This book is dedicated to all my friends who make up Maddock’s Minions. You are the best!
What was real and what was a trick of the light? From an altitude of one thousand feet, the shadows of cumulus clouds on the ocean appeared the same as the low-lying island Amelia Earhart was looking for. Her plane was about to crash. Nothing she could do would change that. She needed somewhere to land and somewhere to land fast.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on the most difficult leg of their journey after having flown two-thirds of the way around the planet in their Lockheed Electra airplane. Earlier that day they had departed Lae, New Guinea en route to tiny Howland Island, where they were to make a refueling stop before traveling on to Honolulu. From there, San Francisco represented the completion of their goal — a circumnavigation of the globe at the equator, piloted by a woman, an almost unimaginable accomplishment.
Things had not gone as planned since Lae, however, and now Earhart was forced to make a choice: she thought that dark patch below and to the right was part of an island — probably not Howland or even nearby Baker, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. It offered what looked like enough flat ground on which to try a crash-landing, but if she was wrong she wouldn’t be able to regain altitude to try somewhere else.
She smiled to herself in spite of the situation, recalling good times spent with her pilot mentors. “Any landing you can walk away from…” She could hear them laughing across all the miles and all the years. This once humble farm girl, born in America’s heartland in 1897, six years before the pivotal Wright brothers’ first flight, had come farther than she had ever dreamed, both literally and figuratively.
Now, as the waves of the Pacific rushed up to greet her, it all came down to this. She squinted through her goggles at the outline below—there! A white line indicating breaking waves on a reef. It was real land and not just a cloud shadow. She would at least have a chance. But there was yet another problem.
She needed desperately to communicate with Noonan, who sat ten feet behind her in the cargo area, rather than in the co-pilot’s seat, to accommodate his navigation equipment. The combined noise of air rushing into the plane and its twin Pratt & Whitney turboprop engines made it very loud, however, making normal conversation impossible. To overcome this, they had devised a crude clothesline system where they clipped a paper with a written message to a clothespin and slid it back and forth on a pulley. In this way they could communicate during the long hours in the air. Right now, though, there was no time for that. But with her engines out, there wasn’t as much noise as usual and by shouting she could make herself heard. She craned her neck to face backward and yelled, “Secure the payload, Fred! Secure it now!”
She could just make out his reply. “Okay!”
Earhart quickly glanced to her right and frowned, then focused her full attention on the little island below. Much of it was forested and offered no hope of a real landing. On the far side of the island she picked out a pathetically small strip of sand or crushed coral, and she nosed her plummeting craft toward that.
She was not sure she would be able to reach it.
“Remember, only one member of your dive team needs to avoid detection for that team to be declared the winners of this exercise!” The U.S. Navy underwater warfare trainer spoke forcefully, almost shouting, as he addressed the two Navy SEALs who stood before him, as well as a dozen others who sat on the dock nearby.
For Navy SEAL Dane Maddock, the statement offered little consolation. He and the SEAL he had been paired with, Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake, would be the last team to attempt the exercise, which so far none of their peers had been able to complete. Maddock stood on a floating dock at the entrance to a military harbor, surveying his surroundings. He squinted against the bright morning sunlight as he focused on their goal: a destroyer ship docked in the harbor about one hundred yards away, a large red flag draped over one side indicating its training target status. The SEALs were supposed to act as enemy combatants infiltrating the harbor, by SCUBA diving through it and sticking a mine on the warship’s hull. Maddock felt the pouch on his weight belt that contained the mine to make sure it was fastened securely. Bones also gave his equipment a last-second inspection. Their task would be difficult enough without any gear failures.
“Divers ready…”
Their warfare trainer spoke through a megaphone now, alerting those in the vicinity about what was taking place. Maddock sized up their foes — the two opponents whose job it would be to stop the SEALs from placing a mine on the ship. They were superior swimmers, much better than Maddock and Bones, and they always seemed to wear annoyingly cocky grins on their faces. This would be a test for them, too.
“Mark 7 team, ready…”
The two bottlenose dolphins circled in their enclosure, an underwater pen with a sliding door which their handler, a marine mammal specialist, now lifted and held open. The United States Navy Marine Mammal Program had been in quiet, low-key operation since the early 1960s, with significant deployments during the Vietnam War and other conflicts. The long-classified program trained dolphins and sea lions to perform useful underwater tasks such as mine detection, the recovery of underwater objects, and, as would be demonstrated in this exercise, the protection of harbors from attacks by scuba divers.
Bones glared at one of the animals as if he could intimidate it. It outweighed him, out-swam him, had additional senses he did not possess, and, depending on whom one asked, was possibly even smarter than him. Unlike the trainers at public dolphin facilities like Sea World who constantly cooed in soothing tones to their charges while wearing brightly colored outfits, this trainer conveyed instructions to his dolphins almost exclusively by hand signals, wore military uniform, and never seemed to offer fish as treats. The dolphins were well-cared for and knew they would be fed well at the end of the day. A word of praise was reward enough.
Maddock, who had been staring at the destroyer, lost in tactical thought, snapped out of it. He flexed his knees in the wetsuit he wore to ward off the chilly water. The suit limited mobility somewhat, but it was important not only to retain body heat in a medium that transferred heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than air, but also to shield their bodies from accidental blows the dolphins might deliver. They could easily kill a man with blunt force, but were trained only to tag the divers by placing a magnetic disc which would deploy a buoy marker when activated. When these yellow markers floated to the surface, Navy officers would then make a decision about how to intercept the potential threat. Maddock observed the dolphin handler closely as he communicated with his mammalian subjects.
“Mark 7 team, set, go.”
The handler blew two short blasts from his whistle and the pair of cetaceans burst from their pen into the open water of the harbor entrance. They would be given three minutes to swim to the destroyer at the other end of the harbor before the dive team hit the water. Maddock and Bones watched the sleek animals recede into the harbor until they were no longer visible.
“And to think I used to like that show Flipper when I was a kid.” Bones shook his head. Of American Indian descent, his six-foot-six frame and muscular build intimidated many a human warrior, but would matter little to the dolphins.
Maddock frowned at his friend and colleague with eyes the shade of a stormy sea. He often found Bones’ outgoing demeanor irritated his more reserved personality. It wasn’t that long ago that the two had butted heads in BUDS school while training to be SEALs, but gradually they had gotten to know each other through the course of various missions and adventures. Now they had what Maddock considered a good working relationship, although he wished Bones would shut his mouth sometimes.
“Divers: set…”
Maddock leaned over to Bones. “Let’s stick together.” The other teams had operated on the principle that splitting up underwater offered greater odds of success. But to Maddock, it also meant each diver was more exposed, more on their own. It hadn’t worked so far. Bones just had time to nod before their warfare trainer spoke once more into his megaphone.
“Go!”
Maddock and Bones slipped into the water of the harbor with barely a ripple at the same time as the marine mammal trainer gave a sustained blast of his whistle.
The clarity of the water left a lot to be desired. They could see perhaps ten feet in front of them and knew that it would only get worse the deeper into the harbor they ventured. The dolphins, meanwhile, depended less on sight and more on their echolocation sense, a kind of natural SONAR that allowed them to “see” objects by pinging them with sound waves generated from their melons. Maddock knew they would have no trouble picking out two human forms.
They reached the muddy bottom at a depth of about twenty feet. Like their fellow SEALs who had already tried and failed, the thinking was that if you were near the bottom, at least the dolphins couldn’t profile you from below. Maddock took a bearing from a compass he wore on his wrist and pointed toward the destroyer. They would swim straight toward it. Sneaking along the edges of the harbor, which provided some small measure of shielding, also took more time, thus giving the dolphins more time to detect and tag them. Bones nodded and the two warriors swam at a rapid pace toward their target.
There was little to see except for the flat muddy seabed. Clouds of silt puffed into the water when their fin strokes got too close. Maddock glanced at his dive watch. They’d been swimming hard for two minutes. It wouldn’t be long before the marine mammal sentries began sizing them up and closing in. They would swoop in and plant the magnetic buoy on their tanks, as they had been trained. If intimidating physical gestures or movements worked, the other teams would have had success by now.
Maddock pulled on one of Bones’ fin tips to gain his attention. The big Indian whirled around. Maddock held up the index finger of each hand and then drew them together, indicating that he and Bones should stick close together. Bones looked around, head on a swivel. When he saw nothing he held his hands up in a what’s up gesture. Maddock wrote with a pencil on the underwater slate he had clipped to his dive vest.
STAND TANK-TO-TANK AND WALK IN ON BOTTOM
Maddock watched as Bones’ eyes narrowed in confusion behind his mask. He was a fast, powerful swimmer, they were making progress toward their goal, and now Maddock wanted to stop and do something weird? At the same time, Bones had been in the field with Maddock enough times to know that he wouldn’t propose a tactic he hadn’t already thought through.
Bones shrugged, took a last look around and settled into an upright position, fins flat on the bottom. Maddock did the same and backed up to him so that their air tanks each contacted the others’ back, severely limiting the amount of exposed metal. Maddock checked his compass, tapped Bones’ arm and pointed toward the destroyer.
They proceeded to move across the bottom in a strange kind of crab-walk, their progress slow and plodding. They slowly rotated as they moved, kicking up the mud as they went along, further limiting their visibility. After a couple of minutes of progress, Maddock caught a streak of movement in his peripheral vision. He could no longer see anything there, but he knew it had to be a dolphin, shooting by, making a surveillance pass. He felt a tap on his arm and looked back to see Bones pointing off to their right. He, too, had seen something.
They kept walking across the bottom of the harbor. Maddock glanced at his watch, tracking exercise elapsed time. At least one of the previous teams had been tagged out by now. Two more forms shot past them, closer this time, one on each side of them and moving in opposite directions. They were closing in.
Still, they kept moving, Maddock keeping a close eye on the compass. The going was slow and they didn’t need to go anywhere but straight to the target. Had they been swimming, they could have reached the ship by now. But at the same time, more minutes had ticked by, and Maddock knew that by now some of the SEALs on the dock would be surprised that they hadn’t seen a yellow marker pop up yet.
Then he felt Bones slip and the big man fell in slow motion toward the bottom, rolling over on one side. Instantly one of the gray marauders homed in, the magnetic buoy tag clenched in its formidable peg-like teeth. Maddock kicked at its snout as it closed in, the dolphin easily avoiding his finned foot with an effortless swerve of its head. He heard a shrill series of staccato clicks and whistles and could only speculate it was a fighter’s trash talk.
Or perhaps tactical coordination?
Almost too late, Maddock turned while Bones got to his feet in time to see the other dolphin swimming toward them at ramming speed. Maddock spun, eliciting a muffled grunt from Bones as he slammed his tank into his ribcage. But the dolphin missed, its muscular side careening off Maddock’s wetsuit as it rocketed past. Maddock now realized full well what they were up against. There was no way a mid-water swimmer would get past these aquatic sentries, no matter how skilled. His tactic was paying off.
He gripped Bones’ shoulder and looked into his eyes when he turned around. Okay? Bones held up a thumb and finger in a circle, the universal diver’s okay sign. They began their slow dance toward the warship once more. Maddock hoped the trail of silt they kicked up might confuse the dolphins’ echolocation, causing their pings to bounce back before reaching them. The animals began to circle around them like sharks, moving slower now, studying their quarry, looking for a weakness.
The next time Maddock looked up from his compass he was rewarded with the sight of the dark underbelly of a U.S. Navy destroyer. Perhaps fifteen feet above them and another ten feet away, it represented their objective. The dolphins stayed with them as they passed under its hull into near darkness, the massive ship blotting out the sunlight. They could hear vibrations coming from the war machine, not its propulsion system but various machinery on board as sailors carried out their business in port.
When they were directly under the middle of the hull, the V-shaped part of the ship that was deepest underwater, Maddock signaled to Bones to stop moving. They looked up and saw the metal surface, painted black with antifouling paint, a mere ten feet above them. Maddock unclipped the snaps on his mine pouch.