RW15 - Seize the Day

by Richard Marcinko

  Oh, and there were no seats for the passengers.

  Doc was real pleased about that.

  “Where the hell am I supposed to sit?” he demanded as we looked over the plane.

  “On your tush,” Trace told him. “It’s padded.”

  “Careful, girl, or I’ll bend you over my knee.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to try.”

  “Pick one of those ribs on the deck and curl up,” I told him.

  “Bullshit on that.”

  “You can sit up in the cockpit with me,” said M.W. “I’m not flying with a copilot.”

  He explained that he flew alone as a matter of “operational security,” but I suspect it was just to keep the overhead down.

  “Trace ought to be in the cockpit,” said Doc. “She’s a pilot.”

  Actually, Trace is a helicopter pilot, and barely past trainee level at that, but Doc was too chivalrous to let her sit on her rump in the back while he was up front.

  “Here’s my seat,” said Junior, walking over to a bucket lodged in the ribs at the very tail end of the plane. He pulled it out, then almost fell over as he caught a whiff.

  “That’s not for sittin’, it’s for shittin’,” said M.W. “It’s a piss bucket. You’re on a long flight and you gotta go, it’s better than the alternative.”

  The alternative was pulling open one of the large hatches on either side of the tail and sticking your butt into the breeze. Lots of fun at two hundred knots.

  ______

  We spent Sunday night going over the satellite images of the area where the team would land, planning for various contingencies, and trying to scout alternate routes and hiding places.

  Monday morning saw Trace leading PT. It was a light session—broken bones the next evening would not have been welcome—so she only screamed like a drill sergeant, not the she-devil she usually is.

  “My Girl Scout troop works harder than this, Mongoose,” she bawled when he was doing his crunches. “Let’s see some sweat.”

  She stopped in her tracks and glanced down at Shotgun.

  “What the hell are you giggling at, asshole?” she barked.

  “I can’t see you as a Girl Scout leader.”

  “I train you pansies, don’t I? After that, everything else is a breeze.”

  Trace really does have a Girl Scout group back on the rez, and while I’ve never seen it, I’m going to guess it’s the toughest in the country. The only thing tougher than Chiricahua Apache males are Chiricahua Apache females.

  My bones were aching and my muscles sore by the time her “light” workout was over. This encouraged a hearty round of “old man” jokes, which of course grew more and more juvenile as they progressed. Fortunately, breakfast was followed by bicycle orientation. The entire team took part in the exercise just in case the ops roster had to be shifted. We went out in two-person teams; I drew Junior.

  The bikes we were using were not your normal Schwinn roadsters. Built for easy packing, they literally folded up and fit in or, in our case, on a backpack. Their wheels were small and their tires narrow; sit too long on the seat and you’d be sterile for a week. But once you got used to the pedals, you could move along at a decent clip. The gearing was so good you didn’t have to strain on the hills, or not much anyway.

  Junior and I pushed each other for about ten miles, trading leads. Then finally he started to pull away. In fact, he could have coasted home with a good half-hour lead if he hadn’t slowed down and let me catch up.

  “It’s OK, Dad,” he yelled back to me. “I’ll wait for you.”

  I don’t know which pissed me off more—him taking pity on me, or calling me dad.

  Probably the former, but don’t count out the latter.

  My legs started pumping faster than a jackrabbit in heat. There was a hill directly in my face; the incline had to be close to forty-five degrees. I passed Junior about midway up and never looked back.

  Oh, I heard him huffing behind me, but that only made me go faster. My heart pounded out a rap beat in my chest, and my forehead was so hot you could have fried an egg on it, but I beat him back to the house by a good hundred yards. I broke down my bike and hit the shower.

  Trace was waiting when I got done.

  “What got into you?” she asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Junior said you were mad about something.”

  “I ain’t mad about anything.”

  Trace gave me the Dahlgren eye roll.

  “He called you dad?” she said.

  “Stick to your job and I’ll stick to mine,” I told her.

  I walked away before she could say anything else stupid, like watching out for me was her job.

  We spent the rest of the day refamiliarizing ourselves with our gear, plunked a few targets, then had a siesta. After darkness fell, we worked with the boat and airplane, practicing transfers back and forth. Then we rehearsed landings with our gear, setting up the bikes, etc. With the exception of Junior, we’d all done this a million times, but practice makes perfect, and even old farts like me have to keep the muscle memory fresh.

  By the time dawn came, everybody could do their job and their backup job in their sleep. We hit the sack.

  The assault team’s castoff was set for 1600 that afternoon; the backup team would fly out much later at night. We had a late lunch of some Jamaican specialties—brown fish stew and curried goat. The spices were a bit strong, even with the Red Stripe beer to wash them down; I was the only one who went for the fish.

  An unfortunate decision, as I discovered at 1555, when my internal organs decided they wanted to become external in a hurry.

  Doc found me on my knees, worshipping the porcelain goddess.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he asked.

  “Stomach,” I managed. Then I gave him a demonstration of my problems.

  “It’s 1555,” said Doc, as always a paragon of compassion. “You ready to go or what?”

  “I’m coming.” I got up, then bent down again as a fresh load erupted from my interior. I wasn’t just puking up lunch; it felt like every meal I’d had in the past thirty years was coming up. “Be there in a min-uh—”

  “The hell you will,” said Trace from the doorway. “You aren’t going to ride in a boat for nine hours like that.”

  “I’ve been worse,” I managed between retches.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “You know what, Dick? I’m going to take your place,” said Doc. “There’s no sense you going like this. Take your time and go with M.W. and them. If you feel better.”

  I growled something, then puked some more. Doc said something about how no one was indispensable and how mission integrity had to be maintained and some other such bullshit, all of which I recognized from a pep talk I had given him a few months back when I took him out of a mission. Payback’s a bitch.

  I probably could have gone on the boat; I was so sick a hurricane couldn’t have made my insides feel any worse. I don’t know how much fun it would have been for the others, though. With the top half of my digestive track scorched clean, the bottom half began doing its own spring cleaning. All manner of hazardous and noxious material was sent unceremoniously streaming from my body. I spent the next hour sitting and flushing, not necessarily in that order.

  Finally, there was nothing left inside, not even mucus. I won’t say I felt exactly refreshed, but I felt good enough to go on the mission. And pissed that I’d let Doc take my place, even if it had been the right thing to do.

  By 1710 I was in the shower. At 1720 I was fighting off the temptation to get something to eat. I grabbed a Red Stripe, to settle my stomach and restore my fluids.

  We took off as planned at 2000—8:00 P.M. Though the wind was a little over twelve knots and strong enough to kick up some decent waves, there were no clouds in the sky. Trace had told M.W. my stomach was wheezy, so he did exactly what I would have done under the circumstances—threw the plane into a seven-or eight-g power div
e and turn.

  Trace looked a little green as he pulled up over the waves. Behind me in the cabin, Junior eyed the piss bucket nervously.

  I felt fine, of course. I had nothing left to puke.

  “You’re awful brave,” I told M.W.

  “How’s that?”

  “I was standing right behind you. Anything left in my stomach at this point is going to be seriously toxic.”

  He flew straight and level after that.

  The heaviest Cuban air force and navy patrols tend to be around the northern side of the island, aimed at keeping their citizens from leaving for Yankee land. Still, we couldn’t count on there being no patrols over the beach area. While the PBM could overfly it at low altitude with little risk of being seen by Cuban defense radars, the plane was fairly loud and slow. Therefore, our preferred real-time reconnaissance asset was an unmanned aircraft dubbed Eyes 1. Similar to the UAVs the army has been using for tactical recon in Iraq, Eyes 1 was essentially a beefed-up hobbyist’s radio-controlled plane. Doc launched it from the cabin cruiser while they were still a good distance from shore. He started the small engine, stood up, and literally threw the damn thing into the wind.

  A satellite radio aboard Eyes 1 transmitted video to both the control unit on the boat and an encrypted Web site. Junior had rigged a viewer for us on the plane with one of our laptops and a sat phone; Doc had a similar setup aboard the boat.

  The plane had an infrared and a starlight camera as well as regular video, and could stay aloft for nearly eight hours. It didn’t go particularly fast—I think the top speed was fifty knots, though I’m not positive—but speed wasn’t what we were looking for. It was small and relatively quiet, and while not cheap, there’d be no funerals back home if one of Fidel’s minions shot it down.

  The trick was flying it. Doc and I had been playing with it every day for the past week or so, but Doc’s curses filled my ears when I got on the satcom line.

  “Problem?” I asked.

  “Stinking goddamn piece of Chinese friggin’ no shit-good plastic,” grumbled Doc. The miniature aircraft had actually been manufactured in Utah, but I decided this wasn’t the time to point that out.

  “Do you need us to overfly the beach?” I asked.

  “Negative. No, negative. We have an image. We have data flow. It’s aloft. It’s just a real bullshit pain in the back stink-ass problem steering the damn thing.”

  I told Doc that if he put the creativity he was using in choosing his curse words into the airplane, he’d solve the problem in no time. He cursed even more creatively, using words I’d never heard of, then managed to swing Eyes 1 toward the target area. Ten minutes later, an image came up on the screen showing a group of palm trees and big boulders that we’d identified as one of the landmarks on the eastern end of the landing area.

  Then we saw a landmark we hadn’t identified at all: a Cuban defense force jeep. And six or seven soldiers, moving along the shore.

  Murphy at work.

  “That’s what you get for taking my place,” I told Doc. “Check landing area two.”

  Another string of curses rattled my tender ears. I hunched over the laptop and watched the coastline grow more ragged in the monitor—and then suddenly a lot bigger.

  Junior pulled off his headset as Doc’s curses set new decibel levels. Eyes 1 had crashed.

  Had it been shot down? Or had it just crashed? I leaned toward the latter, though there was no way to completely rule out the first. Junior tried getting some clues by rolling back the video and taking a closer look at the soldiers, but aside from the fact that they were all definitely armed, there was no clue what they were doing. It was doubtful that they were looking for us—Mr. Fernandez had no idea who his contact was or from what direction he or she would approach. But this wasn’t the best way to start the night.

  I went up to the cockpit to M.W. and asked if we could overfly the coast.

  “It’ll cost you,” he said.

  “Understood.”

  “We’ll drop down real low, then pop up when we’re almost there,” he said. “But I have to tell you—if their MiGs show up, we’re out of there. And it won’t be a pretty ride home, either.”

  I went over the map with M.W. and Trace, who would do the actual spotting with the help of a set of Gen 3 night goggles. Then I went back to the cabin, where Junior was trying to use our Internet connection to break into the Cuban defense ministry.

  Why was he doing that?

  “I figure that if I can, you know, hook in there somehow,” he explained, “I may be able to find out why those soldiers were on the beach.”

  It wasn’t a bad idea—except for the dubious assumption that the Cubans were advanced enough to have a computerized message system. It kept him occupied at least.

  I grabbed a pair of binoculars and sidled up to the porthole to see what I could see. The glass was thick and probably hadn’t been cleaned since the plane had belonged to Uncle Sam; all I could see were reflections of my own eyes. Finally I got a better idea. I walked back to the rectangular hatch at the starboard side of the aircraft, spun the lock handle open, and pulled the door back, sliding it on its rails inside the wall of the plane.

  A red light started to flash. Wind blew through the cockpit like a drunk teenager racing through a whorehouse. The plane stuttered and dropped precipitously close to the water, the engines groaning with the strain.

  “What the hell are you doing?” yelled Trace, running into the back. “You opened the hatch?”

  “I need to see outside,” I told her, squatting near the opening. “Get M.W. to turn that damn red light off.”

  “Crap, Dick. Don’t fall out.”

  “See about that light. It’s going to give us away.”

  The light turned out not to have a switch. Junior came up with a perfect solution: he shot it out with his pistol.

  Maybe he was a chip off the old block after all.

  Landing area two was three miles farther east than our first choice. It was unoccupied. At the center of the area was a small, dilapidated wooden dock, which protruded from a soggy bog. Most of the immediate surrounding area was bog, actually; think Florida Everglades with more alligators and less retirees. The dock had probably been used by fishermen or maybe farmers during Cuba’s capitalist days. Now it was a jumble of rotted timbers at the end of a dirt trail.

  The satellite image had provided a much more optimistic view of the stability of those timbers than proved to be the case in person. Doc decided there was no sense tying up there. Instead, he continued up a wide stream nearby, braving the overhanging trees and silty bottom until he decided they’d gone as far as they could. They tied up in a large clump of brush, then waded across the muck to a nearby path. Doc had all he could do to keep Shotgun from stopping to make mud pies along the way.

  They dried off, cleaned up, and pulled civilian clothes over their wet suits. Then they broke out the bikes and hit the road, pedaling north. Fallow sugarcane fields gave way to thick jungle within a few miles. Though they weren’t hard-topped, the roads were cut straight and the team made good time, even though as a precaution they stopped before crossing intersections and were careful to follow the most deserted path possible. They spread out as they rode, keeping in touch with low-probability-of-intercept military-style radios. The limited range of the radios was one of the things that made them extremely difficult to detect, but it also meant they had a range of just over three miles. For anything farther—and to talk to us back on the plane—they had to use their sat phones.

  In the days when I was first fitting my feet for frogman’s flippers, SpecOp warriors had to be damn good at reading maps. Translating their squigs and squiggles to landmarks and terrain, especially in the dark, is a real skill. There’s nothing that adjusts the old sphincter quicker than discovering you are up-the-shit-creek-lost as the flares explode over your head and you hear the sick sound of a hundred AK47 magazines being locked home around you.

  Nowadays, even the m
ailman uses global positioning satellite (GPS) technology to tell him where to go. The better units have rolling maps and oversized arrows, and cute female voices to tell you when you’re about to take a wrong turn off the cliff.

  Doc isn’t anybody’s idea of an early technology adopter, but he swears by the damn things. They certainly are convenient—everyone on the landing and backup teams was outfitted with special watch-size units made by a subsidiary of Gamin just for yours truly. Not only did they show where they were on a zoomable map, but the location of each individual unit could be beamed to other units in our network.

  What the GPS couldn’t do, however, was tell the wearer that the bridge he hoped to cross had been closed for repairs.

  Not just closed—completely removed. Which, considering that it crossed a ravine some fifty feet wide, was inconvenient.

  Shotgun was riding point at the time. Eyes peeled for an ambush, he was watching everything but the road itself, and promptly found himself knee-deep in mud. This set off a round of suppressed laughter; even the normally cranky Mongoose thought it was funny. But the muck turned out to be a serious problem—trying to stand, Shotgun found the mud beneath his feet slip away. In the few seconds it took the others to get ropes, he had sunk to his chest.

  Mongoose tossed him the rope from the road embankment, which was only six or seven feet away. But between the dark and the mud, Shotgun couldn’t find the rope. Every move, it seemed, sank him in farther.

  “Too bad you don’t have Doc’s nose,” said Mongoose. “We could tie the rope to that.”

  “Ha, ha,” laughed Shotgun, sinking deeper. Only his neck and head were free.

  “I’m going to swim out to you,” said Mongoose. “It’s the only way we’re going to grab you.”

  “You’re too heavy,” said Red. “Let me try.”

  She stripped back to her wet suit, looped the rope around her waist, and slipped into the mud. Two kicks and she reached Shotgun—who was tilting his head back in a desperate attempt to float, or at least not sink any farther. He pried one of his hands out of the mud and grabbed her.