Vince Flynn - Act of Treason

The place was out on Sparrows Point, just south of Baltimore on the Patapsco River. The SEAL Demolition and Salvage Corporation was Coleman’s brainchild. He’d seen too many of his fellow special forces operators leave the military and grow miserable living the civilian life. Coleman himself used to have nightmares that one day he’d be forced to take a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart. During long deployments, he began to flush out the idea for his own company. Going to work for someone else didn’t seem very appealing. Not after taking orders from others for so long. He asked himself one simple question. What skills had the navy taught him? There were many, but some of the more unique ones were diving, shooting, and blowing things up. Legally speaking, the first and last skills were more transferable than one might think. Ports and shipyards all over the world were in need of expert divers who knew how to get rid of debris.

SEAL Demolition and Salvage Corporation started with that express purpose, and their very first job illustrated the need for such special talents. British Petroleum had a problem brewing that needed to be solved before it became an international issue. They had quietly contracted to have one of their abandoned oil rigs in the North Atlantic demolished. Somehow, word had leaked out, and Greenpeace was mobilizing a group of protesters to occupy the rig and prevent the demolition. They wanted BP to dismantle the rig girder by girder. To the executives at BP the decision was simple: demolish the rig at a cost of two hundred thousand dollars or dismantle it piece by piece at an estimated cost of five million.

BP scrambled to get its people together and blow the rig before Greenpeace could mobilize. BP’s best estimate was that they could have all of the charges in place and ready to go within forty-eight hours. They found out that a boat loaded with Greenpeace activists was docked in Reykjavik, Iceland, and set to leave port the following morning. The activists would arrive at the rig by noon the next day and storm the platform, creating an international media event that would bring public and political pressure on BP to dismantle it piece by piece. BP needed to slow the protesters down so that the company would have enough time to blow the rig.

The vice president of operations at BP was told to find a way to stop the activists from reaching the rig, and to make sure BP was insulated from any fallout. The executive made several calls to his contacts in America and Britain and found out that there was a new upstart company in Maryland that might be perfect for the job. The man called Coleman and explained the situation to him. He had twenty hours to get to Reykjavik and stop the boat from leaving the harbor. He didn’t care how it was done, just so long as no one was hurt.

Coleman had a rough idea of how much it would cost BP if they had to dismantle the rig, so he said he’d do the job for $300,000. The BP exec agreed, and Coleman, Stroble, and Hacket were on the next flight out of Dulles with their diving gear. They landed in Reykjavik just before sundown and were down at the pier by 11:00 that evening. Thanks to years of training by the United States Navy, they knew exactly what to do. During their tenure as SEALs, they had spent countless hours swimming around dirty harbors attaching explosives to hulls and disabling propellers and rudders.

The only difficult aspect of this specific mission was the water temperature. Even with their cold-water gear they could stay in the water for no more than fifteen minutes at a time. They took turns swimming over to the ship from a berth about two hundred feet away. Using an acetylene torch, they cut away at the U-joints where the drive shafts met the propellers. The boat would be able to maintain steerage and prop speed up to maybe ten knots for a limited period of time. Anything more than that and the laws of physics would take effect. The increased torque on the propellers would cause the sabotaged joints to snap and the boat would be dead in the water.

They sat at a café the next morning and wagered as to whether or not the ship would make it out of the harbor. Coleman didn’t feel guilty about the job. He’d been around the ocean his whole life and had a deep respect and healthy fear of it. Sending a couple thousand tons of steel to the ocean floor wouldn’t harm it a bit. As they drank coffee and waited for their 8:00 a.m. flight back to Washington, a tug moved in and towed the ship out to the main channel. The lines were released and the ship was under way. A white froth churned up behind the stern of the boat as it headed for the open sea. It had just cleared the seawall when the frothy wake subsided and the ship stalled, turning sideways in the middle of the channel. An hour later Coleman, Stroble, and Hacket were on their way back to Washington.

That little company that Coleman had started before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 now had annual revenues of over twenty-five million dollars a year, and had grown to over 20 full-time employees with another 100-plus independent contractors under employment. Those 100-plus employees were all former special forces operators, men who used to make $30,000 to $40,000 a year who were now making a quarter of a million dollars and up.

Coleman moved the growing company to new digs in a more business friendly area midway between DC and Baltimore, but hung on to the old warehouse. Through an off shore company he had an attorney approach the owner and acquire the building. The place was simply too private to part ways with, and in Coleman’s line of work privacy was paramount.

Two large cargo doors and one service door faced the street. There was no signage, only a street address painted in white above the service door and the faded remnants of the U.S. Steel logo. Inside the warehouse, the old cracked and chipped floor had been acid washed, patched, and painted. Along the left side was a mix of storage lockers, racks, and large metal tables. Lined up on the right side were two motorcycles and a car, all three under gray tarps, and a twenty-eight-foot Boston Whaler with two Merc 150 HP outboards. A black Chevy pickup and a big Ford Excursion were both backed in and parked in the middle. At the back of the building were the offices, bathroom, and workout area. A metal staircase led to the second floor. There were two offices and a conference room, all with large glass windows that looked out onto the floor.

Coleman was in the right corner office sitting behind a large gray metal desk. It was military surplus. Sturdy, cheap, and functional. He was working on clearing his e-mails. He received on average a hundred per day, and they came at all hours. He had men in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Jordan, Qatar, Kuwait, and Indonesia, and those were only the places he could admit to. A beeping noise caused him to turn around. He ran a hand through his sandy blond hair and looked at the two twenty-eight-inch flat-screen monitors. The one on the left showed a man lying on a bed in a cement-walled room. The room was the building’s WWII bomb shelter that they had converted into a cell several years before. The man on the cot was the mystery Russian whom they had brought with them from Cyprus. The screen on the right was split into four separate pictures. One of the stairs leading down to the bomb shelter, the back door to the warehouse, the front door, and the fourth and final frame rotated between shots of the roof and the sides of the building.

Two cars were lined up in front of the main cargo door waiting to be let in. One was a silver Audi A8, and the other was a blue Toyota Land Cruiser. Coleman knew both vehicles, and he was expecting them. He turned back to his computer, grabbed the mouse with his right hand, and clicked on a security icon at the bottom of the screen. A menu popped up listing the building’s doors and their status. Coleman maneuvered the mouse’s arrow to the main cargo door and clicked on the Open tab. Coleman watched the vehicles roll in and then closed the big door. He pushed himself away from his desk and walked out onto the catwalk. Coleman put both hands on the top railing and watched Rapp climb out of the Audi and Dumond the Toyota.