Power Play (44 page)

They’d watched the TELARs go aboard, they could watch the work being carried out on the hull, and they could see the big French road freighter standing by on the dock. They’d seen components being loaded into that. But now there was nuclear material, almost certainly warheads, judging by the shape.

They also had a couple of shots of two big metal boxes being loaded down the foredeck hatch. General Myers instantly hit the direct line to Admiral Mark Bradfield in the Pentagon.

The two men agreed on one shining truth—that Russian Naval officer, the one the FSB shot down in cold blood on Galkinskaya Street last September, had been right on the money with just about every piece of information he had provided.

 

Delta Team 10 was, as ever, at operational readiness for deployment for any task the US Navy elected to throw at them. From the moment their commander, Captain Mack Bedford, was reunited with them, every man could sense there was a new mission forthcoming and that it was something top secret, highly dangerous, and extremely important.

Mack had already decided to take as large a group as possible to Donegal, even if there was no room on board the attack ship for everyone to make it to the ops area. He had by now refined the personnel he required—the four-man diving team and a team of at least three medics who could be used as a reserve. He wanted a fifteen-man assault force to
board the Russian ship and ten marksmen on board his own ship, all of whom could double as members of the assault force if necessary.

He would take a total of eight SEALs with prior experience in the surface navy. These men would assist the Irish crew in maneuvering the ship through the likely rough North Atlantic. All of these were hard-trained combat warriors, and they were ready at a moment’s notice to step in as replacements or, possibly, reinforcements.

Mack knew the mission needed the forty-man team because it was hard to assess how many personnel would be on board the Russian freighter.

Mack reasoned there were only about thirty crew in the biggest oil tankers, so the
Koryak
should be around the same. But if there were a lot more Russians on board, that would represent big problems after the SEALs boarded—like Russian sailors, possibly with cell phones, locking themselves in rooms.

The principal objective of this mission was top secrecy. If these Russians were permitted to make phone calls home, the US Navy may as well bomb the goddamned ship, since one phone call home to Severomorsk meant the whole world would find out in the next twenty minutes. The more he pondered the personnel problem, on both ships, it seemed to Mack the more difficult this mission became.

Too many SEALs might mean chaos; too few might mean unnecessary death and mission failure. Team 10 would have to fight its way through the
Koryak
’s interior, and there would be enough danger from ricocheting bullets inside the steel hull without having to use high explosive to blast open steel doors in order to confiscate cell phones.

In any battle situation a lot of problems rise up unannounced and get solved on the spot. It was Captain Bedford’s job to subdue and silence that Russian crew in the preplanned way, board and capture, destroy radio contact, every SEAL free to fire at will. All Russian guards on deck as the ships closed to be eliminated by SEAL marksmen the moment the lines were secured.

Right now what Team 10 needed was practice at boarding. If this operation went pear-shaped after the initial boarding, every team member would transform instantly into a fighting warrior. They would need to seize the grappling lines and scale the hull of the
Koryak
like a swarm of armed orangutans.

Mack was taking his tried and trusted SEAL leaders, guys he had known and fought with, the very heartbeat of Team 10. Several of them had grown up under his command. There was Barney Wilkes, from the salt marshes of North Carolina, who had joined him as a twenty-four-year-old petty officer/2, the best swimmer in Coronado. He was thirty now and, having passed Officers’ Training School with brilliant grades, had become Lieutenant Barnaby Wilkes, team leader. He was also very handy with a machine gun and an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade).

Also going to Donegal was Cody Sharp, now thirty-seven, son of a North Dakota cattle rancher and a chief petty officer. Cody was formerly with SEAL Team 1 in Hawaii and had fought with Mack in Iraq. He was a gunner by trade and an exemplary boatman, the precise kind of seasoned SEAL leader you need when operating several hundred miles from shore in the North Atlantic.

A long-serving CPO, Brad Charlton, would also be going to Ireland. Mack Bedford never went anywhere without his right-hand man. Brad was now a master chief petty officer.

Shane Cannel had been with Mack for six years, first as a PO/2, but he would go to Donegal as a chief.

Mack’s 2/IC would be a young officer who had fought with him in Somalia, Josh Malone, now a lieutenant commander. They went together to see Admiral Carlow, trying to get hold of an old merchant ship they could borrow for a couple of months’ training, practicing their boarding techniques.

Admiral Carlow instantly put twenty men on the case, scouring the immediate southern California coastline for a suitable ship, calling shipping corporations, asking for help. Everyone knew, of course, that if the navy did not get it, the admiral would commandeer someone’s freighter for a couple of months, with or without their blessing.

It took exactly four hours to find the ship. It was moored in a small harbor north of the Port of Long Beach. A five-thousand-ton freighter called
San Natale
had been plying the coast from California to Bogotá for many years, especially during the time the United States blacklisted Colombia for failing to curb its drug-growing activities.

The
Natale
was owned by an outfit called Panama Steamships and sailed under a Panamanian flag. It was probably the only ship in history that was suspected of smuggling bananas. But that was its mission in life,
running ripe Colombian blacklisted bananas into California for the past thirty years.

When the Port of Long Beach authorities made contact, the captain of the ship was so terrified the United States might put him in jail for banana offenses from twenty years ago that he willingly handed the
Natale
over to the navy in return for a two-month charter fee.

Thus was Mack Bedford’s trial horse floated in San Diego Bay in mid-January, when the weather was still warm but with a brisk wind gusting under the towering arc of the Coronado road bridge.

All forty members of the team had been briefed as to the requirements, but not provided with details of the actual target, nor indeed the location of the ops area. Admiral Carlow had also commandeered the three-thousand-ton US Coast Guard cutter
Bertholf,
a twin-shafted, fast twenty-eight-knot Legend Class vessel, which would “double” for the Irish ship they would use when the
Koryak
hove into sight.

On the opening morning of training, Mack sought out the ship’s handlers to undergo the first detailed practice—bringing the
Bertholf
alongside the old banana boat, close aboard, and ready for lines to be attached, holding the ships together.

Mack’s crew was then informed that the real ship they would use in the operation would be fitted with flooding tanks, which would heel her over to thirty-eight degrees during this exercise, giving the appearance of imminent sinking, a disaster about to happen.

For the first two days this was not possible, but coast guard engineers quickly organized something very similar, and a couple of passing yachtsmen, out in the ocean, did indeed believe the
Bertholf
was about to meet her doom, which Mack considered to be a “darned good sign” of the training authenticity.

There were a few SEALs who thought it likely the coast guard ship really would sink at this diabolical angle and jokingly asked permission to abandon. Which Mack impolitely declined.

It took four days out in the Pacific before they could comfortably approach the old freighter, cutting the engines back and drifting in with the wind and tide, several huge navy fenders made of synthetic rubber hung protectively over on the port side. Every time the
Bertholf
bumped the starboard-side hull of the freighter, six Navy SEALs hurled the grappling
irons up and over the gunwales with expertise being honed daily both onshore and at sea.

This skill, the bedrock of all pirate operations in the Indian Ocean, was hard to perfect, but for the SEAL assault force preparing to hit a Russian ship, it would be a matter of life and death. And this entire element of the forthcoming attack needed to be planned with precision, timing, athleticism, and marksmanship.

When those grappling irons grabbed and held, the SEALs in the upper works would open up with withering fire on any Russian who appeared on deck. The aim was to extinguish any attack on the climbers, still hauling themselves up the ropes, hopefully unseen by anyone still alive on the
Koryak
.

It took three weeks before Mack Bedford was confident that his team could hit that Russian ship with speed and ruthlessness. At this point he reduced oceangoing practice to every other day. This was especially welcome among those SEALs who had been seasick, tossing around out in the Pacific, and those who had managed to fall into the ocean off the side of the banana boat, four of them more than once.

Mack now designated every second day to the CQB (close-quarter battle) range, especially constructed inside the compound, wood rather than steel, but built to replicate the confined areas of an ex-Russian warship. This also led to intense fire-control drills, since any kind of a blaze after an explosion could jeopardize the entire operation.

The frogs who would place the limpet mines on the underside of the hull of the
Koryak
came under the command of Lieutenant Barney Wilkes, and they had already gone over the side of the
Bertholf
many times. But they too had much to practice. No one knew quite what the hull of the Russian freighter would look like, whether it would be covered in barnacles, impossible to make a limpet mine stick.

If this was the case, the SEAL divers would need their long combat knives to scrape a section clean in order to clamp the magnetic bomb base onto the steel. This is all very well in short sentences on dry land, but deep under the freezing Atlantic water, breathing carefully to conserve oxygen, being moved by the current, and working in the most uncomfortable environment—well, this wants a lot of concentration. SEALs need to know exactly what they are doing before going over the side.

There are only a very few people on this entire planet who would dream of taking on such a task. But one of the great SEAL mottoes is
For almost every fighting force, tackling water, ocean or river, is nothing short of a pain in the ass. For us, it’s a haven.

From the moment new applicants join a BUD/S class, they are plunged into the enormous Coronado pool and drilled for months on end, until swimming, diving, and working underwater are second nature to them. Pool Comp, it’s called. And each of the three men who would accompany Barney Wilkes under the
Koryak
had finished class honor man in the underwater section.

Each of them had also been among the 11 or 12 men selected from an intake of around 165. They don’t just take anyone into the US Navy’s most elite fighting force. You need to finish in the top 8 percent to get through. And if you intend to be a frog commander, you probably need to make honor man underwater. And this coming mission was what they all came for—basic underwater demolition.

Throughout the Donegal training program, the frogs routinely checked their underwater gear, making sure everything was in top order, especially the diving tanks and the lines that provided them with air. When the nondiving group was in the close combat zone, the frogs moved to a specially constructed area under the hull of a boat and practiced every phase of their preparation.

Over and over, they unhooked the limpet mines from their backs, removed the bombs from their knapsack holders, and rammed them tight against the steel, checking the timers, examining the mechanism, ensuring there would be no mistakes when those lethal weapons clicked into place under the
Koryak.

As they moved into the second month, they fired at targets daily: they practiced firing from the hip in narrow corridors with sharp turns, they climbed, they threw the grapplers, they ran, and they staged hard, close races in the huge SEAL pool. The days of accidents, even near accidents, were eliminated. No one broke an ankle, and no one else fell off the hull of the banana boat. No one nearly got shot; no one nearly drowned in the Pacific. Mack Bedford’s men were almost ready.

The final phase, before departure for Ireland, involved drawing their equipment and storing it for transit—“packing down” in SEAL parlance. Each man was taking his personal weapons: combat knife, SIG Sauer
9mm pistol, and M4-A1 rifle, with three magazines, each holding thirty 5.56mm rounds. Packed in separate boxes was a thousand-round reserve.

They also took a couple of heavy weaps (machine guns) and ammunition belts. SEALs feel only half-dressed without the ever-present ability to blow the living hell out of someone, or something, should it be required.

In addition to the limpet mines, there were three M203 grenade launchers (including a spare), together with a box of sixty hand grenades, just in case they had to fight their way out against an overwhelmingly greater force. They took their regular medical kit, mostly bandages, dressings, and morphine. Plus communication gear, camouflage cream, and a couple of laptop computers with navigation software, showing shorelines, depths, rocks, sandbanks, early warnings for anything that might get in the way of the coming SEAL assault.