"Pretty much."
The walls gave way to solid rock about eight feet from the surface; the bottom of the little inlet was another eight or so feet below that. A thick layer of muck covered the floor; just about anything might have been in it, including several skeletons. The stones themselves were covered with a blackish growth, but there weren"t any fish, and certainly no octopuses patrolling the depths. So when I felt a tug on my leg as I surfaced I knew Trace had found something.
The pa.s.sage was about midway down the wall just to the right of the dock. It was stone on all sides, about as wide and high as the slot for a coffin in a crypt. The comparison seemed particularly appropriate as we came to an elbow that led straight upward. Trace had no problem sliding through; I sc.r.a.ped the side, knocked my knee, and nearly broke my arm-not a problem, really, as long as I could get to the surface soon and get some air into my shrieking lungs. I pushed through the ooze all around me and managed to move upward, squeezing next to Trace as we surfaced.
We came up at the top of what looked like a chimney in the middle of a stone room. A dim blue light filtered in from high above. I stared at it for a minute, then realized that I was looking at the sky. We had gone through a pa.s.sage to the southeastern tower, surfacing in what must have been a guardroom, back in the days when wood beams filled the large keyholes in the side walls.
A narrow ledge rimmed the tower"s circular walls about six feet from the surface of the water. We climbed to it, our fingernails sc.r.a.ping up bacteria for everything from lockjaw to tuberculosis. The ledge was a bit wider than my b.u.t.t, but offered nothing more than a rest stop. A bricked-over doorway sat about a third of the way up; another was about fourteen or fifteen feet above it.
"To the top?" asked Trace.
"Sounds good to me." I pulled out my MP5N and slung the strap around my neck; I wanted the gun handy in case we encountered lookouts at the top.
There was just enough light for us to get by without using our flashlights. The stones were tightly s.p.a.ced together, but their irregular shape made handholds plentiful, if you had the patience to find them.
Unless you were Trace. In which case you had incredibly sticky fingers and could scoot up the wall twice as fast as a spider. She disappeared over the ledge, going in the direction of the walkway on the wall and the other tower opposite this one.
While my objective was to capture at least one tango and have a heart-to-heart talk about what was going on. I was, however, prepared to be realistic. If the odds turned out to be overwhelming-say, if we found that those ZSU-23 guns were accompanied by three or four main battle tanks-then we could always back off and call Frankie or the Italians.
What I was not prepared to do was come away empty-handed. So when I heard an outboard motor in the distance as I reached the top of the tower, my first reaction was, "son of a b.i.t.c.h."
My second reaction was to grab tightly at the wall, because I had almost slipped. Reminding myself that I didn"t want to have to start over, I reached up and pulled myself onto the ledge. I stood, and found myself staring at the horizon.
A light flashed off in the distance on the surface of the water. It was a small needle, thin and off in an instant. But it was too far to have been the boat.
I leaned over the stone wall and saw what I was looking for. While we were climbing through the tower, a rigid hulled boat had come up close to one of the doors that opened from the castle. Something dangled from the door now-a rope ladder.
The motor went from a low, quiet idle to an a.s.s-kicking high rev. The boat jerked in the direction of the pinp.r.i.c.k of light I"d seen.
Clearly, the people in the boat were going to get away. I didn"t want that to happen. There was only one way to stop them. So I did the stupidest thing possible: I jumped.
*The chickens.h.i.t lawyers don"t want me to use the actual address, since the property is owned by people who had nothing to do with what went on there. Like I believe that.
*I"m not dumping on the minisubs. They make insertions possible in conditions that would be impossible in the old days. I"m just jealous.
7.
Maybe jumping wasn"t the stupidest thing possible. Maybe firing the MP5N as I fell was.
But what the heck. It was going to get wet anyway.
How many bullets I got off before I hit the water is anybody"s guess. At least some hit the three figures in the boat, including whoever was steering, because the last thing I saw as I hit the water was it lurching back toward me.
I had about a half of a half of a second to wish that it would go the other way. The bow may have missed my head by two inches; I was too busy pretending to be a concrete anchor to get a good estimate.
Two strong strokes to the left and I surfaced about twenty feet from the boat. It was moving toward me, but not on purpose. The helmsman had fallen dead against the wheel.
Getting aboard a runaway boat from the water is more difficult than stopping a runaway train by a factor of only ten or so. You take your best shot and you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting clipped by the propeller. And that"s if no one on board the boat tries to help.
I got a hand on the rubber hull but couldn"t hang on. The boat turned again, its circle wider. It seemed to be slowing, not trying to run me over, but I didn"t trust it. Something leaned off the side. Sensing I was about to be shot, I ducked under the water, stroking in the other direction. When I surfaced, the boat had begun to drift sideways toward the castle.
If I"d been a giraffe, maybe I"d"ve been able to see into the d.a.m.n thing and understand what the h.e.l.l was going. But as low in the water as the boat was, I was still lower, and between that and the dim light, all I could see were a few shadows. I pulled out my diving knife and began stroking warily toward the boat. As I got closer, I saw that the shadow at the side had an arm off toward the water. Still not trusting that I wasn"t being suckered into a trap, I dove, resurfaced, then came over to the side and pulled down on the arm. As the body flopped into the water I shoved myself under the hull and came up on the other side. When I pulled myself up into the boat, it was empty.
While all of this was going on, Trace had been standing up on the wall watching. I looked up at her and waved; she waved back. Then she disappeared.
There are a million reasons for a person suddenly not being where they were. At that moment, I couldn"t think of any but one: She"d been ambushed by someone in the castle.
As I turned to find the wheel and controls of the boat, I saw the light flash again on the sea. It was about a mile away. I"d have to get back to it; Trace was more important. I started the engine and turned the boat around, heading for the door on the castle wall. Similar to the one we"d seen inside, there was no handle or anything else to grab to open it with. I was just about to get out and scale the wall when Trace shouted down to me.
"d.i.c.k, what are you doing?"
"Looking for you," I yelled back. "What"s going on?"
"Nothing! The place is deserted."
"All right. Jump."
"Jump? f.u.c.k you."
"Later-right now there"s someone offsh.o.r.e that was supposed to meet these jokers. Let"s go see who it is. Come on, before they leave!"
A fresh string of expletives ended with a loud splash in the water.
After I fished her out, we headed for the light. When we got within a half-mile, we saw a shadow looming low on the water, the sort of inky smudge the conning tower of a submarine makes against a very dim background before it sinks into the water. (Yes, I have seen it, many times. A very lonely sight, especially if you were supposed to be on the f.u.c.ker.) I could describe an interesting chase scene here, with us arriving just as the submarine dives. I could say how I leapt from the boat, grabbed hold of the periscope, and stuck my tongue out at the captain before it disappeared beneath the waves.
But none of that happened. We crisscrossed the area where I"d seen the light a dozen, two dozen times without finding anything. There definitely had been something there, but it was gone now.
"Fireflies," suggested Trace sarcastically.
"Then where was the boat going?"
"Only a million other places up and down the sh.o.r.e."
We went back to the castle to search the place more thoroughly. Besides the boat garage and door on the sea, there was only one entrance that connected to the building"s interior rooms. This was near the northern tower, and was down a stairway so narrow only one person could fit at a time, and even then if you had decent-size shoulders like mine you"d have to turn a bit sideways. The stairway opened into a corridor only a few inches wider. Ten rooms sat on the left of the hall. Only one had a door, and that seemed to have been a combination lookout post and control room. Roughly twenty feet wide but only six deep, it had a slit that looked out toward the sea. A control panel of toggle switches had been mounted in the stone beneath the opening, with a thick metal-sheathed cable running out into the corridor and then downstairs. The switches worked an electronic lock in the watery garage below, as well as lights there and on the parapet.
Three very thick cables ran across the floor from the corridor and stopped under the slit window, their ends curving upward as if they were snakes.
"They had cable," sneered Trace.
"My bet is that there was a panel from the radar here. We"ll trace the wires back later."
There was no bedding in any of the upstairs rooms, and except for some plain white bags and a dozen empty plastic bottles, there was no sign that anyone had stayed in the place for any length of time. The bags were long and narrow, the sort we"d use in the States for a loaf of Italian bread or a French baguette. The bottles were unlabeled and all but one were empty; that one held water, and I guessed that the others had as well.
"They weren"t here long," said Trace. "And they were neat."
More than that. If they"d been here more than a few hours, they"d slept on a stone floor; we didn"t find any bedding, not even a blanket, in the rooms downstairs. Nor was there any furniture; no chairs, no tables, nothing but ancient dust.
The section of the castle between the walls had once been a large central hall. The timbers had collapsed long ago and much of the floor and whatever else had been inside lay in a large pile of rubble. The beams that held the roof above didn"t look as if they were in the greatest shape either. Perhaps a quarter of them had been braced, but these repairs looked pretty old themselves. Whoever had been holed up here had used the area for target practice; we found a few sh.e.l.l casings scattered on the stone walkway.
We tracked the cables back up to the tower and then the wall on the land side of the castle, onto the hill where it was covered by camouflage netting to look like a cl.u.s.ter of rocks. There was no antiaircraft gun or missile battery for that matter. My guess is that the unit was used as an early-warning system to track aircraft that showed too much interest in the place. Someone standing on the tower and armed with a Stinger or similar shoulder-launched antiaircraft weapon would have been a more than adequate defense, especially if cued to the general direction by the radar operator.
Just a theory.
I found a type number stamped inside the radar unit, along with a sequence of letters that turned out to indicate when it had been modified and refurbished. But if there had ever been a serial number or an ID plate, it was long gone.
So was the boat when we went down to leave.
The first thing I did was make sure I had a full load of ammo in the MP5N. The second thing I did was drop to my belly and crawl out farther through the doorway over the sea, staring into the dim twilight.
We"d left the boat tied to the gate below. Trace had tied the knot, and she swore now that she had tied the knot, and d.a.m.n tight, too.
"I"m not questioning it." It was about a half hour before sunrise and the area directly below the castle lay in deep shadow. I had to stare to make anything out.
"f.u.c.k. I tied it tight. They were all dead. Weren"t they all dead?"
"Don"t panic."
"Screw yourself, panic. I"m not panicking. They were dead. I saw them die."
One was dead, definitely. The other two men Trace had seen in the boat had disappeared before I got there, falling off into the water and presumably dead.
Presume? Is that the same as a.s.sume? The word old-style Navy chiefs define as: a.s.sume-to make an a.s.s of U and ME?
Which one of my old chiefs said that?
Every last one of them.
We spent the next hour searching, first for possible ambushers, then for the boat, and finally for the bodies of the men who"d been in it. But we found niente: nothing. I considered smashing my fist against the stone wall in frustration, but decided against it. You never know how long you"re going to have to wait to see a competent doctor in an Italian hospital.
c.r.a.pinpants and Kohut didn"t appreciate the fact that I hadn"t invited them and ten thousand troops to my private sneak and peak at the castle. Frankie resented my holding back the information as well. But I wasn"t in the mood to apologize. Nor was an apology warranted; by the time they would have been able to mount an operation the tangos would have been long gone anyway. It took until late that afternoon to get a helicopter up to search the coastline and nearby waters. Call it Murphy or incompetence, but five minutes into its search the helo developed engine trouble and had to return to its base. A full-scale search wasn"t launched until the next day, and the boat was never found. Nor were the bodies of the men who"d been in it.
I concentrated on the road less traveled. I called an a.n.a.lyst friend of mine at Langley (where the Christians In Action hang their hats) to see if the radar unit could be tracked down using the model and modification numbers I"d recorded. He pa.s.sed me off to a clerk at the NSA-aka No Such Agency-who found a dusty file drawer (metaphorically speaking, since the databases the secret spy agency keeps are all on computer) that indicated the unit was probably part of a shipment to Egypt replacing units destroyed by Israel in the Six-Day War back in the sixties. I took that information to a friend of mine at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Several hours of hold-Muzak later, I determined that the radar had been on a ZSU-23 (Zeus) gun vehicle that was still allegedly active in Egypt, even though it was older than the hills and several pyramids.
"Officially, it belongs to a unit near the Sudan border," said my friend. "My guess is that it was actually surplused ten years ago and they lost the paperwork. I"m looking at a satellite photo of the unit and there are zero Zeus guns."
The lousy records meant I"d hit a dead end, though even if the unit had been officially recorded as surplus it would have been hard to trace further. Its most likely disposition would have been "destroyed," which in Egyptian is another way of saying "sold on the black market."
On the other hand, the fact that the radar had been in Egypt at one time made the next little tidbit I picked up that much more interesting. After a check with the official sources showed that there were no vessels anywhere near the sh.o.r.e that night, I found a few unofficial sources to talk to. A conversation with a friend in the radar (not sonar) department of a never-to-be-named U.S. Navy ship revealed that there was a submarine in that area of the Mediterranean that night, albeit a decent distance away. And guess whose navy owned the sub?
Egypt"s would be correct.
Granted, the submarine, a Chinese-built Romeo-cla.s.s diesel boat, was reported to be about thirty miles away at the time. The sub-which by the way had been updated with the a.s.sistance of American companies and equipped with goodies like U.S. Harpoon missiles-could make about fifteen knots on the surface, and went a good bit slower underwater. It wasn"t inconceivable that it had been near the castle when I saw the light.
I dug into my little black book and made some more calls, easing my time on hold with a tall gla.s.s of Dr. Bombay"s boredom cure. The submarine had sailed from Alexandria-HQ for the Egyptian navy-about a week before and was due back in another week. It had traveled so far from home to prove to NATO that the Egyptians are real swell guys and can be counted on in a crisis, and therefore deserve a few billion more in military aid to beat the p.i.s.s out of their citizens and build air-conditioned villas for relatives of the ruling cla.s.s.
In other words, they were taking part in a NATO training exercise, just concluded. The submarine was now on its way home to Alexandria, a fact that I was able to confirm. My inquiries eventually brought me to the American naval attache a.s.signed to Egypt, a Captain Green. Naval attaches are basically spies in uniform. I know because I was one in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, and among my duties was dispensing advice on how to run the war against Pol Pot and taking a few pleasure cruises to see if my advice made any sense. These cruises were aboard varied combat riverine craft that I needed to keep the Mekong River open to resupply Phnom Penh with beans, bullets, oil and luxury items. They were so much fun I broke four ribs and punctured my lung. But the experience was worthwhile in the end, for it introduced me to the wonderful medicinal powers of Dr. Bombay, whose elixir has proved to be a cure-all for me.
Green knew about the submarine and the NATO exercise, but wasn"t particularly helpful when I asked what he knew about the commander. He kept asking why I wanted to know. I told him that I thought the submarine had been much closer to Sicily than was believed, and he quite rightly asked what the big deal was. I told him that I believed the submarine had been trying to rendezvous with someone onsh.o.r.e but didn"t get into the nuclear weapons angle. I didn"t know Green and I wasn"t sure exactly how far I could trust him. And besides, there wasn"t much sense accusing the Egyptian navy of being involved in a plot to steal nuclear weapons from the U.S. unless I had real proof.
Pus Face told me this himself, shouting so loudly over the phone I probably could have heard him without it, even though he"d flown up to Berlin to continue doing whatever it was he pretended to be doing. Pus Face"s att.i.tude toward the situation bounced back and forth like a pinball because he was constantly calculating the benefit-loss equation. Unlike Kohut, who now simply wanted everything to go away so he could retire in peace, Pus Face had ambitions for another two stars and then a career beyond the uniform. This had him twisting in several different directions at once. Catching a deadly terrorist leader would be a good thing-but causing Egypt to break off diplomatic relations with the U.S. would be a bad thing. Foiling a plot to steal a nuke from Sigonella was a good thing-but losing a chance to grab the thieves was bad. The more angles to the situation, the tighter the knots Pus Face tied himself in. Apparently, Pus Face was trying to take the lion"s share of the credit for stopping the theft, and telling anyone that some of the thieves may have gotten away wasn"t going to make him look good.
(Why would Pus Face take credit for that? Why would anyone believe that he deserved credit? Oh, dear reader, you have a lot to learn about the world.) Late in the day I got an update from Doc about our company party and the planned operation to visit Ali Goatf.u.c.k in Pakistan. One of our sources in Afghanistan had reported that Goatf.u.c.k was on his way to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, to meet with other resistance figures.
"May be a good place to grab him," I told Doc.
"That"s what Danny thought. He"s on his way. He should be on the ground by now."
I felt a twinge of regret. It wasn"t that I didn"t trust Danny and the three shooters he brought with him to do the job. I wanted to be there. But I couldn"t tell him to wait for me to hop on a plane and meet him. Parachuting into the middle of an ongoing operation has any number of drawbacks, beginning with the not-so-subtle message it sends that you don"t trust your men to do the job.
Doc sensed my disappointment and changed the subject. He was about to head from Germany to Afghanistan, to inspect our operation there personally.
"This will cheer you up. Apparently Goatf.u.c.k has spread the word that anyone who kills one of our guys will get ten thousand dollars American. Unless they manage to kill Marcinko. You"re worth a hundred grand. They have pictures of you on a little leaflet."
"Is it a good likeness?"
"Not bad. Must"ve gotten it out of a magazine somewhere."
Ah, it"s nice to be wanted. I"ve learned to take these things in stride as I"ve matured. The news even made me a bit nostalgic, reminding me of the Vietcong wanted poster that appeared in the tourist Mecca known as the Republic of Vietnam. The photo there came from an article on the SEALs and moi which appeared in a male magazine...available in our PXs in country (duh!). And you thought the commies only read those things for the articles.
"You better watch your a.s.s around me," Doc added. "I could use a hundred thousand. Donna has her eyes on a nice little speedboat."
Donna is his wife, which is why she"s known as "St. Donna" to anyone who knows Doc.
"You"re just jealous because your head"s worth less than mine," I told him.
"Ragheads never were much good judging character," he retorted.
Our project to track the shoes had not gotten very far. The manufacturer contracted with several companies that acted as distributors. There were only a dozen, but simply getting them to answer calls or email was proving to be a problem. There was a considerable language barrier, even when using email.
Nine of the twelve were located in Eastern Europe and Asia, where we would have little way of pressuring them to cooperate.
And then there was the tenth, M.E. Boots & Gear, which was located in Cairo.
Definitely worth a visit, if I were planning on being in Egypt anytime soon.
Which, I thought that evening, might not be a bad idea. I wanted to know who the h.e.l.l Saladin was, and while Danny might pick up something in Pakistan, tracing the shoes was our next best bet. At the same time, the possibility that the Egyptian submarine had been involved in the terrorists" operation bothered the h.e.l.l out of me. Egypt may not be our most dependable ally in the world, but it"s important strategically-and it has received a h.e.l.l of a lot of my tax dollars over the years. Involvement by the military in an operation against America? Almost unthinkable.
The key word in that sentence is "almost."
By the time I went down to find Trace and go out to dinner, I"d decided I"d go over to Egypt to poke around. Besides visiting the shoe distributor, I"d knock on a few office doors belonging to friends of mine to see if they knew anything about Saladin. And then I"d hop up to Alexandria and see what I could determine about the submarine.