They were looking down toward the water. Now one of them tossed his butt into the water and walked on.
Then the second one followed. Pacino brought the view down. There at the waterline was the black shape. He could make out the draft markings on the rudder, even the running light on top, the light off, the glass of the bulb cracked. No doubt now that it was the Tampa.
Pacino did a rapid low-power periscope search, scanning the horizon for approaching contacts or aircraft, then checked the supertanker-pier one last time.
As he was about to lower the scope he stopped. There had been something odd on the pier between the inboard destroyer and the end frigate. He returned the periscope to the Tampa’s rudder, rotated it to the right so that his view was between the destroyer and frigate, then switched to high power and hit the doubler trigger.
Buses. School buses. Two of them he could make out, with the possibility of a third in between. Buses suitable for removing the crew of a submarine, Pacino thought. The vehicles were dark and unmoving. Perhaps they were there for taking the crew off later, or had something to do with the surface warships. Whatever, it was not a good sign. Pacino shifted back to low power, again checked the sentry on the supertanker-piers and lowered the scope.
“Periscope exposure, eighty-four seconds, Cap’n,” Turner reported. Not good, Pacino thought. Too long.
Periscope exposure begged for detection.
“Attention in the firecontrol team,” Pacino said. “I observed the two destroyers on either side of Friendly One as well as the frigate aft on the seaward side of the pier. I confirm the presence of Friendly One as a submarine. In addition, there were buses on the pier, not sure why. In the next twenty minutes the SEAL team will lockout and commence the operation. Carry on.”
He then phoned Morris.
“You have permission to lockout and commence the operation.” He was intentionally formal with Morris. “Be advised we’ve sighted several buses on the pier. The Tampa crew may or may not be in the process of being removed. Watch the pier for buses — if they start an off load open fire on the pier guards — we can’t allow a crew off load I’ll back you up with the Javelins.”
“We’ll play it by ear.”
“Be careful.”
“Don’t you worry about us. Captain. Just you be there when we need you.”
CHAPTER 16
SUNDAY, 12, MAY
1728 GREENWICH MEAN TIME
GO HAD BAY POINT HOTEL, XLNGANG HARBOR
USS SEAWOLF
0128 BEIJING TIME
The upper level passageway near the hatch to the escape trunk was crowded with men and equipment.
Commander Kurt Lennox stood aft of the tall pile of clutter, heart pounding. He mistrusted his voice. When one of the SEAL operators asked if he was okay he nodded, trying to look it.
Lennox was fitted with full SEAL combat gear, not that he would use it, but rather he was functioning as a mule to carry spares for the commandos. Morris had insisted on it, saying contemptuously, “ain’t nobody goes on a SEAL OP without carrying their weight.”
And weight he carried, perhaps a hundred pounds of it. He had on a black coverall with a heavy combat vest whose waterproof utility pocket contained a Heretta 9-mm model 92 automatic pistol with a loaded clip of hollow-point ammunition plus five spare clips.
The right pocket, an oversized collarbone-to-waist container, held a MAC-10 submachine gun, official weapon of all self-respecting American drug dealers, complete with “hush puppy” silencer, with the additional burden of four 30-round magazines, each filled with jacketed hollow-point rounds. An upper central pocket stocked five flash-bang grenades and ten pounds of C-4 explosive. Below that pocket was a pouch containing the Inter Sat scrambled VHF walkie talkie with its lip-mike headset. The vest, fully loaded, weighed over fifty pounds. On Lennox’s thighs were pouches stuffed with Mark 114 satchel charges, each containing two charges, each charge a hefty twelve pounds with its wire reel for the parallel connection to the floating detonator receiver. On his back Lennox wore the combined buoyancy compensator vest and Mark 20 Draeger bubbleless scuba lung, the tanks feeling even heavier than the vest and the satchel charges.
With his mask on, Lennox felt like his head was in a goldfish bowl. He took it off and let it hang from his neck. He had always tried to hide a tendency to claustrophobia. Strange, it didn’t bother him in the tight spaces of a submarine but surfaced when he found himself in large crowds. Of course, if the Navy shrinks ever got word of his problem his career would be over in a hurry. Ever since his Navy scuba training, he had stayed away from diving. Anxiety attacks could paralyze him. Now, in addition to having to overcome that fear, he would have to dodge bullets as they tried to take back the Tampa.
For a moment, as Lennox stood there in the passageway, he thought about his wife Tammy and the leave they had spent touring Japan. He had been shocked and happy that she had come. The WESTPAC deployment of the Tampa had come at a particularly bad time for them, only a week after he had caught her in another man’s car, in their own driveway, the car windows fogged, but not enough to hide his too vivid view. He had returned from the ship early at nine in the evening. He had told her he’d be aboard the ship for three nights straight attending to pre-underway emergencies, the staples of submariner’s lives, but after one night on the boat he could no longer stand the loneliness, the mournful deep hum of the ventilating ducts, the moaning cry of the ESGN ball as it spun at thousands of RPM in its binnacle aft. In frustration he had left the ship and driven home, picking up a bottle of wine on the way. He had also found a florist who was still open that late on a weekday and bought Tammy’s favorite red roses. He had craved one last romantic night before Tampa got underway. What he got was a black Mercedes in his driveway, the license plates spelling “RACY,” the windows dewy, his wife inside. He had caught only a glimpse of her raising her head from below the steering wheel, her hair a mess, the car door opening, the sound of the wine bottle shattering on the asphalt, the roses now a bad joke.
He had thought about divorce, moving out right then. But in the early weeks of the deployment, all he could think about was how much he still wanted her, how he didn’t want to lose her, and why in the hell he was in the middle of the Pacific welded into a steel pipe with one hundred and fifty other sweating men when his wife might be … He tried to block it out of his mind.
Captain Murphy had insisted that Lennox go on leave, and when they made landfall in Yokosuka, Tammy was on the pier. Murphy had radioed Squadron to ask Tammy to come, even flying her out on a military hop. After a few days in Japan, Lennox’s troubled marriage seemed to be healing, when the phone rang one evening at the hotel. A bureaucrat from NAVPERS had been on the phone, ordering him to report for duty aboard the Seawolf.
Goddamn Murphy, Lennox thought. Of all people, why did he have to get caught by the Chinese? Best skipper in the fleet, and now he was at gunpoint. A man who was more than Lennox’s commanding officer — he was also Lennox’s friend. At least the thought of being involved in an attempt to save Murphy made the claustrophobia recede for a moment.
The men from the first platoon opened the hatch to the huge escape trunk, the metal sphere with watertight hatches at the side and top. They began loading equipment into the hatch — heavy RPG grenade launchers and AK-47 machine guns. Bundles of Mark 114 satchel charges. Claymore mines. C-4 plastic explosives. An Inter Sat radio for talking to the COMMSAT high above. When the gear was stowed, SEAL Commander Jack Morris climbed into the hatchway with his executive officer, a scrawny young lieutenant named Bartholomay, known to the SEALs as Black Bart, perhaps because of his jet-black hair.
Morris looked at the interior of the escape trunk, nodded he was satisfied, and called to Lennox to climb into the sphere. As the older commander climbed in, huffing from humping the heavy vest and scuba tanks, Morris shook his head at Black Bart. The toughest part of the operation would be getting this bubble head submariner safely aboard the Tampa. Finally Lennox ha
d climbed into the sphere and sat on the wood bench, precariously balancing the tanks on his back and the weapons in his combat vest, and began to put on his swimmer’s fins, struggling to reach his feet over the bulk of the combat vest and buoyancy compensator.
“Ready, Lennie?” Morris asked Lennox.
“Let’s go,” Lennox managed to say, ignoring the derision in Morris’s voice.
Morris raised a phone handset to his lips.
“Upper level, escape trunk. Shutting lower hatch.” He then unlatched the heavy spring-hinged steel hatch and shut it over the hole leading to the forward-compartment upper level. The light and warmth of the ship were suddenly replaced by the shadows of the interior of the escape trunk, lit only by a single pressure-resistant bulb. Morris rotated the wheel of the hatch, engaging the ring latch.
“Lower hatch shut and dogged,” he reported on the phone.
“Flood and equalize the trunk.”
A rush of loud noise filled the spherical airlock as cold sea water flooded in the bottom of the trunk from a four-inch line and began to lap over the men’s feet.
Lennox grabbed his Draeger mask and put it over his face, testing the regulator for air. He was getting air through the unit but was obviously anxious, the mask of the unit fogging up but not enough to hide his wide eyes.
Morris looked down at the water level rising and looked over at Black Bart in shared amusement at Lennox as the water climbed above the men’s knees and rose to their waists. The air in the space was foggy from the pressurization. Black Bart yawned to clear his ears. Morris clamped his lips shut and blew, relieving his eardrums against the pressure, then yawned.
By then the water was up to his chin, the air foggier and hotter from the compression. As the water filled the sphere to the upper hatch, Morris put on his Draeger mask and blew out the water with his nose, tasting the coppery air from the lung. He then keyed a button on his belt, inflating the buoyancy compensator until it overcame the weight of the vest, then deflated it slightly to avoid being over buoyant — no sense popping to the surface and alerting the Chinese.
Morris peered through the dim light of the murky water to look at the faces of Bart and Lennox. Bart gave him an “okay” sign. Lennox, still wide-eyed, was under control and also returned an “okay” signal.
Morris reached to the bulkhead of the sphere and rotated a switch-handle, cutting the light, and the sphere plunged into blackness. He felt up into the overhead for the wheel to the upper hatch, rotated it, and when the dogs clicked home he pushed upward, letting the spring hinge assist the heavy hatch to the vertical position.
He pushed it until it latched and then swam out of the opening into the lukewarm water of the bay.
Scarcely thirty feet overhead was the surface, their position less than a hundred feet from the supertanker-pier. He felt his way up and out of the chamber, holding onto the hatch and waiting for Black Bart to swim out behind him. The water of the bay was totally black, not so much from being dirty but from the absence of light. The moon would light their way close to the surface and on the boat, but this far down the moon was useless. The swimming would have to be done almost completely by feel.
Morris and Bart felt their way to the trailing edge of the sail, where a recessed lug was set into the sail’s steel. Morris pulled out a line and attached it to the lug, then grabbed Bart and swam with him to a similar lug ten yards aft of the escape-trunk hatch and set flush into the deck. Once the tie-off line was in place Morris swam back into the escape trunk and pulled out Lennox, making sure his buoyancy compensator was filled to lift him up with the combat weights but not so light that he would have to struggle to remain deep. Satisfied, Morris pulled Lennox to the tie-off line and attached his lanyard to the line. No sense having the bubble head float off into the bay.
Morris and Bart pulled the equipment out of the trunk and tied off the bundles to the tie line, then shut the hatch and tapped on the hull. Below, in Seawolf, the first platoon would be draining the trunk, loading their gear and locking out. With the dark water, it would take a half hour just to get everyone out of the ship. Morris frowned inside his Draeger mask — thirty minutes to lock out was not good enough. This operation should have been done with a swimmer-delivery submarine, one of the old missile subs that used the ballistic missile tubes as airlocks and could lock out thirty men in a few minutes. So much for progress.
While Morris waited for the second platoon he turned his mind to calculating how long it would take to lay the satchel charges, letting his thoughts drift to the days when he had been first trained in Spec War techniques, to how they had practiced diving in enemy waters. He had been a platoon leader of Team One when his platoon had been ordered to lock out of the Silverfish in Severomorsk Harbor in the Soviet Union back in the eighties. He had been newly frocked to lieutenant then, still finding his style, and there he was diving in the sovereign waters of Russia, where he would have been shot or imprisoned if he were caught.
The job had been to tap a submerged phone cable with an NSA device to record all the phone conversations.
He should have been scared or at least anxious, but instead had felt only a rush of pleasure. Maybe it was sick, as some suggested, but it was what he lived for.
Six years after the Soviet bay dive he was in command of SEAL Team One out of Little Creek, Virginia, when the CIA asked them to insert into Libya and destroy a chemical plant known to be making biological weapons. His SEALs had been inserted by unmarked black helicopters, converging on the plant from all points of the azimuth, and had watched until the plant operator patrols had passed. Once the sentry had retreated to the control building the SEALs wired up two dozen explosive charges to the 120-foot-tall distillation column, wired in their detonator charges and retreated to watch the fireworks. When they were a half-mile away in the sand, the column blew apart, the white-hot fireball mushrooming into a brilliant, poisonous cloud that rose over a thousand feet into the air. The resulting secondary explosions and fires took out the remainder of the site, killing every Libyan within a thousand-yard radius of the column. His team had escaped, using their Draegers for gas masks, and vanished into the Mediterranean, where a second set of helicopters picked them up and brought them to the carrier Nimitz. The operation had earned him a Bronze Star and the admiration of the Spec War community, and had finally led to his command at Team Seven. It was also after Libya that he had been given a free hand — unquestioned budgets, the finest commandos in the fleet, and the choicest — most dangerous — operations.
So much for his professional life. By contrast, things at home were SNAFU. He had never married — women only made life complicated — and had drifted from bed to bed. In the last ten years he could recall only a handful of women who had turned down his many advances, including the married ones. He had wondered why he lost interest in women after he bedded them and had even talked to a unit psychologist, who suggested it was a “self-esteem problem,” and had asked him how he felt about his mother. Morris had nearly knocked out the man’s front teeth. Still, for all his macho self-image, a woman he had picked up in a bar and gone to bed with over two months before and forgotten was calling him and telling him she was pregnant.
“Sounds like you have a problem,” he said, but the problem was now getting to be his, because he had, in spite of himself, started to think what it would be like to have a little boy. Of course, it would be a boy. He had almost called the woman and told her to have the child and he’d live with her.
He had stopped himself from calling, but now here in this goddamned Chinese bay with an OP in front of him, he kept thinking about her. And the kid that maybe was his … As he watched, the first and second platoons locked out and unloaded their equipment from the escape trunk. Finally the third platoon was locked out and the hatch was shut for the last time. Morris swam down the line and tapped the men on the shoulders-saddle-up time. It took a few moments for the men to tie the equipment onto their lanyards and adjust their buoyancy. The two hundr
ed yards to the P.L.A piers might look like a short walk from the periscope, but hauling underwater enough ammo to blow a flotilla would be no piece of cake, never mind what he had told Pacino. He checked the men again, shining his hooded penlight into each face, getting an “okay” sign from each of them. He tied onto his own load, an RPG with six reloads, and tied his own lanyard to the tie line. When he tapped the man next to him, the signal was passed down the line to the men at the end, who untied the tie line from the submarine and looped the line onto their belts. Now all twenty-four men — the three platoons of seven plus Bart, Morris, and Lennox — were tied onto the line and could swim to the targets together without getting lost or separated. Also, should one of the lungs fail, the closeness to a swim buddy would allow buddy-breathing off a spare regulator.
And instead of having two dozen lighted compasses tempting detection, there was only Morris’.
He flipped the cover off his watch and held the face horizontal. When he clicked the light, the dial lit up, showing the depth and the compass bearing. Morris had memorized the chart, but the unknown was the Seawolf’s position when it locked them out. Still, he believed he could find the P.L.A pier.
He pushed off the hull of the submarine and swam over the cylindrical edge of the ship, diving down to the bottom of the deep channel, all the way to the one-hundred-and-twenty-foot level, his ears popping on the way down. Finally he felt the silt of the bottom and paused to let the others catch up. When they did he checked the compass again and swam northwest toward the piers. Almost immediately the silty bottom began to rise out of the supertanker channel to the shallower region of the piers, the sloping bottom there an average of thirty feet deep. Morris followed the up-slope, one hand in the silt, the other horizontal to see the compass, keeping them on course three four five. Now that they were shallow again, Morris looked up to try to find moonlight. There was a faint shimmer from overhead but no real light. The SEALs continued to follow the contour of the bottom until Morris hit concrete with his outstretched hand. Pier 1A. He waited for the team to catch up with him, then shined his light upward to see the surface. Instead of waves there was the black shape of a hull overhead — one of the ships tied up directly to the pier. Morris tapped the man on his right to confirm their position.
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