Electra

Chapter 1

“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.

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.

The dolphins were still right there, chattering incessantly. They, too, seemed to know that this was the endgame. Maddock was tempted to make a dash for the underbelly of the vessel, but suppressed the urge. They’d come too far to get careless now. He summoned some of the discipline SEALs were known for and forced himself to think. What would work here?

The tanks back-to-back was the thing. They had to stay in that formation. He signaled to Bones that they would ascend together in the same orientation. He was relieved to see the Indian simply nod his agreement. He must also be surprised they’d made it this far.

Then the dolphins disappeared and Maddock guessed they were going to the surface to take a breath. Dolphins typically surfaced to breathe every few minutes and they’d been down longer than that.

Now! He widened his eyes at Bones and the two of them began a slow and careful ascent toward the ship’s metal underside, spinning slowly in a circle as they neared the spot where they would place a mine. Maddock slipped the heavy disc from his pouch — a ballistically inert training model — and waved it in front of Bone’s face, his message clear: I’ll place the mine.

The combat dolphins were back by the time Maddock was within arm’s reach of the metal structure. Very aggressive now, they darted in and nosed around Maddock’s and Bones’ midsections, seeking access to the scuba tanks. Maddock gripped his own magnetic disc tightly in his hand, waiting for an opening. He didn’t want a dolphin to nose it out of his grasp. When he saw both dolphins move to Bones’ side, teaming up on him, Maddock made his move.

He thrust an arm up until he felt the mine snap onto the hull with a satisfying clack. The LED on the explosive device turned from green to red and began to blink. Maddock knew that it was now transmitting a signal to the training officials that the mine had been triggered.

Although technically they had won the exercise, since a suicide bomber’s mission would be complete at this point, not caring if he were caught or killed, Maddock still wanted to reach the surface without being tagged at all, if possible. Extra points. He was glad to see Bones fall into formation by his side and together they awkwardly swam their way out from under the ship. The dolphins still followed them but seemed to have lost some of their fight, perhaps knowing the game had already been won.

Still together as a unit, Maddock and Bones surfaced next to the destroyer. They were still untagged as their heads broke the surface and the first thing Maddock heard was the dolphin trainer’s whistle. After a moment, the dorsal fins of their two adversaries were seen slicing the water in the direction of their holding pen on the floating docks.

Looking up at the destroyer, Maddock saw the excited faces of the sailors leaning over the rail, many of them clapping and cheering.

Maddock held his hands up and pantomimed an explosion.

“Gotcha!” he called up to the crew.

“Nice work!”

“Got lucky!” The calls came down.

As a small Zodiac inflatable boat neared Maddock and Bones for pickup, a gruff voice issued over the ship’s PA system.

“Maddock, Bonebrake: come on up to the Commander’s office. Now!”