Kaituna

The second operation takes place on the 9th of July in the port of Mersina. At 22:20 Ferraro lowers himself into the water and starts swimming in the direction of the merchant ship Kaituna, anchored two or three kilometres away. At one o' clock in the morning he is forty metres from the bow of his target. He floats along the surface of the sea, slowly creeping towards the ship, a veil concealing his face: a brown tuft of seaweed. As his body touches the steel bulb, the commando stays unmoving: he must regain his strength, slow his heart beat, his breath's rhythm. He is on his way again. The brown tuft of seaweed gradually rolls away, sliding along the right side of the ship.

As he reaches the bilge keel on the right he stops, and slowly vanishes into the sea. Ferraro starts breathing pure oxygen from his rebreather and has dived . Weighing on him, an unsettling feeling that he might have detected, by touch, of course, a verrina - a cable that is passed from one side to the other underneath the keel and run from bow to stern and back to check that there are no foreign objects on the ship; bugs, limpet mines or other tricks devised by the enemy. The commando immediately finds the keel, moves to the rear, attaches the first limpet mine, tearing its float and pulls out the fuse safety catch. One down. Now, without losing contact with the keel, he pushes towards the front where the second limpet mine has to be placed. Damn! And there was the verrina. Ferraro is perplexed, hesitant, worried. He still decides to attach the second charge, nonetheless, securing it well with the clamps. He takes all necessary actions so that the limpet mines are ready to explode. But he becomes uncertain: "should I remove those limpets? What if they find them with the verrina ... " He checks the sliding connector: he verified its functionality in person. It is a device that has been especially designed and developed to deceive the enemy's verrine: "no... it should work, they'll never find them ... "
After leaving the bilge keel, he approaches the centre of the hull, following the keel up to the bow. At 1:40 he returns to breathe in sea air, he repeats his forty metre "stroll", moving away from the position of the mined ship, swimming vertically. His face, a bush of brown seaweed again, floating idle on the water's mirror surface. And finally, weightless, he stretches out and swims as fast as possible.
At 3 in the morning Ferraro reaches the shore.
Following the explosion of the limpet mines, the Kaituna will sustain serious damage and, to prevent it from sinking, it will be beached on the coast of Cyprus.
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