by Ted Bell
But Hawke had a personal need to witness and feel that sense of urgency and commitment in the men he was about to send into harm’s way.
Here in the spec-ops part of the ship, he found the Stokeland Raiders gathered. They would form two squads for the mission: Redcoat and Bluecoat. Both teams were kitted out in head-to-toe black Kevlar assault gear, looking like some demented alien NFL coach’s football fantasy of the most badass damn team in the universe. Which is exactly what the hell these guys were.
Hawke was now down in the ship’s well, a large rectangular opening cut into the aft section of the keel inside the very bottom of the hull; he saw black seawater sloshing up onto the surrounding decks. The steel decks were strewn with various items the assault teams had selected but chosen to discard at the last moment.
Extra M16 hot mags, assault knives, gloves, a couple of pairs of NVGs, even an M110 sniper rifle someone already heavily armed had felt was overkill. Hawke had ordered this undersea-launching platform for the two SDVs (SEAL Delivery Vehicles) built while the boat was still in dry dock back in Key West. It was comparable to the dry deck shelter used aboard U.S. Navy submarines.
The Stokeland Raiders, the sixteen-man platoon divided into two squads of eight, and containing battle-hardened frogmen, demolition experts, and snipers, were already splashing around in the black water inside the ship’s enclosed well. They appeared to be simply a bunch of incredibly fit young men without a care in the world, laughing and joking. Beach boys who just happened to be swimming around inside the hull of a megayacht, waiting to climb aboard a pair of highly classified U.S. Navy torpedo-shaped minisubs and go to war instead of playing water polo.
Humor was a great armor to don before battle. It offered a kind of mystic or mythic protection, some of them thought, and those who didn’t believe such stuff went along with it simply because, after all, you never know, do you? How many guys die laughing? Prayer takes many forms on the grim eve of battle.
One younger guy hollered to his mirthful brothers, “So this flashy car salesman says to the young black guy, ‘You thinking about buying this Cadillac convertible, son?’ And the black guy says, ‘Hell, no, man. I’m thinking about how much pussy I’d get if I bought this Cadillac.’”
And the echoes of laughter of a bunch of men who had been there and back more times than they could count filled the steel interior of the ship’s well. Every one of them knew that as soon they deployed inside the two SDVs and were en route to engage the enemy, everything was going to get deadly serious in a hurry. American frogmen were coming . . . watch your ass, boy . . .
Underwater, undetected, and underestimated.
Hawke saw Stoke standing on the deck, looking down at his men, alone with his thoughts.
“You good, Stoke?” Hawke said quietly, standing next to his old friend.
“All good, all the time,” was Stoke’s standard reply to that one.
Hawke looked down at Brock, already swimming up inside his sub on the port side of the well.
“And Mr. Brock over there in SDV 2? He ready?”
“Good to go. He loves this stuff. Never short on courage, you gotta give him that.”
“Right. Listen, because he doesn’t, Stoke. Tell him that as soon as he blows that Cuban command bunker, his team hauls ass back down the mountain. I want him at the warehouses to reinforce you and your guys’ final attack. I still don’t have a good feeling about the human intel on the amount of resistance we’re going to see tonight. But, hell. Darkness, element of surprise working for us, superior fighting men, tactics, weapons . . . we’re good, right?”
“We got me, remember?”
Hawke laughed briefly, then turned very somber. “You get shot up bad tonight? I want you to remember what I told you about pain that night in that Hormuz Strait hellhole after I got shot to hell, right?”
“I remember.”
“What’d I say?”
“Pain is just weakness leaving your body.”
Hawke saw the concern in Stoke’s eyes and looked away, embarrassed.
“It’s just that the stakes are as high as they can get now, Stoke. High as they’ve ever been. The world will little note nor long remember what we do here tonight. But—if we screw this up, well . . . you know . . . it’s pretty much all over. All of it.”
“I do know. And I won’t let you down, boss. My guys won’t let you down. None of us. Never.”
“Give ’em hell, Stoke,” Hawke said, giving his friend’s shoulder a squeeze.
Might as well try to squeeze concrete.
CHAPTER 68
Stoke dove below the surface and swam up inside the SDV’s plexiglass-canopied cockpit. In the SDV, the pilot was dry from the waist up, wet from the waist down, giving him cockpit-style visibility to drive the boat, monitor the batteries and compressed air supply, and then egress the hell out when it was time to shoot bullets and kick Commie ass.
He pulled himself up into the enclosed pilot station in the port-side watercraft and said hello to his copilot, Gator Luttier. He’d gotten to know Gator pretty well when they’d boarded the Russian spy ship and he’d liked what he’d seen.
Another one of his Raiders, the skinny kid from Kentucky, Fat Jesse Saunders, otherwise known as Fat, climbed up inside to take the helm on the other boat with his copilot, Harry Brock, in the vehicle located to starboard in the well. Gator and Stoke were both smiling.
They loved operating these damn boats. Stoke had the most experience, having first encountered them as a young Navy SEAL in his war, his guys using them for riverine operations in Cambodia and Thailand. Gator had gained experience tearing ass all over the harbor at Tripoli during the dustup in Libya.
Clandestine SDV teams used the submersibles to operate or access ports, harbors, and beachfronts held by hostile forces. Or, like now, areas where military activity would draw unwanted notice and objection. Let’s just say Vladimir Putin for starters. The vehicle was flooded during maneuvers, and the swimmers rode exposed to the water, breathing from the onboard compressed air supply or using their own SCUBA gear.
Each of the modified Mark 8 SDVs was lithium-ion battery powered and equipped with propulsion, navigation, communication, and life-support equipment. Each also was capable of transporting one-half of a SEAL platoon composed of sixteen SEALs—two officers, one chief, and thirteen enlisted men, from the mother ship to the mission area. The submersible boat could then be “parked” or loiter in the area, retrieve the troops, and return home to the mother ship.
Blackhawke’s interior SDV launch well was crucial to tonight’s success in achieving surprise once ashore. The well allowed the vehicles to exit unseen beneath the ship’s keel and to remain submerged and out of sight as they began powering away from the megayacht and across the broad harbor toward the mission target, the explosive-laden warehouses on Spy Island.
The two boats, each fully loaded with its complement of eight covert warriors, shoved off. They were both headed in the same direction, ESW to the fortified Cuban navy complex, about a fifteen-minute excursion beneath the sea. After a final video surveillance a quarter of a mile offshore, they would proceed directly to their agreed-upon insertion point.
Fat, working late in the war room the night prior, had determined the single shoreside location where the invaders stood any chance of making landfall without detection. He’d done a thorough search of all the possibilities, located the ideal spot, then created a new map of the harbor that pinpointed their LZ for tonight. They would disembark just off an old and abandoned Soviet area of the port, well beyond the reach of the big searchlights and the big dogs patrolling the perimeter fences.
Fat had pinpointed a dilapidated concrete launch ramp on one of the sat photos, in an area built by the Soviets prior to JFK’s Bay of Pigs invasion. This section of the old port was originally designed for launching amphibious vessels to use against the Americans and had not been used since. The ramp and surrounding buildings were in a section of the harbor that was no longer f
unctional and devoid of any visible guard or other personnel.
BACK ON DUTY ON BLACKHAWKE’S BRIDGE, Commander Hawke raised the high-powered Zeiss lenses to his eyes. His eyes happened to alight at the top of the ship’s flag mast, mounted just forward of the wheelhouse. Damn it. The ship was still flying the Hawke Industries burgee and the yacht ensign, both designed to conceal the ship’s true nature while in U.S. ports and in transit to the operation sector.
Irritated with himself for his own sloppy lack of attention to detail, he grabbed the PA mike and depressed the transmit button.
“Ahoy, the foredeck! About time we showed the enemy our true colors, gentlemen.”
“Aye-aye, Skipper!” said a young crewman already racing toward the base of the mast.
“Strike the colors,” Hawke said, referring to the burgee flying now.
“Strike colors, aye!” was the reply.
The young sailor turned to the flag halyard secured to the mast, eased the lines, and hauled down the offending burgee and ship’s ensign. Once they were in his hands, he disengaged them from the halyard and replaced them with a faded and tattered old cotton flag of black and white. Hawke had given the rubber pouch containing it to the sailor for safekeeping while they were still in Key West.
The new colors were now hauled smartly up to the masthead and the flag was soon whipping around in the stiff breeze. Headed yet again into the thick of battle, the yacht Blackhawke was flying her true colors once more.
Something stirred inside Hawke at the sight, roiling his pirate blood. He had long admired this artifact from his pirate ancestor’s treasure trove of museum-quality artifacts. It had been discovered years ago during the excavation of an area of the port of Kingston, Jamaica, and somehow made its way into the hands of Alex Hawke.
It had been flown by the legendary pirate Captain Edward Teach. Sometimes known by his nom de guerre—Blackbeard.
The skull and crossbones of the mighty Jolly Roger.
CHAPTER 69
Hawke shifted the Zeiss lenses down to the black coastline of Spy Island and entertained a thought: When the next war starts, it will start here—here in a forgotten backwater on a forgotten island in the Caribbean Sea.
He dropped the binocs. Something troublesome on the helm radar screen above caught his eye. An unwelcome blip had strayed from his comfort zone, shifting onto a parallel heading and—
“Hard to port, engines all ahead flank,” he said sharply to the helmsman. The man reacted instantly.
“Hard to port, all ahead flank, aye,” came Lieutenant Des Fitzgerald’s reply. The big boat heeled hard over and carved a tight turn in the rough seas, over onto a new, southerly course. Misdirection was what was called for now, confuse enemy radar as to your true intentions.
“Hard to starboard, Lieutenant. Come to new heading three-two-zero, maintain flank speed . . .”
“Three-two-zero, maintain flank, aye.”
Again the boat heeled, this time to starboard.
Hawke looked up at the digital mission clock. He wanted to see if it was concurrent with the Hawke mission clock ticking down in his head: Stoke and the two SDV teams would be nearing the abandoned ramp about now and—his reverie was unpleasantly interrupted by Sparky, the ship’s radar/sonar officer.
“Helm, Sonar, new contact bearing three-nine-five . . . range, 36.3 miles . . . uh . . . screw signature indicates she’s a Russian Thunder class missile frigate, sir.”
“Sonar, Helm,” Hawke replied. “What’s her bearing?”
“Sorry, sir . . . contact bearing three-one-niner . . . we’ve been tracking her ever since she steamed out of Havana and made a major course correction . . . she’s headed this way . . .”
“Roger. She’ll attempt a blockade outside the harbor mouth, attempt to trap us inside . . . what’s her armament, Sonar?” Hawke said.
“Thunder class frigate carries four C802 missiles, two 30mm cannons, and two 23mm cannons . . .”
“Christ. What’s her speed, Sonar?” Hawke said, immediately heading aft to the sonar station just off the bridge.
“Flank speed classified. She’s fast enough though . . . Engine turns for thirty-nine knots . . . she’s got boost gas turbines . . .”
“ETA at Isla de Pinos?”
“Roger, if she maintains current speed and course . . . 0230, sir.”
“Forty-two minutes,” Hawke said, looking over at Geneva. “Helm, maintain current heading,” Hawke said. “We’re going in. We’ll find out who blinks first on the way out.”
“Maintain current heading, aye,” Captain King said. Having relieved Fitzgerald, she was back at the helm. It was not Geneva’s first taste of battle and Hawke was glad to note that she seemed preternaturally calm and wholly in command. A very good sign, Hawke thought, adding, Let’s just hope it stays that way.
STOKE WAS FIRST ASHORE.
Cradling his M16, he waded through knee-deep seawater and then up the gradual incline of the wide concrete ramp. Redcoat squad was right behind him. The old 1950s concrete in the harbor was intact, but barely. Great chunks had fallen off into the sea. Russian construction in Cuba was notoriously shoddy. Cheap sand-based concrete was a mainstay of the era, and many of the old Soviet-era apartment complexes surrounding Havana had simply fallen down after the Russians packed up and went home.
Brock and Fat, with the balance of the Bluecoat headbangers right behind them, were slogging the ramp up to solid ground. The weather had ramped up, too, as the eye of the storm approached. Tall palm trees everywhere were bent almost double, their fronds whipping back and forth and clacking loudly in the gusts. The increasingly ferocious wind and driving rain made it difficult for anybody to see anything.
Stoke could barely make out Brock ten feet away, doing a last-minute weapons check along with his guys from Bravo.
Flipping down his IR night-vision goggles, Stoke checked out the guard towers in what he’d taken to calling the “warehouse district,” and the fenced perimeter surrounding the naval base camp. Or as much of it as he could see in this crappy weather. He kept on looking, hoping to find a weak spot he’d missed looking at charts and diagrams in the Blackhawke war room.
Originally, he’d thought the best way inside was to breach the main gate, storm it, and get it the hell over with. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He could plainly see how closely the dense jungle encroached on the base fence line. Yeah, okay. Maybe he could do a feint. A small noisy squad at the front gate . . . meanwhile, the bulk of the Raiders are disappearing into the jungle . . . wire cutters at three locations opening big holes for a lightning assault from the landward side.
Yeah. That was maybe the way to do it.
Surprise, surprise.
QUIET. YOU HAD TO FIGURE those guys in the towers were busy watching the smoke and fire rising from the two big patrol boats Blackhawke had most recently taken out of service. Had to be pissed about that, not to mention seeing one of their fighter planes being blown out of the sky right in front of their eyes. The other three fighters had gone to lunch. So far, anyway, things weren’t exactly going their way. But there was a long way to go before it was over.
Stoke, Brock, and two badass machine gunners packing M60s from Redcoat, were all sitting beneath a row of blown-out windows in an abandoned warehouse. From their position, the men looked directly down on the main gate. Redcoat and Bluecoat teams were making their way through the jungle at the rear of the perimeter. Stoke was awaiting the signal letting him know the Raiders had successfully punched a big hole in the wire fencing and were ready to attack.
“Mr. Brock, a word?” Stoke said, imitating one of Hawke’s mannerisms just to stick it to Harry. The ex-marine came knee-crawling over, lifting up the face shield used to keep the driving rain out of his eyes.
“What’s up?” Brock said, keeping his head down. Searchlights were now playing their beams all over the façade of the old building.
“This is where we part ways, little buddy. You and Gator know what the drill is.”
“Bet yo’ ass.”
“Seriously?”
“Something Gator says. I think it’s funny.”
Stoke tended to ignore the typical insolence but not this time. He put a big hand on Brock’s shoulder, turned him around so they were face-to-face, looked down, and said:
“Harry, listen up, damn it. I’m communicating this to you at the request of the bossman, okay? As soon as you and Gator have taken out that mountain bunker, you get your ass back down here to the waterfront, you understand? The boss is apprehensive about the intel we got from those two Cuban CIA undercover guys. Most especially, the number of armed Russian troops defending the warehouse complex. He’s apprehensive? Hawke? That means I’m double apprehensive. You hear me on the radio looking for your white ass—you get it in gear. Capiche?”
Brock nodded his head, sullen, but with respect.
“Something happens, some good reason you guys can’t make it, we rendezvous at the ramp at exactly 0400. Don’t miss the boat, Harry. You know that ‘no man left behind’ tradition? Yeah, well. I just might make an exception in the case of your sorry ass.”
Brock laughed it off and motioned to Gator. He and Gator got on pretty good now. Neither of them really gave two shits and that gave them a kind of bond. They weren’t exactly good old boys but they liked to think of themselves that way. Country, not city. Each of them would be toting a big M60 heavy machine gun and satchels of Semtex. It was a helluva lot of firepower for two guys and Stoke just hoped it was enough.
Harry said something stupid in farewell, but Stoke couldn’t hear over the loud hiss of the rain and sporadic gunfire around the town. Brock and his sidekick slipped out into the rain and through the maze of falling-down brick buildings and rusted out trucks and burnt-out Russian jeeps from another war, another time.