Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (19 page)

Compounding matters, when swells met the rush of outgoing tide, they would occasionally lurch up, sucking out and pitching forward in what surfers call “closeouts.” Most waves break in a predictable manner; closeouts break almost without warning. Two-hundred-yard sections of wave would fold over and break almost instantaneously, sending a wall of white water across the entire channel. I studied the waves and waited for an opening.

“You’ve got a set coming,” Dave said quietly.

I turned and looked aft. Half a dozen cliff-sized waves rolled silently toward us, getting bigger as they came. I turned the boat 180 degrees, headed seaward, and gunned the engine. The Zodiac went nearly vertical as we made it up the face of the first wave. It was a monster. I put the tiller to port and headed for the low shoulder of the next wave as the breaker exploded on the bar like a depth charge.

Holy shit. I looked at Bubba. For a kid from Tennessee, he didn’t seem too impressed. I wasn’t comforted to think that maybe he didn’t know any better.

I stood up again and looked out into the blackness. The set had passed, I hoped. I would have to cross the bar in the relative calm between sets. But which sets? And how would I know when it was safe to go?

The rain stopped as though someone had turned off a tap. The moon came out and lit the channel and the Laguna beyond the bar. Suddenly, the way before us was clear. The sea behind us was also lit.

“Jesus tap-dancing Christ,” Bubba said.

This time he
was
impressed. Behind us, a massive set of waves crested up on the outermost part of the bar. Here was the Big Kahuna and his buddies. We were now a hundred yards from the mouth of the channel. These waves were the biggest we’d seen tonight. There would be no turning to seaward and getting away over them. Like it or not, we would have to run the channel. Now.

“Okay, let’s do it,” I said. As if we had a choice. I pointed the Zodiac toward the shore.

As we moved into the impact zone, I gunned the engine, trying to keep the boat in the low spot between the last wave of the first set and the first wave of the new. A foot-thick layer of sea foam danced on the water around the boat. Behind us, a gigantic wall of water felt bottom and loomed up.

In slow motion, the wave pitched out. The lip was two feet thick and fell trailing a white plume of spray. As it slammed the bar, the rumble was something we could feel in our chests. Another wave broke behind it. Then another. These waves were breaking 250 yards to seaward and rolling toward us in ten-foot walls of white water. The broken waves rushed at us, closing the distance between sets faster than I thought possible.

I gave the engine a squirt and overtook the white water in front of us, the remnant of the first set. The Zodiac bumped up, then dropped down five feet as we overhauled the broken section. We were now surfing, only we weren’t riding a surfboard; we were in an inflatable boat loaded with a thousand pounds of men and equipment, and it handled like a dump truck with four flat tires.

The good news was we were slotted right down the middle of the channel. The bad news was the Big Kahuna was still closing. Fast. We streaked along, and I kept the tiller as steady as I could. Any turn right or left could broach us, and the boat would flip and be run ashore. I steered and gritted my teeth.

The wave behind kept coming. Even broken, it was bigger and faster than the wave we rode. I knew from thousands of hours of surfing that one breaking wave does not usually overtake another. I also knew that sometimes they do. When it does happen, the doubled wave is bigger and even more unpredictable. I didn’t want to do the math. We were inside the channel mouth, and I could see beach, forest, and mangrove on either side of us. I knew the wave would have to peter out. Soon. The wall of white water behind us started to subside, gradually lessening until it faded out completely under us.

To my right was a rude jumble of fishing shacks, maybe five. This place was called Barra de Caratasca. It wasn’t a town, just a group of huts. They showed no light, but I didn’t want to be seen. I aimed the Zodiac at the left side of the channel and reduced speed. We puttered out of the impact zone and toward the darkness of the mangroves.

We were in.

I looked around the boat. Grinning like a monkey, Bubba had his hat folded back like Gabby Hayes. Dave knew exactly how close we had cut it. He rolled his eyes. “Cowabunga,” he said.

Nobody laughed. Everybody knew we would have to cross the bar again to get home.

I told Dave to contact
Fairfax County
and let them know we were in. I listened as he intoned, “Long Bow, this is Garfish. Susan, over.” He flashed a thumbs-up as the ship rogered our transmission.

We headed southwest, toward the middle of the bay. Three miles passed before we caught sight of the scattered lights of Puerto Lempira, another two miles due south across the water. The rain came and went, but the night remained exceedingly black. Confident we were not visible from shore, in the middle of the bay, we turned southeast toward the landing site.

As we motored slowly along, Dave heaved a lead line from the bow of our boat, testing the depth of the water. We rode a shoal contour for a while; eventually, we veered south and found deeper soundings. This was the channel our landing craft would follow to the beach site.

We dropped a buoy and a fifty-pound anchor. The buoy was a translucent plastic milk jug into which we stuffed five infrared light sticks. The chemlights could be seen only with night-vision goggles. In daylight the buoys would be visible to the landing craft. We marked and followed the channel southeast.

Even though we had located the channel, finding the landing site was a bitch. I had to be sure of our location by hugging the shore and counting the two cove openings to the west of our beach. Using NVGs, we finally located the small, low point of land adjacent to the beach-landing site. We dropped a second buoy.

I idled back the engine. Dave and Tim slipped over the side and swam quietly toward shore. They were swimmer scouts, and would make sure the area was unoccupied before we brought the boat or the rest of the team any closer. For reasons of security, our reconnaissance mission had not been coordinated with the detachment of Honduran infantry stationed at Puerto Lempira. The Hondurans had no radio equipment that could receive coded traffic. It was decided to conduct all of the prelanding operations “in obscura” rather than to radio the plan on an open frequency. Not a bad idea, since we were right on the Nicaraguan border.

Swimmer scouts were also a good idea. Though it was likely that the Hondurans were tucked safely in their barracks, an unexpected encounter with one of their patrols might lead to a serious misunderstanding.

Half an hour passed, and we waited, pressed down as low as possible in the boat. I scanned the shoreline with my night-vision goggles. Finally, the signal came: five flashes from an infrared strobe. I put the engine in gear and motored toward the beach.

The water inside the cove was flat calm, and we glided silently against a stand of mangrove next to a broad white crescent of beach. I killed the motor. We pulled a camouflage net over the boat and moored as close in to the mangrove as we could. I broke an infrared chemlight and placed it on the boat. If we needed to extract in a hurry, I didn’t want to have to crash around in a pitch-black mangrove thicket looking for our ride.

We split into two elements. Tim, Bubba, and Stan formed a swimmer line and swam three passes up and down the beach. They used their lead lines to sound the offshore area and wrote depth readings on swimmer slates attached to their wrists. Dave and I shot a compass bearing as a baseline for the swimmer element, and when they had finished, we patrolled inland a hundred meters, sketching the terrain and beach exits and taking soil samples. We rendezvoused back at the mangrove. The entire operation took less than thirty minutes and went off without a hitch.

We radioed the brevity code Katherine, indicating that we had completed our survey. We transmitted twice but got no response from
Fairfax County.
We didn’t force the communication window. We’d try again when we reached the mouth of the channel and the radio would have a better shot at reaching the ship. It was time to get out of Dodge.

The camo net was pulled back and stowed, and I started the engine. The moon was out now, and the clouds appeared to be breaking up. Going back the way we came, down the middle of the bay, was no longer an option. I headed north along the eastern side of the lagoon. The shore along this part of the Laguna was uninhabited mangrove and impassable swamp. This inhospitable terrain extended south all the way to the Coco River and the border with Nicaragua.

Even though the coast was deserted, I kept the boat two hundred yards offshore, motoring north, then turning west at the top of the bay. The return trip was longer, but it validated a fundamental precept of naval special warfare—never go out the way you came in. As we puttered quietly along the shore, we couldn’t know that the route we had chosen would save our lives.

The rain started and stopped, and finally, the moon set behind the trees, no longer a factor. We’d been wet and in the wind for over nine hours; the adrenaline was wearing off, and we were getting cold. I figured we would make our exit without further adventure when Dave nudged me. He was scanning the water south of us with his NVGs.

“I don’t see the buoys,” he said.

“Look harder.”

“They’re gone.”

I throttled back, letting the Zodiac drift. I looked through my NVGs, panning south and then west, every place I would logically expect to see the green glow of the chemlights. There was nothing.

I turned the NVGs off, then turned them on again, listening to the soft whine as they warmed back up. When they were functional, I looked behind us. What I saw nearly stopped my heart.

Glowing green in the night was a huge spotlight.

I peered over the top of my goggles. There was no light visible to the naked eye. I looked again. The NVGs showed it plainly: a powerful spotlight sweeping the water behind the point to our right. Someone else was out in the bay—someone with an infrared searchlight.

“You copy that light?” I asked.

“Fuckin’ A. Somebody’s got a goddamn IR spotlight.”

But who?

“Let’s get into the weeds!” I said.

I opened up the engine and headed directly north toward the shore. The Zodiac skittered over the three-hundred-yard distance quickly. I throttled back at the last second, and the boat rode up on its wake as we bumped against the half-submerged roots of a dense stand of mangrove.

“Get us in as deep as you can,” I said.

We yanked at the branches and roots, pulling the Zodiac as far into the trees as we could. We quickly spread the camo net over the boat and ourselves. I killed the engine. We pointed our weapons out into the bay.

Silence.

I looked through my NVGs and saw nothing. Could I have been wrong? No. Dave had seen it, too. There was something, someone, out there, shining an IR searchlight.

Then the light came again, this time closer and brighter; still behind the point to the east, but now under 150 yards away. We could not see the vessel or person, but we plainly saw the IR beam panning out across the bay.

“Fuck,” Stan said.

Then we saw it. The infrared light played down on the water and reflected up, silhouetting the source of the searchlight. It was a patrol boat, maybe sixty feet long. It was outlined perfectly as its IR light shone down close and outboard. Green on green, the outline of the vessel was plainly not American. The Hondurans didn’t have anything like it, either.

Lightning flashed in the sky, and through the NVGs, I got a good look. It was a Russian-made Zhuk-class patrol craft. Nicaraguan. I could see the two domes of its 14.5-millimeter machine guns, fore and aft. There were maybe half a dozen crewmen on deck. I had no idea how they failed to see us before we saw them. Seeing their IR searchlight was probably the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me.

What was a Nicaraguan PB doing in Honduran territorial waters? They weren’t just in Honduran territorial waters, they were miles
inside
Laguna de Caratasca, a nearly closed Honduran lake.

The PB turned in a broad circle away from us, moving slowly toward the beach we had just reconned. The IR light periodically swept out into the bay, but away from us. I could make out two glowing balls of infrared on the aft deck of the PB. They were our marker buoys.

We had big problems. We were no match for a sixty-foot patrol boat. They were faster than we were, had greater range, radar, IR capability, and outnumbered us. Their advantages would be magnified in daylight, when they could see us from farther away, run us down, and gun our brains out.

I looked at my watch. It was 0240, three hours until dawn and our rendezvous with
Fairfax County.

The patrol boat couldn’t compete with the three-inch guns of the LST, but that didn’t help us in here. There was also the small matter of effecting an exit from the bay and crossing twenty miles of open ocean. At sea, and in the open reaches of the bay, the game was all theirs.

“Maybe we should call the ship,” Stan said.

“What are they gonna do, pray for us?” snorted Bubba.

“We gotta stay off the radio,” I said. Before the Sandinistas took over, Uncle Sam had pumped millions of dollars’ worth of equipment into Nicaragua. The radio we carried was a PRC-77. Nothing special—the standard-issue radio for American infantry units. It was certain to have been supplied to the pre-Sandinista army. Hooking a PRC-77 to a scanner was a no-brainer. If we used our radio, chances were the patrol boat would know it. If we talked long enough, they would pinpoint our location.

The only thing we could hope to do was stay in the mangrove and try to skulk out of the Laguna. My best guess was that we were seven miles from the mouth of the bay. It was twenty miles beyond that to our rendezvous point. My orders didn’t cover playing hide-and-seek with the Nicaraguan navy. Or starting a shooting war.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s the plan. We’re going to continue west across the top of the bay, staying as close in to the mangroves as possible.”