The boat was nowhere in sight.
And just like that, a plan that had been going swimmingly began to capsize.
7
Eastern Mediterranean
9 Miles West of Tartus, Syria
0414 Local Time
“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 ofhowlate 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, thewater 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 wasAphrodisia, 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.
Aphrodisiawas a case in point. She’d been purchased six weeksago 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.
