by Cap Daniels
I held up four fingers to Diablo then pointed into the container. He nodded and began climbing down the stack.
Four unarmed surveillance technicians weren’t going to be a problem, but if the man had lied, we’d be in for a fight. We had to be prepared for every possibility when we breached the hatch.
I whispered the plan in English for Clark and Spanish for Diablo. “Clark, you go right. I’ll go left. Diablo, you go low. Only shoot to avoid getting shot. There’s no reason to kill these guys if they’re unarmed.”
Diablo grimaced at my mention of letting the men inside the container live.
I met his eyes. “Don’t hold back. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I was quickly learning how challenging bilingual tactical operations could be.
In rapid-fire Spanish, Diablo said, “They will destroy the data when we breach. They have to be stopped before they can do that. They will die to protect that data.”
I agreed. “Okay. In that case, if they make any moves toward the equipment, we’ll put them down. If not, we’ll take what they have, disable and secure them, and get out. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” said Clark.
“Sí,” came Diablo’s staccato response.
We made our way down the stack and took up positions outside the hatch. Clark and I had not only practiced tactical entry together countless times, but we’d made more than one real-world assault on confined spaces. However, this would be our first with Diablo. I didn’t doubt his ability, but I was concerned with his ability to operate with restraint. If he had the opportunity to kill them, I doubted he would let anyone live.
I raised three fingers and began the countdown. Two. . . . One. . . .
Clark threw a powerful kick to the hatch, sending it flying inward. Diablo was first through the door and hit the deck like a cockroach, scampering left and right with astonishing quickness. With my left hand on Clark’s shoulder, I followed him through the hatch. He broke right as I peeled off to the left.
Clark yelled what I assumed was some variation of “Don’t move,” then I heard his suppressed forty-five spit twice. I was tempted to turn and see who he’d shot, but I kept my focus on my sector as a mortified face appeared just beyond the front sight of my pistol. The man’s hands flew above his head, and he whimpered in Chinese. Out of my peripheral vision, I saw another man stand, draw something from his waistband, and take up a fighting position.
Diablo leapt from the deck to face the man who was holding a glistening, curved, Kali-style fighting knife.
Short of being blown to the surface eighty feet above by thirty pounds of plastic explosive, there were few things I dreaded more than a knife fight. It ensured only one thing—you were going to get cut. Diablo obviously didn’t share my concern. He propelled himself forward and delivered a powerful side kick to the man’s knee, sending him melting to the deck. With his pinky laced through the finger hole, the man still had a firm grasp on the knife. Diablo stepped on his opponent’s wrist with his left foot, and in a lightning-fast delivery, landed his right heel just beneath the man’s chin. He exhaled a guttural groan and gave up the ghost.
I refocused my attention on my target whose hands had moved from directly over his head to his waist.
I yelled, “Hands up! Now!”
He followed my instructions, but this time his hands weren’t empty. Dangling from his index finger was a metallic pin on a ring. Just leaving the fingertips of his other hand was the body of a Russian F1 anti-personnel grenade beginning its slow arc toward the center of the container. Diablo was right. They would die to protect the data. The spoon released a metallic click, and the fuse began to burn. Depending on the variant of the grenade, we had between three and five seconds before the container would be full of countless shards of shrapnel flying through the air.
I yelled, “Grenade!” and dived toward the baseball-sized explosive sailing through the air. I caught it in my palm like a baseball and hurled it toward the hatch, hoping to get it outside the container before it detonated. To my horror, my throw was off the mark. The grenade clanged off the frame of the hatch and ricocheted back onto the deck of the container. I had landed in front of the man who’d thrown the grenade, so I wrapped my arm around his knees and rolled with all my strength toward the grenade that was less than a second away from sending us and the data to the great beyond. Just as I’d hoped, the man’s body collapsed toward mine as I continued my roll. He landed squarely on top of the grenade, and I allowed his momentum to carry me with him.
I experienced a second explosion in one week, but this one was inches away with a Chinese techie between me and the source of the blast. The sound was deafening, the shock wave was horrendous, and we were lifted off the deck before falling back into a bloody heap of misshapen flesh. I couldn’t tell how much of the blood was mine, but the shock reawakened every pain my body experienced from the underwater explosion days before.
Clark had taken cover behind an overturned table full of computer equipment, and Diablo was crawling from beneath the body of the knife fighter. My ears rang from the thunder of the grenade coupled with the residual tinnitus from my bout with the bends. I doubted if I’d ever hear again. Clark rolled me off the corpse of the grenadier and felt my abdomen and chest for shrapnel and open wounds. After the examination, he collapsed to the deck beside me.
There was relief in his muffled voice. “I know you’re willing to die for your country, but it’s so much better making the other guy die for his.”
He offered a hand and pulled me to my feet. Though temporarily nearly deaf, we were unharmed, and the data was intact. We bagged the data storage devices and made it through the hatch. I led the way with Diablo behind me carrying the bag, and Clark covering our six as we ran for the stern.
We emerged at a sprint from between two stacks of containers just as two armed guards leveled a pair of AK-47s at us. I downed each of them before they could get off a shot, and Clark stripped a rifle from one of the fallen guards. Every soul on that ship knew we were aboard, and covering our retreat with a thirty-caliber fully automatic rifle would be far more effective than doing so with his forty-five.
We descended the stairwells on the port side, backtracking the route I’d taken when I’d come aboard. At the base of the stairs, we picked up our pace, running with every ounce of speed we could muster. The unmistakable sound of rifle fire was behind us, but with my diminished hearing, it was impossible to tell if they were firing at us, or if we were firing at them.
Time slowed down as Clark, Diablo, and I dived from the stern toward the waiting water, and Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil” thundered in my head.
24
Ginger or MaryAnn
White ribbons of air followed the bullets through the water as they chased us downward toward the rudder. Clark and I knew we had air and rebreathers waiting for us fifteen feet below the surface, but Diablo didn’t have that intimate operational knowledge. He was blindly following us toward certain death if we couldn’t reach the rebreathers before one of the bullets found its mark.
We reached our gear, and I caught the slightest hint of a smile from Diablo as I poked a regulator toward his mouth. The three of us inhaled our first breath in over a minute and watched the full metal jacketed AK-47 rounds sinking harmlessly all around us.
We weren’t out of the woods—or the water—just yet, but our ticket to relative freedom was less than four miles away . . . as long as someone hadn’t helped themselves to our boat.
Clark and I donned the rebreathers and suited Diablo up with a mask, regulator, and cylinder. We had plenty of air for the water devil, but our problem wasn’t air—it was electricity. The single remaining DPV was designed to pull one two-hundred-pound diver through the water at just over five knots. There were three of us. That was far too much load to expect the DPV to drag us at any meaningful speed. Fortunately, the Pacific tide was receding, and our adrenaline was still pumping. We clipped ourselves into a single line
behind the DPV and headed south. I was in front, tucked in as tightly as possible behind the motorized housing with Clark in my wake, and finally, Diablo in the rear where his limited surface area would do little to diminish our speed through the water. We kicked at a moderate pace, adding propulsion to the tug of the DPV.
After forty-five minutes, I floated the buoy to take a GPS position. We were less than a mile from the boat. I was tempted to surface to sneak a peek back upstream, but I remembered the Bible story of Lot’s wife turning to a pillar of salt when she looked back as they were fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah.
Twenty minutes later we were climbing aboard the RHIB and doffing our dive gear. Diablo checked the seal on the dry bag to make sure the data wasn’t swimming in salt water, while Clark hauled the anchor aboard. Just as she had done at every turn of the key, the engine purred her reassuring rumble, and we roared southward, away from Farfan Beach and toward the island of Bona.
Clark made the sat-phone call, and I was relieved to see Leo and his trusty Huey racing barely above the waves from the north. He easily beat us to Bona and was waiting on the beach, ready to roll out the red carpet. We climbed from the boat, thankful to be feet dry on the beach.
“What happened to you, Baby Face?” Leo said. “You look like hell.”
Clark dabbed at his face with the tips of his fingers. “Oh, this? It’s nothing. I just cut myself shaving this morning.”
“It’s good to have you guys back. You, too, Diablo. I’ve been missing your world-famous roasted turtle.”
Since Leo had chosen to welcome us home in English, Diablo stared at him with his trademark empty expression. “Llévame a Ginger.”
“Even I understood that,” said Clark. “The little devil wants to see his girlfriend, and I think he’s earned it. I’ve always been more of a Mary Ann kinda guy myself, but I can understand how he feels.”
“Yeah, about that,” said Leo. “I guess you guys haven’t had a chance to catch the news.”
“No, we’ve had our hands full this morning. What’s going on?” I said.
“Well, it seems that a bunch of Muslim extremists hijacked four planes in the States this morning.”
“Okay,” I said. “What do they want?”
“It’s not so much what they want as what they’ve done that’s the problem,” he said.
“Come on, Leo. Spit it out. What did they do?”
He dug at the sand with the toe of his boot and bit the corner of his bottom lip. “They seized control of two airliners and flew them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York.”
“My God,” I said.
“How many dead?” asked Clark.
“We don’t know yet, but that’s not all. They also flew one into the Pentagon and dumped one in a field in Pennsylvania. There were minimal casualties at the Pentagon, and except for the passengers, crew, and hijackers, no one was hurt on the ground in Pennsylvania.”
I was at a loss for words, so I busied myself tying our boat to a twisted tree.
When we’d finished briefing Leo on the success of the operation and extraction, I noticed Diablo was missing . . . again. I caught a whiff of a fire and found him cooking a peacock over a small, smoldering pit.
For someone who was barely half my size, food certainly seemed important. The four of us ate ravenously, and I contemplated the dramatic events back in the States.
“I can get you to Cuba, or Bimini, or maybe even Nassau,” Leo said, “but there’s nothing flying in the States. And I mean nothing.”
I turned to Clark. “What do you think?”
“Elizabeth and Penny can get the boat to Bimini in two days,” he said.
I still had trouble thinking of Skipper as Elizabeth, but he was right. “I’ll get on the phone and get them headed that way.”
Leo said, “I’ll find you an airplane.”
“Us?” questioned Clark. “You’ll find us an airplane? Aren’t you coming?”
“Not if you’re going to Bimini. I’m persona non grata on that particular rock in the ocean for another few years,” he admitted.
“What did you do to get thrown out of Bimini?”
“Well,” he began, “I was allegedly involved in the reacquisition of a particular flying machine on behalf of someone I believed to be its rightful owner. I may have been slightly underinformed on the exact details of the whole situation.”
“You stole an airplane?” I said.
“I prefer to think of it as mistakenly relocating it to a little island whose people tend to roll the best cigars in the world.”
“You stole an airplane and flew it to Cuba?”
“Allegedly,” he reiterated.
“Did you at least get paid?” I had to know.
“Allegedly.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “We’re not exactly welcome back in Cuba.”
“Oh really?” Leo raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah, I allegedly shot a Russian mafia kingpin in the shoulder and chopped up a legendary assassin with a borrowed outboard motor in Havana Harbor.”
“That was you?” There was a hint of admiration in his tone.
I smiled. “Allegedly.”
“How about you, Clark? Why don’t the beautiful and friendly people of Cuba want you back on their little island?”
“The people don’t have a problem with me. It’s the government who isn’t rolling out the red carpet for us. We, also allegedly, relocated a mini spy sub from the harbor one dark night.”
“You boys get around, don’t you?”
Clark and I echoed, “Allegedly.”
* * *
Skipper answered on the seventh ring. I’ve come to believe that rings on a satellite phone have no correlation with actual rings, so I never hang up early.
She wasted no time with hello. “Chase, you’re never going to believe this. Somebody hijacked two airplanes and—”
“Yeah, I heard, but listen . . . I need your help.”
“My help?”
“Yes. I need you and Penny to get the boat to Bimini as quickly as possible. Leave right now if you can.”
“Sure,” she said, “but can we bring Ginger? She’s awesome.”
“Yes, absolutely bring Ginger. I don’t know if she can sail, but we need her there. Do not leave her behind.”
Before hanging up, she said, “Woo-hoo! Girls’ cruise!”
Clark chuckled. “That was quick.”
“They’re leaving today. They should be there by Thursday morning.”
Leo returned after a lengthy phone conversation. “Okay, guys. Here’s the deal. I got you an airplane. It’s a C-47.”
“A DC-3?” I said, a little concerned about the range and speed of the old cargo plane.
“Yeah, a DC-3. The military called them C-47s, same-same. Anyway, we . . . well, you will pick it up in Puerto Jimenez tomorrow morning. You’ll need a fuel stop, but she’ll make the total trip in eight hours or so.”
Clark was beaming with excitement. “Do we get to keep the airplane?”
“No, Clark,” said Leo. “You can’t keep the plane. It’s part of my penance. It’ll need to stay in Bimini.”
“We never get to have any fun.”
Leo huffed. “Yeah, Russian mafia boss, chopped-up assassin, stolen spy sub, air assault amphibious raid on a sunken Chinese freighter in the Panama Canal. . . . You guys never get to have any fun.”
“Okay, okay,” Clark relented. “We’ll leave the plane in Bimini, but I’m pissing out the door when we fly over Castro’s house in Havana.”
Leo laughed. “I would expect nothing less.”
We humped our gear to the chopper and left the key in the boat. Somebody was going to have a good time with our little toy, and I was going to miss her. I’d definitely be adding one just like her to my Christmas wish list.
The flight back to Puerto Jimenez was uneventful except that I got to do the flying. I had very little helicopter time, so it was a good opportunity to refresh my l
imited skill as Clark put me and the Huey through a battery of challenges. The chopper did well. Me? Not so much. But I had fun, and the landing was far better than I’d expected. Leo and Diablo slept through the whole thing.
The DC-3 looked like a pile of miscellaneous airplane parts taped and riveted together. I wasn’t sure it would make it to the end of the runway, let alone fifteen hundred miles to Bimini over open ocean.
“That’s your penance?” I said.
“Yeah, she ain’t pretty, and she’s old, but just like me, she still flies like the day she came off the assembly line.”
I scoffed. “Oh, she’s far worse than not pretty.”
“Don’t worry, Pretty Boy. It ain’t the paint that makes ’em fly. It’s the nuts and bolts, and she’s got good bones.”
Clark and I did an extensive preflight inspection and found Leo to be quite correct. She was mechanically sound, even if she was uglier than a bowling shoe.
“Well, boys. It’s been fun. Thanks for taking an old man on an adventure with you. Maybe I’ll send you a Christmas card sometime.”
I shook his hand. “Thanks, Leo. Take care of yourself, and don’t forget to send us a bill.”
“Yeah, I’ll get around to it. Fair winds and following seas.”
With that, he and his Huey vanished across the canopy of trees and into the millions of acres of Central American rainforest.
Clark had a couple dozen hours in the DC-3, so he climbed into the left seat, and I settled into the co-pilot’s perch. He walked me through the start-up procedures, and the old radial engines sputtered to life with clouds of smoke pouring from each.
“They do that,” he said. “It’s perfectly normal.”
The gauges were all in the green as we taxied out, and the old workhorse lumbered into the sky just like she’d been doing for sixty years. She had two VHF radios, but it didn’t seem possible to make either of them work for more than a few minutes at a time. The only navigation equipment was a compass that didn’t point toward anything consistently, and an ancient automatic direction finder that was supposed to point toward nondirectional beacons and a.m. radio antennas. I couldn’t make it do either one. As we leveled off at three thousand feet over the rainforest, I climbed out of the cockpit, rummaged through our dive gear, and pulled out our GPS units.