Hunt the Scorpion (3 page)

A wise man named Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen; few in pursuit of the goal.” Crocker had committed those words to memory. They were his mantra. Don’t worry about the fuckups and bumps in the road, focus on your goal.

The goal was to protect his countrymen from people who wanted to destroy their way of life, take away their freedoms, shred the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

That wasn’t going to happen as long as Tom Crocker was alive. No way. He hadn’t earned his reputation as Chief Warrant Officer Manslaughter for nothing. People oohed and aahed over high-tech drones, listening systems, heat imaging. But when real nasty, difficult shit needed getting done, it was sheepdogs like him and his men who had to step in to protect the sheep from the wolves.

Crocker followed the LSO down steep metal steps and through a tight corridor that led to the captain’s quarters. Photos of the ship’s namesake, Congressman Carl Vinson—the only man to serve more than fifty years in the U.S. House of Representatives—lined the walls. Another bald-headed, sharp-eyed man in a suit. All Crocker wanted when he grew old was a shack in the woods, his wife—hopefully—and a means of securing food and water.

The LSO stopped and opened the door to a state-of-the-art conference room. The captain—an energetic man with a lantern jaw and short-cropped gray hair—stood and squeezed Crocker’s hand.

“Welcome aboard, Warrant. Glad you could make it.”

“It’s good to be back, sir.”

“Take a seat and we’ll drop the disco ball.”

Crocker, still dressed in his desert cammies, barely got out a question—“Sir, what’s going on?”—before the lights dimmed and a panel of four large color LED monitors descended from the ceiling and lit up. On one of them he recognized the gaunt face of his CO back at SEAL headquarters in Virginia, which caused him to sit up at attention. Instinctively, he started to wonder what he had done wrong.

“Crocker, is that you?” His CO, Captain Alan Sutter, was squinting through wire-rimmed glasses.

“Affirmative, sir.” Crocker focused on the bump where the captain’s nose had been smashed during Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada, 1983, when his chute had failed to open and he crashed into a tree. Lost a mouthful of teeth, too.

“Can you hear me?”

“See and hear you clear as day, sir.” His CO was damn lucky to be alive. So was he.

“Good.”

“How are things back at headquarters?”

His CO didn’t answer, cutting the small talk. “A critical situation has come up. Somewhat of a strategic emergency. Demands a swift response.”

“My men and I are ready, sir, to do whatever’s needed.”

“We need someone we can trust with a very difficult scenario who’s deployed in the area,” Sutter continued.

Crocker was going to say “Difficult is my call sign,” but bravado didn’t go over well in SEAL teams. Operators were expected to be humble, do their jobs, and limit the chest pounding.

“I appreciate that, sir,” Crocker said instead, fighting through his exhaustion. He wasn’t twenty years old anymore but in his midforties. And even though he was in incredible shape, his body needed time to recover.

He could probably forget about resting tonight.

From the video monitor, his CO continued: “Involves a pirated cargo ship off the Somali coast.”

The word “pirated” intrigued Crocker. He’d heard stories of local gangs stopping cargo ships and even supertankers off the coast of East Africa and the Malacca Straits in Indonesia.

An aide slipped a pad and pencil in front of him, and Crocker took notes as his CO and two officers from the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center related the ship’s position and various details, including info gleaned from the vessel’s emergency signal and satellite surveillance.

Crocker was wondering why a cargo ship of Australian registry was getting so much attention when his CO mentioned that it was transporting “sensitive nuclear material” from Melbourne to Marseille.

Among Crocker’s various duties, he happened to be the WMD officer at SEAL Team Six. “You referring to yellowcake, sir, or something else?” he asked. Yellowcake was uranium ore concentrate. Once it was enriched in a process that involved turning it into a gas called uranium hexafluoride, it could be used to fuel nuclear bombs.

“The exact nature of the material is classified. It’s not dangerous in its current state. But it’s important. Very goddamn important.”

“I understand, sir.”

“The White House wants this handled immediately.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get your men geared up and ready to deploy.”

“You can count on us, sir.”

“There’s no time to fly in another team or the cigarette boats. You think you and your men can handle this situation alone?”

“Absolutely. We’ll take care of it, sir, as long as someone can get us there.”

Typically pirates operating off the coast of Somalia held ships and their crews hostage while they negotiated five- and six-figure ransoms. So Crocker asked, “Have there been any communications from the pirates, sir? Have they made any demands?”

“None so far.”

Strange,
he thought.

“Approximate number of pirates?”

“Expect six to ten. Secure the sensitive material because the White House would like to use it as evidence.”

Evidence of what?

“Deploy as quickly as you can,” his CO said.

“Yes, sir.”

As soon as the room’s lights illuminated, the supercarrier’s operations officer appeared at Crocker’s side. A big man with a shaved head, dressed in a khaki uniform, he said, “Give me a list of what you need and I’ll turn this carrier upside down to find it.”

Crocker thought quickly and answered, “A helicopter that can get us there fast, two Zodiacs with twin outboards, wet suits and skin suits, fins, Dräger LAR V rebreathers, twelve frag grenades, a telescopic pole and caving ladder if you have one, flares, TUFF-TIES, comms, SMGs, and pistols.”

The op officer scribbled everything down. “That all?”

“A cutlass and eye patch, if you can find them.”

“What?”

“It’s a joke.”

“I should find most of this in one of the Conex boxes from the last SEAL platoon on board.”

“Works for me.”

“Be on the flight deck in fifteen minutes with your men.”

“Yes, sir.”

Crocker was thinking about his wife, Holly, as a tall navy officer led him through a maze of corridors, past a gym, commissary, and barbershop. She worked for State Department Security and was about to deploy overseas any day, too. He wanted to call her, but there was no time.

They entered the ship’s mess, where he found his men feasting on Szechuan chicken and chow mein noodles. Moving them over to a corner table out of earshot, he briefed them as more aides arrived with nautical charts and satellite photos.

According to the latest intel, an unmarked assault boat appeared to be towing the MSC
Contessa
to the Somalia coast, which was highly unusual. What were primitive pirates doing with a launch that was powerful enough to tow a forty-thousand-ton ship?

Crocker and his men would soon find out.

Still chewing a mouthful of chicken, he helped his men carry their gear and weapons up past the ship’s hangars to the flight deck. There they were greeted by a fresh ocean breeze, a welcome relief from the stale air and claustrophobic atmosphere below.

Crocker didn’t like the confined feeling of ships, particularly the submarines he and his men had deployed from a dozen or so times over the years, which seemed like sardine cans filled with pasty-faced men. He especially disliked Swimmer Delivery Vehicles (SDVs), which were basically mini-subs.

He covered his ears as an F-18 Super Hornet approached the
Vinson
’s flight deck, its engines screaming, its tailhook deployed. The F-18 hit the deck, sending a tremendous shower of sparks into the night sky. The fighter jet was slightly off track and missed the ship’s arrest wire, so it quickly zoomed up to full throttle and took off again with a roar.

Crocker noted that the sky was cloudy and the sea choppy, which caused the carrier to rock side to side.

“That can’t be easy,” Akil remarked.

“Flying in at a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour and trying to hit a wire. You try it sometime.”

“No thanks.”

The LSO who was escorting them shouted into Crocker’s ear, “Be careful where you walk. A year ago one of our maintainers got his cranial matter sucked right out of his head when he stood too close to the intake of an A-6E.”

“Good to know.”

Right under the ship’s superstructure, known as the island, they met the pilots and copilots of the two MH-60 Knighthawk helicopters that had been tasked with flying them in. Each helo was equipped with M240 machine guns and Hellfire missiles. The four stood in a huddle studying weather charts as Crocker’s men loaded their gear. One of the pilots—a lanky-haired man with gray eyes and a Fu Manchu mustache—turned to Crocker and said, “Expect the flight to be a little rough. We got some weather blowing in from the south.”

“What have you got in terms of in-flight entertainment?”

“If you watch carefully you might be able to see a pelican taking a crap.”

“Just get us close. We’ll be fine.”

“You planning to fast-rope onto the deck?”

“No, I’d rather take the bastards by surprise,” Crocker answered.

“How far away you want us to drop you?”

“You’ll need to approach lights-out. Drop us about a mile behind the stern so we can’t be seen.”

The lead pilot nodded. “We can do that.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

F
ifty minutes
of bouncing around in the sky later, the six SEALs were in their black skin suits, ready to jump. Crocker leaned out the side door of the Knighthawk, trying to locate the MSC
Contessa
ahead. The light mist that fell dampened his face and hair. That and the cloud cover made visibility problematic, which meant that they had to rely on the helo’s radar.

The pilot kept his eyes focused on two green blips on the screen that appeared practically on top of each other east of the coastal town of Eyl—part of Puntland, the northeast corner of Somalia, which had declared itself an autonomous state in 1998.

When the helicopter got within two miles of the vessels, the pilot spoke into his headset. “Looks like they’ve both anchored off the coast.”

“They’ve stopped moving?”

“Correct.”

“Two vessels?” Crocker asked.

“Yeah, the cargo ship and the launch.”

“At what location?”

“Approximately fifteen miles off the coast. Direction…east.”

“Interesting.”

Crocker could understand the pirates commandeering the ship and anchoring it in friendly waters while they negotiated ransom. That was SOP in such cases. But what was the launch doing there?

The pilot’s voice interrupted his train of thought. “Signal when you’re ready for extraction.”

“Will do. And thanks for the lift.”

“Godspeed.”

The pilot lowered the helo within forty feet of the ocean and flipped a switch, which changed the light inside the starboard door from red to green. Crocker gave his men the signal to go. They pushed out the two Zodiacs and then the men fast-roped down—Ritchie first, followed by Akil, Davis, Mancini, Cal, and Crocker.

Lastly the copilot lowered their equipment—engines, paddles, Drägers and related dive equipment, fuel bladders, watertight weapons bags, telescopic pole with caving ladder attached.

Each three-man squad moved expertly, Davis, Akil, and Crocker in Zodiac 1 and Mancini, Ritchie, and Cal in 2. Each man knew what he was supposed to do: connect the engines and get them started, establish direction, comm. Check gear and weapons.

Within three minutes they had the motors running and were on their way, water slapping the bows, the boats twisting violently from side to side.

Crocker felt the adrenaline slam into his veins—that welcome burst of energy that produced a sense of invincibility. He lived for moments like this.

The warm air and faint scent of rot and tropical flowers reminded him of the times he’d operated in Somalia before. All hair-raising and life-threatening. Each time he left injured or sick. It was a country that had come apart at the seams in the early ’80s and never managed to pull itself back together. An anarchic mess of young gangs and drug lords armed with AKs and rocket-propelled grenades. Somalia seemed many centuries away from the social norms and political stability enjoyed in the U.S. and even other African countries. Much of which, he thought, people back home took for granted as they sat in their easy chairs watching TV.

He’d save that thought for another time.

Now he was trying to locate a dark shape ahead, which was difficult through the clouds, the spray from the bow, and especially the pitching of the Zodiac.

“You see anything?” he shouted at Davis.

“Fuck, no!”

Be a real shame if we can’t even find it.

“There it is!” Akil exclaimed from behind them. “Eleven o’clock.”

Crocker wiped the moisture off the lens of his night-vision goggles and looked again. This time he located a triangular-shaped blotch with a smaller, indistinct form beside it.

“Bingo! Good eyes.”

Akil quickly adjusted the direction of the Zodiac until Davis held up a hand and shouted, “Now we’re on course!”

“Nice work, huh?”

“That’s what you get paid the big money for.”

“Sit back and enjoy the ride!”

The view through Crocker’s NVGs was anything but steady. The rubber duckie climbed up the crest of an oncoming wave, then dropped and slammed hard at the bottom, tossing the contents of his stomach up and down. The swells seemed to be growing bigger, which indicated that they were approaching the coast.

He turned back and spoke to Akil—more like shouted into his ear. “When I give the signal, cut the engines.” They needed to go in undetected.

Akil: “You need me to hold your hand, too?”

“We’ll dive from about a thousand meters.”

“Nice night for a swim.”

“Get an exact bearing.”

“I did that already, boss. What kind of fucking navigator do you think I am?”

“A wiseass one I’ve got to constantly check on.”

“Ha. Ha!”

He’d done hundreds of VBSSs (Visit, Board, Search and Seizure operations) in his career, in the Middle East and Central and South America. He’d also been on dozens of hostage-rescue ops—Christian missionaries in Afghanistan, kidnapped oil company execs in Colombia.

Crocker waited until the ship grew bigger in his NVGs, then held up his fist. “Kill it here. Stop!”

Akil cut the engine on Zodiac 1. Ritchie, piloting Zodiac 2 behind them, did the same. As the current tossed them up and down, side to side, the SEALs in both boats quickly donned masks and Drägers, grabbed gear and waterproof weapons bags, then slid into the Indian Ocean.

They swam in order, Akil, Crocker, Mancini, Davis, Cal, Ritchie, all holding on to the five-foot telescopic pole with its attached caving ladder. They moved at the same speed, same depth—approximately twenty feet under the surface—the way they’d been trained when they were part of Green Team, the four-month training course required to get onto an assault team and ST-6.

The water was cool and dark. Visibility was terrible, barely enough to see the luminescent dials on their depth gauges, compasses, and Tudor dive watches. The German Drägers strapped to their chests fed them pure oxygen so no bubbles would escape to the surface to give away their position.

Akil, the primary navigator, focused on his dive compass. Crocker kept time and counted kicks. He knew exactly how many kicks it took to swim one hundred yards. Because they were swimming against the current, they had to kick harder than normal. Thirty minutes, forty, fifty, until Crocker figured they were getting close.

Although visibility was limited, the last thing he wanted to do was surface and be seen. He had planned the dive for four legs, but it was awkward turning and stopping with three men on each side of the pole, maintaining a depth of twenty feet.

They proceeded at a forty-five-degree bearing for six minutes, then Crocker squeezed Akil’s arm, which was the signal to reset their compasses and watches before starting the next leg at seventy-two degrees for twenty-two minutes.

Less than a minute into their fourth leg, Akil stopped abruptly and pointed to the dark shape literally two feet in front of him. He signaled to Crocker, then swam away from the pole to establish their position. Returning, he signaled that they were on the ship’s starboard side, approximately fifteen feet from the stern, which put them beside the ship’s superstructure. Realizing that it would be easier to climb aboard near the cargo bays, Crocker ordered his men to swim another twenty feet along the hull.

They surfaced one at a time, the sky a welcome sight.

Light rain continued to fall as Akil and Crocker raised the telescopic pole with its caving ladder. The others removed their MP5 submachine guns from the waterproof bags—safeties off, straight fingers as always.

After a couple of attempts they managed to hook the pole on a deck railing. Then Crocker signaled to Akil to pull down sharply, which released the caving ladder from the rubber tubing that held it to the pole. The ladder rolled down the side of the hull approximately fifteen feet to the ocean.

Crocker, as lead climber, was the first man up, his MP5-N equipped with a three-inch silencer slung over his shoulder. He placed his weight on each rung carefully because he didn’t know how securely the ladder was hooked. Attached to his web belt was a holster with an MK23 Mod 0 .45-caliber pistol, extra ammo, and a climber carabiner with three tubular runners. He made it look effortless. After climbing over the rail he hitched a two-foot tubular nylon runner to it and carabinered that to one of the ladder’s rungs. Now it was secure for the rest of his team.

Then he crouched behind a hatch cover and conducted a quick survey of the ship. All the deck lights were off, except for several around one of the cargo bays near the bow. That bay was open, and the foremost cargo crane seemed to be in use.

Interesting,
he thought.

Not one pirate in sight, so he signaled the rest of his team to climb up.

They had already secured their Drägers, masks, fins, and weight belts to the rungs of the ladder below the surface. Now they climbed up quickly and took up preassigned firing positions that gave them a 360-degree security perimeter. Dressed in black suits with camo face paint, they looked like ninjas.

Crocker raised his hand and tapped his head twice, which was the signal to deploy they’d worked out during their abbreviated PLO, or Patrol Leader’s Order—Ritchie, Mancini, and Cal toward the stern and the ship’s superstructure; Crocker and the other two in the direction of the bow, always staying in visual contact with one another.

Seeing someone climb out of the forward cargo bay, Crocker extended his right arm and lowered it. Akil and Davis behind him quickly knelt down out of sight. He pointed to Akil, then placed his hand on his KA-BAR knife.

Akil nodded, then ran in a crouch along the centerline bulkhead to the forecastle bulkhead. Crocker, meanwhile, took two steps to his right. Past the forward mast, he saw a man in black standing with his back to him on the forecastle deck. He watched him push a button that lowered the crane into the cargo bay. A few seconds later the man punched another button and the crane rose, bearing a fifty-gallon orange barrel with a triangular yellow deadly-materials symbol on its side.

The question that flashed through Crocker’s mind was
Why were pirates unloading sensitive nuclear material from a ship?

That’s when he realized that the man operating the crane looked too well dressed to be a pirate. And when he turned sideways, Crocker saw that he was somewhat light skinned and had a close-cropped beard.

The SEAL team leader watched Akil spring from the foredeck and grab the man from behind. His left hand covered the man’s mouth while his right dragged the blade of the KA-BAR across his neck.

Textbook, Crocker thought, until Akil let go and the slumping man slipped off the wet bulkhead and pitched forward into the open cargo bay.

Mistake!

Shouts and exclamations echoed out of the bay, then someone started firing up at Akil, who hid behind the foremast. Sparks were flying everywhere from bullets ricocheting off metal as weapons discharged.

“We’ve been compromised. Let’s go!” Crocker shouted.

He and Davis followed the path Akil had taken forward. Halfway there, he heard an engine start up on the port side of the
Contessa.
Detouring left, away from the bulkhead to the port rail, he caught a glimpse of the launch.

It wasn’t a funky pirate vessel, but rather a clean, military-type fast attack boat painted gray. No markings, no name. Seventy to eighty feet long, armed with deck-mounted .50-caliber guns fore and aft.

“Watch out!” Davis shouted.

Seeing a bearded man on the deck aiming an AK-47 at him, Crocker jumped back and ducked behind a ventilator. He was joined by Davis, who reported seeing orange barrels stacked along the bow of the launch.

“How many?” Crocker asked.

“Half a dozen.”

“Pirates, my ass.”

An explosion went off near the top of the
Contessa
’s superstructure, where Ritchie, Cal, and Mancini had deployed. It pushed Crocker and Davis into a round metal ventilator and sent shards of glass and hot metal flying through the air, smacking the deck and mast. Crocker felt something embed itself into his left forearm, more painful than disabling.

I’ll deal with it later,
he thought.

Men shouted at one another from the boat below while others continued to fire from near the bow of the
Contessa
toward where he and Davis hid on the deck. The shouting sounded more like Persian than Arabic.

Iranians?
he asked himself.

It made sense. The Iranians needed parts and nuclear fuel for their atomic weapons development program. And they’d been hit by a series of UN embargoes that made it almost impossible for them to import uranium legally.

So they’d hired pirates to hijack a vessel transporting the things they needed.

Kind of clever.

“We’ve gotta stop that launch!” Crocker shouted as bullets smashed into the metal in front of them.

“What about Akil?”

A teammate in a firefight was always a priority. “We’re going to save his ass first.”

Not only was Akil pinned down near the
Contessa
’s foremast, but pirates firing automatic weapons had climbed out of the cargo bay and were attacking him from two sides.

On Crocker’s hand signal, he and Davis moved to the bulkhead at the center of the deck. From a position twenty feet forward, they fired their MP5s and caught two pirates by surprise—one in the chest, another raked from his knees to his sternum.

Akil took out a third with his 9-millimeter handgun. All those years of daily live-fire practice had paid off.

The foremost deck became quiet.

“Dammit to hell,” Akil groaned, holding up his right hand. “I got stung!”

“Where?”

“Back of my hand.”

Although it was a bitch to see in the minimal light, Crocker did the best he could, feeling through warm blood along the palm to the knuckles and fingers, ascertaining the extent of the damage.

Akil gritted his teeth. “What the fuck…”

Crocker said, “Appears to be a gash. Not serious. You’re one lucky motherfucker.”