“Uh-huh,” she mumbled. She was so exhausted her eyes were nearly shut.
Doc used some dry paper from Mongoose’s ruck to start a fire, then stripped off their wet gear. Red curled herself into a fetal position and fell asleep. Mongoose started to snore a few minutes later.
“I’ll take the first watch,” said Shotgun.
“Two hours,” said Doc. “Wake me up.”
“Yeah.” Shotgun stared into his battered rucksack.
“Something wrong?” asked Doc.
“You think salt water will improve the taste of licorice, or ruin it?”
___________________
1 See: “What I did on my summer vacation,” aka Rogue Warrior: Dictator’s Ransom, available at finer bookstores and pawnshops across the land.
2 Check out Green Team, among others, for a full rundown of Doc’s résumé.
3 FNG = Fucking New Guy. The smell is somewhere between the aromatic hint of a new car and the sulfurous rot of overcooked eggs.
4 You know Murphy: he’s the guy with the famous laws, the most important of which dictates that whatever can go wrong will go wrong, at the most inopportune time.
5 The exchange was supposed to be made in person because of the sensitive nature of the DVDs. It was the CIA’s call, not ours.
6 9mm Heckler & Koch submachine guns, equipped with a silencer that softens the gun’s bark, but not its bite.
7 A Strider Rogue model, naturally.
8 The publisher believes in the greening of America, and has encouraged all of his writers to include “green” themes in their novels; the crocs are my contribution. I believe in environmentalism with teeth.
9 I said on paper. Don’t get all hot and bothered.
10 More environmentalism. You can score on your own from here.
11 A two-mile ocean swim, with fins, is required in the third phase of BUD/S. You have all of seventy-five minutes to do it. It is DAMN HARD, CHILDREN! That’s why SEALs are SEALs.
( I )
RECIPE FOR A GOAT FUCK:
1. Start with an “easy” mission.
2. Spice with good intentions.
3. Add real-life complications.
4. Shake hands with Mr. Murphy.
With the PBM now just an oversized swampboat, M.W. steered us toward Jamaica at a pace that a turtle would have found excruciating. Danny, meanwhile, was trying to figure out what the hell had happened to Doc.
“No answer on his sat phone, no indication where the hell he is,” he told me.
“Start pumping our sources.”
“Already on it. I talked to Ketchie,” he added, naming a friend of ours at USSOUTHCOM (the military’s Southern Command, whose interests include Cuba). “Cubans have a patrol ship going out that way. There’s been radio traffic but it’s all encrypted. He’s going to give me updates every fifteen minutes. And I have a call in to Gene to see what he can find out.”
Gene12 works for the NSA—No Such Agency, the snoops who listen into radio transmissions across the world.
“I figure he was a mile or two from the coast when the MiGs came out,” said Danny. “It’s possible that they got by without a hitch and the Cubans are just jamming the sat phones.”
It may have been possible, but we had spent a good amount of coin to make it very unlikely. Still, it was something.
“You want me to call Admiral Jones and see what he can do to help?” Danny asked.
“He’s helped more than enough. Have a boat standing by and ready to leave as soon as we get in.”
“You’re going to sail back to Cuba in daylight?”
“It’s faster than swimming.”
______
Right about then Doc was giving up on his futile attempt to go to sleep. The dampness had cramped his legs pretty bad, and he got up to loosen his muscles by walking around. He made sure Shotgun was awake—he was—took a circuit around the camp, then decided to do some scouting. He walked about a mile through the swamp and jungle until he came to a narrow trail made of logs and dirt. A set of tire tracks cut through the mud, but it was impossible in the dim light to even guess when they had been made. Doc scouted to the east and west without seeing anyone, then headed back to the camp.
Shotgun wasn’t by the fire where he’d left him. Doc’s first thought was that he was in the trees taking a leak, but when he didn’t appear after a couple of minutes, Doc got concerned. He started looking for him in a gradually widening circle, calling his name in a soft stage whisper.
“Shotgun, you jackass. Where are you?”
No answer.
“Shotgun? You mother-loving fat-sucking congenital doofus-of-an-imbecile—there are no snack stores around here. Where the hell are you?”
Something rustled to his left. Doc dropped to a knee, listening—and as he did, unsheathed the knife at his belt.
He knew it was Shotgun—it had to be Shotgun—it could only be Shotgun.
Unless it wasn’t. His leg muscles cramped again.
The noise got closer. Doc drew a deep breath, holding it.
Then whatever or whoever was walking through the jungle stopped. All Doc could hear was his own breath, gliding between his teeth. The knife was heavy in his hand, his fingers tense. Doc readied himself to spring without actually moving. His legs were ready, his chest, left hand, right . . .
“That you, Doc?” said Shotgun.
“Damn it, Shotgun. I almost slit your throat.”
Shotgun laughed and stepped out of the brush.
“Well, I almost shot you,” said Shotgun. His gun was level with Doc’s chest. “Wouldn’t we have looked like a couple of assholes, huh, you with a hole in your chest and me with my neck slit open?”
Doc didn’t find that particularly funny. Shotgun changed the subject.
“Look, I found Red’s rucksack. It washed ashore.”
The backpack had been ripped in half by the explosion, but the ruck containing spare magazines for her pistol remained in the bottom corner.
“There’s more stuff down there,” Shotgun told Doc. “The tide’s turned.”
“You stay here,” Doc told him, though Shotgun wasn’t going anywhere. “When I come back, I’ll whistle so you know it’s me.”
“What kind of song?”
“Your funeral march.”
It took Doc about ten minutes to get down to the water. That surprised him, because he thought they’d walked in farther.
His next surprise was more ominous. A ship13 was sailing offshore, playing its spotlights all around the water. While it was far enough away that it didn’t present an immediate danger, the fact that it was there meant the Cubans were still very much interested in them.
Doc waited until the ship had sailed farther east, then began walking parallel along the shore. A strong tide had whipped up, and there was a good amount of debris. Most of it was wood and useless junk from boats lost years before.
One of their plastic equipment boxes sat end-up in the surf. He waded out to it, only to find that the explosion had broken the end of the box off, and it was empty.
A few feet away he found one of our sat phones. The blast had jarred off the bottom plastic case, which was gone, along with the battery that normally sat in a slot on the casing. A few yards from that, he found a med kit and one of the team radios—probably one of the backups. The radio was intact, but lacked a headpiece. The med kit had been cracked, but the water had done little damage to the equipment and meds, since everything inside was wrapped in plastic.
Doc used the damaged gear box to collect his treasures. Working westward along the beach, he came across a tangle of debris that included an earset from an Apple iPod, probably lost by some vacationer miles away and taken by the tide. He balled it up and stuffed it into his pants. It was the only thing worth taking that he saw.
By the time he tucked back to camp, Mongoose had gotten up to spell Shotgun. He whistled back when Doc whistled, and met him, pistol in hand.
“What’d you get?”
“Sat phone. Half of one, anyway.”
Not daring to relight the fire, Doc moved around until he found a spot in the clearing where the light from the moon and stars seemed strongest. The sat phone’s single circuit board appeared intact. The volume control was loose, since half of it normally rested on the back of the unit, and the on-off rocker had to be held to be clicked into position. But otherwise, the phone looked as if it was in good enough shape to work.
If they could find a battery for it.
“I thought we weren’t going to use Fernandez’s cell phone,” said Mongoose after Doc retrieved the phone from the small pile of their gear.
“We’re not,” said Doc. He undid the back and took out the battery.
“You gonna put that in the sat phone?”
Doc would have done that, but it didn’t fit. The contacts at the edge of the radio slot seemed similar, though—four little prongs, which corresponded to four goldish-looking bars on the battery.
Doc took his knife and cut up the earphone wire he’d found earlier. Then, with the help of tape from the med kit, he wired up a crude connection from the battery to the radio.
“Ready?” he asked Mongoose.
Mongoose shrugged. “Got nothing to lose.”
We were about fifty miles from shore when Doc called in to Danny. Danny called me, and patched me into the line from Jamaica.
“Doc?” I said when I heard the line click through. “Where are you, what’s going on?”
“We liked Cuba so much, we decided to hang around for a while,” Doc said before explaining the situation.
His handiwork with the radio solved our biggest problem: finding him. The next problem was how to get them out of Cuba.
They were way too far from Gitmo to take any chance on getting out in that direction; besides, the Cubans patrol much more heavily near the camp than elsewhere on that side of the island. While getting to Havana wasn’t impossible, their lack of money and clothes added greatly to the difficulty level. The best option remained a rescue mission led by yours truly.
Picking them up during the day would have been dicey even without the ship Doc had seen; it made the most sense to wait until the following night. Because the makeshift sat phone couldn’t be counted on, we arranged a series of pickup points to be checked in order of priority. Doc also said he would move inland as soon as he ended the transmission, just in case the Cubans sent someone to investigate the wreckage and the flotsam that had washed ashore.
“Did you hear what happened to Traba’s brother?” Doc asked just before I was going to hang up.
“You told me he committed suicide.”
“Yeah. Red’s pretty broken up about it. She’s mumbling in her sleep, calling his name. She was asking about whether you go to heaven if you commit suicide.”
“I didn’t know you were a priest now, Doc.”
“Gotta do a little of everything in this business. You oughta know that, Father Dick.”
( II )
I called Ken Jones at the CIA as soon as I got off the dock in Jamaica. He greeted me with the big, twenty-one-gun hello he uses when he’s talking to someone who he owes a big favor to.
When he bothers talking to them at all, that is.
“Dick—Dick.” His voice boomed over the handset. “How are we doing?”
“Fernandez is dead.”
“Dead?”
“That’s not the least of your trouble. He may have been a double agent.”
Ken cursed. I told him briefly what had happened. I left out the part about Traba, since it didn’t concern him or the agency.
“I’ll get right back to you,” he said.
Right back to me turned out to be two hours later—all the time I needed to nap and recharge my batteries.
“Our people are out,” said Ken as soon as I picked up the sat phone. “Thank you.”
“Which people?”
“The ones who were going to make the switch. They’re safe. Turned out they hadn’t touched down yet.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Fernandez was just a mule in the middle. He didn’t know what the discs were for, or what the plan was.”
“So you told me.”
“Yes, but I just wanted to reassure you.”
“I’m reassured. I’m warm and fuzzy. I may even go get a drink.”
“Dick, we’ve got a big problem here.”
“I can get my people out, don’t worry. I’ll do it tonight.”
“That wasn’t the problem I was talking about,” said the admiral. “Maybe we can make a deal.”
Ken proposed a cooperative venture: he’d help me get Doc and the others, if I then went and swapped the DVDs out.
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re going to need help getting your people out, Dick.”
“Not really.”
Ken changed tactics. “What about the people of Cuba?” he asked. “Don’t they deserve a fresh start? Don’t they deserve hope?”
“They deserve more than that.”
“So you’ll switch the discs for us?”
“I don’t see how you got from A to Z there.”
“We will, of course, pay at your usual inflated rate. And expenses.”
“Ha.”
“You’re going to need our help to get your people, Dick. Without us, there’s no guarantee. And let’s face it—I don’t think there’s anyone else around who could switch the tapes, let alone live to not tell about it.”
“Are you trying to butter me up, Ken? The cholesterol count of this conversation is getting pretty high here.”
The conversation continued for a while before I told him I’d do it.
In truth, I’d decided before he asked.
I didn’t need Ken’s help to get Doc and the others out, or at least I hoped I didn’t. And even if I had, it wasn’t exactly a fair swap—the fact that Fernandez had been made, even if he didn’t know what the discs were for, made any plot to move the discs even more dangerous than it already was.
But I was more than a little pissed at Fidel, and I did want to do something to help the people of Cuba. Traba, his brother, Red’s family, the other Cubans I’ve known over the years—it made me mad knowing they’d all been screwed for so long. Somebody had to do something to help them.
Your heart’s bleeding, I know.
If it makes you feel any better, Ken also agreed to pay triple my usual rate . . . which worked out to a lot of Bombay for Daddy and friends.
A short while later, Junior hooked one of our computers to the encrypted satellite phone, pulled up a special Web browser, and turned the back room of our vacation house into a secure video conference center. There were two other feeds. One was from CIA headquarters at Langley, where Ken and some of his Cuba hands had gathered. The other came from the infamous “location not disclosed,” which by all indications was in Florida somewhere.
Ken started off by promising we’d have access to some real-time intel networks and other data the CIA controlled or was privy to. I guess he wanted to prove he could be generous when it didn’t cost him anything. As it turned out, that access, while in some cases useful, wasn’t nearly as critical as the intel that had already been gathered, most of it from humanint sources, aka real people.14
From what I learned later, the Agency had good intel on Fidel’s taped will because one of the men who had helped make the tape had been a CIA mole. Unfortunately for us, Fidel had decided to eliminate the small team that had created the video, and within seventy-two hours of its completion the half-dozen techies were all dead. Only two copies of the video were made, both on DVD; the master was destroyed. Unfortunately for Fidel, the mole had already fully briefed his CIA handler.
In a perverse way, Fidel’s decision to eliminate the team probably made things easier. Since very few people besides his brother and perhaps a handful of Communist Party big shots knew the tape existed, there was no need to put the DVDs into the Cuban equivalent of Fort Knox.
Often times, the best hiding place is in plain sight. The discs weren’t all in plain sight—both were locked away in safes, according to the CIA sources—but neither was directly guarded.
Which didn’t mean they’d be easy to get.
Fidel kept one of the DVDs in his office at one of his Havana headquarters. The other was believed to be at a bunker/villa he’d recently built on the northeastern side of the island.15 The bunker was part of a military base that was still under construction. The Christians in Action had gathered a large amount of information about both sites. In the case of the bunker, they had detailed blueprints, thanks to the architect in Estonia who designed the facility.
By the end of an hour and a half, we had more than enough information to sneak in and out of either complex, locate the DVDs, make the swap, and get out.
Ass-u-ming the CIA information was correct, of course.
Big assumption, I know.
______
After the briefing, Danny went to work tapping sources in Miami to see if he could round out the information the agency had given us without tipping our hand. I changed into my sweats and went for a run, during which I planned most of the operation. When I came back, I called everyone together and laid it out for them.
“Sounds kind of complicated,” said Trace when I was done.
Complicated is not a compliment. As a rule, successful operations follow the KISS principle—Keep It Simple, Stupid. In outline, the plan was simple: we’d parachute in with supplies, hook up with the landing team, then head east. That job done, we’d go to Havana, make the second switch, and use phony IDs to fly out. It was the details along the way that added complications.
Danny made a few suggestions, which I immediately integrated. Junior, meanwhile, sat at the edge of his seat, practically salivating at the idea of a night jump into hostile territory. They’re sweet when they’re young and green.
“I’m ready, Dick,” he said as I wrapped up. “When do we jump?”
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