It made one small pass over the White House lawn, checked in with the control room, manned as always by Marines, and came clattering down onto the concrete square. A Marine guard moved smartly over to open the door, and Admiral George Morris disembarked clumsily, holding his briefcase and two big files, one spilling over with a Navy chart.
“Hi, George,” said Arnold Morgan. “We cracked it?”
“I think so, sir. If we haven’t, we’ve discovered something even bigger.”
“There isn’t anything bigger.”
The two men hurried to the West Wing, where one of the agents momentarily fussed about a badge for Admiral Morris. That lasted for almost three seconds, before Arnold Morgan snapped, “I do not have time for that crap, y’hear? Get the badge and bring it to my office…that upsets you or your boss, run along to the Oval Office and tell the President.”
And with that he hustled Admiral Morris through the door and on down the passage to his own office, never even hearing the agent mutter, “Yessir.”
Inside the big carpeted headquarters of the National Security Adviser, Kathy waited with coffee. George Morris opened a file and laid a line of 8 x 10 photographs on Arnold Morgan’s desk.
“Okay, sir. Let me take you through this in sequence…that way you’ll know as much as we do. Now, take this picture shot from the overhead about three weeks ago…this is one of our benchmarks…a direct shot of a couple of islands around eighty miles west of the Pearl River Delta…see, we got almost nothing on it. The place is just about uninhabited save for this cluster of probably empty buildings in the north.
“Now, sir. I put a man on this. Pulled up photographs for the past five years. There’s never been so much as one person in any picture we’ve ever had in that time. Of course I had other people studying other places along that coast…but this is where we got a development.
“In the past we’ve photographed it irregularly, but subsequent to your orders last weekend, we have intensified all our photography from the overheads, taking in this stretch of coast eighty miles east up to Houmen, and along here westerly to this island. It’s called Xiachuan, and quite frankly it was right at the limit of the range you gave us…but we’ve zoomed in on it and done blowups that I’m working toward.”
Arnold Morgan picked up the first two pictures and studied them, then moved on to the next.
“Now, sir. Take a look at this. See the difference? Right here…right here…”
“Where?”
“Here, sir…this little white spot near the buildings.
“It’s too small, George. Gimme a magnifying glass, will you?”
The admiral leveled the magnifier over the spot and peered through it. “Holy shit! It’s a helicopter.”
“Right, sir. Now have a look at the other white mark down by the water…”
“Christ, George…it’s a Navy ship.”
“Right. Now take a look at the next picture…see, right here, the white mark’s gone…but up here we can see it again…right off the coast…heading for Canton…then here, sir, we got another shot four hours later and it’s back…see, right here.”
Arnold Morgan nodded. “And what the hell, you asked, is all this military activity doing on this deserted Chinese island?”
“Right, sir. So we blew up the photographs, showing every aspect of the place. And here is the first picture. Those old buildings represent a jail…see…there’s the watchtowers. And suddenly, right here, we have an outcrop of radio aerials…and the boat’s back. Looks like it patrols for four hours and then returns. Here’s a sequence of photographs taken approximately every four hours…and here’s the blowup. We identify it as one of those Chinese fast-attack crafts…Huangfens…guess they weigh about two hundred tons…so far as I remember, they’re fitted with Russian guns.”
“George, we’re getting warm…I feel it.”
“Right, sir. But I have not finished. Now look at this…these are shots of the central yard in the jail. There are people, quite a lot of them, in this shot. What would you say? Maybe a dozen, wandering around…see this colored shot…they’re wearing full uniform, with shouldered arms…dark blue…Navy. These guys are on duty…in the middle of a deserted island. In company with a military helicopter, new communications, and a two-hundred-ton patrol boat. Right inside the range you and Colonel Hart gave us for the ferryboat last Sunday. Sir, we’ve found ’em. No doubt.”
“George, if they’re not guarding our prisoners, they’re guarding someone else’s. But the key is the set of pictures you have from last Thursday, this one here…no radio, no chopper, no patrol. By late Saturday, the infrared shots, right here, the stuff was all in place. That night, Saturday, the ferry leaves Canton with our guys, arrives Sunday morning…and your next picture sequence shows a dozen guards patrolling every time the camera clicks…”
“And, sir…in this photograph taken in the small hours of Monday morning…look here…you can see the lights in the towers are on, sweeping across this courtyard…”
“By God, George, you’re right again. We got ’em.”
Admiral Morris gathered up the photographs, left some for reference for the National Security Adviser, and made his exit, “back to the factory.”
Arnold Morgan switched on his big illuminated computer screen and pulled up the chart that featured the entire area around the Pearl River Delta. He needed to think before he contacted John Bergstrom, and he needed to give himself a detailed picture of the tiny island the Navy SEALs must now assault.
He called Kathy in and asked her to bring her notebook, writing down his thoughts as he called them out.
“Okay. It’s called Xiachuan Dao. It’s six miles long and three at its widest point. It’s set about four miles to the west of the island of Shangchuan, which is approximately twice as big. Chart reference 21.40N 112.35E. The jail is situated way up in the northeast corner of the island, which is almost on the edge, since the island is set diagonally in shallow water, northeast to southwest.
“Chart shows one big mountain in the south called Guanyin Shan, thirteen hundred feet high. There’s another peak rising to sixteen hundred feet guarding the entire northern end. There’s a long flat peninsula in the southwest jutting almost a mile out into the ocean.
“The western side is dominated by a long marshy mudflat, so whatever we do, we won’t make any kind of a landing there. The only deep water, close in, lies between the two islands, which is how the ferry got in. And the patrol boat. There’s probably twenty feet in that area, which means we probably go in from the south, and get out to the east using inflatables, four of ’em.
“Incoming from the South China Sea my chart shows a depth of forty-two feet a half mile off the southern peninsula. Following the 112.30-degree line of longitude, I’m showing a very gentle shelf into deeper water, six miles before it gets to seventy-five feet, then another three miles to one hundred feet depth, twelve more miles to one hundred and fifty feet…as submarine country goes, it’s approximately fucking lousy…sorry, Kathy, I thought you were John Bergstrom.”
Kathy giggled at the steely-eyed tyrant she adored.
“To find really decent water, two-hundred-foot-plus depth, you have to be sixty miles out, which means the submarines are probably going to end up on the surface during the takeout, but by then the Chinese Navy is going to be totally involved with a nuclear catastrophe in their own dockyard. Any problems with a Chinese patrol, we sink the sonofabitch, right?”
“Right,” said Kathy.
“Okay, sweetheart. Print that out for me, will you…then get John Bergstrom on a secure line.”
He continued staring at the chart, trying to imagine the terrain the SEALs’ reconnaissance party would encounter. Since the place had been uninhabited for so long, he assumed they would hit primary forest, a landscape dominated by tall, uncut trees, which creates darkness below and thus reduces undergrowth. That was good. What was also good was an ocean bottom that appeared sandy rather than rocky. If the submarine
commanders wanted to take a few minor chances creeping in, in the dark, deep as possible in shallow water, they wouldn’t do much worse than scrape off a few barnacles. That was also good.
The secure phone rang. Admiral Morgan picked it up and someone said, “Just a moment, Admiral Bergstrom is right here…”
“Arnie…what news?”
“We found ’em, John. Island, 21.40N 112.35E. I’ve made my first observations…Kathy’s just printing ’em out…get ’em off the satellite in ten. George has a lot of good pix…you should have ’em electronically inside thirty.”
“Perfect. The guys have landed. It’s around oh-one hundred Thursday. They should all be on the Reagan by oh-four hundred. You have a time frame in mind?”
“Is the submarine ready?”
“Yessir. Right on station. Five miles off the carrier’s bow, my last report. ASDV’s prepared, in the shelter on deck.”
“According to my charts, John, we’re nine hundred and fifty miles out — which means that if we leave right away the guys will be in the area, say sixty miles south in deepish water, by Friday afternoon…they go in as soon as it’s dark…and we want ’em out by oh-two hundred Sunday morning…Operation Nighthawk starts Sunday night. It’s tight. Too tight. But it’s now or never.”
“You got it, sir…we’ll talk in an hour. I got Frank Hart on the other line…secure from Okinawa…we’re all set.”
Arnold Morgan smiled darkly, picked up his green telephone and hit a button connecting him to the President’s secretary. “Hi, Miss Jane,” he said. “Arnold Morgan here. Would you tell the President to cease whatever the hell he’s doing for the next ten minutes, and report to my office with the utmost speed and stealth.”
Miss Jane laughed, despite the fact that it was entirely possible no one in the entire history of the White House had ever issued such a blunt command to a sitting President of the United States.
She relayed the message verbatim to the Chief Executive, who also laughed, as much as he was capable of laughing these days, and excused himself from a meeting with Harcourt Travis and the Israeli ambassador. Then he made his way to Admiral Morgan’s office with the utmost speed and stealth.
“Hey, Arnie…how do we look?”
“Sir, we look just about as good as it’s possible to look, given our awful circumstances.”
“Have we found ’em?”
“Yup, we found ’em.”
“Have we got a shot at rescue?”
“It’s under way, sir. Siddown. Let me fill you in.”
When President Clarke returned to the Oval Office 20 minutes later, he no longer felt that the burden of the catastrophe in Canton was entirely on his shoulders. Right now he felt he was sharing it with a lot of very, very good guys, and that in the end, there was a real chance Linus would make it home. He had not felt that way before.
0330 (local). Thursday, July 13.
U.S. Navy Operational Runway.
Okinawa-Jima.
The huge Sea Stallion helicopter came thundering, out of the night for the third time, hovering and then touching down gently on the runway lately vacated by the Galaxy. Off to the left, standing outside in the warm air blowing southerly off the Philippine Sea, were Lt. Commander Rick Hunter, Chief Petty Officer John McCarthy, and a half-dozen other SEALs who had been supervising the loading of the gear and their 40-odd colleagues who had already made the journey out to the Ronald Reagan.
Colonel Hart was working high in the tower with Lt. Commander Bennett and a small staff setting up the operational headquarters on the carrier. These were excellent quarters, because Admiral Art Barry, the battle group commander, had decided the SEAL commander should work in conjunction with his own 70-strong staff in the admiral’s own ample-sized ops room.
This was principally because Operation Nighthawk would be relatively short, just a few days, and it would not be worth installing a brand-new set of comms and computerized naval charts. Besides, Admiral Barry was longing to know precisely what was going on, and he very much wanted to work with the legendary Colonel Hart, around whom an unmistakable aura of mystique revolved.
Anyway, Art Barry now had the carrier under way, moving southwesterly in a long swell toward Taiwan at around 25 knots. When Rick Hunter and his men arrived they would have made by far the longest of the three helicopter journeys. But the Sea Stallion had a range of almost 600 miles and clattered along at 130 knots, eating up the now 90-mile journey from Okinawa in 45 minutes.
It touched down on the gigantic 1,090-foot-long flight deck of the carrier at 0430, and the SEALs set about unloading the last of their crates, the ones with the high explosive. There were two forklift trucks and four ordnance staff from the carrier to assist in the removal of the C4, the limpet mines, and the 40-pound satchel charges, and to ensure that they were safely stored, ready for transportation to the island of Xiachuang.
Chief John McCarthy went down in the aft lift on the port side with the forklifts in order to check and mark the explosive cases in their designated area. Several of the other SEALs, already regarded with some awe by the deck crew, stood around looking at the lines of fighter/attack aircraft, placed neatly around the perimeters of the flight deck, with the great central runway left clear for landing on at all times. The carrier’s giant steam catapults can have these fighters away at 20-second intervals if necessary.
Flight crew pointed out the aerial cavalry gathered on the deck of this ferocious example of front-line United States naval muscle: the 20 F-14D Tomcats, ranged in two lines on the starboard side. Toward the stern, the SEALs could see four EA-6B Prowlers, four Hawkeyes, six Vikings, two Shadows, and six helicopters.
In two long lines to starboard was a total of 36 F/A-18 Hornets, the lightning-fast workhorse of the U.S. naval attack strike force. Out here in the black of the Pacific night, the Ronald Reagan, America’s mighty fortress at sea, seemed to flex its rippling muscles as it pitched heavily through the rising ocean, with more than 2,000 fathoms beneath the keel. And it seemed well nigh incredible that the all-powerful U.S. military machine could not just roar in anger, right out here from this colossus of an aircraft carrier, and terrify the Chinese into returning Seawolf and the men who drove her.
But the subtleties of modern checks and balances of power, and the appalling ramifications of war on a global scale, sometimes render such monstrous examples of brute strength back to the age of the dinosaurs. Sometimes it works, but not always. And this was one of the tricky ones. The SEALs’ silent methods, involving high planning and low cunning, more often than not left an enemy utterly bewildered as to the identity of the culprit.
God willing, this weekend would see them carry out their deadly work in secrecy. And it was paradoxical that the most terrifying secret of all was already standing unrecognized, less than 100 feet away, from the on-deck SEALs. No, one noticed two F/A-18 Hornets, armed, parked separately at the end of the line, both ready to go, the second in case the first failed to start. No chances taken.
Clipped underneath the fuselage of each Hornet was a 14-foot-long, dark green, laser-guided armor-piercing Paveways bomb, its warhead containing almost 1,000 pounds of compacted high explosive, sufficient to penetrate the heavy steel hull of a big nuclear submarine.
8
0900 (local). Friday. July 14.
Admiral’s Briefing Room.
USS Ronald Reagan.
20.15N 116.10E. Speed 30.
There were 15 men in attendance, including the 12 SEALs who would make the insertion into the island tonight, led by Lt. Commander Rusty Bennett. He sat at the main table with the mission’s forward platoon leader, Lt. Commander Rick Hunter. In front of them sat Rusty’s number two man, the ASDV and landing boat expert Lt. Commander Olaf Davidson. There were two lieutenants, Paul Merloni and Dan Conway; the grappling-iron ace Chief Petty Officer John McCarthy; and the ex-deep water fisherman Petty Officer Catfish Jones. The two SEALs from the bayous, Rattlesnake Davies and the alligator-killing Buster Townsend, were also there
, plus four other noncommissioned SEALs.
Standing up behind the table was the overall mission controller, Colonel Frank Hart, now wearing a SEAL uniform, holding a mahogany officer’s baton. Behind him was a large bulletin board to which was pinned a chart of the island of Xiachuan. At the back of the room, allowed to sit in, was Rear Admiral Art Barry.
The doors were locked, and outside, two armed sentries were on duty. No one was permitted entry. And the tension inside the room was high. All of the SEALs sat silently, alone with their thoughts, not least the one they all tried to hide away: “Tonight may be the last night of my life.”
Frank Hart was slowly pacing the width of the room in front of the chart. There was taughtness written all over his face. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you all know the broad outline of tonight’s mission, which you must regard as covert in the extreme. You are to land on the island, in the south, establish a rendezvous point behind the beach, and then the observation party will move northeast, a distance of six miles, probably through tall jungle, and establish two observation posts as near to the jail as possible without getting caught.
“Now I have delayed this briefing until the last moment, because it is essential that it remain fresh in your minds. For those of you who have not been told, I will now let you know formally. Inside that jail, probably undergoing the harshest form of interrogation, is the entire crew of Seawolf, among them the ship’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Linus Clarke, die son of the President of the United States.
“It is unnecessary for me to explain the gravity of that situation, save to say that immediately upon your safe return to the carrier, with detailed maps, diagrams, and notes, we will be sending in one of the largest Special Forces expeditions ever assembled by the United States in peacetime to rescue the prisoners and get them out to the carrier.
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