Brad Thor - State Of The Union

And there was no doubt in Scot’s mind that the sea was his father’s mistress. Many times in his young life, Scot felt that the sea mattered more to the man than his own family, but then, Scot himself had joined the Navy and began his own affair with it. Though Scot had very much enjoyed his career as a competitive skier, if he was honest with himself, he would have to admit that there had always been something missing.

The U.S. Ski Team, as much as he had cared for his teammates, was really no team at all. It was every man and woman for themselves. All that mattered was you and the judges. There might not have been any “I” in team, but there was “me.” Harvath had been hungry to be part of something more than just his own selfish pursuits and the SEALs had given him that opportunity.

For the first time in his life, he had discovered the true meaning of the wordteam and what it meant to be part of something greater than yourself. It didn’t take long for him to realize what the SEALs had meant to his father. In a way, Scot’s time on the Teams had given him a sense of something he had never before experienced, a sense of belonging-belonging to something that really mattered and really made a difference in the world. With the SEALs, character, honor, integrity, loyalty, and duty meant something. They weren’t just empty words. And though he often liked working on his own, being able to still do that as part of a team, where everyone had a shared objective and where every participant’s performance mattered, was one of the most fulfilling undertakings he had ever pursued.

As he thought about it now, he wondered if maybe his decision to follow in his father’s footsteps was less about searching for something from his father and more about searching for something in himself.

Harvath’s concern over his mission drew his mind back to more relevant issues. As he glanced out the back of the wheelhouse to check on his Diver Propulsion Vehicle, which had been tied to the rear of the trawler, he hoped the rest of the team had made it to their objective safely.

After Frank Leighton’s nuke was retrieved and brought down to the beach, it was placed in a long, streamlined tube, which Carlson and Avigliano gently slid into the water and connected via towropes to their DPVs. Once Leighton was outfitted in his own dry suit, flippers, facemask, and rebreather, the men submersed themselves beneath the water and headed for the Advanced Swimmer Delivery System waiting a few miles offshore. From there, it was a short cruise to the Finnish mainland, where a group of three cars would be waiting for them with money and instructions on how they were to cross into Russia, as well as what Leighton’s new mission parameters were.

As Harvath headed further into the Eastern Gulf of Finland, he monitored the trawler’s antiquated radar system and tried to assess the proximity of the Russian patrol boats he knew were shadowing him. TheRebecca’s equipment was useless. Random islands, fishing boats, patrol boats…they all looked the same on the cracked, green display screen. It was only a matter of time before the Russians would be on top of him.

Almost as if rushing to meet the challenge head on, Harvath shoved the trawler’s twin throttles farther forward, trying to coax as much speed as he could from the struggling old engines.

Three hours and twenty-seven minutes later, after a short stop to change the trawler’s registration markings from Finnish to Russian and substitute one country’s flag for another, Harvath found himself less than three kilometers inside Russian territorial waters when the trap was sprung. A lone Federal Border Guard Service high-speed Sokzhoi-class patrol boat had appeared virtually out of nowhere and was bearing down on him off the starboard bow. Harvath, per the plan outlined by Rick Morrell, quickly turned theRebecca around and attempted to head back into Finnish waters. Even though he knew he’d never outrun them, it made him look guilty as hell and that’s exactly what was supposed to happen.

A second Sokzhoi joined in the chase and fired a warning shot from its 30mm cannon across theRebecca’s bow. Though the plan had called for Harvath to throttle back to neutral at this point, he decided to push his luck a little further. The Baltic water was freezing and the shorter he could make his impending swim, the better. Besides, the prevailing assumption was that the Russians wanted to take Frank Leighton alive. If they blew up the boat they thought he was on, not only would that put a serious dent in their plans, but it might also detonate the device they believed he was carrying. Harvath glanced out at the Sokzhois and hoped he was right.

Pressing the throttles as far forward as they would go, Harvath heard the engines groan in protest. Just then, another 30 mm round was loosed, landing much closer to the bow than the one before, throwing up a large sheet of spray that covered the wheelhouse. Harvath began to realize that dead or alive, the Russians had no intention of letting him leave.

With the high-speed crafts staring him right in the face, Harvath’s decision to get back into the cold water was made a lot easier. He doused all of theRebecca’s lighting and then “lit the candles” as Carlson had put it, on the special “cake” he had baked for the Russians. Blocks of C4 had been placed strategically throughout the vessel, with special attention focused on the engine room and its remaining stores of diesel fuel. As Harvath grabbed the boat’s flare gun and exited the wheelhouse, he activated a waterproof timer strapped to his wrist. It was synched to Carlson’s digital fuse aboard theRebecca, which had already begun its own deadly countdown.

Arriving at the rear of the trawler, Harvath was suddenly illuminated by one of the most powerful spotlights he had ever seen. A voice over a loudspeaker commanded him first in Russian and then English to stop where he was and prepare to be boarded.Fat chance of that, Harvath said to himself as he readied the flare gun. Aiming it over the top of the patrol boats, he pulled the trigger.

The bright red signal flare soared high into the night sky and hopefully carried with it the eyes of the Federal Border Guard agents so intent on capturing him. Placing the regulator in his mouth and flipping over the side, Harvath was far beneath the surface when the crews of the Sokzhois began strafing the water with rounds from their 14.5mm machine guns.

As he was no longer carrying his M4, the bulk of Harvath’s gear was now contained in a medium sized buoyancy bag, which could be partially inflated via a small, attached bottle of air, thus rendering the bag weightless underwater. Harvath inflated it to the proper buoyancy and using carabiners, secured the bag to two eyehook style receivers mounted beneath his DPV. Cutting the cord that connected the Farallon Diver Propulsion Vehicle to theRebecca, he let himself drift downwards for several meters while he got his bearings before firing up the DPV.

His rendezvous point was off another island, just inside the Russian maritime border, about five kilometers away. It was a tiny, insignificant port where fisherman stocked up on fuel and supplies, as well as waited out storms or repairs to their boats before putting back to sea. The vessel Harvath was meeting, complete with the SEAL team that had commandeered it, would fit in perfectly.

As Harvath fixed his location with the DPV’s Global Positioning System, he wasn’t surprised to hear the low grumble of Zevzda high-speed diesels coming from one of the Sokzhoi patrol boats on the surface. It had made a beeline straight for theRebecca the minute he had abandoned ship. It was exactly what he had been counting on.

Depressing the trigger switches of his DPV, Harvath began to move as quickly as he could away from theRebecca and the Russian boarding party that was probably already clambering over her gunwales.