CHAPTER 14 – A CLEAR 
AND PRESENT DANGER
01:50 (Caribbean Basin Time)
Thursday, July 7, 1988 ‘C’
Shores of Old Man Bay
Grand Cayman Island
Caribbean Sea, west of Cuba
The two men watching the side of the house facing the nearby beach and ocean didn’t see in the darkness of the night the nine black shapes which cautiously emerged from the waves some 300 meters to the left of the residence. Those shapes then ran across the white sand of the beach, conscious that they could become visible if they stayed on the sandy surface. Entering the tropical vegetation growing along the shoreline, the nine men wearing wetsuits and diving gear stopped and regrouped at the foot of a large tree.
‘’Alright, let’s take off our air bottles, masks and flippers and leave them here, guys.’’ Said in a low voice their team leader, a tall and solidly built man in his late twenties. ‘’Then we will go accomplish our job. Remember: our main target is Sean MacManus. We will also kill anybody who will resist or threaten us, but we are not here to massacre everyone on sight, so don’t play happy trigger without reason.’’
Taking the time first to take off their diving gear, but keeping on their black neoprene wet suits, the eight men under the command of John Price then followed their leader through the jungle, heading towards the beachside house marked by a couple of light shining inside it. Each CIA Action Division man was armed with a silencer-equipped submachine gun, a silencer-equipped pistol and a combat knife, plus carried a number of either grenades or explosive charges. After some twenty minutes of cautious advance, the American agents arrived at the western limit of the property, marked by the end of the forest. Using a night vision scope, John Price took the time to locate the mobsters placed on night sentry duty to protect the house in which their boss, Sean MacManus, aka ‘The Mad Irishman’, was sleeping.
‘’I see two sentries watching the beach and sea, posted at corners of the veranda, plus two more men watching the side facing the access road. They don’t seem to be using either night vision scopes or binoculars and none of them is looking persistently at our patch of jungle. We will cross the band of open ground one by one and as silently as possible: noise will be our biggest enemy here. Once at the house, we will eliminate the outside sentries, then will enter the house. Mack, Steve, Mike, Tony, you will take care of the seaside sentries. John, Jake, Dick and Alan, you will take care of the roadside sentries. I will stay between your two groups, ready to support if someone pops up unexpectedly. I will go first.’’
Not wasting time, John Price then left the cover of the vegetation and, with his black diver’s suit making him a dark shape in the dark night, walked at a crouch across the twenty meters or so of open grass area before arriving at the foot of the wooden veranda surrounding the house itself. Crouching under the veranda, he signaled for the next man to come, his submachine gun at the ready. All eight of his men were able to cross the open ground without being detected by the mobsters playing sentry, something that did not surprise John: mobsters, while capable of great violence against their victims, were not trained soldiers and were not equipped for night fighting, contrary to CIA Action Division field agents. Also, this was about the hour at which the human mind was at its lowest in terms of alertness and speed of thinking. All this meant one thing: those mobsters were going to die in the next few minutes. His team then split in two groups of four men, with John staying in position while rising his head high enough to be able to watch the sentries and point his submachine gun at them. The two sentries nearest to the CIA team were the first to die, their throats cut open while their mouths were covered. For the two mobsters posted at the far corners of the house, the CIA agents used silenced pistols equipped with oversize silencers and firing subsonic ammunition, in order to produce as little noise as possible. Contrary to what people normally saw in action movies, a silenced pistol still makes quite a loud noise when fired. In that case, what the silencer did was to cut down but not eliminate the detonation from the shot and also made it more difficult to locate the shooter. However, when using subsonic ammunition, meaning bullets fired at a muzzle velocity of less than 300 meters per second, silencers became a lot more efficient in their job of noise reduction. While someone on the alert inside the house could possibly have heard the two shots that killed the remaining sentries, someone actually sleeping was very unlikely to wake up because of them. Waiting a few seconds to see if anybody reacted to the muffled shots, the CIA field agents then moved silently into the house, entering it via the rear and front doors while holding their weapons at the ready and pointed.
They found two men sitting in the kitchen and playing cards, submachine guns laying on top of the table on which they played. Those two were the next to die from shots to the head or neck. A silent but quick search showed that nobody else occupied the ground floor. That left the bedrooms on the upper floor. John Price took the lead in climbing cautiously the stairs leading to the upper level, followed by his men. Once in the main hallway, which was deserted, he again split his men, this time in four pairs, with each pair standing by next to the door of one of the four bedrooms. On his part, John posted himself next to the pair due to break into the main bedroom, where Sean MacManus was supposed to sleep. Raising his left hand high, he then suddenly lowered it, giving the signal for the assault. As they had expected, none of the doors proved to have been locked from the inside. The only surprise was when John erupted into Sean MacManus’ bedroom and found that the mobster was sleeping with a young black woman, probably a local prostitute he had picked up for the night. John again didn’t waste time and shot MacManus once in the head and once in the chest without saying a word: he had been sent to kill the mobster, not to start a conversation with him. That quick shooting on his part actually proved its worth, as MacManus reacted with uncommon speed once the noise of the door being busted open awoke him with a startle: he had time to plunge his right hand under his pillow before being killed by John Price’s two bullets. John’s next move was to rapidly walk to the black woman in the bed, who had also awakened, and then knock her out with a powerful punch to the jaw: he didn’t want her to possibly scream in horror and thus wake up any mobster his team may have missed up to now. It may not have been a gentlemanly move, but it was better for her than a bullet in the head. Going to the inert body of Sean MacManus, John doublechecked that he was truly dead, then looked under his pillow. As he could have bet, he found a loaded revolver there, ready to be used in an instant.
The next thing John did was to order his men to carefully search the house for any documents or notes that could give up information on MacManus’ criminal organization and activities. Since this house had been rented by MacManus rather than having been built to his specification, John didn’t expect to find some kind of hidden, built-in safe. What he did find inside the closet of MacManus’ bedroom was a solid steel foot locker locked with a padlock. One bullet took care of the padlock, letting John look inside the foot locker. What he found was a collection of a few small gold ingots, thick wads of American dollars and British pounds, three fake passports bearing the picture of MacManus, a loaded revolver and a few documents. Ignoring the cash money and the gold, John examined carefully the document and soon felt triumph fill him: one of the documents was a bank account booklet from a local Grand Cayman bank showing a balance of over 450,000 dollars. That booklet had been put inside a waterproof plastic bag, along with a piece of paper bearing what had to be the personal bank access number of MacManus and his account password. The United States was now going to be able to repatriate all that dirty money accumulated over years of criminal activities by the mobster. Another document John found proved at least as interesting as the bank booklet: it was a ledger book full of numbers, names, telephone numbers, addresses and annotations. With that ledger, the FBI was now going to be able to take down MacManus associates and accomplices in the United States.
Quickly putting the precious ledger, bank booklet and fake passports inside a large waterproof bag he was carrying with him, John then debated what to do with all the cash money and gold ingots, finally deciding to take them. Not that he wanted to take that money and use it for himself: he was proud to be able to say that he was absolutely incorruptible. Rather, that money could help compensate and support the numerous victims of the crimes committed by MacManus. On second thought, he took the British Sterling pounds banknotes, of which there was for 4,000 pounds worth, and went to the purse of the unconscious prostitute, in which he stuffed the banknotes: that woman was going to wake up with a painful jaw but was also going to find out that she had just made the most lucrative pass of her career as a prostitute. Looking at two of his men, he pointed the woman, her purse and her clothes, which were spread on the floor near the bed, while giving them orders.
‘’Jack, Mike, carry that girl and her things out of the house and on the veranda facing the road and quickly put at least some of her clothes on her. Let her keep her purse. She should wake up in less than half an hour and will then be able to walk away before somebody comes and alert the local police. As for us, our job here is finished. Let’s go retrieve our diving equipment, then we will swim back to our yacht.’’
The last thing John Price did before leaving the house with his men was to take multiple photographs of MacManus’ body. They then disappeared into the jungle, leaving behind fourteen dead Irish-American mobsters and one slowly awakening local prostitute.