Bring On the Dusk (27 page)

Michael and Bill drove their DPVs elbow to elbow. With no running lights, it was the only way to be sure they didn't lose track of each other. They'd also tied ten meters of line between them, but hadn't needed it yet.

They were three meters underwater, approaching the south port. They couldn't see crap, and Michael's head hurt from the cold. The water was temperate, actually unseasonably warm for May, but still cold. He and Bill both wore thin-skin neoprene suits under their clothes, but he hadn't pulled on his hood. There'd been one in the Phase I package in his pack, but he'd been distracted by looking at Claudia. Dangerous mistake, but too late to rectify.

The DPVs tugged them along relentlessly. They were deep enough that they'd pass below any late-night fishing boats. Only big ships would draw deeper, and they'd hear those easily over the DPV's slight propeller noise.

He checked the GPS readout on his wrist and adjusted a few degrees to the north. The water clarity was only fair. While it was good enough to read the GPS, they'd have to surface for the final stage.

The DPV was attached by a short leash to a D-ring on his harness down at his waist; that did all of the towing. All he had to do was hold on to the handles to steer it. Still, his arms were starting to burn with the effort.

At least, in exchange for the thermal lashing his head was taking, he had an amazing picture of her in his head. Full gear, in clear command of the mission, hovering as stable as a rock just inches over foreign waters and sticking her tongue out at him. God he loved that woman so much.

The thought chilled him more than the water rushing by. Maybe Bill had some suggestion on how to handle this.

No. Why would he? He was happily married, and if there was one thing the happily married wanted, it was for everyone around them to be in the same state. But that wasn't an option.

So he kept his head down and the motor switch on high rev as they were pulled into Bibi-Heybat harbor.

* * *

“I've never seen Michael so happy. Is he good to you?”

Claudia had no experience with woman-talk. The closest she'd ever come was Emily's discovery that she was having a second child. Yet here they sat side by side in a parked helicopter on the oily shore of a country that their team was robbing right at this moment. And the question had been asked.

She considered how to approach Trisha's opener, then decided that what the hell, she'd try honesty.

“He's amazing to me.”

“Yeah, he's really good. I mean a good guy. I didn't mean—”

Claudia considered letting Trisha dangle for a while but she sounded so distressed as she dug her hole deeper and deeper that Claudia decided to throw her a rescue line.

“I already know about the two of you.”

That didn't slow Trisha down for a second; all it did was change her course. “You do? He told you? Why that low-life slime. Aren't a woman's secrets sacred anymore? Next time I see him, I'll—”

“Say absolutely nothing. He didn't tell me. But there are times that despite being Mr. God of Special Operations Forces, he's actually fairly easy to read.”

“Did he, uh… Never mind.” Trisha's voice went soft.

“All you need to do is look at how he treats you to know how he feels about you. Maybe it's more like a protective brother now, but he'd defend you right to the grave.” Claudia felt a chill at her own words.

“I don't know, Claudia. If he'd do that for me, I can't imagine what he'd do for you.”

“Well, whatever it is, I hope he has no intention of dying any time soon.”

Their conversation drifted from the men they were awaiting to the mission's plan and alternates, and then on to other missions they'd each flown. The time passed far more easily than Claudia had expected.

* * *

Michael and Bill shut down their DPVs before they rounded into the mouth of the south bay. There was a thin sheen of oil on the surface, not enough to coat you, but enough to smell. That's when he realized that he'd been smelling it since they'd approached Baku. His SAS pal had warned him, but he'd thought it was hyperbole.

“The whole place reeks of oil, pal. The air, the water—the banks reek of oil money—but all the rest just smells like oil,” the SAS operative had said. And he'd been right. It was thick on the air. The oil was so shallow in places that it had been harvested for millennia using hand-dug wells. And it also was so deep in places that the first offshore undersea oil rig in history had been an Azeri rig in the Caspian Sea, long before the Texans even thought about tapping into the Gulf of Mexico.

They kick-swam into the harbor and surveyed their options. Third pier up on the left would be the Triton subs. They were close when Bill stopped Michael with a hand on his arm.

Michael stopped to tread water and turned in the direction that Bill was staring.

“Now isn't that a pretty sight?”

Michael had to agree. It really was.

“Hi.”

Claudia yelped—she couldn't help herself—and then grabbed for her gun.

Michael had simply appeared right by her shoulder. Even Trisha squealed in surprise. They'd been keeping watch. She had intentionally landed the helicopter facing down the beach. Between the two of them, they'd been watching the whole strip.

He continued to grin at her like an idiot. She checked her watch to see it wasn't even half past eleven.

“What are you doing here?”

“Aren't you glad to see me?” He was teasing her and enjoying himself entirely too much.

Well, two could play at that game. She grabbed the front of his vest by the D-ring mounted there and hauled him in. He tasted and smelled like the rest of Baku, but she was so glad to see him that she really didn't care. The heat flashed through her and she could feel it overcome him as well. Gods but she wanted to just tumble right down onto the beach with him, oil sheen or not.

Trisha whined, “Hey, where's
my
D-boy?”

Michael eased back abruptly, clearly recalling he was on a mission, not a fling. He pointed over his shoulder.

Beyond the point of land that made the west end of the beach, eighty feet of U.S. Coast Guard ship came into view.

“I thought there weren't any U.S. assets in the Caspian. Those bastards lied to us.”

“No.” Michael was back to looking very pleased with himself. “We sold this one to the Azeri Navy about a decade back. You can't tell at night, but she's dark gray now rather than bright white. So, we thought we'd take the old
Point
Brower
for a ride.”

“You idiot!” Claudia jabbed her fingers into his collarbone just above his vest and armor. He didn't even flinch. “The whole idea was to remain low profile! That ship is—”

“Going to be invisible because they expect her.” His voice was absolutely calm, as if they were having a quiet conversation in a forest canopy. “She's known in these waters. And we have an Azeri officer on board who is only too glad to aid a pair of well-armed caviar smugglers in exchange for his life and a thousand manat, about eight hundred U.S. dollars. Even he doesn't know that he has a Triton-2M submarine in tow. We have it trimmed at about five meters depth.”

“Caviar smugglers?” And she'd thought that just his body made her head spin.

“Sure. Big business on the Caspian. The Azeris set very tight catch limits on fishermen to sustain the fish stock. But the smuggling market for Caspian Sea caviar is so lucrative that their mafia can pay the necessary bribes and still turn a nice profit.”

“Eight hundred dollars isn't much of a bribe.”

“It's okay. He isn't much of an officer. Only one aboard, fast asleep and drunk out of his gourd on vodka. We also may have led him to believe this was just a test run and much more would follow if tonight went well.” Michael was so pleased with himself that he was being positively outgoing.

Claudia remembered Emily's instructions to be flexible and tried to reset her thinking. She checked her watch again. The original plan had them at this point by 0200 if they were lucky, and in position to hunker down for the day by 0400. There just wasn't enough time between 2:00 a.m. and sunrise to execute the plan safely and get out of the area. But they'd gained two and a half hours. If they moved fast…

She grabbed the D-ring on the front of Michael's vest and dragged him back in for a quick-smacking kiss.

“Okay, you done good. Can anyone think why we shouldn't go directly to Phase IV rather than wait out the day?” She gave Michael and Trisha a few moments to catch up with her. When they did, all she got was a “Hunh!” of surprise.

That was the answer she needed. She'd left two of the encrypted radios powered up—one on the team frequency and one that connected to the Gray Eagle circling somewhere above them.

Despite the encryption, she wasn't going to do it in clear speech.

“Hey, Brooklyn,” Claudia called. “Talk to me.”

Kara caught on to the schedule change faster than Michael or Trisha had, even though she hadn't been expecting that request until tomorrow.

Claudia powered up the display of the Gray Eagle's data that Kara was feeding back to her.

“Patrol on schedule.” A flashing red highlight appeared on her display. All two hundred feet of a Russian Buyan-M class warship was right where it needed to be, if this were tomorrow night. The recent powerful addition to the Russians' Caspian Sea flotilla had been cruising the Azerbaijani coast as if the Russians owned it, harassing pipeline construction vessels, violating territorial waters, and generally being a royal pain in the ass. They were making it clear that no one was going to build a pipeline as long as Russia ruled these waters, even if by legal treaty it actually didn't.

With the vessel in place now, Claudia and her team should grab the opportunity in case tomorrow's schedule changed for some reason.

That was the key fact Emily had uncovered that had sent them hustling into Azerbaijan. An apparently unrelated bit of intel on the Russian patrol schedule had said that after tomorrow night, the Russians were going to up the ante by shifting over to day patrols, possibly kidnapping working crews or at least scaring them off.

That change would have made their present plan impossible; they needed the darkness.

Yet another reason to go for it right now.

Claudia smiled to herself. If this worked, the Russians' schedule was going to change a day ahead of schedule—and by a great deal.

“Sting 'em, Bumblebee,” came over the radio.

“Will do, Brooklyn.”

The Bumblebee nickname took her back to the desert for a moment, her beloved Arizona desert. She'd show it to Michael someday soon. Show him the most magnificent sunsets on the planet and sunrise vistas that made you feel so alive it was hard to hold them in your memory.

“Let's do it.”

* * *

Michael swam back out to the boat, old
Point
Brower
. Now it was going to get interesting.

So many times, Delta rehearsed, analyzed, and rehearsed again for a target only to be called off at the last moment. It was always energizing when they received the actual “go” on a mission. It didn't matter if the planning had spanned hours, days, or months; when it all came together, the feeling of satisfaction that all the preparation was actually going to be used was the same.

The old cutter floated off small Vulf Island—where the helicopters were still parked—about five miles to sea from Baku. Except for the distant city lights, the cloudless night was pitch-dark. The wave chop was low enough that he made good time back to the boat, which was little more than an outline against the stars.

On the afterdeck of the
Point
Brower
, the Azeri officer greeted him with a hug as if they were long-lost brothers and a sloppy kiss on the cheek, and waved a fresh bottle of Xan Premium vodka, which he immediately forced into Michael's hands.

Michael sucked in a mouthful of vodka and then blew it back into the bottle so that it looked as if he'd taken a huge swallow. The guy was way past minding a little alcohol-sterilized backwash. He didn't have to pretend to gasp afterward; this stuff was high-test. He handed the bottle back and slapped the guy on the back hard enough to send him staggering into the rubber service boat sitting in its cradle on the ship's stern.

He found Bill at the helm.

“You had to give him another bottle? Wasn't he drunk enough yet?”

“No. He was starting to sober up, and we can't let him figure us out. Also, I heard the ‘go' message from Claudia, and I had an idea on how to spice it up. We're actually going to use this guy”—he patted the helm of the cutter—“for something more than towing a submarine out to sea.”

When Bill told him his plan, Michael didn't even bother to say he approved. It was a great addition.

Then Bill started reciting a message in Azeri for Michael to memorize. Once Bill told him what it meant, Michael gladly began repeating it back phonetically until he had it right.

Bill fed power to the
Brower
's big engines, accelerating slowly enough to not strain the towline still attached to the submerged submarine. They headed northeast to the far point of the Absheron Peninsula and out toward the deeper parts of the Caspian.

“You'll want to broadcast that phrase starting the moment Phase IV is completed. Remember to sound very charged up.”

“Thanks. Real helpful.” Michael mumbled the phrase to himself several more times to anchor it in his mind. Bill went back to nursing along the boat that really should have a crew of eight to run her properly.

Michael went to check over his Phase IV kit once more. The only kit below that included an E and E bag. He sincerely hoped they wouldn't be trying to do an escape-and-evade across four hundred miles of hostile countryside. Especially not with the state of alert everything would be in if this worked.

It took most of an hour to steam around to the northern tip of Pirallahi Island at the very easternmost tip of the Absheron Peninsula. They were now at the very limit of where Azerbaijan's land reached out into the Caspian Sea.

On Pirallahi, a couple of smaller pipelines, each a half-dozen feet across, rose out of the ocean and came on land over the northern beaches. The island itself was quite populated, but the northern tip was industrial. The existing pipes led out to the offshore drilling rigs, pumping the oil and gas directly ashore.

There were also some new concrete foundations for unbuilt pipelines that showed up on satellite imaging but weren't in the news yet, which suited the D-boys' needs perfectly. Whether or not the new foundations were for the proposed Trans-Caspian line didn't particularly matter in the overall scheme.

They beached happily snoozing Auxiliary Officer Zadeh in the
Point
Brower
's rubber utility boat—without oars or gas for the engine. They found him a muddy island just a short swim from land and slipped another two thousand manat into his pocket. It should be enough to buy his silence, if he remembered anything at all.

They also left him with a radio—with dead batteries—set to the emergency radio frequency he had provided while still sober enough to do so.

“Part one of my ace in the hole,” Bill had practically crowed after Michael had swum back from beaching the Azeri officer.

“Now, for part two.” Bill drove the
Point
Brower
so close ashore that he was making Michael nervous.

“You do recall that we're towing a submarine.”

“Fear not, my friend. Water and I get along just fine.” Bill anchored her close ashore.

Right. Never try to tell a SEAL anything about boats, because they already knew it. So, he'd keep his mouth shut. Besides, he had plenty to worry about.

Michael's job waited for him after Bill delivered him by submarine to his point of attack. What happened to the boat they'd used to drag the sub into position wasn't his concern. He trusted Bill to get it right because that's what you did with your team. Bill had proved his worth long before Claudia Jean Casperson came on the scene.

And he'd trust her with his life. Already was. And his heart too, which had become a problem.

He and Bill both pulled on their scuba gear again and slipped over the side to dive down to the sub.