It was personal for Stoke, and that was not good.
Hawke checked his watch. The commando team would commence rescue operations in six hours. At midnight. There was no moon, few stars. At least some of the hostages would be asleep. Maybe only a skeleton OMON crew standing guard, if they were really lucky.
Luck? Luck was for losers. They were six hours out, and they didn’t have a goddamn plan.
Hawke needed to talk to Stoke alone, and fast.
58
“Doesn’t feel good, Stoke, none of this,” Hawke said from his perch on the upper bunk, his legs dangling near Stokely stretched out on the bunk directly below.
“No shit, boss.”
They were in Stoke’s tiny cabin, just aft of the forward torpedo room, the only place on the sub where they could find any privacy. Putin had given Hawke a pack of smokes, and he shook one out and lit it now.
“Oh, great. Now you’re smoking,” Stoke said. “Good thinking.”
“I might well be dead in a few hours. Perfect time to start smoking.”
“Now, that’s what I call inspirational leadership. Shit, I’m feeling better about this whole mess already. I’m psyched. Happy, you and Urine better watch your asses up there. Man coming after you got himself a death wish.”
“Urine?” Hawke said, puzzled like everybody else about that confusing Russian name.
“With a Y. Yurin. He’s the one I told you about who was training these OMON guys down in Miami. Big blond muscle-boy type. Badass, though. Probably killed a couple thousand Chechen children when he was there.”
“You think he’s running the show up there?”
“I know he’s running the show. Total professional killer. They’ve been training for this for months, out there in the Everglades. One of the many reasons I’m feeling down on my luck.”
Hawke nodded and took a deep drag on his smoke. He couldn’t remember a time in his career when he’d felt such apprehension over an impending operation. SEAL Team Six, now officially known by the less harmonious DEVGRU, was about as good as it got. One of their first deployments had been the hijacked cruise ship Achille Lauro. Boats and oil rigs were common fare for Six. But they’d never mounted a maritime combat boarding operation with situational parameters remotely like this one.
A bloody airship!
Enough to make any rational man start smoking, he thought, taking another puff and blowing it at the ceiling. He’d been thinking about this rescue attempt until his head hurt, the whole flight from Ramstein. The Russian ploy was brilliant. A dirigible presented huge logistical problems, insurmountable problems, maybe, to any hostage-rescue operation. There had to be a way, though. There always was. But damned if he could think of one.
“Damn right it doesn’t feel good,” Stoke said after a long silence. “Hell! I never should have let the girl go on the damn zeppelin in the first place. She didn’t want to go, you know. I made her go. Anything happens to her now, hell, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Stoke, I’m just as worried about Fancha as you are. But I mean this operation doesn’t feel good.”
“You think I don’t know that, boss? It sucks, is what it does. SEAL Team Six? The best HRT on the planet. You get a hostage situation on a goddamn cruise ship or a 747 sitting out on a runway? Team in, team out, in a heartbeat, tangos dead, freed hostages not even scratched. But this shit? A fucking zeppelin suspended in midair? Nobody on the planet is trained for that.”
“Exactly why he chose it,” Hawke said.
“Why who chose it?”
“Korsakov. The new Russian Tsar. He built the goddamn airship, maybe with this eventuality in mind. No, make that probably with this in mind.”
“Smart man. So, how the hell are we going to do this without getting our asses kicked and taking a couple hundred hostages down with us?”
“I have a thought on that. You’re not going to like it.”
“Yeah? Try me. I’d like anything better than what we’ve got.
We’ve been sitting out here submerged in this old boat going crazy with this for two days. We could use some fresh ideas. SEALs don’t get discouraged easily. That team in there? They are discouraged.”
“You’ve got to call Fancha, Stoke. I hate to say it. She’s our only chance.”
“I’m listening.”
“That hatch in the floor of the control pod. It’s the only good way for us to insert. The rear staircase doesn’t work. The fore, aft, and midships emergency egress doors in the fuselage don’t work. All bad. Right?”
“Right. You’d have to use choppers and fast-roping down to the airship from above, and you do that, invade their no-fly zone, they start heaving elderly geniuses out the door from five hundred feet. Water’s like concrete from that height.”
“So we go up through the control-pod hatch. But it’s locked from the inside. How do you plan to get in?”
“Blow it. Charges on the hinges only way.”
“Might as well ring the doorbell, Stoke. Hey, Yurin, you got company! Start heaving hostages out the door.”
“Think I don’t know that?”
“Hostages will be tossed out, shot, or gassed before we get even three guys through that hatch.”
“Yeah. So tell me your idea before I kill myself.”
“Fancha has to open the hatch.”
“What? How the hell is she going to do that without getting herself killed? Her cabin is two decks up and half the damn ship away from the bridge. I think you forgot the part about the twenty-some-odd armed killers wandering around that ship looking for trouble.”
“I don’t know how she does it yet. I wish I did. But she’s got to try, Stoke, she’s got to. It’s the only way to do this. Believe me, if I had a better idea, I wouldn’t even suggest this.”
There was a long silence from the bunk below.
“She’s got a gun,” Stoke said softly.
“She does? Well, hell, man, that’s great. What kind of gun?”
“My H & K nine. Two extra mags of hollow-point meatpackers.”
“Silencer?”
“Yeah.”
“Perfect. How’d that happen?”
“I left my gun bag in the stateroom closet by mistake. Thank God I did.”
“Can she shoot?”
“A little. Took her out to Gator Guns a few times. Just range shit. But she knows the gun.”
“So, bloody hell, she’s got a chance, Stoke. The ship is mostly dark. With any luck at all, she’ll make it down to the control pod without even being seen. There’ll be someone down in the pod, but maybe not. The ship’s not moving, so you don’t need a pilot. Not much to do down there, just monitor the radar looking for bogies inside the no-fly, check the airship’s elevation, and adjust for windage, right? Maybe one guy down there? Two max?”
“Yeah. Maybe two. Certainly not expecting anybody currently aboard to make a move on the damn bridge. Hell, most of the passengers are in their seventies. All of them with IQs in the thousands. The whole bunch way too smart to do anything as stupid as what we’re talking about.”
“Listen. I’ve been down in an identical pod. She’ll have a clear shot from the circular hatch at the top of the ladder. So she takes them out before she even goes down. Then she opens the hatch for us. That’s it. Done. We’re in. The best HRT team in the world with the element of total surprise. A walk in the bloody park, Stoke.”
“Sounds so easy a child could do it, doesn’t it? I don’t even know what I’m so worried about.”
“Stoke, look. I know you love this woman. I know it’s dangerous as hell, what I’m asking her to do. But it’s the only chance we’ve got, man. Not only to save four hundred people’s lives but to counter Russian aggression that could trigger a world war. You know that, don’t you?”
“Fancha saves the world. Man, shit I get myself into hanging around with you.”