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  He bowed slightly. “I thank you, but until the situation in Mexico City is clarified, I’ll have to wait before I pass on that offer. But give your President my heartfelt regards the next time you see him.”

  “Will do.”

  De Lorenzo whistled up an SUV to take the two Americans to the pier to meet their submarine before returning to his new duties. He’d never known just how much was involved in running a city. Even with the Panthers doing double duty as cops and medics, as well as soldiers, until the civilian authorities could be screened and put back to work, he was going to be a very busy man. Now he knew why he had gone into police work and not politics.

  NGUYEN CAO NGUYEN stood on the Carib Princess’s bridge, his feet spread well apart to move easily with the roll of the deck. Less than half an hour after leaving Cancun harbor, the ship had sailed out of the calm eye of the hurricane and back into the full fury of the storm. The rain was slashing the bridge like liquid machine gun bullets and the howl of the wind was unrelenting.

  Even though the ship was designed to ride out the worst the Caribbean and South Atlantic could deliver, she had her work cut out for her this time. She had been battened down for rough seas, so her exterior was weathering the storm well compared to what was going on inside. The stabilizers were supposed to keep the ship stable on all three axes, roll, pitch and yaw, and they were getting a real workout. Nguyen had the helmsman head her into the gale to minimize the effects of the waves.

  “How much longer is it going to blow this hard?” Nguyen asked the Matador operative serving in the place of the ship’s first officer.

  “The Yankee National Weather Service is giving it the rest of the night,” the man reported as he consulted his clipboard. “But they say it should slow to something like forty or fifty kilometers an hour by daybreak.”

  “How long before it’s completely gone?”

  “Hard to tell.” The First Officer shrugged. “The radar plot shows that it’s turning north and east over the Yucatán, so it’s probably going to turn and come back into the northern Caribbean. We might have to endure this for at least another two days.”

  The Matador planning team hadn’t included a hurricane in the operation, so they were reverting to Plan B. The problem was that Plan B wasn’t comprehensive and wouldn’t deliver the crushing blow to America that the original operation had envisioned. The Yankee economy would still be crippled, but the results wouldn’t be as long-lasting as Nguyen had wanted so Beijing could make its move.

  Nguyen was disappointed that they had been forced to evacuate Cancun, and he knew the lords of Beijing wouldn’t be pleased when they got his radioed report. They had depended on him to make this plan work for their ends, as well. China was poised to jump in to provide assistance to any of the Latin American nations that asked for it in the name of Revolution. Several treaties of mutual defense and assistance were ready and waiting to be signed by the victorious revolutionaries. Once inked, the pacts would be implemented immediately.

  It was planned that most of that assistance would be in the form of military forces on the ground. Several older oil tankers had been converted to troop transports for the operation, and a hundred thousand men, their weapons, ammunition and equipment were on the high seas right now. More men and equipment were standing by at Chinese airfields ready to be flown in. At this point in time, though, those troops might just have to sit in their transports a little longer. There was still the off chance that they could prove useful in Panama or Guatemala, but the planned Cancun beachhead was off the table.

  To make it worse, the news coming in from the Matador units in Mexico City wasn’t good. Even with Cuba’s proclamation of support for the revolutionary “uprising” in Mexico, it didn’t look as if it was going to be successful, either. He had more hope, though, for the second phase of the plan. With the American hostages on the ship as a shield against American attack, at least it could be accomplished.

  They were scheduled to arrive at their resupply point at daybreak and, if the weather report was accurate, they could load the material and the helicopters they needed immediately. Once that was done, it was only half a day’s sailing to the first of the Plan B targets.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Commander Douglas “Bulldog” Rawlings, captain of the nuclear submarine USS Sandshark, was a typical attack-boat skipper. Closing with and destroying enemy warships on the high seas was in his blood. Commanding a lumbering Boomer cruising around the oceans of the world waiting for a launch order that would probably never come would have driven him mad. At least in a fast-attack boat, he could lurk around the sea lanes and play bumper tag with the Russian and Chinese pigboats when he wasn’t making practice torpedo attacks on unsuspecting cruise liners.

  As the skipper of a United States warship, Rawlings had no idea why he’d been ordered to divert to a Mexican resort town at flank speed to pick up two stranded civilian VIPs. To him that sounded like a job for a garbage scow, not a nuke attack boat. On top of that, modern submarines didn’t like to be on the surface of the ocean even in good weather. Their hull shapes had been maximized for underwater speed, and they were pigs on the surface in any kind of gale. Sailing into a hurricane and surfacing in a harbor was a good way to mess up his tidy little boat.

  All that aside, though, when the Chief of Naval Operations got on the horn to personally order him to take his deep-sea boat into Cancun, he hadn’t argued. It wouldn’t have been a wise career move. He fully planned to be the first pigboat officer to be CNO himself, so he knew how to act when the admiral came asking for a favor.

  That task was, however, turning out to be easier said than accomplished.

  Deep under the waves at diving depth, the Sandshark wasn’t at all affected by the storm raging on the surface. The problem was that he would have to surface to make it all the way into the harbor. It was too bad that he hadn’t gotten the call an hour or two earlier when the eye of the storm had passed over Cancun. That would have been smooth sailing for him even on the surface. Now that the eye had passed, it was rather nasty up there again.

  Rawlings knew better than to even try to dock his boat at the pier when he pulled into the harbor. He didn’t need to have his outer hull plates stove in. Instead he held her half a mile offshore submerged up to the sail, under just enough power to hold her in position headed into the gale. He didn’t have direct communication with his would-be passengers, but when CinClant informed him that the package was waiting, he launched a Zodiac raft to retrieve them.

  He watched through the optical attack scope in the control room as the small rubber boat fought her way through the waves to the pier. And, as he had been informed, two men were waiting on the dock. They quickly climbed down into the raft for the rough trip back.

  When they got closer, he turned the periscope over to the watch officer. “Bring them to my cabin before you dry them off,” he ordered.

  “Aye-aye, Sir.”

  RAWLINGS WASN’T impressed when the two men were shown to his quarters. One of them was notable to be sure, a tall dark-haired guy who looked like a professional hard case. If he turned out to be any kind of trouble, though, he’d put the SEALs on him. The other, older man looked like some kind of federal desk jockey. What in the hell he’d been doing in Cancun that required his being picked up in the middle of a hurricane, he had no idea.

  “I’m Captain Doug Rawlings,” he said, ignoring the puddles of water forming at their feet, “skipper of the Sandshark. Welcome aboard.”

  The bureaucrat put his hand out. “Hal Brognola,” he said. “Thanks for picking us up.”

  “I have no idea who you two gentlemen are, but, my orders are to put my boat and my crew completely at your disposal.”

  He paused. “Except, of course, for my offensive armament. No offense, but if you ask me to shoot, I’m going to have to clear it with someone first.”

  “No problem, Captain,” Brognola said smoothly. “I’d have to talk to the President myself before I asked y
ou to do something like that.”

  That put Rawlings back a little. If this guy thought that he could pick up the phone, call the National Command Authority and ask for a hotshot, he obviously had a lot of pull somewhere. He’d best step lightly until he had a better understanding of who these two guys were and what in the hell was going on.

  “But I really don’t think that it’s going to come to that,” Brognola added quickly. “At least, I certainly hope not.”

  “I understand that you have a SEAL team on board?” Bolan asked.

  Rawlings hesitated for a long moment. His six SEALs were on board to support a highly classified operation code-named Ever Last. Not too many people were cleared to know about it and beyond the President, the Secretary of Defense and of the Navy, to his knowledge none of them were civilians. That meant, of course, that the hard case was a spook of some kind.

  Bolan caught the hesitation and understood the problem. “I assure you, Captain,” he said, “that I’m cleared to know about Operation Ever Last.”

  “And you are?” Rawlings said. “If I might ask.”

  “Colonel Cooper, Jeff Cooper.”

  “Yes, I have a SEAL contingent on board, Colonel, but not a full team.”

  “Do they have a SDV?” Bolan asked. The SEAL Delivery Vehicle was one of the best underwater vehicles ever invented and might be useful.

  “They do.” Rawlings nodded.

  “I might need to ask to borrow it later.”

  Again Rawlings hesitated, but for a shorter length of time. The CNO had made it clear to him that these guys could have anything they wanted. If this hard case wanted to borrow the SDV, he’d better let him have it. He would, though, make him sign for it. Army guys had a history of not returning the stuff they borrowed from the Navy.

  “Gentlemen,” the captain said, “I know we have much more to talk about, but can I offer you dry clothing and something to eat first? Maybe coffee?”

  Since eating hadn’t been very high on their priority list of things to do for the past couple of days, a meal sounded good. “A sandwich perhaps?” Brognola suggested. “And coffee, please.”

  Rawlings keyed his intercom. “Cookie, report to my cabin.”

  “Aye-aye, Sir,” the speaker answered.

  “And,” Brognola added, “if I could ask, do you happen to have antacid tablets in your medical stores? I have a rather sensitive stomach, and I’ve been without anything to take for a couple of days now.”

  Rawlings kept a perfectly straight face as he keyed his intercom again. “Doc, bring a couple of rolls of burp pills to my cabin.”

  Bolan hid a grin, Brognola was known for never being without a stock of his trademark antacids. There was no crisis anywhere in the world that was so threatening that it couldn’t be controlled by crunching a couple of tabs every couple of hours.

  “Nausea or heartburn, Sir?” the medic asked.

  “Antacids.”

  “Right away, Sir.”

  When the chief cook reported, the captain ordered a cold-cut plate with appropriate condiments and a coffee service. The sub’s corpsman followed right on the cook’s heels and handed over two rolls of industrial-strength antacid tablets.

  “Thanks a lot.” Brognola gratefully accepted them and immediately popped two.

  The meal appeared quickly and little was said as Bolan and Brognola made sandwiches and wolfed them down.

  “What can you tell me about your mission?” Rawlings asked. “It’ll help if I know what we’re heading into. And—” he locked eyes with Brognola “—my crew performs at their best when they know what it is they’re supposed to be doing.”

  Brognola understood the unspoken message and agreed. “Needless to say, Captain, this all has to be on a strict ‘need to know’ basis, but I want you to shadow a cruise ship full of Americans. They’re being held hostage by what we think is a Cuban terrorist group.”

  Now Rawlings understood the urgency of the mission and his unconventional passengers. In the War Against Terror, a ship full of American hostages was a nightmare.

  “What’s the ship?”

  “The Carib Princess,” Bolan replied. “It was hijacked as it passed through the canal.”

  Rawlings hit the intercom again. “Mr. Johnson, to my cabin, on the double.”

  Lieutenant Rob Johnson was the Sandshark’s intelligence officer and the man who kept track of the submarine’s potential target list. “Yes, Sir?”

  “Mr. Johnson,” the captain said, “drag out the cruise ship recognition file and fire up the satellite downlink. I want the SS Carib Princess and as soon as you’ve located her position, have the officer of the deck make an intercept course on her at all speed.”

  This wasn’t the usual kind of target that the sub went after, but Johnson knew better than to question the order. There were, however, a couple of operational details he had to ask about.

  “Captain,” he said, “the wind’s gusting better than sixty knots up there, and I don’t know if I can tow the satcom array in that. I’d hate to lose it.”

  “It’s either that or surface and use the antennas, Mr. Johnson,” Rawlings said. “I need that ship’s location War Emergency.”

  “Aye, Sir.”

  “He’ll find her.” The captain poured himself a cup of coffee. “He’s a regular hound dog.”

  He took a sip, sat back and looked at his guests. “And what do you plan to do after we find her?”

  Brognola smiled grimly. “We’re still working on that, and we can use any input you might have.”

  Rawlings was beginning to like these two spooks. At least they didn’t think they had the world by the balls and knew all the answers.

  “And speaking of input,” Brognola said, “it will speed things up quite a bit if I can have access to secure communications, so I can get in touch with my headquarters.”

  “No problem,” Rawlings said. “I’ll make a secure suite available and have coffee sent in.”

  BEING ON BOARD the USS Sandshark put Bolan and Hal Brognola back in real-time contact with the combined intelligence-gathering apparatus of the United States of America. Everything from NSA Carnivore E-mail intercepts to real-time imaging from the NRO’s Keyhole series deep-space recon satellites was now available to them as it came in. Even better was that America’s premier clearinghouse for such information, known as Stony Man Farm, was also hard at work on the situation. But even with Aaron Kurtzman and the Farm’s computer room crew hard at work, they had little to show for their efforts.

  The problem was that Diego Garcia had apparently planned and executed his operation completely off-line. The lessons learned from the dismantling of Bin Laden and his terrorist network seemed to have been taken seriously by the Cubans. In fact, nothing relating to the Matador Section of the Cuban DGI was on any computer anywhere in the world. Further, the use of cell phones by the operatives had been strictly limited. Instead they were using fifties technology against adversaries who were geared up to look for twenty-first century clues. There were some radio communications between the different elements that had been intercepted, but they were all encoded and were limited.

  When Brognola returned to the small berth he and Bolan had been assigned as their quarters, he looked as if he were about ready to have a coronary. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Hunt and the Bear haven’t been able to come up with anything on those Cubans. We’re still operating blind.”

  Brognola was beyond frustration and starting to edge into rage. He was never one to back down from a fight, but at least he had to know who to shoot at.

  “Except that we now know exactly where they’re at right now,” Bolan informed him. “The sub’s crew was able to access their link to the spy satellites and the ship’s been spotted. Rawlings is on an intercept course for her at flank speed, and we should be in torpedo range within a few hours.”

  “That’s even worse,” Brognola. “We may have them spotted, but we can’t do a damned thing about it.”

&nbs
p; “What’s the deal?”

  “The usual.” Brognola sounded disgusted. “The Carib Princess’s passenger manifest reads like a Who’s Who of the world’s medical research community. He’s got prominent scientists, including a couple of Nobel prize winners, from almost every industrialized nation in the world on board, and most of them have their families with them. When the Man informed the nations involved that the ship had been hijacked and that some of their citizens were being held hostage, the excrement hit the ventilation big-time. We’ve got ourselves a big problem here with no solution in sight.”

  “We’ve got to let the captain know.”

  Brognola shook his head. “I guess we have to.”

  CAPTAIN RAWLINGS WAS in the sub’s control room personally supervising the pursuit. The Carib Princess was an older ship, but she was fast. Even with the storm, she was still running at better than twenty-five knots, and it was a stern chase. It would be a few hours before he could catch up with her.

  “We’ve just heard from Washington,” Brognola said.

  Rawlings accurately read the expression on his face. “Let’s take it to my cabin.”

  The captain listened grim-faced as Brognola briefed him on the nature of the hostages and the problems they posed for the President.

  “Right now,” Brognola said, “the President is conferring with the governments involved to try to work out the rules of engagement if we do have to start shooting.”

  “Christ!” the captain said. “Another multinational circle jerk.”

  Even with the much publicized allied coalition that was supposedly “assisting” the United States in the War Against Terrorism, working with other governments had rarely been in America’s best interests. And there was little chance that this incident would prove to be any exception. Regardless of the nationalities of the hostages involved, history had shown that the best hope for success in any hijacking situation was swift, bold action against the hijackers, not endless conference calls while politicians desperately tried to cover their respective asses.