“Any idea why he stole your boat?”
“Stole it and lost it! The Eagle’s never been seen since.”
“You were fully insured?”
“Oh, yes, all fishing boats are well insured. We get pretty good rates because we don’t often lose a trawler. I’ve claimed for the night’s catch as well.”
“Did they pay?”
“Not yet. They say, how can they pay out for a cargo of fish we never caught? I told ’em we would have caught. There were haddock out there, thousands of ’em. And they owe us the bloody money. That’s what I pay the premiums for.”
The interviewer smiled, and asked one last question: “Do you think they’ll catch the pirate?”
“I’d be surprised if they didn’t. He was as big as a bloody house and as hairy as a bear. They can’t hardly miss him. He looks like King Kong.”
Mack was unable to stop chuckling, taking cover behind the Irish Times.
They called his flight at 6:45, and he slept almost the entire way across the Atlantic. He was still exhausted from his long swim across the river, the swim that had undoubtedly earned him his freedom and completely baffled one of the top police forces in Europe.
The aircraft was already over Massachusetts Bay, a few miles to the east of Boston’s Logan International Airport, when the flight attendant finally awakened him and asked him to fasten his seat belt.
Because of his front seat he was one of the first to disembark, and he made straight for the glass booths where the immigration officers scrupulously inspect every visitor’s passport, photograph them, check their visas and fingerprints. This was Mack’s last hurdle, Jeffery Simpson’s exquisitely forged document.
But American passports are not nearly so scrutinized. The officer opened the passport, checked the photograph against the bearer, noted it had first been issued in Rhode Island years ago, and said, “Welcome home, Jeffery.”
Mack walked through and went downstairs to the baggage area. Only then did he realize it was a quarter past four in the morning in Switzerland. And anyway he could not possibly go home to coastal Maine right now, so he walked outside and picked up the bus to the Hilton, which stands less than a half mile from the terminal.
He checked in with impeccable honesty, Lt. Cdr. Mackenzie Bedford, US Navy. It was the first time he had told the truth to a hotel receptionist in living memory. He ordered an alarm call for 4:00 am when he would call the Nyon Clinic.
The hotel bar was quite busy, and he asked for a Scotch and soda, the way he drank them with Harry. The television was on above the bar, and he was astounded to see the French police had made an arrest in connection with the murder of Monsieur Henri Foche. The man was a Swiss national from Lausanne who had been picked up in Saint-Malo, where he had been enjoying a brief holiday with his wife and two children on board a chartered yacht. His name was Gunther, and he was six-foot-four and bearded.
However, his lawyer claimed he was a coach to the Swiss national soccer team, had never fired a gun in his life, had never even heard of Saint-Nazaire, and had been having coffee with his family on the Saint-Malo waterfront at the time of the assassination. He added that on Gunther’s behalf, he would be suing the French police for an undisclosed amount of money, for wrongful arrest, loss of reputation, mental anguish and God knows what else. Meanwhile, Gunther was very much in the slammer, awaiting a court hearing. Brittany’s chief of police, Pierre Savary, said he was hopeful they had the right man.
“Stupid prick,” muttered Mack uncharitably.
That night he slept only fitfully, mostly because he was worrying about Tommy. And when he was awakened by the hotel alarm call, he dialed the number of the clinic with considerable trepidation. He identified himself and was swiftly put through to the office of Carl Spitzbergen, and then to the great surgeon himself.
“Well, Lieutenant Commander, that’s a very fine boy you have there.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Mack. “I am really calling to find out if he’s okay.”
“He’s as okay as I can make him,” said Carl Spitzbergen. “And I have to say that’s about as okay as he can be. He’s tough and strong, and he came through an eight-hour operation as well as any young boy could.”
“I believe it was a complete bone marrow transplant?”
“Exactly, and I conduct these operations only rarely, because they are life-threatening. But it worked for Tommy. I cannot promise anything, but everything went fine, and if I had to give a professional opinion I would say we have reversed the condition. Tommy can look forward to a long life.”
“Can I speak to him?”
“Well, you could if he was here. But he recovered so fast, only twelve days, I sent him home. He and Anne left Geneva on the morning flight yesterday.”
“You mean he’s back home in the States?” asked Mack.
“I sincerely hope so,” replied the surgeon.
* * *
There was no possibility of further sleep, and Mack dressed, paid his bill, and took a cab to the bus station, booking a ticket on the first bus to Brunswick, Maine, which left at around seven.
He sat almost in a daze of happiness, reading the Boston Globe. Foche had been bumped off the front page, but an inside story revealed that the Swiss national who had been arrested in Saint-Malo had been released without charge late last night, owing to insufficient evidence.
It was a little after ten when the bus pulled into Brunswick, and Mack was the only passenger disembarking. He stood at the bus stop, waiting for the local one to come along to take him home, and it arrived ten minutes late.
It was a strange feeling returning to Maine after all that had happened. Absence had seemed to heighten the natural glory of the landscape, and Mack stared appreciatively at the long waters of the Kennebec River, flowing down to Dartford, past the coves and the bays, and below the tireless screeches of the gulls and arctic terns.
When the bus eventually pulled up at the stop at the top of his road, he climbed down and set off, wondering what the hell he was going to tell Anne – where had he been, why hadn’t he called, and why did he want her to look like a leprechaun?
But today, nothing mattered. He marched down the middle of the lonely road, carrying his leather bag. Up ahead he could see the estuary of the Kennebec, and soon he would see the house where Anne and Tommy would probably go into shock when he walked in, straight out of the wide blue yonder. Except that he had punctuated their entire married life with sudden comings and goings. There had been so many times when he could not call, could not tell her what he was doing, where he was going, or when he was coming back.
All SEAL missions were highly classified black operations. Each mission “went dark” days before they left: no phone calls in or out of base; no contact with the outside world. Anne knew that, accepted it as the wife of a Special Ops naval commander. Anne might never ask him what he had done or where he had been. She never had before.
He reached the house and walked across the broad front yard, striding over the grass, and onto the covered porch. And that was where Anne spotted him, through the window. She ran out of the house and into his arms, and he dropped his bag and held her so closely she thought she might suffocate.
She could feel the beat of his mighty heart, and she whispered to him in the softest, most seductive tone she could manage, “Welcome home, my darling, and shhh. Tommy’s asleep. He won’t wake up for another couple of hours. Aren’t we lucky?”
Dawn. Five Days Later Persian Gulf
One by one they came screaming off the flight deck of USS Colin Powell – twelve F/A 18C Hornets, the delta-winged angels of death, built by McDonnell Douglas, and generally regarded as the most lethal fighter bombers in the skies. At the controls were the men of the fabled Florida-based VMFA 323 squadron, the Death Rattlers, men who referred to their aircraft as Snake 200 or Snake 101. This crowd represented Top Gun to the tenth power.
The deck of the gigantic Nimitz Class carrier was still vibrating from the sonic shock w
aves from the Hornets’ engines, the thunderous sound of the launch of the last one, hurled skyward by Bow Cat Three.
The carrier glowered in the early morning light, fifteen miles off the Iraqi port of Basra, way down south of the Shatt-al-Arab. High above, the Hornets moved into their attack formation. Lt. Cdr. Buzzy Farrant led them at more than 600 knots, straight up over the flat, watery land to the left of the disputed seaway.
They came in low over the ancient territories of the Marsh Arabs. The deafening roar of this full-blown US air assault would have shaken the waterside homes to their foundations, if they’d had any. Trees swayed, the earth shook, as they ripped through the skies, heading north. They reached the Tigris and changed course, coming hard right, straight for the Iranian border. Four of the Hornets peeled off and made for the port of Korfamshah. Four more kept going, following the GPS numbers, until they were almost in Iranian airspace.
Buzzy Farrant fired two Sidewinder missiles AIM9L straight at the stone bunker where the Diamondheads were stored. The bright-blue chemical explosion he left in his wake dwarfed the sunrise. They pressed on the attack, bombs and missiles, blasting a huge warehouse in the oil-refining city of Ahvaz, and then switched their attack to the airfield, where they smashed to smithereens a giant Ilyushin 11-76 military freighter.
They hit the railroad, wiped out a freight train, destroyed the jetties of Korfamshah, and put two oceangoing freighters onto the bottom of the harbor. Both ships, underwater, still burned with a dazzling bright-blue chemical flame. As did everything else in the path of the American bombardment.
The Intel had been top class, and the pristine accuracy of the attack frightened the Iranian military badly, frightened them as Gadhafi had been frightened when President Reagan explained to Tripoli precisely how displeased he was with them in 1986.
The Americans wanted their ruthless destruction of Iran’s Diamondheads kept secret, but the government in Tehran put out a halfhearted statement to the effect that it deplored yet another example of reckless American aggression. Which well and truly let the cat out of the bag.
Time magazine, which is famously well connected in these regions, worked on the story for two weeks before coming up with “The Death Knell for the Diamondhead.” The account was masterful, detailing the dawn raid on every known storage area for the missile, especially on the huge shipment down in Korfamshah, preparing to weigh anchor for Afghanistan. It ended the story with a less well-documented, but obviously accurate, account of the reaction in France:
The assassination of Monsieur Henri Foche, believed to be the majority shareholder in Montpellier Munitions, appeared to take the pressure off the French government, which, for the first time, admitted the missile was French.
Acting with United Nations military personnel, the government of France has closed down the arms factory, set deep in the Forest of Orléans. Sources claim that at least two of the senior directors left the building in handcuffs. The entire complex has been dismantled, and eyewitnesses believe much of the ordnance has been removed by the French military.
The vexed question of the illegal missile, which caused so much sorrow in the US armed forces, has thus been finally solved. But it would never have been solved had Henri Foche become president of France. And it took his untimely and brutal death to make amends for the Diamondhead, and to end its reign of terror in the Middle East.
Lt. Cdr. Mackenzie Bedford read the article with a wry grin, and an acute observation right out of the SEALs’ playbook… “Sonofabitch had it coming, right?”
Epilogue: Three Months Later
There was an October chill in the air now. And an October chill in Maine is not the same as an October chill in Washington. Nonetheless, the World Series had not yet been played, and Mack and Tommy, both in warm jackets, were still practicing, on the beach, throwing and catching the dying embers of the summer game.
They stood wider apart now, wider than they had been all year on the lawn outside the house. In fact, it was close to the full sixty feet between mound and plate.
Mack threw pretty hard, steadily to Tommy’s left, and the little boy kept snagging the baseball, pulling it out of the air, and throwing it back at his father, high, low, left and right. And Mack kept catching.
He wanted to test the boy, but he didn’t want to see him fail with a wide ball, not after all he had gone through. He remembered that bad afternoon back in July when Tommy had overbalanced on an easy one and then not wanted to play again.
And he really remembered the words of the doctor who told Anne that loss of balance was one of the symptoms of ALD. But he could not help noticing that Tommy’s quick feet and fast glove were getting better every time they played.
Tommy threw a high one, up over Mack’s right shoulder. He twisted suddenly and caught it, and almost as a reflex whipped the ball back, sending it hard and low to the boy’s right. Tommy brought his left arm over in an arc, swooping low, taking the ball but rolling onto the sand, right over.
Mack started toward him, but Tommy was up in a flash, on his feet, hurling the baseball back to his father. Mack was so astounded that he just stood there as the ball shot by his left ear.
“Thought you’d get me, right, Daddy?” yelled Tommy. “And look where the ball is – quick, it’s going in the stupid water.”
Mack took off, pounding toward the ocean’s edge, splashing through the little wavelets as they rolled up over the hard sand. Coronado all over again. He could never get it out of his mind. And he looked back at his little boy, and he heard again the far-lost voices of the SEAL instructors who had once taught him.
“My Trident is a symbol of my honor. It embodies the trust of those I am sworn to protect. I seek no recognition for my actions. I voluntarily place the welfare and security of others before my own.”
The memories stopped him in his tracks. The sand, the sea, the cold evening breeze in his face. The voices. It all reminded him of what was gone. And what could never come back. What had been said. And what would never be said.
And he heard again his own voice now, distinct but distant, firm and certain, the words he had uttered so long ago, back on the grinder in Coronado, the creed of the Brotherhood.
“For all of my days I will be a United States Navy SEAL.”
Next in The Mack Bedford Military Thrillers:
Intercept
Retired Navy SEAL Lt. Commander Mack Bedford is called in to assist on one of the most highly classified missions ever launched from CIA headquarters, with the stakes higher than ever before...
Find out more
First published in the United States in 2009 by Vanguard Press
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
Third Floor, 20 Mortimer Street
London W1T 3JW
United Kingdom
Copyright © Patrick Robinson, 2009
The moral right of Patrick Robinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788633307
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Look for more great books at www.canelo.co
Diamondhead Page 45