only by the phosphorescence in the ocean. They could see the next roller coming straight at them, maybe eight feet high. And they felt the bow rise, until Rick bellowed above the buffeting wind,
All eight of them grabbed and leaped, floundering inboard with the boat's bow rising upward. Ron Wallace was first. He hit the starter and the big twin Yamahas roared. The other three dived onto the bow and hung on.
In the other boat, Ed Segal hit the starter two seconds behind Ron. Both helmsmen hit the button to lower the engines fully and simultaneously rammed open the throttle. They surged up the face of the wave, but in the rush for the bow, now rising forty-five degrees from the horizontal, Mike Hook slipped and slithered over the side, half in the water, half out, still hanging on, but with only one hand.
With a totally outrageous display of strength, Rick Hunter, lying flat on the short curved bow, grabbed Mike's elbow, left-handed, and hauled him back on board.
And now the wave was breaking, and threatening to turn the boat over backward, but Ed held the throttle open, and suddenly they burst through the crest in a gale of windswept foam and roared forward into the calmer waters beyond the surf.
Rick glanced right and saw Ron Wallace come surging toward him, and the big Zodiacs bumped together.
'Hell, Rick, that was beyond the call of duty,' yelled Dallas.
'Duty?' called Mike Hook. 'He just saved my fucking life.'
'Shut up, Hook,' said the Commander, 'or I'll have you charged with desertion in the face of the enemy…now fall in, guys, and follow me through the Tamar Pass…it's gonna be a little rougher out there…and we got an eight- mile run along the shore into the Sound…just follow our speed. We're staying real close to the shore.'
'We turning in at White Rock Point?' asked Dallas.
'No choice, kid. And anyway, if there's any Args still up there, you can be damn certain they're pretty busy staring at that airfield right now. We'll just creep around slowly, but I'm damn sure that garrison is deserted.'
Dallas and his team fell in, line astern, and Rick ordered Ed to make for the flashing light up ahead at flank speed. 'This channel's deserted,' he said. 'We gotta make time while we can. It's 0400 and we need shelter before 0600 when it starts to get light.'
The twenty-four-foot Zodiacs made for the pass, making twenty-five knots through the short, choppy sea, slicing through the tops of the waves, riding the stump caused by the howling propellers.
Ed Segal, steering the lead boat, could see the flashing light coming up, on his starboard bow, and arrowed the Zodiac forward, coming off red two degrees, to leave it a hundred yards off his beam. And as he did so, they felt the swell of the open ocean deepen, and the bow rode up alarmingly.
They surged down into the trough, and Ed Segal, with a seaman's instinct, rammed back the throttle just in time, cutting the speed instantly back to five knots, allowing them to ride up the incoming wave rather than plummet headlong into its front wall and take a half ton of green water on board.
In another age, Commander Rick Hunter would surely have stood shoulder to shoulder with Jones in the burning
They chugged through the seething tide for another four hundred yards, then made their ninety-degree hard turn to starboard. Right now they were being pursued by a driving four-knot Atlantic surge on their port quarter. It made steering tough because it threatened to nudge the boat ever inshore, toward the rocks.
But Segal and Hunter were its masters. Rick ordered the helmsman to come off eight degrees from their due east, zero-nine-zero course…
Hard astern the sky was still lit up by the burning ammunition store, but right ahead there was a heavy darkness, visibility not twenty feet, even with a bright western horizon. According to the softly lit GPS they were only 350 yards offshore, but the depth gauge showed a hundred feet of water.
This was surely the most dangerous part of the operation — exposed out here right off the north shore of West Falkland, easy prey for any Argentinian warship or helicopter. The slightest suspicion of the SEALs' presence would have put the entire Argentinian Army, Navy, and Air Force into a collective war dance swearing vengeance. Rick Hunter shoved the thought to the back of his mind.
And Ed Segal and Ron Wallace kept going forward into the night, confident of the U.S. military intelligence, sure of their leader, and certain these seas were utterly deserted, as specified by SPECWARCOM in their last satellite communication.
The Argentine military had switched off here in the waters north of the Falkland Islands. Their enemy had gone home, and so far as they could see, nothing else was threatening — except for a band of sheep-stealing brigands who appeared to have kidnapped a four-man patrol somewhere to the landward side of Port Sussex over on East Falkland, twenty miles away from Pebble.
The calm in these northern waters was, of course, a situation that would hold only for perhaps four or five more hours, until the Air Force ground staff established incontrovertible evidence that someone had blown the bombers on the Pebble Island air base. And then all hell might break loose. Nothing was more important for Rick Hunter than to get as far away from here as possible, and pray that SEAL Team Two would blow up Mare Harbor and everything in it sometime this morning and give his guys a bit of breathing room.
They pressed on along the coast, gaining some shelter from the offshore wind, which had now backed around to the southwest. But it was still freezing cold, and whoever had insisted the SEALs wear their wet suits for this entire operation deserved, in Commander Hunter's opinion, some kind of a medal.
The maximum possible speed, without swamping the boat and jolting the hell out of everyone, was still fifteen knots. The Zodiacs were outstanding in a sea, once they were riding the stump of the Yamahas, driving smoothly along the wave tops, drawing less than a foot of water. The trick was to get the speed dead right — thirteen knots would have been choppier as the boat sagged into the water, but eighteen knots would have thrown them out of tune with the quartering sea. On second thought, Rick Hunter decided, both helmsmen, Ed and Ron, deserved medals.
Huddled behind the windshields, trying to keep down out of the cold, the U.S. Navy SEAL team took another half hour to make White Rock Point. They never saw a boat, never heard an aircraft, never even saw a light, neither onshore nor at sea.
They cut back the throttles at the sight of the flashing beacon on the point, and came trundling slowly over the shallow kelp beds with engines slightly raised, and into Falkland Sound. Rick Hunter ordered a course change to one-seven-zero to bring them back into the south-running channel, and at this speed, on much calmer waters, they made hardly a sound, even in the shattering silence of the night.
But they did make some sound, and an alert military surveillance system would have picked it up. Commander Hunter could only ascertain there was no one around, that the Argentinians had abandoned all forms of observation in the remote, scarcely populated northern waters of both West and East Falkland. Coronado, as usual, was correct.
After two miles, running at only eight knots, Commander Hunter ordered another change—'Two-two-five, Eddie…we want to head down the shore of West Falkland, slowly, for about eight miles. That's when we turn away and find shelter…'
'You know where we do that, sir?' asked Ed Segal.
'Sure,' said the Commander. 'We'll head into Many Branch Harbor…that's to our right, a landlocked bay with only one narrow entrance…'
'Wouldn't want to get caught in there, would we?' said Mike Hook. 'Not with only one way out.'
'It would be almost impossible to get caught in there,' said Rick. 'It has probably six narrow bays within the bay, three of them a couple miles long. And there's probably another three just as sheltered. Plus the place is surrounded by mountains, some high, some lower, but protective hills. We could hole up in there for a month and never be found.'
