Barracuda 945 am-6

by Patrick Robinson

  In the normal course of its duties, the COD would be crammed with mail for the carrier's 6,000 crew, and spare parts. But tonight, the former combat fighter pilot Lt. Comdr. Steve Ghutzman was flying a very different cargo— sixteen armed U.S. Navy SEALs, plus thirty-six satchels each containing thirty kg of the most modern explosive in the U.S. arsenal, a diabolical cocktail of RDX (Research Developed Explosive), TNT (Trinitrotoluene), and Aluminum to provide an ultraheavy blast effect. The total weight of high-explosives contained in the satchels was a little over one ton.

  To take the most recent instance of a massive warship being sunk by explosives, in 1982, when Adm. Sandy Woodward's force sank Argentina's cruiser, the General Belgrano, in the Falklands War. The torpedo that broke her back contained approximately one-tenth of the explosive currently flying over the Gulf of Mexico in the COD.

  Tucked in the aircraft's hold were two of the four outboard inflatables that would be used in the operation, plus five radio transmitters.

  The first two seats on the port side of the COD were occupied by the Commanding Officer of the operation, Lt. Comdr. Bill Peavey, a big, powerful former USC slugging third baseman. He was a remarkable physical presence, 6 feet 4 inches, 210 pounds of blue twisted steel. Came from San Francisco, where his father, the eminent attorney Bill Peavey Jr., ran a successful law practice.

  The SEAL instructors at Coronado soon selected the former Trojan baseball star as a potential team leader. He had applied to join the SEALs at the age of twenty-seven after only five years in the Navy, and they saw him coming. He was a Lieutenant Commander at thirty-two and now, one year later, this was his first full command of a Special Forces operation.

  He sat in that front seat surrounded by charts and maps of the jungle that surrounds the Gatún Lake. He spent most of the time dictating into the slim microphone connected to his computer, and making detailed pencil notes on a checklist he was compiling for all four of his principal teams, the eight-man recce squad, the two bomb-lashing groups, and the protection wing.

  Right now he was locked into the diagram of the upper lock gates, the lakeward pair, which hold back several billion tons of deep water stretching over a giant area of 164 square miles, through which runs the route of the Canal. The gates that hold back the lake from the lock chambers were seven feet thick with a railed walkway along the top. Each gate was attached by three colossal hinges, six hinges in total, three on each side. It was the destruction of these cast-iron monsters, each one seven feet in height, that held the key to Bill's first operation.

  And he read the Navy engineers' report with fascination. The blast from the explosion will create severe oscillation of the water, and massive shock waves to the area of the hinges, precisely like a depth charge, but so powerful it will have repercussions for ANY ship in the immediate vicinity. Lt. Comdr. Peavey's diver, CPO Chris O'Riordan would go in with the recce party on the first night to measure accurate underwater distances, down from the top of the gates, from which each of the six bombs would hang, resting hard against their designated hinge.

  Bill Peavey tried to imagine a force of ten times the power of that which put the 13,500-ton Belgrano on the bottom of the South Atlantic, and he thought, privately, that it might not be smart to get within two miles of that blast when the SEALs finally let it rip.

  His 21/C Lt. Patrick Hogan Rougeau, a thirty-six-year-old former tennis professional from Massachusetts, was sitting right behind him in company with another member of the five-man command team, Lt. Brantley Jordan from Texas, who would lead the bomb-lashing team on the near side of the lock. Lieutenant Rougeau, like the boss, Bill Peavey, had joined the Navy late, but he was a fitness fanatic, applied to join the SEALs at the age of twenty-six, and sailed through the murderous Basic Underwater Demolition (BUDs) indoctrination course with as much ease as was humanly possible; that is, it damn nearly killed him, but not quite, and when the dust cleared, he was still conscious, and still standing. Which was a whole lot more than could be said for most of the others.

  Patrick Rougeau was not only a radio expert, he was also an underwater expert, who had immediately volunteered to make the first dive into the lake. However, he was also an acknowledged expert with the heavy machine gun and Lieutenant Commander Peavey refused to risk him being eaten by a crocodile.

  "CPO O'Riordan can do that," he had said. "No crocodile in his right mind would risk breaking his teeth on that little son of a bitch."

  He referred to the legendary toughness of the ex-street fighter from Chicago's South Side, Navy boxing champion, and all-around professional hard man, O'Riordan, who was as fast and as lethal with a combat knife as any SEAL who had ever lived.

  At the age of twenty, he had fought on Saddam's oil rig, the one the SEALs ultimately blew up in the Gulf War. The one where not one of the Iraqi Guard survived the SEALs savage opening assault from the water.

  The three other young SEAL officers on the command team, Lts. Zane Green, Chris Hall, and Brian Slocum, were riding out to the carrier in the second COD, which had left Pensacola thirty minutes in arrears. Right now, both aircraft had reached their cruising height of 30,000 feet and were making 300 knots out toward the Cayman Trench, crossing high above the western end of Cuba. The lead COD expected to touch down on the Eisenhower's flight deck at half past eight. Rendezvous point: 11.80' N, 81.50' W, 1,320 miles south of Pensacola, 200 miles off the northern coast of Panama, 220 miles east of the coast of Nicaragua.

  Every one of the SEALs carried a map of the northern Gatún Lake and the Colón Coast, plus a diagram of the locks, showing how millions of tons of concrete form a sixty-foot-thick wall separating the inward and outward locks, two identical constructions, one for Pacific-bound ships going up, one for Atlantic-bound ships coming down.

  By the time they landed, every one of the SEALs on this time-stressed operation would understand with total clarity the precise mission, the attack, and the exit. SEAL Commanders do not approve of even the most junior member of an assault party being anything less than expert on the objectives.

  They studied, high above the blue, deceptively deep and rough Caribbean, each man much within himself as they headed ever closer to the hot, scarcely populated northern jungles of the Republic of Panama. But first the landing on the carrier, always difficult, but especially so in this big, heavy aircraft, with its eighty-foot wingspan and famously difficult torque created by the turboprops.

  In the clear skies, the pilot and his first officer picked up the Eisenhower some twenty miles out, steaming southwest, with a destroyer positioned a half mile off her starboard bow.

  Ears popped as the COD lost height, cutting its speed, keeping level, as it came under the control of the carrier's tower. Through the cockpit window, the landing space looked like a postage stamp and the sea was plainly rough. A one-and-a-half-degree motion in the center of a carrier represents a thirty foot rise and fall on the stern, and it was all of that today.

  Lieutenant Commander Ghutzman, sunglasses on, staring through the glare of the subtropical sun, throttled back, trying to judge the pitch of the deck. The speed of the aircraft dropped to 120 knots. They were about a half mile short of the carrier now, and Steve throttled back some more.

  With the great yawning expanse of the Eisenhower's stern now stark before him, he cut the speed to one hundred miles an hour right above the wake. The ship was making thirty knots, which made the COD seem even slower, and as they came in there was not a single passenger who did not believe they were going so slowly they must surely drop straight into the churning white water below.

  But Steve had done this a few times before—187 times, to be precise — and, with the steel loop streaming out behind, he opened the throttles and rammed the wheels down onto the deck, engines howling, ready to scream down the runway and take off instantly if they missed the hook. Anything to avoid flopping over the edge with no speed, and crashing under the keel of the carrier.

  But they all felt the jolt, as the hook grabbed and held, and th
e aircraft went from seventy knots to dead-stopped in 2.9 seconds. In the back, sixteen hearts restarted.

  The COD taxied to its normal parking space below the island for refueling, unloading through the stern ramp, and then reloading with mail, and a few personnel returning to base.

  The flight deck crews moved back to their allotted positions in readiness for the arrival of the second COD from Pensacola. There was always a heightened feeling of anticipation when a SEAL team was landing, and every one of the 6,000 crew knew that tonight the recce group was going into unknown jungle territory, perhaps to face a foreign enemy. Tomorrow, before dark, the rest. God help them.

  The second flight came in with all the professionalism of the first. The SEALs were taken below to a special mess that had been organized for them, and the carrier now turned due south into lonely seas for the five-hour run inshore to a point fifty miles north of Colon, from where the operation would begin.

  Lieutenant Commander Peavey, with Lieutenants Green and Slocum, supervised the unloading and the loading of the big CH-53D Sikorsky 47 Navy helicopters, the Sea Stallions that would take the SEALs in, across the Panamanian coastline, and then onward to the lake, down the course of the Chagres River. They would fly over uninhabited rain forest, to a mainland point on the northwest shore of the lake, one mile southwest of the great dam that caused the lake to form in the first place, and almost two miles from the beginning of their target, the downward Gatiin Locks.

  The SEALs were all served an excellent breakfast of omelettes, ham, and hash browns, with whole-wheat toast— as much as anyone could eat — before they were led to separate sleeping quarters, all of them having been traveling all night from California.

  The recce party would eat again at five thirty in the afternoon, before embarking the Sea Stallion on the first step of the mission at half past eight, just after dark. They would take with them two inflatables, Zodiacs with Yamaha 175 outboards, and compressed air cylinders, six plastic cans of gasoline; paddles; personal weapons; the big machine gun; two radio transmitters; food and water for thirty-six hours; two 100-foot-long steel tape measures; two wet suits; two Draegers, the SEALs' underwater breathing apparatus; a few hand grenades; night goggles; and a half dozen cans of bug spray.

  Those remaining on board the Eisenhower until the following evening would attend briefings with the Command Team, and then wait for the early recce report from the lake before turning in for the rest of the night.

  The second group would fly off the carrier in two waves, using both Sea Stallions, departing at half past seven. Same route. Same procedures. Objective: unchanged. Hopefully.

  That Sunday passed swiftly. The eight-man recce team left the mess hall, having eaten salad, steak, and eggs, followed by fruit salad, then black coffee. They returned to their departure area as the sun was setting, they blackened then-faces, pulled on their "drive on" caps and bandannas, picked up their heavy bags, light machine guns, and headed for the flight deck led by Patrick Rougeau and Chris O'Riordan.

  They boarded the Sea Stallion, which took off immediately, powering into the sky beneath its huge rotors, tipped south, and thundered into the gathering night, straight at the north shore of Panama, now only fifty miles distant.

  Twenty minutes later, the helicopter's young navigator picked up the coastline through night goggles, checked the GPS, and located the estuary of the Chagres River. It was only five miles to the lake.

  A bright moon lit the way as they came clattering over the gleaming silver path of the river three miles west of the high locks. They could see the lake now, way out in front, a vast expanse of bright water. The pilot kept at least a mile distance between the Sea Stallion and the Gatún Dam, which may have had an armed guardhouse, although the SEAL planners back in Coronado said not.

  In fact, the planners back in Coronado considered this to be one of the slackest Third World countries on earth. The National Maritime Service — the Panamanian Coast Guard — has only six hundred personnel and maybe twenty patrol boats to police the entire country, half of them laid up in need of decent servicing.

  The country is entirely linear, geographically, with coastlines hundreds of miles long on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. To the south lies Colombia and its crime-ridden borders, featuring guerrilla incursions, cross-border drug villainy, refugees, and asylum seekers.

  Panama, now without American help, is militarily useless, and certainly, if one of their creaking, lightly gunned Vosper-type patrol crafts had stumbled accidentally upon the SEALs in action… well, if it had been a boxing match, the referee would have stopped it before it started.

  Nothing in all of the Panamanian military could possibly cope with the might of even a small number of America's Special Forces. The unknown factor was the Chinese; how many and how well armed were their patrols that guarded the locks. Essentially, that's what the recce group was going in to find out.

  The Sea Stallion put down unobserved on the shores of Gatún Lake, one mile west of the Guarapo Islands, a group of many such clusters all through the lake. They throttled back but did not cut the rotors, and disembarked, dragging their equipment out into the hot, damp jungle air.

  It was dark now and intermittent clouds covered the face of the moon, for which everyone was grateful, as they began to haul the two inflatables out, six men taking the weight of the outboard engine, using specially constructed canvas handles.

  They lowered the two boats to the ground, tested the radios, and instantly the big Sikorsky revved its engine to life and lifted off, moving north as fast as possible so as not to betray the position of the eight Americans working below.

  With an inspired piece of navigation, the pilot had landed on a clear stretch of shoreline, about thirty yards deep from the edge of the water, running slightly uphill to a line of trees that sheltered the area from attack from the shore. For the moment, they concentrated on inflating the Zodiacs and carrying one of them to the water's edge.

  Lt. Patrick Rougeau detailed two seamen, and a Petty Officer to man the new base, and again he tested the radios. Then he and CPO O'Riordan, in company with PO/2 Brian Ingram from North Carolina and two other combat SEALs, climbed immediately into the boat, filled the gas tanks, and let the others push them out into the lake, paddling for 100 yards before they started the motor and began the quiet journey through the dark toward the Gatún Lock.

  There was not a sound on the lake as they chugged forward, steering northeast toward the point on the west corner of the lock's superstructure, where the gigantic concrete edifice met the rough shoreline of the lake.

  They crossed the face of the silent Gatún Dam, towering steep into the night to their port side, and they kept going, Lieutenant Rougeau watching the compass, watching for the great shadow of the locks to darken the water.

  Up ahead, they could see lights, not many, just a bulb every fifty feet, maybe thirty feet above the water level. They could discern no sign of life, which was more or less what they expected, since the Panama Canal was formally closed to all shipping.

  Patrick cut the motor and each of the five SEALs took up a paddle and they silently headed for the beach, tipped up the engine, and dragged the little gray craft into the shadows below the massive wall. CPO O'Riordan took one of the seamen and they cut brushwood and covered the Zodiac. It would be unrecognizable unless you knew it was there.

  Each man took his personal weapon and binoculars and headed for the steel ladder that led up to the giant concrete jetties that bounded the lock gates. They carried with them two wet suits, flippers, and two Draegers in case of an accident. The place was absolutely deserted, but they found a square gray building, which overlooked the upper chamber and offered a flight of stone steps to a second floor from which they could easily make the roof and observe the entire downward lock system for all of the hours of darkness.

  Five minutes later, they were all on the roof, scanning the complex, trying to discern any sign of life. The only disconcerting problem was the fact th
at the upper chamber was full, ready to receive a ship. And they wanted it empty.

  But there were no ships. And there appeared to be no one in sight. And the five SEALs just waited until one o'clock on that Monday morning, scanning the area, looking for a sign of life.

  There was an Ops area on their map, and they could make it out, over on the incoming side. But they could see only two lights burning in there, and no people.

  At quarter after one, Patrick Rougeau gave the word, and young Brian Ingram assisted both him and CPO Chris O'Riordan into wet suits. They carried the flippers and the Draegers with them, and began the climb down from the flat roof and onto the jetty that bounded the right side of the giant lock gates (looking toward the lake).

  Carefully, the three jet black SEALs made their way across the walkway, crouching, but moving fast. Patrick Rougeau handed the end of the steel tape measure to Chris, while Brian fixed his flippers. And with that the veteran combat SEAL placed his fingers over the top of the gate and dropped almost soundlessly the eight feet into the black water on the lakeside.

  Pulling the metallic tape with him, he kicked downward, diagonally toward the huge girder that held the hinges, running his hand against it until he felt the top of the cast-iron fitting. He could feel the concrete wall make a sharp recess here and he calculated it three feet deep by four feet wide, presumably to give the hinges some "breathing space" when the great doors were opened, and to allow the doors to settle at ninety degrees, flush against the jetty walls.

  He kicked downward until he reached the botton of the hinge that the SEAL Intelligence Division had said was seven feet from the top. Then he came up three and a half feet searching for the center bolt. He found it, checked again that it was the exact middle of the hinge, then hooked the metal end of the tape into the center groove and pulled down on the tape three times sharply.