The colonel looked at the overhead. “The Raiders destroyed a radio transmitter, gasoline, and other stores. The Japanese landed a thousand reinforcements on Makin, so the diversion worked. There was a PR bonus, too. Makin was the first offensive action by American forces. But there wasn’t much gained for such heavy losses.”
The colonel turned the projector off. “To summarize the lessons of the operation: The intel’s probably going to be wrong. Surprise won’t always work. Luck can cut both ways. And leadership is all-important.”
He paused, then seemed to shrink, to lose his classroom confidence. “I’m not sure why I was asked to give you this briefing. And probably it’s best I don’t know. But I can guess. So can you, probably. Thanks for your attention.”
The light in the trunk turned green, then went out. A clunk, Teddy’s ears popped, and the hatch unsealed. “All right, let’s go,” he said into his throat mike, and unplugged. One after the other, the team uncoiled. A black circle appeared above as the hatch powered open.
The open sea pulsed and flashed with light. They were surrounded, enmeshed in a coldly glowing net. Green and blue, it shaded off into a shimmering glow, as if they hovered high in the ionosphere, among the northern lights. The gossamer illumination snaked and swirled, like snow in the White Mountains.
Levering his fins, wincing at a flash of pain from the leg, Teddy rotated slowly, hanging in ultraviolet space.
A hundred yards away, a black whale-shape was emerging from the second sub. The swimmer delivery vehicle. Battery-driven, with its own sonar. Only one sub in the Pacific could transport it. But they needed more than the six SEALs it could carry to accomplish whatever their objective was.
Whatever that was. He still didn’t know. Echo had been given a warning order, which let them gather equipment, conduct training, then do a rehearsal — this one, in fact. A Patrol Leader’s Order would follow, to detail individual responsibilities. But nothing had specified their objective, beyond the generic “hostile beach” and that it involved sabotage, demolition, and intelligence collection. Maybe Commander Laughland knew. But he wasn’t saying.
All Teddy had to go on was the briefing about Makin. That, and the fact that his investments had been wiped out.
His broker had called before they left Hawaii. An immense tide of short-selling. The markets had closed, but not before he’d lost everything his grandmother had left him. Since then, the snippets of news they got aboard the sub had made clear that things had gotten even worse. Shit, he’d never expected to have to live on his Navy retirement. In LA, that would be a grim prospect.
Snap out of it, Obie! Shaking his head, he sucked gas from the Dräger, mainlining oxygen until his bloodstream sang.
The beach gradient was shallow, and they figured the sand would be laced with listening devices and mines. The subs would have to stand off. The delivery vehicle would make two runs, dropping the first team, along with a homing sounder, at sixty feet, then going back for the second team. Once assembled, the force would power the last miles in to shore with prop-driven scooters, towing weapons and equipment. After that…
He hovered, waiting, until the hatch cycled again with a thud that echoed through the sea. When it powered up he reached in.
The Package was five feet long, black, vaguely torpedo shaped, but with an annular bump or ring around its midpoint. Definitely not the usual satchels he’d gotten all too familiar with in Afghanistan, blowing down walls and doors.
He beckoned, and Swager got the other side — there were handles on it, to make it easier to maneuver, but even in water it was heavy as a bomb — and working together, they got it up and onto the curving steel hull. He secured the lift saddle on it and inflated it with gas from a bottle that dangled on a hose. It rose from the hull and he valved a little off, until it floated weightless, massive but balanced in the sea.
Another hand signal, and he and Swager swam it out into the void. The lights swirled around them. He saw now what they were. A massive tide of coelenterates, flashing like pulsars in the dark. A spiral of argon light rotated slowly, a blue galaxy in interstellar blackness. He put out a hand; the glow passed through his fingers without resistance, intangible, like smoke. Another cloud succeeded it, passing like snowflakes in utter silence.
A touch on his arm. Swager looked puzzled behind the flat plate of the mask. What the fuck? he gestured. Clanks and thuds echoed through the water as the SEALs clambered into the vehicle, stowed gear, and switched to the onboard breathing supply.
As the motors whirred into life, Teddy glanced toward the surface. Only sixty feet up, but totally black. No moon. No stars. Only the weird shimmer of that cold luminescence surrounded them, appearing, created, sweeping past, then vanishing forever, back into the void.
An hour later, crouched behind his carbine, he rose slowly from the sea. Facemask first, the fold-down backup sight of the SOP-modd’d M4 flipped up in front of his eye. For whatever reason, they’d been told to use only iron sights, to leave anything electronic (aside from night-vision devices, and the controllers in the rebreathers) on the sub.
Sand crunched as he waded forward. The shore ahead was black dark. Until he flipped down the goggles and powered them on. Then he made out the curved boles of palms. The slowly wavering fringe of leaves, caressed by a night wind. To their left, the solid ebony of impenetrable mangrove.
Exactly where they’d planned to land. Fallen trees lay scattered across the beach. The sand sloped upward and he leaned into it, ignoring the pain in his calf. Suddenly one of the logs stirred. He swung without thought and centered it in the sights as a shape heaved up and shook itself, then lumbered into a heavy, belly-swaying run.
He blew out and lowered the weapon, thumbing the safety back on. A hog, roused from slumber, making tracks away from the intruders who’d waded up out of the surf like Lovecraftian aliens.
Fading snorts and the muffled thunder of hooves on sand signaled the departure of other livestock. He swept the green-and-black field of view left to right. Aside from the pigs, and smaller shadows that were probably sand crabs, the beach was deserted. He raised an arm and pointed forward. Around him other silhouettes grew from the surf, took on human shapes, and became armed men, wading forward, bent under burdens of gear.
A dark figure emerged from the palms and strolled down to meet them. “All accounted for?” Commander Laughland snapped.
“First team, all present.”
“Second, all here.”
“Package one?”
“Over here,” the first team leader called from down the beach.
“Package two here.” Teddy and Swager leaned into the braided nylon yoked over their shoulders. The dark seal-bulk emerged behind them, the sea parting as it shouldered up.
The officer knelt, and a shielded flash glowed for a moment. He glanced up. “Any problems on the way in? Did Sandia get the buoyancy right?”
Sandia, Teddy thought. So it was nuclear. But, Jesus, couldn’t they figure a better way to deliver a nuclear warhead than having fucking SEALs swim it ashore? And how long would the team have to get clear before it went off? He cleared his throat. “Maybe a tad light, but we can stick some of those wheel weights on it. Uh, not that I personally care, but are we gonna get any radiation exposure from this thing, Commander?”
Laughland frowned. “Radiation?”
Teddy coughed. Some officers never seemed to think enlisted, even master chiefs, were capable of thinking. But what was this black turd squeezed from the asshole of DoD? His only clue was a shipping tag, with a cryptology of bar codes and what might be a serial number: TA-III No. 12. “Uh, sir? Could be helpful down the road, if you’d share a little about what we’re escorting, here.”