Ted Bell - Spy

Mako was a fast fish, too. Any Keys fisherman will tell you a mako can reach speeds of almost twenty-five miles an hour and can jump about twenty feet in the air. They’ve been known to attack small fishing boats, leaping up suddenly and landing on the deck, biting everything in sight. Like a collision at sea, a thing like that can ruin your day.

Stoke kept one eye on the mako, especially because he was pretty busy trying to stop his arm from bleeding. He’d ripped it on the jagged edge of some protruding cockpit glass. Reaching inside again, trying once more to move the dead pilot around, he’d been forced to pull his hand out in a hurry. What happened was, a big ass barracuda swam right up inside the cockpit, knocked the pilot’s head to one side and gave Stoke the evil eye.

Shit! Tore his damn wet suit, yanking his arm out and slicing his forearm deep and now his cut up hand was bleeding pretty good, too. Nothing like getting a good blood flow going around man-eating sharks to add a sense of heightened drama to any situation.

One swift scissors kick got him to the entrance to the plane. He poked his head inside. Visibility was way down inside the submerged airplane, but he could clearly see his man Luis poking around in the plane to his left. Sharkey saw Stoke and motioned him forward, pointing down at something below his fins. Stoke checked his right flank first, see if there were any more jaws-of-death types lurking around in the rear of the fuselage.

It was clear so he swam right through and hung a left toward the cockpit.

Sharkey immediately saw all the blood trailing from Stoke’s hand and started shaking his head, pointing upward, meaning he thought the wound was bad enough they should surface and get it taken care of. Stoke shook his head “no” and turned on his Beacon halogen dive light to see what all the excitement was about.

Sharkey had already ripped up a small section of the plane’s aluminum flooring. Something was down there and Stoke had the feeling it wasn’t any damn cocaine. He swam right down to the small opening and peered through it. Too dark to see anything much but they were definitely carrying cargo down there. He poked his hand down there and felt around. A flat surface under some kind of rough covering.

He stuck his light through the hole and directed the bright white beam fore and aft. There was way too much silt and blood in suspension to see anything much and he had to wait a bit for it to settle.

He looked at Sharkey, mouthing the words “good job.” Luis nodded his head, but grabbed him by the elbow and pointed up at the surface again.

Stoke held up two bloody fingers. “Two minutes.”

He pulled out the dive knife strapped to his thigh and used it to lever up a larger section of flooring. Now he could maybe get his light down inside there and see what the hell he had here. A foot below the floor frame, what looked like two large rectangular containers were lying side-by-side and covered with heavy burlap.

Stoke felt his heart pump.

Sharkey helped him get the rest of the floor section up. It took about five minutes. Stoke was starting to feel the loss of blood, but this was damn well worth a little dizziness. There were two long cases, each about six feet across and about twenty feet in length. He tried, but he couldn’t see how far they stretched back under the remaining floor.

He sliced open the burlap, making a slit about four feet long and then just ripping the material away.

Inside was a large metal container. There was stenciled information on top, printed in red. The writing was Russian, not one of his languages. Still, a word popped out at him and sent a new sensation flooding through his body, a mixture of fear and satisfaction. He’d seen this word buried in the thick briefing documents Harry Brock had given him to study when they’d met for his initial briefing in Washington.

On the Jet Blue back home, he’d opened the brief book and dug in. Read a lot of governmental boilerplate about what he could and could not do as an independent contractor. Perused a CIA overview of all of Latin American countries. And, finally, a long list of all the bad shit he should be on the lookout for when he got to the Caribbean. One whole section had been about black market foreign cruise missiles. Brock had told him to read that section very carefully. He didn’t need to tell Stoke why. It was one of the things the U.S. was most concerned about in the region.

Hell, you had half the nation’s strategic oil supply going up the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans. Somebody, Fidel or Hugo, say, started taking out tankers or offshore rigs, you were looking at war on your back porch.

The Russian word he had recognized was Yakhont. Stoke sucked a lot of oxygen down and held it there, trying to calm himself down.

Yakhont had a familiar ring to it.

Sharkey and his old man had stumbled on the jackpot.

Yakhont, called Firefox by U.S. military, was the new Russian anti-ship missile. It scared the hell out of everybody in Washington. Death with wings. Unstoppable ship-killer. And, precisely what the U.S. government did not want was for even one of these damn things to find its way into the hands of somebody who didn’t have America’s best interests at heart. That’s why it was at the top of the list Brock had given him.

Firefox combined all the qualities of future anti-ship missiles. It was designed to fly at supersonic speeds, be invisible to radar, deaf to jamming, and was guided autonomously on a “shot-forgot” principle. Fire a Firefox and fugheddaboudit, game over. It had a range of up to 300 km at an altitude of about 15 meters. The missile would drop down to about fifteen feet seconds before it hit you.

Flying at roughly 750 meters a second, and performing complex tactical maneuvering during flight, the Firefox would reach its target no matter what. Just one of these damn things could sink a supertanker or an aircraft carrier. And, no navy in the world had an effective means of defending against the Russkis’ new missile. Not one.

The missile was designed to be carried by Russian Su-27 and Su-35 fighter aircraft. This was the new Sukhoi Flanker, a front-line fighter that was one of the mainstays of Russian airpower. Sophisticated and extremely expensive. Now, who the hell had planes like that down here in the tropics? Castro certainly couldn’t afford any damn Su-27s. Cubans could barely afford breakfast in that island utopia.

But his bosom buddy, Latin America’s new Daddy Warbucks, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, sure could.

Two minutes had been used up. Stoke swam up to Sharkey who was tapping on his watch and staring at Stoke like he was crazy which was no newsflash. Stoke knew he’d lost a hell of a lot of blood but he wanted to get this done in one dive and get on the horn to Washington as quickly as possible.

Stoke opened his dive bag and pulled out a small digital camera designed to work underwater. He gave it to Luis and then pointed at the two cruise missiles. Sharkey understood and swam down to photograph the things.

The big barracuda, thank you very much, had left the premises when Stoke got up to the cockpit. He’d chewed up el Capitán a little more but Stoke wasn’t interested in the man anymore, only his uniform.

It was light blue. Military, but if Stoke expected to find insignia identifying the pilot’s outfit, he was mistaken. Anything that could have identified rank or national origin had been removed from the corpse’s uniform. And it wasn’t fishies who’d done it. Someone had used a knife to cut the patches away. Stoke knew that because he saw the knife still lying in the pilot’s lap.

Very interesting. The deceased had been stripped of ID. Somebody had survived the crash. Yeah. Somebody who’d kept his wits about him before he disembarked.