“So, fuck ’em.”
“Easy to say. Hard to do.”
Day Three: 0140. Mick wanted to get back to London and straighten out the situation. I didn’t want to commit until I’d made contact with Nod. “Once Eamon or your people know where we are, we’d be operating at a disadvantage,” I argued. “We’d be on the defensive, which we both know is tactically unsound. Besides, with Gwilliam and Gerry both out of the country, I don’t see any reason to hurry back.”
Mick thought about what I’d said, and finally saw the light. So we settled into the anonymity of the transit lounge. Let me tell you folks that if you want to real-life play hide-and-seek, one of the best places to do it is the transit lounge of a major international airport. There’s food and drink, and creature comforts—if you don’t mind hard chairs and squalling children. And best of all, since you haven’t passed through Customs and Immigration, the government of whatever country you happen to be in doesn’t know you’re there.
0300. On my sixth try, I finally made contact with Nod on the cellular.
“I’m in Lisbon, Skipper.”
“What the hell—”
“You don’t wanna know, Skipper. And besides, I ain’t got a lot of time.”
“Okay, Nod: sit-rep.”
“Our boy’s with Brendan O’Donnell. They’re cooped up in a place called the York House—it’s a small hotel overlooking the port. I thought that might be significant because of that boat of theirs—the whatchamacallit.”
“Báltaí.”
“Yeah, whatever. We tracked ’em thanks to Mick’s pals. They have a car and a driver and a bodyguard and they’re playing tourist: hitting the Fado clubs all night and the museums during the day. We’ve had to keep way back, because these guys are good. But we have ’em covered.”
I knew that there are regular flights from Madrid to Lisbon. “We can be there in a couple of hours. You want us to come help?”
“Negatory, Skipper. Mick’s friends told me our lads are gonna pull out in five days. They have reservations on a commercial flight to the Azores.”
I thought about it. And all of a sudden what Nod was telling me made perfect sense. It made sense because we were in day three of a sixteen-day cycle. That meant, for the next twelve days at least, nothing was going to happen. I say “nothing,” because if the Kelleys were smart, they were going to maintain low profiles and radio silence until they staged their simultaneous two-part hit on those American and British targets.
Except, as you and I know, one element of that operation had already been canceled, by moi. And, if Robert Evers was as good as his word, and I had no reason at all to doubt him, given his past performance, all of the Kelleys’ Green Hand Defender allies in BA were being quietly scooped up by the Argentines, and—in Robert’s words—“lost within the legal system,” which I certainly hoped was a metaphor for being dropped out of a plane sans parachute, ten thousand feet over the South Atlantic.
So, with part one of the Kelley op canceled, there was only part two for me to deal with.
And now that I’d made contact with Nod I didn’t give a shit whether the Báltaí refueled in Recife, Brazil, or not. Why? Because now, I knew where the Kelleys’ yacht was going to make its final refueling stop before it went on to do whatever it was going to do: the Azores.
“You stay with our boy. We’ll go straight to the Azores and preposition there.”
There were two flights from Madrid to the Azores in the next eight hours. One went through Lisbon to Terceira; the other stopped in Porto and then flew into Ponta Delgada. I chose the latter destination. The Terceira flight landed at Lajes Field, which is a joint civilian/military airport, and home to some four hundred U.S. NAVAIR and eighteen hundred U.S. Air Farce military personnel. I knew that, given Mister Murphy’s proclivity for WPWT,62 we’d run into someone I knew at Lajes.
And so, using our French passports, we flew into Ponta Delgado, the largest city on the island of São Miguel, the largest of the Azores’ nine islands. As the 737 banked in from the sea over the craggy, grass-covered volcanic hills on its final approach, Mick peered out the window and said, “Shit, it’s greener than bloody England here.”
He was right, too. Vegetation in the Azores, unspoiled by industrial pollution, is emerald green twelve months of the year. The islands are largely rural and unspoiled. The climate is temperate, the fish is always fresh, and the people are friendly. Since we were traveling with carry-ons only, it didn’t take long to clear what passed for Customs and Immigration. Then we convoyed into the city in a pair of ancient Citröen taxis, found a modern, nine-story beachfront hotel, checked in, and hit the bar.
Day Four: 0500. I was up betimes, as that olde English diarist Sam Pepys liked to say. I pulled on a pair of shorts and a cutoff sweatshirt, and ran ten miles barefoot through the chilly surf and cold wet volcanic sand of the beach. After the summer temperatures of the Southern Hemisphere it was probably considered downright cool here in the North Atlantic—temperatures only in the low fifties. But I welcomed the chill. It reminded me of my Underwater Demolition Team Replacement Training at Little Creek, Virginia, during the fall. Hell, I am an amphibian. I am drawn to water. It doesn’t matter whether the water’s tropical warm or nut-shriveling cold. Just so long as it’s water.
The long run cleared my head and gave me time to think. By the time I’d covered five miles, I knew precisely where things stood, and what I had to do.
I knew that the time frame from when Gwilliam left the villa until the simultaneous hits were to be staged was sixteen days. We had so far used up four of those days. Gerry Kelley would arrive on Day Eight. If my pencil work on fuel consumption, cruising speed, and the North Atlantic weather conditions was correct, the Báltaí would arrive late on Day Eleven. The yacht would refuel and take on supplies, and then continue in a northerly direction, where it would locate and strike its oceangoing target from over the horizon, and then disappear.
Wait just a fucking second, will you? Who the hell is out here on this beach making all that racket at such an early hour?
Holy shit. Would you believe it’s the big APE63 again. He’s wearing a god-awful pair of baggy plaid swim trunks and a prissy Vassar College sweatshirt, he’s shivering like some pussy-ass Air Farce pilot during SERE64 training, he’s waving his fucking blue pencil in my face, and he’s demanding to know how I know that the Báltaí will be heading into the north central Atlantic to hit a target in the open seas, and not steering a landward course to stage a missile attack on Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament or some other potential target in Britain itself.
Hey, APE, fuck you. Stop shivering and I’ll answer your question in exactly one word. And that one word is: Exocet.
See, the Exocet missile is not a multiuse weapon. It was designed specifically for one act only: skimming along the water at wave-top level and then blowing a hole in the side of a ship. The MM 38 is a two-stage, solid propellant missile. Before you fire it, the Exocet’s control system determines the range and bearing of the target. In its first stage after firing, the Exocet’s performance is much like that of a Cruise missile. Then, at a range of about six miles, the Exocet’s unique radar system automatically switches on. At that point, the missile locks on to its target, and descends to one of three preset skimming altitudes, depending on the sea conditions and the damage requirements. Exocets, therefore, do not shoot down planes like SAM-7s, or target structures and hit them from above like Tomahawks do. Exocets work solely against maritime targets.
Hey, the all-powerful editor must be happy with my explanation, because he just performed a well-executed, single-handed absquatulation. So, let’s pick up where I left off, okay?
I left off in the middle of telling you that Báltaí would arrive on Day Eleven, to take on fuel, and supplies—and no doubt Gerry Kelley and his henchman Brendan O’Donnell, whose fellow TIRA-lira-lira tangos were responsible for the death of Butch Wells—before it headed out to sea to stalk its prey and make its
kill.
And I? I would be waiting for Báltaí. So I could head out to sea to stalk my prey and make my kill, too.
17
DAY FOUR: 0900. THERE WERE PREPARATIONS TO MAKE of course. You’ve heard the phrase “naked warriors” used to describe the World War II generation of what has come to be known as Naval Special Warfare? Well, we were currently very much akin to our Froggish forbears. We had our swim trunks, and the face masks, and the diving knives we’d bought in Buenos Aires, but that was it. We had no weapons or ordnance. We had no comms, except for the cell phones. We had no wet suits or fast boats, or any of the other supplies SEALs use to stage what’s known in the trade as a clandestine, sea-borne tactical assault.
I mean, sea-borne tactical assaults aren’t put together by chance or happenstance. You just don’t go out and willy-nilly take down a vessel. In fact, let me detail for you how a squad of SEALs is usually equipped in order to assault a ship under way. Because we’re talking about hundreds of pounds of equipment, much of it sophisticated and very, very specialized.
You need a fast boat like a Boston Whaler, or a RIB—a Rigid Inflatable Boat—so you and your people can get close to the target ship undetected. You need titanium-hooked steel-and-cable caving ladders atop painter’s poles, so that you can snag a rail or a scupper and make the long, muscle-burning climb without being seen. You’ve got to wear neoprene wet suits to keep you from going hypothermic in the chilly water, and above the wet suit, fire-retardant BDUs or a one-piece Nomex flight suit to make sure you don’t catch fire. You wear an inflatable SEAL combat vest and a CQC assault harness that supports the thirty to forty pounds of equipment you’re carrying: the flashbangs, the flares, the radios, waterproof earpieces and throat mikes; the door wedges, the flexible nylon handcuffs, the spare magazines, the first aid kits, the water canteens, the CS gas grenades, and the climbing ropes, to give you a partial list.
You have weapons and ordnance: a suppressed MP5 submachine gun in 9-mm and six extra magazines, a suppressed 9-mm pistol and three extra mags at the very least. Suppressed because CQC in the enclosed areas of a ship is a very loud affair, and you want to keep noise at a minimum. Your breach man has a Remington 870 or Benelli shotgun and two dozen rounds of 12-gauge in assorted flavors that run the gamut from powdered zinc breaching rounds to double-ought buckshot. To scuttle ships we carry a range of explosives from blocks of C-4 or Semtex, to shaped or ribbon charges, to the new Cubane-based explosives, plus an assortment of newfangled electronic detonators and old-fashioned analog timers. To scuttle people there are frag and high explosive grenades.
Obviously, that’s not the complete list, either. You wear Nomex flight gloves and a balaclava and even perhaps a knit watch cap. You carry safety equipment like flares, and chem-lights, those luminescent plastic tubes that you squeeze to make ’em light up. Many SEALs carry waterproof pencil flares and a pocketsize flare gun, as well as a couple of MK-13 smoke flares in visibility orange, red, or yellow so they can attract choppers or rescue craft if the need arises.
Now for the BNGN. The bad news first. Out of all that equipment, we currently had … none. And the GN? The good news was that we had more than a week to assemble enough of the inventory to make our mission achievable.
Yes, I hear you out there. You say you are dubious. Okay, Mr. Dubious, I am the Rogue Warrior®, whaddya want?
You want to know how I can assemble enough assault gear to take down a vessel under way, when I’m sitting on a small, pastoral, volcanic island group in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, eight hundred miles from Lisbon and twenty-five hundred miles from Norfolk.
The answer to that, Mr. Dubious, is a mélange, a combination, an intermingling, of Roguish ingenuity, as well as my profound knowledge of the dynamics of SpecWar and the capabilities of SpecWarriors, with a deep understanding about the environment in which I must work. When you combine all of the above with my SpecWar credo, which is: I WILL NOT FAIL, you can come up with only one conclusion. And that sole conclusion is, that I WILL OVERCOME THE FUCKING ODDS, I WILL FULFILL THE FUCKING MISSION, AND I WILL BRING ALL MY MEN HOME SAFELY.
Let us first take the problem of transportation. As I just mentioned, we would need a fast boat or a RIB to stage our assault. Well, it so happens (the truth often being stranger and more incredible than fiction), that the Azores are one of the world’s best places for whale and dolphin watching. Almost two dozen species of cetaceans—that’s the fifty-dollar word for marine mammals—can be found in the waters off the Azores during the summer months, running the gamut from sperm whales to Atlantic spotted dolphins.
Two of the five central islands, Pico and its smaller neighbor, Faial, are each home to a handful of whale-watching companies. Some of those firms take the tourists out on fishing boats. But three of them—the companies hired by Outward Bound–type, high-excitement vacation tours based in the States—use Zodiacs, so that customers can actually run with the whale and dolphin pods, keeping up with the creatures as they race through the choppy seas.
How do I know all these details? I know them because I am educated, perceptive, and observant. I know them because, as an unconventional Warrior, a SEAL, it is my business to know essentials like these so that I can operate comfortably anywhere in the world. But most important, I know these details because, on my way back through the hotel lobby this morning after my run, I picked up every one of the whale-sighting company brochures I could find, leafed through them, and zeroed in on the one from something called Azores Whales Unlimited, which displayed pictures of satisfied customers bouncing through the Atlantic chop in Zodiac rigid inflatable boats. To be precise, bouncing through the Atlantic chop in fire-engine red, seventeen-foot-eleven-inch-long, Zodiac Pro-II 550 “Thoroughbreds.”
The Pro-II 550 has a top speed of fifty miles an hour, which translates to about forty-seven knots. That meant it could outrun the Báltaí over short distances. It has a deep V-shaped bow and deeply fashioned fin rails, which give the craft excellent handling capabilities in choppy seas, as well as the ability to plane easily and turn tightly. When fitted with a couple of supplementary twenty-gallon gas tanks, the Pro-II’s range could run well over 250 nautical miles.
Day Four: 1321. While Boomerang, Randy, Hugo, and Timex spread out over São Miguel looking for useful supplies, Mick and I and a briefcase full of cash caught one of the island-hopping SATA commuter planes to Pico. We never met the pilot, but his name was probably Murphy, because instead of flying direct from São Miguel as scheduled, he diverted to Terceira, then stopped on São Jorge, and finally, two and a half hours after the posted arrival time, flew in over the crest of the huge, dominating volcanic cone for which Pico is named.
We grabbed a cab for the five-mile ride into Madalena, climbed out on the main square, paid the fare, asked directions toward the address stamped on the brochure, and, having been pointed in the right direction, started marching up a winding, one-lane, cobblestone street.
Six minutes later we stood in front of a whitewashed, two-story, tile-roofed house. There were two doors. The first was glass and led into what could have been a small travel agency or tour office: a couple of desks, and lots of maps of the Azores and posters of whales on the wall. Above the grimy office window were two hooks three feet apart. The color of the whitewash between the hooks told me that a sign must have hung there. But there was nothing to identify the place now. Mick tried the door. Nada. I stuck my nose up against the glass and peered inside. From the look of things, no one had been around for some time. But leaning up against a desk was a sign that read AZORES WHALES UNLIMITED.
Well, obviously not literally unlimited. But the fact that the place was shut down made sense: it was, in fact, three months past prime whale-watching season.
Maybe they’d be at home. The second door was made of wood, and led upstairs to what were obviously living quarters. I tried the handle. It was firmly locked. There was no doorbell, so I rapped on the heavy, painted wood. No answer. I tried again—pounding harder�
��without result.
Then, the door to the neighboring two-story house opened and a woman in black, age about sixty, peered out quizzically, and machine-gunned some rapid Portuguese in our direction. She had the tanned, weathered look of people who live all their lives close to the sea, or on it. You see ’em in fishing villages all over the world. She rattled on for about ten seconds, gesturing as she spoke.
But since my Portuguese is virtually nonexistent, I had no idea what she was saying. Mick held a hand out to her, palm up. “Desculpe—excuse me, fala Inglês—do you speak English?”
“Inglês?” Her lined face brightened.
Mick, whose Portuguese was even less fluent than mine, continued his tourist guidebook phrase conversation. “Sim, Inglês— yes, English.”
“Não Inglês.”
He looked at me. “She doesn’t speak English.”
“I knew that.” I looked at the woman and smiled. “Desculpe—fala Espanhol?”
“Espanhol?”
“Sim, Espanhol.”
“Não Espanhol.”
I tried the fala Françês route, but had to take não for an answer there, too Okay, we had reached the ol’ Dead End.
No, we hadn’t. I pulled the brochure from my pocket and pointed to the pictures of the whale expeditions.
“Ah,” she said, and launched into another impenetrable monologue.
I interrupted her tirade. “Não compreendo Portuguès—I don’t understand Portuguese.”
“Aah,” she said. She reached over and took the brochure out of my hand, unfolded it, found the map of the island, and pointed at the harbor. “Aqui, aqui,” she said, her gnarled index finger tapping at the port area.
Thirty-eight minutes later we stood at the edge of the small but busy port area. To my right was a tidy plaza, lined with cafés and restaurants and a trio of small, inexpensive hotels. To our left was the main harbor, with its wooden piers and fishing boats moored alongside. Directly in front of us were a series of stowage sheds, most of them weather-beaten, two-story wood structures, whose rear doors, now closed, cantilevered out over the water. The third shed in the line was painted blue and white, with the cartoonish figure of a frolicking whale. The wide front doors were wide open, so I walked inside, followed by Mick.
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