USS TAMPA
Buffalo Sauer crouched outside the door to the wardroom in the forward compartment middle level, straining to hear the radio report from Buckethead Williams, who had slipped through a passageway to the second door to the wardroom. As Sauer set up with Williams, he was nearly thrown to the deck by the lurch of the ship as it accelerated backward. Buffalo glanced at his watch — Baron and the ship’s XO had gotten the vessel underway right on time, he thought.
When Buckethead reported that he was ready, Buffalo called out the order to storm the room and then kicked in the locked door. Actually the door did not open fully but stopped halfway. And even as Buffalo saw the reason for the door stopping he realized that he was in for another scene like he’d just survived from the crew’s mess. The body of a man on the floor had kept the door from opening all the way. The man leaned against a sideboard, legs thrown out in front of him, eyes sunk deep in his sockets, face terribly pale.
Buffalo launched himself into the room, trying to avoid stepping on the man’s legs. Once he was inside the stench hit him, as bad as it had been in the crew’s mess. He had a brief impression of the room around him, the central feature being a large table used for the officers’ meals and meetings. On top of the table were two bodies, the skin of their faces green with decay, the foreheads open and raw from bullet wounds. Both men looked vaguely young, although the bloating of the corpses hid their ages, as did the facial wounds. They were both wearing the silver dual bar insignia of lieutenants. The thought occurred to Buffalo that the men in the room were meant to see the butchered, decaying corpses of their fellow officers, perhaps as a reminder not to do what they had done. Perhaps the dead lieutenants had tried to escape or defy the guards.
Seated around the table were the ship’s officers, eight of them. The scene was eerily grotesque, as if the Chinese captors had insisted that the officers sit about the table with the dead bodies lying out on it like some sort of nightmare meal. Each man’s chair was drawn up to the table, and the men on the far side of the room all had their heads on the table. The others, the ones with their backs to the doors, were sitting straight up, as if at attention. Whether that was by order of the guards or because of revulsion at the dead bodies, Buffalo had no clue. For a moment Buffalo was reminded of plebe year at the Academy, the harassed plebes sitting around their tables at attention, forbidden to look at their plates, their eyes locked into the distance by order of the first-class midshipmen.
The men at the table had eyes staring blankly like that, except haunted by madness rather than mere fear.
Buffalo looked toward the wall of the room opposite his door and saw Buckethead sailing into the room. For a moment he wondered what had taken Williams so long, but then as he saw the way Buckethead’s body seemed to float slowly into the room he realized that he was experiencing the dilation of time peculiar to intense injections of adrenaline, and that he himself had only been inside the room for less than a second. Williams saw the scene in the corner of the room at the same time Buffalo did.
A Chinese guard had a pistol to the head of one of the officers seated at the table. As he watched, the guard pulled the trigger. Before Buffalo or Buckethead could react, the guard turned his pistol to the next man at the table and fired. The man slouched in his chair, his head hitting the table. It was only then that Buffalo realized that the men against the far wall had their heads on the table because each of them had already been executed.
For a moment Buffalo was thrown off-balance as the guard continued to execute the men at the table rather than defend himself by shooting at the invading SEALs, and by the awful reality of watching men being executed at a table without resistance. What had these men seen that paralyzed them so, even in the face of certain death?
One answer came as Buffalo aimed his MAC-10 at the guard and squeezed the trigger, the HydraShok bullets exploding the interior of the guard’s abdomen, his pistol dropping to the ground as his body slammed against the aft bulkhead and slipped toward the deck.
The answer in Buffalo’s mind kept his trigger finger tensed, continuing to shoot into the guard’s body.
These men had seen things so horrible that they no longer wanted to live. For them, death was a deliverance.
Buffalo was suddenly thrown into the sideboard by the force of the ship turning, the deck tilting as the ship came around. He found himself staring into the glassy eyes of the man lying on the deck, the one who had been lucky enough not to have had to sit and stare at the rotting corpses. The man wore the single silver bar of a junior-grade lieutenant on the collar of his coveralls. Above his left pocket was a set of gold submariner’s dolphins. His eyes were dead, as if he had been lobotomized. Buffalo waved his hand in front of the man’s eyes. At first the man blinked, then shut his eyes. Buffalo shook him, heard mumbling. He put his ears next to the man’s lips, straining to make out a voice distorted by thirst and hunger and sickness and fear. Finally came the words.
“What took you so long? God, what took you so damned long? …”
The man lost consciousness, collapsing in Buffalo’s arms. Buffalo glanced at Buckethead Williams, whose jaw had tightened.
Buffalo reloaded his MAC-10 while speaking into his lip mike, trying to raise the men he’d sent to the chiefs quarters, “Peach” Pirelli and “Roadrunner” Kaplan.
“Peach, Roadrunner, you up?”
“Roger, One.”
“What’s the status?”
“CPO quarters are a meat grinder Mr. Buffalo.
They’d executed five of the chiefs before we could nail the guards. Just like the crew’s mess. Almost as if they were carrying out orders in case of a raid. Like they were expecting us.”
“How are the survivors?”
“Pretty bad, One. Must have been tortured. They seem like they’re in deep shock.”
“Roger. Keep Roadrunner there and meet me in the passageway to make sure the level is clear.”
Any remaining guards hiding in cubbyholes or staterooms would need to be dealt with before the middle level was considered secure. When it was, they’d help the other teams on the other levels. Until then, it would be best to stay out of the line of fire.
As Buffalo made his way down the narrow passageway, he almost hoped to see another Chinese guard.
The more he saw of the prisoners, the greater the itch in his trigger finger.
CHAPTER 22
SUNDAY, 12 MAY
1907 GREENWICH MEAN TIME
GO HAD BAY, XLNGANG HARBOR
USS TAMPA
0307 BEIJING TIME
Leader Tien Tse-Min felt the rush of air as the bullet flew by his ear, felt a sticky wetness on his neck from the blood that came from Captain Murphy, who twitched in his arms. The commando had shot at him and instead hit the captain. He dropped the hostage and the pistol and bolted for the ladder behind him, thrusting himself out of the cavern of the submarine, wondering if he would feel the rounds of the American’s machine gun crashing into him. What he heard were the sounds of the commando’s footsteps as the man ran toward him, but fear propelled Tien out of the hatch and onto the deck before the man got to him. Tien wondered momentarily if the commando had been running to catch him or to attend to the captain. It no longer mattered. He felt more than heard the two additional bullets from the direction of the American, but the shots missed and by then Tien had reached the top of the ladder.
He emerged from the forward hatch to a fiery landscape, the destroyer hulks burning, the fuel in the water of the slip burning, gunfire coming in from the pier, the helicopters overhead spraying bullets onto the ship. He had a brief impression of motion, of the destroyers and the pier moving away from him as the submarine, incredibly, moved backward, the water of the slip flowing swiftly over the bow as the ship backed up. It was true — the Americans had somehow found a way to recapture the submarine and were driving away with it in spite of the platoon of heavily armed guards Tien had stationed in the ship’s control room. How could his troops
have been overcome in seconds since the explosions sounded from the pier?
Impossible or not, it was happening right before his eyes. He continued out of the hatch, his body’s momentum propelling him forward along the sloping bow of the submarine. He took a deep breath and dived into the water of the slip, closing his eyes against the scummy oil floating on the surface, came up for air, spitting out brackish bay water, and watched as the submarine backed clear of the slip, two heads visible at the top of the ship’s conning tower, one of them driving the submarine.
Tien swam to the berth that had been occupied by the frigate Nantong astern of the sub. He could only hope that it would be chasing the American submarine.
He found a maintenance ladder leading up to the pier, and climbed out of the oily bay water. In front of him were the troops of an armored unit of the P.L.A, the troops firing their weapons without effect at the retreating submarine.
Tien watched as the ship pulled out, the wake boiling around its bow as it reversed its way into the channel water of the bay.
He found the man who seemed to be in command and took his radio, calling for the Hangu airfield, where he knew there was a fleet of Hind assault helicopters.
On the third try he reached the base and convinced the duty officer to scramble the helicopter gunships.
“How long for the Hinds to get here?” Tien shouted.
“Five minutes.”
Tien waited, hoping that five minutes would be soon enough.
* * *
Lieutenant Pig Wilson lay on the deck forward of the port rack of torpedoes in the forward compartment’s lower level torpedo room, waiting for the last Chinese sniper to make a mistake. When he and Chief Python Harris had first inserted into the room there had been at least a dozen guards. The initial volley of shots had dropped four, sending the others for cover. Unfortunately, there were too many places to hide in the room, including inside the tubes themselves.
In the rush of taking the room Pig had heard a torpedo tube door slam shut. No doubt one of the guards had dived into an empty tube, hoping to pop back out unexpectedly and shoot the SEALs from behind.
But Pig knew how to lock a tube from the central console in the room. He peeked up at the torpedo room central console. The top of the console was burned out and full of holes, but the controller section for the port tube bank looked as if it had been hastily repaired and rewired, the plastic function keys ripped out with crude toggle switches installed in their place.
Hoping the repaired switches worked, he had thrown a switch and watched as the thick steel ring rotated over the dogs of the inner tube door. He could hear the faint sound of a man shouting, the sound muffled and resonant, as if the noise came from inside a metal can, which in a way it did. Pig threw a second switch to vent the tube to the torpedo room, opening a valve in a pipe on top of the tube, the pipe intended to make sure no trapped air remained in the tube when it was filled with water. The third switch was the best; the marking above it said FLOOD. Pig hit the switch, opening up the tube to the water in the tube tanks, filling the tube with seawater all the way to the vent valve, which automatically shut when the tube was full of water. There followed a rushing noise, louder shouts from the tube. By the time the vent valve shut, the tube was full of water, and all human sound was extinguished.
But they couldn’t all be that easy, Wilson knew.
The room was the most vulnerable of all the spaces they would be raiding, full of weapons and their high explosive warheads as well as the volatile fuel. A single bullet would be enough to cause a fire that could kill the whole ship … the self-oxidizing torpedo fuel, once lit, could not be extinguished by anything — it burned under water, it burned when blasted by a CO^ or PKP or foam-extinguisher, it just burned until the fuel was gone. That kind of violent fire would blow every warhead in the room, creating a chain reaction that would breach the hull, perhaps even cutting the ship to pieces. One goddamned bullet.
When the stun grenade exploded in the space, Pig held his breath, but heard only the clatter of guns dropping to the deck and the screams of the guards as the stun juice hit them. After a moment of quiet, Pig and Python began to search the space.
* * *
Fighter Sai, the last Chinese P.L.A guard remaining alive aboard the Tampa, managed to escape Pig and Python and bolted for the stairs leading from the torpedo room to the middle level, his AK-47 clattering against the rails of the stairs as he ran. He ran aft along the passageway between the crew quarters and officers’ country, heading toward the crew’s mess to the tunnel and the aft compartment. He knew a hiding place where he hoped they wouldn’t look for him.
When the Americans thought they were safe in their recaptured boat, he would emerge and take over the ship, killing the complacent, overconfident Americans with some of their own weapons. Or at least he could sabotage the vessel, sufficient to sink the ship somewhere in the bay.
Sai reached the corner of the galley and turned into a short passageway leading starboard. He thought he heard an American shouting something and worried he’d been seen. At the end of the passageway was the massive hatch to the aft compartment that lay open on its latch. Without stopping to shut the hatch Sai climbed through and ran along the tight tunnel leading to the aft compartment, and felt the deck tilt as the ship turned at high speed.
Midway along the tunnel Sai stopped at the door to the room he privately called the forgotten compartment.
Forgotten because it seemed to be between the forward and aft compartments, but other than the one tunnel going through it there was no access to the space. The one door to the space was set into the wall of the tunnel and it had a window with a mirror that rotated with a hand wheel providing a view into each corner of the room. Inside the space there were large pieces of equipment, mostly tanks or storage containers.
Sai knew that no one ever ventured into the room because the oval door to the space was locked with a thick chain and padlock. No one went in, no one ever came out. There were a hundred places where no one would see him from the tunnel. He was feeling better.
As Sai shot the chain of the lock and turned the wheel of the door’s latch, he ignored the yellow-and magenta-colored sign set above the door as well as the panel next to it flashing red letters. He pulled the thick door open, marveling at its thickness and heaviness. Once inside the room, on a grating platform on the other side of the door, a suffocating steamy heat assaulted him. What was the compartment’s original purpose? Part of the engine room But if so why would it be locked? Why was it so hot? Sai pushed the thoughts from his mind and shut the door, then climbed down the two ladders to the grating at the lower level and found a place to sit next to a large steel tank, keeping the tank between himself and the window of the door high above.
The sign Sai had been unable to read was printed in block letters in English: CONTROLLED ACCESS — NO ADMITTANCE — HIGH RADIATION AREA. The panel flashing the red letters read: WARNING — REACTOR CRITICAL. The tank that Sai sat next to, his hiding place, was the pressure vessel of the Tampa’s nuclear reactor, which was then at fifty percent power.
Sai could not feel the radiation as it went through his body. The gamma radiation ionized the molecules of his cells as the waves penetrated, the radiation some ten million times the strength of an X-ray, the equivalent of standing next to a nuclear explosion. The neutrons from the uranium atoms’ fissioning slammed into his tissues, the flux of the radiation vaporizing the structure of his cells.
The first indication Sai had that something was wrong was his hair standing on end as if he had grabbed a hot wire. The second sign came within ten seconds, when Sai’s eye lenses changed from being clear to being black and opaque, leaving him blind.
His abdomen began to swell with fluid buildup as his tissues tried to compensate for the massive damage.
When his stomach ballooned he could no longer see it from the blindness.
Unfortunately, in a sense, for Fighter Sai, his brain was the last organ to be affe
cted by the radiation, protected as it was by the bones of his skull, which acted as a partial shield, leaving a capacity to feel the effects of the radiation inflating his body to several times its normal size. He was still alive when his abdomen exploded. An observer standing at the window of the door to the compartment would have seen only a dark stain in the bilges.
Fighter Sai’s death marked the end of the occupation of the submarine Tampa by the Chinese P.L.A. Inside, the ship again belonged to the U.S. Navy. The same could not be said for the outside.
HANGU P.L.A NAVAL AIR FORCE STATION
Aircraft Commander Yen Chitzu jogged out of the ready-building off the taxiway at Hangu, pulling on his flight helmet and blinking the sleep out of his eyes.
He only half-cursed the late hour. A year before he would have been mumbling obscenities about the senior officers and whether they had any idea what time it was. Now, with the White Army closing on Beijing, the landscape of reality had changed. Now when the alarm to scramble to an aircraft blared in the ready building Yen rushed to his aircraft without a complaint.
He climbed up the step over the 23-mm forward gun into the upper cockpit of the Mil Hind-G helicopter, pulled his feet up and over the sill of the door and landed in the thinly padded seat, then shut the cockpit door after him, already starting in on his preflight checklist while his weapons systems officer, Leader Ni Chihfu, checked the weapons pods and, apparently satisfied, climbed into the lower forward cockpit. The Hind was the largest assault-helicopter gunship in the Chinese P.L.A Navy, the ship licensed for construction from the Russians, the new variant named the G, although it was essentially identical to the F variant of the old Red Army. This particular helicopter was fairly new, its interior still smelling of the vinyl and plastic and paint.
Below in the forward cockpit Ni ran through his checklist, tested the intercom, announced he was ready. Yen waved at the fighter out on the pad, who backed away, and put on ear protectors, then snapped the toggle for the electrical starting motor for number two turbine on the port-engine control-console and watched the engine tachometer as the turbine spun up to speed, the whining noise coming from over his left shoulder. At ten thousand RPM he snapped up the second toggle marked FUEL INJ, beginning the fuel injection to the combustors, then toggled in the IGNITION switch, lighting off the combustion cans. The tachometer needle lifted as the engine became self sustaining He pushed up the throttle-tab to stabilize the turbine above the idle point, then repeated his actions for the starboard number-one turbine, the sound of it spooling up adding to the earsplitting noise-level in the cockpit. When both turbines were up, he engaged the clutch, connecting the power turbines’ output shafts into the main reduction gearbox.
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