They reached the sea around midnight, but the port area at the end of the oil pipeline was crawling with troops, so they turned south and followed the coast road to the seaside village of Al Khudr. They chose one particular boat, a thirty-foot green-and-white fishing trawler with a high vertical prow and a small pilothouse set well forward. It was tied up by itself to a rickety pier on the north end of the marina area, with rubber tires slung over the sides as fenders to protect the wooden hull as it rocked in the gentle, Mediterranean swell. Eyes were painted on the prow, in Levantine fashion; the name La Joie was picked out on the transom in gold letters.
Silently, Randall, McKenna, Bowman, and Anderson walked out on the pier and slipped aboard the boat, while
Payton stayed with Spinelli in the back of the truck. They'd expected the boat to be deserted, but… "Qui va la?"
French, after Arabic, was the most common language in worldly Lebanon. There were two civilians aboard, asleep in the nets at the boat's stern, an older man and a teenage boy, both terrified at the apparitions moving stealthily and armed about the deck.
"You will not be harmed," Randall told them in stilted, high-school French. Reaching into a pouch slung from his harness, he pulled out a heavy packet containing a roll of gold coins minted for just such a need. "But we need transport in your boat. We will pay you well…. "
There were initial protests, then avaricious bargaining… but clearly the fishermen's interest in the gold outweighed any ideological concerns they might have had. Swiftly, the SEALs brought Spinelli and the lieutenant's corpse aboard, while Anderson kept the wide-eyed civilians under guard. Within twenty minutes, La Joie was under way, chug-chugging clear of the breakwater, then swinging her blunt prow west, toward the open sea.
Little was said on the voyage. Randall's French was years rusty, but the fisherman and his son both spoke Arabic and a little English, so communication was no problem. McKenna sat in the stern, trying to use his Motorola to contact American aircraft in the area, quietly intoning "Starship, Starship, this is Free Sanction, do you copy" like a mantra. Randall went to work on the fishing boat's fish finder, a small electronics package in the pilothouse connected with a low-powered civilian sonar unit on La Joie's keel. It was a simple enough task to find a way to disconnect a key wire in the control unit, then tap it against the contact in Morse code, sending out the cryptic signal "Free Sanction, Free Sanction" over and over again.
"Got 'em!" McKenna said at last, nearly two hours after their departure from port. By then, they were well past the twelve-mile limit, still cruising slowly toward the west. "An E-2C off the Nimitz. They know we're here."
The E-2C Hawkeye was the Navy's answer to the big AWACS aircraft flown by the Air Force, a prop-driven collection of sensitive electronic monitoring and detection gear beneath an enormous, revolving radome that looked like a flying saucer.
"Instructions?" Randall asked.
"They say to stay on this heading. We'll be met."
"Good enough."
It was just growing light in the east when Payton called to the others. "Periscope, port beam!"
They looked, and watched with numbed emotions as the periscope, mottled in camouflage gray-greens, slowly rose from the sea atop a feather of wake, followed in moments by the blunt, charcoal gray tower of a submarine's sail marked with the characters SSN 697. It was a Los Angeles class submarine, the Indianapolis, one of two attached to the Nimitz battle group.
The fisherman turned and looked at Randall. "You are Americans, non?"
Randall shook his head. "Non," he said. "Russe." Let them, and Syrian military intelligence, chew on that. He doubted that these civilians would know the difference between an American submarine and a Russian.
Sailors appeared on the submarine's forward deck, some of them armed with M-16s. Lines were tossed, and La Joie was brought alongside.
"Merci, Capitaine" Randall told the fisherman. "We appreciate the help."
"And we the gold," the man said with a gap-toothed grin. "We are available for charter any time!"
Spinelli died during the medevac flight from the Nimitz to Naples later that day.
"Gordon?"
"Admiral Goldman!"
"Don't get up." The admiral made a stay-put motion with his hand as he stepped into Gordon's office. He placed his briefcase on Gordon's desk. "I just thought you'd like to hear. Free Sanction made it out. The rest of them, I mean."
Gordon felt a wave of relief wash through him. "Thank
God! Casualties?"
"Two dead. A couple of the others were dinged a little, but nothing serious." He frowned. "One of the dead was the team's Wheel. Lieutenant Gallagher."
"Damn. I'm sorry."
"It happens."
"Yes. But this time it was for nothing." Gordon had been chasing the events of the past few days around and around in his thoughts. It was hard not to take the blame for the op's failure. It had been his idea, his plan, after all. He wondered about the families of the dead men. It was one thing to have a father, a husband, a son die in exchange for some lofty goal — the liberation of Americans held by Middle East terrorists, for example.
But the team had gone in and turned up a dry hole. The hostages might have been at Objective Nevada, but they'd been moved before Free Sanction had arrived.
Worse, worse by far, was the knowledge that Hezbollah and Syrian troops had been waiting there in force, almost as if they'd set a trap for the expected arrival of American rescuers.
"It wasn't for nothing," Goldman said after a long moment. "We know that Waite was being held at Objective Nevada. One of our people saw where he'd left his name, and the letters CE."
"'CE'?"
"Church of England. Anyway, it looks like our intel was good. Just… a bit late."
"Either that," Gordon said, "or they knew we were coming."
"An ambush?"
"Remember how much political capital the Iranians got out of the failure of Eagle's Claw?"
"Sure. They weren't responsible for the failure, though."
"Oh, we did it all to ourselves. Too few backup helos in the op plan, an unexpected sandstorm, and a bunch of civilians joyriding out in the middle of the desert where they had no business being. And finally, the collision of one of the tankers with a helicopter." Gordon closed his eyes and tried to picture what it must have been like that night at Desert One, with America's one chance at rescuing fifty-two hostages in the balance. "But the Iranians took the crash and turned it into a great victory for the Revolution."
"You think Hezbollah wanted to do the same?"
"It's certainly a possibility, Admiral. One we ought to be looking at carefully."
"Failure doesn't necessarily imply enemy action."
"Of course not. There is a precise military-technical term for what happened at Objective Nevada the other night… and at Desert One, for that matter."
"And that is?"
"A cluster fuck. Pure and simple."
Goldman chuckled. "Not a bad term."
"But it shouldn't have been. Everything went exactly right. Every man did what he was supposed to do. But there were Syrian troops at the objective, not to mention a hell of a lot of militia. And they shouldn't have been there."
"Mmm. Maybe. Still, no student of military history can help but notice how many battles are won through sheer dumb luck. But that cuts both ways, you know. While one side is winning through luck, the other side is losing." He shrugged. "Sometimes the coin toss just comes up tails."