by Cap Daniels
I sputtered and swatted at him. “So, now we’re even?”
“Not even close, buddy. Not even close.”
I wiped my face and sat up. “Where are we?”
“About ten minutes out. We’re going wet near Isla Otoque. That’ll give us about twenty miles in the RHIB.”
I stared out the door. “Perfect.”
“Are you sure you’re up for this one, Chase? I can go it alone.”
“No chance, Baby Face. I’m not letting you have all the fun. I’m good to go.”
We donned masks, fins, and snorkels before sitting in the doorway with our fins hanging over the skid.
From the cockpit, Leo gave the “okay” signal. I didn’t see any other boats, so I flashed the thumbs-down, telling him to put her in the water. He descended and decelerated until the hull of the boat bounced across the tops of the waves. I gave him the release signal, and he cut away the sling with a disconnect lever in the cockpit. As the boat settled into the water, I turned to Clark and yelled, “Airborne!”
He shook his head. “Air assault, baby!”
We pushed off and immediately covered our masks and snorkels with our hands to ensure they didn’t get knocked off when we hit the water. As we fell, my body turned slightly, and my feet rose in front of me. I hit the water butt first, and it knocked the wind from my lungs. When I surfaced, Clark had one hand on my collar and was pulling me toward our boat bobbing on the waves. I caught my breath and nodded silent gratitude. We swam clear of the rotor wash and climbed aboard.
“Well, that was fun, huh?” Clark said as he threw his mask and snorkel to the deck.
“Yeah, a real joy ride.”
“You gotta keep your feet underneath you, or else . . . well, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, “but that wasn’t bad for my first time.”
“Your first time?”
“Yeah, I’ve never done that before. I’m a college boy, remember?”
“Well, you never forget your first. Let’s get to work.”
He started the engine and eased the throttle forward. The impressive craft accelerated and soon settled into her rhythm, darting across the waves. Leo was heading back to the northwest. We hoped the next time we saw Leo was after we’d successfully extracted Diablo from the Pearl.
The closer to the canal entrance we got, the more ships we saw at anchor. The closure of the Miraflores Locks was causing dozens of ships to stack up and wait their turn. I wondered what the ships in Gatun Lake would do. I imagined they were just as stranded as the Pearl.
As the Bridge of the Americas came into view, I got an uneasy feeling in my gut. Nothing good had ever happened to me within sight of that bridge. I hoped I was about to break that cycle.
Clark yelled, “How close do you think we can get before somebody stops us?”
“I don’t know, but I’d rather swim than risk getting stopped!”
We pulled up just off Farfan Beach and anchored in the brown water. The entrance to the canal was littered with boats displaying flashing lights of every color. It was like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The work ahead of us would be nothing like a parade, but when it was finally over, we hoped we’d be able to disappear like Santa back up the chimney, leaving nothing but cookie crumbs and an empty milk glass behind.
We opened our cases and began gearing up for the long swim.
“Oh, Chase, I forgot to tell you. I scored a couple DPVs from the divers on the Lori Danielle.”
Diver propulsion vehicles are small electric motors with plastic propellers that pull divers through the water without wasting the energy of finning.
“I could kiss you right now.”
“Go ahead and try that and see where it gets you,” he said.
“Okay. A raincheck, then?”
We packed our dry bags with every piece of gear we thought we’d possibly need for the mission and attached them to the DPVs. As much as I hated the thought of getting caught in Panama with a pistol, we couldn’t risk going unarmed, so a pair of suppressed forty-fives also went into the bags.
“I had the gear technician on the ship refill the O2 and service and repack our scrubbers. We should be good for at least five hours or so.”
Clark had been busy while I’d been riding Dr. Shadrack’s magic carpet.
We donned and tested our rebreathers and communication equipment. Surprisingly, my gear hadn’t been destroyed in the explosion, and the commo gear still worked just as advertised. We clipped the DPVs to our harnesses and rolled overboard.
To get an accurate reading of our position, our GPS equipment required that we float a buoy every few minutes. The buoy was small and brown, but it still could’ve been easy for a pair of vigilant eyes to see it on the surface. We marked our position when we entered the water and stored it in the GPS’s memory. This way, we could find our way back to the boat, no matter what the conditions. We each plotted a course to the Miraflores Locks and agreed to meet at the stern of the Pearl in ninety minutes. We couldn’t risk swimming together and both getting caught and detained. I’d swim the western side of the canal, and Clark would cross and swim the eastern side. Our DPVs could make the four-mile run in just over an hour if everything went perfectly, but nothing ever went perfectly.
“What’s the contingency plan if one of us gets busted?”
I didn’t hesitate. “We’ll wait twenty minutes at the rudder and then continue the mission solo. We have to get Diablo off that boat.”
“Agreed,” Clark said in his best Green Beret voice.
When I swam over the spot where the explosion had occurred, I felt a cold chill, but I pushed it to the back of my mind and kept heading north. I floated the buoy and found that I was just off the navy base where we’d bought our new favorite toy from Pablo. I was making great time. I hoped the same was true for Clark.
I entered the narrow channel leading into the locks and slowed down to give Clark a little time to catch up. His swim was longer than mine since he had to cross the canal. I floated the buoy once more to reconfirm my position and found that I had less than one mile remaining to the stern of the Pearl. I could make that in less than fifteen minutes with the DPV.
I recoiled the buoy line and pulled the trigger on my DPV. Nothing happened. I yanked the trigger a dozen more times and got the same response. Nothing. I beat on the side of the housing and shook the machine, but it was dead. My sub-fifteen-minute DPV ride had just turned into a half-hour swim.
Wasting no time, I unclipped my dry bag from the now useless DPV and reclipped it to my harness. Unwilling to let the device be discovered, I opened the housing and flooded it with seawater, sending it to the bottom of the canal. After taking a compass bearing, I started kicking.
My body soon reminded me that I wasn’t at peak performance level. By the time I made it to the rudder of the Pearl, my heart was pounding like a drum, my ears were ringing out of control, and I was tired, but not exhausted. I discovered Clark’s DPV tied to the rudder, and I was relieved to know he’d made it that far. God only knows what he was thinking had happened to me. Because his gear was still in the water, but he wasn’t, I had to assume he’d arrived more than twenty minutes ahead of me.
I caught my breath, let my heart rate calm down, and then I slowly swam for the surface. My head barely broke the surface, and I scanned the area for onlookers or guards. I saw neither.
The knotted rope I’d seen in the satellite imagery was exactly where it was supposed to be, and tied to its end was a plastic devil figurine. I was starting to like Diablo.
Confident that I’d rested long enough to muster the strength to climb the rope, I secured my rebreather, mask, and fins to the rudder, and I started up.
After making the long climb with relative ease, I stowed the rope in a space beneath a bench and started my search for Clark and Diablo. When I rounded the port stern quarter of the ship, I saw a single forty-five caliber shell casing lying on the deck. A splatter of blood was on the bulkhead. Unle
ss the Chinese were using Colt forty-fives, the shell casing was Clark’s, and the blood was someone else’s. With my pistol held close to my side, I crept forward, replaying the schematics of the ship in my head to avoid getting lost on the massive vessel. Several sets of stairs led me to the cargo deck. Clark would be moving toward the cargo container we’d seen with the bullseye and antennas.
Every sound froze me in my tracks. A few voices were speaking what I assumed was either Mandarin or Cantonese, but I couldn’t tell the difference. The conversations sounded routine, so I continued my search.
I paced off the distance I’d memorized until I reached the walkway between the stack of containers they’d constructed as the listening lab and the next stack. There was enough rigging on the containers that would make the climb easy when I was ready.
I reached the center of the deck, still having encountered no resistance. Something didn’t feel right about the absence of security personnel as I started making my way up the containers. There should’ve been a sentry at every walkway and on every stairwell, but it almost felt like the ship was abandoned.
Someone yelled in broken, Chinese-accented English. “Why you here? Why? What your name?”
The yelling was followed by a long silence and punctuated by the unmistakable sound of fists striking flesh, then Clark groaned.
“Why you here? What your name?”
I moved silently across the containers until I was confident which one contained my partner and his captors. I retracted the slide on my forty-five a fraction of an inch to reconfirm what I already knew. There was, indeed, a round in the chamber ready to be fired.
A rough door had been cut into the side of the container, and a clumsy attempt at installing a knob had been made. That was a one-second obstacle at most. The problem was I didn’t know what I’d find inside.
How many targets are waiting inside? How are they armed? How prepared are they for my inevitable arrival?
Clark would be tied to a chair or table and wouldn’t be able to move. I’d heard at least two angry voices, but there could’ve been more observers or additional guards waiting to take their turn at Clark. There were eight rounds in my pistol and fourteen more in my two extra magazines. I could make the first three or four shots count, but if there were more men than that, I’d be badly outgunned. There had to be a way to get a look inside the container without giving away my position.
I approached the makeshift door and pressed my face to the hot metal. To my surprise and delight, I could see through the slit where the door didn’t quite mesh with the wall of the container. Clark was shirtless and strapped to a wooden rack on the wall. Blood was trickling from his mouth, but his eyes were open. Two interrogators had their backs toward me. I listened for sounds that didn’t coincide with the movement of the two interrogators, hoping to get an accurate count of the bad guys.
That’s when it happened. I was spotted.
But it wasn’t the Chinese interrogators who’d seen me. Clark’s eyes met mine, and he yelled, “Four! Eleven and One!” He ducked his head and closed his eyes against the delivery of the last punishing blows his captors would ever deliver.
In one blinding motion, I grabbed the door and threw it open. I sent a pair of hollow-point rounds into the faces of the two men at Clark’s eleven and one o’clock positions, and then two more into each of the men moving to inflict their blows on my partner. I was too fast. They never got to deliver those blows. Clark opened his eyes just as I released the magazine from my pistol, letting it fall to the ground. I slammed another in its place, rechambering a round a millisecond before the slide closed.
Clark spat blood from his battered lips. “Okay, now maybe we’re even. But I would’ve given Christine a night she’d never forget.”
“Next time I see her, I’ll tell her I’m sorry for robbing her of that pleasure,” I said as I cut him free.
“What took you so long?”
“You gave me a lemon,” I said. “I had to swim the last mile.”
“I’m sorry about that, but under the circumstances, I think I’d have been glad to trade DPVs with you.”
He’d taken a nasty beating, but he was far from out of the fight. I took a look at the cuts on his cheeks and around his eyes. “It looks like Baby Face may have just become Scarface.”
He spat another mouthful of blood to the deck and forced a smile. “I’m still prettier than you, college boy. Now let’s go find ourselves a water devil.”
23
Runnin’ with the Devil
Clark grabbed a pair of handheld radios from two of the bodies and recovered his pistol.
“That was a pretty good entry,” he said, “but I had them right where I wanted them. It was all part of my plan. I was on the verge of handing them their butts on a platter.”
“Yeah, but I can’t let you have all the fun. Did you have any luck figuring out where Diablo is before you implemented your grand plan to get captured?”
“No, other than the IR tape, there’s been no sign of him. I put down four Chinese gunmen before I ended up in here. The one on the stern went overboard, but I stashed the other three.”
I tried to piece together a search grid to find Diablo, but I kept coming back to the fact that there was no sign he’d been aboard. “We have to find a way to let Diablo know we’re here. We’re never going to find him unless he wants to be found.”
Clark nodded. “I thought he might react to the gunfire if I could ever get one of the Chinese guards to squeeze off a round. They’re all carrying unsuppressed AKs, but he never would’ve heard the rounds we fired unless he was next door with his ear pressed to the container.”
“That’s it!” I said. “He may not be next door, but wherever he is, we know he’ll be listening in to everything that’s happening in that container. If we can get inside of it and cause some general mayhem, he’ll know we’re here, and hopefully, he’ll reveal himself.”
He holstered his pistol and pulled on his shirt. “I’m in.” Blood was still trickling from his face, but the determination in his eyes made it clear he was feeling no pain.
We started our agonizingly slow climb up the mountain of containers, moving a foot or two at a time as we covered each other’s movement. There was no way to know where they might have posted guards or installed monitoring cameras, and while we could deal with the guards, the cameras were another issue. We had to avoid being detected by an overwatch. If they had time to plan and dispatch a force to stop us, we’d be badly outnumbered and even more outgunned.
After climbing, crawling, and trying to remain invisible, we arrived near what I’d labeled “the listening lab.”
“Let’s take out the antennas and see if they send somebody out to investigate,” I whispered.
“I’ll knock out the two on the forward section.”
Crawling across the neighboring container, Clark moved like a cat silently stalking his prey, but still not as stealthily as Diablo. I wanted to take out the four antennas as close to simultaneously as possible, so I slinked into position and waited for Clark to arrive at the front of the container. Two minutes later, he made eye contact and snapped the first antenna off at its base. His movements toward the second were less furtive and more rapid, never slowing down as he passed the corner of the container and broke the metallic whip like a twig.
I did the same, and we took up positions on diagonal corners of the container so we could see every exterior surface. We needed to know the egress points so we could make entry when the time came.
It didn’t take long for our bait to attract a rat. A spiky-haired, twentysomething Asian in flip-flops, shorts, and a filthy T-shirt poked his head out of a well-camouflaged hatch near the front right corner of the container, and then he started climbing. When our flip-flop-clad techno nerd reached the broken antenna, he quickly turned, looking in every direction for the source of the damage. Confusion looks the same on everyone’s face, regardless of the language they speak.
Clar
k and I ducked behind the corners of the container to avoid being seen, but in the end, it wouldn’t have mattered if the man had seen us and taken our pictures.
As the tech threw one leg over the top of the container and began to pull himself up, a small figure fell from the sky, grabbed the tech’s spiked hair, and yanked him from the container. As they fell, Diablo torqued the man’s neck, releasing an audible crack. Our little devil then released the tech from his grasp, letting him fall some fifty feet to the deck below. In a swift, silent motion, Diablo kicked the side of one stack of containers, forcing his body toward the next stack. He grabbed the rigging and drew his body against the wall of the container, making no more than a slight brushing sound as he came to rest.
Where did he come from? How could he have been watching from above without Clark or me seeing him?
Knowing there would be a second technician emerging from the hatch at any minute, I moved to the top of the container and crept to the front corner. Clark joined me as Diablo climbed back to a position above our heads. As soon as the tech had reached the top of the container, I grabbed his right arm and threw him facedown, twisting both of his arms behind his back and pinning him to the hot surface. Clark folded the man’s legs, pinning his feet to his butt, then sat on the man’s shins and pressed a pistol to the base of his skull. In that position, the man could neither kick with his feet nor pound with his hands on the container to warn his comrades inside.
Clark leaned in close to the man’s ear and whispered in Chinese.
In terrified English, the trembling man said, “Six.”
“Six including you and the first guy, or six still inside?”
The man’s face showed confusion. Clark switched to Chinese, and the man replied with something I didn’t understand.
Clark wove his arm beneath the man’s chin and squeezed until the technician fell limp and his breathing became deep and rhythmic. “Four inside.”