Operation Caribe ph-2

by Mack Maloney

  In fact, Harry already had his pistol out. He shoved it so far into Smash’s temple, it broke the skin and the SEAL started to bleed.

  Ironically, in the midst of all this, the rain had suddenly stopped. Morning had come, and the hurricane was moving off as quickly as it had arrived. There were even signs the sun was about to break through on the rapidly clearing horizon.

  “Perfect weather for a firing squad!” Harry roared.

  Word had spread of what was happening on the deck and a group of freed sailors had gathered on the lake’s muddy bank nearby to watch the drama play out. Harry’s call to action elicited screams of support from them.

  “Drown them!” someone yelled from the bank.

  “No! Burn them at the stake!” came another voice.

  “No—hang one! And make the other walk the plank!”

  Harry buried his pistol even deeper into Smash’s head wound.

  “I say we do them right here — right now,” he growled. “No ceremony. No bullshit. No last words. Quick justice, just like we planned.…”

  An even louder cheer erupted from the muddy bank. Smash began to weep openly. Harry’s finger started to squeeze his trigger.

  But then Nolan calmly reached over and moved Harry’s pistol away from the SEAL. “As much as I want to do this,” he said, “we just can’t…”

  Harry looked back at him in total bewilderment.

  “Can’t what?” he asked. “Shoot them up here you mean?”

  Nolan shook his head. “Can’t shoot them at all,” adding quickly: “Or hang them or burn them or drown them.”

  Harry just didn’t understand — and neither did the growing crowd of sailors on the bank.

  But strangely enough, Ramon understood, and so did the Senegals. And Twitch. And even Batman and Gunner, who were standing in the shallow water nearby.

  Ramon said, “We kill them like that, mon, we become as bad as they is.”

  Nolan looked at the others and just shrugged. “Exactly…” he said.

  But Harry was devastated. “I’m so confused,” he moaned.

  Nolan collected his thoughts, then spoke again. “We’re better than this. All of us — because we’re Americans, in spirit if not in body. I know it seemed like a good idea at the time, freaking these guys out, screwing with their heads, and intending to get our pound of flesh when we finally got our hands on them. But we have to remember who we are, and what country we call home — and what the hell we’ve been fighting for all these years, two hundred and thirty years and more. Fighting these traitors, defending ourselves against them — that’s a different story. But if we pop these guys now, taking justice into our own hands, then we’re no better than the tyrants who run Iran or North Korea or the Taliban or bin Laden and his mooks. Like our very good friend here just said, if we kill them now, like this — we become like them. No … We’re civilized. They’re not. We’re Americans — and now they’re not. And that’s what makes all the difference.”

  The sailors on the muddy bank were stunned at first. But slowly, Nolan’s words began to sink in.

  “We’ll turn them over to the Navy,” he went on. “They’ll get a trial — and then, they’ll get their punishment, guaranteed. But until then, we’ll do this the right way.”

  Many of the sailors on the bank started to applaud. A few even cheered. And though a few remained silent, Nolan had given them all something to think about.

  Standing near the muddy bank, watching it all, Batman lit up a damp joint, took a puff and passed it to Gunner.

  “That was an interesting speech,” Batman said, letting out a lungful of smoke. “Especially from a guy who’s not allowed to step foot inside the U.S.”

  At that moment, the sun finally broke through on the horizon, bathing the top of the tilted sub and illuminating Nolan in particular.

  Harry took note of the atmospherics and just shook his head. “Oh for Christ’s sake!” he exclaimed. “If you got the Almighty doing your special effects, how the hell can I argue against that?”

  Harry then turned back to the still confused but much relieved SEALs, now sitting on the slanted deck, their hands tied behind them.

  He leaned down and spit in both their faces.

  “What do you know?” he hissed at them. “Today’s your lucky day.”

  40

  The sunrise turned out to be especially spectacular that morning. The hurricane was entirely gone thirty minutes later, taking its wind and rain and heading north to brush the Atlantic coast, but ultimately to die at sea.

  After binding and gagging Beaux and Smash and then lashing them to the sub’s top tail fin, the Whiskey team, plus Harry and Ramon, went down to the blue hole and helped sort out the sick sailors from the very sick ones. But even the crewmen who appeared the most ill were starting to look better. Maybe it was being out of the sub and out of danger, or maybe it was the water from the mysterious blue hole, but everyone seemed to be improving, including Nolan and Twitch. When Ramon told them the blue hole’s water was rumored to have healing powers for both mind and body, both men drank a gallon each.

  * * *

  The first C-130 appeared over Big Hole Cay around 10 A.M.

  It was a Coast Guard plane out of Miami. It circled a few times, then dropped three flares. Nolan had exactly three flares left in Bad Dawg Two; he fired them in reply.

  The C-130 wagged its wings and flew off.

  * * *

  The first Navy copters arrived about an hour later. There were five of them in the initial wave. Three were filled with heavily armed Shore Patrol police; another was carrying Navy investigators, engineers and medical personnel. The fifth copter was the command aircraft.

  The CO of the landing party was a Navy captain from Fleet Forces Command named Billias. Sitting in the cabin of his large Sea Stallion helicopter, he listened to Whiskey’s account of what had happened, first warning everyone involved that they would still have to do a full debriefing starting the next day on a Navy ship yet to be determined.

  This debriefing would take at least a couple days, but as Billias told them, the team couldn’t complain very much. After all, Whiskey was still on the clock.

  Batman asked him how the Navy finally figured out where to look for them. Whiskey sure didn’t call them — even if they had wanted to, their sat phones had crapped out long ago.

  “Someone on a passing airliner saw the sub in the lake and asked the pilot about it,” Billias replied dryly. “They thought it was a new amusement park.”

  Meanwhile, Navy investigators dressed in hazmat gear had gained entry to the sub. They confirmed there were two dead SEALs inside, plus three dead sailors, including Commander Shepherd.

  They also reported, after killing the balky generators, that the sub was more or less intact. The reactor was unharmed, as were the Trident missiles. This meant the Navy still had an aura of plausible deniability surrounding the incident. One of its subs had simply run into a little mechanical trouble east of the Bahamas, no big deal. That would be the official story — at least for the time being.

  Unofficially, Billias told them the Navy was thrilled that Whiskey didn’t destroy the sub in order to save it, like they did the Indian Navy warship, the Vidynut, in another adventure.

  The weirdest thing of all, though, was that some of the Navy SP police had recovered the body of the fifth SEAL, the one nicknamed Ghost. It had washed up at the opposite end of the island.

  Whiskey had told the Navy investigators that he’d been blown off the bridge during the battle for the sub. Yet when the SPs found his body, it had been torn apart, right down to the bones. These were not wounds consistent with someone who’d been shot.

  “It’s the chickcarnie,” Ramon said, on seeing Ghost’s gruesome corpse. “The monster that lives out here. They wreak havoc on anyone who disturbs their nesting place, dead or alive. He’s been out there all night watching us.”

  It sounded crazy — yet no one had any other explanation why the renegade SEA
L’s body was found in that condition.

  * * *

  The Navy finally finished with Whiskey by midafternoon.

  More Navy helicopters had landed by this time. One took Beaux and Smash away to a high security lockup in, of all places, Guantanamo Bay.

  “Haven’t you heard?” Billias told Whiskey. “It’s where we put all the professional terrorists.”

  Two Navy repair ships were on the way to Big Hole Cay. The naval engineers were already studying ways to disassemble the Senegals Bridge, intent on letting the water back into the lake gradually and, with any luck, floating the sub out for a tow back to King’s Bay.

  Meanwhile, Whiskey asked for and received full tanks of aviation gas for their gunships. While they were all aware of the formal debriefing the following day, they told the Navy there was something they just had to do first.

  So, after bidding farewell to the three dozen or so sailors they helped free from the Wyoming, the two Whiskey copters finally took off from Big Hole Cay.

  * * *

  Batman was flying Bad Dawg One; Nolan was piloting Bad Dawg Two. The Senegals, Agent Harry and Ramon were all with them — as well as another passenger. Crash’s body had been wrapped in plastic and temporarily buried on Big Hole Cay, away from the fighting. It was now lying on the floor of the passenger compartment of Bad Dawg Two, a borrowed U.S. flag draped over it.

  The two copters flew west until they reached the coast of Florida. Night was just falling.

  Using Agent Harry’s directions, they found a military cemetery right on the coast near Fort Lauderdale. They landed on a beach nearby, and climbed up to the darkened graveyard. The four remaining Whiskey members carried the body. The rest of the group carried some of the rusty shovels from Big Hole Cay.

  They found an empty spot and dug a grave, with everyone pitching in, including Harry and Ramon. Adhering to an ancient custom from their country, the Senegals dug with their hands.

  Then they finally laid Crash to rest.

  There were no prayers, just five good minutes of silence. Crash had no family, so he would stay here, in good company with other fallen heroes, until his friends could make more permanent arrangements.

  When they were done, Harry used a sat phone borrowed from Billias to call ONI headquarters in Washington. He asked for the status of the three other crisis points around the world.

  The reply was brief. “No nukes have gone off anywhere in the past forty-eight hours,” he said. “So things must be heading the right direction.”

  So, positive news all round.

  It was time to leave. The group headed back down to the copters on the beach, but Batman and Nolan stayed behind for a moment.

  “Well, you got your wish,” Batman told him. “Bad way for it to come about, but at least it happened.”

  Nolan didn’t know what he meant.

  “You’re on U.S. soil,” Batman explained. “For at least a little while anyway.”

  Nolan looked around and took in a long breath of the warm air.

  “Yeah, I guess I am,” he said.

  He reached down and took a bit of dirt from Crash’s grave and put it in his pocket.

  Then he said, “I guess this will have to do — for now.”

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