by Ian Slater
“Excuse me, sir, but what’s all this about my brother? Robert or Ray? I don’t—”
“Robert. The submariner. SEAL man, too, right?”
“Robert?”
“Yes.” Norton’s tone informed David that he would be told no more. “Sorry,” said Norton, “but it’s on a need-to-know basis. And you don’t need to know. All I can tell you is that he’s step number three.”
“A Heck 7.6-millimeter barrel for me,” said Lewis without further ado, referring to the Heckler and Koch machine gun. “Run short of ammo, we can strip the Siberians.”
“You, Brentwood,” said Norton. “The same?” And immediately David Brentwood was drawn into the urgent preparations.
* * *
A SEAL team for the third part of Freeman’s plan had been needed so quickly that there was no time to bring them from their CONUS — continental United States— NAVSPECWARGRU — Navy Special Warfare Group — at either Coronado, California, or Little Creek, Virginia. Instead, Freeman had requested the nearest SEAL contingent, Team Nine from Pearl Harbor, and had personally requested submariner captain Robert Brentwood of the Sea Wolf-Hunter/Killer USS Reagan to join the team as leader.
CINCPAC–Commander in Chief Pacific — Admiral Leahy responded in Top Secret “immediate” cable that this wasn’t possible. The admiral had nothing against brothers serving in the same theater — the services were replete with such cases — but Robert Brentwood, captain of the Reagan’s blue crew, was now back at sea on a seventy-day war patrol around the southern Kuril Islands north of Japan, guarding the vital entrances to the Sea of Okhotsk, and so would not be back in Pearl for the gold crew changeover for another fourteen days. Furthermore, because of the “strain on TACAMO aircraft” following the sabotage of the sub communication aerial in Wisconsin, Admiral Leahy said it might not be possible for the TACAMO aircraft assigned the USS Reagan to contact the sub for several days.
“All right, Dick,” Freeman had told Norton. “Now we’ve requested, I’ll pull rank. I’m ordering it as Commander in Chief Far East. I want Robert Brentwood because that submariner performed magnificently in Baikal before these jokers pulled a cease-fire on me. So did young David Brentwood. That’s why I put them on my list. They’re men I’ve worked with before, and when you’re in a corner—”
“Pearl also points out that he’s too old, General,” interrupted Norton. “Robert Brentwood, I mean. At forty-four, he’s pushing it even for a sub captain, let alone the SEALs. They usually limit entry to SEAL Special Ops to twenty-seven-year-olds.”
“God damn it, Dick! You know the age of the oldest Tornado pilot in the Iraqi War?” Before Norton could give him an answer, Freeman charged on. “A Tornado pilot, Dick. Those boys went in on the deck. Needed goddamn windscreen wipers to keep the sand off their cockpits. Most dangerous air missions of all. Fifty-nine. That’s how old he was, Dick. Fifty-nine. A fifty-nine-year-old Brit. A grand-daddy, and some pen pusher in Pearl’s telling me forty-four’s over the hill?”
“Not exactly, sir but — well, you have to admit, for what you have in mind it’s going to be pretty rigorous.”
“Life’s rigorous, Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the wall map. “And I need someone I can personally trust and know on this one.” Taking up the Day-Glo pen, he circled Nizhneangarsk terminus. “Now Nizhneangarsk’s mine.” Next he moved the marker south to the Siberian-Chinese border area around A-7. “The SAS/Delta boys’ll have to take care of this one, number two. But,” he turned back to Dick Norton, “no way we can break through south of Baikal and stop Cheng unless Robert Brentwood does his job. And it has to be done before the full moon. So you tell CINCPAC I want Robert Brentwood out of that pig boat if he has to put every goddamn TACAMO onto the Reagan, and I want him in Pearl within forty-eight hours for a week’s refresher course. Send them the details — Most Secret, need-to-know basis only.”
“Yes, General. But they will have to know the specific target sooner or later.”
“Later. Not over the air — coded or otherwise. When he gets here.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
Robert Brentwood was passing through the USS Reagan’s “Blood Alley,” the redded-out narrow corridor between the banks of the Sea Wolfs missile fire-control computers, into the ethereal blue of the sonar room, where he had just been handed the millisecond “burst” transmission received via the long, trailing, low-frequency aerial. He preferred using the quick pop-up, high-frequency mast to receive transmits — the time needed to reel in the longer VLF could be the margin between life and death in the tight turning war of the Hunter/Killers. Besides, with sound passing through water at four times the speed it moved through air, the “reel-in” now under way could be heard miles away, despite the fact that the hydrophones’ spools were heavily insulated to prevent noise shorts from alerting the enemy. But after the catastrophic breakdown of the computer-phone networks in the States, the VLF had been his only bet of picking up the TACAMO aircraft.
Robert Brentwood was tense, but it was more the content of the burst message man the reel-in that made him so, and only Hale, his executive officer, could sense it. The message had been brief and to the point — pickup for transport to Pearl to be made by a carrier-borne chopper at 0400 the next morning.
“Don’t they realize we’ll be violating the first rule of a war patrol?” said Brentwood, handing back the decoded message to Hale.
“Must be important then,” said the XO, by way of making his skipper feel better about having to surface. “Besides, we have air superiority.”
“It’s not enemy air that I’m concerned about. It’s those Alfas. They can pick us up breaking surface a hundred miles away through the sound channel.” Brentwood turned around to the officer of the deck, Merrick. “What’s state of sea topside?”
“Beaufort scale — eight. Gale force,” said the OOD. “Should be enough turbulence to cover our bust-through noise. Might have to be a wet pickup for you, though, Captain.”
“Well, better me wet than you guys.”
“Have to agree with you there, sir,” responded Merrick easily.
“Any idea what they want you for?” asked Hale.
“No, but it’s from CINC-Far East, so I figure Freeman’s behind it.”
“Maybe more subs in Lake Baikal?” proffered Merrick.
“Possibly. I hope not. Too darn cold.”
* * *
The pickup by a navy Sea King helo, and the transfer to Pearl via one of Salt Lake City’s Mach 2.3 F-14 Tomcats, went much more smoothly than Robert Brentwood had anticipated. Apart from being told he was to be taken to the BUD school at Pearl Harbor, Brentwood was still in the dark about the operation, and on his arrival in Pearl he discovered that not even Chief Petty Officer Brady, the “Bullfrog,” the chief and most senior instructor at the Navy Special Warfare Group, knew much more than he and the six enlisted men who, besides the Bullfrog, would make up the SEAL team requested by Freeman.
“Well,” said the Bullfrog happily, “one thing we all know, gentlemen. BUD doesn’t stand for Budweiser.”
“Thought it did!” said one of the enlisted seven.
Basic underwater demolition training was essential for the SEALs, and was one of the prerequisites for wearing the coveted badge, a trident grasped in the eagle’s right talon, a flintlock pistol held in the other, the anchor between them.
“Beach clearance?” posited one of the men.
“Come on, chiefie!” pressed another of the SEALs, such informality allowed nowhere else in the navy except in the tightly knit band of elite UD teams.
“Honest to God, Reilly,” replied the chief. “I haven’t been told the specific area. None of us’ll know till week’s end. Freeman’s orders. Till then we’ll be doing a rerun of motivation week in Pearl.” He had everyone’s undivided attention. “Motivation week” was the sanitized naval version of what used to be called “hell” week. It meant a week of CDU — combat demolition unit — training, a week of de
liberate sleep deprivation to slow your responses and wear you down, weed out the weak ones — if there were any. Drop-out rate was fifty-one percent.
Part of the treatment involved flying the men over to the outer island of Kauai, to the muddy taro fields around the Wailua River where the men would have to avoid detection by a squad of instructors, one of the methods being to stick a reed in their mouths while lying submerged in the mud, waiting for the searchers to pass by. Problem was, every now and then a leech draped itself over the straw and the air was cut off. In the past, some men came up purple-faced, gasping wildly for air, only to attract the attention of the instructors, thereby failing that part of the course.
The eight-man team — Robert Brentwood, the Bullfrog, and the other six enlisted men — knew, of course, that regardless of whatever the specific mission was, they’d be issued with special UBA — underwater breathing apparatus — specifically, the military version of the COBRA— closed-circuit oxygen breathing apparatus — a rebreather system which, apart from not issuing any telltale bubbles while you were going into a beach, for example, allowed the swimmer by means of the carbon dioxide filter canister to rebreathe the same gas, additional oxygen being bled as needed from a front waist tank into the inflatable bag. It was much better than the standard SCUBA, or scaphandreautonome, system. There were still problems, however, and during the motivation week, one diver, Seaman Michael Rose — his last name reminding Robert Brentwood of his wife Rosemary back in England — ran into what the chiefs report blandly designated as some “difficulty” at 120 feet in Pearl. Being in saltwater, the helium inject needed at that depth to prevent nitrogen narcosis, or “nitrogen drunkenness,” was bleeding in too slowly, and Rose, despite his wrist fathometer, lost all sense of direction, going down to 240 feet, thinking he was going up, before being located by the Bullfrog and Robert Brentwood.
On the third day, the team, under Brentwood’s direction, practiced egressing from a submerged sub’s forward escape hatch with the sub under way at one and a half knots. For Brentwood it was the first real indication of what their mission might be. On the fourth day, the eight of them were split into four two-man UDT-IBS — underwater demolition teams; the IBS, or inflatable small boat issued each of the four pairs, a thirteen-and-a-half-foot-long F-470 fiberglass-hulled Zodiac. Each pair of SEALs was then assigned to a landing craft.
The first of the four two-man teams consisted of Brentwood and Dennison, a stocky man who, despite his shorter height, was probably the strongest swimmer of the group, and who possessed a wry sense of humor. As the landing craft started its run, he crouched low in the Zodiac on its outboard side and then, on the signal from Brentwood, rolled over the rubber boat’s outer tube into the roiling water on the landing craft’s port side, a quarter mile out from Pearl’s sub net.
Brentwood followed and they began casting, Dennison unreeling a.065-gauge nylon fishingline marked “for feel” every one hundred feet, at which point Robert Brentwood let a knot-marked lead sinker line down to the bottom, quickly recording the depth by scratching it on his plastic knee slate and noting any other underwater obstructions, apart from the sub net, that an amphibious landing might encounter, including the positions of channel markers and angle of breakwater to the beach. Each number-two man in the four two-man teams had to keep radio contact with the other team via waterproof cigarette-pack-size walkie-talkies, it being vital for the teams to act in concert to effect a proper “extraction” or pickup. If the Zodiacs didn’t cut out from the LCTs at the same time, on full throttle — the muffled thirty-five horsepower outboards streaking at right angles from the landing craft to pick up the swimmers, each man’s left hand raised high to mark his position — there wouldn’t be a second chance to be “snared” by the rubber loop held outboard from the fast-moving Zodiac. Once a swimmer’s arm passed through the loop, he would immediately bend his arm to a V and kick toward the Zodiac as an LCT crewman, grabbing his webbed belt at midriff, hauled him quickly aboard, where he would ready himself in turn to “snare” the second man, until all eight swimmers had been accounted for. The four rubber boats would then turn and head out to sea, away from the enemy shore, to await their submarine pickup.
“You did good,” Bullfrog told Dennison. “Remember, we lost more marines from drowning off Tarawa than we did from Jap shore fire. If we’d known just how deep some of them holes were in that coral, we could have saved a lot of guys.” The chief hesitated for a moment, then added, “But we still got a problem.”
For the moment the other seven men, including Robert Brentwood, said nothing, sitting back on the gunwales of the tender, exhausted from more than six hours in the water. Brentwood, though he didn’t show it, was sure he was the most fatigued. He was old enough to be some of these men’s father.
“What problem?” asked Dennison, reaching tiredly for a squeeze bottle of Gatorade. “None of us drowned!”
“Speak for yourself,” put in Rose, the California tan of the twenty-five-year-old contrasting with the stubble of what had been a full head of straw-colored hair.
“No,” conceded the chief. “Swimming was okay. But it was a screwup on the walkie-talkies.”
“Hell,” said Dennison, “ours worked fine. Didn’t it, Captain? Waterproof one hundred percent.”
“Oh, they all worked fine,” said the chief. “That’s the problem.”
“Did Pearl pick it up?” put in Brentwood. “On the hydrophones?”
“Pearl!” said the chief. “Captain, they heard you up off Diamond Head. Frightened the fish in Hanauma Bay.” He grinned. “So now you guys know why you were made to learn American Standard.” He meant the sign language used by the deaf and mute.
“Hold on!” said Robert Brentwood. “I don’t know anything about sign language.”
“Oh—” said the Bullfrog, clearly caught off base for the first time since the refresher courses had begun. “Special orders from General Freeman, sir. Thought you knew.”
“Hell, no!” answered Robert, who, despite the normal give-and-take of profanity in the service, wasn’t in the habit of swearing, even mildly.
“Then, Captain,” said the chief, “you’re going to have to learn, sir. Rose — you’re the best with a bunch of fives.” The chief turned back to the commander of the USS Reagan. “You have twenty-four hours, Captain.”
Brentwood gave an “Aye aye, chief — the only situation in which the captain of one of the most powerful warships in history would have done so, at least so obligingly. Besides, Brentwood’s momentary annoyance was mitigated by the growing conviction that he was now solving the puzzle of the mission’s precise location. Well aware, as a commander himself, of the “need-to-know” rationale for keeping an operation secret until the last, he couldn’t help taking pride in the certainty that he had divined Freeman’s plan. He wondered whether any of the enlisted men had put it together — a sub approach offshore, casting for obstacles, sinker line depth measurements, width of approach… General Douglas Freeman was about to do another MacArthur, another Inchon, launch a daring seaborne invasion across the China Sea. And unless he, Brentwood, was all wet, the SSN USS Reagan would be used to insert a survey UDT — underwater demolition team. And, once the underwater terrain was known, the Reagan would most likely use its torpedoes to clear any major underwater obstruction just prior to the amphibious assault.
The giveaway from Brentwood was the concern over the walkie-talkies. If they were going to be that close to shore that they had to worry about the walkie-talkie sound being picked up by a beach garrison, then it had to be a pre-invasion mission. The final clue was the sign language. It meant they were going to be very close to the enemy, plus sign language wouldn’t help you in the dark. A dawn invasion. He put this last conclusion to the Bullfrog without revealing any of his other deductions, and couldn’t resist a quiet satisfaction in seeing the chief completely surprised.
The chief looked quizzically at him, and Brentwood got the distinct impression the chief was thinking t
hat perhaps at forty-four the sub skipper was getting a bit old for it. “Dark’s no problem,” responded the chief, explaining, “We’d have PVs.” It wasn’t equipment that they used on a sub much — unless they surfaced at night — and the Bullfrog could see Brentwood had been caught off base. “Infrared,” added the chief, unconsciously adding insult to Brentwood’s injured pride. “Same kind they used in the Iraqi War. Pick up hand signals no problem. Warm arms in a cold sea — stick out like you got a hard-on.”
* * *
For the Bullfrog it was a joke, but everyone else was too tired. Including swimming time, they’d been “refreshing” themselves with all the minutiae of SEAL underwater techniques for thirty hours without a break. Still, as fatigued as he was, Brentwood recalled the Bullfrog’s earlier mention of Tarawa. It mightn’t be that the SEALs would go in during the daylight, given the chief’s mention of the PV goggles, but you’d have to be crazy to try a massive amphibious landing at night. Then again, a lot of people had thought Freeman was crazy for making a night attack on Pyongyang — until he’d pulled it off.
“Right, gentlemen,” said the chief. “Six hours sleep and we start on some lovely abutments.”
“Where?” asked Rose. “Down on Waikiki?”
“Doesn’t matter,” put in Smythe, a tall string bean of a man. “What matters is how big these mothers are, eh?” He turned to the Bullfrog. “How big are they, chiefie?”
“Mothers are big,” answered the Bullfrog truthfully. “Quartermaster’s got us down for primacord with demolition knots, with three-foot trailer cords to tie your charge to the master primacord.”
“Be using bladders?” asked Smythe.
“Yup,” confirmed the chief. “We’ll all need tits.” He was referring to Schantz bag/basket flotation packs that would take most of the weight of the explosive charges off the swimmers.
“Heavy fuckers, then?” said Reilly. “If we got Schantzes.”