by Cindy Dees
Sometimes being a doctor sucked. Normal people just thought they were sore from a hard workout, but she knew exactly how badly she had abused her body. Unfortunately, she couldn’t turn off the mental monologue. She was a physician to the core of her being. Like her grandmother before her, she’d felt like a healer ever since she could remember. She’d always wanted to be a doctor, nothing else, and had pursued it with ferocious, single-minded intensity. When the Navy sent her a brochure inviting her to apply for a full medical scholarship in return for an eight-year stint, she’d jumped all over it. Now here she was, a world away from her roots. Of course, it didn’t take her diplomas or her training in trauma and sports medicine to know that the only cure for what ailed her body today was time and getting moving. Even grandmama’s crude Obeah voodoo healing could’ve told her that. She briefly considered writing herself a prescription for a mild painkiller, but opted against it. Diving on any kind of medication was a bad idea.
The hot shower helped some, and she stepped out of it, her normally café-au-lait-colored skin rosy pink. At least she was able to move without too bad a hitch in her git-along. Time to suit up for the dive.
The Port of Miami harbormaster gave them a quick overview of which ships were docked where and when they were departing. Four ships would go out in all, starting at 5:00 p.m. with the Grand Adventure, a new luxury cruise ship carrying 2800 passengers and a crew of a thousand.
Aleesha did a quick equipment check on her five team members. And today no intuitions had her fine-tooth combing her teammate’s gear for intentional sabotage. Praise God. Everyone’s gear was shipshape. The SEALs had taught them well. You couldn’t get a more qualified diving instructor than one of those guys.
She announced to Major Vanessa Blake, the Medusa commander, “Everything looks good, Viper. We’re ready to go.”
“Mamba, this show is right up your alley. You lead the way.”
All the Medusas had field nicknames, after dangerous snakes, and hers was Mamba. Aleesha blinked. She was in charge today? “Hey, I’m only here to patch up people. I don’t need to run the show.”
Viper—Vanessa—shrugged. “If something happens to me, you’re the next highest ranking member of the team. You’d be expected to take charge. It’s time to let you get your feet wet.”
Aleesha frowned. Her specialty was fixing hurts, physical and otherwise. She was a caregiver by nature, and that did not make her command material. She had joined the Medusas—aside from the fact that she never could turn down a dare—to make everything better. It was what she did. There was a beautiful simplicity to the world of Special Forces. Find the bad guy, stop the bad guy, restore order. The Medusas worked as a team of equals, and on the rare occasion that a command decision was needed, the job fell to Vanessa, who was extremely competent at making those calls. Meanwhile, Aleesha was here to heal, not kill. Or give orders to kill.
If she was being honest with herself, she’d admit that her aversion to command came from not wanting to be responsible for what happened on her watch. It was okay for someone else to order her to kill people, but she didn’t want to be the one making that call.
But before she could think much more about it, Vanessa said, “You’re the only certified divemaster among us, ’Leesh. Today’s your shot at glory.”
Misty, the team’s blond, impossibly gorgeous, Air Force pilot from California, piped up. “Hey. Does that mean I get to be in charge if we go combat shopping on Rodeo Drive?”
Aleesha looked over at her boss and friend. “I’ll pass, Vanessa.”
Vanessa shrugged unsympathetically. “It’s not open to negotiation. You need the experience in making command decisions.”
Put her in a hospital and she’d make command decisions all day long. In an E.R. the choice was always to fight for life. In the real world the choice wasn’t always so clear-cut. Aleesha sighed. Problem was, she knew a brick wall when she saw it. No sense bloodying her forehead against it. “Okay, okay,” she said, capitulating reluctantly. “Sorry I hassled you.”
Vanessa shrugged easily, clearly not holding any grudge. “The only person who truly hassles me is Jack.”
Aleesha grinned. Jack Scatalone was the Delta Force lieutenant colonel who’d trained the Medusas, and he was also Vanessa’s significant other these days. “How’s de boogeyman, anyway?”
Vanessa’s expression melted into fondness. “He’s training a new class of Delta recruits.”
Aleesha groaned at the memory of what he’d put them through in their initial training. “In other words, he’s having the time of his life torturing some poor kids.”
“Exactly,” Vanessa replied drolly.
Lord, she loved the camaraderie of these women. They were a family—every bit as tight as the big, rowdy Gautier clan back home. Funny how fast the Medusas had gelled. Six strong, smart, independent women, and they functioned as one with only the rarest of disagreements. She’d give her life to keep these women safe. But then, that was her job. As the team’s medic, she was responsible for keeping them all up and running. Although she didn’t need a job assignment to do that. She’d been rescuing hurt birds and adopting lost kittens her whole life, and embracing this bunch had come as naturally as breathing. The only twist was that she happened to be damned protective of her loved ones, and that was a bit of a trick in their line of work.
Aleesha felt the tug of Vanessa checking her gear one last time, got a thumb’s-up from her boss, and nodded at the harbormaster. He led them out to his tugboat moored to the dock outside, and they trooped aboard, hauling their air tanks and fins. It was a hot, humid day, and her wet suit felt like a custom-fitted oven-roasting bag. They motored out into the harbor just north of downtown that made up the Port of Miami. The harbormaster slowed his vessel, and the team donned its heavy air tanks, stepped into fins and pulled on masks. Aleesha waited until the other five women had fallen backward off the edge of the boat into the water, and then, with a quick thumb’s-up to the harbormaster, rolled overboard herself.
The shock of the cold water, even through her wet suit, took her breath away. Her body adjusted in a few seconds, and she looked around, getting her bearings. The water was murky, a sickly shade of green. A thin film of surface oil obscured the sunlight. Visibility was about eight feet. Not great, but they could work with it. They’d start with a sweep of the area, and then move in close to the docks to check for explosive devices on or near the ships. Once that was done, they’d loiter nearby to be sure no hostile divers showed up at the last minute.
All of the major cruise ships had their own divers to help with underwater maintenance and repairs and to provide security in port. But they’d go aboard a few minutes before their ships sailed. The Medusas would cover the ships during those last few minutes until they actually got underway.
It was a routine patrol. At 4:45, Aleesha traded a thumb’s-up with one of the divers from the Grand Adventure and, using hand signals, directed her team to take positions around the giant ship. They’d go out of visual range, but they’d been over the drill a dozen times. Stay with the ship until it was moving faster than they could swim beside it, staying far enough back not to get caught in the suction of its mighty propellers. She and Misty, the Medusas with the most experience in the water, would take up positions farthest aft on either side of the ship, closest to the propellers.
At 5:01 p.m., the steel hull began to move. It eased forward almost imperceptibly. She kicked easily alongside the behemoth. As a kid in Jamaica, she used to watch these ships come into port and disgorge hordes of spoiled, rich tourists. She’d resented those people for all they had and all her people lacked. As she got older, though, she recognized them for the cash cows they were. Tourism was Jamaica’s number one source of revenue. Someday she really ought to go on a cruise herself. She’d heard they were great vacations. And after the last few months of grueling, nonstop training, she was ready for a break.
Gradually the Grand Adventure picked up momentum as it headed for t
he mouth of the harbor, until it pulled away from her best efforts to keep up with it. She fell back, heading for the surface. Aleesha was the last to pop above water. The team swam to her, and they headed for the next ship.
Aboard the Grand Adventure Viktor Dupont marshaled his wife and her seven-year-old twin boys—his stepsons, legally adopted when he married their mother—to the railing on the top deck, oohing and ahhing appropriately over the view as they headed out to sea. He noted when the harbor divers surfaced and when a phalanx of dolphins picked up escort duty, racing alongside the vessel as it cleared the port and hit the open ocean. It was only a matter of time now. Six years of planning was coming together like a finely constructed piece of clockwork.
His entire team had slipped past the preboarding scrutiny without incident. The cruise industry relied heavily on customer screening to identify potential terrorists before they came aboard. But if a man was patient—willing to keep his team in place for nearly a decade, to help his men establish normal lives as American residents, to recruit actual American citizens to join him, to keep his team mostly out of contact with one another except through him—then it was fully possible to slip through that screening process successfully. Oh yes, he was a patient man.
He strolled around the pool deck, enduring the twins’ squeals of anticipation over the water slide and the unlimited free ice cream and pizza offered poolside. How was it that some children lived lives of such innocent excess while others suffered and starved and died in the streets of his Basque homeland? His jaw clenched.
He was a wolf among lambs. He anticipated the taste of the kill on his tongue, the blood-scented satisfaction of justice to come, all the sweeter for the years he’d waited for it. It fell to the wolves, the men of action, to set the world back in its proper order.
There. A discreet security camera. He counted paces to the next camera. Roughly two hundred feet. Good to see that nothing had changed since he’d cruised on this ship’s maiden voyage six months ago—a casing mission for the operation. A thousand-foot-long ship, five cameras two hundred feet apart down each side, ten cameras to a deck. His team would have to disable three, maybe four, cameras to make tonight’s transaction invisible. No problem. Six men from his two-dozen-person team were assigned to the task.
He rounded up the twins and took them downstairs to dress for dinner. Time to scope out the ship’s restaurants. They, too, had their part in the plan. As he passed through the four-story atrium and walked down halls luxuriously decorated with plush Aubusson carpets and teak paneling, he savored the idea that this ship would soon be his. Now that Operation Defiance had been set in motion, there was no stopping the inevitable. The plan had a momentum all its own.
Aleesha peeled off her wet suit, surprised to see Bud Lipton, their primary SEAL instructor, waiting for them in the harbormaster’s office when they came ashore. “What’s cookin’, bro?”
“Last-minute training opportunity for you ladies. You up for it?”
“That sounded suspiciously like a challenge, Bud.”
He grinned at her.
“Go on. Spill it before you bust a seam,” she snapped when he said nothing more.
“A destroyer that’s being refitted has hit a snag in its work schedule. It’ll be down for the next week, and I’ve got the okay to run you ladies through a few training scenarios aboard her. We’d have most of the ship to ourselves.”
“Sweet!” Aleesha exclaimed. “What will our operational limits be?”
Lipton answered dryly, “You can’t sink her or cause any serious damage that’ll hold up the refit schedule.”
Aleesha grinned. He’d heard about the Medusas’ take-no-prisoners approach, had he? They’d caught some flack for actually blowing up a building during their initial training.
He scowled. “Part of my cadre’s on standby to meet us at the ship and act as hostiles for you.”
That wiped the grin off her face in a hurry. It would be the very devil to go up against SEALs in their native shipboard environment. She glanced at Vanessa for her decision, but her boss gestured back that Aleesha was still in charge. Well, okay, then.
She looked around at the eager faces of her teammates. “It looks like we have a consensus, Bud. Make the call to your posse.”
Two hours later, as she sat in the belly of a cargo jet bound for Norfolk Naval Air Station in Virginia, she had to give Bud credit. He didn’t mess around. She’d no sooner said yes to his offer than he’d whisked the team back to their barracks to pick up their gear and hustled them out to this bucket of bolts, which was ready and waiting for them on the ramp at Homestead Air Force Base just outside Miami.
Bud caught a rare nap, as did several of the Medusas. Aleesha was tired, but she kept a doctorly eye on Vanessa to make sure the airsickness pills she’d given her boss did the trick. Poor Vanessa was plagued by the barfing willies any time she got near an airplane.
The flight was smooth, and Vanessa came through it only vaguely green about the gills. They stepped off the plane in Virginia a little after dark, and Aleesha took a long, fond breath of the familiar mix of salt air and diesel fuel. The smell of the Navy.
Bud was all business. “Let’s go, ladies. You’ve got an orientation briefing in a half hour, and then we hit the decks.”
She should’ve known the idea of letting them get a decent night’s sleep wouldn’t have even crossed the guy’s mind. She also should’ve forced herself to sleep on the ride up here. Tonight was going to suck rocks, doubly so because she was already tired. Too late to do anything about it now, though. At least it wasn’t as if she was any stranger to sleep deprivation. Her medical school residency had seen to that. She steeled herself to tough out a long night.
He hadn’t seen another member of his team since he’d boarded the ship, but Viktor could feel them moving into place, positioning themselves for phase two of Operation Defiance. He checked his watch as the bartender regretfully informed him the piano lounge was shutting down for the night—2:00 a.m. on the nose. Give the bartender an A-plus for punctuality. He shoved a five-dollar bill into the guy’s tip jar and strolled out of the joint. Eight men would be making their way by various routes toward the rear of the ship right now, none of them interacting with each other in any way.
Precisely at 2:15, six men reached up simultaneously from where they lounged under the aft security cameras on Deck 5 and slapped pieces of black construction paper over the camera lenses, blacking out the entire starboard aft portion of the promenade deck’s surveillance system. The two extra men lounging in the now camera-free area straightened quickly. One of them opened his jacket and tossed a white nylon line overboard, while the second man quickly lashed the end of it unobtrusively to the white railing of the ship. When the rope was secured, anonymous among the hundreds of other lines tied all over the ship, they moved away, splitting up and heading in opposite directions.
Precisely thirty seconds after they’d held up their black papers, the six men yanked them down, restoring the camera views. Casually, over the next several minutes, they all faded away, disappearing in various directions.
From the deck above, Viktor leaned on the railing with both elbows, peering out to sea, apparently in deep thought. He glanced at his watch when a white-uniformed ship’s officer passed below him, walking quickly, looking up at the security cameras as he went. Five minutes and fourteen seconds. About as long as it would take to get from the ship’s security office just off the bridge to the opposite end of the ship at a brisk walk. Not bad. He grinned sardonically to himself. But not good enough.
Aleesha crouched in front of the ammunition storage locker, using a stethoscope to engage in a little old-time safecracking. Newer locks could be broken only with diamond-bit drills or high-tech electronic gadgets, but a dinosaur like this could be opened simply by listening for the sound of the tumblers falling into place, or, more precisely, listening for the silence of the tumblers not being out of place. She almost had it.
Bingo, b
aby. She nodded over her shoulder at Misty and tugged gently on the door. Aleesha slipped a mirror inside the crack in the safe door, and ran it around the edge of the opening. Sheesh! Not one, but two separate flash grenades were wired to blow when she opened the door all the way. She pulled out a set of dental tools, and, holding her flashlight in her mouth, maneuvered the long-handled instruments with both hands. It took her several minutes of delicate work performed in tight confines to disarm the traps, but it was no harder than surgically reconstructing a shoulder joint. She eased open the safe’s heavy door to the sweet sound of silence. She taped a note to the back wall of the safe detailing how much of the hypothetical dynamite she’d have helped herself to, were this not an exercise.
She hand signaled to Vanessa, “How much time left?” They’d allotted themselves ninety minutes for her to crack the safe and snatch the explosives. Unlike in the movies, in reality it usually took safecrackers hours to open these old tumbler locks.
Vanessa signaled back, “Four minutes.”
Aleesha grinned. Excellent. She turned back to the safe and quickly rewired the pair of flash grenades to explode, using different connection points. For good measure, she wired up a dummy pair of trip wires to the original connection points, too. When the SEALs EOD—explosive ordinance disarmament—guy came back here to disarm his toys and collect them, he’d head straight for his trip wires, which were now the dummies. If he wasn’t on the ball, he’d miss her new wires and get himself a little surprise, Medusa-style. Grinning, she stepped away from the safe and signaled that she was ready to go.
Viktor made his way in stages to the back of the ship over the next hour. He wouldn’t be able to hear the high-speed RIB—rigid inflatable boat—over the ship’s gigantic diesel engines, but then, neither would anyone in the ship’s crew. The civilian version of the U.S. Navy’s fast stealth insertion boat was readily available for purchase by any sportsman willing to shell out a little extra cash, and it lost very little by way of performance over its military cousin.
