I pounded on Digger’s shoulder. “Gotta move,” I croaked. And then I started swimming.
We were back in the hotel by 2040. Since the human body cools down twenty-five times faster when subjected to cold water than it does when subjected to cold air, my body temperature had dropped to 94.6 during the thirty five and a half minutes I’d been in the harbor doing God’s work under Báltaí.
I stood under a hot shower trying to get my body above ninety-seven degrees. It wasn’t easy. I’d been as thoroughly chilled down as a shipping carton of Perdue Oven Stuffer Roasters when I climbed out of the water. If it hadn’t been for Mick’s support I probably wouldn’t have made it back to the hotel. Lemme tell you the unvarnished truth about Warriordom: it is tough work, and it is hard on the ol’ Rogue bod. In point of fact, Warriordom is an occupation most well suited to youngsters, whose bodies can more easily absorb the bumps, humps, lumps, jolts, dents, and dings that come with the job. Once you start the inevitable slide toward middle age, the body needs more time to recover from the sort of abuse people like me tend to heap upon it.
And so, slapped, zapped, whapped, and tapped out, I stood under the hot water for about three-quarters of an hour until I stopped shivering. Then I stood there another fifteen minutes until I could actually feel my fingers and toes. Then I toweled off, applied a piece of tape to the inch-and-three-quarter laceration on my forehead, wrapped myself in a pile of blankets, and since no one was offering me what I really wanted, which was a beaker of Dr. Bombay Sapphire and a long, long soak between a pair of warm thighs, I threw myself on the bed for a quick combat nap. I figured about half an hour would do me, because I wanted to be up and running in time to see the results of my labors over in the marina. I set my never-fail mental alarm clock, lay back on the mattress, and closed my aching eyelids.
19
I ROLLED OVER AND PEERED AT THE DIGITAL READOUT on the clock-radio sitting on the bedside table. The bright blue numerals told me it was 0735. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. Oh, shitfuck. Oh, fuckshit. I sat upright and fumbled for the light switch, then blinked when the lamp came on. The room was empty; the shades and drapes pulled tight over the small pair of windows. I rolled out of the sack, stood up, and lurched toward the bathroom. Why the hell hadn’t somebody come to get me?
Day Twelve: 0812. Boomerang, Timex, and Digger were working on plates of ham and eggs and cheese in the hotel’s dining room. I picked up a cup of coffee from the bottomless buffet, and dropped into an adjacent chair. I nudged Boomerang’s shoulder as I sat down. “Thanks for waking me.”
Boomerang shrugged. “Hey, Pibe, FYVM. You looked like you needed your beauty rest, so we let you sleep. Besides, there wasn’t much to do.”
“How’s Goober?”
“Sore as hell. He’s gone for a run to stretch out his leg.”
“What about Báltaí?”
“Seems as if Báltaí fouled a fishnet, Skipper,” Digger O’Toole grinned. “Nicked a prop blade, too. They’ll be here until about thirteen hundred.”
I looked at Digger. He certainly didn’t seem much the worse for wear. “How do you feel?”
“Fuckin’ great, Skipper,” Digger said. He leaned over toward me and whispered conspiratorially, “Except, by the time we got back to the hotel, I couldn’t feel the end of my dick anymore. So I went looking for someplace hot and wet to keep it until the feeling came back. Call me fuckin’ lucky, because I found me a nice pair of warm thighs and big tits right here at the hotel bar. Man, I gotta tell you: these Portuguese women are something else. They know some tricks… whoo-eee.”
I do so hate youth. I gave Digger a dirty look. “I really appreciate your sharing that with us all, Edwin,” I said.
I sipped at my coffee. Timex continued: “So there’s no need to rush, Skipper. We have all morning. Why not grab a decent breakfast?”
I looked over at Timex’s two plates, which he’d piled high with slices of yellow Portuguese cheese, sliced tomatoes, smoked ham, and scrambled eggs. Another held popovers, the last half of a sweet roll, and half a dozen slices of well-buttered white toast. “I see you’re not shy.”
“Heck, Skipper, it’s all included in the price of the room. Why let it go to waste?”
The kid actually had a point. In our trade, you never know if you’re going to get the chance to eat. So, I picked a fresh plate off the table and started toward the buffet.
As I rose, Timex handed me his bread plate. “Please, sir, as long as you’re up, could I have some more?”
Oh, great: my crew of merry marauders now included Priapismic O’Toole and Oliver fucking Twist. I guess that made me Mister Bumble. Actually, that’s not far from the mark. Mister Bumble, you’ll remember, was… an undertaker.
0920. Mick and Hugo had the watch. It wasn’t especially onerous duty, as they’d ensconced themselves at the rear table of a small outdoor café facing the marina. But it wasn’t downtime either. Occasionally, Mick would sneak a peek at Báltaí through his binoculars. That way he’d get a feel for what was where, because once we were aboard, there’d be no time for any land-lubbing hide-and-seek.
The rest of us began the load out. Digger and Nigel filled the red plastic jerry cans with gas and tied them down in the stern of the Zodiac. I’d already topped off the little boat’s internal tanks. On a whim I bought another two-and-a-half-gallon container of gas. I’d use it to top off the tank just before we left. The small can could be jettisoned at sea. Boomerang and Rotten stowed the two shotguns (which Nod had neatly sawed off to sixteen-inch barrels), the pistols, the magazines, and the ammo in the locker below the double bench seat. Goober made sure that we carried extra batteries for the Magellan in a watertight Baggie. Timex stowed our fishnet, which we’d use as an assault ladder, and our climbing rope, with its improvised hook, in the Zodiac’s forward stowage compartment. Nod worked the laptop, scrambling to get us additional intel on the prospective target.
The Zodiac had no windscreen, so I packed all the face masks in case the seas got rough. Uniform of the day would be dark clothes: jeans and sweatshirts, covered by nylon anoraks. Underneath, we’d wear our shortie wet suits. I knew from the previous night’s experience that they wouldn’t do us much good if it turned real cold. But then, I didn’t plan to be out at sea for more than a few hours.
1017. We moored the Zodiac at the end of a pier at the outer edge of the harbor. I called Mick on the cell phone. “What’s up?”
“They’re making progress,” Mick answered in his thick Welsh accent. “They cleared the net about two hours ago. There’s a crew of divers still working on the prop, but they’re almost finished.”
“Any sign of our boys?”
“Oh, yeah. They’re in the wheelhouse, bitching to the captain and the chief boatswain’s mate.”
“How can you tell?”
“Gerry’s body language, mate. Gerry’s body language.”
“Whaddya mean?”
He handed me the glasses. “See for yourself.”
I focused until I could see Gerry. He had one of the crewmen backed up against the bulkhead, bitch-slapping him. Gerry turned away, took a step or two as if to leave, then whirled and came back with a vicious kick. The crewman went down like the proverbial sac de merde. Gerry looked at his brother. I could make out Gwilliam’s happily malevolent smile clearly through the long lenses.
I handed the binoculars back to Mick. “Nice pieces of work, our Kelley boys.”
Mick grunted. “I guess—if you like malicious wankers.”
1054. Mick reported that Báltaí had cast off from the dock and was backing slowly into the channel. I told him to get his ass over to our position ASAP. We still had no confirmation of their target. But actually, the target was unimportant, because it would become apparent as soon as they reached open water. If Báltaí went north, they’d be heading for the supertankers. If it went southwest, they’d be going after the QE2, on the Funchal/Lisbon leg.
1100. Nod jumped into the Zodiac, the laptop under his arm.
“It’s QE2,” he said breathlessly.
“How do you know?”
“Because,” he said, “the last two legs of this trip are a theme cruise.”
“A theme cruise.”
“They have VIP speakers. The VIPs get a free first-class cruise in return for a lecture. And their names draw a crowd. This one’s about politics in the new century. Lady Thatcher’s aboard. So is General Sir Michael Rose. So is Senator George Mitchell.”
Margaret Thatcher is, of course, the former prime minister who turned Britain around in the 1970s and 1980s. Mike Rose was an old colleague of Mick Owen’s. He’d led 22 SAS Regiment, then gone on to head British forces in the former Yugoslavia. He’d been knighted a few years back. And George Mitchell? He was the former American senator who’d been the main architect of the peace agreement in Northern Ireland that’s known as the Good Friday Accord.
Two Exocets were sufficient to sink the QE2. And the water north of Madeira was deep: twenty-five hundred fathoms, which translates into almost three miles. Oh, QE2 had sufficient lifeboats to ensure that most of the passengers would get off before she went down. And the crew had emergency procedures training. But the mere fact that Gerry and Gwilliam could hit and sink the centerpiece of the British commercial fleet would cause incredible political repercussions.
Not that they’d get away with it, of course. Because to get to QE2, they’d have to go through MOI.
1128. Báltaí eased out of the harbor at Horta, then turned in a northerly direction, skirting the coast of Pico. I gave the con to Boomerang. We followed about two nautical miles behind the big yacht, keeping to its inshore side. The Zodiac didn’t give off any more of a radar signature than a small whale. But even so, we zigged and zagged so as not to attract attention.
1228. Báltaí picked up a little speed. It was now moving at about twenty-five knots. We shadowed it through the strait between São Jorge and Pico, and out into the open sea that would lead us past the island of São Miguel. For them, it was an easy sail. For us, things were not so pleasant. The day had clouded over, and the wind had picked up. It was hard work to hold the little Zodiac steady, and after about an hour and a half, Boomerang relinquished the con to Goober so he could rest his arms and shoulders, which had taken quite a pounding.
So had we all. The Zodiac is not a craft built for comfort, or long-haul trips. It is a short-range boat, built for speed and maneuverability. On the open sea, after a couple of hours in a two-foot chop, your kidneys feel as if they are being worked over by Mike Tyson while the two of you are riding a roller coaster. And then there is the Wet Factor. We shipped a fair amount of water—not enough to overload the twin automatic bailers, but enough to make ’em work hard. But between the spray and the shipped water, we all got wet—which meant we were getting colder by the minute because we were generating wind chill, running as we were at thirty knots.
But as you will recall, hypothermia when submerged is twenty-five times more potent than in cold air. I looked over at Mick, who is not used to this sort of maritime punishment. His jaw was tight, his face dripping seawater. He grunted with each bone-jarring shock. But he rode it out just like the rest of us—gritting his chattering teeth, and keepin’ on keepin’ on.
1635. By my guesstimation, we were now just northeast of the big island of São Miguel. Guesstimation, you ask? What about the Magellan GPS, you ask? Well, lemme tell you about Magellan GPS units—especially first-generation Magellan GPS units. They were not built for this kind of abuse. And so, the readouts we got were sporadic. And interpreting them was being made difficult by the fact that we had to keep the unit inside a plastic Baggie to keep it dry. By 1630, the Magellan wasn’t working at all. Was it the moisture? Was it a battery problem? Who knew—and more important, who cared. All I knew was that we were running on sheer guts—and Randy’s Silva compass—right now.
I knew that we were heading in a northeasterly direction. I knew our speed, and according to the chart Boomerang had bought, I could dead-recon our position. But where we were vis-à-vis São Miguel, I had absolutely no precise idea. And that wasn’t the only thing. The skies had started to darken and the wind had picked up, which meant that the lovely foot-and-a-half chop had turned into a menacing three-and-a-half-foot chop. Now, we had only intermittent sightings of Báltaí. Oh, fuck me. Bad weather is one of your more nasty Murphy factors. Sure, it was something that I had included in my mental list of SNAFU, TARFU, and FUBAR mission possibilities, but since there isn’t anything you can do about the weather, there was nothing to do about it. Here and now, however, the weather was going to impact on our ability to continue the pursuit. The Zodiac is a tremendously seaworthy craft. But it’s not built for the kinds of seas you may have seen in The Perfect Storm.
Moreover, the rougher the seas became, the more gasoline we would have to consume to keep ourselves on course. Báltaí was running at about twenty-eight knots. We were doing thirty-two, because it was harder for us to fight against the water and current than it was for the Kelleys’ huge yacht. Plus, we’d already run about 130 miles—using more than half of our fuel supply. If Báltaí picked up even more speed—kicked up to thirty-eight or forty knots, for example—we could conceivably run dry before we caught up with them, given the waves, the current, and the wind.
1642. I smacked Goober on the shoulder, relieved him, and took the con. Time—and daylight—were slipping away fast. I didn’t give a shit where we were, or whether we’d passed the ledge where the bottom dropped from nine hundred meters to thirty-five hundred meters. It was time to ease us up behind Báltaí, board her, and take these assholes down. I stood up from the double bench seat so that Nod could break out the weapons, and he and Digger could load mags. Mick and Hugo rummaged through the bow locker to extract our climbing rope and boarding net.
I moved the throttle forward. The little RIB shot ahead, cutting through the chop. With the increased speed, waves were now breaking over the bow. That meant we were shipping a little more water than I would have liked, but the bailers were working okay, so I nudged the throttle a little bit and we picked up some more speed. I didn’t want to lose sight of Báltaí, which was about fifteen, maybe sixteen hundred yards ahead of us, slightly off to our port side. Even in the growing darkness I could still make out her underway lights. They were faint but visible when the swells worked in our favor. And so, I steered toward those lights, trying to close as much distance as I could before we lost ’em in the dark.
1656. Except I wasn’t making any damn progress. In fact, Báltaí was putting more and more distance between us. The motherfuckers had increased their speed. Had they seen us? Had their radar picked us out? It was unlikely, but not altogether impossible. But frankly, it didn’t fucking matter. All that fucking mattered was that I had to catch the goddamn Kelleys and do it soon. Before they disappeared into the night and we were left adrift, out of fuel and way past the point of no return.
We were all completely soaked through now—and cold. Cold? Oh, that is an understatement. My previously Rogue-size balls had shrunk to the size of marbles and were trying to climb back inside my body. It was so cold that Digger’s dick had probably shriveled up to eight or nine inches.
And yes, I’d factored the cold and the wet into the mission’s EEIs.67 But lemme tell you, friends, it’s an apples-and-oranges kind of thing to war-game something into an op-plan or tactical scenario when you’re sitting in a dry hotel room, and to experience said selfsame factors when you are wet and cold and your kidneys are being pulverized by the smack-smack-smack of wind-driven waves against the hull of a small boat out in the open sea who-the-fuck knows how far from the closest haven.
It is one thing to noodle the time-distance-temperature graphs for hypothermia on a legal pad or hotel message sheet with CNN droning on in the background and a nice cuppa java at your elbow. It is another to sit in a fucking RIB and be physically unable to speak because your teeth are chattering too goddamn hard.
But all of the above did not ma
tter now. Because either we were going to: (A) catch up with the fucking Báltaí, or we were going to: (B) die trying.
Those were the only two choices. Frankly, I was a lot more interested in pursuing choice “A” than I was in pursuing choice “B.”
And so, I screamed “Everybody hang the fuck on!” into the wind, grabbed my face mask from Timex, slipped it over my head, and pulled the strap tight. Then, as soon as my Warriors hunkered down and grabbed onto the safety lines, I slammed the fucking throttle into the firewall,68 the Zodiac stood on its ass, and we mythic Warrior heroes shot forward into the emergent darkness. It was like, “Hi-Ho, Silver Bullet, awaaaay.”
Awaaaay for all of about fifteen fucking seconds, that is. At which point the big, powerful, 120-horsepower Yamaha outboard ca-ca-cough, ca-ca-ca-cough-cough died, the Zodiac’s bow slapped down into the water, and we began to wash dangerously to-and-fro in the swells, vulnerable to swamping and other nasty oceanic possibilities.
20
OH DAMN, OH SHIT, OH DOOM ON DICKIE. I HIT THE starter, but all I got was the kind of halfhearted cough I give out when the friendly dicksmith is (squeeze-squeeze) testing me for hernia. Meanwhile, the Zodiac was being turned broadside by the arrhythmic waves, and we started shipping water, making us vulnerable and pushing me straight into the BOHICA zone. I mean, there was no fucking ventilateur in sight, so what the fuck had I done to deserve this merde?
And then, I understood. And I realized WTFIW,69 was that Timex either hadn’t been paying attention, or he’d been distracted by Mister Murphy, who’d obviously snuck aboard. Timex, you see, was the fuel guy on this little exercise. And it was obvious (ca-ca-cough … sp-sp-sp-sputter …) that he’d let the fucking tank run dry. Being the captain of this pint-size vessel and therefore IN CHARGE, I drew his attention to his nasty faux pas by using command-language RUT.70
Detachment Bravo Page 28
