He’d save that thought for another time.
Now he was trying to locate a dark shape ahead, which was difficult through the clouds, the spray from the bow, and especially the pitching of the Zodiac.
“You see anything?” he shouted at Davis.
“Fuck, no!”
Be a real shame if we can’t even find it.
“There it is!” Akil exclaimed from behind them. “Eleven o’clock.”
Crocker wiped the moisture off the lens of his night-vision goggles and looked again. This time he located a triangular-shaped blotch with a smaller, indistinct form beside it.
“Bingo! Good eyes.”
Akil quickly adjusted the direction of the Zodiac until Davis held up a hand and shouted, “Now we’re on course!”
“Nice work, huh?”
“That’s what you get paid the big money for.”
“Sit back and enjoy the ride!”
The view through Crocker’s NVGs was anything but steady. The rubber duckie climbed up the crest of an oncoming wave, then dropped and slammed hard at the bottom, tossing the contents of his stomach up and down. The swells seemed to be growing bigger, which indicated that they were approaching the coast.
He turned back and spoke to Akil-more like shouted into his ear. “When I give the signal, cut the engines.” They needed to go in undetected.
Akiclass="underline" “You need me to hold your hand, too?”
“We’ll dive from about a thousand meters.”
“Nice night for a swim.”
“Get an exact bearing.”
“I did that already, boss. What kind of fucking navigator do you think I am?”
“A wiseass one I’ve got to constantly check on.”
“Ha. Ha!”
He’d done hundreds of VBSSs (Visit, Board, Search and Seizure operations) in his career, in the Middle East and Central and South America. He’d also been on dozens of hostage-rescue ops-Christian missionaries in Afghanistan, kidnapped oil company execs in Colombia.
Crocker waited until the ship grew bigger in his NVGs, then held up his fist. “Kill it here. Stop!”
Akil cut the engine on Zodiac 1. Ritchie, piloting Zodiac 2 behind them, did the same. As the current tossed them up and down, side to side, the SEALs in both boats quickly donned masks and Drägers, grabbed gear and waterproof weapons bags, then slid into the Indian Ocean.
They swam in order, Akil, Crocker, Mancini, Davis, Cal, Ritchie, all holding on to the five-foot telescopic pole with its attached caving ladder. They moved at the same speed, same depth-approximately twenty feet under the surface-the way they’d been trained when they were part of Green Team, the four-month training course required to get onto an assault team and ST-6.
The water was cool and dark. Visibility was terrible, barely enough to see the luminescent dials on their depth gauges, compasses, and Tudor dive watches. The German Drägers strapped to their chests fed them pure oxygen so no bubbles would escape to the surface to give away their position.
Akil, the primary navigator, focused on his dive compass. Crocker kept time and counted kicks. He knew exactly how many kicks it took to swim one hundred yards. Because they were swimming against the current, they had to kick harder than normal. Thirty minutes, forty, fifty, until Crocker figured they were getting close.
Although visibility was limited, the last thing he wanted to do was surface and be seen. He had planned the dive for four legs, but it was awkward turning and stopping with three men on each side of the pole, maintaining a depth of twenty feet.
They proceeded at a forty-five-degree bearing for six minutes, then Crocker squeezed Akil’s arm, which was the signal to reset their compasses and watches before starting the next leg at seventy-two degrees for twenty-two minutes.
Less than a minute into their fourth leg, Akil stopped abruptly and pointed to the dark shape literally two feet in front of him. He signaled to Crocker, then swam away from the pole to establish their position. Returning, he signaled that they were on the ship’s starboard side, approximately fifteen feet from the stern, which put them beside the ship’s superstructure. Realizing that it would be easier to climb aboard near the cargo bays, Crocker ordered his men to swim another twenty feet along the hull.
They surfaced one at a time, the sky a welcome sight.
Light rain continued to fall as Akil and Crocker raised the telescopic pole with its caving ladder. The others removed their MP5 submachine guns from the waterproof bags-safeties off, straight fingers as always.
After a couple of attempts they managed to hook the pole on a deck railing. Then Crocker signaled to Akil to pull down sharply, which released the caving ladder from the rubber tubing that held it to the pole. The ladder rolled down the side of the hull approximately fifteen feet to the ocean.
Crocker, as lead climber, was the first man up, his MP5-N equipped with a three-inch silencer slung over his shoulder. He placed his weight on each rung carefully because he didn’t know how securely the ladder was hooked. Attached to his web belt was a holster with an MK23 Mod 0.45-caliber pistol, extra ammo, and a climber carabiner with three tubular runners. He made it look effortless. After climbing over the rail he hitched a two-foot tubular nylon runner to it and carabinered that to one of the ladder’s rungs. Now it was secure for the rest of his team.
Then he crouched behind a hatch cover and conducted a quick survey of the ship. All the deck lights were off, except for several around one of the cargo bays near the bow. That bay was open, and the foremost cargo crane seemed to be in use.
Interesting, he thought.
Not one pirate in sight, so he signaled the rest of his team to climb up.
They had already secured their Drägers, masks, fins, and weight belts to the rungs of the ladder below the surface. Now they climbed up quickly and took up preassigned firing positions that gave them a 360-degree security perimeter. Dressed in black suits with camo face paint, they looked like ninjas.
Crocker raised his hand and tapped his head twice, which was the signal to deploy they’d worked out during their abbreviated PLO, or Patrol Leader’s Order-Ritchie, Mancini, and Cal toward the stern and the ship’s superstructure; Crocker and the other two in the direction of the bow, always staying in visual contact with one another.
Seeing someone climb out of the forward cargo bay, Crocker extended his right arm and lowered it. Akil and Davis behind him quickly knelt down out of sight. He pointed to Akil, then placed his hand on his KA-BAR knife.
Akil nodded, then ran in a crouch along the centerline bulkhead to the forecastle bulkhead. Crocker, meanwhile, took two steps to his right. Past the forward mast, he saw a man in black standing with his back to him on the forecastle deck. He watched him push a button that lowered the crane into the cargo bay. A few seconds later the man punched another button and the crane rose, bearing a fifty-gallon orange barrel with a triangular yellow deadly-materials symbol on its side.
The question that flashed through Crocker’s mind was Why were pirates unloading sensitive nuclear material from a ship?
That’s when he realized that the man operating the crane looked too well dressed to be a pirate. And when he turned sideways, Crocker saw that he was somewhat light skinned and had a close-cropped beard.
The SEAL team leader watched Akil spring from the foredeck and grab the man from behind. His left hand covered the man’s mouth while his right dragged the blade of the KA-BAR across his neck.
Textbook, Crocker thought, until Akil let go and the slumping man slipped off the wet bulkhead and pitched forward into the open cargo bay.
Mistake!
Shouts and exclamations echoed out of the bay, then someone started firing up at Akil, who hid behind the foremast. Sparks were flying everywhere from bullets ricocheting off metal as weapons discharged.