There was still a wind from the north kicking up a light chop and he used the chop to look for shoals. Small breakers could be seen on the upwind side and the shoals were also marked by flatter water. He steered clear of these while keeping one eye on the GPS and checking around for signs of life.
He saw nothing on the transit to the target area. The water was clear of boats as well as islands. When he neared the target area he bore southeast, swinging in from the east towards the target and using the cover of the small islands northeast of the target, hopefully unsentineled, for cover.
He drove the Zod onto a slip of open beach and donned his gear. He’d loaded most of his weaponry in a waterproof bag, but he donned his armor and combat harness, with a USP .45 for a sidearm and MP-5 SPD on a friction strap. Then he put on his swim gear, including the rebreather, and slipped over the side, dragging the bag behind him.
The water was shallow around the keys but deep enough that, with the weights loaded into the rebreather harness, he could keep below water level. He crab-walked along the bottom, using the contour of the bottom and his compass, to move towards the northeast end of the island. He hit a couple of shoals and had to maneuver around them. He tried to stay eastward, where the map indicated thick mangrove cover.
The Kryton rebreather was good for nearly twenty-four hours and he could have made a much longer swim approach, but getting the yacht into position and all the rest had pushed him for time. It was nearly two AM by the time he started his swim and if the intel was correct — that the pickup was to be at around four — he barely had time to make the short swim from the Zod to the target, recon and do his raid. So he pushed his movement faster than he’d have liked, occasionally surfacing and using the waterproof NODs to check his position.
Finally he got to within a few dozen meters of the mangroves on the northeast side of the island and found a fairly deep channel in which to rerig. He dropped the rebreather, attaching his fins to it, and slowly surfaced, MP-5 in one hand, dive bag in the other, checking his position and looking for threats.
No one was in sight so he kicked towards the mangroves until his dive booties found soft ground. In moments he’d made his way into the outer rank of the mangroves and started making his way deeper into the thicket.
Mangroves were the major nurseries of tropical waters, small trees with complex root systems that acted to form cover for small fish and invertebrates. The roots curved downwards from the trunk and often were covered in oysters. In addition to being a nursery, they captured soil and held it in place, slowly building up land around their roots; many keys in the Caribbean were nothing more than the build-up from mangroves. They dropped their leaves regularly and the decaying leaves both supplied food and added to the material trapped in the roots. The roots prevented erosion from wind and wave, often being the only thing that survived hurricanes and kept the land from being completely swept away. All in all they were something of a miracle plant.
They also were a pain in the ass. The tangled roots constantly tried to trap him as he made his way through the thicket. The microclimates formed in the roots mostly consisted of hot, almost boiling hot it seemed, water that stank to high heaven from decay. Each step raised bubbles of foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas, and the oysters and barnacles on the roots tore at his wetsuit, shredding it before he could even get shot.
But they gave him cover as he made his way onto the land, finally passing into a narrow strip of sand where the mangroves ended and the sea grape still hadn’t started. He paused before he entered that strip, sticking his head out of the mangroves and looking around carefully as well as using his ears and nose to check for signs of threats. Since nothing was in sight, he slid out into the open area and considered the situation.
There was a small gap in the mangroves on the north side, a strip of dirty beach about three meters wide. On the south side of the island there was a strip of real beach. The charts indicated truly shallow water near the north opening, so it was unlikely the relief boat would come in that way. However, it was a natural place to put a sentry.
The small island was covered in scattered palms with a heavy undergrowth of sea grape. Sea grape wasn’t thorny or particularly unpleasant, but it was thick, too thick to walk through. However, it had open area under it. He paused and opened up his bag, pulling out equipment and checking it. The main thing he needed from it was the thermal imager. Nobody had ever made a thermal imager that could handle a dive approach, unlike standard NODs. He flipped up the NODs and swept the imager around, looking for hot spots. The immediate area seemed to be clear, so he slid the imager into a pouch on his combat harness, stored the bag in the mangroves and started crawling northeast under the grapes, cautiously probing for sentries.
He found the first one more or less where he expected, sitting on the sand of the north beach, looking out at the water and smoking a cigarette. The wind had shifted around to the south and Mike moved cautiously so as not to give away his position, choosing each placement of his hands and knees with care.
There was a narrow path running generally southeast to northwest and terminating at the water. He slid out into this open area carefully, checking to see that the sentry wasn’t in sight of any of his friends, then slid the MP-5 to burst and put three rounds in his head. The sentry flopped backwards so that he looked like he had simply fallen asleep, except for the twitching of his legs and arms. Mike wasn’t sure exactly why one guy in four was a twitcher, but it was pretty consistent. Make for a great doctoral dissertation some day.
He used the path, cautiously, probing southwest towards the target building, stopping from time to time to check with the thermal for heat. Finally, after a move of about fifty meters, he spotted a heat image and dropped down to crawl cautiously forward.
There was an open area running up from the beach. It was about seventy meters long and about fifty deep, in an irregular oval. The target building, which was lit, was on the north side, the beach on the south, and otherwise it was surrounded by sea grape. There were a few palm trees scattered around, but not many. The ground was sand covered liberally with palm fronds.
There was another sentry standing outside the main door of the small shack. He was looking pretty bored, but reasonably alert. He also was close enough that simply shooting him was likely to trigger the group on the interior.
Mike crawled backwards and into the sea grape, cautiously and silently making his way to the building under cover of the grapes. When he reached the building he found that the thicket came right up to the walls and moving through the thick portion at the edge was hard to do silently. He slowly slid up through the plants, though, until he could get an optical viewer over the edge of an open window and get a look inside the target building.
There were five Middle Eastern males in the room, lounging on cots or seated. At the far end of the room was a large bomb-looking thing on a rolling cart. It didn’t have the shape of a MIRV and his last class in Soviet nuclear weapons was a very faint memory. It more or less had to be the target, though. The light came from a Coleman lantern on a table.
He made his way back down through the sea grape, silently, then low crawled to the front edge of the thicket. He slid slowly out, keeping the MP-5 centered on the chest of the sentry, who was totally oblivious. The wind was from the south, filling the area with the sound of rustling palm trees and sea grape, and that rustling hid the faint noises he was making. It was dark by the sea grape, with shadows cast by the light from the windows; it was unlikely that the sentry would have seen him if he’d looked right at Mike’s position. Which he wasn’t doing, simply looking down towards the sea, clearly hoping that the boats would get here soon.