U.S.S. Seawolf am-4

by Patrick Robinson

On a swim like this, SEALs reckon to feel tiredness late in the second mile. This short-haul run thus counted as little more than a sustained sprint, and when Rusty suddenly noticed his attack board grounding in sand, he knew it was over, and he was not surprised to see Lieutenant Dan Conway and Rattlesnake Davies pop up right behind them. Chief McCarthy and Paul Merloni came next, with Bill and John almost level.

  The Islands

  It was nearly eight in the evening now, and the beach was in a shadowy twilight, the sun having set to the west beyond a heavily wooded headland. Rusty was glad of the last of the light, because it confirmed what they had been told: they were in a wide, gently curving bay, and the place was deserted, save for the jail complex six miles to the northeast.

  From the land it would be impossible to spot anything on the dark water. There was no moon, and the rain clouds still hung over the entire area. Rusty sat in the shallows up to his neck in water and motioned for the others to join him. “I think we’ll stay here for ten more minutes,” he said. “Just until it gets really dark…if we make a run for it now up that wide, white beach we’d stand out like a dog’s balls, if there happened to be anyone around. I’d rather play it dead safe.”

  Everyone agreed, and they sat silently in the warm water until they could no longer see even the beach. They never saw the Zodiac either, never even heard it as Olaf Davidson and his crew slipped the craft across the bay, with short, beautifully timed strokes, the paddles hitting the water as one, almost noiselessly, tirelessly. This quartet would have put a Harvard crew four to shame.

  “Watch where you’re going, you crazy fucker,” said Rusty softly as the rubber boat almost bumped Buster in the back of the head.

  “Jesus,” said Catfish. “What the hell are you guys doing, sunbathing?”

  The SEALs stifled their laughter as the crew stepped out into the shallows, and they all pulled the boat in, spinning it expertly around, the engine raised, landing it stern-first. Even in mild shore waves these boats immediately ship water over the stern if they spend even a few seconds in the shallows. The trick is to get the bow around to face the ocean.

  This particular boat was moved with extreme speed, six SEALs on either side, using the specially fitted handles, positioned so that eight men could put all their strength into lifting and dragging the heavy end. They had it out of the water, up the beach and into the trees inside 90 seconds.

  It was very dark the moment they left the white sand, and it was beginning to rain again. Rusty was not crazy about the first spot they chose because it afforded no cover or protection from the seaward side. In short, if anyone arrived on the beach, the SEALs could be seen.

  Rusty took a short walk in company with Dan Conway, and 40 yards to the east they found an outcrop of rocks, around five feet high, running right back into the trees for 30 feet. “That’s for us,” said the recon team leader. “We’ll get the boat in behind there, under a waterproof shelter, and we’re golden…the watchmen can cover the beach and the landward approach with the machine gun — the guys can sleep in the boat…because no intruder could see anything.”

  For the next 30 minutes the SEALs got themselves thoroughly organized. The boat was camouflaged and covered with the waterproof shelter, which they rigged up about three feet above the hull. They took some palm branches and carefully brushed out their tracks in the sand, then used them to hide the boat even more thoroughly. They rigged up the radio in case of emergency, and fitted the ammunition belt to the machine gun.

  When the exercise was complete the entire thing was virtually invisible. And when Rusty Bennett was finally satisfied with the safety of the position, he and his seven teammates prepared to leave.

  They removed their wet suits and climbed into their light jungle combat gear, brown T-shirts with green and brown camouflage shirt and trousers, and long soft lace-up boots. Each man then applied light and dark green greasepaint to their faces, with the occasional splotch of brown. Rusty Bennett never wore a hat, preferring his dark green headband, which he called his “drive-on rag.” When they were all fitted out they made a final weapons check: the pistol, the MP-5 automatic, the ammunition, the fighting knife. And then they shouldered up their packs, including two trench shovels, and very formally shook hands with the four men who were staying behind.

  They had a radio frequency between themselves and their new base camp, but it would never be used unless something absolutely shocking happened. SEALs don’t speak much. The two most lightly packed members of the team, Paul Merloni and Rattlesnake Davies, carried the big machine gun between them. Chief McCarthy and Buster had the machetes, and Rusty led the way with the compass.

  It was 2104 when the red-haired lieutenant commander from Maine turned north up the peninsula, checked the bearing three-six-zero, and led his team into the sopping-wet jungle. In fact, they could have walked the first one and a half miles along the beach, but Rusty had dismissed that out of hand after studying the map. He knew it would probably have been quicker, but it also made them vulnerable to any observation from a Chinese patrol boat cruising the shoreline checking for intruders. They might even have run into a Chinese foot patrol, which would have spelled the end of the entire mission.

  And so the SEALs did it the hard way, walking through the rain forest, a hundred yards inshore, out of sight, almost nonexistent. They traveled in single file except for the two men with the big machine gun, who brought up the rear. And it was very difficult terrain, heavily overgrown every yard of the way for the first half mile. They were almost ready to start swinging the machetes, but the noise factor was uppermost in their minds, and they just kept pushing forward, stopping every 100 yards to listen. But there was always silence.

  Rusty signaled a course change to zero-four-five at the head of the southeastern bay, and they moved on, keeping the ocean to the right, but remaining under the cover of the forest. It was at this point that the going became noticeably easier, with very little undergrowth beneath a canopy of extremely tall trees. However, an all-encompassing darkness made it difficult not to walk into the trunks, and Rusty kept his left arm outstretched in front of him, pushing on into the great unknown. So heavy was the overhead cover that Rusty doubted it would have been much lighter at midday.

  Underfoot the ground was very wet and soft. It was impossible to avoid long muddy puddles, which turned up frequently, and each man was glad of his waterproof boots. Once they almost blundered into a fast-flowing stream, but Rusty managed to call a halt just in time, which was a considerable feat since they were all confined to the merest whispers.

  The water in that first stream was quite fast-flowing, and they risked a tiny flashlight to look at the map, ascertaining that the stream must have rushed down from the Guanyin Mountain, which rose to 1,300 feet somewhere up ahead to their right. This was an unnecessary obstacle and Colonel Hart had marked a route through a long flat coastal plain, bordered out to the left by wide mud flats before the sea.

  Privately, Rusty might have chosen the mountain rather than a possible journey through very wet marshland. But the colonel had been insistent. If the Chinese were going to have lookout posts anywhere, they would establish them in the mountains, on the high ground to the north that dominated not only the jail, but also most of the island. If there were outposts up in those hills, it would be impossible to make a journey like this during the day. At night it would be the height of folly to risk running into one by mistake.

  The colonel’s legendary high intelligence often caused him to speak graphically. “Sailor,” he had said to Rusty, “I’m not real happy about you and your guys getting your feet wet, but I expect you’d rather that than your ass shot off.”

  “I think that would be a very fair assessment, sir,” the lieutenant commander had replied.

  And so the flat wet plain between the mountains it was. Thus the eight SEALs were able to cover the first half of the journey without tackling any steep hills. But it was treacherous walking through deep, soft, grassy mud. At one s
tage as they squelched along through what seemed like an abandoned paddy field, Buster came forward and spoke in a stage whisper, “Sir, permission to draw my knife…this is fucking alligator country.”

  “Granted,” hissed Rusty. “And for Christ’s sake stay near to me in case I tread on one of the sonsabitches.”

  Everyone had to suppress his laughter at this banter. “We gotta come back this way?” asked Paul Merloni.

  “Not if we can help it…we’ll have a chance tomorrow to see if the Chinese have any guards beyond the complex. If they don’t, we’ll take to the hills next time.”

  Meanwhile they found themselves suddenly on slightly rising ground, firmer and with a definite steepness. Rusty told them softly that it was the start of the biggest mountain on the island. It was unnamed but high, and it towered over the jail, according to the pictures taken from the overheads.

  The SEALs’ designated route would take them right between the two ranges, north of Guanyin Shan. They now headed due east, back toward the sea, and when they reached it they angled directly north again, into the foothills, hopefully to emerge right above the complex.

  And now they were into the last mile and it was almost midnight. Both Rusty and Dan Conway were using night-sight binoculars, stopping frequently, checking the terrain, watching the infrared sensors, heat-seeking, battery-operated. They never found so much as a rabbit.

  At four minutes before midnight Rusty drew them to a halt, and whispered that in his view they might see the jail right over the next hill. Right now they were walking through big trees again, and they began to move extremely carefully, moving from tree trunk to tree trunk, soft ghostly figures in the Chinese night, like a scene from a children’s horror story.

  Rusty had the GPS system in his hand, a dim green glow illuminating the numbers. He was looking for 21.42N 112.39E. They were sufficiently far north, but the east number was flicking back and forth between 112.38 and 112.39. When that last number hardened up, Rusty reckoned they’d be in the goddamned jail, never mind outside it. They kept moving stealthily between the trees, and suddenly, dead ahead, were the lights of the prison where Captain Judd Crocker and his men were held captive.

  Rusty saw the big searchlights first, the beams lancing out from the two high towers, which seemed to be otherwise in darkness. The beams were also moving slowly across the courtyard, which meant there were almost certainly two men in each tower, the light operator and an armed sentry.

  “Pain in the ass,” muttered Rusty, going to work instantly. “That means we gotta get up there and kill four people before we start, otherwise there’s gonna be all hell breaking out, with us still outside the goddamned jail. Fuck it. We have to get rid of them.”

  “What now?” whispered Merloni.

  “Silence, smartass…I’m thinking. How about over there, Dan? A little lower down the hill. See that line of bushes on the ridge with the big tree in front? We could get in there. It’d be impossible to see us from below, and we’d have a pretty damn good view of the place. I bet we could see right into the courtyard.”

  “We really could only be seen if someone walked up here and tripped right over us,” said Lieutenant Conway, in a voice only just audible.

  “Right, and we’d see him a long time before he got anywhere near…”

  “I wonder how many Chinese there are down there?”

  “Hard to say,” whispered Rusty. “But if they’ve got one-hundred-plus prisoners, they’re gonna have a guard force of thirty on duty at all times, twenty-four hours a day…that’s one hundred and twenty people right there. Then you got all kinds of other turkeys wandering around, drivers, patrol boat crew, helicopter crews, cooks, orderlies, communications “guys and Christ knows what…I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple of hundred Chinese down there.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Okay, guys…let’s just check out this hillside with the binoculars another couple of times…then we’ll edge over to the ridge and see if we can’t get ourselves organized…by the way, I’m as hungry as a sonofabitch.”

  “Don’t worry about it, sir,” whispered Lieutenant Merloni. “I’ll just get rid of this machine gun and then I’ll nip down below and order up a couple of plates of sweet and sour pork…you want fried rice or plain?”

  The urge to laugh out loud was almost overwhelming, but no one did. They just stood against their trees shaking, with their hands over their mouths like naughty schoolboys in the presence of the headmaster.

  Rattlesnake Davies made it much worse. “No need for that, sir,” he whispered. “I’ve got the radio. I’ll whistle ’em up right away…I expect they do takeout.”

  “Make mine chicken chow mein, willya…with extra soy…”

  Lt. Commander Bennett knew it was all just a release for men who had been on the edge of their nerves for many hours, suppressing natural fears, wondering if they would ever get away, knowing that if they were caught unawares they would be shot dead on sight. Rusty didn’t think he could give them a hard time over a few jokes about a Chinese restaurant.

  “Just make sure they don’t take us out,” he said softly. “Come on…get low and over to that ridge…they just might have some asshole with a pair of binoculars like ours, and they’d pick us up very easily.”

  It thus took them fifteen minutes, crawling through the grass in standard SEAL operational mode. You could have stood 20 feet from them and never known they were there, until one of them killed you.

  The thick bushes along the ridge were perfect for their task. They could cut small clearances and watch the jail night and day from their high position, counting the sentries, watching the guard change, timing the patrols, timing the lights, noting the time the interior jail lights went on, assessing the function of each building, establishing the building that contained the communications — the one that would go in the first SEAL assault, the one they had to obliterate, or else die when Chinese heavy-duty reinforcements came in.

  To their great delight they found two low granite rock faces right in the middle of the clump. Behind these they had real cover. The jail was no more than 200 yards below them, but unless they had diabolical bad luck they would be unlucky to get caught out here. The foliage was so dense, their camouflage so professional, they would scarcely be visible even from the air. Certainly not from behind.

  “Of course, we don’t know whether they patrol this hill and if they do, we may have to move,” offered Merloni quietly. “I know I would. If this was America and I was holding captive Mao Zedong’s illegitimate grandson, I’d have guards all over this area all the time.”

  “So would I,” agreed Rusty. “But they may not. It just might be beyond their imagination that the U.S. would launch an operation like this…but then, they don’t know they have Linus Clarke in the slammer, do they?”

  “And that’s the key,” said Dan Conway. “It’s the key to why we’re doing this…and why we have a big chance of getting away with it.”

  Not for the first time, Bennett believed that young Conway was going right to the top in Coronado…if they could just get out of here alive.

  And now he issued his first formal orders. “Split into two teams. Lieutenant Conway, Bill and Buster with me. Lieutenant Merloni, Chief McCarthy, Rattlesnake, and John. The second team will now prepare a bit of food, regular cold rations for us all, then sleep until oh-four hundred. I’ll take the first watch with Buster after we cut a peephole. Dan and Bill will establish the machine gun and keep watch behind our redoubt. Find the laptop, someone, and have a camera ready for first light. The sun set just before twenty hundred, and at this latitude there should be ten hours of darkness, so dawn will be around oh-six hundred…”

  Buster Townsend moved into the bushes with the pruning shears and quietly cut two gaps in the foliage.

  They all used some more insect repellent, drank some water and ate some of the high-protein bars that would sustain them for the next 24 hours.

  Then Rusty Bennett moved forward into
the thicket, propped himself on the rocks and focused the night-sight binoculars, stopwatch in his right pocket. Buster sat behind with the laptop, ready for the commentary that Rusty would begin in around 10 minutes.

  “Okay…there are two guards in each of the watchtowers, one of them working the light…the beam from each tower is activated every four minutes…interlocking with the others…it’s taking forty-five seconds to traverse the yard, which allows a window of two minutes and fifteen seconds when there are no beams at all.

  “There are other lights down below, midway up the tower. There are ladders leading from the roof of the long building. That’s the north wall of the compound and we are observing from the west…range two hundred and twenty yards.

  “Right now, at oh-one hundred, I’m observing a patrol of four guards in the courtyard moving in twos along the inside wall of what I think is the main cell block. It takes them two minutes and nine seconds to walk from end to end, one pair heading east while the other heads west. In four crossings, the four men have stopped to talk together three times, which increased the time of the journey by three minutes.

  “Dead ahead of me, to the right of the main block, there is a square single-story building with all its lights on. This building is situated immediately to the right of the main prison entrance. The door has been open since we got here and there have been people in and out, five out and three in, during the last twenty-five minutes, but they could have been the same people. They were all in uniform. I thus conclude this is the guard room.”

  Rusty spoke slowly, in an impersonal but clear and steady monotone, so that his throat microphone to the tiny laptop could synthesize his voice correctly and record written words for later transmission on their portable satellite link.

  “At oh-one ten I observed a group of four lights moving south a half mile east of the jail. I’m looking right across the jail toward the sea, and the jail has a marginally higher elevation than the shoreline. The four lights were on some kind of a patrol boat. I watched it head south, we must check to see if there’s a jetty somewhere down there…action star right there.”