Table of Contents
Praise
OTHER BOOKS BY PATRICK ROBINSON
Title Page
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
EPILOGUE
Copyright Page
Praise for Intercept
“What happens when the courts spring a bunch of bad guys? A retired Navy SEAL has to clean up the mess. This fast-paced thriller ranges from the Hindu Bush to northwest Connecticut in a plot as relevant as tomorrow’s news.”
—Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review
“In all, Intercept is a fun read. . . . A good book for a summer evening on the front porch swing. . . .”
—Conservative Monitor
“. . . an exciting action packed. . . . The story line is fast-paced throughout . . . readers will be hooked. . . .”
—Harriet Klausner
“Robinson’s Intercept is definitely a page turner . . . Readers who are fans of Vince Flynn’s novels would likely find this a book worth reading.”
—New Mystery Reader
Praise for Diamondhead
“Diamondhead is a fabulous action-packed thriller. . . . Mack [Bedford] is terrific as an obstinate hero . . .”
—Midwest Book Review
“The plot is as fresh as today’s news.”
—Cape Cod Times
Praise for Patrick Robinson
“One of the crown princes of the beach-read thriller.”
—Stephen Coonts, New York Times bestselling author of The Assassin
“Gripping.”
—Tampa Tribune
“Inspired.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Patrick Robinson has tapped into our fear.”
—Herald Express
“Robinson [crafts] a fast-paced, chilling, yet believable tale.”
—San Francisco Examiner
“If you like your techno-thrillers in ripping yarn form, you’ll love . . . [Patrick Robinson].”
—Guardian (London)
OTHER BOOKS BY PATRICK ROBINSON
Novels
Ghost Force
Hunter Killer
Scimitar SL2
Barracuda 945
Slider
The Shark Mutiny
U.S.S. Seawolf
H.M.S. Unseen
Kilo Class
Nimitz Class
Diamondhead
To the Death
Intercept
Nonfiction
Lone Survivor (written with Marcus Luttrell)
Horsetrader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and Fall
of the Sport of Kings
One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle
Group Commander (written with Admiral Sir John Woodward)
True Blue (written with Daniel Topolski)
Born to Win (written with John Bertrand)
The Golden Post Decade of Champions: The Greatest Years
in the History of Thoroughbred Racing, 1970–1980
Classic Lines: A Gallery of the Great Thoroughbreds
A Colossal Failure of Common Sense:
The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers
(written with Lawrence G. McDonald)
PROLOGUE
THE MOST REVERED SQUARE OF BLACKTOP IN ALL THE UNITED States military somehow looked even blacker beneath a pale, quartering moon, which was presently fighting a losing battle with heavy Pacific cloud banks.
Its name, “the grinder,” could give a man the creeps. It was a place where men had, for generations, been crushed, their spirits broken, their will to succeed cast asunder. It was a place where dreams were ended, where limitations were faced. It was a place where tough, resolute military men threw in the towel, publicly, and then slipped quietly away.
It was also a place that represented the Holy Grail of the US Navy SEALs, the place where their battle had begun and ended with the awe-inspiring moment when the fabled golden Trident was pinned on the upper left side of their dress uniform.
No member of the US Navy SEALs has ever forgotten that moment. And for all their lives, the holders of the Trident strive to live up to its symbolic demands. Everyone who receives it expects to earn that honor every day throughout the entire tenure of their service.
Such a man now stood alone on the north side of the square. Commander Mackenzie Bedford was back where he belonged, right here on the grinder, the place where he had once stood as his entire class voted him Honor Man, the young officer most likely to attain high command in the world’s toughest, most elite fighting force.
There were only twelve of them—the survivors of a six-month ordeal, which had seen 156 applicants crash and burn, most of them DOR, or Dropped On Request. They were good guys who just couldn’t make it—couldn’t take the murderous training, the endless pounding along the beach, the cold Pacific, the swimming, the rowing, the sleep deprivation, the log-lifting, the elephant runs. Not to mention the stark SEAL command, Push ’em out—shorthand for a set of up to eighty eye-popping, muscleburning, brutal nonstop push-ups. For most of them it was just too much.
But the SEAL instructors do not want most of them. They want only the elite, the young iron men with the indomitable will to excel, the guys with the strength, speed, and agility, who would rather die than quit.
Not to mention the brains. There are no stupid SEALs. Seventy-five percent of them have college degrees, and they fight and struggle their way through outrageously demanding courses: weaponry, marksmanship, Sniper School, navigation, map reading, unarmed combat, mountaineering, parachute jumping, even medical courses, in preparation for battlefield duty.
SPECWARCOM commanders have one everlasting comment about the dreaded BUDs course that bars entry to their establishment: It’s harder to get in here than to Harvard Law School. Different, but harder.
Commander Bedford, dressed in dark blue for the first time in more than a year, walked quietly across the grinder, relishing every step. He’d dreamed of this moment since his court-martial on a charge of mowing down innocent, unarmed Iraqi civilians on the banks of the Euphrates River.
The officers who presided over the legal proceedings did not believe the Iraqis were innocent, unarmed, or even civilians. And the SEAL commander was found not guilty. However they had issued an “officers’ reprimand,” which finished him in the United States Navy.
There was not one member of the SPECWARCOM community who believed this could possibly be fair. But it took a year to reinstate him under the most extraordinary circumstances. Last night, he dined with Rear Admiral Andy Carlow, the newly promoted commander-in-chief special operations command, and had agreed he should begin the second half of his career as a senior instructor.
And now he was on his way to a meeting in the office alongside the grinder with six of the instructors, including the chief, a Southerner named Captain Bobby Murphy, a veteran of the Gulf, and a man who would always hold a special place in Mack’s heart.
The instructor had stepped forward to shake his hand when Mack received his Trident. He’d said simply, I’m proud of you, kid. Real proud.
Since then, they had become friends, trained together, and served together on the front line in Baghdad. And now he was going to see him, to take up his new appointment, a six-month stint as a senior BUDs instructor.
It was slightly unusual for a newly promoted SEAL battlefield commander to work as an instructor. But Mack had req
uested the position to test his fitness and to bring his vast combat knowledge to a new generation of SEALs who might one day serve under his command in another theater of war.
Bobby Murphy was awaiting him in the brightly lit office across the veranda, where the DOR guys leave their helmets and ring the bell before leaving Coronado. The grinder, the veranda, the hanging brass bell, the line of helmets. This was a place of SEAL folklore. Just the sight of it caused Mack’s heart to miss a beat.
He entered the office and was taken aback when all six of the instructors stood up and applauded. Each one of them shook his hand and welcomed him home.
Captain Murphy had already formulated a game plan. “Mack, old buddy,” he said, “I think you should start as proctor to the next BUDs class when they begin INDOC. It’ll be useful for them to start their training with a decorated combat veteran. Let ’em hear some real words of wisdom.”
“Fine with me,” said Mack. “But right after that I’d like to take a different set of guys through Phase Three, if there’s no objection.”
“Mack, there’s no one I’d rather appoint, if you’re certain about your own fitness.” Bobby Murphy was very serious, considering, of course, that Phase Three BUDs—Demolition and Tactics, Land Warfare—was the most demanding ten weeks in the program. And the instructors were revered as the toughest, fittest men on the base.
“I’m good for it,” he said modestly.
“You’re good for anything,” grinned Murphy. “Matter of fact, I very much like the idea of you coming in to finish them in Phase Three. Especially if you stay with them ’til Sniper School at the end. If I recall you were pretty good at it yourself.”
“Yup, not too bad,” replied Mack, both of them knowing full well he had been voted Sniper Class Honor Man unanimously and to this day was reckoned to be one of the greatest SEAL stealth marksmen there had ever been.
“Anything else?” asked Captain Murphy. “Like how do you want the students to address you?”
“I think Instructor Mack would be fine,” he said. “I’m a SEAL, and I’m well known around here. I prefer first names among the brotherhood.”
“I agree,” said Bobby Murphy. “I’ll make it known that from now on, you’re Instructor Mack.”
AND SO, THREE DAYS LATER, at 0500, Commander Mack Bedford jogged down to the grinder where Captain Murphy introduced the new class going into INDOCTRINATION—prior to the start of BUDs proper. He told them that Commander Bedford was a decorated SEAL combat commander in Iraq and Afghanistan and, as their proctor, would guide them through the first weeks of their training.
He then formally handed over the students to the care of his old friend, the teak-tough officer from Maine. “One hundred and seventy two assigned,” said Captain Murphy.
“HOO-YAH, INSTRUCTOR MACK!” roared the class, with one echoing voice.
The words split the dawn air, and the sound reverberated through Mack Bedford’s soul, because they were words he thought for so long that he would never hear.
He stood before them like Alexander the Great inspecting his legions. And then he stepped forward and said quietly, “Push ’em out.”
CHAPTER 1
IT WAS NOT QUITE ON THE SCALE OF THE CHILLING RHYTHMIC WAR chants of the massed Zulus lined along the hills above Rorke’s Drift. But there was menace in the air along one of the world’s longest beaches, where crowds of Somali tribesmen clapped, cheered, and chanted in that uniquely African style of uniform mob excitement.
The sound of high anticipation. The disciplined clapping. The repetitive chorus, echoing out over the turquoise water. The sound of pounding feet and stamping dulled by the sand.
The grim occasion was lessened by the frequent shouts of laughter rising from the crowd. On reflection, it probably sounded more like Kinshasa in distant Zaire on that October night in 1974, when the anthem of the faithful rose to the skies, ALI, BOMA YE!
That too was somehow joyful but edged with menace. The words meant “Ali, kill him!” which was a bit harsh toward big, affable George Foreman, who landed on his backside in round eight, with the howls of the swaying, chanting mob in his ears . . . ALI, BOMA YE!
The 1,000-mile long Somali beach was filled with about three hundred people—men, women, and children—gathered beneath a burning East African sun, all singing and jumping, forming a vast crescent around twelve tall, lean, tribesmen, each with an AK-47 strapped across his back, manhandling a couple of thirty-five-foot-long, scruffy white skiffs into the surf.
The barefoot boat crews all wore cheap shorts and shirts, but there was nothing cheap about their two huge Yamaha engines, 250cc and $15,000 apiece, bolted onto the stern of each of the old skiffs, befitting the equipment of oceangoing bank robbers.
The majority of the crowd had arrived in a convoy of vehicles now parked behind the remote and desolate beach. They were mostly new, 4 × 4 SUVs, but there were a few rough village carts drawn by oxen, which stared blankly at the arid sand dunes.
The wooden skiffs were heavy, the bows up on the beach, the 600-pound engines seaward, and the sweating, heaving crews were hauling ass trying to get them afloat. Every time they heaved in unison, the boat moved a couple of feet, and the crowd let out a deep, rhythmic note that sounded like WHOMBA!
And their hopes were bound together, the crews working in time to the breathless chant, the spectators willing them to reach sufficiently deep water: WHOMBA! CLAP-CLAP-CLAP! . . . WHOMBA! CLAP-CLAP-CLAP! HE-E-E-E-Y! WHOMBA!
As far as the eye could see, there was only flat, vacant, hot sand, stretching for miles and miles, north and then south. This was Somalia’s Empty Quarter-on-Sea, without Bedouins or camels.
The Indian Ocean, which washed against its long eastern frontier, was much the same, a vast unbroken seascape of gently breaking surf, lazily rising and crashing down on this African edge of the fourth largest body of water on earth.
On this day it was utterly without activity; unbroken solitude all the way to its great curved horizons. No oceangoing freighters, no Gulf tankers running the oil down the African coast, not even a local ferry. No pleasure boats. No fishermen.
There was but one tiny blot on the surface. About a mile offshore was a dark-red 1,500-ton tuna long-liner. If you could read the faded black letters, she was called Mombassa, but there was none of the Indian Ocean’s rich harvest of bluefin tuna on board, nor any deep-sea fishermen.
The Mombassa, stolen a couple of years ago from a Thai fishing fleet, was crewed strictly by Somali brigands. The gear, stowed both below and on deck, comprised rocket propelled grenades, Type 7 with handheld launchers, RGD-5 military hand grenades, spare AK-47 rifles, dynamite, grappling irons, ropes, and nets. Boarding nets, that is. Not fishing nets.
The four-man crew was awaiting the arrival of the local hit men, the pirates who had terrorized the high seas the past dozen years, growing bolder by the week, as international shipping corporations paid up in exasperation. Millions of dollars were often dropped from fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters in fluorescent orange containers right on the decks of the captured vessels. Tax free.
The tuna boat, stolen, like almost everything else on the Somali coast, ran on a single-shafted diesel turbine, with a good range of more than 2,500 miles at 20 knots.
Her master was Captain Hassan Abdi, a black-eyed former fisherman from Puntland, close to the tip of the Horn of Africa on the Gulf of Aden. Up there, the ocean waters were annually decimated by pollution from industrial dumping by Western corporations. And trying to catch billfish had proved increasingly difficult, not to mention a severe blow to Captain Hassan’s ancient family business, which had been harvesting the warm ocean for approximately 7,000 years.
And once more, the bloodthirsty monster of twenty-first-century capitalism had smashed asunder a historic way of life. The reason was simple: It cost $1,000 per ton to dump hazardous waste off the coast of Europe and only $2.50 per ton off the coast of Somalia.
Which made a perfect, well-reasoned, bottom-line busines
s model for the mighty brains of Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, and the London School of Economics. It was obviously a complete catastrophe for the Hassans and hundreds of families like them.
In the end, the short, burly Somali seaman had given up and joined the pirates, abandoning the billfish for the dollar bills cascading into the pirate ships.
Captain Hassan agreed to come south and work out of the new pirate HQ of Haradheere, a small coastal town north of Mogadishu on this sunbaked coastline, a couple of clicks north of the equator.
Haradheere, a town of three or four thousand souls, is a pirate stronghold. One section on the seaward side stands as the equivalent of Beverly Hills when playactors first started earning fortunes in the 1920s. But perhaps a better example might be the beautiful white-painted clapboard captains’ houses skirting the cobbled streets of Nantucket off the coast of Cape Cod. These were the custom-built homes of the wealthy whaling captains, men who went down to the sea and sailed great waters.
Little thought is given, of course, to the fact that Somalia is, even without the pirates, probably the most dangerous place in the world, destroyed by a seemingly endless civil war. It is a lawless country where the capital city, Mogadishu, has been effectively levelled. There is no government and no protection for the citizens, who live in fear and terror of tribal warlords, rampant diseases without medicines, and the ever-present threat of starvation in an agricultural desert. Thousands have fled to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia.
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