Operation Caribe by Mack Maloney

Author:Mack Maloney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780765365224
Publisher: Forge
Published: 2011-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

20

“WANT A PEEK?”

Crash drained the last of his coffee and climbed up to the control deck. There was a periscope here, similar to those found on modern submarines.

But the SEALs’ mysterious vessel was not a U-boat.

Commander Beaux adjusted the periscope to Crash’s height and stepped aside. Crash pressed his eyes against the focal piece and saw the faint outline of a city twinkling in the distance.

“Is that Miami?” he asked.

Commander Beaux laughed.

“You’re off by about ninety miles,” he said. He pushed the periscope’s zoom button, made another adjustment, and let Crash look again. This time the scope was focused on a sign painted on a beach wall. It read: BIENVENIDO A LA HABANA.

Welcome to Havana.

Crash was astounded.

“You can get this close?” he asked Beaux. “Don’t they have a twelve-mile limit? Or military sea patrols?”

“I’m sure they do,” Commander Beaux replied. “But what difference does that make when you’re invisible?”

This was no idle boast.

The SEALs’ vessel was invisible. At least to radar. And at night, under the right circumstances, it was pretty much invisible to the naked eye as well.

Its official name was the IX-529; it was later christened the Sea Shadow. Simply put, it was a seagoing version of a stealth fighter jet.

About 160 feet long and almost half that wide, it shared some design features with the F-117 Nighthawk. It was all angles, with no curves and no vertical surfaces, an overall shape that tended to make radar signals slide off instead of bouncing back to a receiver. Under optimal conditions, the Sea Shadow presented a radar signature no bigger than a seagull.

Technically, it was a catamaran. It had twin submerged hulls, each with a propeller, a stabilizer and a hydrofoil. The hulls were connected to the rest of the ship by two angled struts. With a draft of fifteen feet, it sat so low that it looked like it should have sunk the first time it hit the water. But this odd design actually made the IX-529 highly stable even under the worst conditions at sea.

Inside, the stealth vessel was tight but not uncomfortable. There was enough room to support a crew of six. It had a head, a shower, a small galley, six bunks and a fairly elaborate control deck—but that was about it. It carried no weapons—no torpedoes, no deck guns, no missiles.

But it didn’t need any. The IX-529 Sea Shadow was not built to be a warship. It started out as an experimental platform to prove the basics of seaborne stealth. After its life as an experimental craft was over, it bounced around a bit and was put in storage until the Navy finally turned it over to the SEALs, who then turned it over to Section 616. The first thing they did was boost its power plants. The result was that the odd vessel could now travel close to fifty knots.

The 616 guys referred to it as “the bus,” a way to get them to places where they could really do their thing.

And at the moment, it had brought them very close to Havana Harbor.

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