by Ian Slater
The visible sound blip of the other sub hastily, and now noisily, retreating, suddenly swelled from the size of a pinhead to that of a quarter then just as quickly shrank, becoming two microdots of light on the screen, fading, sliding slowly down the screen into nothingness. It was 0129 hours. It had all happened in just under seven minutes.
It was only ten minutes later, at 0139, that Hale and his crew received the information via an urgent TACAMO VHF “burst” message that they had sunk a Setoshio class diesel electric, not a Soviet Kilo; the Setoshio class’s displacement 2.2 thousand tons, a diesel, similar to that of the Soviet Kilo, also with six torpedo tubes but a JDF— Japanese defense force attack submarine — the Reagan’s attack killing all seventy-five men aboard. No bodies had so far been found, or any other substantial wreckage, the identification having come instead from the contents of the pressurized garbage chute, packets of Shogun noodles floating to the surface and spotted by a JDF ASW patrol boat off the Kuril Islands.
Hale immediately knew that like Captain Will Rogers of the Aegis cruiser USS Vincennes, who had shot down an Iraqi airliner by mistake in 1988—and unlike the captain of a USS guided missile frigate Stark, who in 1987 had allowed his ship to be fired on first — he would be completely exonerated by the navy.
He also knew that the Japanese defense force sub shouldn’t have been in the grid, that it had strayed out of its predetermined patrol area — most likely lured by a Russian HUK probing the strait near the Japanese’s sacrosanct islands — yet neither he, Rogers, nor the firing officer would ever be the same again. But in the massive conflict raging all about them, whatever stayed with them, no matter how deep it ran, would have to run silently aboard the Reagan.
Eleven minutes later, at 0150, the downed sub’s big diesel imploded, the noise momentarily deafening Rogers, so that only his training made him hit the “squelch volume” button rather than tearing off his headset, the noise so loud it smothered all sea sound within a three-mile radius.
It was no surprise then that the Reagan didn’t hear the Alfa that had been lying quietly on the bottom beyond the Kuril gap closest to Japan. By the time Rogers’ sonar did pick it up and Hale ordered the sharp turn, it was too late, the Alfa having had ample time to hear the Reagan firing earlier, to have already vectored in the Americans. The Alfa captain had fired his three twenty-one-inch-diameter, surface-to-surface, torpedo-launched SUBROCS, each of the four-thousand-pound warheads when detonated above the surface capable of killing any submarine to a depth of three thousand feet, well beyond most subs’ crush depth. With the Reagan level at fifteen hundred, the first SUBROC exploded above the Reagan’s hull, forward of its sail.
Hale heard the fire alarm go off for aft compartment three, above the torpedoes, the temperature gauge already registering 122 degrees Fahrenheit, the sub quickly filling with the pungent reek of an electrical fire.
“Inject Lock!” he ordered, hoping the freon gas would extinguish the fire. Within seconds, over the intercom and above cries of men in the sealed-off section, he could hear the freon hissing into compartment three and then a tremendous explosion as an oxygen tank ruptured, its noise bursting eardrums, its contents blowtorching the 122 degrees Fahrenheit to 628 degrees Fahrenheit, plastic fixtures spontaneously combusting, sending more choking toxic fames throughout the boat.
In the next moment, two torpedos exploded, ripping the sub apart forward of the sail, the pressure, at three thousand feet over 130,000 pounds per square foot, driving the mortally wounded sub down toward the bottom in excess of a hundred miles an hour. First Officer Merrick and Sonarman Rogers barely made it from Control into the six-man forward “pop-out” escape capsule with three others, but the release mechanism wouldn’t work, weighed down by what sounded like a pile of junk blown back from the disemboweled forward section. Then quite unexpectedly they heard the pile of metal above shifting like a collapsed barn in a hurricane, the debris that had been holding them down suddenly jettisoned.
“Release arm!” ordered Hale. There was a sound like a small grenade as the escape hatch burst free of the control section. But the Sea Wolf by then was already too deep — well over crush depth of four thousand feet — the sub plummeting at over 120 miles an hour, the release capsule shooting up from it through the water column like a cork released from a bottomless column.
* * *
“Jesus Christ!” It was the voice of a bosun aboard a U.S. Trident sub a hundred miles east of the Kuril gap, the Trident picking up the death throes of the Reagan, the agonizing warping of her bulkheads astonishing, like a dying whale, heard via the sound channel as clearly as if it had been only ten miles away. The sine wave that was the plummeting Reagan was drooping like a U of green pasta on the green screen, the dot of the escape capsule streaking up through the Trident’s three trace sonar “windows” at terrific speed, its noise, like a rush of ice scatter, heard by everyone aboard the Trident. Then there was a tremendous wallop, like a space capsule smashing into the earth, the Reagan’s escape module hitting the air-water interface, its cone shape pancaked by pressures for which it wasn’t designed. Its blip on the Trident’s screen now resembled nothing so much as coffee grounds sliding down an opaque window — the slow rain of detritus all that remained of the Reagan’s capsule and crew, falling lifelessly and silently back into the very deep from which they had sought to escape.
“Poor bastards!” said the Trident’s bosun. No one else spoke.
* * *
By the time the news was being conveyed to Robert Brentwood that he had just lost his second submarine, this time with all hands going down with her, he was about to learn that the target of his mission—”Operation Country Garden”—would constitute the third phase of Freeman’s unexpected counterattack against Yesov.
The other seven members of the SEAL team were as eager as Brentwood had been, but just as taciturn in not showing their expectation — a nonchalant stance, typical of the swimmer commandoes, tempered by the knowledge that whatever the mission was, it was bound to be highly dangerous. It was at this moment of unspoken tension that Brentwood experienced an attack of free-floating anxiety. This time it was guilt, which he irrationally yet understandably felt for not having been in the combat control center when the Reagan had been caught out and destroyed. All her crew had been lost, all men he had made it his business to know, his extended family, many of whom had served aboard the Roosevelt before he’d had to scuttle her in the high Arctic. And now he had not been with them.
After all, he had detected the Alfa that had mortally wounded the Roosevelt, had made it pay for the blast from one of its twenty-one-foot-long torpedoes, which had resulted in a hairline fracture in the Roosevelt’s reactor. Brentwood knew that for him, as for some of the other men who had been farther away from the radiation-contaminated water before it had been pumped out, the “borderline” 250-rad dosage of radioactivity he’d received could kill him before his time.
He had been surprised to learn from the doctors in the Oxford radiation clinic that the same dosage could have widely different effects on its victims. Some went on living without apparent damage, as he had so far — then, quite suddenly, as the result of high stress, a man with the same dosage would rapidly decline in health. The psychological factor, in the words of the military MDs, was all but unmeasurable. You never knew. Brentwood now felt doubly at risk, enmeshed by depression upon hearing of the Reagan.
Had he been aboard, maybe he would have trailed the hydrophone array a little longer instead of relying solely on the inboard built-in hull sensors, and thus might have picked up the whoosh! of the Alfa’s torpedoes or SUBROCS — whatever had hit her.
Ranged against his depression, there was his wife Rosemary in England to think about, and the impending birth of their first child. All his training told him he’d have to put the Reagan behind him. It wasn’t his fault. Everybody made mistakes in their job. Yet he knew from his experience after he’d scuttled the Roosevelt that for the foreseeable future he would
be plagued by a disturbing, dream-filled sleep — a parade of faces known and served with, now gone. Or was it all stress-induced premonition parading in the guise of memory — a foreshadowing of the SEALs’ mission outcome? He had a look at the 3D mock-up of the China coast that had spawned the rumors of an amphibious invasion, rumors bolstered by the fact that their refresher courses here at Pearl had included depth sounding and obstacle clearance. Another rumor — this one correct — was that word of Freeman’s target had arrived by “handcuffed-satchel” courier in Pearl.
By the time Robert Brentwood and the seven others were assembled in the “shed,” the briefing officer from Freeman’s HO. — drawing on what a U.S. president had once counseled — reminded the eight-man SEAL team that in crisis situations you never have all the information you want. You nevertheless have to make a decision based on whatever information you do have. What Freeman’s G-2 intelligence section and the CIA knew before they received the vital information from the underground Democracy Movement was that the bridge over the Yangtze was considered one of the engineering wonders of the world— certainly more impressive to many Chinese than the Great Wall, its guard towers built along the 1,500-mile-long, dragon-backed barrier against Ghengis Khan.
One of the reasons for the Chinese reverence toward the great bridge was that during the bitter Sino-Soviet disputes of the sixties, Khrushchev had suddenly pulled out all Russian advisers, including the plans for the bridge — in effect saying to Beijing, “If you’re so damn smart, build it yourselves.” To the world’s astonishment, especially the Siberians — for whom the bridge was now so vital — the Chinese did build it themselves, producing one of the greatest engineering feats of all time. Not only did the mighty bridge, nine piers in all, support a deck with 2.8 miles of road way, but it had a railroad on a lower second deck that spanned the great river for over four miles. When Mao and his Communists crossed the river on April 23, 1949, chasing out the Nationalists, they had also, for the first time, united the two Chinas: that “cold” China of the north, the country of the “noodle eaters,” and the warmer country of “rice eaters” south of the Yangtze.
“The Nanking Bridge,” began the SEAL briefing officer without ceremony — he might as well have been talking about the Ventura Freeway—”is the largest bridge over the Yangtze. Vital link between north and south China at any time but now — with early rains flooding out the approach roads to the other crossings — this Nanking baby is their only one, especially given its rail-hauling capacity.” He switched on the projector, and Brentwood could hear the quiet whir of the air fan, which was strangely comforting, given the monumental task that eight men now realized lay before them. “Air force,” continued the briefing officer, “haven’t been able to get anywhere near it. It’s not only the lousy weather, but the AA ring around this sucker is something else. Five times denser than it ever was around Hanoi. SAM sites, ZSU AA batteries — you name it, they’ve got it — including a nifty little number they bought from Israel — the Arrow Mach Two plus. Nasty. Besides…” He dimmed the lights and focused the black-and-white blowup of a blurred satellite picture of the bridge which they used in Pearl for a scale mock-up. It always amazed Brentwood that they claimed a camera on some of the satellites in geosynchronous orbit, like the K-16, could read a newspaper in Red Square. All he could see was a black blur indicating the bridge, the latter circled in white on the slide.
“Difficult to make out with the naked eye,” conceded the briefer, as if reading Brentwood’s thoughts. “But under the magnifier, you can see the nine piers all right. Set on concrete blocks. Now, the big problem is that this was built in the heyday of Red China’s paranoia about America.”
“Had a touch of that ourselves, didn’t we?” asked Rose.
The briefing officer shrugged the comment off; his grandpa had said something about it — a Senator Joe McCartney… or something. “Yeah. Well, what you’ve got to remember is that this bridge has, like I say, nine piers, and it’s a truss bridge — that is, there are V-shaped steel supports arcing out either side from each of the nine concrete piers. These steel arcs hold up eight individual sections between the nine piers. I repeat, eight individual sections. It’s not all one span.”
Brentwood was right on it. “So even if we blow a hole in one section — if we don’t take out the whole span, they just build over the hole.”
“Right. And even if you hit the top level, there’s a second, the rail deck, underneath. So you’re going to have to knock out a pier or bring down a whole section between piers. ChiComs knew what the hell they were doing, not building it in one continuous span. They built eight of the bastards in the event of war. The problem is, in order to get enough high explosive to blow out a pier, you’d have to drill deep holes for the charges.”
“And the Commies don’t like that!” said the Bullfrog, Brady.
“Nah,” said the briefer, scrunching up his face, adopting Brady’s tone. “Make too much noise, and concrete dust might hit a sampan, get in their chop suey. Probably get Melvin Belli to sue the shit out of you.”
“That sounds fair,” said Rose.
“That’s all we need,” said Dennison, who was just coming out of a messy divorce. “More fucking lawyers!”
“What we need, gentlemen,” said the briefing officer, “is to insert you clandestinely and have you do what damage you can. Now, we can’t drill into the pier, so you’re going to have to get high enough above the pier’s waterline to attach the HE to the trusses, place the explosives near the bottom of the V-shaped steel supports where they’re embedded into the concrete. Remember, this isn’t the movies. It’s not the blast per se that’ll bring the steel supports down, but the heat generated for a second or two — just long enough to soften the steel so it’ll droop like taffy on a fork, and then the whole damn shebang’ll come tumbling down. It’s all in raising the temperature high enough to plasticize the steel for a split second or two. Failing that, go for an ‘earmuff HE charge on two piers supporting one of the spans. If you don’t get a span, they’ll just lay a few planks across the hole from a half-assed explosion, like they did on that Baghdad bridge we hit in the Iraqi War. Traffic’d be going across it within twenty-four hours. Freeman wants this sucker closed down for a week — two, if possible — and one span coming down’ll accomplish that — sever the ChiCom supply line.”
“While we’re hitting them in the north?” put in Dennison. “That’s a gamble, isn’t it? We’re in enough shit up north already — Three Corps is getting chopped to pieces. What’s going to stop Yesov long enough for Freeman to wheel his muscle south against the Siberian-ChiCom border?”
“General Freeman’s attending to that right now,” answered the briefer. “Your job will be to knock out the bridge.”
“Well, sir,” Rose said wryly, turning to Brentwood. “You were right — it’s ‘clearance’ work all right.” The others laughed, Brentwood responding in kind.
“Ah, what the hell?” he said. “Same country anyhow.”
“Okay,” said the briefer. “We can’t take you in by sub, as first hoped.” He looked at Brentwood. “That’s why you were seconded, Captain. But we’ve had to scrub that idea. ChiCom sub nets at the mouth of the Yangtze are too well placed — set just deep enough for their guided missile destroyers and gunboats to skittle over, but too shallow for any of our subs.” He turned to Brentwood. “Sorry about that, sir. We thought originally we could have you take the team in via—”
“Then I’m excused,” joked Brentwood, getting up as if to leave.
It got the biggest laugh of the day, which was just as well — the details of the task facing them were not encouraging.
Insertion would be by two Pave Low choppers, rather than one, in the event one was hit or experienced mechanical difficulties, flying low, nap of the earth, to avoid radar. They would take off from the carrier USS Salt Lake City on station 320 miles out in the South China Sea, outside the Nanking AA perimeter.
Extraction would
be by the same method. If the SEALs got into difficulty, the SOS emergency code word or signature selected by Bullfrog Brady to initiate an SAS/Delta interdiction would be “Mars.” The Bullfrog had thought hard and long about the code word. While the Yangtze was a hell of a lot warmer than the Manzhouli front where the S/D team were now en route to, it was all relative. For though no ice would be on the Yangtze, it would be cold enough.
Even with the protection afforded by the trapped layer of body-heated water in the men’s rubber suits, the temperatures would be below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. While the suits would protect a man who would otherwise freeze up in twenty-three minutes in such water, even a suit-protected swimmer working a closed-circuit UBA, such as the COBRA rebreather, could be so exhausted, his lips so cold that it would be hard to form words properly. Anything beginning with an S was particularly difficult and had in the past sounded like an F on an emergency radio band. M words were the easiest to pronounce, no matter how cold you were. In any event, the Bullfrog hoped there would be no need to use it.
“And everyone go over your sign language,” added the briefer. “With no radio, it’ll be sign language on the surface, feel line when submerged, and penlights only in an emergency. Study the model all you like for the next couple of hours. We leave for the carrier at oh four hundred, and you’ll go in tomorrow evening at eighteen hundred hours. Two squads, four men each. Designation Echo One— Captain Brentwood the boss; Echo Two — CPO Brady the boss. Flight to the Nanking drop-off seven miles south of the city and upstream will be three hundred twenty miles from Salt Lake City. One and a half to two hours, depending on head winds. Pickup four hours after dropoff. River currents estimated four to six knots. You’ll take thirty-five horsepower outboards on the Zodiacs, but only use them if you have to in strong local cross-currents. Questions?”
