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He took his regulator out of his mouth, raised his mask, looked through the slats in the dock, and assessed the situation from his very limited vantage point.
This was a bustling terminal, and even though the off-loading of the Estelle had not yet begun, he and his team were no more than fifty yards away from men readying equipment to begin the process.
Rows of trucks were lined up; these wouldn’t leave the yard but would deliver the containers from portside to wherever they would be temporarily stored before going through customs.
He and his men had worked tirelessly the day before in preparation of the raid on the Estelle, but at no point had they envisioned themselves in the terminal in daylight. The entire reason for boarding the Estelle in the water was that doing so should have ensured much less risk of exposure. But the late arrival of the Panamax ship, as well as the slow underwater approach because of the currents, had put them here now.
They had abandoned the idea of just swimming all the way back to their initial insertion point, a quarter mile away across the harbor, because two highly mobile Russian-built harbor security boats, each with a crew of five and a pair of mounted 12.7-millimeter machine guns, had moved into the harbor just east of the Estelle, and they now circled through the Ground Branch men’s intended path of travel.
If the six Americans had been wearing rebreather equipment—scuba gear worn on their chests that prevented bubbles from rising to the surface—they would have had no problem moving forty feet or so under the patrols, but the gear they were forced to use on today’s op was basic, and the six men, even widely dispersed, would create a lot of bubbles that the ten Cuban sailors would almost certainly notice and then simply follow to their destination on the opposite shore.
So Travers made the decision to go to the terminal, but here his hopes were quickly dashed that they’d have a covert way out of this situation.
The southern side of the harbor was fenced down to the bottom at the container yard, and the men would not be able to just swim around to get out of the terminal.
No. They were going to have to climb out of the water right here and try to sneak their way to safety.
Travers gave the order; the men bobbing around him all took off their scuba gear and sank it, put on their watertight backpacks, then swam in their wet suits to a ladder.
Travers had his headset back on, and he reported in. “Overwatch. Victor One. You receiving?”
Pace came over the net. “Receiving. Where are you?”
“Unfortunately, we’re fifty yards south of the stern of the Estelle, right under this little gray skiff dock.”
Pace took a moment; Travers assumed he was looking for the dock through his scope. Finally he said, “Got it. There’s no way underwater around that fencing?”
“Negative. We’d have to go out under the harbor patrol to get around. Like our chances better going overland if you can help.”
“Roger. Listen carefully.”
Three minutes later the six men found themselves on dry land, lying under a stationary tanker truck close to the water, just south of the first in a row of ship-to-shore gantry cranes. The rusty but formidable towers loomed next to and now over the Estelle.
Travers looked to the south. “Overwatch. I don’t see anyone on our left. Do you?”
There was a brief pause, then Pace said, “There are a pair of old buses approaching up the yard to the south; they’ll pass your poz around that row of buildings you see one hundred meters to your southeast.”
“See the buildings. Will wait for them to pass and then your instructions.”
The buses passed; Travers got a look inside and saw they were filled with men. He assumed they were terminal personnel who would board the ship to facilitate the off-loading, so their presence didn’t alarm him in the least.
But the two buses stopped at the first crane, still some hundred yards or so to the gangway that had been brought up to the ship’s main deck for people in the terminal yard to board.
Travers and his men looked on while the doors to the bus opened, and men began filing out.
Instantly, all six Americans shifted their squat HK MP7s in that direction.
The buses contained uniformed soldiers, all carrying AK-47s, wearing helmets and flak jackets, and they began dispersing around the terminal in front of the ship.
Travers spoke first. “We’re moving.” He began crawling to the rear end of the tanker, facing south, and his team followed behind, still keeping an eye on what might have been sixty to eighty soldiers.
“Overwatch,” Travers said, “you seeing this?”
“ ’Fraid so. You’re clear to head south. Go into that cluster of trailer chassis parked there, get low, and I’ll advise.”
The chassis pool was a large parking lot south of the main activity at the port where trailer chassis of different lengths were lined up, ready to be chosen by size depending on the cargo a particular tractor driver was transporting to the stacks of containers on the western side of the yard.
The six men ran, one at a time, and then took cover under a pair of chassis. They would have still been exposed to the soldiers to the north if not for several large coils of rope and metal cabling, lined up neatly at the northern edge of the chassis pool. This gave them some cover, but Travers was fixated on getting the hell out of there, not hunkering down.
