PointOfHonor

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  He was her master. His authority extended to the ninety-two crewmen and the mission he had been given. His responsibility settled heavily on his shoulders. The numbers were overwhelming. In one maddening moment, he had lost a quarter of his crew and damaged his ship. He understood hazardous missions. After all, he was charged with the protection of his nation. He had been chosen to deliver this cargo. His ship had been selected to be the envoy.

  Wong kept replaying the disaster as he struggled to come up with a solution. Even now, the American task force might be hunting them. The only escape lay in theStrait of Hormuz . If they had been detected, then aLos Angeles Class attack boat would be waiting. Considering the damage to the outer hull, tracking, trapping, and killing them would be child’s play.

  * * * *

  The sea had been somewhat choppy—nothing terribly dangerous. A light overcast and moonless night made it relatively safe for the404 to surface. Al Faw was to the north-northwest and Bandar-e-Khomeyni due north. They lay in the steady ocean swells fifty klicks south-southeast of the Tigris River.

  The404had been specially modified for this mission. A nuclear boat had a better chance of relying on stealth than one of the antiquated diesels. An elevator was cut directly into the top of the hull aft of the sail. It lowered into a special storage facility capable of transporting chemical, biological, and nuclear materials. The chamber was sealed off from the rest of the boat. So were the men who served this hazardous duty. Nothing should go wrong with routine material transfers. There was, however, nothing routine about their material.

  The elevator dropped like a sinkhole into the back of the404 .Special infrared lights were rigged to reduce the detection signature from overhead reconnaissance. Wong’s men wore night vision goggles to facilitate movement in complete darkness. During these operations, the watch was cancelled. The rest of the boat must be secured from any leakage. Night vision goggles are a marvelous invention, until you combine them with heavy biohazard suits and realize two kilograms of metal are hanging just beyond someone’s nose. Depth perception, normal movement, and balance are all suspect. Add a rolling sea and pitching deck, and accidents can happen.

  Wong’s masters might understand an accident, but disaster and the possible loss of a nuclear boat were different matters. Other boats had been lost. Everyone knew about theThresher —another failure by planners who did not realize the need for precision and care when sending boats to sea. All hands were lost off the Atlantic coast because the plumbing failed.

  There were five stainless steel double-hulled casks. Each weighed three hundred kilos and required three men to safely manhandle them on the elevator platform. When it came down to it, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) still relied on its abundant manpower to settle most problems. The platform was large enough to handle eight men. This night it carried four men and a cask up and down three times.

  It was the third cask that caused the problems. It rose from the bowels of the submarine; a deadly bottle held by four men. The orange biohazard insignia were visible even in the darkness. Maybe this was where the elaborate preparations failed. Men working in bulky biohazard suits fitted with night vision goggles on a sloping deck. They would probably never know exactly what happened, but Wong would never forget what he witnessed.

  The casks were hoisted from the elevator platform to the deck of the Iraqi boat. A crane moved—a phantasm steel arm drifting through the night. Attached to the crane was a heavy hook and cables manipulated by a pulley system. The casks were fitted with a leather harness and chrome carbuncle. The strap enabled swift ship-to-ship transfer. It had been tested several times. Of course tests performed in calm harbors and research labs never take into account the vagaries of the ocean.

  The crane’s hook seemed to move faster than the last time. The sea swells may have moved the ships closer together, or the alignment of the decks tilted at the wrong time. Instead of an orderly movement, the hook slammed into the back of one of his men. Cast iron and weighing over one hundred kilos, it smashed him in the back. The audio microphones from the platform recorded a sickening slap. The splintering of bones and the snapping of a spinal column kept pace with the image of a human being suddenly turned into kindling. His man catapulted over the cask. He hit, slid, and disappeared over the side. The sea swallowed him whole and dutifully washed the blood from the deck.

  The hook did not end its night’s work with the death of one sailor. It turned after its first murder and rammed like a missile into the side of the next cask. Double hulled, stainless steel was no match for the simple physics of mass times velocity. The barrel designed to transport a deadly toxin looked like a crunched pop can. Impaled on a hardened chunk of metal, the breached barrel rose up, smashing the sailor opposite the first casualty. He caught several hundred pounds of metal under the chin. He flipped backward into the sea. They were the first to die. They were the lucky ones.

  Another planning disaster—no one was supposed to be hit by container hooks. Men were not supposed to die on a black deck under a moonless sky. The double-hulled casks were supposed to resist small arms fire. No one considered the transfer mechanism to be capable of such mayhem.

  A green jet spewed from the ruptured cask. It spun like a child’s pinwheel, painting the deck, the men, and the sea. A macabre death dance began with the twirling cask—a deadly pirouette. The green spray slashed a sailor across the middle. In seconds, the yellow biohazard suit parted, exposing bare skin to whatever concoction they had been ordered to deliver. It continued to eat right through the third sailor.

  The planners never checked the biohazard suit’s durability. Or perhaps they had, and this stuff behaved exactly as advertised. The biohazard suits seemed to smoke. Most likely, the chemical agent was fundamentally an airborne acid capable of defeating most safety systems. Wong’s men were beyond the safety systems.

  Wong hit the biohazard klaxon. Instantly, special biohazard and watertight doors dropped inside the404. A seal was created around the storage and elevator rooms, where the casks were stored. Anyone who remained in the biohazard area was a walking dead man. Once the biohazard doors dropped inside the404 , they could not be raised again until they returned to their homeport. Wong was trying to save the rest of his boat. He had no idea how many men he had just condemned.

  Incredibly, the Iraqis started shooting. Three Iraqis opened up with automatic weapons—as if steel core bullets could cripple the death spewing from the cask. It was panic fire. The bullets went wide, walking across the deck and ricocheting into the men still standing. Eventually, something important came under fire as well. A submarine has a variety of sensors in the periscopes jutting like misshapen sticks from the sail. The main periscope was shattered by a lucky shot, and all crew on deck that night were cut down.

  The Iraqi crane operator yelled for someone to grab an axe. With the clattering of automatic weapons, no one heard him. If there had been enough light, they would have recognized the atomization of the chemical weapon. It began to drift like a cloud over the open elevator shaft, slowly settling towards the deck and seeping into the bowels of the submarine. Fright overrode discipline, and no one noticed the coating of death drifting towards the Iraqi boat in the aftermath of the accident.

  Realizing no one could hear him, the crane operator found an axe and chopped through the steel cables holding the ruptured cask. The lines snapped like angry snakes hoping for one more kill before sliding away from the Iraqi barge. The cask could not have landed more squarely on the elevator—still leaking its green death. The cables attached to the hook swung around in a vicious tangle, and the elevator platform continued to lower into the hull of the boat. What little chance the men inside the biohazard chamber had for life ended as the cables and cask snagged the machinery necessary to bring the elevator back up and close the hull.

  The engines on the barge surged to life. One of the Iraqi sailors had dropped his AK-47. He was clawing at his air mask. Somehow, he ripped it off, gagging for air his lun
gs could no longer process. His lungs were disintegrating with each beat of his heart, and soon it, too, would be nothing more than ruptured tissue. His crewmates delivered the same fate they had rendered to the Chinese. Rifle bullets ripped into his body. The bullets’ impact shoved him over the side. Less than ten seconds had transpired since the cask first ruptured.

  Wong turned away from the monitor showing the sail camera’s perspective. “Override elevator and close the hull.” He looked across the control room. The ready board had more red than green showing. “Prepare to dive.” He looked back at the sail monitor. The elevator was not closing. A sick feeling crept into his gut. “Elevator status?”

  A moment passed before a weak voice answered, “Captain, elevator is jammed open.” It came from the intercom. Wong locked eyes with his Number One. Dead men at the bottom of the elevator were piling up, and those that remained had already been poisoned.

  Wong turned to his Number One. “Manual override.”

  The officer shook his head. “Manual override can only take place from inside the biohazard room.” He flipped the channel switch on the monitor. “The biohazard room, Captain. Those men are dead or close to it. There’s no one left to raise the elevator.”

  They could not stay on the surface. The American Navy would find them in daylight and discover the terrible weapon they had been sent to deliver.

  “Take her down.”

  “Captain, we’ll have flooding in the hull.”

  Wong shook his head. “Secure water tight doors. Rig for shallow dive.” There was another moment’s pause, but the age-old tradition that a captain is lord and master took hold.

  “Yes, sir.” Number One turned and shouted the correct orders.

  He turned back to the monitor. The deck canted slightly and the404began to disappear beneath the surface of the Gulf. Water rushed in from the open wound in the hull. Waves flung the inert bodies about the biohazard room before the camera failed, and the relentless sea took for its own those men still clinging to life.

  That was when they discovered the periscope had been hit by one of the Iraqi bullets. Water began dripping from the eyepiece, and the delicate Japanese electronics did not react well to salt water. The pressure hull integrity was compromised. A vessel that could be tracked by American sonar now made more noise than ever due to the hole in the hull.

  * * * *

  “Plot a course for open water. Ahead slow.” He flipped off the monitor. “I’ll be in my cabin. Report when you have a damage assessment.”

  He had his damage assessment and a casualty list. Tze Wong thought about praying, but who would listen? He had failed in his mission and in his command to safeguard his boat. He had seventeen dead sons and no bodies to return to grieving mothers. He had five severely injured men, and limited facilities to treat them. He had a ship with the handling characteristics of a pregnant whale and a maximum speed of seven knots. He had the American Navy with its aircraft carriers, destroyers, and attack submarines. He wondered when they would start hunting. He could fight, but he could not run.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Roselle, Illinois

  Saturday, November 15, 1997

  1:30 P.M. CST

  Karate schools are simple places. In the best ones, there are mirrors on one wall, handrails along the other walls, and a fairly good industrial grade carpet. The carpets usually have a different colored square in the middle. It defines a ring without the need for ropes and posts in the conventional sense of a gymnasium. This floor had a red center with a gray border, and it contained two fighters. Each was clad in workout pants and T-shirts. They looked more like aliens than people with their cage masks, rib guards, and hand pads flashing about.

  For some, the best part of martial arts is the intricate forms. A form, orkata, is simply telling a story of a fight in classical stances and moves. Indeed, classical basics have their place in training and self-discipline, but for others, it is the chase and the fight that holds the allure. Most instructors will explain to new students: “This is a contact sport and youwill get hit.” In the very next breath, they explain that the first rule in sparring is tonot get hit.

  So it was for Jim Harper. He had learned his forms, and worked on his classical basics, but fighting was the chance to test himself against another trained fighter. The most difficult challenge seemed to be against people he fought on a regular basis. They began to recognize the feints and fakes. They understood the tendencies to hook kick towards the head and sidekick towards the stomach. Good fighters made good friends who pointed out things to each other like steel sharpening steel.

  Jim Harper was no novice to fighting. A fourth degree black belt represents at least ten years of training as a black belt, and probably another two or three years as an under belt. Today, he was working with an under belt, just as his trainers had worked with him. He was giving back to another generation what he had been given. He surveyed his opponent—a brown belt teenager. Teenage boys were fascinating adversaries. They had magnificent physical capabilities. They could kick and jump higher and faster than Jim could. But youth and speed was rarely a match for age and deviousness.

  His opponent came with a double round kick, but Jim was no longer where he had been. The kicking leg dropped. Jim stepped in and back punched—not full power, but enough to remind his student not to make the same mistake again.

  “Combinations—kick punch or punch kick,” he explained.

  The brown belt nodded and turned towards him again. He tried a back fist and punch combination, but Jim slid sideways. He delivered a round kick to his middle and dropped a hammer fist inside the shoulders next to his ear. Again, the brown belt turned.

  “Remember to fake next time.”

  He came with a kicking blitz that looked more like a one bladed helicopter than a trained fighter. This time Jim blocked the kicks with his front hand. The brown belt made a common mistake of most young fighters. He was so intent on kicking high and fast that he forgot to cover his stomach. His rear hand was waving behind his hip in an effort to keep balance. Unfortunately, this opens up an enormous target called the body. Jim swung under the leg and struck with a double punch.

  “Control your hands.”

  The fighters danced for another twenty minutes. Jim did little more than counter or jam. Occasionally, when the opportunity was too great to pass up, he landed a sidekick on the brown belt’s hip. Sometimes he rolled left and sometimes right. A few times straight in with a hand blitz or a backhand ridge hand. The odd ax kick or turn sidekick. When finished, they stopped, bowed, and clasped hands thanking each other for a good fight.

  A good fight usually meant a soaking wet T-shirt and sweaty hair as the cage masks came off. The front windows steamed up from the heated bodies. Jim popped the Velcro tabs holding his rib guard, and started walking towards the locker room at the end of the school.

  The slow, ponderous clap from behind the half wall, where parents gather to watch Johnny and Suzy learn how to kick, caused him to turn. A man in his mid fifties stood with a topcoat slung over his arm. The faded blond mustache and bear-like paws belonged to Louis Edwards. The men on either side of him were the same two Jim had chased off earlier that day. His eyes narrowed and his pulse quickened. These people were not supposed to be here. This part of his life was over, and was never to follow him again!

  He pulled off his hand and elbow pads, tossing them towards the corner along with the cage mask. Harper never took his eyes off his target and examined his situation. The feral nature of his training kicked into overdrive as he started walking across the floor to the trio behind the parent wall.

  Louis quit clapping and grinned. “Always a teacher. It’s good to see you haven’t lost your edge.”

  “Really?” He shot a hard look at one of Edwards’s flunkeys.

  Louis glanced over his shoulder. “Oh, I did hear about your encounter with Mister Smith and Mister Jones this morning. Caught them completely off guard.”

  Jim had covered hal
f the distance to the wall. He nodded. “Did they tell you what I’d do to them if they showed their ugly faces again? We don’t allow garbage in this school.”

  Louis sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose. “Perhaps it would be best if they waited outside.”

  Jim nodded again. “Tell them to get lost, Louis—and while you’re at it—you can get lost with them. I don’t work for you anymore.”

  Louis nodded to his men who walked backwards to the door. Jim Harper was not a small man. He carried very little body fat. His posture resembled a cat ready to strike; he projected total menace. “Yes, I suppose you might feel that way, Jimbo.”

  Harper hated being called Jimbo. He stopped a few paces short of the wall. “What do you want?”

  Louis clapped his hands together. “Always one to get right to the point aren’t you—no subtle moves—no finesse, just straight to the point. Well, it made you what you are.”

  Jim folded his arms, waiting. The brown belt he had been fighting came out of the locker room. Louis said nothing and smiled. Jim looked behind him. “Have a nice week, Terry.”

  “Thanks for working with me, Mister Harper.”

  Jim smiled and waited until the kid left the through the front door. He turned back to Louis. “You never answered my question. Of course, that’s nothing new for you. What will it be this time—lies about North Korea or the perils of Red China? Maybe we need to find what’s going on in Bosnia. It’s obvious you folks haven’t got a clue these days.”

  “Yes, well, they did warn me you might be less than receptive to a visit.” Louis suggested. “Maybe I could buy you lunch?”