“Our patrol craft have gotten out, all but two,” said Saed.
He held up a satellite phone. “The submarine is gone. I’ve SATAN’S TAIL
339
passed the order to the Sharia to attack the aircraft carrier.
They will not fail.”
“Tell them instead to attack Satan’s Tail,” Ali told him.
“But—”
“Do it. Then gather every man you can find and get them into fishing boats. Quickly!” he yelled. “We have only a little time.”
DANNY SELECTED FULL MAGNIFICATION IN THE VISOR, LOOKING
at the rocks.
“Yeah, it’s definitely booby-trapped,” he told Boston, who’d first pointed it out. “Question is, why would they bother?”
“Worth finding out, don’t you think?” asked the sergeant.
“All right, we’ll come back.” He turned to one of the Marines nearby and told him to watch the cave entrance.
“It’s booby-trapped, so stay back, and keep everybody else back,” added Danny.
“Captain, the lieutenant wants to talk to you,” said Liu.
“I’m giving her my helmet.”
“All right.”
“Captain?”
“Yeah, Dancer, go ahead.”
“We think we’ve found the headquarters in Building Two here. I’m getting the demolition team to look at it now, with one of your men. You want to come and see?”
The buildings were about two hundred yards to the east.
“I’ll be along in a few minutes, once we’re sure we have this side of the camp secured. Have you heard from the Shark Boat on the Osprey rescue?”
“Negative. My whole communication system is gone,”
she said. “Even the Marine unit.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“My best guess is they used it to store weapons and ammo, Cap,” said Boston. “Couple of boxes of ammo for AK47s on the ground there. Might’ve grabbed them when we were coming.”
340
DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
“All right. Take your team and hook up with the Navy shore party moving in from the west off the Shark Boat,”
Danny told him. “I’m going to go with Pretty Boy and see what Dancer has.”
“She’s hot,” said Boston. “For a Marine.”
“I’ll forget you said that, Sergeant,” snapped Danny.
Aboard the Wisconsin
0015
AS THE SITUATION ON SHORE SETTLED DOWN, ZEN TURNED HIS
attention to the water and the spot where the Osprey had crashed, about a half mile west from the mooring area. He crisscrossed as slowly as possible overhead, hoping the infrared sensors would pick up something in the water he could direct the Shark Boat’s crews to. The Navy craft had sent two small inflatable boats to the area; Zen could talk to them by communicating with the ship’s commander via one of the portable Dreamland communication systems. He took a first pass at three thousand feet, circling back and dropping lower, working the Flighthawk down through two thousand.
He activated the C3 search-and-rescue mode, directing the Flighthawk’s computer to look for men in the water. The computer began beeping immediately, drawing a box about three hundred yards from the northernmost boat.
Zen vectored the rescuers toward them and pushed the Flighthawk even lower, edging down close to five hundred feet. His airspeed bled off and he got a stall warning, C3 getting nervous.
“Boat Two has recovered one body,” reported the Shark Boat captain after he passed along the coordinates. “Pretty mangled.”
“Flighthawk leader.”
DOG LOOKED AT THE RADAR PLOT FROM BAKER-BAKER TWO
showing the two flights of Yemen MiGs. The aircraft had SATAN’S TAIL
341
been flying on the same course for nearly five minutes; there seemed no doubt they were flying toward the assault area.
“Baker-Baker Two, this is Wisconsin. Bree, intercept those MiGs. I don’t want them in the assault area.”
“And if they don’t turn back?”
“Direct them to. If they arm their weapons, engage and shoot them down.”
“Baker-Baker. Will do.”
“You don’t think that’s too aggressive, Colonel?” asked the copilot.
“I’ve already lost an aircraft and its crew,” replied Dog. “I don’t intend on losing any others.”
Northern Somalia,
on the ground
0021
DEAD BODIES LAY ON BOTH SIDES OF THE WOODEN PLANKS ON
the rock-strewn coastline. More than three dozen pirates had been killed, many by the bombardment. Several corpses were missing large parts of their anatomy. A head had landed on the rocks, eyes open, face contorted with pain, as if the man were emerging from hell below.
Danny stared at it, not unnerved exactly, but arrested by the grotesqueness of war and death. The man was his enemy, and surely would have killed him without remorse. Yet Danny felt a stab of pity for him. The absurd futility captured by the man’s death stare reached through the body armor Danny wore, reached past the tough shell he donned to do his job. The Air Force captain had seen much brutality in the past few years—he’d been in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia before joining Whiplash, and had come to know the many ways a corpse could be mangled. But each time he faced death again, there was something fresh, something un-expected, something still capable of eliciting pity and even sorrow.
342
DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
He reminded himself what his job was and plunged on, following the Marine private across the wooden planks that formed a narrow and crude boardwalk to the main area of the compound. There were more bodies here, including two that belonged to Americans. Danny saw the young man who’d been ahead of him stop, then pitch forward to his hands and knees.
Danny gave him a moment, then leaned down close to his ear.
“Take a second,” he told the young Marine. “But then you have to move on. For yourself. You can’t do anything for them now. We’ll grieve later.”
“Yes, sir,” said the Marine, voice choked with tears.
Danny rose and walked alone toward the corner of a nearby building, where another member of the team crouched with an M249 machine gun. Calling the structure a building was optimistic; it was more a hovel that leaned against the side of the hill.
“Down here, Danny,” said Dancer.
He spotted her near the largest of the buildings, on the side overlooking one of the docks. He made his way down quickly.
“We have no more resistance, or at least they’ve stopped firing,” she said. “There are two speedboats, some other small open boats tied up in the water on that side there. The Abner Read has taken care of the hulks. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in them.” She turned and pointed to the boats in the water. “This building looks like a command post. There’s radio equipment and other gear inside. We didn’t see any booby traps.”
“It’s clean,” Liu said behind her.
“All right,” said Danny. “Next objective is the cave where the submarine was, beyond that dock and the breakwater there.
Piranha reports no vessels inside, but there may be people.”
“I’d like a chance to help in the search for our people on the Osprey,” said Dancer. “I think we should do that first.”
“I think we can assist the search while we’re looking for SATAN’S TAIL
343
an entrance to the pen,” Danny told her. “We need to get the divers in before we take on the cave. The Shark Boat too. I don’t want to start an assault, or a possible assault, until we have all the possible entrances covered anyway. I’ll check on what the possibilities are while you take charge of the search. Why don’t you take Sergeant Liu and two of your Marines with you?”
“Thank you, I will,” said Dancer. “And I’m holding on to your sergeant’s hat. Does this thing get baseball games?”
“Only Yankee games.”
“Those are the only ones I watch.”
“Hey, Captain! I got people! Up here in the second tier of hovels.”