Chapter 8
Puerto Limon, Costa Rica
Wednesday
4:20 p.m. Central Time
“What the fuck, Johnny?” USMC Lieutenant Colonel Frank Alvarez held an arm out to his right to hold his friend back.
“Sorry, Colonel. I didn’t see that.” The younger staff sergeant was visibly shaken.
“You almost didn’t see anything and was almost catatonic. Don’t move.” Frank reached over with his left hand, grabbed a broken mop that was leaning against the rust-orange cargo container, and carefully worked it up into his hand, holding it tightly nearest the mop head. He carefully placed the jagged end of the red wooden handle just inside the door of the container and underneath the belly of the coiled brown-and-black, with lighter diagonal stripes, clearly agitated viper. With a swift sweeping motion, he tossed the snake out of the cargo container doorway. He heard a soft kathunk against another container’s side and then another as the snake fell to the asphalt pier.
“That’s the bad one, ain’t it?”
“Fer-de-lance. Fuckers are everywhere down here,” Frank said gruffly. “And yes. That’s the bad one.” Frank paused and looked about the opening for other hazards. No more snakes at least. Carefully, he shined the light from his pistol around the top of the doorway and down each side. He wasn’t sure if the locals had put the snake in there as a booby trap or if the damned thing had just crawled in. Since it was a local snake, he was guessing the latter. With a little further thought on the subject, though, he became fairly certain the snake was a booby trap. The dock was a good mile from any vegetation like those things were normally in. He dropped the broken mop softly to the ground and then worked his flashlight back and forth across the cargo container, still searching for any other surprises.
“Just drugs?” USMC Staff Sergeant Johnathon “Johnny” Parvo asked and then he froze as the voice in his ear buzzed.
“Alpha, this is Overwatch, be advised you’ve got company approaching from the south. Looks like locals, but there are two with them that don’t belong…ETA three minutes.”
“Copy Overwatch.” Frank couldn’t hear the drone overhead, but he knew it was up there. “Shit, Johnny, we’ve got company.”
“ETA, sir?”
“Three minutes.”
“No way we can go through all this in time,” the staff sergeant said.
“I know. But we can’t leave here yet.” Frank looked at the instrument on his left armband and it was pegged in the red. “Gammas are pegged. There’s something dirty in here.”
“Yeah, but where, sir?”
“Let’s back off and see if our company can lead us to it.”
“Right.”
Frank eased backward into the container opening with his head on a swivel looking left, then right, then back again. He rolled his view up and over to make certain nobody was getting the drop on them from atop the containers. He did a rough count and estimate and realized there were at least nineteen rows of cargo containers stacked two high and three deep looking westward. It had taken weeks of work to find this one needle in a haystack and he didn’t want to lose it now that they had gotten so close.
“Come on. We’ll go two rows down and climb up,” he told Johnny.
Johnny began closing the cargo door on his side, causing a very loud rusty metal-on-metal screeching sound, and then stopped abruptly.
“Shit, that’s loud,” he exclaimed quietly.
“All at once and then we go.” Frank nodded. The two of them quickly pushed the doors to and closed the latch. Fortunately, the dock had other background noises of ships in the background and moving cranes in the distance running. Maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t drawn attention to themselves.
“Come on, Johnny. Let’s move!”
The two of them hurried as quietly as they could to the set of containers two rows down, nearest the loading crane that was sitting unattended. Using the crane arm as a ladder they made their way atop one of them. The particular container had been sloppily painted black to cover rust that showed through it. From the stability of the metal container’s top, paint flecked off with each step and the rusty metal gave inward. Frank wasn’t too certain they weren’t going to fall through the damn thing. There were all sorts of foreign letters and words on the side of it that as best he could tell were in Mandarin.
“Alpha, Overwatch has your position. Be advised that your company is about to be in view. Bravo has moved into place to take their egress.”
“Copy that, Overwatch.” Frank toggled the comms to the team channel. “Bravo, stay ready but do not—repeat, do not—take the egress route until you get a signal from me.”
* * *
“Copy that, Alpha. We’re frozen and waiting your signal.” USMC Captain Ellis Jones looked through the scope on his rifle, panning across the three-vehicle convoy that had just arrived. The cars were mostly filled with what appeared to be local drug thugs and muscle for hire. Two of them in the rear car, though, as best Jones could tell, looked like bad news from East Africa. He dropped his rifle to hang from his armored chest and then he turned and looked over his shoulder.
“Gunny!” he whispered.
“Colonel Alvarez?” USMC Gunnery Sergeant Hank Lord appeared from around the corner of a dirty green cargo container. “Clear to the north, sir.”
“Great, Gunny. Listen, I’m thinking the colonel is about to go apeshit any minute now. He’s got nine locals and two Somalis carrying AKs and who the fuck knows what else almost on top of him. The egress is to the south and we have to keep that cut off from the bad guys, right?”
“Understood, Captain. I can take Tapscott and Rheems and get a drop position on them from the east. You have them here. We could easily put them in a cross-fire killbox,” Gunny Lord said.
“Okay, sounds good. But do not engage until we get the colonel’s sign.”
“Did he bother to tell us what that sign would be?” the gunnery sergeant asked, mostly rhetorically.
“You’ve met the colonel, right?”
“Right.” The two men just smiled and nodded. Gunnery Sergeant Lord whispered orders to two of the men in the stack and the three of them moved swiftly toward an eastward position.
“Bravo, Bravo! Overwatch! Be advised three new vehicles approaching from the east. Estimating eleven Somali regulars, well armed.”
“Shit. Copy, Overwatch!” Jones looked back through his scope following Gunny, Tapscott, and Rheems. They were still out of view of the roadway between the containers to the east for now. “Gunny, be advised we have more bad guys approaching right at you from the east.”
“Copy, Captain.”
“Elvis.” Captain Jones motioned toward the three men stacked up with him.
“Sir?” Sergeant Leon “Elvis” Anders kept his rifle at the ready but looked over to his squad leader.
“Get the rest of the guys ready to fight. Shit’s about to go down.”
“Yes, sir!”
* * *
“They’re coming out of the goddamned woodworks, Johnny,” Lieutenant Colonel Frank Alvarez whispered. The two of them were lying prone in sniper position with their rifles following the first team of locals and the two Somalis. “Be ready for some kind of shit.”
“I’m with you, Colonel. Does it matter what kind of shit?”
“Shit is shit, Johnny.”
“Right. I’m ready.”
“Good. As soon as they dig out the goods, we drop ’em.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But not until then! And if you have to shoot the Somalis, shoot them in the leg or something. We need them alive to find out who their buyer is,” Frank ordered him.
“Yes, sir.”
The entourage stepped around the corner, oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by the marines, a UAV drone above, and from national assets in orbit as they passed overhead. That made them no less dangerous, though. Frank watched them carefully as they cycled open the handle on the container and tugged it open, making a metal screeching sound that could be heard across the dock. Frank looked over at Johnny as if to say Been there, done that.
The first man stopped the second before stepping into the container and looked cautiously about. He held them up for bit while he looked around inside for something. Then after a moment he motioned for the other two.
“Well, I guess he couldn’t find his slithery friend,” Johnny whispered.
“Guess we know now how it got there.”
Three of the men with AK-47s stood flank and Frank thought for a brief second that one of them had looked right at him. He breathed and stayed calm until the man’s gaze moved slowly about. Frank realized they hadn’t been spotted, but the men standing flank were on the lookout.
“Overwatch, can you give me ears?” he whispered into the throat mic commlink.
“Audio coming to you now, Alpha.”
“…esta aqui…esta aqui…” one of the locals was saying. Frank was guessing it was the guy talking and pointing but the audio was a fraction of a second behind.
“In English…” the Somali with the AK grunted. The other one kept quiet.
“In here…it is in here…”
“You…go in and bring it out to me…”
“Sí…sí…”
“Be ready, Johnny, this is it.” Frank started slowing his breathing and placed the red dot of the sight clearly on the forehead of the man standing flank nearest their position. “You take the far flank man.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Overwatch, any change on the Geiger?”
“Not yet.”
The three locals who had vanished into the container were clearly rummaging from the noise. The Somalis were standing patiently and observantly at the ready. Then the men reappeared from within with a wooden crate about one meter wide and deep and about two meters long upright longways on a set of hand trucks. The lead guy dropped the dolly forward and the crate crashed over like a falling domino against the asphalt, almost saturating the eavesdropper mic. Frank flinched from the abrupt spike in the noise amplitude bursting in his ears.
“It is here…”
“Open it…”
“Slight uptick on the Geiger, Alpha.”
“Be patient.”
The men fumbled with the wooden crate until one of them produced a steel prybar from within the cargo container. Two of the locals worked at the lid until it pried loose and fell to the ground edgewise then teetered over, making a wood-to-metal clank as it impacted against the door of the cargo container. They then began pulling and kicking at the wooden sides until they were knocked loose and fell away revealing another container inside.
“Help?”
“You two…” the more vocal Somali told the two men standing flank. They immediately slung their rifles and rushed to aid the others. A few seconds later four of the men were on either side of the destroyed crate looking at a flat black metal box that was clearly upside down in front of them. After scratching their heads briefly, and some fast chatter in Spanish, the men surrounded the box with the intent of flipping it over.
“Hurry up…”
“Is it locked?”
The men got handholds and flipped the box. By the looks of strain on their faces Frank was pretty sure it was heavy as hell. Finally, after some more Spanish and Somali expletives, the men managed to, very clumsily, set the metal box down right side up. There was some cursing and chatter briefly about being cautious, but Frank couldn’t decipher it all.
“Jesus, I hope that thing doesn’t have explosives in it,” Johnny whispered.
Frank ignored the comment, but was thinking the same thing. Something about the casing looked familiar to Frank, but he wasn’t quite sure where he’d seen it just yet. He did a mental exercise to quiet his mind and filter through his memories, but so far, he had nothing.
The men around the box continued fiddling with the hasps for several moments. Finally, one of them gestured at the men on either side of the black metal case to back up as he sprang the final hasp and the top opened. As the lid raised, Overwatch immediately chimed in.
“Geiger counter through the roof, Alpha!”
“Must’ve been lead lined,” Frank whispered to Overwatch.
“That’s why it was so damned heavy,” Johnny said.
The Somalis both rushed to the open container and lifted a few items from within and put them aside. They appeared to be long Army green tubular items like an old Viet Nam–era bazooka tube and a tripod. Then the leader strained a bit and lifted an oblong oval-shaped black object with a yellow radiation symbol on the front. It was clearly a small bomb. It had a squatty cartoonish bomb teardrop shape about two-thirds of a meter long and about a half meter in diameter at the largest point. The bomb tapered into about sixteen centimeters at the back, with four aerodynamic fins.
“What is that?” Johnny asked. “The 1980s’ cartoons called and they want their bomb back.”
“Son-of-a-goddamned-bitch. And it would be more like 1960s,” Frank whispered.
“Colonel? You know what it is?”
“Yeah. It’s a Davy Crockett,” Frank said nervously. Suddenly, the pathway to the correct memories in his brain triggered and he knew exactly what they were looking at. He even recalled the technical details from the munitions classes’ topic of potential pilfered, lost, or repurposed special weapons threats. “Looks to me like the Somalis have just bought themselves an old M29 with a W-54 warhead and a one-fifty-five-millimeter launcher.”
“Seriously…” Johnny looked back at him. “Engage? What if we hit the—”
“Overwatch, be advised we have a potentially active nuclear device in play!”
“Colonel, did you say, uh, ‘active’ nuke?” Johnny gulped quietly.
“Take ’em out, Johnny! Don’t hit the bomb!” Frank depressed the trigger of his M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle, releasing the 5.56x45mm NATO round. One of the men still holding his AK-47 at the ready was hit in the head and fell backward. Bright red blood spattered across the man next to him as Staff Sergeant Parvo dropped the hired thug closest to the Somali leader. The two Somalis instantly took cover behind the door of the cargo container, taking the warhead with them. Frank and Johnny continued to shoot at the hired help.
“We can’t let them figure out how to activate that thing, Johnny. We need to push.” Frank motioned toward the ladder they had climbed up. “When I go, Johnny, you stay here and keep my six clean until I get one container up. Then get there!”
* * *
“You hear all that gunfire, Gunny?” Captain Jones said into the commlink.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I guess that’s the colonel’s signal. Be advised Overwatch has your uninvited company almost on top of you.”
“Do we engage them or let them by, Captain?”
“Let them by. Then, we cut ’em down.”
“Copy that.”
* * *
“We don’t let that bomb out of our site, Overwatch!” Frank fired several more rounds at the men hunkered in behind the cargo container as they peeked around the back side, vying for a better attack position.
“Copy, Alpha. Be advised that Bravo has engaged a second company.”
“No shit, I can hear it.” Frank looked over at Johnny and grinned. “Staff Sergeant Parvo, it would appear that we are outnumbered.”
“Aw shit, Colonel, don’t say that.” Parvo didn’t like the ramifications of that statement. He certainly didn’t like what always came next. He knew the colonel was about to go apeshit. And there was always shit when he did that.
“And you know what marines do when they are outnumbered…”
“I had a feeling you were going to say that, sir.”
“Attack! Now let’s move it.”
Frank sprang to his feet like he was doing burpees, leaving a boot-shaped dent in the rickety rusty container top. Quickly, he raced to the edge and leaped outward, grabbing the rails of the crane doing a hand-over-hand walk down the metal lattice of the crane’s arm. Once he felt he was close enough to safely drop to the ground with all the weight of his armor and weapons, he did so with a parkour four-handed landing, followed with a less than perfect judo roll. He didn’t think twice about if Johnny had his six or not. He trusted the marine would be there when he needed him.
Frank sprang upward and turned, landing with his back against the container on the other side of the crane. He shuffled to the edge and peeked around the corner. Just as his head cleared the corner, metal sprayed and sparks flew in his face as enemy fire skittered off the steel frame of the container. A couple of rounds went right through the metal and out only inches from his head. Frank dropped to a knee and then made a low sprint, almost a bear crawl, across the alleyway between the container rows. Once he made it across the path, he gathered his wits for second, as well as his breath, and looked back to see Parvo leaning around the corner laying down suppression fire.
“Which way, Colonel?!”
“Not straight at ’em! Too thick!” Frank leaned over and fired a few rounds, then pulled back to cover. “Get over here in three!”
Frank held up a two, then a one, then he rolled out, firing down the alleyway again as Parvo darted across to him. The two men fell back against the container wall. Both of them checked their magazines.
“Check that side.”
Parvo shuffled to the other edge of the container and quickly ducked back in.
“Shit! Two coming this way.”
“Just two?” Frank asked.
“Pretty sure.”
“Then they’re outnumbered. Come on!”
Frank stood and rushed across all the way to the other side of the opposing alley until he bounced off the container wall. From the moment he stepped into view of the two men pushing toward them he fired his weapon in their general direction. He hadn’t expected to hit them, but that wasn’t the point. He just needed to distract them. And that is just what he did.
Staff Sergeant Johnny Parvo kneeled around the corner, dropping his rifle in his left palm, his elbow on his kneepad, and fired once. The first local gunman fell. Parvo quickly adjusted to the right and dropped the second just as Colonel Alvarez banged into the container across from them. Parvo was up and moving almost as quickly as he’d dropped to his knee.
“Great shooting, Johnny. Go!” Frank motioned. The two of them ran at top speed down the alleyway, going lengthwise with the containers. Once they reached the end of the cargo container row they stopped and put their backs to the wall on the left side. “I’ll take that side. You prepare to cover.”
“Yes, sir.”
Frank bounced across the alleyway to the right-side landing with his back against the metal wall and his rifle at the ready. Instantly, he expected to be pulling his trigger but there were no targets.
“Alpha, Overwatch! You’re being flanked. They are on the opposite side of the container wall you are leaning on and breaching both ends, copy?”
“Copy that!”
Frank made gestures to Johnny telling him that they were about to come at them from each end. He pointed at himself then to the right. Then at Parvo and to the left. Parvo returned a thumbs-up and shifted to a firing position more appropriate.
“Alpha, Overwatch. In four…”
Frank waved at Johnny and held up three fingers on his right hand and counted down with the voice in his ear.
“…three…two…”
He held up one finger and then gripped his rifle.
“…one!”