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  “While he’s trying to get that sorted out,” Brognola said, “we’re to continue following the Carib Princess and to keep him updated on everything she does.”

  “That much we can do.” Rawlings sounded disgusted. “But that’s not the best use of this boat. They can do that from two hundred miles in space.”

  “I think you and your crew’ll get your chance to do something useful before this thing plays out,” Brognola predicted.

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  ON THE BRIDGE of the SS Carib Princess, Nguyen Cao Nguyen and his first officer were keeping the ship out of the worst of the storm. As the weather service had predicted, the hurricane had rebounded after hitting land in the Yucatán and had turned northeast. That put the southern shore of the Caribbean out of the worst of it, but this was a big storm and even the fringes carried powerful winds. And at the speed he was making, the trip was still rough.

  Diego Garcia was hard at work in his makeshift command post set up in what had previously been the cabin of the ship’s captain. He had been forced off his timetable by both the storm and the Mexican army, but now that he was back in communication with his operatives, he could make the necessary adjustments and get back on track.

  Some of the news he was receiving from his operatives , however, wasn’t good, particularly the reports from those in Mexico City where the situation had collapsed. The success of the People’s Revolution in Mexico had been a big gamble, but one that he’d thought would be worth taking. That it had long been a dream of his president to bring socialism to Mexico had also played large in his planning. That the revolution had apparently failed wasn’t a complete surprise to him. The socialist fervor burned brightly in certain progressive segments of Mexican society, but too many of the common people had been seduced by living so close to the United States. Visions of quick riches through greed and capitalism had corrupted them beyond salvation.

  The attempt, even though a failure, could still serve the Cuban president’s long-range plans for the region. The Matador teams had driven a dagger deep into the heart of the privileged and corrupt elite elements who had ruled Mexico for so long, and maybe some reform would come from it. Maybe now the common people would be able to see the vulnerabilities of the ruling class that he had exposed and would start planning their own revolution.

  The news from the United States was also pretty much as he had expected. The widespread invasion of the American border states that had captured so much media attention was finally being contained. This part of the operation had been designed to be a feint to cause a panic and to draw the Yankee forces away from Mexico and Panama to deal with it. The real strike against them, the one that would score the killing blow, was yet to come. By the time it was discovered, it would be too late to stop it.

  Nguyen had said that they would reach their destination by daybreak. Transferring the material he needed for the second phase would take two hours at the most, so by midday he should be in position to launch.

  AT DAWN, the SS Carib Princess arrived at her destination and dropped her anchors in deep water a mile offshore from Goat Island. With the storm not yet completely gone, Nguyen Cao Nguyen had ordered the Matador pilot to keep well offshore. He also kept the engine room online ready to make full turns at a moment’s notice if they lost their anchors.

  The weather was also a topic of great concern to Diego Garcia. “How much wind can those helicopters of yours take?” he asked the Matador operative in charge of the planned air operations.

  “As you know, Comrade,” the pilot pointed out before answering the question, “we are using old Russian machines. Anything over fifty kilometers an hour makes it difficult for them to take off and land, almost impossible.”

  One of the biggest problems Garcia had had to overcome in planning the entire operation was that everything he needed to pull it off had been supplied by Cuba. That meant that it was Russian in origin and long obsolete. No one, not even the new capitalist Russians, were willing to sell more modern military equipment to Cuba. It was sad to see that the Russians had caved in to the pressure from Yankees as they had done, but it was a reality.

  “The wind is blowing at forty klicks an hour right now,” the pilot added, “with gusts up to fifty, so it’s going to be tricky.”

  “We have to load the material now,” Garcia said. “So put your best pilots in the machines. And if I have the ship faced into the wind so the landing pad will be shielded from the wind, do you think they can manage it?”

  “They will try, Comrade.”

  “See that they do better than that,” the Cuban replied. “We have to get that material on board while we still have the cover of the storm. I don’t want to remain anchored here a moment longer than I have to.”

  The pilot stiffened under the rebuke. “They will do their best, Comrade.”

  “See that they do.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The USS Sandshark’s pursuit of the SS Carib Princess had continued throughout the night, but by daybreak the submarine had caught up with the cruise ship as she dropped her anchor close to a small island. Since nuke submarines weren’t equipped with anchors, the captain had been forced to cut power so the boat could lay motionless in the water at her periscope depth of sixty feet while stationed three thousand yards away from the Carib Princess. Sixty feet sounded like a lot of water, but it wasn’t enough to shield the sub from the effect of the waves above.

  Being a round-hulled submarine, the attack boat didn’t take well to sitting idle, especially when there were strong winds topside. Early submariners had once taken pride in calling their primitive undersea craft pigboats. Deep-running, modern subs had banished that nickname, but dead in the water as she was, the Sandshark wallowed like a pig in a distillery slop.

  In the control room, Rawlings braced his feet against the roll of the submarine deck and watched the Carib Princess through the attack periscope.

  “What in the hell is that bastard up to?” he muttered to himself.

  “What’s he doing?” Hal Brognola asked.

  “He’s just sitting there and nothing’s going on,” the captain replied. “No boats are coming out from the island and none are leaving the ship. There’s also no one up on deck. I can see crew on the bridge, but that’s it.”

  “I have engineering contact,” the sonar man reported. “She’s making enough turns to keep her bow into the waves.”

  “Rotary Wing contact,” the radar man called from his console in the attack center. “Fifteen hundred meters, bearing one-nine-six and closing fast.”

  “Contact, aye.”

  “Permission to go defensive, Sir,” the weapons officer requested from his firing console.

  “Permission granted,” Rawlings snapped.

  “Going defensive, aye.”

  In modern antisubmarine warfare, the greatest sub killers weren’t the charging destroyers of WWII fame dropping depth charges off of their fantails. In the twenty-first century, enemy subs were killed by helicopters carrying ASROCs and other antisub missiles. And a motionless sub was dead meat to an airborne killer. When Rawlings had come up to periscope depth, he had also raised the sub’s search radar antennas to keep an electronic watch on skies above.

  With the skipper’s permission to go to a defensive posture, the weapons officer turned the launch key and had his finger poised over the button for the Sandshark’s air defense missile system.

  “Weapons hot,” he called.

  “Weapons hot, aye,” Rawlings confirmed. “Wait for target conformation.”

  Rawlings swiveled the periscope up to take in the horizon. “It’s a Russian bird,” he called as he IDed the chopper. “An old Mi-8 Hip, and it’s heading for the Princess. No ASW gear spotted, go to weapons hold. Relax.”

  “Weapons hold, aye.”

  The tension in the combat control center eased off a bit.

  “The chopper’s turning into the wind to land on the Princess’s fantail,” Rawlings said, keepi
ng up a running commentary about what he was seeing.

  “Can you make out its markings?” Bolan asked.

  “It’s unmarked, but it’s wearing brown and green camo.”

  “That’s Cuban paint,” Bolan said.

  “Which fits with the rest of this program,” Brognola growled.

  “He’s touched down on her fantail,” Rawlings reported, “and armed men are getting out and offloading something in small canisters.”

  “Second aerial contact,” the radar operator called again. “Same bearing.”

  “Weapons still hot, Sir,” the weapons officer reminded his skipper.

  “Maintain weapons hold,” Rawlings commanded. As much as he’d like to splash those guys, his rules of engagement didn’t cover that option. He wasn’t quite sure what they did cover and strongly suspected that Brognola was making them up as he went along. Sooner or later, he was going to have to get something through approved channels before he really screwed the pooch on this bastard operation.

  “The first chopper is lifting off,” Rawlings reported, “and the second one is moving in to land.”

  As he watched, the choppers made several more trips before landing again and being tied down at the Carib Princess’s aft deck.

  “Okay,” Rawlings said. “All the birds are down and are being secured on deck.”

  Diego Garcia having his own little air force now put this whole program in a different light. He’d seen no weapons on the choppers, but that, too, could change.

  “Okay,” Rawlings announced. “She’s pulling up her anchor chain.”

  “I have increased screw noise,” the Sandshark’s sonar man reported. “She’s making eighteen turns and increasing.”

  “She’s putting back out to sea,” the skipper announced.

  “With the choppers on board?” Brognola asked.

  “Three of them.”

  “I need to use the secure communications again,” Brognola said.

  “Cooper and I will be in my cabin,” Rawlings replied.

  BOLAN AND RAWLINGS were having coffee in the captain’s cabin when Brognola joined them.

  “The political shit storm’s amped up even more.” Brognola looked disgusted as he poured himself a cup from the captain’s pot, “and we’re kind of redundant out here. Everybody with a two-bit satellite in a suicide orbit is keeping a close eye on that damned thing, hoping that the terrorists will ‘see reason’ and turn the hostages loose. The only problem is that while everyone’s trying to communicate with the ship, it’s not responding.”

  Brognola shook his head. “And of course, most of the flak is coming from the Europeans. For all their lip service to helping us in the War Against Terrorism, they haven’t been mugged enough yet and they still don’t understand what’s really going on or how to deal with it.”

  “Sounds like the crap we always used to hear from them before 9/11,” Rawlings commented. “You’d think they’d understand by now.”

  “Bottom line,” Brognola said, “is that until further notice, the President wants us to continue following them and see what develops.”

  “How about a private party?” Bolan asked.

  “I suggested that,” Brognola replied, “and he said he’ll take it under advisement.”

  Brognola shook his head. “I hate it when he starts talking like that. All it means is that by the time the shit hits the fan and he gives me the ‘go,’ it’ll be too late and people will be dying.”

  “Do you want me to go ahead anyway?”

  Brognola thought for a moment, and Rawlings couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Whoever these two guys were, they acted as if the wishes of the President and national policy were simply obstacles to be gotten around. He knew what his orders read, but he couldn’t let this one go unchallenged.

  “Gentlemen,” Rawlings said, “I know that I’ve been ordered to cooperate with you guys in any way I can, but I can’t sit here and listen to the two of you trying to find a way to disobey the orders of the President of the United States. In my book that’s a little too much like treason, and I won’t be a party to it.”

  “If you’ll just calm down and listen for a minute, Captain—” Brognola put steel in his eyes “—I’d like to suggest that you don’t really understand what Cooper and I do for a living.”

  “Maybe not,” Rawlings replied, meeting his gaze, “but I know that I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

  Brognola chose to ignore that and continued. “In my line of work,” he said, “I’m almost required to go against the President’s wishes all the time. It’s part of my job description and necessary to get the job done. And, on occasion, I even tell him to his face that I’m going to do it. Unlike him, see, I don’t have to play ‘cover your ass’ games when the lives of Americans are on the line, because I don’t have to run for election.”

  He leaned forward. “You know, Rawlings, sometimes I really wish I did have to be elected to do what I do. Then maybe I’d be defeated this November and not have to do this anymore. Then I’d get turned out to pasture, and then when shit like this comes down, someone else would have to try to find a way through the political minefield to get the job done before the body count gets too high.”

  “Is there any way you can use your weapons to disable that ship?” Bolan asked, purposefully changing the subject.

  “Not without putting the passengers in danger.” Rawlings was glad to be back on a topic he knew something about. This shadow terrorist war was being played by rules he’d never even known existed and it was a bit unnerving for a simple sailor like himself.

  “Remember, that to a submariner, there are only two kinds of ships—subs and targets. All of our weapons are lethal to a ship like that.”

  “Can you fire a torpedo with the warhead disabled?”

  Rawlings shook his head. “Even without the warhead, our MK 48s move so fast that they would probably penetrate the hull of that damned thing and go all the way through it. Since she’s not a warship, she doesn’t have any kind of armor belt to protect her. If I try that, I’ll sink her for sure.”

  “There’s another thing to consider,” Bolan stated.

  “What’s that?” Brognola asked.

  “Right now, Garcia’s in the driver’s seat,” Bolan said. “He’s got the human shields he needs to protect him while he does whatever it is he’s planning to do. And, right now, we don’t know what that is. He’s got those choppers, and whatever they ferried over from that island, so his plans include an aerial delivery of some kind, somewhere.”

  “You’re saying that we just follow him and wait?”

  “I’m saying that for the time being, those people on the Princess probably aren’t in any imminent danger of being killed. He needs those people alive not dead. He’ll only kill the hostages to make a point or to protect himself.”

  “That’s cold, Striker,” Brognola said. “Real cold.”

  “We’ve been here before, Hal. This might be one of those times when the ‘good of the many…’”

  “Dammit, Striker…”

  “Hal, let’s get real,” Bolan said. “This guy was a part of a widespread operation apparently designed to overthrow several Latin America governments while we were tied up trying to stop an invasion across our borders. And from what you said about Garcia, he’s probably the man in charge of the whole thing. And now that he’s been driven out of his base of operations in Cancun, we don’t have any idea where he’s planning to go next or what he’s planning to do.

  “But,” Bolan continued, “considering that he just had cargo and choppers loaded onto the ship, I don’t think he’s finished yet. That doesn’t look to me like the actions of a man who’s running for cover. He’s got another operation planned, and it’s going to be delivered by chopper.”

  As was usually the case, Brognola took Bolan’s assessment of the situation seriously. The man had more time on the sharp end of the stick than anyone in the President’s entire lineup of generals, special opera
tors and advisers.

  “Okay,” he said, capitulating, “we’ll do what the Man wants and follow them.”

  “We already are,” Rawlings said.

  NOW THAT the canisters and the helicopters were safely on board the Carib Princess, Diego Garcia’s mood picked up dramatically. An uncertain fate had intervened against him at Cancun, but he wasn’t defeated and wouldn’t be. In fact, he now would make the strikes that would damage the Yankees the most and bring them to their knees. Best of all, unlike the earlier strike against the Trade Center Towers, it wasn’t something they would ever be able to recover from.

  The clever Yankees had cleared away the rubble from the so-called ground zero in New York and were starting to rebuild. But his strike was one that would remain forever visible to all, or at least for a thousand years, whichever came first.

  The first target of Phase Two was a few hours’ sail away, the Sonoco oil platform Delta 39. D-39 was one of the largest drilling rigs in the Caribbean-South Atlantic oil field region and a good place to start.

  “Make for Delta 39,” he told the Matador helmsman.

  “As you command, Comrade.’”

  AS HE HAD TOLD Mary, Dr. Richard Spellman wasn’t an action-adventure kind of guy. In fact, his favorite pastimes were reading and watching old movies. The last time he’d been involved in sports of any kind had been in high school when he’d been second string on the baseball team for his first two years. He was, though, fairly fit.

  And as an M.D., he knew what fear and stress did to the body and brain. But until he had set foot on this cruise, he’d never been in many fearful or stressful situations.

  In the past couple of days he had learned that he could take more than he thought he ever could. Even the shock of being recaptured in Cancun hadn’t put him down. Having Mary Hamilton taken away had raised his concern, but his dying wasn’t going to help her. Instead, he had docilely allowed himself to be led away and locked in a laundry closet.

  They had taken his watch, so he lost time in his new lockup. From his use of the bucket he had found and the level of his hunger pains, he figured he had been locked up for a day or longer when he heard a key in the lock and the door opened to reveal two scowling gunmen.