“If you have time and personnel, you will proceed by your own devices to locate and eradicate from one to three of the top men in the Medellin cartel. They are supposed to be at the airport facility there for a planning meeting now that they own Colombia and have their government in power. Any questions?”
Just then, the turboprop engines turned over, and conversations inside the COD were limited. The flight engineer came back and told Murdock that they would have a two-and-a-half-hour flight.
They landed on board the Jefferson fifteen minutes sooner than that, and Murdock saw his men put in quarters and their equipment spread out in an assembly compartment.
“Commander Murdock?” an officer who walked up asked.
Murdock saw a short, thin lieutenant commander in a tailored uniform.
“Yes, Commander.”
“I’m Lieutenant Commander Kenney, your liaison with the ship. You have the highest priority I’ve ever seen, Commander. The admiral says that anything you want, you get. Right now I can arrange a meal for you and your men. You have your quarters. There were some indications that you might need arms or explosives and ammo. All I need is a list.”
“Thanks, Commander. You’ll work with Senior Chief Dobler. We have an appointment with your XO in forty minutes. First we need to do some planning and figure out what we’ll need. Sit in, if you like.”
Murdock called his key people around a small table and they made notes on pads of paper as they talked.
First the coke.
“Can’t blow it up or burn it,” DeWitt said.
“How can we melt it the way we did down by Cali?” Jaybird asked.
“Fire hoses,” Senior Chief Dobler said. “The goods will be packaged in plastic to protect it from the salt air and any spray or leaks. We’ll need to slice it open and soak it down using the firefighting hoses and pumps on the ship.”
“If we get the time,” DeWitt added.
“So, we soak it down and melt it,” Murdock said. “Sounds like the only way. Not even sinking the merchant ship at the dock would do it. The goods would just float.”
They moved on the ether situation.
“Talk to Canzoneri,” Murdock said. “Find out how much explosives we’ll need to set the stuff on fire. If it’s in a warehouse it will be best, one big bonfire nobody will be able to put out.”
Dobler went to find Canzoneri.
“This Plato deal is going to be a tough one. First we have to get down there,” Murdock said. “Stroh tells me it’s about eighty-five miles south of the port city. They just said do it, not how we get there. Any suggestions?”
Jaybird swore under his breath. “The sombitches did it to us again. We’re on the Caribbean, right. At this port city. So after we do the bonfire, we get into our rebreathers and fins and swim out a half mile where we meet a Sea Knight after dark for a ladder pickup and transport to Plato with our resupply of ammo and explosives the Sea Knight brings us.”
Murdock looked at the others. “Any more suggestions?” Nobody said anything. “Well, it’s a long swim up the river that runs through Plato and out at the port we’ll be in. The resupply with the Sea Knight sounds like a good plan. How else could we get down there?”
“Long walk,” DeWitt said.
“At Plato we have production vats, ethyl, stored coke. Why not do a few of their small transport planes as well?” Murdock looked at his watch. “Okay, the four of us are going to see the admiral. I told him I was bringing my staff, so look important.”
“Oh, hell, yes,” Jaybird said. “Admirals are always kissing up to me.”
They arrived at the admiral’s compartment early but were let in by a master chief. His brows went up when he looked at Jaybird with no rank showing on his cammies and Senior Chief Dobler.
“The admiral will be right with you.” He indicated a conference table with five chairs. The SEALs sat.
A moment later, Admiral Tennant came through a door from another section of the large quarters, and the SEALs jumped to their feet.
“At ease. I’m Admiral Tennant. As you were.” The admiral smiled. “Glad to see you men. I know a few ex-SEALs. You do good work.”
Behind him came a captain and Lieutenant Commander Kenney, their liaison. The admiral motioned to the second man.
“Gentlemen, this is Captain Wilson, the Jefferson’s XO. You know Commander Kenney.”
Senior Chief Dobler and Jaybird stepped back from their chairs, offering them to the other two officers.
The admiral gave a curt wave with his hand. “No, SEALs, you sit. We do too much sitting around here, anyway. You’ll be on your mission soon enough with no chance to take it easy.”
The SEALs sat.
“Now, Commander, you’ve had some time to consider your assignment. Your suggestions.”
“If you have a Pegasus in the task force, it could take us in to within half a mile of shore, and we’ll go in underwater to the first objective. If no Pegasus, a Sea Knight could take us within a mile and we’ll drop out and swim on in.”
Murdock looked up. The XO nodded.
“We have a Pegasus, an eighty-two-footer. That would be the least intrusive.”
Murdock then outlined in broad strokes their plans to wash down the cocaine in the freighters and be gone before the Colombians knew what was happening. “We understand there are two tons of cocaine on each freighter. That’s over a hundred million dollars’ worth in street value. That’ll hurt them.”
“What about the ether?” the admiral asked. “It’s in a guarded warehouse in the port area.”
“Ether is highly volatile, and if we can get one or two barrels of it burning, it can cook off the rest in a huge bonfire nobody could put out,” Ed DeWitt said.
The admiral looked at DeWitt a moment. “What else?”
“Then we’d need some help, Admiral. Our plan is to go back to the water and swim a mile offshore. We’ll contact the carrier by SATCOM before we leave dry land and ask for a meet a mile off with a Sea Knight chopper. We’ll go up the rope ladder from a hover position. Then the Sea Knight can take us about eighty-five miles upriver to Plato, where the rest of our mission is located.”
“Ladder access. What if you have wounded who can’t climb the ladder?”
“We carry them up or rope them up, Admiral,” Senior Chief Dobler said. “No problem; we’ve done it before.”
“When the Sea Knight comes, it would bring a preordered resupply for us of ammo, weapons, and explosives,” Murdock said. “Some MREs would be good, too.”
Captain Wilson cleared his throat. “After you do your work there, how do you get back to the water?”
“That one we didn’t have time to work out. We could float down the Magdalena River. But that would be at least a ninety-mile trip with a lot of chances to be discovered.”
“You’d need the Sea Knight and some fighter cover, same way you got out of Bogota,” Captain Wilson said. “Will the President authorize it?”
“He did before,” Murdock said. “We think he will again.”
“If the chopper came in due west of Plato, there would be only about sixty miles of territory to cover, and it’s less built up than the north.”
“Noted. What about the Colombian navy?”
“As you know, Admiral, Colombia has only four corvettes in the one thousand five hundred — ton class,” DeWitt said. “They have one larger patrol boat of a hundred and eighty-five feet, and about forty patrol and riverboat craft. We consider the navy’s threat to us as insignificant.”