Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (20 page)

“What do you think he’s gonna do?” asked Dave.

“Search for us for a while. If he knows about the landings, he knows the amphibious ships will bottle him into the bay. He’ll have to try to get out of the bay before daylight.”

“So will we,” Tim said.

“Yeah,” I acknowledged, “so will we.”

We’d have to cross seventeen miles of “international waters” before we got back to the ship. Not that we’d be safe in the three miles of Honduran territorial water. I didn’t want to be anywhere around this guy in daylight—we were inflatable, and he was made out of steel.

“Give me some IR chemlights,” I said. I peeled the covers back, tied half a dozen together, and hung them low in the mangrove. I broke and shook each to activate it, then tore the foil covers all the way down.

I figured if this guy was constantly flashing around with his IR light, that was his primary search modality. He’d picked up our buoys, and he knew that the only things putting out IR light had to be gringo. The chemlights would be visible for a mile, at least. If he saw them, he’d be certain to investigate. And that would buy us time.

I started the engine and backed slowly out of the mangrove. Staying as close as possible to the trees, we moved west toward the mouth of the Laguna. About half the time we had sight of the PB, slashing light around maybe two miles south of us.

We had to cross a small cove backed by a stretch of beach. We’d enjoyed shadow and trees as a backdrop, and now the cover was fizzling out; the mangrove had temporarily ended. To make matters worse, the beach was light-colored, and we were black, a contrast that would be even more obvious with NVGs. The space we had to cross was about six hundred yards. It looked like the mangrove, or at least heavy tree cover, picked up on the other side.

I decided to run it wide open. We scooted past the bald spot at full speed. Though our outboard motors were “silenced”—all exhaust gases exited underwater, and the engine covers were lined with Kevlar and neoprene—they sounded loud as hell to me. We made it across, and the mangrove resumed, curving slightly into a point.

“There he is,” Dave said. He had the NVGs pointed aft. I lifted my goggles and saw it, too. The PB seemed to be crossing the bay. Then the light went out. I lost him for a second, then picked him up—this time his position was given away by our buoys, still carried on his fantail.

I was beginning to have some hope. This guy was no tactical genius.

I lost sight of the PB as we rounded the second point. The next cove presented the same problem: mangrove and cover on the fringes, white beach in the center. I scanned the water in front of us. There were several small frond-topped platforms clustered about fifty yards off the beach. Fishermen used them to dry their catch. The roofs were partially caved in, and they looked abandoned. I steered toward them.

There were flashes of light behind us. At first I thought they were lightning, but within a second or two came a farting sort of sound, but much louder, and it was grouped into a couple of short bursts. The PB was firing its machine guns.

I turned as a flare whooshed up into the sky above the first cove. They’d found our chemlights and opened fire. The flare ignited and drifted down. It lit us and the cove we were in, but the PB was around the point. There was no way they could see us. Yet. I knew the ruse of the chemlights wouldn’t keep them busy for long.

Behind us, the flare went out, and it was silent. No more shooting. It was dark, and seemed blacker because of the flare. We were playing a game, the Nicaraguan skipper and I. Now
he
knew that
I
knew he was after us. We needed to disappear.

I steered toward the platforms off the beach. I was going to jam the boat up under one of them and wait for the PB to pass. As we got closer, I could see hammocks hanging from the poles in one of the shacks. They were occupied. I steered toward the one with the hammocks, figuring it would be better to control anyone we met rather than have them jump into canoes and paddle away.

We came up, and I throttled back on the engine. “Buy us some time, Tim,” I said.

“Buenas noches,”
Tim called to the shack.

“Hola,”
came the reply.

“¿Usted tiene gasolina que poder comprar?”
Tim asked. We had plenty of gas; he was just trying to get them to talk. The reply that came back surprised us.

“No habla,”
the man said.

We were close enough now to see that the shack was occupied by a man of about forty and a ten-year-old boy. They were both still in their hammocks. Several dugout canoes were tied to the shack.

“They’re Indians,” Tim said.

I remembered a piece of trivia I’d read in a guidebook.
“Parlez-vous français, monsieur?”
I asked.

“Nous parlons français,”
the man in the hammock said.

The Miskito Indians had been Christianized by Belgian monks. They spoke French, another factor besides race that served to marginalize them in the eyes of Hondurans and Nicaraguans.

I steered closer.
“S’il vous plaît, monsieur, aucunes lumières,”
I said, telling him not to turn on any lights.

“Qui sont vous?”
the man asked.

“Nous sommes un equipe d’étude. Du service de la pêche.”
A lie, and one definitely at the edge of my high school French. I had told him we were a survey team from the Department of Fisheries.

We pulled up to their shack. “Get us under,” I said to Tim. “We’re gonna hang here for a while.”

By now the man could see that we were armed and our faces were painted green. His son said something to him in Miskito.

I said evenly,
“Nous n’allons pas vous blesser. Nous avons besoin d’information et aide.”
We wouldn’t hurt him, we just needed some information and help. I asked if he had seen the big gray boat come into the lagoon. Yes, he said. It came in just after dark. It was Sandinista, he said, rather matter-of-factly. They’d come into the bay maybe two hours before us, probably at slack water, when the waves were down.

Any other boats in here? I asked.

No, he said. Just them and you.

Then the PB rounded the point behind us. Its IR light was out now; it was harder to see but still visible, maybe a mile and a half back.

We had pulled the Zodiac completely under the platform. We were difficult to see. I hoped that was good enough.

The PB kept coming. We had our guns pointed at it, for all the good that would do. We had M-16s. They had a pair of dual 14.5-millimeters in turrets, plus half a dozen crewmen on deck with AK-47s.

The man and the boy watched the PB get closer.

I don’t want any trouble tonight, I said in French.

“Je compris,”
the man said.

Our luck held. The patrol boat passed the shacks without stopping. We were pressed behind pilings and as low into the Zodiac as we could get. When I heard the engines fade, I peeked up over the wooden deck. I could barely make out the stern of the boat, heading toward the mouth of the bay.

I lifted my NVGs. The PB had the infrared light trained on the shoreline. They’d scanned the shack and us but failed to see anything except a man and a boy in a pair of hammocks. I watched until the PB entered the channel and disappeared from view. I hoped he was headed back to Nicaragua.

“Thank you,” I said to the man in English.

He nodded. I pulled my knife and scabbard off my belt and handed them to him.
“Merci mille froi.”

We pushed the Zodiac out from under the platform and started the engine. We continued toward the mouth of the bay slowly, staying close to the mangrove. I looked at my watch. It was now 0400; we had an hour and a half before daylight would become a factor. I had no idea if the patrol boat had made his exit, or if he was hanging around in the channel or in the offing. In either case, I did not intend to accidentally run into him.

One more finger of land lay between us and the right-hand turn into the channel. We pulled into the mangrove, and Dave and I waded ashore. We patrolled to the edge of the tree line, where we had a good view of the channel. Off the bar, the surf was still impressive.

I scanned the channel, and my heart sank.

“Son of a bitch,” Dave spat.

The PB was drifting in the channel, bow pointed landward, lolling in the outgoing tide.

I just kept telling myself, He can’t stay there forever. I could see men on deck, talking. Their voices came to us in snatches above the background of rolling surf.

As we watched, the boat came about, bow pointed to sea. His engines reversed as he attempted to hold position in the ebbing tide. Hatches were closed and I watched as our IR buoys were tossed into a locker. They were making ready for sea. The PB drifted for a while longer, backing slowly, and then their skipper felt he had a break. The engines roared, and the PB made its run at the bar. It plowed through a couple of waves, then disappeared into the moonless dark.

“Our turn,” I said.

Dave and I hauled ass back to the Zodiac.

“They’re across the bar,” I told the guys. “I want to get as close to the rendezvous point as I can before the sun comes up.”

That was fine with the lads. We rounded the point and entered the channel. The surf was still big. The noise made it hard to speak. I drifted and watched a couple of sets, counting waves and noting the big, the bad, and the ugly. At the end of a particularly big set, I told everyone to hang on. I twisted the throttle and pointed toward deep water.

We plowed through a couple of broken waves, and the boat took on water. I didn’t have to say a word. Hats came off and the guys shoveled water over the sides.

Dave yelled, “OUTSIDE!” It’s the call surfers give to warn that big waves are coming.

That’s when I saw them. A set as big as highway overpasses. But these weren’t walls, they were peaks—higher in one spot than another. The tide was ebbing, and to port, I was pretty sure there was a deeper channel. The waves would break first in shallow water. I headed for the deeper water and the low spot, even though our course took us diagonally across the front of the oncoming set.

As the first wave approached, I swung the tiller around to take it perpendicularly on the bow.

We went up . . . up . . . up . . . and finally over. Like a moving hillside, the wave passed under us. The next wave was the same, a long, impressive climb. We watched this one break to our starboard, a gigantic fifteen-foot tube. If we’d been under that, it would have been game over.

We came down the backside of the wave, delighted to be alive.

And there was the patrol boat.

It was maybe three hundred yards away, nose on to us. Her bow wave was wide and white. She was balls-to-the-wall and headed right for us. We had definitely been seen.

We dropped into the trough, and the PB temporarily disappeared. There wasn’t time to say anything. I swung the tiller and headed up the face of the next wave. At the crest, we could actually look down onto the decks of the patrol boat—now two waves inboard of us, maybe two hundred yards away. Her windshield wipers were on.

I ran onto another wave face, this time cutting it as near as I dared to the breaking section. We were now pointed directly out to sea. Behind us, the PB put her helm over and followed.

The Zodiac was climbing a near-vertical wave face. I thought, calmly, that this wave was bigger than any I had ever surfed. We were halfway up the face. The top of the wave was throwing off spray. To our right, a ten-foot wall of water was starting to go concave as it felt bottom and slowed.

Five more feet to the top. The engine growled, maxed out. As we popped over the crest, we went airborne. The propeller came out of the water, and the engine screamed. The sound was lost in the thunder of the breaking wave. We fell back to the surface, tubes vertical. We landed on our transom, then slammed down like a pancake.

Hail Mary, full of grace. We made it.

I turned around. The bow of the patrol boat exploded through the back of the wave, then seemed to slow. White water swallowed her prow, then swept in, covering her wheelhouse. Her decks were covered as she stopped, listed to starboard, and was sucked backward in the wave. I watched her mast nearly disappear as she was knocked on her beam’s end and dragged back into the impact zone.

We all screamed. Yelled. Cheered. She had broached!

We rolled up onto another swell. Three more huge waves pounded the PB as we watched, pushing her back into the channel mouth. Her engines were belching white smoke as she struggled to keep off the shoals and away from the breaking waves. The PB was driven, wave after wave, back into the bay. It was a miracle, or the result of excellent seamanship, that she did not capsize or get driven onto the beach. When we last saw her, she was afloat with her engines working, but she’d had her ass handed to her. For the foreseeable future, she’d be busy trying to bail out and stay alive.

We didn’t stick around to see how it came out. I went to full throttle, steered out of the impact zone, then followed the coast west and out to sea. No longer bottled up in the bay, we were again a small dot on a vast black ocean. We were as safe as we were going to be.

When we were within five miles of the rendezvous point, the lights of
Fairfax County
came into view. The first fingers of dawn were spreading over the water.

“Long Bow, this is Garfish. Katherine, Avis. We are ready for pickup.”

“Nice talking to you, Garfish,” came the message. “We were getting worried.”

“
They
were getting worried?” Bubba said. “I almost shit my own heart.”

“Stand by to be recovered,” came the radio call.

“Roger, Garfish out.”

I looked back toward the coast. Twenty miles out, Honduras was a low hint of green on the horizon. The sun was coming up, and the clouds were taking on a neon shade of pink. The storm had let up, and it looked like the day would be beautiful.

Once aboard
Fairfax County,
we prepared our beach chart, and I told the story of our encounter with the PB. I was told that
Fairfax County
’s radar had picked up a craft inside the Laguna during our recon. They assumed it was Honduran. Had I checked with
Fairfax County
’s Combat Information Center before I departed, they would have told me about it. Important safety tip: Check the local radar. That was a lesson I would never forget.