The light was attached to an infrared detection system that would warn of a missile launch. It didn’t go off, though the radar detector did. Spaghetti motioned to the rock at the side of the castle, but the direction finder on his detection unit wasn’t precise enough for a pinpoint location; we had to wait for Trace to develop the film.
“Maybe it’s a dish, maybe it’s bullshit,” she said a few hours later, showing me the image. “If that old fart had gone a little slower, I might have gotten something useful.”
One thing about Apaches—if they take a dislike to you, there’s no way in the world you can get back into their good graces, and it’s not worth even trying.
“Useful or not, I think we ought to go take a look around,” I told her. “You in the mood for a midnight swim?”
If this had been a SEAL operation, we would have made our way up to the ocean portal via our own special taxi—an Improved SEAL Delivery Vehicle. The ISDV is basically a minisubmarine that gets you close enough to a target so that you spend your real energy on the mission, not swimming there. They’re a step up from the older SEAL Delivery Vehicle, which was more like an upside down canoe that went underwater than a real submarine. In the SDV, you sat on a wet bench and froze your nuts off, trudging ever so slowly toward your target. The new improved versions keep a swimmer warm, toasty, and dry until the dance.
I can just hear one of my ol’ sea daddy chiefs snorting about that: What da fuck, Marcinko? You afraid your tootsies gonna fall off if they get wet, you lameshit numb-nut lazy sumbitch?*
“Lazy” being the worst four-letter word in a master chief’s vocabulary.
We did it the old-fashioned way, swimming from a boat landing about a half-mile away. Believe me, if you were part of the old UDT program, where the Little Creek waters rarely got much over forty degrees and the tide could approach two knots, the Mediterranean seems like an ocean of milk. Then again, if you were in the UDT program, you probably had a chief screaming words to the effect of: “You sorry little pukeshit, Marcinko—you think this is easy? Easy is exactly when it hits you in balls, you good-for-diarrhea shit asshole.”
About two hundred yards south of the castle I came across a mine anchored just under the surface of the water. It wasn’t a WWII souvenir, either—there were several more nearby, a regular picket fence guarding the gated entrance. We ducked around them easily enough, and made our way to the arch. The spikes that guarded the entrance were placed about a meter apart, more than sufficient to keep a boat out, but not much defense against a swimmer. Even better, they extended only a foot below the water.
By now it’s probably occurred to you that this might be an elaborate trap. Any number of people might be honestly said to hate ol’ lovable Dickie’s arse and the rest of him. They would pay dearly to see his head smacked against the rocks. The fact that the Mafia was involved doesn’t exactly increase your confidence level either, I’ll bet. Nothing is more honorable for a “man of honor” than murder and double-cross.
So what would you have me do? Send a little robot in there ahead of me to take a beating if it was a trap?
Good idea. Call me collect when you get one perfected. Just make sure it works under all sorts of conditions, needs no downtime, and can be counted on to save your ass when the shit starts flying. In the meantime, I’ll keep putting my neck on the line, just like the other poor grunts in our Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. If you want to kick ass, you have to take the risks that come with it.
I eased my way under the gate and slipped upward to the surface. It was too dark to see the roof, and not much was visible in front of me either. I found the wall and worked my way along it. It was man-made, and the stones were tight together. After about thirty feet I found a wooden platform poking out of the side about thirty feet from the gate. I went around it slowly, deciding it was a docking area. Ten feet beyond its back edge I found another stone wall. I worked my way around the wall to the other side and back to the gate. As far as I could tell, there were no openings at or near water level.
It was so dark that I could barely see the hand in front of my face—which, fortunately, belonged to Trace. We stowed our gear by tying it to the bottom of the platform. Then we took out our goodies from the waterproof bags we’d tugged along with us. MP5N in hand, I turned on my LED wristlight and slowly played it around the space. A wooden door sat above the docking area. The wood looked ancient, yet intact. Three thick bands of rusted iron held the panels together. I took my diving knife and tried using it as a lock pick. That was useless. The latch was inaccessible, secured behind a thick iron plate. The hinges—assuming there were any—were either on the other side or recessed into the wood and stone.
Time to regroup and rethink. We found two openings above us, small squares that were probably once part of the castle’s plumbing system. Or maybe still were. All I knew was that they were too damn small to wiggle through.
“What now?” asked Trace.
“We look underwater for an opening.”
“And if we can’t find any?”
“Unless you packed some WD-40, we swim back out and climb up the wall,” I told her.
“That sucks.”
“Pretty much.”
The walls gave way to solid rock about eight feet from the surface; the bottom of the little inlet was another eight or so feet below that. A thick layer of muck covered the floor; just about anything might have been in it, including several skeletons. The stones themselves were covered with a blackish growth, but there weren’t any fish, and certainly no octopuses patrolling the depths. So when I felt a tug on my leg as I surfaced I knew Trace had found something.
The passage was about midway down the wall just to the right of the dock. It was stone on all sides, about as wide and high as the slot for a coffin in a crypt. The comparison seemed particularly appropriate as we came to an elbow that led straight upward. Trace had no problem sliding through; I scraped the side, knocked my knee, and nearly broke my arm—not a problem, really, as long as I could get to the surface soon and get some air into my shrieking lungs. I pushed through the ooze all around me and managed to move upward, squeezing next to Trace as we surfaced.
We came up at the top of what looked like a chimney in the middle of a stone room. A dim blue light filtered in from high above. I stared at it for a minute, then realized that I was looking at the sky. We had gone through a passage to the southeastern tower, surfacing in what must have been a guardroom, back in the days when wood beams filled the large keyholes in the side walls.
A narrow ledge rimmed the tower’s circular walls about six feet from the surface of the water. We climbed to it, our fingernails scraping up bacteria for everything from lockjaw to tuberculosis. The ledge was a bit wider than my butt, but offered nothing more than a rest stop. A bricked-over doorway sat about a third of the way up; another was about fourteen or fifteen feet above it.
“To the top?” asked Trace.
“Sounds good to me.” I pulled out my MP5N and slung the strap around my neck; I wanted the gun handy in case we encountered lookouts at the top.
There was just enough light for us to get by without using our flashlights. The stones were tightly spaced together, but their irregular shape made handholds plentiful, if you had the patience to find them.
Unless you were Trace. In which case you had incredibly sticky fingers and could scoot up the wall twice as fast as a spider. She disappeared over the ledge, going in the direction of the walkway on the wall and the other tower opposite this one.
While my objective was to capture at least one tango and have a heart-to-heart talk about what was going on. I was, however, prepared to be realistic. If the odds turned out to be overwhelming—say, if we found that those ZSU-23 guns were accompanied by three or four main battle tanks—then we could always back off and call Frankie or the Italians.
What I was not prepared to do was come away empty-handed. So when I heard an outboard motor in the distance as I reached the top of
the tower, my first reaction was, “son of a bitch.”
My second reaction was to grab tightly at the wall, because I had almost slipped. Reminding myself that I didn’t want to have to start over, I reached up and pulled myself onto the ledge. I stood, and found myself staring at the horizon.
A light flashed off in the distance on the surface of the water. It was a small needle, thin and off in an instant. But it was too far to have been the boat.
I leaned over the stone wall and saw what I was looking for. While we were climbing through the tower, a rigid hulled boat had come up close to one of the doors that opened from the castle. Something dangled from the door now—a rope ladder.
The motor went from a low, quiet idle to an ass-kicking high rev. The boat jerked in the direction of the pinprick of light I’d seen.
Clearly, the people in the boat were going to get away. I didn’t want that to happen. There was only one way to stop them. So I did the stupidest thing possible:
I jumped.
*The chickenshit lawyers don’t want me to use the actual address, since the property is owned by people who had nothing to do with what went on there. Like I believe that.
*I’m not dumping on the minisubs. They make insertions possible in conditions that would be impossible in the old days. I’m just jealous.
7
Maybe jumping wasn’t the stupidest thing possible. Maybe firing the MP5N as I fell was.
But what the heck. It was going to get wet anyway.
How many bullets I got off before I hit the water is anybody’s guess. At least some hit the three figures in the boat, including whoever was steering, because the last thing I saw as I hit the water was it lurching back toward me.
I had about a half of a half of a second to wish that it would go the other way. The bow may have missed my head by two inches; I was too busy pretending to be a concrete anchor to get a good estimate.
Two strong strokes to the left and I surfaced about twenty feet from the boat. It was moving toward me, but not on purpose. The helmsman had fallen dead against the wheel.
Getting aboard a runaway boat from the water is more difficult than stopping a runaway train by a factor of only ten or so. You take your best shot and you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting clipped by the propeller. And that’s if no one on board the boat tries to help.
I got a hand on the rubber hull but couldn’t hang on. The boat turned again, its circle wider. It seemed to be slowing, not trying to run me over, but I didn’t trust it. Something leaned off the side. Sensing I was about to be shot, I ducked under the water, stroking in the other direction. When I surfaced, the boat had begun to drift sideways toward the castle.
If I’d been a giraffe, maybe I’d’ve been able to see into the damn thing and understand what the hell was going. But as low in the water as the boat was, I was still lower, and between that and the dim light, all I could see were a few shadows. I pulled out my diving knife and began stroking warily toward the boat. As I got closer, I saw that the shadow at the side had an arm off toward the water. Still not trusting that I wasn’t being suckered into a trap, I dove, resurfaced, then came over to the side and pulled down on the arm. As the body flopped into the water I shoved myself under the hull and came up on the other side. When I pulled myself up into the boat, it was empty.
While all of this was going on, Trace had been standing up on the wall watching. I looked up at her and waved; she waved back. Then she disappeared.
There are a million reasons for a person suddenly not being where they were. At that moment, I couldn’t think of any but one: She’d been ambushed by someone in the castle.
As I turned to find the wheel and controls of the boat, I saw the light flash again on the sea. It was about a mile away. I’d have to get back to it; Trace was more important. I started the engine and turned the boat around, heading for the door on the castle wall. Similar to the one we’d seen inside, there was no handle or anything else to grab to open it with. I was just about to get out and scale the wall when Trace shouted down to me.
“Dick, what are you doing?”
“Looking for you,” I yelled back. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing! The place is deserted.”
“All right. Jump.”
“Jump? Fuck you.”
“Later—right now there’s someone offshore that was supposed to meet these jokers. Let’s go see who it is. Come on, before they leave!”
A fresh string of expletives ended with a loud splash in the water.
After I fished her out, we headed for the light. When we got within a half-mile, we saw a shadow looming low on the water, the sort of inky smudge the conning tower of a submarine makes against a very dim background before it sinks into the water. (Yes, I have seen it, many times. A very lonely sight, especially if you were supposed to be on the fucker.)
I could describe an interesting chase scene here, with us arriving just as the submarine dives. I could say how I leapt from the boat, grabbed hold of the periscope, and stuck my tongue out at the captain before it disappeared beneath the waves.
But none of that happened. We crisscrossed the area where I’d seen the light a dozen, two dozen times without finding anything. There definitely had been something there, but it was gone now.
“Fireflies,” suggested Trace sarcastically.
“Then where was the boat going?”
“Only a million other places up and down the shore.”
We went back to the castle to search the place more thoroughly. Besides the boat garage and door on the sea, there was only one entrance that connected to the building’s interior rooms. This was near the northern tower, and was down a stairway so narrow only one person could fit at a time, and even then if you had decent-size shoulders like mine you’d have to turn a bit sideways. The stairway opened into a corridor only a few inches wider. Ten rooms sat on the left of the hall. Only one had a door, and that seemed to have been a combination lookout post and control room. Roughly twenty feet wide but only six deep, it had a slit that looked out toward the sea. A control panel of toggle switches had been mounted in the stone beneath the opening, with a thick metal-sheathed cable running out into the corridor and then downstairs. The switches worked an electronic lock in the watery garage below, as well as lights there and on the parapet.
Three very thick cables ran across the floor from the corridor and stopped under the slit window, their ends curving upward as if they were snakes.
“They had cable,” sneered Trace.
“My bet is that there was a panel from the radar here. We’ll trace the wires back later.”
There was no bedding in any of the upstairs rooms, and except for some plain white bags and a dozen empty plastic bottles, there was no sign that anyone had stayed in the place for any length of time. The bags were long and narrow, the sort we’d use in the States for a loaf of Italian bread or a French baguette. The bottles were unlabeled and all but one were empty; that one held water, and I guessed that the others had as well.
“They weren’t here long,” said Trace. “And they were neat.”
More than that. If they’d been here more than a few hours, they’d slept on a stone floor; we didn’t find any bedding, not even a blanket, in the rooms downstairs. Nor was there any furniture; no chairs, no tables, nothing but ancient dust.
The section of the castle between the walls had once been a large central hall. The timbers had collapsed long ago and much of the floor and whatever else had been inside lay in a large pile of rubble. The beams that held the roof above didn’t look as if they were in the greatest shape either. Perhaps a quarter of them had been braced, but these repairs looked pretty old themselves. Whoever had been holed up here had used the area for target practice; we found a few shell casings scattered on the stone walkway.
We tracked the cables back up to the tower and then the wall on the land side of the castle, onto the hill where it was covered by camouflage netting to look like a cluster of rocks.
There was no antiaircraft gun or missile battery for that matter. My guess is that the unit was used as an early-warning system to track aircraft that showed too much interest in the place. Someone standing on the tower and armed with a Stinger or similar shoulder-launched antiaircraft weapon would have been a more than adequate defense, especially if cued to the general direction by the radar operator.
Just a theory.
I found a type number stamped inside the radar unit, along with a sequence of letters that turned out to indicate when it had been modified and refurbished. But if there had ever been a serial number or an ID plate, it was long gone.
So was the boat when we went down to leave.
The first thing I did was make sure I had a full load of ammo in the MP5N. The second thing I did was drop to my belly and crawl out farther through the doorway over the sea, staring into the dim twilight.
We’d left the boat tied to the gate below. Trace had tied the knot, and she swore now that she had tied the knot, and damn tight, too.
“I’m not questioning it.” It was about a half hour before sunrise and the area directly below the castle lay in deep shadow. I had to stare to make anything out.
“Fuck. I tied it tight. They were all dead. Weren’t they all dead?”
“Don’t panic.”
“Screw yourself, panic. I’m not panicking. They were dead. I saw them die.”
One was dead, definitely. The other two men Trace had seen in the boat had disappeared before I got there, falling off into the water and presumably dead.
Presume? Is that the same as assume? The word old-style Navy chiefs define as: assume—to make an ass of U and ME?
Which one of my old chiefs said that?
Every last one of them.
We spent the next hour searching, first for possible ambushers, then for the boat, and finally for the bodies of the men who’d been in it. But we found niente: nothing. I considered smashing my fist against the stone wall in frustration, but decided against it. You never know how long you’re going to have to wait to see a competent doctor in an Italian hospital.
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