"Yeah, right," McKenzie growled. "If you're so smart, how come you're in here with me?"
That was a good question, Thorpe silently acknowledged. Although they were from different branches of service, as McKenzie had pointed out, they, along with several dozen other members of the military's elite special operations forces, had been co-opted to form covert Department of Energy SO/NESTs teams—Special Operations Nuclear Emergency Search Teams.
At least that was the official jargon on their orders and the explanation given to the congressional oversight committee. In reality, he and McKenzie represented the spear point of much more than simply a search team.
They were actually part of the unit the Department of Defense used to patrol the world to keep the cauldron of nuclear weapons and materials from boiling over. Regular DOE SO/NEST teams were designed to clean up the mess after a nuclear problem occurred. They were reactive. DOD SO/NEST teams were proactive. People like McKenzie and Thorpe searched out potential nuclear problems before they escalated and a mess had to be cleaned up. So far they had been successful, but all it took was one failure and no one on the teams dwelled on that. The pressure was intense and men serving on SO/NEST rarely lasted more than a couple of years before they burned out.
Thorpe had been with SO/NEST for six months. McKenzie was the senior man in the group, with over four years of experience. The stress had aged him.
"You ever think about the insanity of what we do?" McKenzie suddenly said.
Thorpe was startled. That wasn't exactly the sort of question one asked on the inbound leg of a dangerous operation. "It's our job," he replied.
"Job?" McKenzie said. "Cutting grass, now that's a job. Being a doctor, that's a job. A doctor does an operation that saves somebody's life everybody thinks he's a god. He gets paid like one, too."
"We save millions of lives and what do we get? Shit, that's what we get. Hell, we don't even get hazardous duty pay."
"We don't get hazardous duty pay," Thorpe said, "because then the Department of Defense would have to tell Congress what we do in order to authorize it. And what we're doing is not exactly legal in the eyes of U.S. or international law. Not only are we not supposed to be operating overseas like this, it would scare the piss out of the civilians if they knew how close things get sometimes."
"Maybe the civilians need a scare," McKenzie argued. "Everyone thinks the world is safer now that the Cold War is over, but they're fooling themselves. Everything's gotten a lot more dangerous. Too many bombs, too much nuclear material floating around. Too many people playing shady games."
"You know I got passed over on my last promotion, don't you? The promotion board OK'd me, but then some fucking civilian oversight board noticed that I'd been at Tailhook. Fuck, I wasn't even in the goddamn hotel when those aviators were doing their stuff. I was representing SEAL Team Two at the convention."
"Sorry about that," Thorpe murmured, keeping his eyes on the control panel. He'd known McKenzie for the past six months, but had never worked this closely with him. Listening to him, Thorpe was beginning to wish he wasn't on this mission with the man.
"Fucking civilians," McKenzie said harshly, drawing a concerned look from Thorpe across the flooded chamber. "They're talking about chaptering me out, taking away my pension. We're the ones getting screwed while they sit at home and bitch about taxes and cut our fucking benefits. Fuck them all."
"Nav update?" Thorpe asked, trying to draw the older man's attention back to the task at hand.
After McKenzie gave him their present location, they both lapsed into silence. While his hands were steady on the controls, Thorpe felt the tension in the rest of his body and had to force himself to relax.
Thorpe's six-foot-two frame was cramped in the limited space allowed him. Under his wet suit, his body was well muscled, the result of a fierce daily workout routine.
His face, hidden by the mask he wore, was the deep brown of a man heavily exposed to the harshest of the sun's rays. He already carried the deep lines and crevasses that signaled late middle age. Only his blue eyes hinted that he was just thirty-four. If he had allowed his hair to grow beyond the thick, short stubble he favored it would have been dark and liberally sprinkled with gray.
Next to Thorpe, McKenzie had a better lengthwise fit at slightly less than five-foot-six, but his barrel chest and massively muscled arms made it difficult for him to move around. Before joining SO/NEST, McKenzie had carried the label of strongest man in the SEAL teams, quite a feat among a group of men who prided themselves on their physical conditioning. During physical training Thorpe had seen the older man bench press over three hundred pounds. McKenzie had as much pride in his body as a two-thousand-dollar-an-hour-model.
Both men stayed as still as they could during the run in, trying to keep the trim of the SDV steady.
"Running clear," McKenzie eventually said in a level voice. "I put us at three klicks off coast. Change heading to one-one-zero degrees."
"One-one-zero degrees," Thorpe confirmed, as he manipulated the controls. He glanced at his partner. The earlier outburst seemed forgotten, as McKenzie's demeanor eased.
"Two minutes."
"Roger."
The SDV slid through the water, the propellers leaving no trace fifty feet below the surface. As they drew closer McKenzie directed Thorpe nearer the surface as the ocean floor rose beneath them.
"We have one hundred feet under us," McKenzie announced. "Thirty above."
"Eighty down, twenty up."
"Sixty down, ten up. Hold vertical."
Thorpe slowed their forward speed and held their depth steady.
McKenzie was watching his screen intently. "Forty down. Route still clear."
Thorpe slowed until they were at a crawl.
"I've got solid contact," McKenzie said. "Shoreline," he confirmed. "New heading, eight-zero degrees."
"Eight-zero degrees." The SDV turned slightly left.
"Easy, easy," McKenzie muttered as he watched numbers tick off on his screen. "On my mark. Ten down, ten up. Hold."
Thorpe brought the SDV to a halt, then slowly let the craft sink until it rested on the bottom, in twenty feet of water, two hundred yards from shore.
Thorpe reached out and flipped a switch on the control panel. "Beacon on." He checked what looked like a large wristwatch strapped to his left forearm. A small red dot glowed. "I read the SDV beacon six by six."
McKenzie did the same. "Six by six."
Thorpe was doing everything by the book, following a checklist taped to the left side of his compartment. "Begin shutdown."
Each man turned off their parts of the SDV until all that was functioning was the beacon and the air supply.
"Switch to personal air," Thorpe ordered before he turned off the SDV's air supply. He glanced over. McKenzie pulled out his air hose, which also disconnected him from the internal communication system. McKenzie gave him a thumbs-up. Thorpe switched on his own rebreather then flipped a switch cutting off the internal air.
They pushed open their hatches and slid out, pulling their waterproofed rucksacks with them. Leaving the Mark IX resting on the bottom, they swam toward the shore, the rucksacks towed on six-foot lines attached to safety lines at their waists.
The two men ascended until they were just below the moonlit surface. Their fins flickered back and forth, propelling them smoothly toward shore. Thorpe held a nav board right in front of his face, following the azimuth determined from their mission briefing.
After a few minutes both men could feel the sea change. They knew they were close to shore from the increasing swell. Thorpe tapped McKenzie on the shoulder. McKenzie held position while Thorpe surfaced. Thorpe rode a wave up and looked shoreward. He could make out lights to the left but the shore ahead was dark. Thorpe hoped their underwater navigation had been accurate. He returned to McKenzie.
Together, they moved forward until they could feel the tips of their fins hit the bottom. Thorpe edged ahead, the surf lifting him and then slamming him down into the sand. Before the water pulled him back, Thorpe dug his hands into the sand and held his place, then scuttled forward a few more feet. He could feel McKenzie behind him, pulling off his fins. McKenzie then crawled to his side and Thorpe returned the favor. Each retrieved his rucksack and unfastened the submachine gun tied to it, pulling back
the slide and making sure there was a round in the chamber, ready to fire, then pulling the muzzle plug out. They slipped an arm through the shoulder strap of their ruck and lay at the edge of the surf, listening carefully.
Thorpe stood and sprinted across the sand, McKenzie right on his heels. They reached the concealment of the dunes. The dry desert air felt good against their faces, the only part of their skin exposed.
Thorpe carefully unsealed his ruck, making sure it made no noise. He pulled out a small handheld device and turned it on. The GPR—Global Positioning Receiver—quickly accessed the nearest three DOD satellites overhead and pinpointed their position to within five meters.
"We're four hundred yards south," Thorpe whispered. He didn't think that was too bad for an eight-kilometer underwater infiltration. Both he and McKenzie donned their night-vision goggles. Thorpe waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the slightly green and depth-distorted display.
Thorpe shouldered his ruck. He stood and led the way, carefully moving through the dunes to the north, McKenzie behind him and to the right.
They now heard another noise over the pounding surf: heavy diesel engines. Thorpe slowed, searching for the guards that would be near. A high dune lay across their path and they crawled until they could just see over it.
"Shit," McKenzie muttered. Four large military-style trucks were parked with their open tailgates pointed toward the beach. But the trucks were not the focus of McKenzie's comment. Rather he was referring to the two tanks, one with its main gun aimed out to sea, the other guarding the sandy road that led inland.
"They're Merkavas," McKenzie said, confirming what Thorpe had already determined from their distinctive shape. "What the hell are the Israelis doing here?"
Thorpe didn't have an answer. His and McKenzie's need-to-know had only extended to a rumor that there would be transfer of a large amount of weapons-grade plutonium. The plutonium, supposedly smuggled out of Russia, was to be delivered to the buyer tonight on this beach. They had not been informed who was doing the smuggling or who was doing the buying, but the assumption that an Arab group was involved on the receiving end had seemed likely since they were lying on Lebanese sand.
Thorpe and McKenzie had no idea how even this limited information was obtained. They had received only the filtered-down classified version from Department of Defense intelligence channels.
Both men flinched as the seaward tank turned on its high-powered searchlight. The beam spread across the water and Thorpe was glad they had come in four hundred meters to the south. He could see armed men walking around the perimeter, the nearest only twenty meters away on the far slope of the dune.
"What now, Mr. Brains?" McKenzie whispered.
"We get our air and ground support on station and we film," Thorpe said.
"Those are Israelis," McKenzie hissed. "Not some ragheads. Something heavy is going down here."
Thorpe retrieved the handset for the small backpack satellite radio from his ruck. The radio was hooked to a specially designed frequency-jumping scrambler that made it impossible for the transmission to be intercepted. "Heaven, this is Topaz. We are on target. Over."
Heaven was the code name for their commander on board an aircraft carrier two hundred miles to the west.
"This is Heaven. Read you five by. Give us a description of what you have. Over."
"Four trucks waiting on the beach. Also we've got two Merkava tanks standing guard, so your people better have something to take care of that. Approximately two dozen men on foot armed with automatic weapons. Over."
"Did you say Merkavas? Over."
Thorpe glanced at McKenzie who only grunted as he opened his ruck. "Roger. Over."
While Thorpe was talking, McKenzie pulled out a palm-sized digital video camera with a specially designed night lens. Instead of recording the image on film or tape, the camera computerized and digitized directly onto a small CD-ROM disk. McKenzie began filming.
After a few seconds of silence, Thorpe keyed the mike. "Request support stand by, over."
"This is Heaven. Your support is standing by and coming on this channel. Call sign Angel. Will be monitoring. Update us any changes. I still reserve final go. Out."
Thorpe keyed the mike. "Angel, this is Topaz. Over."
The voice that came over the air had a distinct dull roar in the background that indicated the speaker was sitting in a cockpit moving at several hundred miles an hour. "This is Angel. Standing by. We're four minutes out from your location and waiting. Over."
"Roger," Thorpe said, "stand by. Over."
According to their briefing, Angel consisted of several Harrier jets and four helicopters full of heavily armed Marines flying in from the carrier. Thorpe knew the Harriers could make short work of the tanks and the Marines could finish the job.