“No thanks. I have a ride. Good luck.”
Twenty minutes later, they exited the Washington Beltway onto I-95 South. The female voice on the Garmin instructed them to take Exit 84A and merge onto I-295 South.
Approximately three and a half hours after they left D.C., the three sicarios arrived in Virginia Beach. It was almost 9 p.m., so Osito used his iPhone to consult Yelp.com and find a place to eat. He chose the Abbey Road Pub on Twenty-Second Street, because his older brother was a Beatles fan and Abbey Road was one of the CDs that played over and over in the bedroom they shared growing up. The three men ordered shrimp cocktails to start, followed by the prime rib au jus.
A quartet of middle-aged gringos played Beatles songs on a little stage at the end of the room. Osito thought their rendition of “Blackbird” with mandolin accompaniment was particularly good. He sang along on the final verse, and when they left, tipped the quartet twenty dollars.
An hour later, their bellies full, the Garmin directed them to Tom Crocker’s residence on Cherry Oak Lane. They found a dark street with two-story gray clapboard houses spaced at least fifty feet apart, surrounded by tall trees and backed with marshland.
“Quieto,” Guapo commented.
“Muy quieto. Sí.”
Number 2040 was set a hundred yards back from the road behind a patch of oak and poplar trees. As they passed, Guapo glimpsed yellow light glowing on either side of the front door and inside the house on the first floor. He parked farther down the street near some tall trees and got out. He saw no sign of people, just trees swaying in the breeze, and the moon playing hide-and-seek behind high clouds.
A dog barked vigorously from inside Crocker’s house when he rang the bell. No one answered. Glancing at the houses to the left and right, he noticed that both were completely dark and there were no cars in either driveway.
Guapo glanced at his watch, which read 10:16, then circled to his left to the garage, which was empty. Continuing to the back of the house, he peered through a glass door and saw a single light on in the kitchen and a German shepherd barking from a doorway behind it.
Returning to the SUV, he said in Spanish, “No one’s home.”
“We should break in and wait inside,” Osito suggested. “That way we can drink his beer.”
“Gringo beer tastes like piss. We’ll wait here.”
The copilot of the unmarked C-23 Sherpa turned to Crocker, sitting on a bench along the fuselage, and held up ten fingers. Crocker nodded and looked at his watch. It was 0220 and the altimeter indicated that they were flying at 8,223 feet.
The SEALs had used the thirty-odd minutes of the flight to don their jump gear and conduct riggers’ checks on the parachutes to make sure they were folded and packed properly, then inventory their first-, second-, and third-line gear.
Each man carried a watertight weapons bag with Heckler & Koch 45 automatic pistols with Ti-RANT suppressors, MP7A1 submachine guns with extended forty-round magazines, optics, flashlights, and four-inch silencers. Also included in their first-line gear were wet suits, NVGs, pocketknives, Leatherman knives with some 550 cord wrapped around the handles, handheld radios, dummy cord, compasses with self-luminous tritium light sources, Phoenix IR strobe beacons that issued a personal combat identification (CID) that was invisible to the naked eye but could be spotted through NVGs at twenty miles away, Oceanic OC1 Titanium Dive Computer watches, and Rockwell PSN-11 Precision Lightweight GPS receivers.
The secure (Y-code) differentials on the GPS units allowed the users to receive 24/7 2-D and 3-D positioning anywhere on the planet with the help of twenty-two military satellites without giving up the users’ location. They were accurate to within less than a yard and weighed a mere 2.7 pounds each with batteries installed.
As the lead swimmer, Akil also wore a special miniature underwater GPS (MUGR) with position and navigational information that would allow the team to enter the Almendares River without coming up to the surface. It was preprogrammed with charts of the river and maps of the city that showed the target location (Clínico Central Cira García) and the exfil point a block and a half away.
Second-line gear carried in their backpacks included rebreathing Drägers, dive masks, fins, six extra magazines for each weapon, grenades (M18s and M67s), strobe lights, blowout patches, MREs, gloves, and water purification tablets.
Each man also carried third-line gear appropriate to his specific role on the team. Crocker, as the corpsman, packed an emergency medical kit, which included multi-trauma dressings and a needle for a possible thoracentesis. Suárez, as the team breacher, had various explosives, timers, detonators, and fuses.
In his pack, Mancini lugged a high-tech pneumatically fired grappling hook called a Rescue Air Initiated Launch (RAIL), which consisted of a black cannon about the size of a man’s arm that could launch a metal grappling claw attached to a nylon-jacketed line over 150 feet.
Crocker helped Akil secure the F47OU Combat Rubber Raiding Craft (CRRC or Zodiac) to the wooden platform, which involved inflating the 75-inch-wide by 185-inch-long boat with CO2 cartridges, then tying the IR chemical light to the bow and stern, fastening three paddles to the side, and stowing the air pump and hose in the pockets in the right front and left rear. Next they placed a thirteen-by-thirty-six-inch piece of honeycomb on the floor of the boat and stowed and secured the engine and fuel tanks. Finally they lashed the CRRC to the platform, secured a G-12 cargo parachute with the rise compartment facing up, then installed a 5,000-pound M-1 release.
Once that was accomplished, Crocker huddled the men together in the rear of the fuselage and went over last-minute details.
“We’re gonna deploy our chutes low, at two thousand feet. The CRRC is going down first. Hopefully it makes it intact. If it goes down like a lawn dart and disappears into the water, the aircraft will drop us at an alternative DZ and we’ll have to swim in turtle-back.”
“Why didn’t we bring an extra rubber ducky?” Akil asked.
“Because they didn’t have one,” Mancini growled.
“Assuming the Zodiac makes it,” continued Crocker, “we’re gonna ride to within fifteen hundred yards of the coast and swim from there. Akil is carrying the MUGR. He’ll lead the way. Once we enter the river, we’re gonna swim over two tunnels, then under the Calle Eleven Bridge. The river will bend sharply to our left. That’s where we surface, in the vicinity of Parque Almendares.”
“Currents and tide could be an issue, so if we reach a second bridge, the Calle Forty-Two Bridge, we know we’ve gone too far,” Akil pointed out.
“Correct,” Crocker shouted over the engines. “The clinic is four blocks west of the park on Avenida Forty-One. Akil will be primary point to and from the target.”
“What do we do if we’re compromised by dogs, guards, or policemen?” Mancini asked.
“We take ’em out. We can’t risk capture. Each of us is carrying a couple kill pills. I don’t need to tell you what they’re for.”
“What about civilians?”
“Situation dictates. Use your judgment.”
“What are our actions at the objective?” Suárez asked.
“We conduct a thorough search for the hostage. It’s a three-story structure. CIA believes that the operating rooms are on the third deck. We find her, secure her, kill the fucking scumbag Jackal if we can find him, and get the fuck out of there. Then we hightail it to the exfil point, which is in front of a small park a block and a half southeast. We’re supposed to rendezvous with a guy named Flores, who will be driving a small blue-and-white tourist bus with ‘Vizul’ written on it.”
“Flores.”
“Yeah, Flores. He’s gonna put us on a DHL cargo jet that will take us to Miami.”