Dangerous Grounds

by Don Keith

  He grabbed the sound-powered ‘phone handset from its polished brass holder and responded, “Captain.”

  “Captain, TAO.” Lieutenant Brian Simonson’s Nebraskan accent filled his hearing. “Message from NAVLOGGRU WESTPAC. Captain Donohue wants to talk to you on secure voice. Shall I patch him through to the bridge?”

  “Go ahead, Brian,” Wilson answered. “This isn’t going to be fun.”

  Wilson grabbed the red secure radiophone handset and clicked the button mounted on the grip. He saw that the light on the control box flashed red, telling him that they were now on a secure circuit.

  “Commander Wilson here,” he said. “What can I do for you, Captain?”

  “Where the hell are you?” Captain Mick Donohue’s voice sounded tinny over the encrypted circuit, but there was no mistaking the heat in his words. “You’re supposed to be searching for Corpus Christi in the vicinity of her last known position. Then I hear from the P-3 guys that you are over two hundred miles north of there. How come they have to tell me where one of my own damn ships is?”

  “Captain, let me explain,” Wilson began. He knew that this was going to be difficult. Donahue was a gruff, irascible old salt. He wouldn’t look kindly on one of his CO’s steaming off over the horizon, adlibbing, playing a hunch.

  Wilson talked fast, expecting to have his words bitten off at any second by a sharp blast from the other end of the conversation. Strangely, Donahue let him complete his somewhat disjointed explanation. Wilson wrapped it all up with, “So, I thought I could control the P-3s over the original search area, just in case something turned up before Nimitz and her group arrived. I headed north with my tail wet, conducting an ASW area search.”

  “Damnedest bunch of mutinous bullshit I’ve ever heard,” Donahue growled. “But you may have something there. I just talked with Jim Ward. He and that crazy SEAL Beaman are off on a wild goose chase, looking for some stolen Russian nukes that may have ended up in your part of the world. Wonder if this little mystery figures into that mess somehow?”

  “Captain, Combat,” the 1MC announcement broke in. Wilson asked his boss to wait a moment while he grabbed the sound-powered ‘phone and jammed it to his other ear.

  “Captain, Lieutenant Simonson. Sonar reports that they are picking up a constant tone. Sounds like a WQC with its key stuck on. It’s real weak. SNR is minus ten. Best bearing is zero-three-one.”

  Wilson gasped. Maybe his hunch had paid off. There shouldn’t be any submarines within several hundred miles of their location, and certainly not one with an American WQC system.

  “Captain, we may have just found Corpus.”

  There was the slightest of pauses on the other end of the secure circuit.

  “Good work. Now track her and make damn sure you don’t lose her.”

  SEAL lieutenant Brian Walker stared at the upturned pallet. The ATV lay on its side, hopelessly smashed. Evidently the PEGASYS had not worked as advertised. They had searched most of the night for their DPV before finally finding it almost five miles short of the landing zone. That would have been inconvenient but all right.

  The problem lay in front of them. As it was coming in to land, evidently much too fast, the pallet had smashed headfirst into a low rock outcropping. The right front end of the DPV had absorbed most of the impact; mashing the right front wheel and breaking the axle.

  Joe Dumkowski climbed out from underneath the wreckage, wiping streaks of black oil from his face.

  “Ain’t nothing I can do about it, Cowboy. Axle is snapped in two. And to add insult to injury, the oil pan got crunched. We ain’t goin’ nowhere in that piece of shit, no time soon.”

  Walker sadly shook his head. It just wasn’t fair. It seemed that the SEAL gods were teaming up to stop him, not matter how hard he tried to do things right.

  Mitch Cantrell was hunched over a map of the area. He pointed to a place in the middle of a nearly blank page.

  “Cowboy, GPS has us right here.” He then pointed to a squiggly line that snaked across the map to the north of where they sat. “This is the Mecca-to-Jiddah road. Only about twenty miles from us. Way I figure it, we can hike that way and catch us somebody that just happens to be passing by. Then we have us a limousine right up to the Jiddah pier.”

  Walker looked at the map for a moment and then at his team. They were all watching him. He knew that he could simply say that it was too far, too dangerous, something they hadn’t planned for. He could call for an extraction and no one would tell him that he was wrong in having done so.

  He shook his head. That was the easy way out. He grabbed his backpack and started walking into the desert, heading due north.

  “Come on. We’ve got a limo to catch,” he called back over his shoulder.

  Captain Wang watched as the pier crane lifted the crate labeled “machine parts” from deep within the cavernous hold if the Dawn Princess. The old rust bucket seemed to groan in relief as the heavy burden was lifted high in the air above her decks. The crane swung around and lowered the crate precisely on the bed of a waiting Diamond-Reo heavy-lift transport hauler. The truck’s suspension compressed alarmingly, but it settled out before the springs bottomed. The truck was beaten and worn, very unlikely to raise any interest along the route. And, best of all, the company was an old-time local concern with no ties to the DPRK at all.

  Wang grabbed his small valise and walked down the motor vessel’s narrow gangplank and on to the teeming dock. He was sorry to leave the relatively clean and cool sea for the heated masses jammed into Jiddah’s busy port facility. It seemed to Wang as if every unwashed Arab west of Pakistan was crowded onto this one small patch of real estate, and they all wanted to sell him something he had no interest in buying.

  The North Korean agent shook himself free from their clutching hands, from their constant babble, and fought his way to the waiting truck. He climbed up into the cab and slid into the seat beside Lieutenant Tak-Ji.

  “We are ready, Masu Al-Maturis,” Tak-Ji reported, unhesitatingly using Wang’s Egyptian cover name. He motioned to the other man in the truck, the man behind the steering wheel. “This is Ahab ben-Muteri. He will drive us to Mecca.”

  The scruffy looking Arab sitting behind the big truck’s wheel smiled, revealing a mouth full of black and broken teeth. “Insa Allah. God willing.”

  Wang fought the urge to retch as a wave of very bad breath washed over him. It was going to be a long ride to Mecca.

  Commander Don Chapman read his watch. It had been exactly twenty-four hours since they submerged off of Tokyo Wan. At better than thirty knots, Topeka had covered over seven hundred miles. No other type of warship anywhere in the world could do anything like that. But they still had almost fifteen hundred miles to go, over two days before Topeka would arrive on scene to start the search for her lost sister.

  “Mr. Lucerno, broach the boat, grab the broadcast, and get her back down,” Chapman ordered the Officer of the Deck.

  Lieutenant Marc Lucerno turned around from where he stood, analyzing the rows of dots that descended down the screen on his Sonar Display Console. “Aye, sir. Don’t you want to slow and clear baffles first?”

  Chapman shook his head.

  “Can’t waste the time. We can see there is no one in front of us. Not likely anyone is going to run us over from behind at this speed. Use the ‘big ocean, little ship’ theory and get up on the surface in a hurry. We need to get the latest news headlines.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lucerno gulped. It was a calculated risk. Normally, a boat came up shallow and did a careful three-hundred-sixty degree sonar search to make sure no one was going to run them over when they came on up to periscope depth. The boat was in its most vulnerable position then, unable to get out of the way quickly and nearly hidden from any ship that might be up there, steaming along unsuspectingly. Chapman was gambling that there wasn’t any other vessel close enough to hit them. There usually wasn’t, but it took only once for everybody’s day to get spoiled.

  “A
head FULL, Dive, make your depth four-zero feet.” That would put them high enough out of the water so that they could maintain speed without bending over the delicate BRA-34 radio antenna. They were plowing through the water at better than twice the speed it was designed to withstand.

  “Four-zero feet, aye,” the diving officer answered. “Give me a five degree up bubble.”

  The big sub jumped out of the water.

  “Four-zero feet and holding,” the diving officer called out.

  Chapman reached over his head and rotated the large red scope-lifting ring.

  “Number two scope coming up.”

  He squatted down to meet the eyepiece as it emerged from the deck and then slapped down the handles, glued his eye to the eyepiece, and spun the scope around. The dark blue Pacific greeted him. Not a ship anywhere in sight.

  “No close contacts.” Everybody could breathe easier. There was no undetected giant tanker about to cut them in half. “Raise number two BRA-34.”

  “Number two BRA-34 coming up,” the chief-of-the-watch answered. The radio mast slid out of its well, obscuring Chapman’s vision ahead through the scope.

  “In sync on the broadcast.” The 21MC announcing circuit from the radio room blasted in Chapman’s ear. That was followed almost immediately by, “All messages onboard and receipted for. Done with the radio mast. Captain, come to radio.”

  It didn’t take long to swallow and receipt for the digital radio traffic. And from the tone in the radioman’s ear, it had been worth retrieving.

  The deck was already angling downward again as Chapman charged out the control room’s after door. Lucerno had lowered the BRA-34 and scope and the Topeka was already returning to the safety of the deep. Chapman smiled to himself. The hard hours of training were paying off. This crew was pretty damn good!

  Sam Witte met him at the radio room door and handed him the red “Top Secret” message board. The XO’s face was pasty white.

  “Skipper, they think they’ve found Corpus.”

  “Where?” Chapman replied, already steeling himself for bad news.

  “Higgins reports picking up a WQC. They are trying to track Corpus, but the signal is pretty weak. She’s on the move and it looks like they are headed this way. We’re supposed to run down to an intercept point southeast of Taiwan. We’re to do an ASW barrier there and catch Corpus as she comes through.”

  Chapman nodded and took the message board from Witte’s outstretched hand.

  “We’re to get in a firing position and signal Corpus to surface immediately and surrender,” Witte continued. Then his voice went dead flat. “If they don’t, we’re to…uh…shoot.” The XO swallowed hard. “Those orders come directly from the Commander in Chief, the President.”

  34

  Sui Kia Shun gathered his men around him, glaring at them. They were a rag-tag lot, most of them little more than peasants rounded up from the fields and armed with whatever weapons they could scrounge.

  The drug lord was near exploding when he first spied this motley band laboring up the mountain toward him. Sui’s fighters were once well known as the best in Southeast Asia, all well-equipped, properly trained, fiercely loyal. But in the last decade, he had relied more on reputation and bluster to maintain the appearance of invincibility. The ongoing war with Lee Dawn, his own daughter, had cost him many of his men, either through death or disloyalty. The just finished battle cost him even more. This bunch would have to do, at least for now.

  Sui grabbed an AK-47 from one of the peasants. He slammed back the bolt and checked the weapon. It smelled of fresh oil and operated smoothly. At least one of them knew how to take care of his weapon.

  It was time to head back up the mountain. It had been a quarter of a century since Sui Kia Shun had found it necessary to take up a weapon himself and fight his enemy directly. He had always had a small army to do that for him. But now it was necessary that he return to the wars of his youth. Time to annihilate those who dared to attack him in his own home.

  Tom Kincaid looked over the remnants of charred helicopter. They wouldn’t be going anywhere aboard that thing. Sam Liu Chi and Benito Luna stepped from the shadows of the castle doorway and walked slowly toward where Kincaid stood. Their sweat-soaked shirts and stooped, dragging gait confirmed their exhaustion after the short but intense firefight.

  “We’ve got three wounded and four dead,” Chi reported. “Expensive price to pay, but we got almost three tons of shit, too.”

  Kincaid nodded. The drug war took a toll, but keeping three tons of high-grade heroin off the streets of New York or London was a major win.

  “Any word on relief?” he asked.

  Chi shook his head.

  “They say they can’t get another bird up here until tomorrow. We’re going to have to walk out or wait, and I don’t like staying here any longer than we have to. There’s a village at the foot of the mountain. We can commandeer a couple of trucks down there. The nearest airfield is a three-hour drive. Sui liked his privacy.”

  The sudden crack of nearby gunfire interrupted their conversation. Kincaid dived for cover with Chi and Luna right behind.

  “What the hell!” Kincaid yelled. “I thought we owned this place. What’s going on?”

  Dirt and dust kicked up around them. Luna was returning fire with his 9mm. Kincaid had yanked his own weapon out of his shoulder holster, but he couldn’t see anything to shoot at and decided to save the ammo. He listened to the distinctive sound of the weapons spitting at them. The high-pitched, ripping sound of Thai M-16s was counter-pointed by the low, rumbling growl from several AK-47s.

  From the sound of the gunfire, Kincaid could easily discern that his few men were outnumbered. Under the onslaught, the Thai soldiers gradually fell back toward the castle, fighting every step of the way. The three drug agents slithered across the open field, toward the cover afforded by the castle’s lower garden.

  Safely shielded from the incoming fire, Kincaid finally drew a full, deep breath.

  “Where the hell did they come from?” he shouted over the cacophony. “I thought we chased Sui’s people out of here.”

  Luna pointed up the slope.

  “Evidently not all of them, or someone else is in this game.”

  Chi pointed the other direction, down the mountain.

  “We’re going to have to retreat,” he shouted. “My men have wired the heroin. We need to beat feet.”

  He didn’t need to take a vote. They were outnumbered, pinned down. The three withdrew down the slope, right behind the retreating soldiers.

  Lee Dawn Shun was ecstatic as she boldly strolled into the front entrance of her father’s castle. It was all coming together so well. Her family home was in her control after much less of a fight than she had anticipated. The government troops seemed in no mood to defend their newly won ground. Soon her father would grovel at her feet, regretting his decision to excommunicate her.

  Sun Rey followed her out onto the stone piazza overlooking the valley far below. He was dirty, his face streaked with sweat and cordite smoke. His uniform hung in shreds. Lee Dawn could barely reconcile this man with the carefully dressed, conservative CPA that she knew.

  “The Thai soldiers are retreating down the mountain,” Sun Rey said. “My men will pursue them for a few more minutes, just to make sure they keep moving.”

  She hardly gave a sign that she had heard him. She seemed entranced, being back at this place where she had once served her father and his empire. Where she had played as a child, before joining her father’s endeavor. The very spot where he had banished her in dishonor over a mishap that was hardly her fault. The spot to which she had vowed to return and seek her revenge.

  “Any sign of Father?” Lee Dawn finally asked, her voice trembling, as if she might be afraid of the answer.

  “No, nothing,” Sun Rey answered. “I’m guessing that he escaped during the fighting. We are setting up a defense perimeter around the castle. The heroin is ours. My men easily disarmed charges
that were set to destroy it. Shall I bring the prisoners down?”

  Lee Dawn Shun nodded and finally allowed the slightest of smiles to play at her lips.

  “I don’t understand this,” Commander Paul Wilson said, shaking his head. “Corpus is heading out into deep water and maintaining that same course without a wobble. Any guess what they are doing?”

  The Higgins had been trailing what they were certain was the stolen nuclear submarine for almost two days now. The constricted waters of the South China Sea had given way to the open Pacific. Still the submarine steered diligently to the north-northeast. There had been almost no variation in the sub’s track. It hadn’t even maneuvered to clear baffles, to make sure no one was trailing them. Wilson was keeping the Higgins well back, just at the edge of being able to hold the WQC signal, hopefully so whoever controlled Corpus would not know they were being trailed.

  Lieutenant Brian Simonson looked up from the CRT that he had been studying.

  “No idea, Skipper,” he answered. “But they’ll be a lot easier to track in deep water. Not so many other contacts to worry about. By the way, I just got flash traffic from Seventh Fleet. Topeka’s ETA is eight hours.”

  Wilson nodded. The other sub must be hauling ass.

  “Have the ASROC checked and the helos ready to launch on an ASW profile,” the skipper ordered.

  “Already done, Skipper,” the young lieutenant answered. “Forward battery has six ASROCs ready to fly. Both SH-60s are fueled, armed and on a ready fifteen. Higgins is ready to rock and roll.”

  Wilson could barely suppress a smile at the young officer’s eagerness. He had to remind himself that they were preparing to attack an American submarine with real weapons and that there were presumably some American sailors still alive at the other end. He prayed that Topeka would show up and that the pirates—if that was who they were—would give up peacefully. The uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach said otherwise.

  “Skipper! We lost the signal!” Simonson yelled. “One minute, it’s there, clear as day. Next, it’s gone.”