Ashes of Victory, page 13
“One follow-up question, Mr. Secretary,” Prost said. “Should we keep Lincoln in the Mediterranean, or move it to the Gulf or perhaps the Arabian Sea?”
“I can answer that,” Chalmers said. “The Arabian Sea provides the most flexibility, especially since we will only have one carrier group there. We can easily hit all the usual suspects from a more centralized location.”
“I concur with the general,” said Adair.
“Then make it all happen,” Macklin said. “ASAP.”
“Mr. President?” Brad Austin said, leaning forward.
“Yes?”
“About Hart’s suggestion that you get on the horn with President Jiechi . . . I have an alternative thought.”
“Go on.”
“You might want to consider letting me talk with the ambassador here in Washington and use him as a conduit to communicate your discontent with the military build-up.”
“It’s more than a discontent, Brad. I’m fucking pissed off.”
“I’ll, ah . . . find the right words to convey that, sir.”
“Fine,” Macklin replied, deciding to let the secretary of state do his job. “But I’m parking Vinson right in front of their lying asses, and I’m ready to take them head-on. Make sure that message is also . . . conveyed.”
— 12 —
SANTO ERASMUS, NINETY MILES WEST OF LISBON, PORTUGAL
JAVIER IBARRA APPRECIATED THE mild sea and clear weather of the unseasonably warm and breezy October day. It made for a smooth start of his new contract.
Sitting at the helm of the seventy-eight-foot-long vessel, he idled the twin Cummins diesels, while his veteran crew of three worked the furling main, genoa, and mizzen sails, which blossomed and snapped as they caught the westerly winds.
Shipbuilder to the rich and famous for more than a century, Cheoy Lee Shipyards were renowned for their quality motorsailers. They had the range and seakeeping ability to make extended journeys with little or no support. And Ibarra’s Erasmus was no exception. But more important to the master smuggler was the spacious yacht’s ability to haul secret cargo.
He felt the familiar tug as the 145,000-pound yacht accelerated to twenty-one knots under the power of 2,300 square feet of sails, its hull slicing through gentle waves.
Ibarra shut off the diesels and left the generator running to power the vessel’s navigation systems as well as its array of creature comforts, including the climate-controlled bridge, cabins, and its well-stocked galley and main salon amidships. An electric cable also ran into the battery compartment of a twenty-three-foot Vantage Boston Whaler secured to the forward deck, next its hoisting crane, keeping it fully charged in case of an emergency. Most transoceanic luxury yacht crews settled for traditional lifeboats, but Ibarra could never contemplate launching into the North Atlantic without at least some semblance of a backup that could go a few hundred miles between its integrated and auxiliary gas tanks.
His deckhands would soon be gambling their wages playing Podrida, a popular Spanish card game, watching satellite TV, and deep-sea fishing for giant tuna to prepare Marmitako, a Basque stew made of tuna, potatoes, and onions, as well as fish croquettes, to accompany their Spanish bean stew. His men worked hard, but they also liked to play hard and eat well. Bystanders along passing vessels, including those of the US Navy and Coast Guard, would never dream that the well-tanned men fishing for sport aboard the classically beautiful motorsailer could be carrying such deadly cargo.
They also would not believe that the easygoing, handsome, and charming Spaniard with the short, dark hair and golden skin was capable of the violence he’d committed in order to earn the trust of Omar Al Saud.
The only son of a fisherman in the coastal town of Bilbao, deep in Spain’s Basque region along its northern coast, Ibarra had grown up among the sailors and merchants who worked the gritty factories, shipyards, and wharfs of the rugged autonomous community. He had begun accompanying his father on day trips at the age of nine, and by his seventeenth birthday, he knew every aspect of the business. It was heaven, until the day his dad had gotten caught in a North Atlantic gale and never came home. Ibarra would have been with him but had stayed home with the flu.
Crushed at the loss but hopelessly in love with the sea, he found work wherever he could aboard coasters and river vessels and eventually joined a crusty and aging privateer named Arturo Girón, who took the young sailor under his wing. Girón taught him the extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the sea that successful drug smugglers must possess, especially of coastal areas and riverbanks.
For nearly a decade, Ibarra had worked in Girón’s “import/export” business. A quick learner and attentive student, he had risen fast in the ranks of Girón’s smuggling operation, becoming known to buyers and sellers as both a shrewd businessman and a man of his word. He did not double-cross his partners, and they did not double-cross him.
Ibarra soon became Girón’s best smuggler, running drugs for nearly a decade while profiting immensely. Along the way, he became proficient with firearms and used them, especially on his trips to Turkey, Colombia, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, and Myanmar, the latter being the world’s second-largest opium producer. He finally went out on his own after his mentor’s death—six years gone now—taking over some of his routes, as well as Girón’s prized vessel, Santo Erasmus, named after one of the four people considered a patron saint of sailors. He also grew Girón’s old network of corrupt government officials significantly. It now numbered in the hundreds and included high-ranking officials from several governments, including Russia’s.
It was through his government contacts in Saint Petersburg that he had met key officials of JSC Rosoboronexport, the official state agency for Russia’s export and import of military arms. For Ibarra, it had opened an entirely new branch of business: black-market arms dealing. With a total global market value of around $60 billion a year, it had immediately captured the smuggler’s attention. Taking advantage of his established routes and customers, he was able to enter this lucrative business sector, which now represented nearly half of his operation. His successful gun runs into troubled regions in South Asia and the Mideast had earned him a reputation that caught the attention of Omar Al Saud.
Ibarra gazed at the sunlight playing across the water and reflecting off the motorsailer’s burnished stainless steel railings and cleats. He drew in the refreshing salty air. The stimulating scent rekindled his keen sense of adventure on the high seas. Using his custom-made sails most of the time, he could easily cross to the east coast of Venezuela, the western coast of Africa, or even the port city of Istanbul. Upon arrival, he would have plenty of fuel for the twin Cummins 220 hp diesels to navigate the intricate waterways of rivers and bays to reach his delivery zones.
Ibarra smiled as Mario Mendoza, his first mate, stepped in the cockpit. His bronze skin was shiny with perspiration, and rivulets of sweat ran from his short, blond hair down the side of his face.
“All done out there, Javi,” Mendoza said, removing his mirror-tint sunglasses and revealing a pair of hazel eyes. He opened the small fridge under the console, snagged a bottle of water, and asked, “¿Quieres agua fria?” Want a cold water?
“No, gracias,” Ibarra replied as the tall native of San Sebastian, a Basque coastal town near the border with France, and former warrant officer in the Spanish Navy, sat on the long bench in front of the helm. Mendoza was as comfortable rigging a sail, repairing ropes, or navigating the motorsailer as he was handling one of the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns stocked in a secret compartment beneath the main salon—along with heavier hardware. “Could you program the route?” he added.
“Por supuesto,” Mendoza replied. Of course.
Ibarra enabled the autopilot while Mendoza entered a course that would take Erasmus across the Atlantic to the shores of Virginia and into Chesapeake Bay, taking in at the Leeward Municipal Marina on picturesque Newport News in six days’ time. Just as ordered by Omar Al Saud . . .
— 13 —
USS CARL VINSON (CVN 70), ARABIAN SEA
AFTER DROPPING HER REPORT on Lt. Cmdr. Vince Nova’s desk at 1500 hours, Lt. Amanda Diamante went to see Lt. Cmdr. Ed Stone, but the maintenance officer was tied up in a meeting, so she had been redirected to Stone’s right-hand man in the hangar bay. While Nova’s official report would take some time to make it up the chain of command, word had it Kowalski had already cleared her to fly again.
She headed down to the hangar deck, located three levels below the ready room. It didn’t matter how many times she came down here, the sheer size of the cavernous space impressed her. At almost seven hundred feet long—or two-thirds the length of Vinson—and more than a hundred feet wide, and towering twenty-five feet high, it could hold all of the CVW-2 aircraft, plus seemingly endless assortments of spare parts and heavy-duty service equipment.
Divided into four zones by massive steel sliding doors, the hangar buzzed with activity this afternoon, as maintenance crews worked around the clock to keep Carrier Air Wing 2 in business. Amanda stared at the massive isolation doors—the same ones that had allowed the crew of Stennis to contain the flooding hangar bay following that horrible torpedo attack.
As she made her way through the cavernous place, she imagined what it must have been like for the crew aboard Stennis. She had lost friends on both Truman and Stennis and struggled with mood swings from grief to anger and back again.
All around her, maintenance crews were hard at work, tinkering, testing, and repairing dozens of jets, their wings folded up and all parked in what looked like a massive traffic jam. Organized chaos.
She spotted Maintenance Master Chief Gino Cardona in the hangar zone closest to the stern, where the air group serviced the Super Hornets of her fighter squadron.
Standing in his customary drill-sergeant pose, arms crossed, Cardona supervised a young sailor stenciling Amanda’s name under the forward cockpit of an F/A-18E that looked as if it had seen better days. The paint was peeling off the wingtips, and the tail was dark from a lifetime of afterburner work. Weld marks under both wings and the left side of the fuselage, like scar tissue, marked the repairs to ground fire damage. The fighter jet looked as tired and sore as Amanda felt. The ejection had really shaken her down to the bone.
“Miss Diamante. Do you think you can hang on to this Rhino a bit longer?” Cardona asked, without looking at her as the kid balanced himself at the top of the ladder, juggling a template, a brush, and a small can of paint—hot pink.
Seriously?
“And you!” he screamed at the sailor, who looked as if he’d just graduated from high school. “One drop of paint on my deck and I’ll have you scrub it end to end with a damned toothbrush! You feel me, son?”
“Yes, Master Chief!” he cried out.
“Ran out of black paint, Master Chief?”
The man’s mustache straightened as he grinned.
“Looks like it’s been to hell and back,” she added.
The smile faded, and he finally turned to her.
“Lieutenant,” he said in a low, grumbling voice that sounded like a train leaving the station. “This Rhino here is a fine example of American aeronautical engineering.” Then as his voice incrementally grew louder, he added, “It was servicing your country while you were still in diapers!” Then he grinned again and added in a calm voice, “This particular bird served in Operations Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom, Desert Strike, and Northern Watch, and operations off the Somali coast. It has unleashed violence on Taliban insurgents across Afghanistan, ISIS enclaves in northern Iraq, and even enforced the no-fly zone there.” Cardona pointed at the rows of bomb silhouettes stenciled on the nose. Lowering his voice, he added, “And it even shot down a Syrian Air Force Su-22.”
“I never heard of that last one.”
“Like I said, Miss Diamante. Diapers. Besides, it’s either this Rhino or the highway.”
“Copy that,” she said.
“And not a scratch. Clear?”
She raised her brows and once more contemplated the peeling paint and scarred fuselage and asked, “How would you be able to tell if I scratched it?”
Cardona groaned, but before he could reply, Amanda stretched a finger at the artwork spelling DEDDLE.
“Dammit, boy!” he exploded. “There are three Es in Deedle! What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Sorry, Master Chief!” the kid wailed before producing a rag from his back pocket to wipe off the curved section of the second D to turn it into a bastardized E.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Cardona hissed at the smear job.
“It’s all right, Master Chief,” Amanda said. “It actually goes with the whole . . . look.”
Sighing, he said, “It’ll be ready for preflight at oh six hundred.”
As she was about to leave, Amanda noticed a pair of jets in the very rear of the hangar covered with blue tarps, but she could still spot the shape of their twin tails angled outward. However, the overall length was all wrong—almost ten-feet-shorter wrong. And the wingspan was also narrower than a Super Hornet’s by almost eight feet.
And she suddenly remembered her three-month training at Patuxent River in—
“You’re not worthy to even look that way, Deedle!” Cardona snapped when he caught her looking.
“But, Chief,” she said, growing excited. “Those are—”
“Beyond-fucking-limits.”
“But I’m certified in the Lightning, and I thought that—”
The master chief turned back and focused his laser stare on the naval aviator almost a foot shorter than his towering frame. “Lieutenant, do you really, really think I would let you anywhere near a brand-new, one-hundred-twenty-million-dollar F-35C after what you did to my Rhino?”
“But—”
“Miss Diamante, maybe your preschool teacher should have explained to you that the way to get a new toy isn’t by breaking your old one.”
“Okay, okay, I just thought—”
“This Rhino here is your new bird,” Cardona interrupted, his right index finger pointed at the weathered jet as the sailor finished the first DEEDLE with the smudged E and added a hyphen before starting on the second one. “If you have any issues with that, by all means feel free to take it up your chain of command.” Grinning, he added, “And please, do let me know how that works out for you.”
Amanda promptly retreated, letting Cardona redirect his energy back at the young sailor. She could still hear him screaming over the noisy hangar as she ducked through a bulkhead door and headed up to the ready room.
She walked down a series of hallways and climbed ladders between levels, always yielding to senior officers coming in the opposite direction. She also kept to the right or left side of the tape pasted down the middle of passageways or hatchways where sailors cleaned and waxed the floors. Work was always done on one half at a time to keep the walkways open.
Her aching body had a craving for a latte, but when she finally made it to the 03 Level and walked into the ready room, she found Mullet Malloy sitting across from a very somber-looking Ricky Ricardo.
“Hey, Ricky,” she said, “guess what I found down at the hangars when I—”
“Not now, Deedle,” Malloy said, shaking his head. His sandy hair fell over his brow and he unconsciously pushed it back. Ricardo didn’t even look up.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“Our boy just got dumped.” Then lowering his voice, he whispered, “Via Facebook.”
“You know, I can hear you, Mullet,” Ricardo mumbled.
“Jessie broke off the engagement?” Amanda asked, sitting down next to Ricardo.
“Worse, actually,” Malloy decided to answer. “An old academy buddy of ours in Los Angeles posted video of some Charger’s pool party . . . and there she was, dancing around in a bikini, twerking with some linebacker, who then picked her up over his shoulder and carried her inside a cabana. No imagination required to know what happened next. When Ricky called her on the sat phone, she hung up, unfriended him, and changed her status to single.”
“That’s cold, man,” she said, sitting next to him and placing an arm over his shoulders. “You’re out here fighting for your country, and she’s—”
“Doing the football team?” Malloy offered, rolling his eyes.
“Seriously, man?” Ricardo mumbled, shaking his head.
Amanda burned Malloy with her stare, then said, “Ricky . . . I’m so sorry.”
Ricardo sat, shaking his head. “I just can’t understand it.”
“Well, screw her,” Malloy said. “We’re here for you, buddy.”
“That’s right. And better you found out now than after you’re married with kids,” Amanda said. “Besides, we’re the only family you need.”
As Ricardo sat there, still shaking his head in denial, their commander, Dover Kowalski, walked in.
“What the hell’s going on? Don’t you three have someplace better to be?” He pointed at the flight schedule board, where Amanda noticed to her delight that it once again included her for a CAP mission with Ricky the following morning. But then she frowned when she saw that her Greenie Board GPA had plummeted after getting a big fat zero for failing to bring back her bird.
Malloy said, “Sorry, Skipper. Ricky here just found out his fiancée has been banging some linebacker from the Chargers.”
“C’mon, man!” Ricardo snapped. “What’s wrong with you?”
Kowalski blinked.
“Just shut it, Mullet!” Amanda snapped.
“Ricky,” Kowalski finally said. “I’m really sorry.”
Ricardo glared at Malloy, then said, “Thank you, sir. I—”
“Don’t thank me, son,” Kowalski said. “You get over this shit right here, right now. In case you haven’t been keeping up with world events, we’re no longer fighting ragheads. We’re headed at flank speed for the Taiwan Strait. In three days, we’ll be within pissing distance from hundreds of MiGs, Sukhois, and cruise missiles, plus their subs, destroyers, and even a damned aircraft carrier. That means we have to pull together as a fighter squadron, with everyone’s head in the game, a hundred percent. You all get me?”
