Stealth Attack

by John Gilstrap

  “Affirmative.”

  “Git.”

  Finally, Jonathan arrived at water’s edge and the waiting boat. Two corpses littered the sand while a third oscillated in the tide. The boat was still packed with boxes of product, but there was ample room for him. He’d just begun to push off when he heard heavy footsteps approaching.

  He whirled to see Big Guy sprinting toward him. It always amazed Jonathan that a man of his size could move with such speed.

  “Can’t let you go alone,” Boxers said. “I know how you hate boats.”

  Through his earbud, Jonathan heard Dawkins soothing Ciara. It was okay that she had a name again.

  “Thor, Scorpion,” he said. “Switch to papa-tango-tango.” Push-to-talk. “Godspeed. Monitor channel one for further traffic.”

  “Roger, Scorpion. Good hunting.”

  The radio clicked, and it was just Jonathan and Boxers on the net. As always, Big Guy drove. He settled into the back of the boat and pulled the starter cord while Jonathan pushed them away from the shore. When he was knee-deep in the Pacific, he pressed hard against the gunwale to leverage himself up and over.

  Boxers twisted the throttle, and they were on their way.

  “Where are we going?” Big Guy asked.

  Jonathan pointed into the night. “That way.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Using a box on the bow as a seat, Jonathan peered out into the night. To avoid detection, smugglers had for generations plied their trade on moonless nights. Even with night vision, the blackness of the Pacific was absolute.

  “Do you see any watercraft?” Boxers whispered.

  “Negative. But those guys have to be navigating somehow.”

  “They probably have a GPS coordinate to aim for.”

  This was how smugglers were able to do what they did. Jonathan had no idea how sophisticated the Mexican shore monitoring capabilities were, but those probably didn’t matter, anyway. The cartels got to do whatever they wanted.

  “Kill the engine,” Jonathan whispered.

  Boxers complied, and the night went silent, save for the slapping and rippling of the water against the sides of their boat.

  Their prey had no doubt heard the battle that had raged on the shore, so what would their reaction be? Would they understand that this was a rescue mission? If so, what would they do with Roman? It made as much sense to kill him and drop him overboard as it did to bring him aboard. Furthermore, they understood the advantage of darkness, so would they cut their engines, too, and float for a while? Or would they book it out to their vessel and get underway as quickly as possible?

  Maybe they’d stick around until they thought the danger was over and go back to complete their mission to drop off product. No, that one didn’t make sense. With their cover blown and people dead, they’d consider speed to be of the essence.

  “Starboard bow,” Boxers whispered.

  As Big Guy spoke, Jonathan heard it, too. The definite, discernible hum of an outboard motor. They had no choice but to roll the dice that this was the right one. After all, how many boats would there be out on the sea at this hour?

  “Fire it back up,” Jonathan ordered.

  Their motor jumped back to life, and Boxers’ quick acceleration damn near tossed Jonathan overboard. He recovered and sat lower, bracing himself against the gunwales. He changed his NVGs from light magnification to infrared, and there it was, the glow of a working motor, its heat signature a stark contrast to the night.

  “I see him,” Jonathan said. “Speed up.”

  “It’s wide open. How far?”

  “Can’t tell,” Jonathan whispered into his mic. “No perspective.” As he spoke, though, the distance closed considerably. “Pull back, pull back. They must be slowing.”

  As they approached, he could see three people aboard the motorboat. They glowed as white images in the night, almost like photographic negatives.

  “I’ve got three souls,” Jonathan said.

  “I confirm,” Boxers agreed. “I can’t make out the PC from the bad guys, though.”

  The problem with IR imaging as opposed to light enhancement was a significant loss in visual detail. You could see that they were human and you could make out short from tall, but that was about it.

  “I’m switching back to light enhancement,” Jonathan said. Now that he knew where to look and what he was looking for, he could see his target, but it was still were too far out. They continued to close the distance.

  “Cut it back,” Jonathan commanded. He wanted them to be dead before they had a chance to see him.

  They coasted in silence for fifteen or twenty seconds before he got enough detail to make out what he was looking for. “I see PC-One in the center, between two tangos,” Boxers observed. Terrorists. His voice was inaudible in the atmosphere, but perfectly amplified through Jonathan’s earbud.

  “Why are they stopped?” Jonathan mused aloud.

  “Why do we care?”

  “We’re missing something. This feels like a trap. Where were they headed, and why have they stopped now?”

  “Where’s the smuggling ship, you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What kind of trap could it be?” Boxers asked. “Even if they figured out that we were chasing them, they can’t know where we are. It’s too dark.”

  As Big Guy spoke, Jonathan watched his IR laser sight settle on the man on the right, the one at the bow.

  “Still too far out,” Jonathan said. “Too much bobbing. Hold your fire.”

  “I know I have a shot now,” Boxers said. “I don’t know if I’ll have a shot in thirty seconds.”

  “Hold your fire.” His words notwithstanding, Jonathan settled his own laser beam on the centerline of the man on the left.

  As they glided closer still, they could hear the puttering of the idling outboard on the target vessel. Their motor noise had deafened them to the sound of Jonathan’s approach.

  Then, without warning or apparent cause, they abruptly cut their motor, leaving Jonathan’s the only sound on the water.

  Roman’s captors reacted instantly, reaching down onto the deck and retrieving automatic rifles.

  “Fire!” Jonathan said, but Boxers’ target had already pirouetted into the water. Jonathan dropped his with three to the chest.

  “Sorry, Boss, were you saying something?”

  Roman yelled and struggled to remain steady in the oscillating boat, unable to move his hands.

  “Roman Alexander!” Jonathan yelled. “You are safe! We’re here to take you home!”

  The boy looked equal parts startled and terrified. “Who are you?” he called to the night.

  “Stay still!” Jonathan called. “It’s almost over.”

  Roman’s boat continued to rock precipitously from side to side. If he fell overboard, he’d drown with his arms pinioned the way they were.

  “Sit!” Jonathan commanded. “Sit straight down. In fifteen seconds, this is over.”

  “Mr. Jonathan?” In the glow of the night vision, his wide eyes printed as comically large and he folded his legs under him.

  Jonathan reached into a pocket of his vest and withdrew a glow stick. He broke it, shook it, and Roman’s world filled with green light, too. “It’s just a light stick, Roman. I’m tossing it onto your deck so you have vision.”

  Despite the warning, Roman jumped when the stick thumped onto the wooden deck.

  “Mr. Jonathan, is that you? Mr. Boxers?”

  “It’s us, Roman. We’re gonna bump your boat here in a few seconds.”

  Boxers worked the throttle carefully to bring their boat alongside Roman’s. Jonathan reached across the gap and pulled them together until they touched.

  “Which boat do you want to go back in?” Boxers asked.

  “His,” Jonathan replied. “More room. Roman, hang tight. We’re coming over.” Boxers held the boat steady while Jonathan rolled across both gunwales and landed on the deck of Roman’s boat.

  �
��Mr. Jonathan?” Roman looked frightened when he saw his rescuers up close, and Jonathan instantly understood why. Their ballistic gear—especially the four-tube NVG array—made them look more like sea creatures from a horror movie than men.

  “It’s us, I promise.” Jonathan shrugged out of his spare vest, made his way over to Roman, and dropped the neck hole down over the boy’s head. “I need you to wear this.”

  “My hands . . .”

  “We’ll get to those.” Jonathan turned back to the other boat to see Boxers light a flare and jam it under the remaining cargo. The fire lit instantly and grew quickly.

  “Shit,” Boxers said as he scurried across the gunwales to join the others in Roman’s boat. “That caught faster than I thought.” He pushed the boat away, and a few seconds later, something popped inside the boxes of cargo—it sounded like an aerosol can. The fire flared up, and within a few seconds, the whole boat was ablaze.

  “Holy shit,” Roman said. “What is happening?”

  “Kinda cool, isn’t it?” Boxers asked.

  Jonathan said, “There’s a lot you’re going to want to know, Roman, and only a few things we can explain. The headline here is that you’re going home.”

  Boxers pulled the starter cord for the outboard. An instant later, the water beside them began to churn. White foam boiled to the surface, luminescing in the light of the glow stick, made even brighter through his NVGs.

  “What did you do?” Jonathan asked.

  “It’s a trick I learned from Moses,” Boxers said, not dropping a beat. “I’m parting the Sea. I didn’t do anything.”

  Before more words could be spoken, the ocean did appear to part. From it emerged the squatty superstructure of a submarine.

  “You’re shitting me,” Boxers said.

  “Who knew the cartel had a navy?” Jonathan asked.

  Boxers twisted the throttle on the outboard and lurched them away from the breaching boat, back toward shore.

  “No,” Jonathan commanded. “Stay put.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Serious as a heart attack.”

  “Our mission’s accomplished, Boss. He’s right next to you.”

  “You heard me,” Jonathan said. “If we run, we’re an easy target. We take the fight to them.”

  “A motorboat against a submarine,” Boxers said. His voice dripped disbelief. “Just making sure we’re on the same page.”

  There was more to Jonathan’s logic, but it would take too long to explain, and he didn’t want to argue. He’d heard of the narco navy, and he’d heard that they’d commissioned the construction of submarines for their smuggling operations between Colombia and Mexico, but he’d never seen one. He’d never even talked to anyone who’d seen one. But they had to cost a bundle of money, and how often did you get a chance to hurt the bad guys that bad?

  Jonathan spoke quickly. “Here’s how we work it. Big Guy, you bring me up to the sub as soon as it stops breaching. You stay with the PC while I engage the crew and scuttle the boat.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Bring us back,” Jonathan said.

  He’d expected the submarine to rise farther out of the water than it did, more akin to the breaching of a military submarine, but this one stopped with its deck barely above the surface—below the gunwales of the motorboat.

  “Scorpion, this is a mistake.”

  “Duly noted.” He reached over to Roman, put a hand on the back of his head, and pressed him down into the deck. “You stay low till this is over. Kiss the deck.” Jonathan then took the glow stick and flung it out into the ocean.

  Roman complied without complaint. His expression showed total overload.

  Boxers worked the motor like a master, sliding their boat into the submarine’s starboard side just as a hatch opened on the forward end of deck.

  “Oh, shit, here we go,” Boxers said. He raised his rifle to his shoulder.

  “Hold your fire,” Jonathan said. He wasn’t in position yet. He wanted the crewman to be as clear of the hatch as possible before engaging him. The point here was to sink the sub and rid the world of smugglers. If they guy lived and returned below deck, it would become a whole new battle.

  Jonathan hauled himself onto the aft end of the deck, on the other side of a four-foot-high superstructure, next to the heavy-duty fill cap for the fuel tanks.

  On the forward end, a beam of dull red light preceded the emergence of a crew member who carried a slung AK47 in a way that showed he had no intention of using it.

  “Hello, friends!” the crew member said in Spanish. He appeared to be addressing no one in particular. “What is this about human cargo?”

  Jonathan settled the beam of his IR sight on the man’s right ear and blew his brains out his left ear. The dead man dropped vertically, back into the open hatch. Instantly, from inside the sub, Jonathan heard commotion, the realization that a crewmate had been shot.

  As Jonathan pulled himself up and over the superstructure, another crewman’s head and shoulders emerged from the hatch to reach for the lid. Before Jonathan could react, Boxers killed the man with a single shot.

  As that man dropped, the hatch nearly dropped with him, but Jonathan cleared the forward edge of the superstructure just in time to hook-slide into the hatch and prop it up with his foot.

  Gunshots were fired somewhere inside the vessel, but Jonathan didn’t know by whom or at whom they were aimed. All he knew was that he wasn’t hit. And that it was a foolish idea to fire randomly inside a steel tube. Fragments would ricochet everywhere.

  With the hatch lid standing vertical, Jonathan let his M27 fall against its sling while he pulled a fragmentation grenade from its pouch on his vest. He pulled the pin, let the spoon fly, and dropped it into the opening, and then slammed the hatch shut. The deck vibrated with the detonation, but the sub maintained its structural integrity.

  As explosive devices went, hand grenades weren’t all that powerful. They were designed to kill and maim people, not to break things.

  He pulled the hatch open to repeat the process and was greeted with a plume of smoke that smelled of nitrates and burning plastic. He dropped in another grenade and slammed the hatch again.

  Call him twisted, but there was something deeply satisfying in the subquake that the detonation triggered.

  “That oughta do it,” Jonathan said.

  “Try this,” Boxers said, holding up another grenade. He tossed it to Jonathan. “A little thermite for good luck.”

  Jonathan couldn’t help but smile. “Well, this should send everything to the bottom.” Thermite grenades were incendiary devices that burned at about four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. In the past, Jonathan had used them to destroy artillery guns and to take out electrical installations. This would be his first time using one to sink a ship.

  His first thought was to drop the grenade through the same hatch and let it burn through the hull, but then he had a better idea. He hauled himself back over the top of the superstructure to the afterdeck, where he’d boarded the vessel. He pulled the pin, placed the grenade atop the filler cap for the fuel tanks, and hopped back aboard the motorboat.

  “Full speed ahead, please,” he said.

  “Aye, aye.” Boxers throttled in power, and they accelerated back toward shore.

  Behind them, the thermite flashed with brilliant white light. A few seconds later, after it had melted the steel and dropped into the vapor space of the fuel tank, a whump rippled through the air, and a gout of orange flame seemed to rise directly out of the sea. Within a minute, that flame went away as the dead vessel disappeared below the surface, leaving the dark night illuminated only by the smoldering remains of the other rowboat. Soon, it would disappear below the waves, as well.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Every modern handcuff assembly in the United States can be opened by the same key. Jonathan had never looked into the official reasoning, but he supposed it made sense that one cop could free the hands and ankles
of another cop’s prisoner. Thus, a handcuff key was a standard part of Jonathan’s everyday carry ensemble. Even when he wasn’t kitted out for battle as he was today, he carried handcuff keys inside slits that he’d cut into his belt on the front side and in the rear. Given the collection of enemies he’d acquired over the years, it didn’t seem unreasonable that one day someone might want to stuff him into the trunk of a car.

  While Boxers drove the boat toward shore, Jonathan used one of his keys to free Roman’s hands.

  “I . . . I really don’t . . .”

  “And you shouldn’t,” Jonathan said. “It’s a long and complicated story, and you’ll never hear the whole thing.” A few seconds passed. “It’s good to see your face again, kid.”

  “So, am I . . . are we safe now?”

  “You’re safer than you were a little while ago,” Jonathan said, “but real safety is an hour or two away.”

  “How did you find me? Where did you get all this stuff?”

  Jonathan issued a loud sigh. This was why it was always a bad idea to deal with people you knew—children you knew. “Roman, I’m really not trying to be difficult, but most of the questions you ask will have to go unanswered.”

  “Does my mom know you’re here?”

  This was dangerous territory. He decided to roll the dice on the truth. “Yes, she does. And she’ll be thrilled to know that you’re safe.”

  “Can we call her?”

  “Not yet. Not until we know for sure.” Behind him, he could hear Boxers chuckling. “How hurt are you?” Jonathan asked. “I saw the ransom video.”

  “I’m okay. It hurt at the time, but not so much now. Where is Ciara?”

  “She’s been rescued by someone else,” Jonathan explained.

  “Will I see her?”

  Another awkward question. And once again, he went for the truth. “Probably not.” If only to change the subject, he turned to Boxers. “How far out are we?”