Chapter 7
Eastern Mediterranean
“Shit, shit, shit!” Ding Chavez cursed after dropping a wrench into six inches of black bilgewater. He reached down into the oily mess and groped blindly for the tool, finding it after a few seconds.
For all the intensive training he had received in the Army, for all the exotic technology provided by the nation’s intelligence agencies, he’d never been stymied by something as simple as a failed seacock.
Yet if all special operators shared one thing in common, it was a mission-oriented mindset.
An unshakable can-do attitude. This was what the trial-by-fire selection process for elite Special Forces units truly sought to identify.
It wasn’t about who was the fastest, strongest, or smartest. It was about who would not accept failure in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Who would never give up on a team member in need.
Chavez was an expert sniper, a former CIA paramilitary, and could speak five languages.
But in that moment, he needed to be enough of a marine mechanic to fix a badly leaking valve.
“Pipe wrench!” he called out.
“That is the adjustable one, no?” replied Henri Toussaint in his thick French accent.
“Yeah, it’s got a red handle.”
The Frenchman, a veteran of DGSI, that nation’s premier domestic intelligence agency, dug into a grimy toolbox. He removed the wrench in question and handed it down into the engine bay, adding, “Clé à tube, as we say in Paris.”
“Oui, oui,” Ding said distractedly as he started clattering away. “Time?”
Toussaint checked his Rolex Submariner. “Two minutes to our scheduled rendezvous.”
Shit, shit, shit…
They had dropped off Clark and his team over an hour ago, slightly more than two miles from the harbor entrance.
Toussaint had then steered the boat out to sea, roughly halfway to the twelve-mile boundary of international waters.
They had been loitering there when the seacock failed, allowing seawater to gush into the engine compartment.
Worse yet, they hadn’t noticed it right away.
The engine bay was enclosed and there was no high-water alarm.
The first indication of trouble was when the engine began sputtering as they turned back toward the extraction point.
Now they would be late for the rendezvous.
The question of how late rested on Ding’s problem-solving skills.
His first action had been to go over the side with a rag and do his best to plug the leaky fitting.
That slowed the intake of water and bought time.
If nothing else, the boat wouldn’t sink.
The forward bilge pump was still running on battery power, and between that and the rag, the water level was slowly receding.
If he could close the valve completely, they still had a chance.
Ding worked furiously, a penlight held in his teeth. If he could get a good grip on the fitting, he thought he could close it manually. The problem was that he had to do everything by feel, the valve being out of sight under six inches of oily water. The tool kept slipping from his hand.
He dropped the wrench again. His frustration mounted.
Ding had originally been penciled in as a diver tonight, but an ear infection that had begun a few days ago had bumped him off the assault team.
Bauer had taken his place. Now, instead of sinking a Russian ghost ship, he was trying to keep a leaky fishing boat afloat.
He had drawn the short straw for climbing down into the engine compartment for two eminently practical reasons: he was considerably smaller than Toussaint, and also a reasonably proficient mechanic.
The boat’s name was Aphrodisia, drawn from the Greek term for the state of sexual desire—a fact that had elicited no end of commentary from the Task Force 99 peanut gallery.
A forty-six-foot trehandiri, she was a traditional fishing vessel, a type common in these waters.
For a hundred years such craft had been chasing tuna, swordfish, and sea bass around the eastern Med, and even at four in the morning she wouldn’t look out of place off the coast of Syria.
Cyprus had been a launchpad for surreptitious maritime operations for more than a thousand years, and the advantages that had brought the Greeks and Phoenicians to these waters were no less relevant now.
With convenient geography, muddied governance, and a shrewd mercantile heritage, the island was a perfect backdrop for illicit activities.
Aphrodisia was a case in point. She’d been purchased six weeks ago by a CIA front man, and her engines and rigging had been quietly refurbished as she lay moored at a quiet wharf near Mazotos, a village on the island’s rocky southern coast. Unfortunately, whoever had done the refit had missed one faulty valve.
And that now threatened to sink the entire op.
“We’re two minutes past the rendezvous time,” Toussaint said, probably trying to be helpful. “I’ll send a message to John explaining the delay.”
He’d no sooner uttered those words when Ding dropped the wrench again.
—
John Clark was not patient by nature, but he could adapt to bad situations like few individuals on earth. A lifetime in special operations did that to a man.
“Sounds like our boat is down,” he said, with the same tone he might use if his coffee had gone cold.
He was referencing a message that had just hit everyone’s screens.
The DPDs shared a limitation with all submarine platforms—communication via radio or satellite was severely degraded beneath the surface.
But now they were on top, and everyone had a data link to the “mother ship.”
“Okay, everybody power down,” Clark said.
“I’ll leave my unit hot to keep comms.” The batteries on the DPDs were getting low, and there was no point in draining them unnecessarily as they sat doing nothing.
Technology might be a force multiplier in modern warfare, but it also put one at the mercy of the lithium-ion gods.
Four sets of eyes swept the horizon to the west. They saw nothing but the dim lights of a few distant freighters. The situation wasn’t yet critical. More like a holding pattern.
“Ten seconds,” Bauer said.
There was no need to expand. All attention shifted to the harbor.
It happened right on time. There were no bright flashes because the mines were below Draco II’s waterline.
The muffled thumps of the explosions, however, resonated across the sea seconds later.
The synchronization of the blasts was nearly perfect.
If Clark were to guess, three of the explosions occurred less than a second apart, the fourth perhaps two seconds later.
From where they sat, only the top half of Draco II was visible above the breakwater.
The lights on her bridge flickered twice and then extinguished, one dim emergency flood filling the void.
A small deck fire broke out near the bow, and the ship’s superstructure was momentarily lost in a cloud of mist—water vapor generated by the blasts.
When the mist drifted away, she was already listing to port.
“I’d like to take a snapshot of that,” Wu commented. “Maybe send it to President Yermilov.”
“I think he’ll get the picture,” Clark remarked.
“No doubt,” agreed Hyori. “But if our ride doesn’t show up soon, he may get mug shots of us as well.”
It was a valid point. The alarm was now raised. All eyes naturally began shifting back and forth. Shoreward to look for threats. Seaward for salvation.
Clark never stopped planning, adjusting to the circumstances.
His team was floating in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, four frogmen bobbing on DPDs with nearly dead batteries.
Their ride to safety was out of commission.
The nearest land was two miles away, but that would soon be crawling with police officers.
The nearest neutral shore, Cyprus, was eighty miles west—unreachable without commandeering a boat, which seemed a long shot.
Given the currents here—Clark had left no stone unturned in his planning—he reckoned their best bailout would be to float south until they were off the coast of Lebanon.
That was a mere twenty miles. Hardly ideal, but feasible.
The bottom line was that if Aphrodisia didn’t show soon, they would be facing a long swim at the end of a hard night.
“How many patrol boats did intel say the Syrians had?” Hyori asked.
Clark thought back to the briefing. The fall of the Assad regime had put a dozen aging vessels in the hands of a rebel force that had never before dipped its fundamentalist toe in salt water.
“According to the intel estimates, three Syrian navy vessels—one missile cutter and two patrol boats—are seaworthy and operational. But they rarely leave port. Their crews are probably in bed at this hour.”
“They must keep at least one on alert,” Wu argued.
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
“This wind is going to push us back to the scene of the crime,” said the Brit, reading the light swell on the sea.
This was in the back of Clark’s mind as well. The breeze wasn’t strong, but its direction couldn’t have been worse. They were slowly drifting back toward the breakwater. Fighting that movement, either by swimming or draining the DPD batteries completely, would expend valuable energy.
Clark was about to initiate a secure voice call with Aphrodisia when a glimmer to the west caught his eye.
It was little more than a silhouette—a vessel running lights-out.
From his low vantage point in the water, he couldn’t make a solid ID at first. It could be Ding and Toussaint.
Or it could be one of the smugglers that were endemic to these waters.
He instinctively weighed the possibility of commandeering the vessel if the latter turned out to be the case.
They had plenty of firepower, but marginal mobility on the spent DPDs.
As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary.
The boat came right at them, and soon they saw Ding’s wiry frame at the bow. As Aphrodisia closed in, he waved like a passenger on an ocean liner arriving in port.
“About time, mate,” shouted Wu.
“Sorry for the wait,” Ding called out. “Our boat was sinking.”
“That’s a sad excuse.”
The pleasantries continued throughout the recovery process, good humor fueled by a sense of relief. The exfil delay had been the night’s only glitch, and no one doubted that Ding and Toussaint had done everything in their power to overcome the problem.
The DPDs were lashed along the port side, and once the divers were on board, everyone grabbed lines to help haul them up on deck.
Early on there had been discussions about acquiring a boat with a deck crane, but the DPDs weren’t so heavy that they couldn’t be heaved aboard by six strong men.
John Clark thought that simpler. And simpler, in his view, was always better.
Soon Aphrodisia was motoring west. They would be in Cypriot waters in five hours. Moored to a dock five after that.
Ding told them about the flooding in the engine compartment. “But don’t worry, I fixed it.”
“Now I am truly worried,” said Hyori.
The divers all showered—the boat had pressurized freshwater and a hose, a rare luxury for paramilitary frogmen—and changed into warm clothes.
Like soldiers everywhere in post-mission moments, their conversation turned casual.
They began forming plans to blow off steam the next day, most of which involved drinking beer and basking in the warm Nicosian sun.
Clark came out of the wheelhouse rubbing his hair dry with a towel. “Don’t make your reservations at the cabana just yet,” he announced. “Looks like we’ve got new tasking.”
“Where now?” Hyori asked.
“We sail to Turkey, the southern coast. They want us to go ashore without being noticed.”
“ETA?” Ding inquired.
“We should arrive just after daybreak. Charlie will be waiting with two cars.” He was referring to Charlotte “Charlie” Adams, the highly capable Aussie intelligence officer attached to the task force. For this op, she had been handling shoreside logistics.
“Any idea what we’re doing when we get there?”
“No clue. I’ve been told we’ll get further instructions once we’re ashore.”
Clark surveyed the room, such as it was, and saw the usual reactions. Disappointment at the stolen days off. Trepidation about what new five-alarm fire awaited. The thrill of another challenge. There were no more questions.
Aphrodisia’s bow swung sixty degrees to starboard, and soon she was tracking straight and true toward the Levantine Sea.