Jake didn’t stay but a minute or so, then he climbed back up the ladder.
“Let’s check the bridge,” he said to Toad over the tactical radio.
They went aft along the main deck and climbed an outside ladder to the bridge, which stretched from one side of the ship to the other.
“They’ve cleaned her out,” Toad remarked over the tac net. “Yeah,” Jake replied, and kept climbing.
On the bridge Jake again removed the night-vision goggles and used a flashlight. He wanted to see whatever was there in natural light.
What he found were bloodstains. A lot of blood had been spilled here on the bridge; pools of congealed, sticky black blood lay on the deck. People had walked in it, tracking the stuff all over.
“Not everyone was on the payroll,” Jake muttered, and quickly completed his search. He aimed the video camera at the stains, then snapped a couple photos with the regular camera using the flash.
Toad used a flashlight to search for the log book and ship’s documents. “The safe is open and empty,” he told Jake Grafton. He came over to watch the admiral work the cameras.
“Where in hell are the warheads?” Toad asked aloud.
“The Americans are aboard the Colón, Colonel.”
The man shook Santana awake. He held a candle, which flickered in the tropical breeze coming through the screen.
Santana sat up and tossed the sheet aside. He consulted his watch.
He got out of bed, walked out onto the porch of the small house and searched the night sea with binoculars. Nothing.
He lowered the binoculars, stood listening.
Yes, he could hear engine sounds, very faint … jet engines, the whopping of rotors ….
“How long have they been aboard?”
“I don’t know, sir. With this wind it is hard to hear helicopter noises. When I heard the voices on the radio, I came to wake you.”
“Admiral, look at this.” Toad came over to where Jake was standing, showed him the screen of a small battery-operated computer. “I’m picking up radio transmissions, even when we are not using the tactical net. Something on the ship is broadcasting.”
Jake Grafton pulled his mike down to his lips. “Hawkeye, this is Cool Hand. Has anyone been picking up radio transmissions from the target?”
“Cool Hand, Hawkeye. They started about a minute ago, sir, when you went up on the bridge. We have them now.”
“What kind of transmissions?”
“Amazingly, sir, I’m receiving clear channel radio. I’m actually hearing you talk on this other frequency.”
“What the hell? …”
Oh, sweet Jesus!
“This damned ship is wired to blow. The bastards are listening to us right now. We gotta get off!” With that he gave Toad a push toward the door of the bridge. Toad ran. Jake Grafton was right behind him.
Colonel Santana couldn’t see anything through the binoculars, but he heard those American voices coming through the radio speaker. The microphones were on the bridge.
“Any time, Tomas,” he said.
Tomas keyed the radio transmit button three times. A flower of red and yellow fire blossomed in the darkness.
Santana aimed the binoculars and focused them as the last of the explosions faded. He could see the flicker of flames as they spread aboard Nuestra Señora de Colón. These Americans! So predictable! Santana chuckled as he watched.
“Into the ocean,” Jake shouted.
Toad vaulted over the rail into the blackness. As he fell he wondered if there were rocks or salt water below.
Toad Tarkington and Jake Grafton were in midair when the bridge exploded behind them. Jake felt the thermal pulse and the first concussion.
Then the dark, cool water closed over his head and he went completely under.
As he began to rise toward the surface, he felt more explosions from inside the ship. The concussions reached him through the water like spent punches from a prizefighter.
When he got his head above water, flames illuminated the night.
Above the noise of the explosions and flames, he could hear Tarkington cursing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After Rita pulled them out of the ocean and flew them back to the carrier, Toad Tarkington and Jake Grafton were checked in sick bay, then they showered and tried to snatch a few hours’ sleep.
Toad gave up on sleep — too much adrenaline. He lay in his bunk thinking about leaping over the bridge rail without knowing whether rocks or water lay beneath, and he shivered. The shock of the impact with the water had been almost a deliverance.
He turned on the light and looked at the photos of Rita and Tyler he had taped to the bulkhead. Really stupid, Toad-man, really stupid. Grafton must have checked the location of the rocks, knew where he could jump and where he couldn’t, and you never once thought to look.
He got up, dressed, and headed for the computers, where he typed out a classified E-mail for the people at the National Security Agency. After breakfast he was ready to brief Jake Grafton and Gil Pascal.
“Before she was stranded, Nuestra Señora de Colón went into this little Cuban port at the west end of Bahia de Nipe. She was there for six hours, then she steamed out and went on the rocks where we found her. If you look at this satellite photo you can see a boat nearby, probably taking the crew off after she piled up. The folks at NSA in Fort Meade say they can see ropes from the ship to this boat that the crewmen could slide down.”
Toad Tarkington stood back so Jake Grafton and Gil Pascal could study the satellite photos that he had pinned to a bulletin board in the mission planning spaces.
“Where are the weapons now?” Gil Pascal asked.
“In this fish warehouse.” Toad pointed at the photo with the tip of a pencil. “Right here.”
“It’s an easy SEAL target,” the Chief of Staff commented.
“Too easy,” Jake Grafton said, then regretted it.
“When did the freighter reach this port?”
“Noon, three days ago.”
“And they spent the afternoon off-loading it?”
“Yes. It went onto the rocks that night.”
“Too easy.” Now he was sure.
“What do you mean?”
“These people aren’t stupid. They know about satellite reconnaissance; they knew we would see them off-loading the ship in this port; they wanted us to see that. The question is, Why did they go to all the trouble of putting on a show for us? What are they hiding?”
Toad flipped through the satellite photos, looking at date-time groups. “Here is the ship coming into the bay, there it is against the pier at Antilla, here it is being offloaded, here is an IR photo of it going out to the rocks after dark, here is an IR shot of the freighter and the boat that probably took the crew off.”
“Radar images?”
Toad had a handful of those too.
“I want to know where this ship was between the time the destroyer left it and the time it showed up in this Cuban port.”
“NSA is still working on that stuff. Perhaps in a few hours, sir,” Toad said.
“Call me.”
“The weapons weren’t on the ship,” the national security adviser told the president in the Oval Office. “The ship was empty when it went on the rocks. Apparently the Cubans booby-trapped it — the thing exploded a few minutes after the admiral went aboard to inspect it.”
“Casualties?”
“None, sir. We were lucky. If the admiral had taken more people with him, I can’t say the results would have been the same.”
“So where are the weapons?”
“NSA thinks they are in a warehouse on the waterfront in the center of the town of Antilla. They are studying the satellite sensor data now.”