Operation Caribe (21 page)

He let that sink in. Then he began again.

“The trouble is, with these other flash points happening around the world, our SOF groups are spread thin—so much so, there aren’t any regular special forces units close to home who are able to work this threat on such short notice. That’s why we have some asymmetrical units here.”

He nodded toward the Blackwater reps and Team Whiskey.

“This will be a Band-Aid approach, because it has to be,” he said. “And there will be two simultaneous investigations. One will be coordinated on land by our friends in the FBI and Homeland Security. The second, which we’ll call the Sea Mission, will be honchoed by the Navy and involve Team Whiskey, Blackwater and—”

He cast a glance toward the five empty seats at the table. Just as he was about to say something else, the door to the bunker opened and five people came in.

They were wearing black camo and were walking tall and straight, almost as if they were marching. They all wore the same kind of buzz-cut hairstyle, and in a way they all looked alike, too: blondish hair, huge guns for arms, small fish tattoos on their necks. More tats evident on their shoulders. They exuded a real grim-jawed superiority.

SEALs,
Nolan thought.

No doubt about it.

They took their place at the table right next to Whiskey and nodded in the general direction of the briefing officer. They gave no explanation for their tardiness. Judging by the looks on their faces, they believed none was necessary.

For good or bad, in many ways the SEALs were what Whiskey was not. Clean cut. Ripped. Disciplined. A sense of purpose on their chiseled faces.

“We used to look like them,” Nolan found himself thinking. “We used to
be
them.”

The briefing officer did a quick recap of the problem—the three flash points, the pirate threat, and as comic relief, the tale of the missing Russian submarine.

He then addressed the group as a whole again. He began by saying that the land mission would use a place in Miami as its HQ and that the sea mission would be coordinated from a “secure ocean base,” whatever that meant.

At that point, the rep from Blackwater suddenly asked to be heard.

“We’ve thought this over,” he said. “And we’re going to pass on this.”

The room was surprised, to say the least. The briefer was shocked.

“You’re passing?” he asked. “Why?”

The Blackwater rep shrugged. “I don’t think we will have enough information to actually fulfill our role,” he said cryptically.

At that point, Twitch whispered to Gunner: “Maybe that means they already know too much.”

Without further explanation, the four Blackwater guys got up and walked out.

At that point the CO of the newly arrived SEAL team leaned over and shook hands with Nolan.

“So, you’re the famous Team Whiskey?” he asked.

Nolan just nodded.

“Commander Dogg Beaux,” the SEAL CO said. “Team 616. I’m looking forward to working with you.”

18

A NAVY SEAHAWK helicopter finally got Team Whiskey to Denny Cay.

It seemed like a long time ago when they were last here; actually, it had been less than two weeks.

Nothing had changed, despite the mini-hurricane that had blown through the islands not long before. The half-mile-long cay, looking like a quarter moon laid on its side, still had its shimmering flora, its pure white-sand beach, its handful of huts and small finger dock. The
Dustboat
was rolling in the gentle waves just off the island. Anchored about a half mile farther out was the
Georgia June
, as always ready to watch over them like a big brother.

In other words, for Whiskey, this place was paradise.

But they were staying for only a few minutes.

The CIA briefing officer had given the team three things: a set of coordinates to reach the Secure Ocean Base, or SOB; an order that it was necessary to take down the
Dustboat
’s cargo masts; and a very tight timetable.

The team had to get to the SOB in exactly five hours, just as night was falling. It was about a 220-mile trip to the semi-secret location, which was somewhere west of Denny Cay between the Berry and Bimini Islands and identified on civilian maps as Blue Moon Bay. The team had little time to do more than throw their gear aboard the
Dustboat
and get under way.

Having arrived here earlier, the Senegals had the ship ready to go. Whiskey climbed on and the Senegals revved up the ship’s diesel engines and its gas turbine-assisted water jets.

Within a minute of leaving Denny Cay, the small coastal freighter was making forty-two knots, heading west.

*   *   *

THERE WAS A problem, though. The team was still utterly exhausted.

From the time they pulled off the fake hijacking of the
Ocean Song,
to the entire Shanghai adventure, to their escape from China, their hopscotch flight back to Aden, to their fourteen-hour flight back to the Bahamas, none of them had gotten more than a few hours’ sleep. Now they were about to take on yet another mission. So, the idea was that the members would get as much rest as possible while the ship was making its way to the SOB.

But Nolan especially found sleep unattainable. He’d collapsed on his bunk as soon as they were under way, hoping sweet slumber would come. But his psyche would just not allow it. The upcoming gig was strange enough. But he had another problem he hadn’t told anyone about: He was still having flashbacks from his night in Shanghai.

They started back on the long flight to Aden aboard the Arado. Jammed into one of the seaplane’s tiny passenger seats, he was just nodding off when he had a vision that he was back in Shanghai, being chased, being shot at, being butchered alive with a meat cleaver. The flashback lasted only a few seconds, but he was startled awake, and afterward, he found it impossible to fall back to sleep.

The same thing had happened to him a half-dozen times since, and it happened again shortly after the
Dustboat
left Denny Cay. He’d dropped off but was jolted awake just a few minutes later, again after seeing a flash of him and Twitch in the back of the horrible meat wagon. He knew better than to try to sleep after that. So he grabbed a six-pack from his cabin’s tiny refrigerator and climbed up on deck.

The
Dustboat
was moving through the calm clear water like a speedboat on steroids. The Senegals had just finished the process of lowering the cargo masts—though they still didn’t know why the CIA briefing officer asked the team to do this. The weather was perfect, although way off to the east sat a line of very dark clouds. Nolan got a chill just looking at them.

He took up a spot up on the bow, away from everything else. He drank his beer and looked off to the west and was soon filled with a melancholy feeling. Just as he could see dark storm clouds on the eastern horizon, in the opposite direction, he saw a sky full of magnificent cumulus, gigantic, billowing white formations, bathed in the warm afternoon sunlight.

While studying these clouds, Nolan thought he could also see, way off in the distance, after the water fell off, the edge of another world. He imagined this thin line on the horizon to be the coast of the United States.

The place from which he was banned for life.

He spent the longest time looking at it. Was it real, or was it just a mirage, a fata morgana, his overtired mind playing another cruel joke on him?

He didn’t know, but as he tried to figure it out, one thought kept coming back to him: What if he jumped off the boat right now and just started swimming. Would he make it? Could he swim twenty miles? How about 200 miles?

If he could, then he would indeed step foot on U.S. soil again—and there would be no one to stop him.

*   *   *

ON THE OTHER hand, Batman had no trouble getting to sleep.

Soon after they left Denny Cay, he went into a deep slumber and stayed that way for four solid hours, positively Rip Van Winkle-like compared to what the team had gone through in the past couple weeks.

He credited his talent for sleeping to his ability to relax when the time called for it. But, of course, he also had a secret weapon.

Now, he rose from his bunk, refreshed, and went up on deck.

The air was warm and the
Dustboat
was roaring along, closing in on its semi-secret destination. He walked back to the stern near where the team kept its pair of helicopters. He wanted to take a few puffs of a joint in peace.

But he found Gunner and Crash sitting back here. Instead of sleeping, they had dropped a couple speed pills and had polished the team’s pair of helicopters. Now they were lounging on the helipad deck.

Batman took his couple puffs then pinched out the joint and walked over to them. They were hovering over a small paperback book, reading it, unusual in itself. They were so engrossed, Batman was sure it was pornography.

But then he saw its title:
Mysterious Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle,
and just groaned. “Jesus, not again.”

Gunner and Crash had a past when it came to things like this. During the team’s campaign against Zeek the Pirate, Batman, Gunner and Crash had landed in a huge Indonesian graveyard to collect funeral flowers they needed to work a psy-op mission against Zeek’s confederates. Batman had previously read a book on the numerous superstitions of the Indonesian people. The trouble was, Gunner and Crash had read the book as well, and had become obsessed with the many ghosts, gremlins and goblins of Indonesian lore. That night in the graveyard, both men were in a near panic whenever the wind blew or a dog barked, and especially when the clock began ticking off the minutes to midnight, which, in Indonesia, was when the nastiest demons came out to play. It was all Batman could do to get them to complete the mission.

Now they were reading again, this time about all the supposed paranormal mysteries pervading the Bermuda Triangle.

“Where did you get this?” Batman asked them.

“From the Senegals,” Gunner replied. “They believe all this stuff.”

Batman laughed. “Yeah, maybe when they’re drinking mooch they do. Anything seems possible on that stuff.”

“But there’s got to be something to it,” Crash insisted. “It can’t
all
be bullshit. Take a look.”

Batman leafed through the book. Not only did it document supposed disappearances of boats, planes and people in the so-called Triangle, it claimed the huge area of ocean was also a convergence site for UFOs, sea monsters, massive rogue tsunamis, electromagnetic time warps, and wormholes to other dimensions.

Even worse, according to the author, the points of the triangle were Bermuda, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico. This put the Bahamas, the very seas the team had been operating in, right in the middle of the accursed area.

Batman just groaned again. “Please, guys—don’t start this crap again.”

But they just laughed at him. “Like you didn’t see this stuff in action back in Indonesia?”

Batman said nothing.

He just tossed the book back to them and headed amidships again to smoke the rest of his joint.

*   *   *

THE
DUSTBOAT
REACHED the SOB’s coordinates just after sunset, right on schedule.

The entire team had convened on the bridge, curious as to what the so-called Secure Ocean Base really was—especially since it wasn’t technically even in the ocean, but rather in a large bay. The betting was it would be another nameless island, similar to the one where the crisis meeting had been held earlier in the day.

So they were surprised to find nothing at the coordinates but a huge, if unremarkable, ship.

It wasn’t a cargo vessel—not exactly. Though the ship was festooned with cranes and lifts and winches, its deck was crowded not with cargo containers, but with sonar buoys, service boats and what appeared to be scientific equipment of various shapes and sizes. The vessel was about 800 feet long and perhaps ninety feet wide. While outsized, it seemed as plain as could be, right down to its fading blue paint job.

“Oceanographic ship, maybe?” Batman guessed.

“Oil exploration vessel,” Nolan opined.

“A spook ship in disguise,” Twitch said, his words barely audible.

The
Dustboat
’s radio crackled to life. An eerie voice began transmitting instructions to them on how to rendezvous with the odd ship. They were told to maneuver behind it and await further instructions.

On the OK from Nolan, the Senegals followed the instructions and within a couple minutes, the
Dustboat
had lined up behind the slow-moving ship, bobbing gently in its low-level wake.

That’s when the back of the ship suddenly started to open.

Twitch’s guess had been correct. This vessel was a modified LSD. The rather unfortunate U.S. Navy abbreviation came from its hull designation, Landing Ship (Dock). In other words, it could flood its rear compartment and allow smaller vessels to float inside.

The Navy used LSDs in its so-called Gator Navy, those small fleets of ships whose duty was to put U.S. Marines on shore, invasion-style. The back of such a ship would open up and discharge air-cushioned landing craft that could carry to shore anything from tanks to artillery to Humvees to the Marines themselves.

But this ship looked much larger than any Navy LSD the team had seen.

The
Dustboat
’s radio crackled again, telling them to stand by. The back of the ship was suddenly lit by a bank of searchlights. The team could now see the vessel’s internal dock, which was big enough to accept at least two good-sized vessels.

An instant later, the radio came to life a third time. The same voice, now with a ghostly quality, started relaying instructions on how to dock inside the huge ship.

“Now I know why they wanted us to take down the cargo masts,” Batman said.

The closer they got, the smaller the floating dock seemed, especially since another vessel was already tied up within.

“Are we really going to fit?” Crash asked.

Nolan turned to the Senegals. They were the experts.