“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 Telaraña 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 rebreathers and start swimming. They were a half mile from shore. Hawke could see breakers on the white sand and a dark stand of palm trees Fitz had designated as their next rendezvous point.
Before he pulled the swim mask down over his face he did a full 360.
Finca Telaraña, General Manso de Herreras’s massive, grandiose home, sat on a spit of land jutting into the sea. It was a dark, hulking structure, bathed in the pale blue light of a scattering of stars. Hawke said a silent prayer that two men from his distant past were sleeping somewhere inside. But the finca was not their first objective. First they would launch a surprise raid on the building where Vicky was being held.
“Go,” Fitz said simply, and all eight men dove under the surface and started kicking for shore.
Little more than half a mile to the west, Boomer and his Bravo team were just entering the narrow shoals of the La Costa river. The flashing red and green navigational lights at either end of the jetties were unseen by the squad, which was swimming at a depth of twelve feet.
This is where the Draeger rebreathers were critical. Not a single bubble revealed the presence of seven powerful swimmers moving up the black channel. There were sure to be a lot more guards where Bravo was going than the empty stretch of beach Alpha was headed for.
Hawke emerged from the surf and saw two of his men sprinting for cover into the stand of palms. There was still no moon, but the ambient light of stars and white sand made him feel all too vulnerable. He flicked his HK to full fire and headed for the trees, knees pumping.
He found Fitz and the team already gathered and sorting out their weapons and gear. Each man was being given a Motorola headset and lip mike. There would be instant and silent communication among all the men in Alpha. Fitz’s squad would also monitor Boomer’s transmissions and vice versa. That way, the two teams would know each other’s every move.
Hawke noticed Fitz was wearing a big smile. He had a cigarette hanging from the left side of his mouth, unlit.
“What is it, Fitz?” he whispered. “You seem altogether too jolly.”
“I just had a happy thought on the swim in,” Fitz said. “Does anyone know today’s date?”
“May first!” one of the squad members said. It sounded like Froggy.
“May Day in Commieland!” another commando said.
“Fooking right it is.” Fitz beamed. “Which means our little buddies have been partying all day and all night. It’s 0230 hours. I should think most of them would be snug in their little beds by now.”
“With all ze Stoli and rich Cubano cigars,” Froggy said, “zey might be a little sluggish waking up, mais non?”
“A bit like Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Eve, surprising the British at Trenton,” Hawke said, smiling. “Bloody bastard.”
“May Day,” Fitz said with a grin. “Christmastime for Commies.”
“Bravo, you copy?” Fitz said into his mike.
“Copy,” Boomer said.
“Anything?”
“Just came up to take a look. Halfway up the river.”
“Tangos?”
“Six or seven, guarding the entrance, don’t look like they’re expecting company. No problem.”
“Twenty minutes to hostage site rendezvous, Boomer. Go.”
Tangos, or T’s, Hawke knew, was SEAL-speak for terrorists. It’s what they labeled all bad guys around the world. He felt his adrenaline surge. It had been a while since he’d found himself in a foreign locale, surrounded by so many men who would like to do him serious harm.
“Froggy,” Fitz said, “get your NV gear on and see if they’ve got pickets out here.”
“Aye, aye,” Froggy said. Hawke watched the wide little Frenchman strap the night-vision equipment on his head and then slip out of the stand of trees. He darted across the beach, staying low, for about two hundred yards. Then he checked up and ducked behind some large scrub palms and bushes.
“Two tangos in a parked ATV,” Froggy said. “Shucking and jiving, mon ami.”
“Have you got a head shot? A clear plink?”
“Aye on both.”