by Robert Lance
Once they cleared the Palawan Trench, they entered the shallows of the Spratly Island mass and Willer advanced the throttles to optimum cruise. The ride was much smoother. Slinky, with little else to do, served hot coffee to Willer and Bailey. Alamo took note and said, “Hey, I could do with some of that.”
“Slinky smirked and said, “Do I look like a flight attendant? Get your own.” He pointed aft to the small galley compartment. “Ramon made pastries, second drawer. Help yourself.”
The back light of two monitors gave Domino’s skin a purplish glow. Her eyes riveted on the duplicate display from the cockpit. Her pearl smile never left her face. She was concentrating and learning the nuances of her new best friend, Pamela. Alamo towered over her, sipping coffee. Without cracking a single facial muscle, she said, “Would you mind getting me a cup? One sugar. One cream.”
Alamo chuckled. “I guess that makes me the flight attendant.”
He returned with the coffee and a pastry and set it on the work space in front of her. “What’s got you so pins and needles?”
“We are collecting an unbelievable amount of data that I’m sending back to LT. We can get an idea of the traffic flow of shipping, speeds, directions, all that. Right now… we’re mapping the bottom. This is the most expensive fish finder you’ll ever see.” She pointed at an object in the upper right corner of her monitor. “Look there, a mini reef, an aquatic habitat.”
Alamo scoffed. “Leave the discovery business to Jacques Cousteau.”
“It’s a good hiding place, should we need one.”
“I knew there was a reason I picked you for this mission. Good work Domino, keep at it.”
The Ghost cruised onward for an hour and a half without encountering a single vessel. They had arrived twenty miles short of Mischief Island. The radar picked up its first ping. The sonar also alerted. Pamela compared the corroborative inputs, the radar profile, the RPM and pitch of the propeller, azimuth and distance. It was a Chinese patrol boat, capable of speeds in excess of sixty knots. It was moving from left to right, six miles ahead of them. Willer spoke over the intercom. “Let the games begin.”
They tracked the ship for several minutes when Beetle said, “She’s on the hunt, lit up like the White House Christmas tree. I think she’s patrolling for submersibles. The Chinks aren’t taking any chances.”
Willer said, “She’s a big no trespassing sign with a lot of fire power to make it stick. What does that tell you?”
“The Chinks have something to hide.”
Willer called Alamo to the cockpit. He said, “We can slip in behind her, no problem. We might want to track, get an idea of her patrol pattern. It would be nice to know if we’re going to be coming back to these waters.”
“What’s that going to do to our time line?”
“Hard to tell. An hour? You can bet she’ll be coming back this way.”
“Worst case scenario, Willer.”
“We can’t out run her, but we can sink her. Stealth wise, she’ll never see us.”
“Proceed on course to target.”
The stealth boat reconfigured to its patrol profile and continued into enemy waters. They had sailed no further than five kilometers, when Pamela began shaking her head at them. Bailey said, “Sounding buoy, three klicks…dead ahead. Active sonar emitters.”
Sounding buoys were used for a number of reasons. Nav beacons, mini lighthouses to mark dangerous waters, weather stations, and military sonar to detect intrusions by divers. Fitzgerald was the expert on sonar. Alamo threw the problem at him.
“Fuck. It looks like I’m getting wet sooner than I expected. We’re six miles out, and the fuckers probably have the entire island ringed with these bastards.”
The problem was complicated. Sonar emitters had cones of coverage that fanned sound waves in a sixty degree arch two miles in length or more, depending on the sophistication of the sonar. It was a simple matter of placing buoys with intersecting arcs to make an impenetrable wall. With two emitters, each buoy had one hundred twenty degrees with plenty of overlap. The sonars were highly sensitive and could pickup a diver exhaling air in the water a half mile away.
The Ghost could theoretically breeze right past them under electric power, but the Ghost had not undergone testing to prove its capability. There were no effective sonar jamming measures, which made sonar so reliable. Sonar could be tricked, decoyed, or wave shaped, but once detection occurred, the enemy knew there was a sinister presence in their waters.
The weakness of Sonar buoys was the buoys themselves. Active sonar requires a power source, huge battery packs that quickly deplete and require regular maintenance. The second weakness was in the emitter. They could be sabotaged by recalibration of the wave emission, reducing the range without alerting the monitor. That required a diver to approach from the blind side of the buoy and physically tinker with the sonar emitter.
Surface clutter prevented sonar detecting a surface diver with a Draeger rebreather. The task ahead of Fitzgerald was to sabotage the buoy, find its twin sister and sabotage it as well. It would take time and endurance.
The clock was ticking, and Fitzgerald entered the dive chamber. The risk was the Chinese patrol boat could return and catch him on the surface. No sane and brave man would take on such a dangerous dive, but Fitzgerald was a SEAL, insane and brave.
The Ghost loitered beyond range, waiting, clock ticking. Fitzgerald landed on the first buoy, and they could see the sonar wave retract to within a few hundred meters of the buoy. “That’s good, Dave,” Bailey said over the com. “We’ll GPS the next buoy, give us a second to find it.”
“Give me a minute to catch my breath.”
Time ran out. The Chinese patrol boat appeared on the radar, moving rapidly in their direction. Had the sonar operator seen an anomaly on his screen? Fitzgerald was hanging onto the buoy, and Bailey shouted a warning. “Hostiles inbound, dive Dave.”
“I don’t have the coordinates yet.”
“Got it!” Domino yelled. “Sending now.”
Dave slipped below the surface, and they would not be able to talk to him until he surfaced again. Time was freeze framed, one miserable sweep of the radar at a time. The Chinese patrol boat closed on them, and Bailey flipped the arming switch to the Griffin missiles waiting in their launch tubes. The boat didn’t veer from a collision course until it was five hundred meters away. It tracked to the buoy that Fitzgerald had just sabotaged. It stopped. Had the sonar operator been able to detect the recalibration?
In the meantime, Fitzgerald had surfaced at the sister buoy. His voice was labored. “Backing off the calibration, tell me when to stop.”
It was obvious to Alamo that Fitzgerald was oblivious to the Chinese dicking with the first buoy. “We’re busted, Dave. Get out of there.”
“Hang on. Both buoys have short battery life. Maybe they’re switching out the power supplies.”
The buoy seemed to have lost power as it’s emitters shut down. Minutes ticked by. The sonar began transmitting again. The technicians failed to recalibrate the wave length, and the blanked channel stayed dark. It was obvious the patrol boat was doing double duty switching out battery packs. The next stop was the buoy that Fitzgerald was hanging onto.
“Hurry up Dave. You’ve got company coming your way.”
“You’re working me too hard. Tell me when to stop.” The sonar wave receded, leaving a hundred meter hole in the Chinese electronic wall.
“Dave, swim down channel. Get off the buoy—now!”
Bailey voiced over Alamo. “We’ve got more traffic outbound. Three tangos. A patrol boat, one freighter, towing a barge.”
Wayne growled. “Chinese cluster fuck. We’re at a traffic stop until they run past us.”
Alamo also grumbled. “Yeah, and I’ve got a diver right in the middle of the intersection. Fuck me dead.”
The Chinese convoy changed course and remained within the perimeter. They were in no hurry as they slowly tracked west. Probably a work party ins
talling more buoys. The Ghost found the blank channel and slowly slipped beyond the electronic barrier. They parked directly over Fitzgerald’s locator. When the dive door opened Fitzgerald stood there gasping, with cheeks flexing like a chipmunk that just got corn holed. His teammates knuckle bumped and said in unison. “We’re in.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Mischief Island lay a little more than a kilometer away…out of sight. The ground penetrating radar painted a graphic much different than the overhead from three years earlier. Larger land mass, more buildings, lots of small vessels moored in the lagoon. The weather was still nasty with low clouds dumping rain. It would have been ideal if they could’ve launched Kitty to get an accurate overhead to work with.
They were seeing the island from the south, facing the major activity on the island. A seven story building competed with lesser structures to form a skyline. The radar painted three newly installed antiaircraft batteries and a half dozen land based short range antiship missile batteries. It was a discovery to make the backbone wilt.
The Ghost backed away from the crescent shaped island and circumnavigated to the northern rim, mapping the features of the island as they went. The northern sea wall inside the outer reef was complete. The central island was a long empty barrier three kilometers in length and wide enough to build a runway to launch aircraft. The western end of the island was the location of the core community of the Chinese base, approximately one square kilometer. It was within this mélange that housed four barns, not two, of the mobile nuke launchers.
It was more imperative than ever for SEAL Team Four to find the truth.
Back on Palawan, Heather’s analysts were busy reconfiguring the imagery of the captured data with known data. They were able to take the horizontal radar imagery, flip it and construct a detailed map of the island complex. It had doubled in size in three years. More importantly, the military installations left a big void to be filled in. One antiaircraft battery needed a work force of one hundred; radar technicians, missile launch techs, ground support crews, cooks and bottle washers. In addition, a munitions facility to logistically support the defensive network required even more experts.
All the information went into the hopper to be superimposed and analyzed on site. The end product was a bristling military facility with no less than a garrison of one thousand Chinese soldiers and sailors. Mischief Island was not an atoll with a weather shack on it as the Chinese claimed.
Heather could see disaster brewing with the ongoing mission. They had collected enough intelligence to make the mission a success. What was lacking was the overhead warning that Kitty provided to operators on the ground, and for that reason she advised Alamo to call off the landing until they had aerial capacity over the zone. She forwarded the assessment and the new maps to the Ghost and Fort Meade.
Alamo was more than just livid when he read the short crisp assessment that Heather sent. The bitch was undermining his authority, redirecting the mission, planting land mines in front of him and subtly challenging his competence. The last thing he wanted was a committee in Washington looking over his shoulder, telling him how to run his op. He wouldn’t stand for it.
He was seething, but his dead pan expression gave away nothing. He spoke to Domino. “Erase the second half of the message.”
Domino had read it and understood the implication. “I can’t erase it. It’s logged in as received.”
“Then re-log it as not received.”
She was being asked to commit fraud on a vital intelligence advisory. “I can’t.”
The look on her face made Alamo back off. “Then annotate the log with ‘garbled and unreadable.’ I’ll bear responsibility.”
She hesitated, then did as she was told, shaking her head.
Alamo gathered his divers and said, “We got a break. The good news is we have excellent new imagery of the target. The bad news is there’s more there than we bargained for. Perrotte, do a work up on it, and let me know what’s changed. We can do this. We have to.”
Ted took the challenge in stride and gathered his team around the map image on Domino’s monitors to workout the glitches. It never occurred to him that Alamo had made him the goat should things go wrong.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Like any fortification since the beginning of time, the Chinese had sentry posts on the perimeter. And like any sentry since the beginning of time, the dolts, disgruntled, and uninspired were assigned to the task of making a pretense of staying alert. The sentry posts were small sheds that allowed one man refuge from rain and sun. It was a place to retreat and contemplate their sorry assed place at the bottom of the food chain. Boredom and sullen meanderings were their constant companion until relieved.
The sentries were less than diligent making their assigned rounds in the soaking rain. Their flashlights wandered a few feet around them as they patrolled. They didn’t see the dark figures emerge from the sea, slip silently behind them and disappear into the wall of mist covering the compound.
Ted and Perry approached the first barn, and took a few minutes to case their surroundings. No guards. No one moving about. The structure was approximately a 40X60 pole barn that fit anywhere on a Midwest farm. Probably made in the USA, Ted thought, then remembered who he was dealing with. They slithered to a corner of the building and listened for sounds inside the structure. They heard the low growl of a couple of fans. Then a dry cough. The building was occupied. They silently began removing the metal fasteners holding the thin aluminum panels in place. What little noise they made was masked by the rain pelting the roof. They made an opening and flexed the panel enough that Perry could get his MP-5 barrel inside. Ted put his device to repeat the images from Perry’s optic recorder device.
Not a foot from them on the other side of the wall was a sleeping Chinaman. Perry slowly fanned the interior. The building was filled with sleeping men, but what they were looking for was in plain sight. Two Dong Feng 21-D missile launchers were berthed side by side. Perry zoomed in and out to fully get the evidence. He zoomed tighter and got the serial number of one of the launchers. It would have to be enough. Ted’s tap on the shoulder was confirmation that they had company. Perry removed the MP-5 and bit the dust.
Four flashlight beams bounced in the darkness between buildings. They could see the red dots of cigarettes being puffed…a hack…another cough, and the low mumble of men either going or coming from work. They also heard the grunt of the Chinaman, a foot away. His sleep was being disturbed. Feet shuffled past them and into the darkness.
Ted carefully reset the panel screws to button up the opening they made. It was time to skedaddle. He used his throat mic to communicate what he had found and that he was on his way to the rally point. Gates affirmed the same.
Alamo had heard the transmission and countermanded the retreat order. He was desperate to find out what the other two barns contained.
It was Ted’s call, and he knew it. “Negative Tango Six, too much traffic…Team Tango, abort to rendezvous.”
The rain began to intensify. A squall line made the sentry retreat further into his shed. A flash of lightening made him bend his head down, but he caught a glimpse of a human form sprinting from behind a building toward the beach. His eyes were playing tricks on him. Then a second flash revealed they weren’t. He gawked into the darkness trying to determine what he should do. If he sounded a false alarm, his life would be miserable for waking the duty officer. Maybe he didn’t see what he’d seen. Better that way. Another lightening flash spotlighted a second human form dashing behind the first. He sneered in disgust. Dong and Wong were probably monkey fucking each other in the downpour. He wasn’t about to leave his post to find out. The sentry fished in his pocket for cigarettes and forgot about Fitzgerald and Gates. It was good for him that he did because Perry was two feet behind him with his k-bar drawn to slit his throat.
The dive team recovered aboard the Ghost expecting a celebration of another mission accomplished. They stowed their gear, h
igh fiving and knuckle busting. Alamo said nothing but was evidently not in the spirit to celebrate. He made his presence felt, and the team went silent. “That was sloppy. If we had time, I’d make you go back and finish the op.” He glared at Ted. “I expected more from you, Perrotte.”
Ted objected. “We got what we went for. Serial numbers, date, time, and location. What more could you ask for?”
“We need to know the contents of the other two sheds. We need the status of force of the Chinese.”
“Alamo, it was like quittin’ time at a GM factory.”
“It only takes one Dong Feng to sink a carrier. Where are the fuckin’ missiles?”
“They weren’t on the launchers.”
Alamo snidely retorted. “They weren’t on four of the launchers, what about the other four?”
Perry ripped off his Chinese booties and angrily tossed them, muttering to himself.
Alamo picked up on it, and said, “You gotta problem Perry?”
“You wear these and try to slip up on a Chinaman. Tripped all over myself.”
Gates said, “It was a good call, Alamo. The whole point is to remain stealth. All the high tech crap that got us here turns to shit if the Chinese even smelled our farts. LT’s brief was pretty fucking clear. When my team leader calls an abort, that’s a redirect, end of subject.”
Alamo said, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, Gates. We’re not out here picking apples. You should have snaked an auger camera into those two barns before tucking tail. LT is a pussy and I don’t like that shit showing up in the performance of my SEALs.”
“For fuck sake, Alamo. We were without FLIR over-watch. We shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” Gates said.
Perrotte ducked his head and coughed.
Alamo hissed, “You have something on your mind Perrotte?”
“We got what we could get. What I didn’t like was you countermanding my decision to abort. That causes confusion, and that could get us killed. Don’t ever do that again.”
