Pirate (43 page)

“That’s them all right. Good hunting.”

The waiter made his loping way across the dunes and back to the party, careful to avoid the happy couple strolling hand-in-hand through the sand toward the low-hanging moon.

HEAVEN, AT LEAST FOR THE TIME BEING, WAS ON HAWKE’S
side. The inverted bowl of sky above was an ideal shade for his purpose: black. There was no moon to speak of and only a silver sprinkling of stars across the northern sky. Since the winds were calm, so were the seas. Not that you would dare say it aloud: perfect spec-ops conditions. Fifteen feet below the surface, Hawke’s thirty-foot-long vehicle, dubbed
Bruce,
was sliding silently forward. Given the conditions, the sub was, Hawke hoped, invisible to the tower guards manning the heavy machine guns.

“All stop,” Hawke said, looking over at his navigator.

“All stop,” Stoke said.

The two men were adjacent to each other, each tucked into a separate flooded compartment in the nose of the SDV. Both were hooked into the vessel’s internal communication and auxiliary life support systems. They could speak and breathe easily. Easing the throttles back in sync to the neutral position, they felt the sub slow and stop. There was no sound.

Buoyancy systems kept them hovering at the desired depth in the black water. Visibility was near zero. Only a hooded four-color GPS screen in front of Hawke allowed him to see precisely where he was in relation to the island dead ahead. They’d made good time from the mother ship, arriving off Point Arras right on schedule.

The minisub’s all-electric propulsion system was powered by rechargeable silver-zinc batteries and designed for silent running. Only the most sophisticated underwater auditory monitors could pick it up. At idle, and three hundred yards offshore, Hawke felt the chance of audible detection was very slight indeed.

“You have the helm,” he said, removing his hand from the control stick.

“I have the helm,” Stokely replied, taking it.

Hawke completed his preparations to disembark from the portside pilot station. It had been previously agreed that he would now leave the vehicle, alone, and swim the three hundred yards remaining to the entrance to the docks. He disengaged from the onboard underwater breathing apparatus, called a “hookah” because of its uncanny resemblance to a water pipe. He now switched over to his Draeger LAR-V underwater breathing apparatus.

Opening the small hatch cover, he levered himself out of the cockpit and kicked away from the vehicle. Moving his fins with slow, scissorlike movements, he remained in Stokely’s view just long enough to make a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Stokely gave the return thumbs-up and Hawke swam away. Hawke would make sure there were no unpleasant surprises at the dock before Stoke brought the sub in close.

Once he had the all-clear signal, Stoke would pilot the SDV directly to the tunnel entrance. On the panel before him was an array of sophisticated instruments including Doppler navigation sonar displaying speed, distance, heading, and other piloting functions. A ballast and trim system controlled his buoyancy and pitch attitude. A manual control stick was linked to
Bruce
’s rudder, elevator, and bow planes. Pure functionality, no frills, just the way Stoke liked his war machines.

But the beast also had sharp teeth. A shark’s toothsome grin was depicted on the nose, hand-painted on the bow by some boys at the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, Virginia. Boys, Stoke said, who clearly had too much free time on their hands. Still, he had to admit the grinning shark’s teeth did give
Bruce
a very intimidating appearance.

It sort of screamed
Don’t mess with me. I bite.

Hawke covered the remaining three hundred yards swiftly and without incident. He surfaced under the dock, swinging the Beretta nine in his right hand through a tight arc. There was a round prejacked into the chamber.

All quiet. No beeping, screeching alarms, no whispered shouts and frantic running feet on the network of steel docks above his head. Only the soft lapping of the water against the pilings. He flipped down the NVG goggles atop his helmet and quickly located the three marks he’d slashed into the barnacle crust on one of the pilings.

He studied the water’s swift flow against the piling. The tide was running, well into the ebb. If they could manage to stick to their mission schedule, the entrance would be fully exposed when they exfiltrated at high speed.

They would have the newly freed hostages in tow behind the speeding sub, an idea Hawke had gotten on that first day, watching a blue fishing boat towing a string of white dinghies. The sight recalled a favorite children’s book, one his mother had brought him as a present from America.
Make Way for Ducklings,
it was called. There was a problem with the idea, however. When you have your ducks in a row, they make for a very easy target.

If all went well, though, the machine guns would be silent, the twin towers by then a heap of rubble, brought down by massive charges at the base rigged by Chief Charlie Rainwater. Egress from the fortress via the main gate would be blocked. The tunnel the only way out. It might work.

And the dock he was swimming beneath would no longer exist. He reached up and attached an MK-V Limpet assembly module to the underside of the dock. The module contained more than one hundred pounds of high explosives. He set it to detonate in the standoff mode at 0330 hours. By that time, it was expected, the infiltrators would be gone.

That, at least, was the plan.

Hawke submerged once more and located the pinpoint violet beam they had affixed to
Bruce
’s nose. Two seconds on, two seconds off, invisible from above. Hawke had a portable version, a pencil light sheathed in rubber. He signaled three times rapidly, flashing the all-clear, and saw three short flashes in return from the SDV. Stoke had acknowledged and was proceeding directly toward Hawke.

The tricky part now would be maneuvering the cumbersome vehicle in reverse at one knot. Once they’d gotten the thing inside the tunnel, they’d be backing down until they reached the powder magazine. It had been agreed that Stoke, who had trained in undersea warfare at Little Creek with both an early version of the vehicle, the Mark VII, and newer, larger versions, would now pilot
Bruce
from the navigator’s helm on the port side.

They would run dead slow. Swimming, Hawke would position himself at the new “bow,” grasping the handhold and kicking off from sides of the tunnel to keep them on course as they moved deeper within. The screeching sound of metal on stone was to be avoided at all costs. So was damaging the props and disabling the vehicle, which would be disastrous.

“Anything exciting up in the real world?” he heard Stoke say in his headset.
Bruce
was now hovering just ten feet from the surface and five yards outside the underwater entrance. Hawke swam over and grabbed a rail running the length of the vessel.

“Negative. Let’s turn this brute around.”

“Jaws of death, man. Come to call.” Stoke was psyched; Hawke could hear it in his voice.

Stoke reversed the port motor and shoved the starboard throttle half ahead. The painted nose began to swing slowly to the left and Hawke, using his flippers, started kicking, helping to push the nose around. After five minutes of heavy exertion, they had the thing correctly positioned, stern-to, just outside the entrance. Time for
Bruce
and his unexpected guests to go calling.

Hawke checked his watch. He and Stoke were due to meet up with the rest of the force in less than twenty minutes.

On the surface, things were going pretty much according to the plan Hawke and McCoy had agreed upon. Everybody was awake and sober, nobody had fallen overboard, and nobody was shooting at them as of this moment. This, based on FitzHugh McCoy’s vast experience of the counterterrorist trade, was an exceedingly dangerous state of affairs. Something was bound to happen in the next thirty minutes or so that would blow all his plans out the window and everything else to hell and gone.

He imagined Hawke and Stokely had the sub just inside the tunnel now. In twenty-two minutes, they would all regroup inside the large ammunition storehouse just inside the entrance to the fort on the left. A stone staircase led down from that storeroom to the old powder magazine and the tunnel. If there were to be trouble for Hawke, it would most likely be on those steps leading up from where he moored the sub. If an alarm sounded, if the garrison realized they’d been breached, that’s the first place armed guards would go. It was a weak point in the plan but it couldn’t be helped.

Fitz was standing on the bow of the good ship
Obaidallah
in his Arab regalia. His hands were on his hips, his eyes were everywhere as the battered supply boat slowly approached the docks just below Fort Mahoud. He could feel many pairs of eyes on him, imaginary death beams coming from the gunners manning the tops of the twin towers.

The old boat was running dead slow, black smoke leaking aft from her stack. She had only her running and navigation lights on. A reddish glow illuminated the first mate, Abu, standing at the wheel. His would be the familiar face to anyone on the docks. Fitz had told him to angle the overhead light so that his face was clearly visible from the dock. To a casual eye, Fitz believed, all was precisely as it should be aboard the weekly supply ship.

Two men, dockhands, were lounging on the dock silently watching their approach. One of them leaned casually against a bollard, smoking a cigarette. He looked just like he should look, Fitz observed, sullen and lazy. Both men had lines loosely at the ready. There was nothing at all about their body language or facial expressions to cause Fitz any concern.

It was two-thirty in the morning.

Except for the soft yellow lights at either end of the dock, it was pitch dark in the little marina. The docks, as anticipated, were empty. The French patrol boat had left the dock on schedule, fifteen minutes earlier. Fitz checked his watch again. Forty-five minutes, roughly, until the cutter returned. Enough time to do this thing, maybe.

Fitz had his eyes peeled, taking it all in. These rascals with the dock lines had probably been roused again from their bunks to greet the delayed supply ship. They’d be cranky and sleepy, nothing more. He hoped.

Brock’s man, Ahmed, who was standing on the stern, lifted his right hand in a vague greeting as the boat neared the dock. He muttered something in Arabic to one of the dockhands as the vessel bumped up against the pilings. The hand tossed him a line, and Ahmed made it fast to a stern cleat. The other line came aboard amidships and Abu stepped outside and handled that one. The old diesel was still throbbing, and Captain Ali shut it down.

Ahmed stepped easily onto the dock and after a brief exchange sent one of the two hands scurrying for the hand carts. He remained with the other, amiably chatting him up. Ahmed was their point man in dealing with any Arabs they encountered. Without him, Fitz had told Hawke, this mission would have been virtually impossible.

Fitz remained on the bow, checked his watch, and did a surreptitious weapons check beneath his loose-fitting white garments. He had two weapons at the ready. A Heckler & Koch MP 5 machine gun. And a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife in a leather sheath.

The knife was the pride of the McCoy armory back home at Fort Whupass in Martinique. Designed by two British officers based on their close-quarters combat experience with the Shanghai police, it was designed specifically for striking accurately at the target’s vital organs. It had been a standard weapon for commandos during World War II. Fitz touched the hilt, reassured by the well-worn smoothness of the leather wrapping.

He looked aft. Abu and Brock had gotten the heavy iron after hatch open and the first of the supplies were being passed up from the men below. The words
SUGAR
and
RICE
were stenciled on burlap sacks. Some actually contained sugar; many others contained satchel charges, Semtex explosives, and nine-millimeter cartridge belts. The dockhands had returned with dollies and were loading up the carts under the supervision of Ahmed.

Rainwater stepped suddenly out of the shadow of the wheel-house and joined Fitz standing on the bow. With his dark skin and flashing black eyes, Charlie Rainwater looked like some children’s book illustrator’s vision of a terrifying Barbary pirate. All he needed were brass hoops in his ears and a flashing scimitar.

“Looks good,” Rainwater murmured under his breath.

“Doesn’t it just?” McCoy said, also keeping his voice low.

“You see the guys up in the towers?”

“See ’em? I can feel their fooking breath down my neck. Don’t look up there. They appear to have lost interest in us.”

“Here’s some good news. That metal surveillance platform that runs around the top of the tower? They can’t see me rigging charges down at the base unless they happen to lean way out over the rail and look down.”

“I noticed that. I thought you’d be happy. You like your privacy when you work.”

“I’m ready to do this, Fitz. Now. I like the timing. I’ll throw a sack of ‘Semtex sugar’ over my shoulder and take a casual stroll down the dock. Have the charges rigged at both towers in five minutes or less.”

“I agree wholeheartedly, Chief. Do it. Go.”

An ad hoc change of plans was not unusual in McCoy’s world. Thunder and Lightning as a counterterrorist group was still alive and kicking butt the world over precisely because they weren’t afraid to toss the best-laid plans right out the window. Rainwater disappeared aft, careful to maintain a lethargic pace as he made his way past the wheelhouse. Although blowing the towers wasn’t scheduled to occur until just before egress, it made sense to set the charges now while everybody was so relaxed.