The first of two U.S. Navy CODs (Carrier On Delivery) thundered down the active runway at the sprawling Pensacola Air Station on this dark and humid night. The aircraft, a derivative of the mighty Grumman E-2C Hawkeye, the largest and most expensive U.S. aircraft able to land on carriers, banked left over Hovey Road, then proceeded out over the Big Lagoon, heading southwest over the Gulf of Mexico.
In the normal course of its duties, the COD would be crammed with mail for the carrier's 6,000 crew, and spare parts. But tonight, the former combat fighter pilot Lt. Comdr. Steve Ghutzman was flying a very different cargo— sixteen armed U.S. Navy SEALs, plus thirty-six satchels each containing thirty kg of the most modern explosive in the U.S. arsenal, a diabolical cocktail of RDX (Research Developed Explosive), TNT (Trinitrotoluene), and Aluminum to provide an ultraheavy blast effect. The total weight of high-explosives contained in the satchels was a little over one ton.
To take the most recent instance of a massive warship being sunk by explosives, in 1982, when Adm. Sandy Woodward's force sank Argentina's cruiser, the General Belgrano, in the Falklands War. The torpedo that broke her back contained approximately one-tenth of the explosive currently flying over the Gulf of Mexico in the COD.
Tucked in the aircraft's hold were two of the four outboard inflatables that would be used in the operation, plus five radio transmitters.
The first two seats on the port side of the COD were occupied by the Commanding Officer of the operation, Lt. Comdr. Bill Peavey, a big, powerful former USC slugging third baseman. He was a remarkable physical presence, 6 feet 4 inches, 210 pounds of blue twisted steel. Came from San Francisco, where his father, the eminent attorney Bill Peavey Jr., ran a successful law practice.
The SEAL instructors at Coronado soon selected the former Trojan baseball star as a potential team leader. He had applied to join the SEALs at the age of twenty-seven after only five years in the Navy, and they saw him coming. He was a Lieutenant Commander at thirty-two and now, one year later, this was his first full command of a Special Forces operation.
He sat in that front seat surrounded by charts and maps of the jungle that surrounds the Gatun Lake. He spent most of the time dictating into the slim microphone connected to his computer, and making detailed pencil notes on a checklist he was compiling for all four of his principal teams, the eight-man recce squad, the two bomb- lashing groups, and the protection wing.
Right now he was locked into the diagram of the upper lock gates, the lakeward pair, which hold back several billion tons of deep water stretching over a giant area of 164 square miles, through which runs the route of the Canal. The gates that hold back the lake from the lock chambers were seven feet thick with a railed walkway along the top. Each gate was attached by three colossal hinges, six hinges in total, three on each side. It was the destruction of these cast-iron monsters, each one seven feet in height, that held the key to Bill's first operation.
And he read the Navy engineers' report with fascination. The blast from the explosion will create severe oscillation of the water, and massive shock waves to the area of the hinges, precisely like a depth charge, but so powerful it will have repercussions for ANY ship in the immediate vicinity. Lt. Comdr. Peavey's diver, CPO Chris O'Riordan would go in with the recce party on the first night to measure accurate underwater distances, down from the top of the gates, from which each of the six bombs would hang, resting hard against their designated hinge.
Bill Peavey tried to imagine a force of ten times the power of that which put the 13,500-ton Belgrano on the bottom of the South Atlantic, and he thought, privately, that it might not be smart to get within two miles of that blast when the SEALs finally let it rip.
His 21/C Lt. Patrick Hogan Rougeau, a thirty-six-year-old former tennis professional from Massachusetts, was sitting right behind him in company with another member of the five-man command team, Lt. Brantley Jordan from Texas, who would lead the bomb-lashing team on the near side of the lock. Lieutenant Rougeau, like the boss, Bill Peavey, had joined the Navy late, but he was a fitness fanatic, applied to join the SEALs at the age of twenty-six, and sailed through the murderous Basic Underwater Demolition (BUDs) indoctrination course with as much ease as was humanly possible; that is, it damn nearly killed him, but not quite, and when the dust cleared, he was still conscious, and still standing. Which was a whole lot more than could be said for most of the others.
Patrick Rougeau was not only a radio expert, he was also an underwater expert, who had immediately volunteered to make the first dive into the lake. However, he was also an acknowledged expert with the heavy machine gun and Lieutenant Commander Peavey refused to risk him being eaten by a crocodile.
'CPO O'Riordan can do that,' he had said. 'No crocodile in his right mind would risk breaking his teeth on that little son of a bitch.'
He referred to the legendary toughness of the ex-street fighter from Chicago's South Side, Navy boxing champion, and all-around professional hard man, O'Riordan, who was as fast and as lethal with a combat knife as any SEAL who had ever lived.
At the age of twenty, he had fought on Saddam's oil rig, the one the SEALs ultimately blew up in the Gulf War. The one where not one of the Iraqi Guard survived the SEALs savage opening assault from the water.
The three other young SEAL officers on the command team, Lts. Zane Green, Chris Hall, and Brian Slocum, were riding out to the carrier in the second COD, which had left Pensacola thirty minutes in arrears. Right now, both aircraft had reached their cruising height of 30,000 feet and were making 300 knots out toward the Cayman Trench, crossing high above the western end of Cuba. The lead COD expected to touch down on the Eisenhower's flight deck at half past eight. Rendezvous point: 11.80' N, 81.50' W, 1,320 miles south of Pensacola, 200 miles off the northern coast of Panama, 220 miles east of the coast of Nicaragua.
Every one of the SEALs carried a map of the northern Gatun Lake and the Colon Coast, plus a diagram of the locks, showing how millions of tons of concrete form a sixty-foot-thick wall separating the inward and outward locks, two identical constructions, one for Pacific-bound ships going up, one for Atlantic-bound ships coming down.
By the time they landed, every one of the SEALs on this time-stressed operation would understand with total clarity the precise mission, the attack, and the exit. SEAL Commanders do not approve of even the most junior member of an assault party being anything less than expert on the objectives.
They studied, high above the blue, deceptively deep and rough Caribbean, each man much within himself as they headed ever closer to the hot, scarcely populated northern jungles of the Republic of Panama. But first the landing on the carrier, always difficult, but especially so in this big, heavy aircraft, with its eighty-foot wingspan and famously difficult torque created by the turboprops.
In the clear skies, the pilot and his first officer picked up the Eisenhower some twenty miles out, steaming southwest, with a destroyer positioned a half mile off her starboard bow.
Ears popped as the COD lost height, cutting its speed, keeping level, as it came under the control of the carrier's tower. Through the cockpit window, the landing space looked like a postage stamp and the sea was plainly rough. A one-and-a-half-degree motion in the center of a carrier represents a thirty foot rise and fall on the stern, and it was all of that today.
Lieutenant Commander Ghutzman, sunglasses on, staring through the glare of the subtropical sun, throttled back, trying to judge the pitch of the deck. The speed of the aircraft dropped to 120 knots. They were about a half mile short of the carrier now, and Steve throttled back some more.
With the great yawning expanse of the Eisenhower's stern now stark before him, he cut the speed to one hundred miles an hour right above the wake. The ship was making thirty knots, which made the COD seem even slower, and as they came in there was not a single passenger who did not believe they were going so slowly they must surely drop straight into the churning white water below.
But Steve had done this a few times before—187 times, to be precise — and, with the steel loop streaming out behind, he opened the throttles and rammed the wheels down onto the deck, engines howling, ready to scream down the runway and take off instantly if they missed the hook. Anything to avoid flopping over the edge with no speed, and crashing under the keel of the carrier.
But they all felt the jolt, as the hook grabbed and held, and the aircraft went from seventy knots to dead- stopped in 2.9 seconds. In the back, sixteen hearts restarted.
The COD taxied to its normal parking space below the island for refueling, unloading through the stern ramp, and then reloading with mail, and a few personnel returning to base.
The flight deck crews moved back to their allotted positions in readiness for the arrival of the second COD
