"Your action interrupted reception of command message. Secure all writing, note frequency on radio before proceeding. Imperative. Repeat, secure writing, note—"
"I got you, Katz. Over." Manning hissed to Ohara. "Grab whatever that guy wrote down, and write down the exact wireless band."
Returning to the radio room, the Japanese Phoenix fighter saw a notepad of meticulously pencilled Russian. A voice was speaking repeatedly from the radio monitor in Russian, then in Arabic. Ohara gathered all the papers and booklets in the room, then copied down the numbers on the receiver's digital display.
In the bridge room, Manning and McCarter examined the many controls and switches. They found the switch for the general alarm. Manning called out to Ohara.
"Keio! You set?"
The bundle of papers in his hand, Ohara nodded. He took a radio-pulse transmitter the size of a walkie-talkie from one of his belt pouches. He folded the notebook and papers and sealed them inside the waterproof pouch. Examining the pulse-transmitter for water or other damage, he switched on the power. He waited as the circuits went through an automatic diagnostic mode. The power light blinked green.
"I am ready."
Manning flipped up the red safety cap, hit the switch marked GENERAL ALARM.
Sirens wailed. Throughout the Tarala , Palestinians and Cubans and Europeans rolled from their bunks, grabbed their Kalashnikov rifles. Sentries ground out their cigarettes and rushed to join their comrades.
The terrorist "freedom fighters" had rehearsed the defense of the freighter many times. Trained for combat in the Soviet camps in South Yemen and Syria and Lebanon, trained for their attack on New York City during the months of their voyage from the Middle East, they knew they might face attack from the Coast Guard or the United States Navy.
But looking out at the wind-whipped Atlantic, they saw no ships in sight. They heard no helicopters. Officers grabbed intercom phones to call the Tarala's bridge. They received no answer.
Men found two dead Palestinians, shot at point-blank range with large-calibre weapons. Gathering on the decks, the terrorists saw their officers running up the flights of steel stairs to the command deck.
Calling out in Arabic and Spanish and Russian, the officers beat on the steel doors of the bridge.
Inside, Manning looked to Ohara. "Now, Keio." Ohara pushed the pulse transmitter's power button.
In one wave of shock, hundreds of thousands of steel fragments swept the decks and walkways.
The storm of steel from the carefully placed radio-triggered mini-claymores sprayed death in all directions.
Every terrorist on the Tarala's superstructure died at the same instant, their torn bodies falling as one.
After the blast, the Phoenix men heard only the Atlantic wind, and the creaking of the old freighter as it swayed with the swells. Manning nodded to Ohara, who keyed a distress signal on the ship's radio.
"Calling the Coast Guard. Tarala requests assistance.. .
When the Coast Guard cutter Cape Horn finally approached, the captain hailed the crew of the old freighter with a bullhorn. No one answered. The boarding party found only the dead.
16
Florida Everglades
Saturday
2:00 a.m.
(0700 Greenwich mean time)
TURBOCHARGER WHINING, the El Dorado raced
through the humid Florida night. Bolan drove, Flor beside him, Encizo in the back seat.
The shoot-out at the Club Cabana had changed their relationship. Despite the chance of combat, Bolan had not hesitated to bring Flor as backup. Encizo had invited her. More than a compatriot, Encizo and Bolan accepted the lovely though deadly young woman as a friend.
They followed Highway 41 west from Miami and through the savannas and cypress swamps north of Everglades National Park. Rafael Encizo told Flor a story.
"Under the dictator Batista, Cuba was a country of the very rich and the very poor. My family was among the very poor. I made money for my family by diving for coins in the harbor, like many boys my age. The tourists threw coins for the boys to catch. Even then I was as much fish as boy, and I made much money.
"But one time, one hijo de perro, un perro rico in his own yacht, held up a gold five-peso piece and tossed it into the water. But at the bottom, what I found on the sand was a brass washer. I came up and I heard him and his friends laughing.
"I knew what el Europerro had done—"
Flor laughed at the word. Encizo had deliberately mispronounced the Spanish word for European to say "European dog."
"—but he didn't just laugh. He shouted down that I was a bad diver, to dive until I found a coin. That was an insult, of course."
Behind Encizo's words, the night seethed with life. Insects chirped in the darkness.
"Understand. I spent much time in the water. I was still a boy, but my shoulders were wide. My mother worked so hard providing for us, so that our poverty would not stunt us. I was strong. When I fought, I fought with men and I won.
"The European had wounded my pride, yet I could do nothing. But later, his watchman, a Cuban, comes to me. He gives me a peso. He felt very badly about what the rich man had done. He told me he hated the rich man and that this would be the last night. The Cuban would sneak away to his village.
"I did not take his money, but I remembered what he said. That night, after the watchman went away, I slipped onto the yacht.
"I put the brass washer on the European's pillow, as he slept. When he woke up, he had his washer back, but no watchman.
"He thought I killed the watchman. He thought I killed the watchman, then crept up to his own pillow as he slept.. .. He and his yacht were gone from the harbor in minutes."
Laughing, the three friends sped through the night. Swarms of flying bugs splattered on the windshield.
After thirty minutes at ninety miles an hour, Bolan slowed as they approached the town of Paolito.
They cruised through streets vaulted by arching cypresses. Moths orbited streetlights and flickering neon. Passing a roadside bar with only one pickup truck in the gravel parking lot, Bolan flicked on the high beams and accelerated. He watched the odometer and slowed two miles later. Exactly as Mujica, the Cuban DGI captured in the nightclub attack, had told them during their interrogation of him, an unmarked and ungated road appeared on the left.
Bolan wheeled in a slow turn and killed the headlights. He let the Cadillac idle in neutral until his eyes adjusted to the starlit darkness, then he eased the car forward, the big convertible lurching and swaying in the rutted, muddy track. A few hundred yards from the highway, Bolan steered the car under the overhanging branches of a tree.
Taking a flashlight from the glove compartment, Flor got out. She slowly pushed the door to shut it without a slam. A quick sweep of the flashlight Flor cupped her hand over the lens to allow only an indistinct glow of light—revealed a path for the convertible.
Crouching beneath low branches, mosquitoes swarming around them, they dressed for the infiltration. Bolan and Encizo pulled on night-black fatigues, and smeared blacking on their faces and hands. Flor put on a black Kevlar windbreaker over a black denim jump suit. She, too, smeared her face black, then knotted a black scarf over her forehead and hair. From the Cadillac's arsenal, she took an Uzi submachine gun and a hand-held infrared monocular.
The Stony Man warriors carried more sophisticated equipment. Over their shoulders they slung Heckler & Koch MP5A2 silenced submachine guns with mounted infrared scopes. Encizo carried a silenced Beretta 93-R with luminous sight. Bolan buckled on his .44 AutoMag and loaned a silenced Beretta to Flor. They both slipped secure-frequency hand-radios into their thigh pockets. A spare radio went to Flor.
"Frequency's scrambled," Bolan whispered to her. "Unless someone has one of the radios, anyone monitoring the band will only hear bursts of static."
But they took no assault weapons. The fragmentation and phosphorous grenades, the Armburst anti-personnel rockets, the M-16 / M-203 auto rifle/ grena
de launchers remained in the trunk.
Tonight's infiltration would be for information only. They needed to find the leaders of the group threatening the United States. For electronic eaves-dropping, a pouch on Bolan's web belt contained four mini-transmitters and a multi-band monitor with a miniature cassette recorder.
Bolan signalled Encizo. Invisible in their night-black clothing, their boots silent on the soft earth and mud, they moved forward.
As they had agreed hours before when they discussed the operation, the two men—more qualified than Flor with their years of infiltration training and jungle fighting—alternated on point. One man went ahead, while the other and Flor crouched in the shadows, listening for sentries or patrols, sweeping the darkness with their infrared optics. When the point man advanced fifty yards, he stopped to cover their advance.
They moved fast, sometimes running, for the first mile.
An amber flash lit a wall of branches and marsh grass. Bolan and Flor saw Encizo run from the shadows to the complete darkness of the cypresses. They crabbed from the road and went low in the tangled grasses. Using only one eye, Bolan peered out.
Headlights appeared around a curve in the road. They heard gravel rattling against the sheet metal of fender wells.
Bouncing on its heavy-duty suspension, a pickup truck rattled past them. A buzz sounded in Bolan's earphone. Encizo reported.
"Stony One, I counted two men in the front. Heard tools in back. What did you see?"
"The same. Let's get going."
They trotted along the road until they saw the camp lights. Slipping into the high grasses, they circled to the west, crouch-walking, then finally crawling to a bulldozed perimeter. Tangled mounds of rotting grass, branches and roots concealed the three night fighters. They sprawled a few stems from one another, scanning the abandoned installation.
Originally built in the last few days of World War II as a fourth-phase training base for B-24 bomber crews, the airfield and barracks were abandoned by the U.S. government until May 1959. President Eisenhower, irritated by Fidel Castro's Marxist posturing, accepted Vice-president Richard Nixon's suggestion to arm and train Cuban exiles for an overthrow of the revolutionary regime. A covert CIA operation repainted the barracks and cleared the overgrown runways and parade grounds.
After John F. Kennedy assured air cover for Brigade 2506's assault on the beaches, but abandoning the fighters, their landing craft and the supply ships to merciless strafing and bomb runs from the Cuban air force, the U.S. government closed the secret camp.
Years later, freed from Principe prison for a ransom of tractors and medicines, the survivors of Brigade 2506 returned to the camp—but without their CIA officers. The embittered Cuban exiles, hardened by betrayal and the horrors of Castro's People's Justice, accepted no leadership from Washington. They waged endless war-by-attrition against the Communists, fighting into the 1970s, the aging first generation initiating their sons in the techniques of guerrilla combat as the war continued into the 1980s. Various groups used the camp and training fields, sometimes staging maneuvers one weekend, then evacuating the camp during the week—hauling out generators, radios, and weapons—when "old friends" from the CIA appeared.
The latest group of Cubans to use the camp appeared no different from the others, except that the membership included women. In the glare of light bulbs strung over a parade ground of rutted mud and gravel, they gathered around cars and trucks. Bolan saw men loading boxes—some the length of rifles—into pickup campers, others into the trunks of the passenger cars. Some of the Cubans wore fatigues, most wore street clothes. The women wore Levi's or casual fashions.
Across the camp, Bolan saw the lighted windows of an office. He watched forms cross the bright rectangle. Slipping a pair of Zeiss folding binoculars from a belt pouch, he focused the 9-power optics on the window.
A check-patterned keffiyeh passed through the light. Inside, a wide-faced Cuban sat on a desk. No, not a Cuban! An Oriental. Bolan keyed his hand-radio.
"Phoenix Two, can you see into the office?" "Si, I see. Is that an Arab?"
"Do you recognize the head cloth?" Bolan held his tiny binoculars steady on the window. The form wearing the keffiyeh paused in his view.
"I recognize the AK," Encizo told him.
"Do you see the other one?"
"No. A Cuban?"
"I see an Oriental. Looks Japanese. Maybe Chinese. Flor—"
"Here. Ready," she said.
"Phoenix Two, give her your H&K," said Bolan. "Flor, watch the camp, keep us informed as we go in. We'll place the microphones and take a look around. If there's shooting, snipe at those soldiers—"
"My friend," Encizo interrupted, "that little German gun did not kill when I fired from across the street tonight. At one hundred yards, even if she hits them, they might not fall down."
"Even at this distance, a steel-cored slug moving at—" Bolan calculated the approximate loss in velocity "-750 or 800 feet per second will do it. She can keep their heads down if we get into trouble."
"And what if she gets into trouble? She'll be alone against—"
"That's their problem!" Flor answered.
Encizo and Bolan laughed quietly. Encizo crawled to Flor and passed his silenced, infrared-scoped weapon to the black-clad woman. He left her his bandoleer of 30-round H&K magazines and wished her luck.
"Buena suerte, guerrera." The word meant woman warrior.
"Y tu, herrnano," Flor whispered in return.
Creeping silently through the tall grass and brush, Bolan and Encizo continued two hundred yards to the west. Buildings with long-collapsed roofs and leaning walls blocked the view of the Cubans on the parade ground. Bolan and Encizo lay shoulder-to-shoulder for minutes, watching the camp streets and shadows with the binoculars and infrared scope. They saw no sentries.
"Straight across," Bolan told his friend.
They crawled over the scraped marshland. A bulldozer had levelled all the trees and brush months before. Since then, the grass had grown more than two feet tall. At the edge of the camp, they came to a collapsed, weed-overgrown chain link fence. They slipped through the weeds and ran to the shadows of a dilapidated barracks.
For cooling and to discourage tropical insects, a two-foot airspace separated the barracks from the soil. Bolan crouched where steps met a doorway. Hidden from view on two sides, he leaned under the building. The damp, always-dark airspace smelled of rot. Despite sections of collapsed floorboards, he had a view of the opposite side of the building. Nothing moved.
Bolan pointed toward the office. Encizo nodded, then led the way. They stayed against the rotted barracks, stepping over fallen boards and piles of trash.
As they neared the center of the camp, Encizo froze. His hand stopped Bolan.
The sweet stink of mentholated tobacco smoke cut through the odours of mildewed wood and mud rot. They heard voices, a laugh. Boots crunched on sheets of wind-torn asphalt roofing.
Bolan and Encizo could not take cover in time. They squatted where they stood, going low to the ground, rolling onto their sides, letting their shoulders come to rest in the mud beneath them, as if their bodies had flowed onto the earth.
Two men in camou-patterned fatigues wandered around the corner. They stood in the open, talking in Spanish. One spoke quickly, the other deliberately, sometimes pausing to think of a word. One flicked his cigarette away.
Sparks showered Bolan and Encizo. The glowing cigarette butt bounced off the barracks wall above them. Bolan heard a gunman tap a cigarette pack. A butane flame spotlighted a Northern European face, a moon face with fat cheeks and thick lips. The face returned to darkness as the gunman sucked the cigarette.
Bolan smelled burning cotton-polyester. He saw the still-glowing butt on Encizo's back, between his shoulder blades. Moving his arm infinitely slowly, Bolan strained to reach the butt burning into Encizo's flesh, but could not reach it. As the two gunmen continued their loud conversation, Bolan leaned farther, finally flicked the butt into t
he mud.
They lay without moving for minutes. At last the sentries continued on their rounds. When the sounds of their pacing faded, Encizo rose to his feet, cursing under his breath.
"Hijos de la puta grande! They did it to me again! When I was in Principe, they put out a hundred cigarettes on me. Those two die, I swear to God. It is a promise to God!"
"Maybe tomorrow night. What did they say?"
"Their commander has received conflicting orders. There is much argument and confusion with their leaders."
"What were the orders?"
"They did not know. They hear only the argument. They talk also of the Revolution. Of the honor of fighting in this battle. Of world victory. You know the crap."
"Let's hear the rest.. . . " Bolan touched the pouch of micro-transmitters he carried and motioned for Encizo to move.
Peering down the street between the rows of barracks, they saw no one. Encizo stood tall, strode across the open area, then dropped into shadows. Bolan followed him, swaggering like the Cubans, but with his shoulders slumped to minimize his height.
Ahead, they saw lighted windows. Unshaded bulbs projected long rectangles over the mud and gravel of the camp's street. Voices went loud as someone raved in Spanish and others tried to shout him down. Staying in the shadows, Encizo strode forward, swinging his arms, trusting to darkness and daring. He also thumbed back the hammer of his silenced Beretta and held it against his leg. Bolan followed him.
A sentry stepped out of a dark doorway calling out, "Roberto?"
Encizo answered without breaking stride. "No, Juan. Roberto esta alla..." He swept his left arm toward the center of the camp.
The silhouette held up his hand. "¿Tiene un fosforo?"
Slapping at his pockets, Encizo stopped a step away from the sentry. "No, pero...tengo una bala!"
He jammed the silenced Beretta under the sentry's chin and pulled the trigger twice. The bullets smashed into the man's soft throat with sounds like two fist strikes. Encizo caught the dead man with his left arm as he pointed the Beretta into the doorway. But no second sentry stood there.
Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine Page 12