by Brad Taylor
Pike, you’d better be waiting.
His other concern was Brett, the third man on the team. There was no doubt the guy was handy in a gunfight, and plenty smart, but he’d spent the past twelve years in the Special Activities Division of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. He hadn’t done any subsurface work since he was in the Marines, a long, long time ago, and they were swimming the Draeger LAR V rebreather.
A closed circuit underwater breathing apparatus, the Draeger recirculated the exhaled gas from the swimmer, and thus no telltale bubbles escaped like an ordinary scuba system. It was perfect for clandestine infiltration, but the gas mixture was also very deadly. Make a mistake in using it, and it would kill quickly.
He patted Brett on the knee. “You sure you’re good on this system? I don’t want to be towing a dead body after thirty minutes.”
Brett smiled, his teeth stark white against his ebony skin. “Yeah. Quit worrying about me. A few different buckles and switches, but it’s basically the same thing I trained with. Besides, I’m just along for the ride.”
The crew chief tapped his shoulder, holding up five fingers.
Knuckles echoed the command, shouting, “Five minutes!”
All three began preparing for the cast off of the helicopter, Brett working the waterproofed equipment bundle to the door while Knuckles and Decoy prepped their diver propulsion vehicles.
Knuckles checked his GPS and was relieved to see the release point he’d programmed approaching. At least that will go correctly. He shut off the GPS and zipped it into a waterproof bag. Hopefully, it would be the last time he looked at it, since it wouldn’t pick up a signal underwater. If he needed a GPS again, it meant the link-up had failed, and they’d had to surface to get a reading on where they were in relation to the shore.
The helicopter slowed and dropped down to the deck of the ocean, so close that Knuckles could see the white foam of the rotor wash in the moonlight. The crew chief gave the two-minute call and tossed his headset onto the floor of the helo. He positioned his mask on his face and placed the Draeger mouthpiece in, opening the dive surface valve to allow the flow of oxygen. He purged the system, then turned to help Brett.
At the one-minute call, he edged to the open door, holding his diver propulsion vehicle in his lap, then assisted Brett with the bundle of equipment. He would be first out, followed by Brett and the bundle, then Decoy with the second DPV.
He was so intent on making sure Brett was stable and ready with the bundle that he missed the thirty-second call. He felt the crew chief slap him on the shoulder and heard, “Go!”
He turned in confusion only to find the crew chief wildly pointing out the door and shouting “Go, go, go!”
Without hesitation, he chucked the DPV out the door and followed suit, before the towline attached to it yanked him out anyway.
He hit the water with a hand on his dive mask and went under, cursing himself for jumping before he was ready. Dumbass crew chief thinks an extra second or two matters?
He broke the surface, followed his towline to the floating DPV and popped a ChemLight, holding it in the air. Only then did he do a three-sixty survey of the water, the roar of the helicopter fading, leaving a ringing in his ears and a deep quiet all around.
He saw two other ChemLights and stroked to them. Decoy was already prepping his underwater scooter for the ride, while Brett was slowly treading water, holding on to the neutrally buoyant bundle.
He got an “A-OK” hand signal from both.
He attached his towrope to the plate on the DPV to his front, then attached a separate towrope to Brett’s harness behind him. Decoy did the same, hooking his secondary towrope to the bundle.
He secured his attack board onto the DPV, checked to make sure the compass and depth gauge functioned, then got a final A-OK hand signal, the constraints of using the Draeger preventing them from removing the mouthpiece to talk. Once in place, the body itself became part of the system, a symbiotic relationship that couldn’t be broken until the dive was complete.
The restrictions of the LAR V rebreather were a trade-off, but worth it. While it allowed them to swim underwater without telltale bubbles, its true value was in the length of time it could stay under. At thirty feet of depth, they could swim for four hours without surfacing, which, if his calculations were correct, would be enough to make it to the coast should the link-up fail. What was waiting for them there would be the new problem.
Knuckles triggered the DPV and dove, reaching twenty-five feet. He lined up his compass, set the pitch of the propeller on two-thirds, and began moving through the water at a rapid clip. The light attached underneath his DPV gave him enough illumination to see about five feet ahead of him, reminding him of the movies from submersibles at the ocean floor. A thin reed of illumination swallowed by infinite blackness. It was disconcerting and claustrophobic, but something he was used to after hundreds of night dives. He simply watched the compass needle, checking off to his left occasionally to make sure Decoy’s ChemLight was still with him.
Finding a boat in the middle of the ocean was literally worse than finding a pinhole in a field of snow. Using just a compass, with the variable currents underwater and the probability of error of the release point, would guarantee failure, but they had a little help inside their DPVs.
Made by Gavin Water Sports, they were a commercial, off-the-shelf item that looked a little like a torpedo, with a long cylinder up front attached to a propeller. Unlike the ones Knuckles had trained with in the Navy, he was connected to the device by a towrope instead of riding it as a passenger. Ordinarily used for cave diving and shipwreck exploration, the Taskforce had modified the DPVs for clandestine infiltration. In the nose of each was a transducer that would pick up the signals from a sonic beacon. Once it made an encrypted handshake, a computer would take over the steering, guiding them directly to the boat. All Knuckles had to do was get within eight hundred meters—the range of the beacon. A whole lot more room for error with the compass, but still easy to screw up. Miss the bubble by fifty meters and they’d never know it.
Passing the one-and-a-half-hour mark, Knuckles began to feel the adrenaline pick up. One hour and fifty minutes into the dive, Knuckles felt sweat form in his wetsuit, and not from the exertion. By the calculations he had made from the release point, they should hit the boat in two hours. Which meant, traveling at two hundred feet per minute, they should now have been within range of the beacon.
Here we go. Fucking plan B.
If he reached two hours, he was going to conduct a grid pattern, traveling north for five minutes, then repeating the move south for ten minutes. Two race tracks like that, and he would be at a decision point: Continue searching, or use the remaining battery power of the DPV to reach shore.
The two-hour mark passed, and he waved his ChemLight, bringing the DPV to a halt. Decoy waved his as well, and cut by him to the south. What the hell is he doing?
He watched the bundle go by, a shadowy blob miraculously following Decoy as if it could swim on its own. He made sure Brett was ready to move, then turned and followed suit, getting a little aggravated at Decoy for not following the plan. He increased his speed to overtake the rapidly disappearing glow from Decoy’s DPV, intent on knocking some sense into the man, when his transducer pinged. He felt a subtle shift in the direction of the DPV and knew the computer was locking on.
Two minutes later, he no longer worried about the compass, the DPV driving on autopilot. They were on the outer edge of the bubble, and for whatever reason, Decoy’s transducer had picked up the signal first.
He gave a mental sigh of relief and began focusing on the next problem: how to survive a gunfight on the open water if it wasn’t Pike in the boat.
29
Sitting out under the stars, with the waves gently rocking the boat, I felt a sense of calm I hadn’t experienced in a long time. It was very pleasant. Something I wouldn’t mind doing at another time with Jennifer, only with a case of beer and some fishin
g poles. Not like the ones we’d brought when we’d rented the boat, which were simple props used to convince total strangers we were actually going fishing and not conducting secret missions in their sovereign country. Truth be told, if I did get out on a boat alone with Jennifer, I probably wouldn’t want to spend the time trying to catch some smelly, slimy animal with a brain the size of a pea. Although that would ultimately be her decision. I felt the boat rise again and glanced her way. She was giving me the look again, a painful I’m going to ask about it, but maybe not expression.
She’d come back from her PM with the sonic beacon and a host of different passports, looking a little grim about the information she’d received. I’d listened to her, then told her not to worry about it just yet. If we could penetrate the place, we would, but I wasn’t going to do it in a frontal assault. There’s always a solution. The trick is finding it.
I’d flipped through the documents, recognizing Decoy and Knuckles from their photos, but not their names, which stood to reason, since officially they were still in Tunisia. The third passport belonged to the new guy, Brett, and I was surprised to see he was black. I don’t know why, I just had a different mental image. He was short, at five feet seven inches, but either fat or full of muscle, because he weighed 185 pounds. Given our line of work, I was betting on muscle. He had an open face, with a smile in the photo, like he was enjoying a secret joke. That told me a lot about him. Usually, guys who think they’re some sort of badass try to project power in official photos. Very few will smile. I figured we’d get along fine.
Jennifer checked the GPS to make sure our little sea anchor hadn’t let us drift too far off, then said, “How much longer?”
“Should be here within thirty minutes, if Knuckles doesn’t screw up and head to Egypt.”
She nodded and sat back down, staring at me. Here it comes. She’s been working up the courage.
“You didn’t sleep last night.”
We’d stayed at Samir’s house, sleeping on the floor of his living room, which meant she’d had plenty of time to analyze me.
“I slept fine. I’m okay.”
Which wasn’t true. I had some bad dreams reliving the capture, but nothing that was making me catatonic.
“I heard you moaning…. It’s okay to talk about it.”
“Jesus! I’m fucking fine! Let it go. I know you want to play Florence Nightingale, but I don’t need it.”
I saw her snap back at my tone and felt like an ass. She turned to check the GPS again, and I said, “Hey. Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
She said, “Remember Cairo? What I did?”
“Yeah.” She’d been forced to kill a guy with a lamp, literally beating his brains out.
She took my hand in hers. “Well, I had issues with it like you said I would. And you helped me through it. I’m just returning the favor. I know you. Your capture was more than just a firefight. It hurt. I can tell.”
I was thinking up a witty comeback, something to deflect this little probe into my psyche, when I caught sight of my other hand. The one with less than a full deck of fingers. I realized I just didn’t have the energy.
“Okay. It was more than a firefight. Much more. It’s probably a phobia I’ve had since I joined the Army.”
Her mouth dropped open. I continued. “The problem is I’ve had years to worry about that situation because of my job, building it up in my head, petrified of it ever coming to pass. It did, but truthfully, now that it’s over, my time was less than what Daniel Pearl experienced. Or William Buckley. I’ll be okay.”
She searched my face, trying to ascertain if I was being genuine or just placating her. Her eyes reached mine, and I held fast, daring her to question the veracity of what I had said. We spent a second in silence, then she smiled and patted my hand, apparently convinced we’d turned some corner in our relationship, which confused the shit out of me because I didn’t know what our relationship was.
She said, “I know you’ll be okay. I just wanted to let you know I’m here.”
Please. Stop this before my manhood flees. I decided to turn it up a notch.
“Here for what? As my therapist, or something else? We never did have that big talk you kept threatening.”
The smile was replaced by confusion, then embarrassment. Before she could say anything, the beacon squawked.
I grinned. “Saved by the bell. Get ready to pull in some tired swimmers.”
She said, “Pike…I’m not trying to hide anything.”
I checked the sonar echo on the little display attached by wire to the beacon thirty feet below. Two blobs were about five hundred meters out and closing fast.
“Seriously, this’ll have to wait. Get out the clothes and blankets.”
She did nothing for a moment, then turned to a duffel bag at the stern of the boat. I opened up the giant cooler we’d brought, now full of lead weights and a fishnet.
I laid the fishnet on the deck, attaching the weights to the corners. I checked the sonar again and saw the blobs were fairly close. When I was operational, I hated using the sonic beacon because nobody could tell me its effect on marine life. Yeah, it worked fine guiding in clandestine infils, but I wasn’t convinced it didn’t sound like a dinner bell to sharks. Glad I’m in the boat.
I saw the blobs were right underneath us now. As anal as Knuckles was, I knew he would be concerned about surfacing. He didn’t get to plan any of this, and I’m sure he was convinced during the whole damn trip that he was doomed. Now, he’d be positive I was some haji itching to blow his head off. I toyed with the idea of playing a joke on him, but figured he wouldn’t take it the right way.
I suppose I should have passed along some final bona fides when I’d provided the grid to the link-up, like flashing a light six times followed by two or some other method to prove we were who we said we were, but I always figured that sort of stuff was overkill. I mean, really, if there was a boat out here with a top-secret beacon mated to a Taskforce DPV, didn’t that pretty much say it all? Keep making up signals, and it just creates more chances for screwups when someone makes a mistake. Of course, Knuckles didn’t see it that way. We were complete opposites, with me being all about free-flow and him being the guy who organized his sock drawer alphabetically.
Jennifer came up next to me, saw the sonar, and said, “What are they doing?”
“Probably playing rock-paper-scissors to see who gets to poke their head up first. This is ridiculous.” I decided a joke wasn’t off the table—and to give Knuckles the bona fides he was looking for. “Take off your bra.”
“What?”
“Take it off. You can do it underneath your shirt. I’ve seen you. Wrap it in one of those fishing weights and drop it overboard.”
She caught why I had asked and gave me her disapproving teacher look, but with the hint of a smile. She reached underneath her shirt. I turned and faced the bow until I heard a splash, then looked overboard. Ten seconds later a head broke the surface, followed by two others. One held her bra in the air.
I said, “Man, you guys are careless. Anybody could have known you were meeting a woman out here and brought an American bra to drop overboard.”
One head said, “Fuck you, Pike. Hello, Jennifer. Help me with the bundle.”
I recognized Knuckles’ voice and kicked over the ladder. Within thirty minutes we had the DPVs broken down and the wetsuits shredded, all now lying in the fishnet. While the men got warm under dry clothes and a blanket, Jennifer and I transferred the kit from the bundle to the fish cooler that had held the net.
Most of the equipment in the bundle was the usual weapons and tech gear. Cameras, H&K UMPs, Glocks, beacons, and assorted other stuff Knuckles thought we’d need. We reached the bottom, and Jennifer held up an item I’d never seen, saying “What’s this?”
It appeared to be one of those gun-type mounts that held an SLR camera with a long telephoto lens. It had a shoulder stock and a trigger grip with a rail extending out. On top of the rail
was a cylinder a foot and a half long with four metal rods running parallel to its length. Hanging to the left side was an offset scope. At the base was a square box with a host of buttons and dials.
I took it and held it up to Knuckles. “What the hell is this thing?”
“It’s an EMP gun. You sight through the scope, pull the trigger, and it’ll knock out electrical components. At least it’s supposed to. It’s worked fine in testing, but had some issues on our predeployment training. I didn’t use it in Tunisia, but figured it might come in handy here.”
“Who’d we steal this from? Microsoft?”
“Actually, the Department of Defense. They have a request for proposal to develop an EMP gun that can disable a car. You know, so instead of using snipers with anti-armor rounds or spike strips, they simply zap the car with the EMP and cause it to shut down. Electronic fuel injection, computers, all that shit that’s in a car nowadays is vulnerable.”
“This thing will stop a car?”
“Hell no. We just stole the technology. The one they’re working on right now is about the same size as a car. They’re still trying to make it small enough to be useful. Ours is much less powerful. It’ll only take out small electrical components, like a computer, alarm switch, or a radio. It’s pinpoint and limited to about fifty feet, but might be useful.”
I held it up to the light of the cockpit for a better look, and Decoy noticed the bandage on my left hand. More precisely, he noticed the length of the bandage.
“Jesus,” he said. “Somebody shot off your pinky?”
I raised my hand so they could all see it. “Didn’t shoot it off, but it’s not as bad as it looks. They only took the first joint. Most of it’s still there.”
The boat grew quiet, the truth of my statement sinking in. Nobody was sure how to respond. I saw Jennifer wanting to say something to help, but I shook my head. Brett broke the silence.
