Hunt the Dragon (16 page)

“Boss! Boss!”

Something heavy bumped into his left leg, and he reached down through the frigid water and felt an arm that slipped out of his grasp.

“Boss!!!!”

The light from the helo blinding him, he took a big gulp of air and dove. His hands, arms, and legs turned completely numb. In a matter of seconds he knew muscle coordination would go. Seconds after that, his brain and body would shut down. He surfaced.

Balls to that! I'm not losing Sam!

His eyes and limbs becoming rigid, Crocker reached left and right until he felt something round like a human head and dove again until his hands found a neck and shoulder. The cold salt water welled up his nostrils and hit his brain like a hammer. Trying the best he could with numb hands to grab on to fabric, he pushed up until he reached the surface and was blinded again. Sam gasped, spitting water into his eyes.

“Some fucking thanks…”

He couldn't believe he actually had him. The muscles in his legs and shoulder were so badly cramped that his tears were mixing with the water.

“Boss! Hold on!”

Sam's lips and nose had turned deep blue. Crocker's legs were starting to spasm. He figured he had a few more seconds left, and then strong hands pulled him toward a boat. He welcomed the smell of rubber. With his last ounce of strength, he pushed Sam up.

Crocker came to minutes later, upright in a chair and wrapped in a thick wool blanket. Someone was rubbing his feet and another person massaged his hands. Their faces and his surroundings were a blur of light and color.

“You hear me, Crocker?” someone asked.

He didn't recognize the voice. Shivered and clenched his teeth. His tongue felt like a piece of leather. “Ye…ah.”

“Open your mouth and sip this slowly.”

It took several seconds for the signal from his brain to reach his jaw and lips. Then his mouth and throat suddenly came alive and starting burning.

He heard someone say, “Pulse rising. Body temp at eighty-nine.”

“I didn't know he had a pulse.” He recognized Akil's voice. “DARPA told us they assembled him out of parts.”

“That's not funny. He was down to eighty-two when you brought him up. In most circumstances that means you're dead.”

“He's our leader, doc,” Akil said. “He ain't going nowhere.”

Waves of warmth spread from Crocker's throat and stomach out to his limbs and head. His consciousness sharpened. He made out a clock on the wall and the face of a nurse—square jaw, green eyes, black hair with bangs.

“You remember your name, sir?”

“Chief Warrant Crocker. What's yours?”

“Luci.”

“Hi, Luci. How's Sam?”

“He's resting. Recovered fast. Terrible fast-roper from what I hear, but the hide of a walrus.”

In the morning after he'd showered and dressed, Crocker met with the commander, a rail-thin African American with short hair and a black-and-silver mustache. They sat in the sub's tiny ops room, sipped tea, and pored over nautical charts and satellite photos as the ship's doctor checked Crocker's vitals. A very serious looking lieutenant waited at a laptop ready to take notes. A photo of the commander playing golf with the president hung on the wall.

“You play?” Commander Thompson asked.

“Not my game. Don't have the patience.”

“Teaches self-control and the need for precision.”

“Vital signs back to normal,” the doctor announced, cleaning the stethoscope with the hem of his tunic. “Can't tell how it affected his brain without a scan.”

“One-two-seven-thirteen-ten,” Crocker joked. “I can still count to ten. I'll be fine.”

“I believe we've crossed paths before,” the doctor said, peering at Crocker through round glasses. “Tikrit, '04. We were both staying in a safe house that came under attack. You and two other SEALs fought off Iraq insurgents for five hours until a QRF rescued us.”

It wasn't a happy memory. One of Crocker's best buds, Sean, had taken a bullet in the stomach that night and died from complications.

The doctor seemed to be remembering that, too, as he quickly loaded his instruments into his bag. “Good to see you again.”

“Thanks. You, too.”

Commander Thompson cleared his throat and said, “SOCOM had the mission slated for a 2100 launch, but given events last night and the new moon, they figure you're going to want to wait twenty-four hours.”

“Wait another day? For what?” It jarred Crocker back to the mission. In the recesses of his mind lurked the emergency with his father. Sensing that the mission was going to be difficult, he wanted to get it started as soon as possible so he could return home. “No. No, screw that. That won't be necessary as long as the other members of my team are accounted for and in one piece.”

“What's the determination on their fitness, doc?” asked the commander in his rich baritone, freezing the doctor in the doorway.

“Uh, sir…um, yes. They're all fine, except maybe Sam, who could use another day of rest.”

“No time for that,” Crocker pronounced, fixing his eyes on the red phone in the middle of the metal table and wondering if he could use it to reach his father. “That connect to the States?”

“We're in a red zone, so only official calls, and they have to be encrypted,” the commander answered.

“Got it.”

Crocker quickly pushed his concern for his father to a corner of his mind and shifted focus. “Can we back up a minute? Am I correct to infer from what you said that SOCOM has given me the last word on when we launch?”

“That's correct.”

“Then I need to talk to the SDV pilot. Where can I find him?”

“Get Warrant Naylor in here,” Commander Thompson ordered, turning to the lieutenant.

“Yes, sir.”

“Call the members of my team, too,” Crocker added. “I need to know if we lost any gear. I'm assuming we still have time to get things flown in from the
Vinson
if we need to.”

“We should be able to accommodate that. Yes.”

Warrant Naylor appeared to be navy-issue all the way—medium height, thinning light brown hair, watery blue eyes, straight back. As he sat across from him sipping from a mug of coffee, Crocker laid out the reasons it made sense to swap the copilot out for Akil or Davis, both of whom had completed advanced SDV training after BUD/S.

But Naylor wasn't buying any part of it. “Chief, I appreciate where you're coming from. But this mission will be pushing the envelope as is. Taking into account ocean currents, possible live ordnance in the water around the island, and other considerations, guiding
Sleeping Beauty
to the target will be a sphincter-tightening two-person job. Any additional pressures could push the mission past the breaking point.”

“Sleeping Beauty
?
”
Crocker asked. “That's the name of the vessel?”

“We named it that because it resembles the coffin from the movie.”

“Never saw it.”

“My copilot Hutchins has got a six-year-old daughter.”

“Naylor, here's the long and short. This is gonna be a tough mission, and one where we'll be facing lot of unknowns when we reach our target. That's why I need you to work with me and squeeze in five operators.”

“Nope. Not happening. I hear we might be taking a hostage out. So four operators max. That's the law.”

“What law?” Crocker asked, trying to remain calm.

“I'm not trying to bust your balls, chief. Even with four, you're gonna feel like you're squeezed. The fifth means you'll have to severely minimize your gear.”

“How about flying in a second SDV and crew?” suggested Crocker. “What would be the timetable on that?”

Naylor thought for a minute and answered, “The closest one is in Hawaii, and its electrical system is down.”

“Never mind.”

“We're looking at a four-hour ride through frigid seas in wet suits breathing through tanks, and a two- or three-hour ride back. Any weather could throw us off course and kill our chances of returning.”

Crocker, who had taken long rides in SDVs before, didn't need to be reminded of the conditions. Without Davis, he'd be depending on three other operators, one of whom he'd never worked with before. “What's the weather look like?” he asked.

“Clean and calm tonight,” answered Commander Thompson. “Tomorrow fifty percent chance of precipitation and accompanying winds blowing in from the north.”

“Then we're launching tonight. Show my teammate Akil the amount of cargo space we're dealing with, and prepare to deploy at 2100.”

“Chief,” Naylor started, “I just want to say that my co-pilot and I have heard a lot about you, and we're both honored to be working together.”

“Thanks, Naylor. Let's get it done.”

D
awkins hadn't
been the same since the episode in the amphitheater. Something inside him had shut down, severely reducing his energy and affecting his ability to remember simple things—like the names of his assistants or how long he had been held in captivity. He sat for hours in the workshop staring at the partially assembled missile guidance system, vaguely aware of the engineering problems involved in fitting the gyro-stabilized platform, battery, power distribution unit, and missile guidance system together. His assistants Pak Ju and Yi-Thaek stood at his side, looking concerned.

“Battery work, yes?” Pak Ju asked, pointing to the wires running from the lithium pack to the laptop-sized computer that had been specially configured to slip into the platform. Sometimes the ingenuity of the NK engineers surprised him. On other occasions they seemed useless.

“What battery?” he asked, remembering the lullaby Sung had taught him about the peasant woman leaving her baby to search for food.

He found the lithium pack on the bench, and as he picked it up he imagined her looking at the infant's face, trying to communicate without words. Then he was holding baby Karen and recalling the sense of connection between them as strong as anything he'd ever felt.

“How do you measure that?” he asked out loud.

“Measure what, Mr. Dawkins?” Pak Ju asked.

“Is there a way to correlate that to newtons?”

Pak Ju and Yi-Thaek looked confused. The baby-faced interpreter leaned over Dawkins's shoulder and said, “They don't understand.”

“Newtons,” Dawkins answered, rubbing his forehead. “It's how we measure gravity. The acceleration on Earth is 9.8m/s
2
. On the Earth's surface 0.98 newtons equal the force of gravity of 100 grams mass, right?”

“Yes…”

What he felt for Karen and Nan was even stronger. Did it transcend time and distance, too? Didn't it compel him to behave in certain ways?

“I mean…is there any way to measure that?” he asked out loud.

As the interpreter translated, Pak Ju and Yi-Thaek shook their heads. The both seemed to be saying the same thing: the American has lost it.

“According to Einstein, the measurement of space and time are altered by the motion of the observer,” he said, looking from one assistant to the other. “What about the observer's emotional state? Mustn't that alter the perception of space and time as well?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Dawkins. I don't understand.”

Dawkins wasn't sure he did, either. He was reaching for something. “I mean…attraction and repulsion. They are forces. But do we measure them in a scientific way? Do we understand how they imprint the universe and affect physical time and space?”

He seemed to be getting emotional as he stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at his feet.

Pak Ju stepped closer and, squinting through his glasses, asked, “Mr. Dawkins, you feel sick?”

A tear rolled down his cheek. He turned away and brushed it off with his sleeve. “Ju, you have children, don't you?”

Ju nodded. “Yes.”

“You love them?”

“I love children, correct. But job…to complete guidance system. We fall behind schedule. This bad for us.”

Dawkins furrowed his forehead and nose and nodded. “Sometimes you have to leave the people you love…It's not necessarily of your own volition. There's a need you have to fill. A responsibility. Like the mother in the lullaby. I'm sure you know it. When the mother left her baby, do you think the infant understood that she would return?”

Pak Ju looked at him like he'd lost his mind. Now Dawkins placed his hand on his shoulders and leaned into him. “Of course he did,” Dawkins said emphatically. “Because the baby saw something in his mother's eyes.”

“Mr. Dawkins…”

“That's the force I'm talking about. That's the one that I believe is more powerful than gravity. It pulls us together. It ensures the survival of our species. Through time and distance, past this life and into the next. We have no way to measure this force, even though it's the most powerful in the universe. The best word we have to describe it is…love.”

Crocker and his team faced a series of complications, mostly having to do with the volume of gear that could fit into the tight cargo space of the Mk 8 Mod 1 SDV. Now crouched in the very tight Dry Doc Shelter (DDS)—the sledlike device mounted on top of the sub that held the SDV in place—he pushed the button that illuminated the face of his Suunto dive watch and saw that it read 2142.

Through the headset connected to the Motorola radio clipped to his vest, he said, “We're already forty minutes late. What's the problem now?”

“Trying to squeeze the second med bag in,” Davis reported. “Not gonna fit.”

Ideally, he wanted as much redundancy as possible. According to the saying on the teams, “Two is one and one is none”—which meant two or three of everything, extra batteries, plenty of mags, flashlights, radios. But space was so limited this time, and there were some things they absolutely had to carry. A second complete medical bag, though it could prove to be critical, wasn't at the top of his list of priorities.

“All right, give me the second bag and I'll go through it.”

With the
Dallas
floating on the surface, they moved back and forth in the DDS attached to the sub's forward escape hatch. The DDS allowed the operators to prepare for the op in a dry environment, but it gave them very little room to maneuver. Still, it was a hell of a lot better than trying to load the SDV in the water, with tanks on their backs.

Crocker set the second med bag on the metal floor of the DDS and started tearing through it. As he did, the pilot and the copilot ran a final check.

“O
2
tanks?”

“Check.”

“Backup rebreathers?”

“Check.”

“Level on the lithium-ion?”

“Fully charged at nine-point-nine-nine-five.”

“Backup battery?”

“Charged to the max.”

“Sonar?”

“Working.”

Crocker removed everything except two SAM splints to stabilize broken bones, four rolls of tape, four chest seals with one-way valves so that air could escape but not enter the pleural lining, four packs of gauze, tourniquets, pressure dressings, IVs, and fluids. He tossed the rest of the gear down the forward hatch to one of the sub's sailors. Then he repacked the med bag so it was about half its previous size.

He passed it to Davis. “Try it now.”

Davis stuffed the bag and his big body into the sled-shaped SDV and came out a minute later flashing a thumbs-up.

“That should do it, then.”

Davis, on his hands and knees, got into Crocker's face. He said, “Boss, I don't care what these tight assholes say. You and I can drive this crate ourselves.”

Crocker couldn't help but smile. He knew what Davis was doing—lobbying to be included on the mission even though there wasn't any room. “Sorry, Davis,” he said. “Not this time.”

“Fuck all, boss, I just don't feel good about you going out there without me to watch your flank and run comms.”

“I appreciate that, buddy. I need you to helo back to the
Carl Vinson
and stay with Min, and monitor us from the tactical ops center.”

“Aye, aye, boss. Call me if you need me. I'll parachute in. Good luck.”

The man in front of Dawkins with the red mole on his chin was using a direct ophthalmoscope to examine Dawkins's eyes and test the reflexes of his pupils. He didn't tell him that he was looking for signs of a stroke.

“Doctor, can I ask you something?” Dawkins asked.

Finding no evidence of a major neurological event, the doctor picked up a small syringe from the table behind him that was filled with a yellow dye called fluorescein. He swabbed the inside of Dawkins's forearm with rubbing alcohol and inserted it.

“Why are you doing this?”

The doctor didn't answer. Nor did the young aide who stood behind him watching. Dawkins felt the liquid enter his vein and waited for its effect. He didn't know whether it was an amphetamine, a truth serum, or some medicine to get him to sleep.

He told himself to stay as still as possible. That had been his default defense since he was a kid. Like the time his father had scolded him for taking apart the living room stereo, and he stood perfectly still on the carpet, looking down at his sneakers. He understood that movement in his current circumstance wasn't good. It would bring completion, and completion could bring horror and death.

Now the doctor rolled an elaborate device in front of him and maneuvered Dawkins's head so his chin rested on a metal bar in front of a lens.

The aide said, “Keep you head still, Mr. Dawkins.”

A light flashed in front of him, blinding his right eye. For a split second he saw Nan standing in front of him in a white slip. He heard the click of a camera and willed himself to register only immediate impressions—the scrape of the chair across the floor, the diffuse quality of the light, the smoothness of the metal bar under his chin, the creases in the doctor's face.

The configuration of the SDV made it impossible for Crocker to sit up comfortably. Instead, he had to lean forward and drop his head. He sat shoulder to shoulder with Sam, his knees pressed into the space between Suarez and Akil in front.

I fucking hate these things,
he said to himself, wondering how he could endure three and a half more hours of this. The twenty-one-foot-long aluminum alloy submersible looked like a flattened torpedo with an open top. Beyond a thin aluminum partition the pilot and copilot sat before a panel of glowing dials that indicated Doppler navigation sonar, speed, heading, depth, and distance traveled. The pilot used a joystick to control vertical and horizontal angles by manipulating the forward bow planes and aft elevators. All the electronic instruments were sealed within watertight compartments. But the rest of the interior, crew, and passengers were exposed to the ocean water, which hovered at around fifty-six degrees. Crocker kept a close eye on that measurement, because given the operators' inability to move their limbs, long-term exposure to temps below fifty could produce symptoms of diver degradation and hypothermia.

It helped enormously that underneath his 5mm triple-stitched wet suit, he wore a specially designed “smart” suit made of a polymer membrane that adapted to changes in the air or water temperature. It had been developed at the Natick Soldier Systems Center specifically for SEAL use in a wide variety of environments.

While he breathed through the regulator connected to the SDV's compressed air supply in tanks behind him, the vehicle's electronic engine pulled them through the ocean at 18 knots (21 miles an hour) at a depth of 10.5 feet.

Crocker glanced at his watch, which read 2156, and spoke into the mike embedded in his silicon/plastic Oceanpro dive mask: “Tiger One, this is Deadwood. What are we looking at in terms of EST?”

“Deadwood, EST to the lovely vacation destination of Keno currently stands at 0109,” Naylor responded in code. “That breaks down to approximately three kilos, thirteen mikes traveling time. Sit back and enjoy the ride. The stewardess will be by soon to take your drink order. Dinner service is available at any time by simply reaching out and grabbing any of the sea life that swims past. Over.”

“Roger, Tiger One. We got shit we need to get done. Can't we kick this baby up any faster? Over.”

“Deadwood, that's a negative. Remember, half the fun is getting there.”

“Forget the fun part. You got this crate cranked up to max?”

“Pedal to the metal, Deadwood.”

He busied himself by checking to make sure his depth gauge was attached to his belt, along with dive gloves, MK3 underwater signal flares, strobe light, dive hood, and M4 combat knife. At his feet sat ScubaPro Jet dive fins, a laser target designator, TAC-200 diver swim board, and a waterproof pack that he could strap to his shin to carry his pistol, a specially modified AK-47 with suppressor and extra mags. A Draeger LAR V rebreather unit waited in the cargo space should it be needed, along with a larger waterproof backpack with med pack, grenades, mags, chemical canisters, batteries, MREs, a water bladder, comms, and Dragon Skin tactical vest made from overlapping silicon-carbon-ceramic disks and capable of stopping 7.62.x51 full metal rounds fired at an impact velocity of 2,810 feet per second.

Everything accounted for and in place. He checked his watch and saw that a mere fifteen minutes had passed.

Screw this!

Dawkins clutched his arms across his chest and shivered. The room he was sitting in felt and looked like the inside of a refrigerator, with light blue walls and strong fluorescent light. At first he didn't recognize the face across from him, a severe one with round cheekbones and sallow gray skin that matched the color of his jumbled front teeth.

When the man stepped back, Dawkins saw that he was wearing a green uniform with gold-and-red epaulets, and realized that this was the honored general he had met weeks before. Then, he'd appeared kindly. Now he kicked the chair in front of him so that it spun across the dark blue linoleum floor and hit the wall. He leaned into Dawkins's face and shouted.

Dawkins tried to cover his ears, but the general's angry aide and translator slapped his hands away.

“Most honored general say you liar and coward. He want to know why you delay?”

“I'm not delaying. Everything is going well. I have solved most problems, and a few minor ones remain. I will solve them.”

“What problem?”

“It's complicated. Optical mechanics…the challenges of dealing with very limited space and weight. Tell the honored general that for every problem there is a solution…up here.” He pointed to his head.