Silent Running

by Don Pendleton

  WHEN RICHARD SPELLMAN heard the terrorists come out onto the rear deck to board their choppers, he had gone down to the utilities deck to keep out of the way. He had left his hiding place and was moving through a dimly lit section when he heard a slight noise.

  “Don’t move,” a low voice behind him said in English, “and slowly put your hands out where I can see them and then turn around.”

  Spellman did as he was told and was surprised to see one of the men who had rescued him and Mary that first night in Cancun. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I was just about to ask you the same thing,” Bolan said. “You didn’t do what we told you back in Cancun, did you?”

  “We tried.” Spellman shrugged. “But we didn’t pick a good place to hide and ended up in a little beach shack when the storm hit. Then, when the winds calmed down a little, we tried to find a better place to hide.”

  “How did you end up back on board?”

  Spellman shook his head. “We were in the downtown area looking for another place to hide when we were spotted by a patrol and they grabbed us. They put me in a closet and took Mary away. I was able to get away later and I’ve been looking for her.”

  “Have you found where they’re holding her?”

  “Not yet.” Spellman sounded grim. “The passengers are being held on two of the decks, and I can’t get past the guards.”

  “How many terrorists are on board?”

  “I don’t really know,” Spellman said, “but I’d say there’s at least fifty or sixty.”

  That was close to Bolan’s own estimate.

  “I take it that you’ve made yourself acquainted with the ship?”

  “More or less.” Spellman nodded.

  “Before I get started, then,” Bolan said, “how about giving me a tour?”

  Spellman didn’t quite see himself as the commando type, but was pleased that this walking arsenal was trusting him this much. “Sure.”

  “First,” Bolan said, “do you know how to shoot?”

  “I’ve done a little target practice with hunting rifles and pistols,” he said. “But that’s about it. I don’t consider myself a gun expert.”

  The SEAL hadn’t had a pistol, and Bolan wasn’t going to give up one of his own, so he unslung his extra silenced H&K. “Think you can use this?”

  “It’s full automatic, right?”

  “Yeah,” Bolan said, “but I can set it on burst mode for you. Every time you pull the trigger, it’ll fire just three rounds instead of full-auto. It’s easier to control that way.”

  Being a fan of action-adventure movies, Spellman recognized the thick sleeve on the subgun’s barrel. “It’s silenced, right?”

  “That’s right. It’s not completely silent, but it’ll make very little noise.

  “And you’ll need this,” Bolan added as he shrugged out of the SEAL’s magazine carrier. “Do you know how to change a magazine?”

  “I’ve seen it done in the movies.”

  In spite of the situation, Bolan repressed a smile. At least the guy had some idea of what needed doing. He handed the subgun over. “Try it.”

  Spellman checked to see that the H&K was on safe before punching the magazine release. Once it was out, he popped it back in.

  “Okay,” Bolan said. “Let’s put that thing on 3-round-burst mode and let’s get started. I have a deck plan of this tub, but it’s from back when it was built and I’m finding that things have been changed. I need you to take me to every place you’ve been.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Now that the terrorists’ choppers had been destroyed, Captain Rawlings ordered his sub to a greater depth to try to lessen the effect of the waves as they continued to track the Carib Princess. He was, however, still trailing an antenna on the surface to keep in communication. In military terms, the situation was still fluid, which was putting it mildly. As far as he was concerned, it was more like quicksilver: try to put your finger on it and it would slip away. He still was following the cruise ship, but knowing where the target was wasn’t a tactical solution. You also had to know how to deal with it.

  Unknown to Hal Brognola, the sub skipper was also in periodic contact with his headquarters in Washington, seeking guidance. It wasn’t that he didn’t really trust his unorthodox guest or disbelieved his credentials, but his adult life had been spent following orders that came down from the top of the military structure. But for the first time in his long career as a naval officer, he wasn’t getting anything from his chain of command. As far as CinClant was concerned, he and his attack boat were on extended detached duty to the White House. Not since World War II had an individual naval vessel been under the direct guidance of the President of the United States, but those were his orders.

  He hadn’t been told, though, exactly what those orders meant or how he was supposed to carry them out. Since Hal Brognola was the only man on board talking to the President, he and his nuclear submarine were effectively being commanded by a civilian.

  “Just got a hot flash from the NRO,” Brognola said as he walked into the control room waving a handful of hard copy. “Their satellites are showing that Garcia has put some of the passengers on deck as shields.”

  “That bastard,” Rawlings growled. As a professional naval officer, he was ready to go head-to-head with the armed enemies of his nation, to kill them in a military manner and to take his chances on being killed in return. He wouldn’t, however, purposefully target civilians as terrorists routinely did. To him that was what made him a warrior and terrorists the scum of the earth.

  “It’s typical for those assholes,” Brognola replied. “But, thankfully, he’s a little too late. Had he brought them out on deck earlier, I don’t think I’d have gotten permission to let you splash those choppers.”

  “So,” Rawlings asked, “does that mean that there’s going to be a change in our orders?”

  “Sorry. We’re just to continue following her. I’m to check in with the President’s National Security Adviser every half hour, but I don’t anticipate any real change soon.”

  IN HIS OPERATIONS ROOM, once the Princess’s captain’s cabin, Diego Garcia went over his next move as he waited for Nguyen to join him.

  As would any great commander, when he’d proposed this operation to his president, he’d had more than just a Plan B ready to back up his main effort in case it failed. He also had a Plan C ready to go and it was more than a just a secondary fallback position. It had been designed to be the grand finale and the master stroke of the entire Matador operation. It had also been kept a secret from the rest of the Matador leadership. Not even Elena Martinez had known about it.

  Nor, sadly, did his president.

  Garcia had never openly criticized his president—the man was a towering god of the revolution and the savior of his people. But, unfortunately, he was also a mortal, an aging mortal.

  There had once been a time when the man would have welcomed a plan like the one Garcia had devised as his coup de grâce, welcomed it and backed it enthusiastically, but that day was long in the past. Being fully aware of that, Garcia hadn’t even proposed his Plan C to his leader. Instead, he had presented the Matador plan for the Mexican revolution and the contamination of the oil wells, and the Cuban leader had willingly signed off on those operations.

  The effects of the radioactively contaminated offshore oil fields would have delivered a crushing blow to the capitalistic Yankee economy since they were so petroleum dependent. But he also knew how clever those devils were. Cutting America’s oil supplies would merely have spurred its government to faster development of alternative fuel sources. The science needed to make oil from biomass had been known since the Germans had invented it during World War II. It wasn’t widely used because it was too expensive.

  His strike would have made natural oil so expensive that the Capitalists could then make a profit by manufacturing oil, and they would have had oil production plants in operation as soon as they could be built. And, w
ithin a couple of years, they would have recovered fully from the oil shortage and would be back to spreading their fast-food culture all over the world again.

  He could have caused a temporary dip in the march of Yankee globalism by hitting the oil fields. But destroying Miami would have an even greater effect than the attacks on New York City had produced. For one thing, Miami was a central point of the Yankee economic domination of Latin America. More goods moved in and out of the port than from any other city in the region. If it was shut down, American economic domination of the Southern Hemisphere would be seriously crippled.

  On top of that, Miami was the home of the anti-revolutionary Cuban terrorist cartels that had relentlessly waged an almost fifty-year-long war against the socialist motherland. It was true that the Yankee government had encouraged their activities and in many circumstances had even armed and paid for their terrorist operations. But were it not for those traitors who had fled the motherland, life for the Cuban people wouldn’t have been as difficult as it had been for these past decades.

  Perhaps the most important factor in his choosing his ultimate target was that Miami was where his mother had been degraded and humiliated as a young woman merely for being Cuban. Her family had immigrated to Florida in the days of the thug Bastista when she had been just a young girl, and her experience growing up in America hadn’t been a good one. Even though she had eventually learned to speak very good English, her teachers had treated her as if she had been mentally retarded. Her Anglo classmates had treated her worse, though.

  He had been going through his mother’s file in the DGI before retiring it to the archives when he learned that he had been born a year earlier than he had thought, and seven months before she had married the man he had always known as his father. In Castro’s Cuba, being born a bastard didn’t carry the disgrace that it did in other, reactionary, Latin countries. Nonetheless, he was a Latino and felt the shame, but not for himself alone. He had felt it for his mother, because she had been forced to hide it from him.

  Making sure that the Anglo Cubans of Miami would never again abuse real Cubans or harbor traitors would be the crowning achievement of his operation. The lesson he would teach would ensure that arrogant Yankees would never again look down upon any Latino as being less than human. His were a proud people with a long history of greatness. And if given a chance through socialism, they would once again become a major force in the world.

  After all, it was the Spanish who had discovered the New World and had opened it up to civilization and development. The Anglos, all of them, had only come as pirates and looters of the thriving old Hispanic empire. That they had triumphed over the Spanish was a cruel twist of fate, but history didn’t stand still. He was seeing to that.

  More than just punishing Miami, though, his last effort would strike fear into the hearts and minds of the Yankees. They would be fittingly punished as no people had been punished since God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

  NGUYEN CAO NGUYEN didn’t think of himself as being a stupid man. There was no way that a stupid man could have overcome what he had to become what he was. Being a double agent spying on one Marxist government for yet another wasn’t for the dull-witted, nor for the faint of heart. But for all of his well-practiced intelligence, he had somehow completely overlooked one critical part of the Matador plan. Admittedly, it was a minor point, which was easy to overlook against the backdrop of regional revolution leading to a major change in the power politics of Latin America. It was, however, a telling minor point.

  What was Diego Garcia ultimately planning to do with the hostages on the Carib Princess?

  It was only now that the plan to contaminate the oil fields had been foiled that he had given more than a passing thought to the seven hundred odd hostages on the ship, American and others. It was obvious that sailing to Miami had to be somehow tied to them, but he couldn’t imagine how.

  Those people were foremost on his mind when he entered Garcia’s command post. “What are we going to do now, Comrade?” he asked. “Without the helicopters, we cannot proceed as we had planned.”

  The Cuban allowed a rare smile to cross his face. “Ah, but we can, Comrade. The fight is not over.”

  “The fight is never over, Comrade,” Nguyen replied, automatically parroting the old Party slogan he had learned as a child. “But we have run out of options and have to find a way to escape and continue the fight somewhere else.”

  “Options, Comrade?” Garcia leaned forward, his voice rising. “Options? We still have an option for those who are brave and devoted to the cause. And this is an option that will strike a harder blow to the Yankee Imperialists than our other plans would have done.”

  Nguyen frowned. He knew of no other plan to attack the United States and, as the number two man in the Matador operation, if there were such a plan, he should know about it. If Garcia had been hatching plots on his own, there was bound to be trouble.

  “But I don’t understand, Comrade.”

  “I am not surprised,” the Cuban replied. “No one understands the need to bring the Yankees to their knees as much as I do. Since I was a young boy, every waking moment of my life has been dedicated to their ultimate destruction. You are an Asian, Comrade, and your people have also suffered the predations of the Yankees, but not as my people have. The debt they owe us is beyond payment.”

  Nguyen doubted that the Cuban people had suffered from the Americans as much as the Vietnamese people had over the course of the long war in Southeast Asia. But this wasn’t the time or the place to get into an argument about whose cause was more just and whose people had suffered the most. His earlier belief that the Cuban wasn’t sane was proving to be true. The man was stark raving mad and that made him dangerous.

  “What is this plan, Comrade Colonel?”

  Garcia smiled. “When we loaded the nuclear power plant waste on board, I had a shipment of another special material loaded, as well, and several rockets I can use to deliver it.”

  “But I don’t understand.” Nguyen frowned. “What special material?”

  “Radioactive cobalt.”

  Nguyen was stunned. He was no scientist by any means, but even he knew that cobalt was a dangerous material.

  “The cobalt has been ground into submicron-size particles,” Garcia explained. “Tests with similar molecular weight, but nonradioactive material of the same grain size showed that it will be picked up by the offshore winds and dispersed inland for miles. It will be a thousand years or more before southern Florida will be anything other than a dead wasteland. In fact, the effect on the city will be far more destructive and longer lasting than even a fifty-megaton nuclear weapon would be if it detonated in the harbor.”

  Nguyen was shocked speechless. A nuclear terrorist attack against an American city was unthinkable! Not even the strongest hard-liners in Beijing were willing to even consider such a move. The retirement of a large part of the Yankee’s nuclear arsenal since the demise of the Soviet Union had lessened their retaliatory strength, but they were still so strong that no one wanted to play the nuke card against them.

  “I see that I have your attention, Comrade,” the Cuban said.

  “But you are inviting a nuclear strike against at least Cuba, if not China, as well.”

  Garcia smiled. “I am confident that they would not retaliate in that manner unless I were to detonate a regular nuclear device. Which, of course—” he shrugged “—I am not planning to do. And, even if I had such a device, I wouldn’t use it.”

  “But I don’t understand.”

  “Everyone fears the destructive effects of nuclear weapons,” Garcia continued, “and the hysteria has always been amusing to me. They have all forgotten that the first two nuclear weapon targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were not eradicated by the attacks. The buildings were destroyed as well as much of the population, yes. But the survivors were not forced to abandon their cities and flee forever. In fact, the Japanese have continued to live in those two cities uninter
rupted until today.”

  Nguyen was no military historian, but he recognized the truth of that statement. The threat of American nuclear domination had hung over the heads of the world for so long that people had forgotten the reality of those history-making events. Nonetheless, Garcia’s plan was horrifying.

  “What I am planning to do to Miami will leave the buildings intact for the entire world to see. In fact, there will be no signs of what had occurred at all except that all higher life in the affected area will have ceased to exist.”

  The Cuban shrugged. “Most of the plants and trees will continue to live as will much insect life. But all higher animals—mammals, birds and fish—will have died along with the Yankees, and no one will be able to live there for a thousand years.”

  Garcia sneered. “The Yankees are pathetically involved in an endless debate about what kind of monument they think should be built in New York to memorialize the attack on the World Trade Center towers. They will never need to do that for what I am going to do. The memorial for my attack on Miami will be Miami itself.”

  AFTER RICHARD SPELLMAN conducted a slow, methodical hour-and-a-half tour of the lower decks of the Carib Princess for his companion, Bolan had tossed his faxed deck plan. He had learned that even the stairwells had been changed over the years.

  “That’s all of it I know about,” Spellman said when they were back in their hiding place. “I haven’t been unable to get into the upper decks much.”

  “You’ve done well,” Bolan said.

  “What are we going to do now?” he asked.

  Bolan smiled thinly. “We’re going to start cleaning this place up one piece of dirt at a time.”

  That sounded like a real good idea on paper, and it was Bolan’s usual response to this kind of situation. But the circumstances he was dealing with this time were going to require some fancy footwork. For starters, being on shipboard severely limited his freedom of movement. He had told Spellman that he was going on a rat hunt, but more to the point, he and the doctor were more like the rats in a trap. Also, with the hostages onboard he couldn’t go into a full-bore slash-and-burn operation.