Operation Caribe (38 page)

Brown said, “But to do that, you need the launch codes.”

Beaux replied, short of breath, “I
have
the codes and the launch keys—
and
the weapons officer’s firing mechanism. And after some persuasion, I managed to convince one of the crew members to show me how it all works.”

There was another long coughing spell. A FBI man put a note in front of Brown. It read: “He’s sick. Probably the flu.”

Beaux recovered and went on: “Now, let’s stop playing games. In an effort to hurry this thing up, we might be willing to adjust our demands. We can come down to fifty million dollars for our fee, and we’d be willing to split any profits from any TV broadcast or movie production with a charity, possibly for the families of people killed in unfortunate sinkings earlier. But we still insist on total immunity from prosecution.”

Another FBI agent passed a note to Brown. “He’s bending. Keep him talking.”

But then those in the Rubber Room heard a loud noise coming from the other end of the phone. Something had just happened aboard the sub.

Beaux’s tone changed instantly. “If you say there are no Special Forces guys around us, what the fuck do you think that was?”

More sounds in the background. Gunfire—and explosions.

Then Beaux said, “Back these guys off, Admiral! I’ll fire these goddamn missiles and maybe I’ll start shooting sailors, too. Call off your special ops guys or else!”

And with that, Beaux hung up.

Brown just looked around the room at a dozen stunned, bewildered faces.

“Who the
hell
are they fighting?” one of the FBI men asked. “And where?”

At that moment, one of Brown’s aides came into the room. He had a freshly burned DVD in hand.

“You should see this, sir,” he said. “Everyone here should.”

He fed the DVD into one of the computers, and they were soon looking at aerial footage taken above the unmistakably clear waters of the Caribbean.

“We just got this from our drone unit,” the aide explained. “It was shot yesterday. It shows a special ops team working on Operation Caribe recovering the body of one of their members. Apparently Team 616 killed this guy before they took over the
Wyoming.”

The footage, cloudy, shaky, and in black and white, showed a small helicopter diving down to the surface of the water to pick up what appeared to be a drowning victim. The helicopter then fired on two vessels nearby, identified in the video footage as “Abandoned by hijacking suspects.” Then the video ended.

“What special ops team are we talking about?” Brown asked the aide.

“They’re private contractors,” the man replied. “Those Team Whiskey guys? You know, the whole ex-Delta Tora Bora thing?”

Brown felt his heart sink to the floor. He knew all about Team Whiskey from his contacts in ONI.

“Those guys are crazy,” he moaned. “They’ve been off the reservation for years and were only called back because we were all so shorthanded on this Caribe thing. But they’re like the freaking Band of Brothers. If these SEALs killed one of them, they’ll be relentless in getting their revenge.”

“So these Whiskey guys probably know where the SEALs are?…” one of the FBI men asked.

Brown nodded grimly. “They must. But believe me, from what I know about them, they’re not going to call and tell us. If one of them has been whacked, they’ll want their own pound of flesh, no matter what.”

The FBI man said, “Are you saying that wherever the hell they are, this Whiskey unit would risk a nuke launch just to get payback?”

Brown thought for a long moment, worry lines creasing his face.

Finally he said, “We’d be crazy to bet against it.”

PART SIX

The End of Whiskey Justice

35

TEAM WHISKEY KNEW the SEALs would come to Big Hole Cay.

It was the final piece of the puzzle. The last bit of mystery to fall in place.

The SEAL team’s perplexing behavior in the last few months all made sense now. Sneaking in and out of the Bahamas, cruising these strange waters in the dead of night. All the planning, the subterfuge, the machinations. The murders. All of it, just to make this weird little island the center of their universe.

Their plan
was
simple. They’d stalked then hijacked the
Wyoming
, and instead of hiding in the ocean where they knew they would eventually have to surface and be spotted, they found this place and hid it here, among the outer islands of the Abaco Bahamas, where no one would ever think to look for it.

Except Whiskey.

*   *   *

THE TEAM WAS here long before the sub arrived—and in that time they’d come up with a plan of their own.

It wouldn’t be easy. There would be hurdles. Their sat phones were fading, a combination of weak batteries and the massive oncoming storm. No one in the team had slept or eaten in almost two days, meaning they were all running on pure adrenaline. And their copters were so low on fuel, they barely had thirty minutes flying time left between them. Maybe just enough to go for help, but not much more.

But that was OK—Whiskey didn’t want any help. It would have taken hours to get anyone to believe their story anyway, and they had no desire to wend their way through the bureaucratic minefield of U.S. military intelligence. They’d just gone through that bullshit exercise with The Three Kings. They weren’t about to make
that
mistake again.

No, this one they wanted to do themselves. On this little island, out in the middle of nowhere. With their limited resources, no sleep, in the middle of a hurricane.

They wanted to do it this way because, if their plan worked, they’d be able to spring a trap that even the
uber-
devious 616 would find impossible to get out of.

And once their enemy was ensnared, Whiskey planned to get its revenge in spades. Not just because the traitorous SEALs had stolen the
Wyoming
or killed scores of people on the
Mothership
, the Blackwater vessel, the Russian sub and God knew where else—

Whiskey wanted retribution because the 616 had killed one of their own. Their friend. The guy who’d put Whiskey back together. The guy who’d saved their lives many times over.

This was personal.

They were doing this one for Crash.

*   *   *

WHISKEY KNEW EARLY on that once here, attacking the
Wyoming
directly would not work. Forcing their way inside the sub and fighting amongst the cramped cabins and compartments would be like the worst kind of urban warfare. Plus, as the
Wyoming
cost more than $1 billion, the Navy probably wouldn’t appreciate Whiskey shooting it to pieces.

More important, though, the team had to think about the sub crew’s safety, plus the twenty-two nuclear-tipped missiles onboard. They also had a time element hanging over their heads. Whiskey knew they
had
to execute their plan quickly—and not just because everything they intended to do would work better under inclement conditions, and eventually the cover of darkness. It was because once the weather cleared, there was no telling what might transpire, including the possibility of the Navy finding the sub on its own.

Whiskey
did not
want that to happen—at least not until they were able to get their hands on the SEALs themselves and mete out their own brand of justice.

*   *   *

WHISKEY HAD ESTABLISHED their gun positions while it was still daylight, long before the sub arrived—and as it turned out, they’d placed them perfectly. There was a particularly thick grove of strangler fig trees near the lake’s north embankment, about a hundred feet away from where the sub would eventually come to rest. Thick vines ran horizontally along this bank, many entangled with patches of green moss. There was so much vegetation, it turned out to be the ideal spot to hide two of the team’s portable .50-caliber machine guns.

Farther down the lake’s embankment, close to where the sub’s bow would eventually be, was a trench that ran off into a small cavern. This cavern, in turn, housed one of the island’s mysterious blue holes. The trench and the cavern were almost impossible to see from the middle of the lake, a weird topographic trick.

This also made it difficult to detect the 30mm cannon that had been taken from
Bad Dawg One
and relocated here.

*   *   *

HIDING IN THE forest that afternoon, the team watched as the sub squeezed itself through the widened channel opening, stopping under the overhanging strangler figs and then sinking to the lake bottom, leaving only half its sail poking above the surface. The team waited until the skies began to darken in earnest, a combination of the approaching hurricane and the coming of night. Only then did they move to spring their trap.

The rusty tools left by the twenty day laborers on the beach nearby had turned out to be godsends. Once the sub had hidden itself and the first rain began to fall, the team had taken a 300-foot, half-inch-diameter cable from one of the copter’s emergency winches and had strung it back and forth across the channel mouth, wrapping it around posts they’d pounded into either side of the opening. They pulled this cable tight, then placed any tree or branch of substantial size they could find against it, upright at first. When enough trees were impaled vertically, the team had added more horizontally. With the pressure of the water flow keeping the trees in place against the cable, the weave they created slowly began to resemble a wall.

They’d next added mud, sand, and beach debris washed up by the coming storm. The more stuff thrown on the blockage, the less water came through the channel. Within an hour, all water flowing into the lake had stopped. And about two-thirds of whatever water was left in the lake had gone out the much narrower opening on the other side of the island.

It didn’t seem like it should have worked—but it did. That’s because the idea had come from the Senegals, residents of a country where water could be so scarce, people learned how to use everything at their disposal to quickly capture it or, when need be, control it.

That’s why the team had dubbed the dam
Senegals’ Bridge
.

*   *   *

THE HURRICANE HIT full force shortly after the sub was trapped.

The winds arrived first, then the rain, the thunder and lightning. Hiding in the forest, Whiskey was quickly soaked, as was all their gear, including their copters. But they’d pressed on because the next step was a major one: preventing the SEALs from launching the sub’s nuclear-tipped missiles.

Having Agent Harry along had come in handy here. He wasn’t the same person as before. He’d snapped after the SEALs sank the
Mothership,
and he’d yet to snap back. He wanted revenge on the SEALs now as much as Whiskey did. This had become personal for him, too.

Because of his position in the ONI, Harry knew about sub-launched nuclear missiles. They worked in a curious way. Generally speaking, once the firing sequence had been initiated through a series of keys being turned and codes being inputted into the launch computer, tanks on either side of each missile tube were filled with water. Controlled explosions beneath these tanks quickly turned this water into steam. The steam was so powerful when shot into the confined area of the tube that it forced the missile out, literally expelling it into the air for a dozen feet or so. The moment the missile started falling back to earth, its own rocket engine ignited, sending it on its way.

The bad news here was that even though Whiskey had drastically lowered the water level of the lake, the SEALs could still launch a missile if they wanted to. They could still flood the missile tube side tanks with water and set off the explosion to create the steam and push the weapon out of its silo. As soon as the missile fell even one iota, its engine would light and off it would go.

So, how could Whiskey prevent this?

Harry had come up with the answer. To avoid accidents, the hatches above any ballistic sub’s missile tubes were designed so if there were any resistance to opening, the missiles would not fire. If Whiskey could somehow keep the missile hatches shut, the world would be spared a possible nuclear catastrophe.

Ideas such as piling rocks atop the sub were discounted as impractical; because the island was mostly coral, few rocks here were bigger than a pebble. Besides, Harry claimed all that was really needed was a shim welded into the right spot on each missile hatch hinge. If done correctly, the shim would create enough resistance to prevent the hatch from opening and thus a missile from launching.

That’s where Ramon came in.

Batman had used about half the team’s remaining gas to fly to North Gin Cay, stir Ramon out of a pot-induced slumber, explain the situation as best he could to him, and then make him an honorary member of Team Whiskey. Ramon had gathered his welding supplies and they’d flown back to Big Hole Cay at top speed just before the weather became really bad.

As soon as the water went down Batman had delivered Ramon and his gear to the submarine’s stern and he started welding the half-dollar-size shims onto the missile hatch hinges, sealing them in place. Once discovered, the only spot from which the SEALs could fire on him was the open bridge, and Whiskey and Ramon’s two Senegal bodyguards had that covered, blasting the SEALs whenever they showed their faces.

It had taken a few of these one-sided battles before Ramon felt safe doing his work. But after a while, and a little bit of inspiration, he’d ceased to notice the gunfire going on around him.

*   *   *

ONCE PART TWO of their plan was in motion, Whiskey had concentrated on part three: rescuing the sub’s crew.

Harry was very helpful here, too. Again, he knew about the inner workings of ballistic submarines and especially how cramped they were, despite their size. He also knew that if the reactor were taken offline, the SEALs would have to rely on power stored in their batteries for electricity. Should that source be interrupted, the hijackers would be forced to use a handful of small maintenance generators to work all their environmental systems, including the emergency lights and the air circulators. While, in theory, these generators could supply enough electricity to work the nuclear weapons too, in this scenario, the SEALs would find themselves prisoners of their own prize—enclosed in a dark, congested space, running on ten percent power, with foul air and little illumination. Under those conditions, it was hoped 616 would become so distracted, they’d let down their guard on the crew.