Inside the red-lit ASDS, Scott, Jefferson, and the six SEALs, faces blackened, wearing dry suits over cammies, their gear ready and staged, sat facing each other across a narrow aisle. They would soon lock out of the mini-sub for a stealthy surface swim onto an island controlled by heavily armed drug-traffickers. They knew that if they were caught there’d be no backup for rescue; they’d either have to fight their way out, E and E — evade and escape — or risk capture and possibly torture. Scott remembered Carter Ellsworth saying it would be a piece of cake. Too bad Ellsworth wasn’t sitting across the aisle, thought Scott, H-gear weighing him down, nervous sweat seeping into his eyeballs, knees quaking. Scott just once wanted to have Ellsworth and Radford along on a balls-in-a-vice op so they could see what it was really like to be a gun fighter.
For the rest of the team it was gut-check time. Time to mull what the possibility was of getting in and out without blowing something or someone away, including themselves. Scott hoped Deitrich and Allen were fully occupied flying the vehicle and not, like him, deep-thinking.
Scott looked at Jefferson, and saw that his eyes were closed. Was he thinking about Scott’s fuckup in Dubrovnik or how they’d fly the micro air vehicles into the villa without the bugs being discovered and smacked with a fly swatter? If they were, it’d be all over and they’d be in for a fight. Matsu Shan wasn’t Dubrovnik, and Wu Chow Fat wasn’t Karst.
Scott did box drills in his head, reviewing their direction of travel, how far it was to the beach, and, as best he could, accounting for tides and currents. They’d done a time hack before liftoff, and now he rucked back his dry suit’s wrist dam and looked at his watch: soon, very soon.
The ASDS hummed quietly as it cruised toward shore at six knots, ten feet below the surface. Up forward, Deitrich had a hand on the joystick, thumb on its roller-controller, and both eyes on the computer screens used for controlling ballast and trim.
Directly in front of copilot Allen and to Deitrich’s right were two monitors, both enabled but blank, linked to the craft’s sonar system and the electro-optical periscope, which they’d use to surveil the AO — area of operation — as the ASDS closed the island.
Before liftoff, Scott had taken a trick at the Reno’s scope. From two thousand yards offshore, the channel and beach, seen in eerie green NV mode, looked deserted except for the motor launch tied up at the dock. There was no sign of anyone, nor was there any sign of the White Dragon. There was also no sign of the chopper, though it was hard to be sure, since Scott’s sea-level view of the landing pad/parking area where the craft would have been parked was partially cut off by the sheer height of the bluff. Still, he should have been able to see something, at least the tops of its drooping rotor blades. Scott had a premonition but kept it to himself.
The villa appeared quiet — too quiet. He spotted a heat bloom in IR, a still-warm truck engine, but no warm bodies moving around inside or outside the villa’s walls. He toggled the scope to normal view and saw the effect that moonlight, blunted by cloud cover, had on the sea: The dim canopy of light that made the water shimmer like silver might also make eight swimmers’ heads easy targets from shore.
Jefferson had taken a look, too. While he had, the fingers of both hands had beaten a nervous tattoo on the scope’s training handles. His eye had come away from the buffer, and he’d turned to Scott. “You’re right. I don’t see the chopper. Maybe they moved it. Or camouflaged it.”
“Maybe.”
“Nothing we can do about the moon,” Jefferson had said, beating his tattoo. “Your call.”
“We go.”
Now Scott felt the mini-sub slow and, like the others, leaned into the craft’s deceleration. He tightened the straps on his H-gear, checked everything again to make sure his first line gear was all there: two canteens of water, ammo, penlight, compass, pocketknife. And in his rucksack, Carb-Boom energy packets, Handi Wipes, insect repellant; the rest of it — boots, extra ammo, and weapons — in waterproof baggies. He confirmed, too, that the medical gear he carried was stowed in its standard location on the H harness so it could be easily located if needed.
Check, check, check, and recheck: the mini-sub’s interior crackled with tension, the SEALs on guard against mistakes that could prove fatal.
Jefferson touched his earphone connected to the pilot’s throat mike. “Roger that,” Jefferson said into his own throat mike. Then to Scott, “Deitrich says the beach looks clear. He’ll have us in position in another five minutes.”
The men stirred. Van Kirk, the designated scout swimmer, moved first. He slipped swim fins over his booties, strapped on and tested his Draeger, and fitted the mouthpiece. He adjusted a pair of underwater night-vision goggles and got set to drop through the ASDS’s moon pool to begin an underwater recon of currents, obstacles, and anti-swimmer devices. Strapped to one of his legs was a computer “light box” linked to the mini-sub’s GPS. The box would indicate, in real time, his position relative to X-Ray, the SEALs’ designated landing patch on the beach.
Deitrich deployed the sub’s hovering thrusters and dropped the fore and aft anchors to hold the craft in position against a light current they could feel like an invisible hand against the titanium hull.
Van Kirk, looking like a grotesque sea monster, with bulging goggles clamped over his eyes and the Draeger’s mouthpiece in place, eased finned feet first over the coaming around the open moon pool. To prevent flooding of the mini-sub, the seawater in the moon pool was held in check by an equivalent pressure head pushing against it from inside the sub’s hull. Van Kirk, armed with a K-Bar and Sig Saur, gave Scott a thumbs-up, then dropped into the pool and swam out.
Time stood still.
Scott remembered reconnoitering the obstacle-strewn harbor at Dubrovnik: sunken vessels, debris of all kinds, including a steam locomotive and tender lying on their sides near the base of the pier where the ASDS had anchored.
Scott had finned through the cold, murky water to discover rudimentary antipersonnel mines anchored to the harbor bottom not far from the ASDS. These he had marked with laser flags. He had also marked the barnacle-encrusted anti-swimmer cages wrapped around the wharf’s pilings. These had had hundreds of sharp, hooked needles designed to impale a swimmer and trap him underwater.
But here, off Matsu Shan, the water was warmer and less turbid. The sandy bottom sloped gently up onto the beach. With high tide more than ten hours away, they would have plenty of time to conduct the mission and extract without the mini-sub needing to back down into deeper water.
Scott heard a splash: Van Kirk’s head and shoulders popped up in the moon pool.
“Clear all the way in, Skipper,” Van Kirk reported. His mates helped him out of the pool and out of his dripping gear. “About a two-knot current setting inshore and a bottom so smooth we can walk in the last twenty yards. No tricks, no mines, no traps. I went ashore and planted a laser homing beam as a guidon.”
He had marked their position and the position of the laser homing beam on the light box. It was a straight-in swim of about 300 yards. Curved lines on the box indicated the surf zone and the depth of the water out to twenty fathoms in ten-foot increments. The mini-sub’s mark hovered between the three- and four-fathom lines. Swimming in on the surface after a shallow-water free ascent from the ASDS would avoid the problems associated with deep-water decompression and allow easy entry and exit from the sub.