Foreign and Domestic Page 15

  Perfect timing, he thought.

  But Mahegan also knew that the apparent dormant state of the ship from the outside might indicate something else altogether, such as a decent technological barrier or scanner.

  He watched the ship from the water for about five minutes and saw no noticeable activity, so he dove silently underwater and pulled hard until he was about fifteen feet deep. His left shoulder bit at him, but he continued downward at a forty-five-degree angle. He figured the keel on the ship was at about seven feet and wanted to give the vessel’s bottom as wide a berth as possible in the shallow sound. Its beam appeared to be no less than thirty feet. Thirty yards long and ten yards wide, he figured. Seemed like good math, though he was no kind of mariner and his only affinity for the water was that over the past year it had rehabilitated his shoulder.

  When he felt he was deep enough, he blew out a small amount of air to deflate his lungs and went deeper. What little light there was in the sky could not penetrate the dark water, and the world was entirely black at this depth. Keeping himself level, he kicked and pulled, trying to replicate a pace count in his head. On land, Mahegan knew that if his left foot hit the ground fifty-two times, he had just traveled one hundred meters. In the water, he had developed a decent gauge of his overhand stroke, that for every left arm pull, he had gone five meters, or fifteen feet.

  He slowed at the last second as the ambient light reflected back at him and he knew he was beyond the ship. He nosed just above the meniscus of the water, quietly sucking air in through his mouth and expelling it through his nose. He rotated so that he was facing south and silently used his hand to clear the water from his brow so that he could assess what he was viewing.

  The first thing Mahegan saw was a two-meter wall ten feet in front of him. He treaded backwards to gain a better angle on the structure. What he was looking at was too big to be a dinghy and too awkward looking to be the Teach’s Pet. Pushing back, he saw that he was looking at a barge of some type that was secured to the starboard side of the ship. He heard voices and the dull whine of machinery.

  “Okay, let’s lift it,” a voice said.

  “Aye, got it. Heavy bitch.”

  The sound of hydraulics pumping coughed briefly and Mahegan looked to his right, to the west, and saw the outline of forklift arms raised high against the backdrop of the towering masts of the Teach’s Pet.

  On the forklift was a container that appeared to be ten feet by ten feet square.

  “Hope he doesn’t drop it,” the first voice said.

  “Famous last words,” the second voice added.

  Mahegan searched for the two men he could hear and thought he saw one head in the center of the workboat on the northern rail, which would explain why he could hear them so well. He also got a better view of the vessel and flashed back to Ranger school when he was doing the mock assault on Florida’s barrier islands. They had used military landing craft, nearly the same as the Army and Marines used in World War II and Korea. This one was newer, of course, but essentially the same. There was a forklift at the aft end near the enclosed pilot’s bridge, which was elevated above the gunwale. Now, he could see one man leaning out away from him and shouting in a loud whisper to the other man on the deck. He treaded the water with his arms doing silent back-and-forth motions and a slight kick from his legs every few seconds.

  “Okay, just got word. She’s three minutes out. This needs to be quicker than a Dale Earnhardt, Jr. pit stop, understand?”

  “We’re getting pretty good at this, mate. Don’t sweat it.”

  “Well, one more of these and we’re done with it.”

  Mahegan wasn’t sure what exactly was three minutes out, but he figured it involved some kind of transshipment of whatever was on the forklift and that he would be directly in the channel of whatever might be heading toward the ship. He drew in a deep breath, slid vertically under the water, dropped about ten feet, then frog-pulled toward the vessel. He had calculated the landing craft to be only about fifteen meters long and as he disappeared under the water, he noticed spud wells, like on a barge, for driving long poles into the floor of the sound and holding steady against the current. It was a landing craft that someone had converted to a workboat.

  This time he anticipated the flat bottom and surfaced slowly until his hand was touching the boat’s barnacled underbelly. He walked his hands toward what he knew to be east, and away from the forklift, until he found the slight upward curvature of the bow. He slowly pushed his nose and mouth out of the water, pulled in some air, and remained motionless.

  After a minute, he treaded toward the port side of the boat, remaining concealed under the low hang of the bow. He could hear the voices again, though more muffled this time for two reasons. First, he had the thick hull of the boat between him and the voices and second, they were drowned out by the approaching low idling thrum of powerful engines. He repositioned now between the new boat and the landing craft. He could tell the approaching boat was a deep-sea fishing rig. Having worked on one for a couple of weeks out of Wilmington, as the fishing vessel slowed near the landing craft, he recognized it as an Albermarle 410, which was a state-of-the-art offshore deep sea fishing boat with two powerful Caterpillar 710 horsepower C-12 engines.

  He watched as one person on the sleek white fishing rig tossed two marine fenders over the gunwale and the person in the elevated bridge expertly worked the throttle back and forth until the rubber bumpers were crushed between the fiberglass of the just arrived boat and the steel of the barge.

  “Let’s do it, jerkoffs,” a new voice said. “Two minutes.”

  “Hoorah,” one of the two original voices said.

  Mahegan heard the whine of the forklift and knew that the container was being loaded onto the deck of the fishing boat. A minute passed, and then another, and the forklift stopped. As he was noticing that the waterline on the fishing rig had risen considerably, he heard the voices again.

  “Where is the other box?” the voice from the fishing boat said.

  “What box?”

  “The MVX-90s, dickhead.”

  “We packed them in with the rest of the stuff. On the top.”

  Silence ensued, except for the ricochet of waves lapping between the three vessels in tight quarters. Mahegan imagined that the fishing boat pilot was gauging whether he could trust what the two on the barge were telling him.

  From the bridge, the pilot said in a low whisper, “Let’s go.”

  “Jackasses.”

  Mahegan’s mind reeled. He had destroyed a warehouse full of the lethal MVX-90s along the Iraqi border in Iran; an MVX-90 had killed Colgate and his team; and now some Americans in North Carolina were shuttling them from ship to ship in the Croatan Sound? He had to wonder if the MVX-90 was somehow involved in the Fort Brackett attack yesterday.

  He heard the original boat guy say, “Tomorrow night, same time. And I want to see the rest of the ’90s. Got it?”

  “Hoorah.”

  Hoorah was a distinctly US Marine term as opposed to “Hooah,” the Army version. Mahegan didn’t like either because both could be used to mean, “Roger that,” or, “Go fuck yourself.”

  It was another clue, and he hadn’t even boarded the Teach’s Pet. A Marine, a landing craft converted to a workboat, MVX-90s, and something very heavy in a box on a state-of-the-art offshore fishing boat.

  He watched as one of the two men on the fishing vessel stepped back onto the boat, placed a hand on the lines securing the fenders, and as the pilot worked the two inboard Caterpillar engines, which were deathly quiet, yanked the fenders onto the deck, undid the half-hitches, and then set about lashing the ten-foot-by-ten-foot container to the sides.

  He overheard pieces of a conversation between the men on the fishing boat, but the only word he thought he could make out was “Galaxy,” which made no sense at all.

  The whole thing took no more than three minutes. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. would be pissed, Mahegan thought. But not bad, otherwise. The boat ha
d come in from the northwest, as if from the north point of Dare Mainland and Alligator River National Forest, or from the west side of Roanoke Island.

  As the boat pulled away to the southeast toward Oregon Inlet, Mahegan saw someone already sliding a tarp over the wooden box. A Zodiac Bombard dinghy was evident as well, secured tightly to the aft end of the boat on the swim platform. Mahegan, his hand keeping him steady next to the barge, watched the boat slip past him ten feet away.

  Close enough for him to see the name of the departing fishing vessel, perhaps headed out to sea.

  Lucky Lindy.

  Chapter 15

  About twenty miles away on a straight-line azimuth of two hundred degrees from where Mahegan treaded water in Croatan Sound, Samuel Nix sat inside his command bunker in what was formerly known as the Dare County Bombing Range. Today the front gate off Route 264 near the Dare and Hyde County borders bore the distinctive Copperhead, Inc. insignia, which was a gaping snake’s mouth with the word “COPPERHEAD” written in taupe across the white background of the mouth, the fangs hanging menacingly over the letters and supplying the spine to the second “P” and the “H.”

  Nix recalled how he had lifted himself out of bankruptcy by convincing the Department of Defense that he had the best Navy bomb technician in Vinny Falco. Mine clearing and bomb removal were the least attractive contracts a company could go after, but after losing everything he’d had to start somewhere. The work was unglamorous, labor was difficult to find, workers got maimed, and lawsuits were aplenty. In Afghanistan, Copperhead had won a small contract to clear the Russian mines around Bagram Air Base, the main headquarters of the US forces there. The perception of Copperhead’s competence in the mine-clearing effort at Bagram, coupled with a lawsuit appealing their blacklisting by the Army, led the Defense Department to award the Dare County contract to North Carolina-based Copperhead, Inc.

  On average, when performing similar mine removal tasks in Afghanistan, Nix had lost a worker a week to a mine. It didn’t matter, he reasoned, because they were locals and it was a combat zone, meaning there would be no lawsuits he’d have to deal with. But here in the United States, where people sued over hot coffee, the Defense Department was having a difficult time finding an affordable contractor. He had outsmarted that problem and knew he could still make millions while nobody could underbid him.

  For Copperhead, the contract to clear all of the ordnance from Dare County Bombing and Electronic Warfare Ranges was a gold mine. Nix had badgered every contact he had on Capitol Hill to win the ten-million-dollar annual deal. It had one base year plus five option years, of which they were in the first option presently. Now in their second year, they had already grossed twenty million dollars with the base plus one option year paid in full. As Nix had done his research, the real cost in the ordnance business was labor. It was simply hard to find people who wanted to wander around in the equivalent of a minefield. There were unexploded GBU-28s, bunker busters, sticking up like lawn darts in the sandy soil. They were finding five-hundred-pound MK-89s in every quadrant, even near the tower. Worse still, the Air Force had let pilots drop the infamous BLU-97 cluster bombs that scatter out the back of a canister while on descent from the delivering aircraft like seed tossed in the air. Despite the shortcuts he’d had to take to deal with the labor costs and laws, Nix believed he was earning every penny.

  The biggest find, though, had been the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Explosive, otherwise known as the “Mother of All Bombs.” One of his three-man clearance teams had been trudging through knee-deep swampland wearing hip waders and waving mine detectors as if they were divining rods when they’d come face-to-face with the exposed body of a thirty-foot-long by four-foot-wide cylindrical body of the largest nonnuclear bomb in the world. The bomb was hanging from parachute suspension lines that were connected to a nylon G-type parachute, which had become stuck in the tall pines and had never detonated. It had hung less than a meter from the swampy carpet.

  In addition to being Copperhead’s vice president, Vinny Falco was, first and foremost, a chief explosive ordnance technician in the Navy, which had given Copperhead, Inc. the competitive advantage in winning the contract. Upon finding the MOAB, they had waited a week before contacting the Navy and Falco had spent a full two days alone with the beast, toying with it before he determined that it was inert, full of concrete, though not without value.

  Nix knew that in August, 2007, the US Air Force had “misplaced” several nukes from Minot Air Force Base. Then in 2013, the DoD had fired the general in charge of all nuclear and near-nuclear weapons, which spawned a nationwide inventory. Of the fifteen MOABs in existence, one had been stored at Dare County Bombing Range. When the Air Force came calling for the live MOAB, Nix gave them the inert round, practically undamaged from its descent.

  A fully functional MOAB, commonly called a Daisy Cutter, remained in storage on the compound. His compound, as he was beginning to see it.

  Nix stood and walked to the window of the command center. The windows were twenty-four-inch ballistic material designed to withstand shrapnel from the dumb bombs that were sometimes let loose by a hungover Navy F-14 or FA-18 pilot after a night of chasing women at Oceana Naval Air Station’s Officers Club in Virginia Beach. There were a few chip marks to show for it in the glass of the octagonal-shaped tower that was akin to an airport control tower.

  He had divided the entire bombing range into zones. He had 46,000 acres to clear and six years to do it, unless he wanted to squeeze another contract out of the Department of Defense. He had agreed to do 8,000 acres a year of surface clearing, which, technically defined, meant that Copperhead, Inc. was to till to a depth of three feet where possible and that there was a ninety-five-percent “guarantee” that there was no unexploded ordnance in the cleared area. To clear deeper would require different technology and more time, and of course another huge contract, which was all part of the plan.

  Already they had cleared a good portion of the western edge of the peninsula near Buffalo City, the Army’s Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) training facility. MOUT was the technical term for a small city in which the soldiers could train in urban combat, arguably the toughest type of fighting. Delta Force, Rangers, SEALs, and the 82nd Airborne Division had used the facility for live-fire exercises to prepare for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because the MOUT facility was in the bomb release impact area, they were able to call in live artillery and air-dropped ordnance. The village was about the size of a small town with all the trappings of a spaghetti Western movie frontage: restaurants, stores, and homes fronting paved streets. Of course, once the trainees moved through the door, there were friend or foe target mock-ups they would shoot, or not, and nothing but plywood walls filled with sand to prevent ricochets and pass-through rounds.

  The troops had added piled-up junked autos and tires. They also installed speakers that could blast riot control directives, homeland security warnings, or Islamic jihad music to add to the realism. But with the wars on the wane, and pressure from Congress to close the range, the Department of Defense Inspector General had shut down operations for the time being.

  Standing in the control tower in the center of the bombing range and using his night-vision device, Nix looked south toward Route 264 and the inlet off Croatan Sound fed by Long Shoal River. As he scanned, he saw the series of moats that were ever increasing concentric squares emanating outward from his position. The moats were actually ten-meter-wide ditches filled with water moccasins, snapping turtles, alligators, and, of course, copperhead snakes. Each ditch ran parallel to a gravel road that the military had constructed to either provide access to the control tower and associated command buildings or to head into the impact area.

  The entire peninsula was called Dare County Mainland and was a chunk of land that looked on the map a lot like the state of Michigan.

  Nix heard his partner, Vinny Falco, ascend the steps and walk through the door.

  “Thought you were with Lucky Lindy
?”

  “Saving myself for tomorrow night, boss. Wind is picking up and the chop is kind of sucky out there right now.”

  “Former Navy bomb tech scared of a rough ride?”

  Falco lifted his coffee cup. “Nah. It’s four in the morning and the sun’s coming up in a couple of hours. We’ve got workers getting ready to plow the fields. I feel like a plantation owner. Life is good.”

  “So who’s got the run on the Lindy this morning?”

  “Lamont and Tyler. They’re good. I’m told they hit the Pet and were away from there in under three minutes.”

  “That’s too long. Needs to look seamless. Someone from the shore on Roanoke or Kill Devil Hills needs to look, turn away, and then look back, and that bitch needs to be gone.”

  “There was a minor debate about the MVX-90s,” Falco said. “Morons had packed them in with the other stuff, so we didn’t get those.”

  “Is the LCM coming back for the last run?”

  “Yeah. We’ll do one more load and then I’ll personally dive down there and ensure we got everything.”

  Nix nodded. He didn’t like using the Teach’s Pet wide open in the middle of Croatan Sound, but there was a certain simplicity to Falco’s recommendation to use an old ship that just sat there as a pivot point for their operation. He needed to send certain things out to sea and the landing craft couldn’t weather the rough seas, nor did it have the range to go where Nix needed it to go. All of the cargo was heavy and use of the landing craft in Stumpy Point Bay was guaranteed in his contract with the Department of Defense. Neither could they bring the Lucky Lindy into the Long Shoal River for trans-load operations. It was too big and would be noticed by the fishermen.