“Yo, Blankethugger—you stepped on my hand on the way up,” said Mongoose once he was on board.
“Want me to kiss it and make it better?”
“Shuddup and get with the program,” said Doc. “Shotgun, take care of that anchor chain. Sean, Mongoose, you’re with me.”
The Russian ship was oriented almost perfectly perpendicular to the Korean coast. All it had to do to get into neutral water was to “drift” backward exactly a quarter mile. It would drift a little faster if the engines were on and the screw turning in reverse. Losing the anchor would help even more.
Doc and Sean followed Mongoose at point. They got inside the ship without being seen, stopping near the ladder as a pair of sailors passed by, one deck below. Mongoose slipped down after them, but they’d turned the corner and were gone.
There should have been an officer or at least some sort of watchman in the engine room near the control station on the compartment’s upper deck. But either he was sleeping somewhere, or hiding, because neither Doc nor Mongoose could spot him as they snuck down the passage into the space. The overhead lights were off, and the room was filled with a reddish glow cast from the night lights and instruments. Though the ship was probably twenty years old, whoever owned it had retrofitted it with new engines and controls within the last few years. While its exterior was covered with thick rust, the diesel-electric motors and apparatus below practically sparkled in the dim light. A large computer screen sat at the left end of the panel; this showed the operator the status of the systems at a glance. The propulsion controls for the ship’s two screws were at the center of the board, their black ball-topped handles looking like Tootsie Pops standing above the wheels.
“Tell Shotgun to cut the chain,” Doc told Sean, studying the panel. “And hold on.”
Doc stared at the panel. Had this been a vintage sixties control system—or even the original one put in the ship—he would have been fine. But Doc and computers don’t completely mix. Whether that was a problem or not, he had trouble getting the engines cranking.
Meanwhile, Shotgun was running into his own problem up at the anchor chain. The plan for taking out the anchors was simple—a dab of plastique on each, ignited by remote control. A certain level of skill was involved, of course: Shotgun had to be fairly judicious in measuring out the explosive, since too big a blast would put a hole in the bow. But otherwise the job was fairly easy. As the last man up, Sean had applied the first charge when climbing aboard; all Shotgun had to do was put the charge on the other chain and push the button on his igniter.
It was at this point that Murphy decided to wake up the watch hand who’d been snoozing earlier. Then he whispered in his ear, sending him forward to check and make sure that the shadows he saw near the bow were just shadows.
There was very little room for a normal person to hide where Shotgun was, and even less for someone Shotgun’s size. Shotgun raised his gun to pop the man, then heard someone calling to him from the distance. Deciding now that hiding was his best option, he hid in the only place available—on the anchor chain over the side.
Unfortunately, he forgot how far it was between the gunwale and the anchor. He was already hanging over when he realized it; thinking he could grab the chain as he fell, he let go.
They don’t teach you much in the army about ships, and apparently even less about gravity. The latter pulled him down so quickly there was no way for him to get a handhold and he plummeted into the water.
Shotgun surfaced right next to the anchor chain. Unsure whether he’d been seen or not, he began shimmying up the chain, climbing up to a good spot to leave the explosives. He strapped them in place, then continued top-side. But having used his suction cup earlier to help Mongoose, he was stuck below the rail.
As Shotgun contemplated his situation, he saw lights flash on the nearby North Korean ships. His first thought was that they had spotted him; then he realized they were moving away. General Sun had alerted the North Korean Navy that there was no longer any point in watching the Russian merchant ship; the deal was off and the navy could go home. Shotgun didn’t know this, of course, but he did realize that the Russian ship would start moving soon as well. He pulled up the microphone to the SEAL radio he’d borrowed and contacted the others to let them know what was going on.
“Shotgun to Doc—yo, the other ships are moving.”
“Clarify?” said Mongoose. All four of my guys were on the same circuit.
Knowing Shotgun, he probably made some comment about Mongoose suddenly using big words. But in the version of the story I heard, all he did was explain what he meant.
“Screw that,” said Doc, who at this point hadn’t gotten the controls to work. “Are the anchors blown or what?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Blow them now! Jesus.”
Shotgun, being very religious about Demolition work, wanted to comply. The problem was, the explosives were less than ten feet away, and simply pushing the button would bring him face-to-face with the Creator quite a bit sooner than he wanted. So he took the detonator in his hand and jumped off the chain, pressing the little red button just as he hit the water.
Below, Doc was pressing buttons as well. In fact, he’d graduated to combinations, frantically hitting them in any order he could think of. Finally, he remembered his chief’s training and did what any old salt would do when faced with a similar situation: he unleashed a string of curses the like of which had never been heard in the Eastern Hemi sphere before.
Possibly, some random combination of computer screen tappings and switch shoving overrode the computer safety protocols that had kept Doc out of the automated system. But I prefer to think the computer simply wilted under the weight of the chief ’s personality, as many a seaman and lesser officer had over the years. The ship’s engines sprang to life.
Doc threw the levers to full astern and the ship immediately began to respond. As soon as he was sure it was moving in the right direction, he put a small explosive charge on the engine controls, set the timer for two minutes, then began trotting over to Mongoose.
“We got company!” yelled Mongoose as a crewman appeared in the passage. He raised his gun to fire, but the sudden, unexpected movement of the ship knocked his target off balance. The Russian fell behind a piece of machinery, blocking Mongoose’s shot.
Alarms began ringing. There were shouts in the distance. Mongoose fired a few rounds to knock out the lights in the nearby passage.
“Come on, door number two,” said Doc, leading the way to the nearby catwalk. “We have a minute and a half before my bomb goes off.”
They crossed over the engine room, pausing in the middle of the steel bridge to send a burst of gunfire toward the passage, beating back a crewman who’d foolishly thought of coming in. They then continued across to a second catwalk above the motors, where they found a ladder leading upward.
Mongoose once more took point. The passage was part of an auxiliary piping space, barely wide enough for Doc—Shotgun couldn’t have squeezed through. It was also pitch-black. Mongoose continued climbing hand over hand until finally he came to a hatch.
A locked hatch. Where’s OSHA when you need it?
“We’ll have to blow it,” said Mongoose.
“No time. Shoot the hell out of the latch.”
“The ricochets will kill us.”
“Not if you close your eyes.”
Mongoose held the gun up to the metal, closed his eyes, and fired. The 9mm slugs, designed for doing maximum damage to human flesh, did a workable job on the Russian steel. Mongoose levered the submachine gun’s snout into the space and pushed up into fresh air.
“Up, up, up,” said Doc, encouraging Mongoose to explore the open deck.
He was grabbing the nearby railing when the bomb on the control panel blew.
Shotgun prided himself on using just the right amount of explosives for a job. Doc was old school—he’d never seen an explosion too big. He had prepared the explosives for th
e control panel, and his explosion didn’t just take out the controls—they turned most of the engine room into a mangled mess of blackened metal and burnt plastic.
Wind from the blast flew up the hatchway they’d just escaped from. Debris showered over Mongoose and Doc, who covered their heads and ducked. When the ship finally stopped spewing, Mongoose rose and took the GPS locator beacon from his vest pocket, activated it, and attached it to the side of the railing, making sure that it had a clear view skyward. As he turned around to see where Doc was, something whizzed overhead.
“If I didn’t know any better,” he said, “I’d think that was a 37mm cannon going by.”
“Fifty-seven millimeter,” said Doc, pointing in the direction of the Hainan-class patrol craft a short distance away. “The bastards are shooting at us.”
I’m not sure whether Sun’s orders had advised that the Russian ship could be sunk, or the North Korean captain in charge of the escort fleet had decided to make his play for admiral. In any event, the effect was the same—the Russian vessel was taking heavy fire. The automated control system shut down the engines once Doc’s bomb went off, but by then the ship was already moving astern at a good pace. Fast enough, in fact, that less than a minute after hitting the water, Shotgun found himself a good distance from the ship.
Coming up from the engine room, Sean took out the man on watch. A few seconds later, the explosives went off. Sean was baffled when he couldn’t find Shotgun or get an answer to his hail on the radio. He began searching the deck in vain, looking for a hiding place that didn’t exist.
Shotgun is not a weak swimmer, but with all due respect to my friends in the army, even a good land soldier doesn’t compare to a poor SEAL. He’d been chosen to cut the anchors because Doc figured Mongoose’s naval background would come in handy if something happened to him on the way to the engine room. It was a logical choice, but Murphy loves making hash of logic. Weighed down by his gear, Shotgun began to tire. He finally had to rest—not an easy feat in the ocean, even after inflating his faithful UDT SEAL life vest—drifting and bobbing rather than continuing to swim. This just made things worse; in the darkness, he lost sight of the Russian ship.
The cannon fire should have given him a clue. Doc and Mongoose scrambled to the other side of the ship as the nearby Korean patrol boat continued to pummel the superstructure. Another zeroed in on the Russian’s retreating bow, lobbing 37mm shells just over the railing. They were close enough that Sean could have read the serial numbers on them as they passed.
The Russian captain, realizing that the North Korean ships were not going to accept a surrender, gave the order to abandon ship. Two sailors ran by Doc and Mongoose without stopping or even seeming to notice them, scrambling over to the lifeboat. With the help of four or five other men, they began lowering it to the water. They’d only gotten a few feet when a shell splintered one of the davits. The men were spilled into the waves; two were killed by shrapnel and a third drowned.
The SEALS chose this moment to arrive. They’d left the Greenville via an Advanced SEAL Delivery Vehicle, surfaced just inside international waters, and crowded into inflatable raiding crafts to bide their time. As the Russian ship drew next to them, they shot lines to the railing and pulled themselves up, securing the ship exactly as planned.
Except for the shelling. That wasn’t planned.
The young bloods fanned out throughout the ship, one detail heading to the engine room. Despite the fact that Doc had been a little too enthusiastic in his application of the explosives, one of the SEALs with a mechanical bent managed to get an engine back online and jury-rigged a system to control it. Meanwhile, a prize team took the bridge and began steering the ship deeper into international waters.
Sean hadn’t found Shotgun, but he did turn up a Russian heavy machine gun. He set it up near the bow and began firing toward the nearest North Korean ship, doing enough damage to turn it away, though the others continued to blast their guns.
Our new generation of SEALs are a raucous, can-do bunch, but even they wouldn’t have survived the onslaught had it continued. Fortunately, the commander of Greenville decided to intervene.
The captain’s orders directed him not to attack the North Korean vessels, and it’s likely that had he followed those orders, no one above him in rank would have blamed him no matter what happened to the SEALs or my men.
Not that he would have made the SEALs or my men happy. But then dead men tell no tales.
The captain had two Korean-speaking specialists aboard, and he was just about to order one of them to tell the Koreans to stand down or be sunk when he had a more creative idea.
“Tell them we’re Korean sub 409 and we’re going to sink the ship for the glory of the homeland. Tell them to stand off while we take our position.”
The sailor looked at him cross-eyed, then complied.
“Tell them this Admiral Ku. Use that name,” said the captain. “Go ahead.”
Ku and submarine 409 were real Korean units, which the captain knew from his briefings. His transmission gave the commander of the small ships pause, though only for a moment. He requested the submarine’s identifier codes.
The Greenville’s captain checked the location of the Russian ship, which was now moving at about six knots away from Korea. He ordered the Greenville to surface between the Koreans and the ship, and then prepared his torpedoes to fire.
Let’s face it. Submarines are nowhere near as intimidating as capital ships, which can make a hell of a show swiveling guns and missiles in an enemy’s direction. But the Greenville’s sudden appearance took the Koreans by surprise. The sun had just set, and in the dusk it’s likely they thought the Greenville really was their comrade: no American would be nuts enough to surface so close to this many enemy ships; the lawyers would never allow it. The Korean commander ordered his ships to immediately stop firing at the Russian vessel.
If it had been me, I’d’ve fired the damn torpedoes and told the C2 commanders above me what they could do with their orders. But some people say I have trouble with authority. By the time the Koreans realized that the Greenville had no intention of sinking the Russian ship—it’s not clear that they ever realized it wasn’t on their side—the SEALs had taken the vessel well out of their range. A flight of Super Hornets from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln came on the scene a few minutes later. Just like aviators, always late even for sloppy seconds. A pass or two convinced the lingering Korean ships that their fuel supplies were low and had best be checked back at base.
While the SEALs took care of the injured Russian crewmen, Doc, Mongoose, and Sean looked for Shotgun. With him not answering their radio calls, they feared the worst.
“That no good son of a bitch. If he died, I’m going to kill him,” said Mongoose.
Shotgun’s radio gear included an emergency GPS locator beacon, but the system had not been activated. Bad news. The ship was searched and secured without finding him. Worse news.
Search and rescue assets from the Lincoln were rallied, and an aircraft with infrared gear, along with escorts, was ordered up and vectored over to our area. Mongoose borrowed some night goggles from the SEALs and began scouring the nearby ocean. By that point, I’m sorry to say, everyone was convinced they were looking for a dead body. Their eyes swept the ocean back and forth, back and forth, without seeing anything.
Until a green blip appeared in the distance, stroking a bit unsteadily.
“Doc—look,” yelled Mongoose.
“You sure that’s him?”
“Has to be. The head’s too square to be a normal human being.”
A rigid hulled inflatable boat set out from the sub to investigate. As they neared the figure, one of the crewmen reported hearing an odd sound rising above the waves. At first he thought it might be the baying of a very lost sea lion. Then he realized the voice was human, and it was singing.
“Sir, the words to the song appear to be, ‘I keep a close watch on this heart of mine,’ ” the sailor
reported back.
“Johnny Cash,” said Sean.
“That’s Shotgun,” Doc told the sailor. “Pick him up—but you better make him promise to stop singing before you do.”
[ III ]
MEANWHILE, I was having dinner with the world’s last true communist pinko slime. Rather than having me shot as promised when we finished, Kim took me back to his lair for a final game of snooker. It was just him and me; the sycophants had been dismissed, and Sun was off seeing to whatever latest evil required his attention. Kim played well, and probably would have won even without his special house rule enabling him to take his opponent’s shot as his own by decree.
After he’d beaten me for the fifth straight time, he had a pair of full bottles of Bombay Sapphire placed on a table in the center of the room. Opening them, he poured me a drink and offered a toast to my health. I poured him one and offered a toast to his health. We traded shots back and forth until the bottles were half full . . . or were they half empty? General Sun came in with some sort of update for Kim, distracting him long enough for me to switch the bottles. To my great surprise, his bottle had been filled with gin as well.
We bantered a bit more when Sun left. I offered another toast to his health, then asked how his cancer was.
“Oh, that. It turns out the doctors got it wrong,” he said. “I don’t have cancer at all.”
“So you really don’t care about seeing your bastard son?”
“On the contrary—seeing him now is more important than ever. General Sun’s men are bringing him over as we speak.”
“I doubt that,” I said, taking my cue to line up a shot.
“It is a fact. When he arrives, I will have you killed. Since I am a great admirer of yours, I have decided to allow you to choose your method of death.”
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