The airplane’s entire fuselage and wings were painted matte black. There were no lights winking on her wingtips, none showing at her tail or nose. Even the lights in the cockpit were a muted shade of red, barely visible from the outside.
The route of flight had taken them north out over the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, then Archangel veered northwest out over the Caribbean Sea. She’d skirt the southern coasts of the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, then vector due north toward the southwest coast of Cuba.
Most of the guys were sitting along rows of canvas sling chairs that lined the fuselage interior or resting atop greasy pallets on the floor. Everyone was dressed in dark camouflage tigerstripes, wearing nothing reflective, faces blacked out with camo warpaint. Thunder and Lightning would be invisible when they floated down from the heavens toward their objective.
In addition to the two C-130 pilots up front and the jumpmaster, there was a platoon of commandos aboard. The platoon consisted of two seven-man squads. Fitz McCoy would lead Alpha squad. Bravo was under the command of Charlie Rainwater, known to his men as Boomer.
They’d been airborne for over an hour. Hawke was checking and rechecking his weapons and ammo. In a coin toss on the runway, he had been assigned to McCoy’s squad, while Stoke would tag along with his old XO, Boomer. Since Hawke was easily the least experienced member of the counterterrorist team, he’d promised Fitz he’d stay right by his side.
In what seemed like no time at all, the green light came on, and the jumpmaster was pointing at Fitz’s squad.
Fitz, sitting next to Hawke, took a long drag on his cigarette and said, “Saddle up, Commander. We’ll dip on down to twenty thousand feet now, reduce our airspeed, and then we go.”
“Five minutes!” the captain said over the intercom.
Hawke nodded. He was thinking about his last jump. He didn’t particularly want to think about it, but it kept popping up. He felt the plane dropping and cinched up the straps crossing his chest. In addition to his chute, he was carrying a lot of gear. Still, he was probably the lightest man going out.
He had an MP5, the HK 9mm submachine gun favored by SEALs, and a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol, both fitted with what the Yanks called hush puppies or silencers. He also had stun grenades and Willy-Peters hanging like grape clusters from his web belt. Willy-Peters were white phosphorus grenades, lethal and terrifying to an enemy when used.
“Two minutes!” The huge ramp began to lower and the cavernous interior was suddenly filled with a roaring wind. “Ramp open and locked,” the jumpmaster said.
Hawke eyed the jump/caution light. It was glowing crimson. He rechecked his Draeger for the third time. Since they’d be jumping into the sea and swimming ashore, all the men were equipped with Draegers. These German-made oxygen-rebreathing units produced no bubbles and made no sound. That made them ideal for secret insertions like this one. Hawke was feeling especially grateful for his tour with the SBS unit of the Royal Marines. He’d trained with all of this gear before.
Most of it, anyway.
Weight was a big problem in the thin air of high-altitude jumps. Many of these men would be going out the door with a hundred pounds or more strapped to their bodies. Two men were going out, carrying two IBS boats complete with motors. In SEAL lingo, IBS stood for Inflatable Boat, Small. Once they’d exfiltrated, each one was capable of carrying a seven-man squad, plus, in an extraction, a few hostages.
The jump alarm bell signaled one minute to drop.
Hawke used that minute to turn everything over in his mind once more. In the plan, worked out over the course of the afternoon, the two IBS boats would rendezvous with Nighthawke, the seventy-foot-long offshore powerboat carried aboard Blackhawke. The jet black oceangoing speedboat, two-time winner of the Miami–Nassau race, was capable of speeds in excess of one hundred knots per hour.
Nighthawke’s huge cockpit and hold below could easily accommodate twenty people. In the likely event of trouble, Hawke had instructed Tom Quick to mount a fifty-caliber machine gun on the stern deck.
If the IBS boats could make it safely to the designated rendezvous, Nighthawke could easily outrun the fastest Cuban pursuit craft. And deliver the two teams safely to the mother ship, Blackhawke, which would be cruising innocently twenty miles offshore. That was the plan anyway and—Hawke’s musings were interrupted—the jump light! It flashed from crimson to green.
The jumpmaster pointed at Fitz and said, “Good hunting, Fitz. Go!”
Hawke stood and followed his squad to the rear. One by one the five men in front of him strolled down the oily ramp of the C-130 and dove off into the blackness of the nighttime sky. It was Hawke’s turn. He hesitated a second and instantly felt Fitz’s hand on his shoulder.
“You okay, Commander?” Fitz shouted over the roaring wind.
By way of answering, Hawke stepped off the ramp.
His first sensation was that of the freezing slipstream hitting him like a wall of ice. Then the huge black airplane overhead was gone and he looked down. Nothing below but pitch black nothing. He checked the altimeter on his wrist. Four miles up. He pulled his ripcord.
He felt the chute slide out of his backpack and separate.
Instantly, he was yanked violently upwards in his harness. Then, just as he prepared to settle in and enjoy the ride, he veered sharply left and began to descend in a ferocious, out-of-control spiral. Looking skyward, he saw that one of the cells in his canopy had collapsed.
“Bloody hell!” he shouted in the darkness. This was not a good start. He yanked on the guidelines, desperately trying to fill the canopy with air. It didn’t happen. What happened is that the crazy corkscrewing continued. Then two more cells collapsed and the chute fluttering above him folded neatly in half. He was at nineteen thousand feet and plummeting in free-fall. His body felt suddenly very cold, and he realized he’d broken into a sweat.
All right, Hawke thought, he’d practiced this before. This was, in SBS parlance stolen from the SEALs, SNAFU. Situation Normal All Fucked Up. But it was not yet FUBAR, which translated to Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. He had a backup.
Hawke did a cutaway, jettisoned the useless chute, and let himself relax into free-fall again. He was now just under fifteen thousand feet, flying on cruise control. He spent the next ten seconds that way, then he yanked the ripcord on his second chute.
The flat chute opened beautifully.
He began a controlled descent of lazy spirals in the blackness. It reminded him of why he’d enjoyed some of his jump training at SBS. Checking his compass and altimeter, he determined that he was descending through ten thousand feet, about five miles from splash-down in the two-hundred-square-yard patch of ocean designated LZ Liberty. Boomer’s Bravo squad was going into LZ Nautilus a quarter of a mile away.
Alpha squad’s primary mission was to locate the hostage. Bravo was going to create an explosive “diversion” of sorts when the time came for both squads to link up and go in for the snatch and grab.
Five minutes later, Alex could make out the black humped outline of the island called Telarana and the southwest coast of Cuba beyond it. He saw phosphorescent white rollers gently breaking along the island’s beaches. He estimated he had about a fifteen-minute glide remaining, so he just hung in his harness and enjoyed the view.
He was so relaxed he was startled to hear canopies fluttering all around him and the sound of men splashing down just under him. He pulled the cord that inflated his BCD vest, a buoyancy compensator device, then initiated a series of S turns to eat up speed and waited for his boots to get wet. Five seconds later, he flared up and hit the water.
He saw black faces bobbing all around him, white teeth smiling at him. He heard a whoosh as the IBS partially inflated. One man would stay offshore with the rubberized inflatable. His main problem would be staying out of the path of the Cuban patrol boat.
“You’re a bit late,” one of the faces said.
“Sorry, Fitz,” Alex said. “Minor equipment problem.”
“I noticed. Good recovery,” Fitz said. “We got lucky. We just missed landing on the fooking roof of a Cuban patrol boat. He’s gone round that point now, but he’ll be back.”
Fitz did a quick head count. Every man in Alpha had made it to the LZ. It was time to don the Draeger oxygen
