pausing to take their bearings.
According to each of their chronometers, they were exactly on course,
creeping in toward land along the least guarded section of the coast.
Another ten minutes and they’d be in.
Sikes motioned to his fellows to stay below water, and gently kicked
himself up to the surface to take one last sighting. The landmarks
were thoroughly embedded in his memory, as was every target point.
Still, it never hurt to be certain.
He let his head poke up above the surface of the water, maintaining
neutral buoyancy with gentle flicks of his flippers. He lifted himself
up on the next swell and stared inland, trying to pinpoint the tall
tower that was the first landmark. Within a few seconds, he knew he
was Kicked.
Lining the shore from one end of the insertion point to the other was
light. Large headlights, as though a news crew were awaiting their
arrival. And, after Grenada, he knew exactly what that was like.
Fifteen minutes later, they crowded back aboard the RHIB, tired,
frustrated, and pissed beyond recovery. The peals of laughter and
jeering from the crowd ashore just behind the lights still rung in
their ears. Worse yet was the military band that had struck up martial
music just as Sikes had poked his head above the water. And the
fireworks.
They would hear the sound of laughter all the way back to the carrier,
even after they were out of earshot.
Monday, 01 July 0800 Local (+5 GMT) Joint Chiefs of Staff Washington,
D.C. The morning was off to a bad start. Each one of the four men
around the conference table had already heard from his civilian boss.
The secretary of the Navy had been particularly unpleasant about the
events off the coast of Cuba, since it was his service that was
plastered across the early editions of ACN News. The live feed of the
SEAL squad lurking in the shallow waters off the coast of Cuba, tracked
by their thermal image and the blazing arrays of light along the coast,
was already old news by the time most Americans were having their
morning coffee. Personally, the secretary had agreed with the
President-the marching band had been the worst part of it.
The reaction around the world had been immediate and vehement. There
were too many small nations that had begged assistance from the United
States, along with massive infusions of cash from the State Department,
then immediately turned upon their supposed saviors as soon as a new,
more repressive regime was installed. These nations’ guilt over their
inability to take care of themselves would transform itself immediately
into righteous indignation that the United States would interfere with
the political events of any country their own included.
Still, the other chiefs of services refrained from commenting on the
events. Each one of them knew that it could just as easily have been
their own forces. The Army, the Rangers, the Marines, or even the
elite Delta Force. That the SEALs, and by extension the Navy, were
taking the brunt of world outrage was sheerly a matter of luck and
timing.
While they might fight viciously among themselves over which service
would win that high-visibility tasking, when the world united against
them the Joint Chiefs of Staff stood firm. To admit to wrongdoing on
the part of one service was to damn them all, and further jeopardized
the fragile funding that kept a barely adequate core of forces in beans
and bullets.
“They’re there illegally,” the Air Force chief of staff said finally.
He looked off into the distance, avoiding eye contact with the chief of
naval operations. “They’ve got no business being in Cuba.”
“The First Amendment. I wonder if our founding fathers ever had this
in mind,” the Marine Corps chief of staff grumbled. “It’s one thing to
allow them to say anything they want in our own country, another matter
entirely to be providing aid and comfort to the enemy.”
The CNO nodded. “You won’t get any argument from me. But like it or
not, they’re there. These days, the media’s usually there before we
are. You know that.”
The Air Force chief of staff stirred restlessly in his chair.