Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

Jack brought the gun to his eye.

“Pull!”

Two clays flew.

Jack missed both.

71

GULF OF MEXICO

The Dulces Sueños cruised due north some eleven miles north-northeast of Cancún at minimum speed to conserve fuel. It was scheduled to round the tip of the Yucatán Peninsula before sunrise.

Despite its security contingent of cartel sicarios on board, the resin-infused carbon fiber vessel remained a very soft target. Logan knew that speed made a soft target hard—or at least, harder to hit. He was as restless as the tide these days, trapped on board his Mexican-flagged luxury yacht. He was unable to risk going ashore even under the cartel’s protection. America’s eyes were everywhere. He still needed to hide. A luxury yacht near the Mayan coast was just another platinum needle in a haystack of platinum needles.

Despite the late hour, he couldn’t sleep. The rumble of the boat’s big diesel engines calmed his nerves a little. The two-hundred-and-eighty-foot four-deck cobalt blue vessel remained far enough from shore to avoid any landward threats, and just inside the outer bounds of Mexico’s territorial waters to remain under her jurisdiction. The Uxmal, a lightly armed twin-diesel Mexican Navy Tenochtitlan- class vessel, half the size of his own, patrolled these waters on a disciplined schedule like a vigilant sheepdog.

Logan knew that Ryan wouldn’t risk a shooting war with Mexico over something as trivial as his arrest, especially since the TRIBULATION project had been completely defeated. The President was many things but he wouldn’t risk America’s national interest to satisfy his personal need for vengeance.

With Sammler destroyed, Logan turned to his most important criminal ally, the infamous Gulf Cartel, under whose protection he now lived as he plotted a return to the stage. He’d stashed away enough money, resources, and weapons to secure his future, despite the fact Ryan’s government was seizing White Mountain assets and shutting it down.

The only thing that kept him from losing his mind was imagining the look on Ryan’s face when he realized Buck Logan had played them all and nearly ran the table, all on Ryan’s watch.

—

The HALO jump was timed to the patrol route of the Uxmal , now at its maximum distance from Logan’s vessel. Speed and silence were key to the operation. So was the covering darkness of the moonless night.

Adara was the first to splash into the dark water two miles due north of Dulces Sueños, a fifty-five-pound float bag leading her way. Once in the water, she shed her chute, pulled on her fins, opened the bag, and began assembling the vehicle inside.

Thirty seconds later, the rest of The Campus team dropped into the Gulf, less than a quarter mile from Logan’s luxury vessel. Three landed due east, the other two due west of the big boat. Like Adara, they were kitted out in neoprene scuba suits.

But strapped to each of their chests in specialized harnesses was a 77-pound Rotinor DiveJet RD2, along with suppressed H&K MP7A1 automatic PDWs, firing 4.6x30mm armor-piercing rounds. They also carried full underwater diving and boarding gear—along with a few other surprises.

Once in the water and clear of their chutes, Clark, Ding, Dom, Midas, and Jack unharnessed their DiveJets, pulled on the rest of their dive gear, and checked their comms—waterproof Sonitus tactical mics attached like a retainer to their upper back molars, utilizing bone conduction through the jaw for both transmitting and receiving radio signals. The Campus started using them after seeing them deployed by a Marine FAST platoon in Indonesia.

“Alpha ready?” Clark asked.

“Alpha ready,” Adara replied.

“Bravo and Charlie are ready. See you in twenty.”

Clark gave the signal. Each of the men in Bravo and Charlie grabbed the control grips of the four-foot-long, lithium-ion dive sleds and slipped beneath the waves, tracking on a swift and silent intercept course for their target.

—

The Bravo and Charlie divers stopped on their first timed mark and stripped away their tanks, then rose just enough to breach the surface. At one hundred yards they were still far enough away that searching eyes would struggle to see the black forms in the black water. Each man swapped his scuba mask for NVGs and pulled his suppressed HK.

“Bravo and Charlie are in position,” Clark said. “Alpha, you are good to go.”

“Launching now.”

Clark acknowledged. The clock was ticking.

It wouldn’t be long now.

—

In less time than it took for Clark and the others to get into position, Adara had removed, unfolded, and assembled the waterproof UAV and its controller from the float bag. She pulled on her own pair of waterproof NVGs and shoved the rolled-up bag between her thighs to add to her buoyancy.

Time to rock and roll.

Weighing just fifty-five pounds, the Songar UAV lifted swiftly into the air. The drone’s night-vision sensors, camera, and laser range finder fed its data in first-person shooter imagery into the gaming-styled, handheld controller. The drone was hovering in position one hundred feet above the water when Clark reported that both teams had reached their waypoints.

Lying directly in the path of the oncoming vessel, Adara needn’t fly the Songar any farther. The sound of the UAV’s whirring blades was masked by the gentle rolling Gulf waters and the rumbling diesel engines coming toward her.

She zoomed in on the brightly lit forward bridge on the third deck of the magnificent super yacht, bought and paid for with dirty narco-money and crewed by narco-killers. She felt no guilt when she set the reticle on the man standing at the helm and pressed the trigger.

—

The helmsman never heard the shot or the sound of the breaking glass as the 5.56 NATO round tore into his abdomen. He fell to the floor with a scream, grabbing at his burning guts.

The captain dashed out from behind a door just as more bullets—fired in three-shot bursts—shattered more of the bridge-wide glass. Two of the rounds struck him in the chest. A third ripped out his throat, splattering blood against the polished mahogany bulkhead as he dropped to the deck.

—

The first shots startled the starboard guard out of his waking slumber on the second deck. He was no coward. The other sicarios were shouting behind and below him as more shots rang out from the distance.

He unslung his AK-47 cuerno de chivo —goat horn—and charged forward toward the sound of the gunfire coming from high and ahead of the boat. He raced at a dead run toward the bow and raised his rifle at the sparks flashing like angry fireflies in the night sky. But the sparks changed position, pointing at him.

Bullets clawed his chest open.

The brave sicario died before he could even scream.

—

Clark waited for the sound of AK-47 fire—the weapon of choice of assholes everywhere—before giving the “go” signal.

All five men simultaneously revved their silent DiveJet engines and sped toward the yacht. Their eyes were locked on the sicarios charging forward on all three decks, firing their weapons at the Songar drone dancing in all directions off the bow and sniping at them from out of the dark.

Thirty seconds later, all five Campus operators had reached the port and starboard sides of the slow-moving vessel, avoiding the spinning props at the stern. They slapped boarding hooks onto the rails, the first man up clearing the way for the others to follow. They scrambled aboard completely undetected by the distracted gunmen, leaving their DiveJets behind.

They’d already studied the yacht’s schematics. Clark and the others knew where they had to go, and what they had to do.