"Suba al suelo! En su vientre!" Manny shouted. The men complied and dropped to the floor of the dock on their bellies.

  "Coming in." Priest's voice in Manny's ear.

  "We're clear in here, Chili," Manny said. "Go check on Pig."

  "Going," came the reply.

  Priest planted a foot in Skin's back and flex-wrapped his wrists behind him. The same for Shirt. Neither resisted. They knew the drill and complied with practiced ease.

  "My count has us five down," Priest said as he stood.

  "The crew for the submersible," Manny said. "It was still here the day before yesterday."

  "So, a forty hour head start minimum," Priest said and slung his M4 to free his hands to unholster his Sig Sauer automatic. He crouched by Skin and placed the barrel on Skin's temple. He repeated the same question in Farsi, Dari, Arabic and Persian.

  Skin told Priest to go home and fuck his sister. He growled it in Farsi. He was putting on a show of courage. The puddle of urine spreading under him betrayed him.

  Priest asked about the destination of the submersible. He asked about the target. He asked about Green Eyes. He asked how many hours ago they left.

  Skin responded with more suggestions for Priest: things he could do with his sister, his mother, a dog and himself.

  All the while, Shirt lay with his head turned and lifted from the floor; his eyes wide and shifting from Priest to Skin. He was struggling to understand what was being said and what it all meant for him.

  "You have any ideas?" Priest said in English to Manny.

  Manny shrugged.

  Priest fired three rounds into Skin's back. Shirt wriggled like a hooked fish, hot blood sprayed over his back and into his hair. He was trying to get away from the body, away from the gun, away from this whole fucking mess. He made pathetic progress. He levered himself up using his forehead against the floor and tried to get his knees under him.

  A kick in the ribs flipped him onto his back and Priest was in his face. The searing hot front end of the Sig was pressed to his nose.

  "Your turn," Priest said in fluent, Mexican-cadenced Spanish.

  Shirt couldn't talk fast enough. He apologized. He explained it was just a job. He didn't know who they were. They hired guys from a marina in Culiacan to work on the boats. He needed the money. His family was hungry.

  Priest tapped him on the forehead with the 9mm.

  "When did they leave?" His voice was even and calm. Like a priest in a confessional.

  "I do not know. I have no watch," Shirt mewled.

  "You have a calendar, right? What day was it?"

  "Yesterday! It was yesterday!"

  "Was there daylight?"

  "Yes! Yes! It was day. Siesta."

  "Where were they going?"

  "They did not tell us!" Shirt's panic rose. His ignorance would doom him. "They spoke their own language! We only worked on the boats! I am not lying!"

  "You never saw a map? You never heard the name of a place?"

  "Baja del Mar!" Shirt shouted. "I heard them say Baja del Mar! It is the only Spanish words they used!"

  "Baja del Mar."

  "Yes! That is it! Baja del Mar! I am not lying! I am not telling you lies!"

  "I believe you," Priest said. And he did.

  Priest stood and put two rounds through Shirt's skull and a third through the center of the colorful Mexifornia logo on his t-shirt.

  "Baja del Mar. Mean anything to you?" Priest said.

  "We'll give it to the admiral," Manny answered.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  THE CHART ROOM

  "With a thirty-six hour head start we'll need to search almost five thousand square miles of ocean looking for a twenty foot boat in thirty foot seas," Admiral Dorrance said to the room at large. Most of his crew didn't look up but tapped away to begin their searches as he spoke, entering data and looking for hits and patterns.

  "We know the craft is heading north," one of the cyber-sailors offered.

  "So, three thousand square miles of water," the admiral sighed. "And with a launch point from Puerto Secreto this bastard could make it as far north as Los Angeles. It's a one-way trip for them."

  Dana Morton sat at her station sipping coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in.

  "What do we know about Baja del Mar, sir?" she said.

  The admiral leaned on the wall of her cubicle and drew his eyebrows together.

  "Nothing worth shit, Morton. What do you have?"

  "It's a flyspeck coastal town north of Ensenada," she said, her eyes on the three monitors before her. "There's a few golf resorts there. Unless they plan on surfacing in a water hazard I'd say this is a wash. It's not the target. But the team said the jihadis on site made multiple references to it. Did they get anything else?"

  "They questioned a local who overheard the main actors say it," the admiral frowned. "He could have misheard it. He could have been lying. One of the bastards could have been telling another about a time he got laid there."

  "Is the local available for further questioning?" Dana said.

  "Negative. The local is answering to Jesus about now."

  "At least it's something. Maybe he did mishear it. If they said it enough times for him to hear maybe it's close to something in Farsi or Arabic."

  "Then you run with that," the admiral said. "I've deployed some ships to the area under cover of another operation. You have another hour or so to follow up on your hunches. Then I need your help on search parameters."

  "Aye, aye, sir," she said brightly.

  "Dana, please," the admiral winced.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  THREE STEPS TO EVAC

  The team divided labor based on priorities.

  Eliminate targets.

  Gather intel.

  Destroy facility.

  Get the hell out.

  The targets were eliminated. Eighteen dead. The prime target, Green Eyes, was not present. They could assume that he was part of the crew of the departed submersible. Manny had his doubts about that.

  Priest and Manny searched for anything that might provide useful data. They found two laptops and some paper schematics along with charts of coastal waters from Ensenada north of the California coastline. These all went into waterproof pouches for the trip out. There were no conveniently discarded maps marked with an "X." But they'd keep hunting through the boathouses and work crew quarters in the time available to them.

  Manny had already radioed Davies and Danker on the Lolita. He gave them some cryptic mission progress along with the scant intel they'd gathered. Baja del Mar. What the hell was that? They sent that up the pipeline for whatever good it might do. At least the fobbits at NSW would know the submersible was at sea and in transit.

  Chili worked at wiring up the eight tons of HIGH JEX industrial explosives stacked in the shed built as an addition to the rear of Boathouse Two. He wired up two cases in the center of the stack. When they went up they'd ignite the rest.

  Flame wasn't going to be able to swim out. Pig had him as comfortable as he could make him. But there was nothing to be done for the pain. This was a concussion case at best so painkillers were out of the question. Pig needed Flame awake no matter how much his brother wanted to slide into coma and escape the agony inside his skull.

  He was stabilized for now. But there were a hundred other things that could go wrong for Flame. Shock. Infection. Further bleeding. Pig was at the outer limits of his med training and all he could do was keep Flame in some state of semi-consciousness until he could be treated by professionals in a stable, sterile environment.

  Pig fired questions at him. What kind of car do you want to buy with the casino bread? Who would you rather do, Madonna from twenty years ago or Madonna now? Who'd win in a fight between James Bond and Batman? Did he think the Rays looked good this year? Stupid shit. Anything to keep Flame with him, keep him engaged.

  "Ask him who he would kill if he could kill anyone in the world and get away with it," Chili said trotting up.

  "Mukti Al Thadar," Flame said with a grin made hideous by the tear to his now swollen lip.

  "Naw," Chili said with real umbrage. "That fucker is all mine. All mine."

  "We need to move him," Pig said.

  "What do you need?" Chili said.

  "Anything that can serve as a backboard. Anything we can strap him down on."

  Chili pulled his combat knife and pried off the hinges of the back door of Boathouse One. They placed it next to Flame just as Manny came up to them.

  Manny and Chili got a grip on Flame while Pig supported his head. On "three" they lifted him enough to get him centered on the board. A low, bubbling moan escaped from Flame's throat.

  "What now?" Chili said while Pig used some nylon line taken from stores in Boathouse One to tie Flame down.

  "Priest is getting us our ride out," Manny said.

  From over the water they heard the cough and sputter of an outboard. Another cough. Another. Then the whine of whirling props spinning free in the air followed by a churning roar.

  Priest piloted the aluminum hulled skiff to the edge of the surrounding wharf and tossed out a line. He stripped down to shirt and pants for the swim out to the moored craft. The water was heaving the little boat against the wharf wall. Chili secured the rope line to a stanchion and Priest tossed a second line from a davit on the stern. Chili dogged that one down and the skiff lifted and scraped against the wharf wall but was as stable as the surging water would allow.

  "Get him on board before we swamp," Priest said.

  The three SEALs kept the wooden door as level as they could as they carried Flame from the rear of the boathouse to the wharf edge. With some difficulty they got Flame on board the heaving deck of the boat. Manny and Pig tossed gear and the waterproof pouches of intel aboard and climbed on themselves.

  They motored for the dogleg inlet against the rush of water still slamming ashore on the back of the massive tropical depression. The white caps whipped toward them. They were making less than two knots with the throttle wide open. Priest stood white knuckled at the controls. He was a Boats man and had the skill sets they needed to get them clear.

  The little shallow draft boat climbed up swells it was never meant to withstand. Then down the other side into troughs that hid the sky momentarily.

  Out on the Lolita, Ernie Davies keep his binoculars trained shoreward past the SEMAR station where only the prow of the patrol boat was visible and bobbing in the water. The rest was flooded and drifting stern down. Bill Danker was belowdeck sharing the poor intel pickings and bad news with the admiral back in Arlington. Blair Freeman was below deck too and fighting motion sickness between encrypted texts to his masters in Langley.

  A crackle in his earpiece.

  "En route, Lolita." Manny's voice. "Man down."

  Davies swung the lenses and picked up a whitish object cresting a swell a thousand yards out. He called down through the hatch to the cabin, hand cupped to his mouth.

  "Bill!" he shouted. "Weighing anchor! Get your ass up here and pilot us. Bring Freeman with you!"

  Minutes later the SEALs were aboard and the Lolita hammered its way for the open sea where they could see a strip of silvery light along the horizon. The system was moving away south and away from them.

  They were free of the torrent rushing into the inlet at Puerto Secreto and riding atop swells forty feet in height when they heard a long, sustained rumble of thunder from their wake.

  Sixteen thousand pounds of industrial explosives released a fury that, for a few seconds, hushed even nature's wrath.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  AT SEA

  The ball was in the air.

  NSW sent an alert to all craft engaged in Operation Maximum Vigilance. There was a hostile Alvin-class submersible in the waters off the Mexican coast on a likely northerly heading. "Alvin" was the class designation for any underwater craft that displaced less than sixteen tons. The search area was huge and growing larger the longer the search went on. A small diesel-driven craft would be a bitch to find even on mirror seas. The tropical depression was stirring up weather that was going to be a near impossibility.

  The time and distance calculations from NSW indicated that, barring mishap or God's intervention, the target submersible had made it past the USSIndependence's eyes and ears. There was a high probability that it was within the Freedom's search footprint on a northerly course for US waters.

  In thirty-foot seas and under a roiling overcast, the USS Freedom deployed an MFTA, a torpedo shaped module twelve feet in length. This model was a TACTAS, a sophisticated submarine and mine detection device using Sonar and hydrophones to reach out into the seas for up to one hundred miles around the Freedom to find any surface and sub-surface craft within their area of operations. The MFTA was towed on a tether behind the ship so that the radiating sounds created by the Freedom did not interfere with the device's findings.

  It provided a constant, real-time audio landscape for the fobbits within the Freedom's hull to interpret and analyze as they eyed their screens and listened on their headphones. The STGs used the sonar pings and live audio to create an aural snapshot of the waters around them in every direction. If there was any craft making way through the chop out there the multi-million dollar gadget would pick it up. From a school of mahi-mahi to the screws of a fishing smack, if it moved above or below the waves they would find and identify it and nail it down.

  Along with the full complement of brainiac sailors was a humble boatswain's mate whose only job it was to steer the MFTA through a set of controls mounted in a special cabin below the bridge. This swabbie spent six months training at Norfolk learning the highly-classified system that allowed him to remotely adjust the bow and aft planes of the million dollar steel tube to keep it in line with the tow ship.

  The entire system came about after an embarrassing incident in 2007. The American Pacific fleet was on exercises in the water between the southern Japanese islands and Taiwan. A Chinese Song class diesel sub surfaced, undetected until it was visually sighted, in the middle of the fleet within spitting distance of the USS Kitty Hawk, an American super-carrier with almost five thousand crewmen aboard. A damned throwback piece of sub-aquatic shit and it foxed the best equipped navy in the world.

  It didn't get much press but the effect on the balance of military naval power was akin to the Soviets launching Sputnik. It was a game changer and the Navy adjusted rapidly to the new rules with the creation of the MFTA, a finely tuned submarine-finding machine that could pick up cavitations from a submersible vessel up to one hundred miles away and down to a midget sub running on batteries no matter what the weather, current or sea temperature.

  They rotated sonar crews as often as the roster would allow. The skipper wanted them sharper than sharp. The flaw in the system was the boatswain. The bench wasn't deep for that rating. This was a new system. A new, larger class of boatswains was coming out of Norfolk next month with the skills to pilot the fish. But that didn't help the Freedom right here and right now.

  He had only three qualified men aboard and they were on four hour shifts to give them as much rest as was possible. But their watches were grueling with seas this high. Even though the device was maintaining negative buoyancy at two fathoms, it was still affected by the slack and drag on the tether. The Freedom broached rougher and rougher seas as the barometer crashed and the wind rose to gale force.

  The skipper leaned in the open hatch of the MFTA steering cabin, a closet inserted by the ship planners as an afterthought. He watched the E-4 at the controls make minute adjustments to the towed module's attitude with a pair of wheels mounted side-by-side on a console. The wheels were mounted below a monitor display showing an animated image giving the boatswain a virtual visual of the MFTA. Alongside that was a window containing updated speed, depth and water temperature. He could adjust the planes to keep the tube horizontal or tip the bow to offer resistance in order to remove slack from the long steel tether. Out in the wake of the Freedom the MFTA responded to his control adjustments.

  "How are we hanging, Torres?" the skipper said. He knew the names of every crewmember and something about each one. It was a matter of pride to him. These men relied on him as he did on them and he wanted to know them; their strengths and their failings. Petty Officer Third Class Stephen J. Torres was from Galveston and was planning on marrying his girlfriend from high school in a few months.

  "It's jiggy, sir," Torres responded without turning. "But it's answering fine. I just have to keep it in the middle."

  "You'll be spelled in an hour," the skip said.

  "I can hack it longer if you need me to, sir," Torres said and made a minute adjustment to the wheel under the fingers of his right hand as the deck lurched to starboard.

  "You know what they say," the skipper said. "You have to stop before you feel tired."

  "Yes, sir," Torres said without turning.

  The skipper made his way back to the bridge up a narrow ramp. The ship heeled hard to port then righted itself. He took his place on the bridge, unacknowledged by crewmen watching readings on screens. He looked out at the uncertain horizon through the ship's hardened Plexiglas windows mounted around the bridge. If the seas increased they'd lower the dead lights and then rely on their instruments and exterior cameras alone.

  It was miserable duty. The Freedom wouldn't be out in depths like this as a normal deployment and never in weather this fierce. She could handle this chop without too much difficulty despite a sick bay filled with green marines puking their guts out. It was what might occur later on in the storm's progress that occupied the skipper's thoughts. The LCS would be climbing forty foot swells and higher. At some point the weather could turn bad enough for them to be more concerned with the ship's survival than the mission at hand.

  But that couldn't happen. He would never let it. They'd stay on station and seek the sounds of a diesel engine no matter how high the seas or how punishing the wind. The skipper only wished he could share the mission goals with the entire crew. It was only right that they know why they were risking near-hurricane conditions. Informing the crew wasn't part of his orders so the weight of command was on his shoulders. Even his number one didn't have the full picture of what they were seeking and why.