Kara circled her Gray Eagle Tosca from six miles high down to three—low enough to confirm no human-sized heat signatures at the airport, though she did spot a small family of deer. As long as Claudia’s team kept it quiet, no one should even know they were there. They could just steal some fuel and go. At least things were starting out well.
Claudia and Trisha slid the Little Birds into the airport from the north at barely five feet above the ground and then settled to either side of a fuel tanker truck that was parked beside the field. Kara was the one who’d spotted the truck parked close beside the hangar when they were reviewing the initial satellite images. Tosca’s overflight had confirmed that the truck was parked in a different position than in the first reference photo. That meant it was still operational.
Michael flicked on his night vision and hit the ground running the instant the skids touched. He rapped his knuckles up the side of the large tank on the back of the truck as he trotted down the length of it. Over a quarter full. He tried not to think of how old this particular load of fuel might be.
While he hot-wired the tank truck, Bill climbed on top and began a survey of the surrounding neighborhood through his rifle’s night scope. At ten at night, the closest light was a half mile distant. The air was still and the temperature was about seventy-five. They’d have accurate shooting to at least a half mile even without the sniper rifles.
By the time the truck was running, Trisha had spooled out the grounding safety line to make sure there were no sparks and Claudia followed close behind with the nozzle.
At her signal Michael hit the pump switch. It caused the fuel truck’s engine to falter, then groan with a deeper note as it began pumping fuel from the tank into the Maven.
He climbed up onto the tank to help Bill keep watch. Ten minutes to max out the fuel in each bird. Twenty minutes on full alert. The pump was so damn slow—each wheeze and gasp of the old engine worried him—but they got a full load of fuel onboard both Little Birds with no sign of anyone being the wiser. Maybe they could use this stop on the way out as well. It was certainly one of the contingency plans that they’d discussed.
They’d also discussed ditching the helicopters off the Iranian coast, stealing a truck, and trying to drive out across the desert. A hundred scenarios had been reviewed and the best had been chosen. None had been wholly rejected. Flying back through Karachala was one of the better options, but driving across the Iranian desert was far from the worst. Far.
Once the fuel was loaded, Michael made sure to wind the hose and wire back so that they would look unused. He considered breaking the pump’s readout for number of gallons in case anyone tracked it, but he saw that it was already broken. He pulled off his hot-wire tools. The engine idled to a stop, then released a backfire as loud as a mortar barrage. He locked the door and bolted for the helicopter.
A single glance back as they pulled aloft and scooted off to the north showed several houselights flicking on in the distance. Maybe coming back this way wasn’t the best option. Either way, they had their fuel and had made it through the first leg of their inbound journey.
* * *
Claudia hated this next part, but it was the best idea they’d come up with. It was time for the boys to go swimming and steal a submarine.
The port at Baku’s south bay was a naval military base. And as paranoid as the Azeri were about possible attacks, it would be well guarded. Maybe not to U.S. standards, but certainly better watched than the airfield at Karachala they’d just raided.
Now she felt as if she was letting Michael go on without her. Three miles off Baku harbor, she and Trisha settled down to the wave tops. With no heavy weather anywhere on the Caspian Sea, the waves were barely a foot high.
They’d considered skid floats for the helicopters to perform this part of the operation. It would have allowed her and Trisha to wait right where they were. It would also have allowed them to land safely on the Caspian in an emergency. But they simply couldn’t justify losing the extra hundred and thirty pounds of ammunition to rig the inflatable pontoons. That would have emptied the seven-rocket launcher. They’d already sacrificed one of those to the extended-range fuel tank. At least that choice of the hundreds she’d made had been an easy one.
She hovered inches off the water while Michael climbed out onto the skid and retrieved his pack from behind his seat. He pulled out goggles and snorkel, and slid out a small rebreather tank.
Then he pulled out something she hadn’t seen last night that he’d stowed behind his seat. It was a cylinder about as long as his arm and big around as his leg—a bulbous housing, two handles at the sides, and a caged propeller. It was a DPV, diver propulsion vehicle. Its little electric motor could tow them quietly to their goal faster than they could swim. They also wouldn’t be tired out when they arrived at the sub.
He noted her attention in the light of the tiny red flashlight he’d clamped to his swim goggles. “Under four hundred dollars; I bought them online. They have the range we need for this mission.”
Claudia had been really worried about the plan of dropping them so far from shore. Michael had kept insisting it was no problem without explaining why. Because he had planned from the beginning to use a DPV and simply not thought to tell her. And Emily said she’d managed teams up to eight people? Twice this many variables and four times the amount of communication required. The woman was amazing.
Claudia stuck her tongue out at him for not telling her.
He winked and then fell over backward into the water. The last she saw of him was two-raised arms making a circle around his head in a “diver okay” signal before he disappeared under the water.
It was a good moment. Claudia refused to think that it had at least been a good last moment. They’d get through this. They had to—there was too much waiting for them on the other side.
She lifted the Maven to five feet over the waves and Trisha did the same, which meant Bill must have gotten off as well. It was a short flight to Vulf Island, where they landed on the deserted strip of mud well off Baku harbor. The far end of the island had a small radar installation and a couple of the inevitable oil derricks. But the radar was watching outward for others attacking Baku, not someone parking a bird on the Baku side.
They landed and prepared to do the thing she hated even more than worrying. It was time to sit and wait.
Trisha shuffled her way across the sixty feet of oil-blackened fine sand beach separating their helicopters and slouched down into the copilot’s seat, dragging on the headset Michael had been wearing moments before.
“This had better work, Casperson. I’m gonna be really ticked if Billy comes home dead.”
“Me too,” was all Claudia could think to say in response. She understood Trisha’s humor, but it was unnerving. The image of her life if Michael suddenly wasn’t in it was one she didn’t like.
“Well, if anyone can live through this, it will be those two assholes. Can you imagine how insufferable their egos are going to become if this whole thing succeeds?”
“As big as ours?” Claudia offered.
Trisha laughed. She had the greatest laugh, and it was easy to join in.
They sat in silence and watched the distant lights of Baku. It was barely 2200, and they’d have hours of darkness yet to decide if they had to spend the fuel to retreat back into the desert and hide out through the daylight hours. The earliest they were likely to see the boys was around 2:00 a.m.
“This sure is something,” Trisha remarked softly.
It sure was.
Chapter 25
Michael and Bill drove their DPVs elbow to elbow. With no running lights, it was the only way to be sure they didn’t lose track of each other. They’d also tied ten meters of line between them, but hadn’t needed it yet.
They were three meters underwater, approaching the south port. They couldn’t see crap, and Michael’s head hurt fr
om the cold. The water was temperate, actually unseasonably warm for May, but still cold. He and Bill both wore thin-skin neoprene suits under their clothes, but he hadn’t pulled on his hood. There’d been one in the Phase I package in his pack, but he’d been distracted by looking at Claudia. Dangerous mistake, but too late to rectify.
The DPVs tugged them along relentlessly. They were deep enough that they’d pass below any late-night fishing boats. Only big ships would draw deeper, and they’d hear those easily over the DPV’s slight propeller noise.
He checked the GPS readout on his wrist and adjusted a few degrees to the north. The water clarity was only fair. While it was good enough to read the GPS, they’d have to surface for the final stage.
The DPV was attached by a short leash to a D-ring on his harness down at his waist; that did all of the towing. All he had to do was hold on to the handles to steer it. Still, his arms were starting to burn with the effort.
At least, in exchange for the thermal lashing his head was taking, he had an amazing picture of her in his head. Full gear, in clear command of the mission, hovering as stable as a rock just inches over foreign waters and sticking her tongue out at him. God he loved that woman so much.
The thought chilled him more than the water rushing by. Maybe Bill had some suggestion on how to handle this.
No. Why would he? He was happily married, and if there was one thing the happily married wanted, it was for everyone around them to be in the same state. But that wasn’t an option.
So he kept his head down and the motor switch on high rev as they were pulled into Bibi-Heybat harbor.
* * *
“I’ve never seen Michael so happy. Is he good to you?”
Claudia had no experience with woman-talk. The closest she’d ever come was Emily’s discovery that she was having a second child. Yet here they sat side by side in a parked helicopter on the oily shore of a country that their team was robbing right at this moment. And the question had been asked.
She considered how to approach Trisha’s opener, then decided that what the hell, she’d try honesty.
“He’s amazing to me.”
“Yeah, he’s really good. I mean a good guy. I didn’t mean—”
Claudia considered letting Trisha dangle for a while but she sounded so distressed as she dug her hole deeper and deeper that Claudia decided to throw her a rescue line.
“I already know about the two of you.”
That didn’t slow Trisha down for a second; all it did was change her course. “You do? He told you? Why that low-life slime. Aren’t a woman’s secrets sacred anymore? Next time I see him, I’ll—”
“Say absolutely nothing. He didn’t tell me. But there are times that despite being Mr. God of Special Operations Forces, he’s actually fairly easy to read.”
“Did he, uh… Never mind.” Trisha’s voice went soft.
“All you need to do is look at how he treats you to know how he feels about you. Maybe it’s more like a protective brother now, but he’d defend you right to the grave.” Claudia felt a chill at her own words.
“I don’t know, Claudia. If he’d do that for me, I can’t imagine what he’d do for you.”
“Well, whatever it is, I hope he has no intention of dying any time soon.”
Their conversation drifted from the men they were awaiting to the mission’s plan and alternates, and then on to other missions they’d each flown. The time passed far more easily than Claudia had expected.
* * *
Michael and Bill shut down their DPVs before they rounded into the mouth of the south bay. There was a thin sheen of oil on the surface, not enough to coat you, but enough to smell. That’s when he realized that he’d been smelling it since they’d approached Baku. His SAS pal had warned him, but he’d thought it was hyperbole.
“The whole place reeks of oil, pal. The air, the water—the banks reek of oil money—but all the rest just smells like oil,” the SAS operative had said. And he’d been right. It was thick on the air. The oil was so shallow in places that it had been harvested for millennia using hand-dug wells. And it also was so deep in places that the first offshore undersea oil rig in history had been an Azeri rig in the Caspian Sea, long before the Texans even thought about tapping into the Gulf of Mexico.
They kick-swam into the harbor and surveyed their options. Third pier up on the left would be the Triton subs. They were close when Bill stopped Michael with a hand on his arm.
Michael stopped to tread water and turned in the direction that Bill was staring.
“Now isn’t that a pretty sight?”
Michael had to agree. It really was.
Chapter 26
“Hi.”
Claudia yelped—she couldn’t help herself—and then grabbed for her gun.
Michael had simply appeared right by her shoulder. Even Trisha squealed in surprise. They’d been keeping watch. She had intentionally landed the helicopter facing down the beach. Between the two of them, they’d been watching the whole strip.
He continued to grin at her like an idiot. She checked her watch to see it wasn’t even half past eleven.
“What are you doing here?”
“Aren’t you glad to see me?” He was teasing her and enjoying himself entirely too much.
Well, two could play at that game. She grabbed the front of his vest by the D-ring mounted there and hauled him in. He tasted and smelled like the rest of Baku, but she was so glad to see him that she really didn’t care. The heat flashed through her and she could feel it overcome him as well. Gods but she wanted to just tumble right down onto the beach with him, oil sheen or not.
Trisha whined, “Hey, where’s my D-boy?”
Michael eased back abruptly, clearly recalling he was on a mission, not a fling. He pointed over his shoulder.
Beyond the point of land that made the west end of the beach, eighty feet of U.S. Coast Guard ship came into view.
“I thought there weren’t any U.S. assets in the Caspian. Those bastards lied to us.”
“No.” Michael was back to looking very pleased with himself. “We sold this one to the Azeri Navy about a decade back. You can’t tell at night, but she’s dark gray now rather than bright white. So, we thought we’d take the old Point Brower for a ride.”
“You idiot!” Claudia jabbed her fingers into his collarbone just above his vest and armor. He didn’t even flinch. “The whole idea was to remain low profile! That ship is—”
“Going to be invisible because they expect her.” His voice was absolutely calm, as if they were having a quiet conversation in a forest canopy. “She’s known in these waters. And we have an Azeri officer on board who is only too glad to aid a pair of well-armed caviar smugglers in exchange for his life and a thousand manat, about eight hundred U.S. dollars. Even he doesn’t know that he has a Triton-2M submarine in tow. We have it trimmed at about five meters depth.”
“Caviar smugglers?” And she’d thought that just his body made her head spin.
“Sure. Big business on the Caspian. The Azeris set very tight catch limits on fishermen to sustain the fish stock. But the smuggling market for Caspian Sea caviar is so lucrative that their mafia can pay the necessary bribes and still turn a nice profit.”
“Eight hundred dollars isn’t much of a bribe.”
“It’s okay. He isn’t much of an officer. Only one aboard, fast asleep and drunk out of his gourd on vodka. We also may have led him to believe this was just a test run and much more would follow if tonight went well.” Michael was so pleased with himself that he was being positively outgoing.
Claudia remembered Emily’s instructions to be flexible and tried to reset her thinking. She checked her watch again. The original plan had them at this point by 0200 if they were lucky, and in position to hunker down for the day by 0400. There just wasn’t enough time between 2:00 a.m. and sun
rise to execute the plan safely and get out of the area. But they’d gained two and a half hours. If they moved fast…
She grabbed the D-ring on the front of Michael’s vest and dragged him back in for a quick-smacking kiss.
“Okay, you done good. Can anyone think why we shouldn’t go directly to Phase IV rather than wait out the day?” She gave Michael and Trisha a few moments to catch up with her. When they did, all she got was a “Hunh!” of surprise.
That was the answer she needed. She’d left two of the encrypted radios powered up—one on the team frequency and one that connected to the Gray Eagle circling somewhere above them.
Despite the encryption, she wasn’t going to do it in clear speech.
“Hey, Brooklyn,” Claudia called. “Talk to me.”
Kara caught on to the schedule change faster than Michael or Trisha had, even though she hadn’t been expecting that request until tomorrow.
Claudia powered up the display of the Gray Eagle’s data that Kara was feeding back to her.
“Patrol on schedule.” A flashing red highlight appeared on her display. All two hundred feet of a Russian Buyan-M class warship was right where it needed to be, if this were tomorrow night. The recent powerful addition to the Russians’ Caspian Sea flotilla had been cruising the Azerbaijani coast as if the Russians owned it, harassing pipeline construction vessels, violating territorial waters, and generally being a royal pain in the ass. They were making it clear that no one was going to build a pipeline as long as Russia ruled these waters, even if by legal treaty it actually didn’t.
With the vessel in place now, Claudia and her team should grab the opportunity in case tomorrow’s schedule changed for some reason.
That was the key fact Emily had uncovered that had sent them hustling into Azerbaijan. An apparently unrelated bit of intel on the Russian patrol schedule had said that after tomorrow night, the Russians were going to up the ante by shifting over to day patrols, possibly kidnapping working crews or at least scaring them off.
Bring On the Dusk Page 27