Damn Few by Rorke Denver

Author:Rorke Denver
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

It was the final challenge in an elaborate port-security exercise at Roosey Roads. They had plenty of warning. The Navy’s ship’s commanders knew we were on our way. They were on full alert and waiting for us. Several times in the pre-planning briefing, the ship’s executive officer had used the phrase “when we catch the SEALs.” Not if. When.

Getting to the ship had gone far more smoothly than we had any right to. But we needed our good fortune to continue. We still had to get out of there and safely back across the bay. Really, the only choice we had was getting out exactly as we had gotten in. Piling to piling, on breath holds, then quietly turtlebacking out into the bay. That’s when I really feared we were about to get caught.

Just as we broke the cover of the pier, we saw four sentries standing immediately above us. They were out there smoking cigarettes, staring almost directly our way. This is a lesson our enemies often fail to heed. When you smoke cigarettes, you kill your night vision. You’ve got the glow of the cigarette distorting your eyesight. The smoke is floating into your face. And people who are smoking usually aren’t paying such careful attention to what’s going on around them.

“Don’t look at ’em,” I said under my breath to Toro. Humans have an innate sense of when people are staring at them, the way you can almost feel it when someone’s eyeballing you in a restaurant or across a crowded room. I didn’t want to risk that.

“Just don’t give them any reason to tap into that sixth sense,” I told Toro.

It worked. None of the smoking sentries noticed a thing, and we made our way swiftly back across the bay.

Toro and I didn’t say a word to each other until we were three-quarters home. Kicking on our backs in the water, staring back at the scene of the crime, we were both superstitious enough not to want to jinx it. Finally, I broke the silence.

“Holy shit, we did it,” I said.

“Amazing,” Toro agreed.

As soon as we hit the far shore, we called our chief on a radio we’d hidden there.

“Please tell me, ‘Mission complete,’” the chief said.

“It’s done,” I told him.

“Five minutes, I’ll meet you at extract.”

In five exactly, he pulled up in the junker van.

“My boys!” he said with a huge grin on his face. Our wetsuits still dripping, Toro and I climbed inside.

The chief drove straight to the guard post at the front gate of the port’s main pier. “Hey,” he told the sailor at the gate, “we need to talk to the officer of the deck right now. Let him know the SEALs are here.”

The sailor must have misinterpreted what the chief said. He seemed to think the chief meant that the SEALs had been captured during the training mission—not that they had succeeded in planting their dummy bomb. The guard called his executive officer and announced into the phone: “We got the SEALs,” he said.

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