by Don Mann
“Here.”
“Equipment?” Guapo asked.
“Three hush puppies”—Smith and Wesson M39s with detachable suppressors—“with ammo, incendiary grenades, gaffer’s tape, rope, ski masks, three prepaid cell phones. Programmed into each cell phone is a number. You need anything, or when you’re finished with the vehicle, call and we’ll pick it up. The SUV has a full tank of gas and is equipped with a Garmin GPS. Those were my instructions. Anything else?”
Guapo thought for a moment and said, “I think we’re okay.”
“Good.”
“You want us to drop you off somewhere?” Guapo asked.
“No thanks. I have a ride. Good luck.”
Twenty minutes later, they exited the Washington Beltway onto I-95 South. The female voice on the Garmin instructed them to take Exit 84A and merge onto I-295 South.
Approximately three and a half hours after they left D.C., the three sicarios arrived in Virginia Beach. It was almost 9 p.m., so Osito used his iPhone to consult Yelp.com and find a place to eat. He chose the Abbey Road Pub on Twenty-Second Street, because his older brother was a Beatles fan and Abbey Road was one of the CDs that played over and over in the bedroom they shared growing up. The three men ordered shrimp cocktails to start, followed by the prime rib au jus.
A quartet of middle-aged gringos played Beatles songs on a little stage at the end of the room. Osito thought their rendition of “Blackbird” with mandolin accompaniment was particularly good. He sang along on the final verse, and when they left, tipped the quartet twenty dollars.
An hour later, their bellies full, the Garmin directed them to Tom Crocker’s residence on Cherry Oak Lane. They found a dark street with two-story gray clapboard houses spaced at least fifty feet apart, surrounded by tall trees and backed with marshland.
“Quieto,” Guapo commented.
“Muy quieto. Sí.”
Number 2040 was set a hundred meters back from the road behind a patch of oak and poplar trees. As they passed, Guapo glimpsed yellow light glowing on either side of the front door and inside the house on the first floor. He parked farther down the street near some tall trees and got out. He saw no sign of people, just trees swaying in the breeze, and the moon playing hide-and-seek behind high clouds.
A dog barked vigorously from inside Crocker’s house when he rang the bell. No one answered. Glancing at the houses to the left and right, he noticed that both were completely dark and there were no cars in either driveway.
Guapo glanced at his watch, which read 10:16, then circled to his left to the garage, which was empty. Continuing to the back of the house, he peered through a glass door and saw a single light on in the kitchen and a German shepherd barking from a doorway behind it.
Returning to the SUV, he said in Spanish, “No one’s home.”
“We should break in and wait inside,” Osito suggested. “That way we can drink his beer.”
“Gringo beer tastes like piss. We’ll wait here.”
The copilot of the unmarked C-23 Sherpa turned to Crocker, sitting on a bench along the fuselage, and held up ten fingers. Crocker nodded and looked at his watch. It was 0220 and the altimeter indicated that they were flying at 8,223 feet.
The SEALs had used the thirty-odd minutes of the flight to don their jump gear and conduct riggers’ checks on the parachutes to make sure they were folded and packed properly, then inventory their first-, second-, and third-line gear.
Each man carried a watertight weapons bag with Heckler & Koch 45 automatic pistols with Ti-RANT suppressors, MP7A1 submachine guns with extended forty-round magazines, optics, flashlights, and four-inch silencers. Also included in their first-line gear were wet suits, NVGs, pocketknives, Leatherman knives with some 550 cord wrapped around the handle, handheld radios, dummy cord, compasses with self-luminous tritium light sources, Phoenix IR strobe beacons that issued a personal combat identification (CID) that was invisible to the naked eye but could be spotted through NVGs at twenty miles away, Oceanic OC1 Titanium Dive Computer watches, and Rockwell PSN-11 Precision Lightweight GPS receivers.
The secure (Y-code) differentials on the GPS units allowed the users to receive 24/7 2-D and 3-D positioning anywhere on the planet with the help of twenty-two military satellites without giving up the users’ location. They were accurate to within less than a meter and weighed a mere 2.7 pounds each with batteries installed.
As the lead swimmer, Akil also wore a special miniature underwater GPS (MUGR) with position and navigational information that would allow the team to enter the Almendares River without coming up to the surface. It was preprogrammed with charts of the river and maps of the city that showed the target location (Clínico Central Cira García) and the exfil point a block and a half away.
Second-line gear carried in their backpacks included rebreathing Drägers, dive masks, fins, six extra magazines for each weapon, grenades (M18s and M67s), strobe lights, blowout patches, MREs, gloves, and water purification tablets.
Each man also carried third-line gear appropriate to his specific role on the team. Crocker, as the corpsman, packed an emergency medical kit, which included UVs and a needle for a possible thoracentesis. Suárez, as the team breacher, had various explosives, timers, detonators, and fuses.
In his pack, Mancini lugged a high-tech pneumatically fired grappling hook called a Rescue Air Initiated Launch (RAIL), which consisted of a black cannon about the size of a man’s arm that could launch a metal grappling claw attached to a nylon-jacketed line over 150 feet.
Crocker helped Akil secure the F47OU Combat Rubber Raiding Craft (CRRC or Zodiac) to the wooden platform, which involved inflating the 75-inch-wide by 185-inch-long boat with CO2 cartridges, then tying the IR chemical light to the bow and stern, fastening three paddles to the side, and stowing the air pump and hose in the pockets in the right front and left rear. Next they placed a thirteen-by-thirty-six-inch piece of honeycomb on the floor of the boat and stowed and secured the engine and fuel tanks. Finally they lashed the CRRC to the platform, secured a G-12 cargo parachute with the rise compartment facing up, then installed a 5,000-pound M-1 release.
Once that was accomplished, Crocker huddled the men together in the rear of the fuselage and went over last-minute details.
“We’re gonna deploy our chutes low, at two thousand feet. The CRRC is going down first. Hopefully it makes it intact. If it goes down like a lawn dart and disappears into the water, the aircraft will drop us at an alternative DZ and we’ll have to swim in turtle-back.”
“Why didn’t we bring an extra rubber ducky?” Akil asked.
“Because they didn’t have one,” Mancini growled.
“Assuming the Zodiac makes it,” continued Crocker, “we’re gonna ride to within fifteen hundred meters of the coast and swim from there. Akil is carrying the MUGR. He’ll lead the way. Once we enter the river, we’re gonna swim over two tunnels, then under the Calle Eleven Bridge. The river will bend sharply to our left. That’s where we surface, in the vicinity of Parque Almendares.”
“Currents and tide could be an issue, so if we reach a second bridge, the Calle Forty-Two Bridge, we know we’ve gone too far,” Akil pointed out.
“Correct,” Crocker shouted over the engines. “The clinic is four blocks west of the park on Avenida Forty-One. Akil will be primary point to and from the target.”
“What do we do if we’re compromised by dogs, guards, or policemen?” Mancini asked.
“We take ’em out. We can’t risk capture. Each of us is carrying a couple kill pills. I don’t need to tell you what they’re for.”
“What about civilians?”
“Situation dictates. Use your judgment.”
“What are our actions at the objective?” Suárez asked.
“We conduct a thorough search for the hostage. It’s a three-story structure. CIA believes that the operating rooms are on the third deck. We find her, secure her, kill the fucking scumbag Jackal if we can find him, and get the fuck out of there. Then we
hightail it to the exfil point, which is in front of a small park a block and a half southeast. We’re supposed to rendezvous with a guy named Flores, who will be driving a small blue-and-white tourist bus with ‘Vizul’ written on it.”
“Flores.”
“Yeah, Flores. He’s gonna put us on a DHL cargo jet that will take us to Miami.”
“How come we’re not flying FedEx?” Akil asked.
“Because FedEx is an American company, and they don’t like Americans. The Cuban authorities fucking hate us. DHL is German owned.”
“They gonna seal us in a box?”
“I don’t care what they put us in. Neither will you at that point. Get jocked up and ready for the jump.”
Guapo, Osito, and Stallone sat in the RAV4 taking turns watching Crocker’s driveway. When no one arrived by 2 a.m., they took a vote and decided to try Mancini’s house, which was a couple of blocks south. Palmetto Drive was even more desolate—a two-lane country road with modest one-story ranch houses on large plots of land. Number 1005 featured a front lawn half the size of a football field, with an American flag hanging from a pole in the middle next to a family of ornamental deer. To the left of the deer stood a dark blue Real Estate Group FOR SALE sign.
Guapo parked the vehicle in a church parking lot across the street. From that vantage, they saw a late-model blue Mustang resting in front of the two-car garage. Lights shone through the front windows.
The sicarios tucked Glocks into the back waistbands of their pants and crossed together. Through sheer white curtains they saw the profile of a man sitting in a brown recliner watching TV. The theme song from Friends wafted under the front door.
Guapo indicated to the other two men to hide in the bushes on either side of the door; then he rang the bell. Ten seconds later, a hand pushed aside the curtains, and a bearded face peered out at him. Guapo smiled, waved, and pointed to the door.
Mancini’s young brother, Paul, opened it a crack and spoke past the safety chain. “What d’you want?” he asked.
He’d been living there for three weeks now and planned to stay until either the house was sold or he traveled to College Park, Maryland, to start engineering school in the fall. His brother’s wife and two young sons had recently moved to a new colonial-style house farther south on Dam Neck Road.
Guapo flashed his friendliest smile. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but my car broke down, and my cell phone is out of juice.”
“You live nearby?” Paul asked.
“I drove down from New Jersey. I’m visiting my cousin.”
Twenty-three-year-old Paul, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless Terrapins T-shirt, gave him the once-over. “Wait here,” he said, “while I get you the cordless.”
“Thanks.”
Half a minute later, when Paul reached through the door to hand Guapo the phone, Guapo grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him forward abruptly. Though Paul was strong enough to have won several fights as a UFC light heavyweight before he ripped the rotator cuff in his left shoulder, he was caught off guard, fell forward, and slammed his forehead against the doorframe, which caused him to drop the phone. Guapo aimed the silenced Glock through the crack in the door and shot him once in the side of the head. Paul groaned, “What the fuck did you do that for?”, then slumped to the floor.
Guapo instructed Stallone to run back to the Toyota, bring it around to the front of the property, and keep the engine running.
Then he and Osito entered the house and searched the bedrooms. In a closet they found old camouflage boots and uniforms. Aside from clothes, some furniture, and a few items in the kitchen, the house was empty.
Miguel X had told them that the SEAL named Joseph Mancini was married. But the two sicarios saw no evidence of a woman or any other person living in the house. So they dragged Paul’s big body back to the recliner, sat him in it, wiped the butt of the Glock clean of fingerprints, and placed the pistol in his hand.
They used rolled-up newspaper to set the curtains and rug on fire before they exited.
“One gringo down,” Guapo announced when he returned to the RAV4 and flames lit up the night sky. “One more to go.”
Chapter Twenty
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
—Mike Tyson
At 7,980 feet the back door of the C-23 Sherpa aircraft swung open and Akil pushed the platform with the Zodiac, forty-horsepower engine, fuel tanks, and paddles out. The SEALs waited until the CRRC landed safely in the water. Once the aircraft circled back over the target, Crocker gave the signal to jump.
He loved to free-fall, even if this was only a hop and pop at two thousand feet. Still, it was exhilarating—diving like an eagle through the fresh ocean air and steering the risers toward the Zodiac with Havana glowing in the distance.
He and his men had trained hundreds of times for infils like this, and they executed this one to perfection, all splashing down within ten meters of the boat.
They slammed into action immediately, cutting the CRRC from the wooden platform, inflating the keel (a fin at the bottom of the boat that helped convert sideways force into forward propulsion), attaching the engine, loading their gear, and assuming their preassigned positions in the boat.
“Ready?” Crocker asked Akil, who sat next to him in the stern.
“Ready, boss.”
He fired the engine as Akil fixed the location (approximately 23.10 north/82.22 west) on his digital compass. The boat took off with a low growl.
“¡Cuba libre!” Suárez shouted from the bow.
The temperature hovered at around eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and there was a mild nine-mile wind blowing in from the east. The tide had started to recede, and the current in the Straits of Florida wanted to pull them northwest into the Gulf of Mexico.
Crocker and Akil worked in tandem to keep the boat on course. All four SEALs were wearing a combination of Sharkskin with Polartec lining and more lightweight Lycra dive skin, which Crocker preferred.
As the Zodiac climbed up moderate swells and rode down, the men slipped Rocket Fins over their IST Proline 3mm boots and got the LAR V Dräger rebreathers ready to strap to their chests.
Crocker had chosen a DZ west of the commercial shipping lane into the port of Havana. When he saw the lights of a vessel to their left, he instructed Akil to cut the engine. The four men paddled, making little progress against the current.
“We need to pick up the pace,” Crocker said as the muscles in his back and shoulders started to burn.
Once the lights faded out of sight, he instructed Akil to restart the engine and checked his watch, which read 0417. They had to move faster if they were going to reach the target on time.
Crocker visualized the mission in his head—the bridge and tunnels, the bend in the river, Almendares Park on their right. When they got within a mile and a quarter of shore, Mancini spotted another vessel directly ahead through a pair of Night Owl Tactical Series G1 Night Vision binoculars. He couldn’t tell if it was a Cuban patrol boat or a fishing vessel puttering along the coast. The SEALs cut the engine again and paddled.
Cuban security forces were no joke. Led by Commander in Chief Raúl Castro, they consisted of a highly trained and largely Soviet-equipped army, navy, and air force. In the past they had foiled a number of CIA plots, including the 1961 U.S.-planned invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
When the boat got within three quarters of a mile of the coast, Crocker saw additional small vessels ahead to their left. He said, “Strap on your Drägers and get in the water. We’ll sink the Zodiac here and swim.”
First they dropped the engine and fuel tanks into the bay, and then they attacked the rubber vessel with Leatherman knives.
The water they dove into was cool and pitch black. They swam in teams of two, connected by a swimmer’s lanyard, with forty-pound packs on their backs and waterproof weapons bags slung across their shoulders, secured with bungee straps. Crocker was paired with Akil; Suárez followed with Mancini.
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Akil led, focusing on the luminescent dials of his dive compass and MUGR GPS, while Crocker timed each leg with his watch. Every fifteen minutes of swimming at a particular bearing, he’d squeeze Akil’s arm, which signaled him to stop and reset the direction on the compass.
The Drägers recycled the air they were breathing into a closed circuit, where it was filtered of carbon dioxide. As a result, the SEALs were taking in pure oxygen and not producing bubbles, which was ideal for a clandestine mission like this. But there were drawbacks. One, the closed-circuit underwater breathing apparatus (CCUBA) were only operational at a maximum depth of seventy feet. And two, since the men were breathing pure oxygen, they could only use the Drägers for four hours before the high concentration of CO2 became toxic.
Each diver constantly monitored the primary and backup gauges, which measured the oxygen pressure in the loop. A low concentration could result in hypoxia, unconsciousness, and eventual death. A dive exceeding O2 depth-time standards could produce hyperoxia and convulsions, which could cause a diver to lose his mouthpiece and drown. Crocker had seen it happen.
It took them an hour and a half of vigorous swimming to reach the mouth of the Almendares River. Now it was 0458, according to Crocker’s watch.
The water was murkier and the current hit them head-on. Crocker squeezed Akil’s shoulder, indicating that he wanted him to pick up the pace.
Akil did for a leg and a half, but as they approached the first tunnel, he stopped, looked back at Crocker, squeezed his arm three times, and pointed to the MUGR, which detected the presence of a sonar device to spot intruders and submerged vehicles. Crocker passed the three-squeeze message to the next diver, Mancini, who relayed it to Suárez.
Mancini, who was the only man wearing DVS-110 underwater night-vision goggles, located the square sonar device on a pylon that rose four feet from the top of the tunnel. Akil led the team in formation along the west shore of the river and circled around the back of the pylon. He disabled the sonar device by cutting through the cable with his knife.