not small craft—they displace over two hundred tons when fully loaded, measure over thirty-eight meters from stem to stern, and are manned by a crew of four officers and two dozen men. So Junior wasn’t exactly trying to take over a rowboat here.

  The first sailor he saw who didn’t run from him was a man near the AA gun at the fantail. He also had been dazed by the collision, and didn’t react in any way until Junior started punching him. He flailed back desperately until Junior connected with a roundhouse to the chin. At that point he disintegrated, collapsing near the gun and then sliding off the patrol boat as it pitched in the water.

  Hunting for a weapon, Junior settled for a large wrench from a tool locker near the gun mount, then ran toward the superstructure. A sailor saw him coming and retreated, battening down the hatches as he went. When he found the portal locked, Junior began battering it with his wrench. He made such a racket that he didn’t hear the first few rounds being fired at him from the base of the radar mast. Finally realizing he was being shot at, he ducked down, hugging the deck as he tried to work his way around the port side of the boat and find another way inside. The helmsman, possibly hoping to knock him off or else still trying to gain control after the collision with the cabin cruiser, weaved back and forth, making it hard for Junior to get anywhere.

  “Ebola?” said Ken when I told him what Trace had found.

  “Yes.”

  “Those boats have to be sunk. Have to be.”

  I agreed—even though I knew that Junior must be on one of them.

  Ken told the ship’s captain that he needed a direct line to the aircraft carrier we’d visited earlier. I was about to hang up when he came back on the line.

  “Dick, are you still there?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “You have people in the flotilla?”

  “More than that,” I told him. “My son’s there.”

  “I’m sorry, Dick. I’m very, very sorry.”

  He hung up. I turned to the pilot.

  “We need to go a hell of a lot faster than this,” I said.

  “Cuban patrol boat is dead ahead, a hundred yards,” said the pilot, pointing.

  “We need to be over it. Now.”

  Junior clawed his way past the forward missile launcher, heading toward the door that sat directly below the bridge. This, too, had been locked down; frustrated, he climbed up on the ladder next to it and tried breaking the oblong porthole of the ship’s command center with his wrench. Even if he’d succeeded, he wouldn’t have been able to get in because the space was so small, but he was desperate and angry and not thinking straight. He cracked the glass on the first blow, but otherwise did no damage; on his fourth or fifth shot he lost his balance, and with the ship turning hard to port, slid across below the rail and fell into the sea.

  There was no way I could see him fall—we were at least fifty yards away, and even with the boat’s nav lights on most of the deck remained in shadow—but I sensed immediately that someone had gone over, and that it was Junior.

  Call it a father’s intuition.

  I leaned forward against the windscreen.

  “What’s that in the water, starboard side of the boat?” I yelled at the pilot. I was wearing a headset, but my voice was loud enough that he could have heard me without it.

  The pilot banked and scanned the water with his Gen 3 night-vision glasses.

  “Man overboard,” he said finally. He was a hell of a lot calmer than I was.

  “We’re getting him.”

  “Sir?”

  “Only one of my people would be crazy enough to try to take over a ship like that single-handedly,” I told him. “We have to get him.”

  “I was only going to ask if you knew how to work the winch, sir.”

  I didn’t, but the directions were fairly obvious—the arrow pointing down means down, right?

  The problem was, I couldn’t see anyone in the water. I leaned out the open doorway, willing whoever it was to appear.

  Hell, not whoever. I knew it was Junior. Don’t ask me how, but I knew.

  “Matthew! Matthew Fuck-ing Loring!” I shouted. Sometimes you have to use tough love to get results. “Get your ass out where I can see it or I’m jumping in after you!”

  Nothing.

  Jumping in wasn’t an option—with no one inside, I’d have to climb up the rescue line. But I told myself that if he didn’t appear in five seconds, I would.

  “Matthew!!!”

  One second. Two seconds.

  The helo fluttered back and forth. The patrol boat had twisted back north and was moving away.

  “Matthew! Time to go!”

  Four seconds.

  “Swing down as low as you can,” I yelled to the pilot.

  Five seconds.

  I’m not sure if he heard me, let alone whether he tried to warn
me not to jump, which he claims he did. But if he did say something, I didn’t hear it—I was already out the door.

  Aboard the PBM flying boat, M.W. was getting nervous.

  “That helo is too damn close to that missile boat,” he told Danny. “The patrol boat carries shoulder-launched antiair missiles.”

  “The navy knows what it’s doing,” answered Red.

  “Bullshit on that. Get on the radio and tell him to get the hell out of there.”

  Before Red could answer, the infrared launch detector aboard the flying boat began to bleat. There was a missile in the air.

  The only thing I could see was the dark sheet of water that surged over my body as I hit the water. I pushed my feet together as I plunged downward, got my arms up, and did my best mermaid routine as the ocean trumped gravity and my momentum died. Kicking upward, I broke through the water, I felt a surge of adrenaline.

  Then I felt a shock.

  Damn, that water was cold.

  “Junior!” I yelled, turning around. “I know you’re in here somewhere! Where’d you go?”

  I saw a reddish spark on the missile boat, and thought it was an illumination flare being fired. Behind me, the helo tucked hard on its rotor—it looked as if it were flying sideways—shot off a bunch of countermeasure flares and did a strange-ass dance in the air. By the time what I was seeing sank in, the helo had managed to duck the Cuban SA-7 that had been launched almost point-blank in its direction. (Probably a good thing, actually. The seeker in the shoulder-launched missile needs a few seconds to find its target, and by the time it was ready to rock the only thing in front of it were the decoys.)

  The warhead blew up almost directly above me with the loud pop of a dozen July Fourth fireworks. I dropped below the surface for a few seconds, hoping to avoid any shrapnel. When I broke back to the surface, the night glowed orange-red, thanks to the decoy flares. They weren’t quite as bright as an LUU-2 illumination “log,” but they gave me more than enough light to see around me in the water. I started yelling for Junior again as I searched.