by Ted Bell
And then it got worse.
Walls of green now pressed in on them from either side, slowing them down even more. Thick, loopy vines and exposed ficus roots underfoot grabbed at their boots. Hawke, having seen Irby suddenly trip and pitch forward, didn’t like it one bit. Not that it mattered much now. Retracing their steps and coming down the open face was not an option at this late stage in the mission.
So there was nothing for it. Hawke grimly kept his mouth shut and told the chattering Rico to do the same . . .
Thirty minutes into the descent, the jungle closed in, then narrowed to a complete standstill. They stumbled into an apparent dead end. A tiny space inside a cathedral of hundred-foot-high palms, the fronds chattering loudly high overhead in the stiff winds, the air in the green hollows cool and damp. Rico was slashing at the solid green walls that remained before them, cursing loudly as he flailed away with his ivory-handled machete.
“Look, Commandante!” the young Cuban kid cried out over his shoulder. “All clear ahead now!”
Hawke looked. Rico had disappeared through the now invisible opening he had slashed between two trees in the wall of palms. The squad pressed forward in an attempt to follow his lead.
“Shut that damn kid up, Stoke,” Hawke said, using his assault knife to whack at the dangling morass of thick green vines as he, too, tried to follow Rico’s path forward. Captain Irby was now in the lead, and he was pulling back elephant leaves and palm fronds, seeking a way forward.
“I don’t like this, boss,” Stoke said, watching Irby struggle. “Something is not—”
“Down! Everybody get fucking down!” Captain Irby croaked, turning to face them, his face stricken. Stoke took one look at the man’s clouding eyes and knew they were in deep trouble.
“Hey, Captain, you okay, man?” Stoke said to him, reaching out to help. There was so much blood. The man had something stuck in his . . . oh, Jesus, it looked like Rico’s ivory-handled machete. It was buried up to the hilt, near the top of Irby’s chest, just above his Nomex body armor. Irby’s fixed and glazed eyes stared out at nothing, and he fell facedown at Major Fitzgerald’s feet.
“Oh, God, I didn’t think he would—” the Aussie said, dropping to his knees to see what he could do for his dead or dying comrade.
And that’s when the thick jungle surrounding the natural cathedral erupted in a storm of sizzling lead. Heavy machine-gun fire came from all directions, muzzle flashes visible everywhere they looked, rounds shredding the foliage over their heads and all around the trapped commandos. Masses of shrieking green parrots, macaws, and other tropical birds loudly rose up into the moonlit skies in terror as the incoming fire increased in ferocity.
“Get down now! Take cover!” Hawke shouted. He dove left, but not before he heard the young Aussie scream, “I’m hit! I’m hit!” And then he was silent.
“Damn it to hell!” Hawke cried, getting back on his feet to go to the wounded man’s aid.
“Forget him, boss! He’s gone,” Stoke cried out.
Hawke felt a visceral torque in his gut. In a rage, he opened up with both his assault rifle and his machine pistol, firing both weapons on full auto until he’d exhausted his ammo and reached for more. Stoke had his back, the two of them stood there back-to-back, leaning against each other as they spun in unison, unleashing a 360-degree hail of lead with overlapping fields of fire. The thumping roar of Stoke’s heavy M-60 machine gun seemed to be having an impact on the enemy hidden in the jungle.
“Gotta be getting the hell out of here, boss!” Stoke said, grabbing Hawke’s shoulder and spinning him around. “Back up the mountain! It’s the only way . . .”
“Go, go!” Hawke said. He heaved two frag grenades over his shoulder while turning to follow his friend’s upward retreat. He’d taken two steps forward when a high-caliber round slammed him in the lower back, spun him around, and dropped him to his knees.
“Boss!” Stoke cried, seeing Hawke trying vainly to get to his feet and firing his weapon blindly.
“Keep bloody moving, damn it!” Hawke shouted. “I’ll take care of these bastards. Leave me be.”
“Not today,” Stoke said.
Stoke whirled around and bent down, firing his weapon with his left hand and scooping Hawke up with his right. He flung Hawke over his broad shoulders and started running flat out straight up the mountain. The giant with his wounded friend tore through the dense foliage as if it didn’t exist.
They got maybe a few hundred yards before all hope of salvation vanished. A broad rope net, weighted with stones, was released by three Cuban soldiers perched on branches high in the canopy. The net fell, entrapping the two enemy combatants, driving them to the ground, and ending for good any hope they still harbored of escape.
WHEN HAWKE CAME TO, HE was gazing into the sweat-streaked face of the Russian general he’d come to Cuba to kill.
Ivanov was bent over from the waist, smiling into his prisoner’s glazed eyes. His thick lips were moving, his Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down, but he wasn’t making any sounds Hawke could understand as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Alex blinked rapidly, trying to focus. He saw Stoke out of the corner of his eye.
His friend was bound by his ankles with rough cordage and suspended upside down from a heavy wooden rafter. He appeared to be naked. And there was a lot of blood pooled on the floor beneath his head for some reason. Had he been shot, too, and hung to bleed out? Hawke’s own wound was radiating fire throughout his body. He fought to stay awake . . . heard a familiar laugh and looked across the room.
The kid, Rico, was there, too, sitting at a battered wooden table, smoking a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of rum with some other Cuban guards. He seemed to be talking to Stokely out of the side of his mouth. Every now and then he’d get up, walk over to the suspended black man, scream epithets into his bleeding ears, and then backhand him viciously across the mouth with his pistol. A few white teeth shone in the puddle of blood under Stoke’s head.
Stoke, perhaps the toughest man Hawke had ever met, was a stoic of the first order. Hawke had never once heard his friend cry out in pain.
Hawke felt a white-hot flare of anger. Bloody hell. He had to do something! He tried to rise from the chair but felt himself slipping away again. He could not seem to keep his eyes open. How long had he been awake? They never let him sleep. No food. Some poisonous water out of a rusty coffee can now and then. It was cold sleeping on the dirt floor of the dank cement building after the sun dropped . . .
They’d both been stripped naked the first night. Allowed to keep nothing but their heavy combat boots with no laces. The bullet was still in Alex’s back, and the wound had turned into one hot mess, all right, but he fought to ignore the searing pain and keep his wits about him. He shook his head and tried to remember where he was despite the spiking fever that made straight thinking so difficult.
It was a compound built in a clearing in the middle of the jungle. Palm tree fronds brushed the ground. High wire fences. Dogs. Every evening the Russians came, including General Ivanov. They drank vodka and played rummy with the Cubans. The general and Rico interrogated the two prisoners until they got bored with torture and retreated deeper and deeper into drink.
The worst brutality the two prisoners had endured was called the “Wishing Well.” Every morning at dawn, two burly guards would march them naked through the jungle to a spot away from the compound. There, two fifty-gallon drums had been stacked one on top of the other and buried in the soil. Hawke and Jones were made to lie down in the dirt beside the well. One guy would bind each of their ankles to a stout bamboo pole while the other one kept his MAC-10 machine pistol trained on both of them.
Then they’d lift them up off the ground by turns and dunk them headfirst down into the foul, slop-filled hole. Sometimes for a few seconds, other times for a couple of minutes. Or longer. Neither man knew how long his head would be submerged. Each would come up sputtering. The hole was brimming with a fetid stew of urine and f
eces.
What the Wishing Well actually was, Hawke and Stokely soon realized, was the Cuban soldiers’ latrine.
“I can’t take much more of this, Stoke,” Hawke said at dawn one morning, before the guards came for them. “I’m deadly serious, man. This will break me. I thought Iraq was bad. But, this? Hell, I’ll just start talking, man.”
“We are just not ever going to do that, boss.”
“I know.”
SO THAT MORNING WAS DIFFERENT. The two guards arrived and marched the naked and manacled prisoners outside the fenced perimeter and single file into the jungle. The Cubanos laughing and shouting to each other out of habit. Another hot day, another hilarious game of dunk the prisoners headfirst into the latrine.
One guard was in front, Hawke right behind him. Then Stoke, then the other guard at the rear with his gun aimed at the back of Stoke’s head. No talking allowed for the two captives. Hawke obeyed that rule until they got within sight of the Wishing Well. That’s when he said the one word Stoke was waiting to hear:
“NOW!”
In that instant, Hawke got his manacled wrists over the guard’s head and cinched tight around the stocky Cuban’s throat. Hawke yanked him backward off his feet, got him on the ground, and began pummeling his face with his two bound fists, using the steel manacles as a weapon. Stoke, meanwhile, planted one foot and whirled, whipping his bound hands in a great sweeping arc, slamming his enjoined fists against the side of the other guard’s head and knocking him off his feet.
Hawke had little memory of the ensuing skirmish. Both Cubans acquitted themselves rather nicely, knowing full well they were fighting for their lives. Hawke was fairly sure he’d bit both ears off his guy and done terrible things to his eyes and teeth. And, ultimately, to the vertebrae in his cervical spine. C3, C4, and C5, damaged beyond repair.
Meanwhile, Stoke used his enormous size and weight to his advantage. He sat atop the guy long enough to break the index finger of the thrashing right hand by removing his gun while his finger was still inside the trigger guard. Then he bounced up and down on his chest a couple of times until all his ribs fractured pretty much at once. Until something sharp and splintery pierced his heart and lungs.
FOR THREE DAYS THEY FOUGHT to survive in the wild. Naked, hungry, no food, no water, no map. They followed the sun during the day. Kept well clear of the occasional dirt roads. Survived on snakes, bugs, and bark. Made a little shelter with palm fronds every night to keep the cold rain off their hides. And so it went.
On the fourth night, they heard booming surf in the distance. That’s when they came upon a high wire fence. They had little strength left to go around it. Hawke was in far worse shape than Stokely; he’d lost a lot of blood and still battled a raging fever. Somehow, they both found enough strength to scale the fence and drop to the ground on the other side.
HAWKE WOKE UP IN SICK BAY the next morning with no memory of how he’d come to be there.
“Good morning, handsome,” a pretty red-haired American nurse said to him, holding the straw in his orange juice next to his parched lips. “There’s someone here to see you.”
Hawke smiled.
“Who is it?”
“I’ll go get him, honey,” the nurse said.
Now a strange man appeared at his bedside. American military. Brass, obviously. A U.S. naval officer, who was also smiling down at him in a friendly way. Where the bloody hell was he? On a U.S. destroyer?
“Good morning, Admiral,” Hawke managed, very happy to see a familiar uniform and a friendly face.
“Good morning,” the old man said, pulling a chair up to his bedside. “Son, I don’t know who the hell you are or where the hell you came from, but I will tell you one goddamn thing. You ruined my golf game, sailor.”
“Sorry, sir?”
“You heard me. I came up the seventh fairway this morning half expecting to find my ball in a sand trap. Instead, I found you. Bare assed, except for your goddamn shoes. Damnedest thing I ever saw. And no tracks in the sand anywhere around you. Like you’d dropped out of the blue.”
“From the top of the fence, Admiral.”
“But how the hell did you—Never mind.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Oh, hell, don’t apologize. I hit my sand wedge out of there and sank it for a birdie! Almost had to take your foot off to get my club face on the ball. Never had a human hazard before! Welcome to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base Golf and Country Club, son! We’re glad to have you and your Navy SEAL friend Mr. Jones here as our guests.”
Then the admiral laughed and handed him a fat Montecristo cigar. He helped Hawke get it lit and then said, “Tell me, what can I do for you, son? You look to me like a man who could use a helping hand right about now.”
Hawke smiled and said, “There is one thing you could do for me, sir.”
“Name it.”
“Got any drones?” Hawke said, taking another puff and feeling instantly much improved. The fog seemed to be lifting. He saw a small green bird alight on his sunny windowsill, and it seemed to him a harbinger of happy days to come.
“Hell, yeah, I got drones, son. Shitload of them. What exactly do you have in mind?”
“Well, Admiral, you see, there’s this little pink hotel over on the northeast coast of Cuba. Place called the Illuminata de los Reyes. One of the guests there, a Russian chap of my acquaintance, was exceptionally rude to my friend Stokely Jones and me recently. Killed a couple of my chaps in an ambush. And I thought, well, perhaps you could teach him a lesson in old-fashioned Anglo-American manners.”
“Done and done!” The admiral laughed. “I’ll have my guys get a couple of birds in the air before lunchtime. That little hotel you mentioned, that’s the pretty pink one over in Cabo Cruz, am I right?”
“That’s the one all right, Admiral.”
“I’m on it.”
And damn if it wasn’t done that very day.
Done, and done, as they say.
CHAPTER 1
You see, the whole damn business started with the USS Cole.
The Cole is a serious U.S. Navy warship, mind you. Think billion-dollar baby. She’s a 505-foot-long Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer. She carries a vast array of advanced radar equipment, not to mention her torpedoes, machine guns, Tomahawk missiles, and, well—you get the picture. Bad mammajamma.
Big, badass damn boat. Kept afloat by a crew of young navy seamen. And you won’t find as nice a gang of fine young men and women as you will in the U.S. Navy. “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” kids, all of them. Manners, remember those? Good haircuts? Pants actually held up with belts? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Along about August 2000—remember, this was about a year before the attack on the Twin Towers—USS Cole sailed from NAS Norfolk to join the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Arabian Gulf. A few months later she called at the seaport of Aden, situated by the eastern approach to the Red Sea. A city, weird as it might seem, built in the crater of a dormant volcano. What were they thinking? Anyway, the day it all went down, the Big Wake-Up Call, I like to call it, the Cole was under a security posture known as Threatcon Bravo. We’re talking the third of five alert levels used by the U.S. Navy to label impending terrorist threats.
Sunny day. Hot as Hades. Most of the crew was busy with daily shipboard routine, but a bunch of guys had their shirts off, sunning on the foredeck, playing cards, shooting the breeze, or, more accurately, the shit, as they say in the navy.
One of the guys, out of the corner of his eye, notices a small fiberglass fishing boat making its way through the busy harbor. Kinda boat local fishermen used to ply their trade around the harbor. Nothing fancy and certainly nothing scary.
The boat seemed to be headed right for the ship’s port side, or, so thought Seaman Foster Riggs anyway. Now, on a normal day, you understand, most of the harbor’s waterborne inhabitants sensibly gave the Cole a wide berth. Which is why Seaman Riggs got up and went to the port rail to have a closer look at the approaching
vessel. Something odd about it, he was thinking.
It was going pretty fast for conditions, number one. Two locals stood side by side at the helm station. Young guys, bearded, T-shirts and faded shorts. Had the throttle cranked, the boat up on plane. Out for a cruise, a couple of amigos just having a good time, was what it looked like.
Nothing looked all that out of the ordinary to Riggs, even as the fishing boat drew ever nearer to the Cole. Big smiles on the local yokels’ faces as they pulled along the destroyer’s port side.
As the boat settled, they were raising their hands up in the air, waving hello at the friendly young sailor staring down at them. Friendlies themselves, Riggs was thinking. But then they did something funny, something that should have sounded crazy loud alarm bells banging big-time inside that young seaman’s head.
The two men looked up at the skinny sailor on the foredeck, snapped to attention, and then saluted smartly. Riggs noticed something really strange then: the smiles were gone from their faces.
A second later, those two boys were vaporized. They had just exploded a whole boatload of C-4 plastic explosive. At the moment of the explosion, the little skiff was about five feet from the warship’s hull. And that much C-4 at close range? Hell, that is the equivalent of seven hundred pounds of TNT blowing up in your face.
The blast shattered windows and shook the buildings along the waterfront. It also opened a forty-foot-by-forty-foot gash in the destroyer’s reinforced steel hull. And turned the inside of that ship into an abattoir. Seventeen of our young warriors were killed instantly or mortally wounded. Thirty-nine more were seriously injured. It was bad. It was real bad, brother.
The Cole incident, that was the single worst attack on an American target since the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
That attack was bad enough.
And then it got worse.
The blast in the Gulf of Aden sent shock-wave repercussions rolling down the corridors of the Pentagon.
The navy brass had finally gotten the wake-up call heard round the world. Decades of the USN’s woefully outdated policies and training procedures had finally come back to bite the navy’s ass, big-time. The much disputed Rules of Engagement, well, that’s exactly what had put the Cole in the crosshairs of two young terrorists hell-bent on killing American sailors.