by Ian Slater
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The two U.S. destroyers, 430-foot-long Knox-class warships of 3,900 tons each and manned by 280 seamen, along with a Canadian Tribal-class destroyer, whose previous twin, angled stacks were now one in order to reduce her line-of-sight infrared signature, moved at flank speed on patrol, slicing through long Pacific swells. They were heading toward the last-reported SOS position of the disabled factory ship, the MV Southern Star, which had reported earlier that she might have seen a submarine in the area being fished by her four trawlers.
The three investigating destroyers were three miles apart, seventy-one miles out, southwest of Long Beach on Vancouver Island on the main egress, or navy exit, “track” for U.S. and Canadian warships coming out of the Pacific Northwest. Suddenly there was a feral roar, enormous mushrooms of foaming water, both Knox-class destroyers ripped apart, sinking within minutes. The only reason some survivors, thirty-seven in all were plucked up from the oil- and debris-scummed water was that the Canadian destroyer was slower and running three miles astern of the Americans when the pressure-activated mines blew, gashing the destroyers open, the modern ships’ thin armor plate a concession in the constant tug-of-war between more equipment and speed. Five hundred and seventy men and twenty-six women aboard the U.S. ships perished.
Tragic as it was, the loss of the destroyers to the U.S. Navy was hardly something in itself to undo the strategy of the chief naval officer in Washington. But the damage was far worse than at first supposed, for the entire egress channels for the northwest were now an unknown factor, meaning that each cargo vessel, submarine, or U.S. warship setting out to sea off the Pacific Northwest had to make a one-thousand-mile southern “detour” loop to avoid the suspect area, thus effectively bottling up and/or delaying large sections of COMPAC’s West Coast fleet.
The sinkings became a crisis because of the cluster of questions pressing the CNO. Why didn’t the U.S. Navy know about the mines? How could a submarine, recalling the Southern Star’s sighting, mine such a huge area, if it was huge and not merely local? Just as alarming, how could an enemy submarine get so close in undetected? If enemy submarines could do this with impunity, “within a stone’s throw of our coastline,” the New York Times had asked, what were the implications for the desperately needed resupply of Freeman’s Second Army?
The CNO’s spokesperson gave a terse “No comment at this time” to the scrum of reporters dogging her and the CNO as the admiral prepared to enplane the helicopter in Washington to report directly to the president at Mount Weather.
As he was whisked across the line into Virginia, CNO Admiral Horton was now giving much more credence to the Southern Star’s initial report, and ordered COMPAC–Commander Pacific — to have his chief of naval intelligence send someone immediately out to the Southern Star to interview her captain and crew before she limped back to dock and before airborne “experts” were rushed out by the TV networks and La Roche’s tabloids.
This proved impossible. There was no difficulty locating the Southern Star, despite the failure of the navy and the factory ships’ four trawlers to make radio contact in surges of static afflicting the northwestern states. The problem was that the ship wasn’t where she was supposed to be, the southern-flowing Californian current taking the disabled vessel to a point sixty miles off the Olympic Peninsula, the swells lethargically moving the big ship to and fro like a wallowing whale who had lost all sense of direction.
When Lieutenant Eleanor Brady, a vivacious redhead who COMPAC’s intelligence officer craftily gauged would elicit much more response than her male counterparts, was lowered by harness onto the Southern Star’s aft helicopter deck, there was no one to greet her. Southern Star was far from a ghost ship, however; the bodies of the two hundred men who had crewed her were painfully visible — strewn all over the ship in the galley, walkways, others having been shot down in midmeal, others murdered in their bunks, the officers on watch and the lookouts found sprawled amid the debris of shattered glass on the bridge, the ship’s telegraph still set for “Full Ahead,” though the engines, while still warm, were dead. The commandos, who, Eleanor Brady supposed, had obviously taken over the ship, had moved with grotesque swiftness and thoroughness. In the cavernous engine room, over twenty men, many more than usually would be on shift, had sought frantic refuge and now lay dead.
To say Lieutenant Brady’s discovery shocked her would be an understatement. When other naval intelligence officers arrived aboard the ship from Bangor, they found her ashen-faced. The ammunition used was quickly ascertained to be depleted-uranium-tipped 7.62mm of the kind used by Spets.
At first the theory was that Spets aboard some other merchantman had somehow taken over one of the four trawlers and, once aboard the Southern Star, had been the ones to radio in the sighting of a submarine — in order to lure the Americans into the mine field, thus inciting a massive panic attack amid the navy brass and precipitating an equally massive lack of confidence in the navy throughout the country. Pressure mines, the CNO informed the president, would not have shown up on the sub-chasing Orion’s magnetic anomaly detector, as the mines were often manufactured of nonmagnetic plastic composite.
The supposition that the Spets had sent out the message to lure the Allied ships made sense, but then questions were asked about where they had come from in the first place. Satellite pictures showed no other surface vessel within a hundred miles of the Southern Star. Had there been a sub as the Southern Star first reported? A sub carrying Spets commandos?
All the theories fell apart, however, when the four trawlers were found between a 110- and 130-mile radius from the Southern Star’s last position. Furthermore, none of the four trawlers had seen any other vessels — the other common agreement among the four skippers being that they had been unable to contact Southern Star after midnight.
With the certainty of ice turning blood cold, the truth began to sink in, and the director of naval intelligence, along with the CNO, knew he would have to inform the president without delay.
The DNI, his gold rings catching the velvety firelight in the deceptively calm atmosphere of the president’s Mount Weather lounge, gave the president the bad news that contrary to first suspicions, the Spets had certainly not come from a submarine. The undersea sound-detection network was working fine — both U.S. and Canadian ships out of Bangor and Esquimalt respectively having run PROSIGs — prop signature recognition tests — in the hours following the Southern Star incident. And to show that everything had been working properly, it was pointed out that the shore SOSUS stations had plotted the Canadian and U.S. warships’ exact positions and given detailed computer visual recognition of the ships and their armaments within twenty seconds of first noise pickup.
A sub would likewise have been picked up by SOSUS with the same ease. Even if a sub had been hiding near a hot spot, using the sound of thermal vents to mask it, once the sub made any move to attack or release mines, SOSUS would have picked it up.
“If there were no subs in the area,” the president asked, “then where the hell did the Spets come from?”
“Mr. President,” the DNI replied, “they were already there.” He paused. “Aboard the Southern Star. Sleepers. Southern Star laid the mines. It’s difficult for the layman,” the DNI began, stopped short by a warning glance from the CNO.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the DNI corrected himself. “I mean for nonnavy personnel to realize, but a ship that size, fifteen thousand tons, while not a big vessel in navy terms, is plenty big enough to hide a couple of automobiles without anyone noticing — if the parts are brought aboard piece by piece. Pressure mines would be a cinch. ChiCom agents among the crew could have been stashing them aboard for months, even years, waiting to be dumped in the event of war. So far,” the DNI continued, “we’ve listed thirty crewmen not accounted for. All Chinese names. Out of San Francisco. But in all honesty we’d have to search the vessel for days to be absolutely certain. There are so many nooks and crannies a body might have been dum
ped in.”
“They would have killed the crew — before dumping the mines,” Mayne proffered.
“That’s what it looks like, Mr. President. What puzzled us for a while is how they got away, but we think we have the answer for that one now. The factory ship’s helicopter is gone, so it’s pretty clear they escaped to shore, flying low, taking advantage of wave clutter to avoid our radar.”
“But could thirty men — I mean against two hundred?”
“Mr. President, it would have taken only ten commandos from the Guo An Bu — Chinese Intelligence — or anywhere else against unarmed men. They used grenades as well.”
For Mayne this was the last straw. The attack on Hillsboro’s cesium clock, the sabotage against the huge electric grid, the water poisoning in New York and other cities — and now his entire West Coast sealift — shipping having to be rerouted, losing days, possibly weeks, in reaching Freeman. He and his cabinet decided he had no alternative but to extend and widen the Emergency Powers Act: curfews and empowering the police to arrest on there suspicion, and suspension of Mirandizing suspects. He turned to Trainor, whose gaze during the crisis seemed morbidly attracted to the flickering of the fireplace.
“Trainor — cancel all my appointments in the morning.”
“Wha— Ah, yes, Mr. President,” Trainor answered, embarrassed at being caught daydreaming, his attention having momentarily been drawn to the crumbling symbolism of logs collapsing in the fire.
Suddenly there was a bang. The door flew open, the two Secret Service men already either side of Mayne, one of them his Uzi drawn, the other knocking the president to the floor, crouching protectively over him. “Everyone down!”
Somebody in the marine corps detachment guarding Mount Weather had goofed and inadvertently thrown a couple of cypress logs in the stack of firewood, a knot in the wood having exploded.
“Enough!” the president said. “Damn it!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Taiwan
In his home port of Kaohsiung on Taiwan’s far southwest coast, Admiral Kuang was waiting. He had been waiting for twenty years, and another few weeks here or there didn’t matter if his dream of personally leading an invasion across the straits came true, after which he would personally go to Hangchow — which Marco Polo believed to be the most beautiful place on earth — and there cross the West Lake to raze Mao’s hallowed villa to the ground.
But Kuang knew that in Taipei the War Council would not release him until they saw the American Freeman was fully committed to an attack from the north. Kuang knew his lieutenant had promised the American general his full support when the time came, but it was a half truth — a promise based on the assumption that Freeman would lead off and so draw the bulk of Cheng’s army northward away from the Straits of Taiwan.
But now Kuang’s agents had told the admiral about the ChiComs’ sabotage via the Southern Star on the American west coast, which would seriously delay resupply for Freeman. Kuang was anxious. It involved his word as an officer to help Freeman. He had, as the Americans would say, stuck his neck out, knowing that only if Taipei was willing to move could he. Had the admiral known, however, the full measure of the growing pressure against Freeman by Cheng’s northern buildup in Manchuria, he would have relaxed. For Freeman, in the face of Cheng’s buildup, would have to do something, and quickly, or be crushed by the Manchurian colossus. Still Freeman, in view of the sabotage on the United States, particularly that on the West Coast delaying his sealift, might be tempted to hold back. Kuang sent an encoded signal to Freeman’s HQ that, decoded, read simply “mercury.”
Freeman could move or not, but Kuang’s message would tell him the ROC navy was ready to invade the beaches of Fukien, and thus take pressure off Freeman. After Freeman read the message there were tears in his eyes. He pulled out a tissue and blew his nose hard. “Damn dust in this hut! Doesn’t anybody clean it?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“You dumb bastard!” Aussie castigated himself in the near-dawn light. He was less than a hundred miles from the border and was ready to use the beeper to bring in an E VAC when he heard the ominous chud-chud-chud of a bug-eyed Hind coming from behind him to the south.
It had been the cross probably. A Spets chopper or ground patrol for that matter had probably come across the cross and then, once alerted, they might have seen the leftovers and signs of his raft making. In any case, he told the Kawasaki they were in deep shit and he’d have to think fast. He picked one of the narrow gullies up ahead that went into an S-curve, probably following an old, dried riverbed, given the size of the boulders and sand dunes between them. He pulled the Kawasaki into the gully, laid it down on its side, took off his del, scooping sand underneath it, quickly sculpturing it into a body shape by the collapsed motorcycle, sweat streaking his blue-and-white Spets undershirt as he pulled out the fifteen-pound RPG-7 and two of its five-pound rounds and scrambled further down into the gully amid a small island of dunes and boulders scattered along its base.
The chud-chud-chud of the five-rotor chopper not yet visible was coming closer, and then suddenly its shadow passed over the gully and went into a turn. The pilot, no doubt having seen the splayed figure by the bike and realizing that the gully was too narrow to land, turned the helo about, coming down as close as he could to inspect the scene in the indistinct light, the rotors blowing sand every which way, obscuring his view.
The chopper suddenly rose, turned abaft, further away from the fallen Kawasaki, then lowered its rope ladder. Two Spets, AK-74s slung across their backs, were already descending.
Aussie knew the RPG-7 well enough from enemy arms training. He knew there’d be no backblast to give him away as he moved behind the rocks further away from the Kawasaki. With the chopper about 170 meters away, he was well within range of the RPG-7’s five hundred meters.
Unlike with the controls of the Sagger or Spigot antitank weapons, he would have no toggle by which to steer either horizontally or vertically. It was strictly line of sight: aim-hit or miss. The chopper was drifting now about 180 meters away.
Leaning against a boulder, Aussie inhaled, exhaled half his breath, held the rest to subdue any nerve tremor, saw the lower Spets about to jump from the ladder, and fired, feeling the strong jerk backward. The pilot must have seen something coming at him and banked hard right, but with the warhead traveling at two hundred meters per second, the helo couldn’t escape the antitank round hitting it below the left engine intake, the Hind exploding like some huge airborne animal, pieces of shard metal, much of it aluminum, looking like flaccid skin as they flew through the air, falling to the earth like so much tin among the stones, then the deafening roar of me gas explosion spewing out bodies like toys.
The man who had been at the bottom of the ladder had been blown to the ground by the downdraft and was now walking, or rather stumbling, around, holding his head. Aussie immediately raced forward. The man saw him coming and fumbled for the AK-74, but Lewis had three shots off, each one hitting the Russian. The man was still alive when Lewis reached him, holding his head as if in pain, as Lewis pumped another into him. “That’ll cure your headache!” Aussie said. “And this one’s for those kids back there in the pit. You bastard!”
Aussie was back on the Kawasaki and took off, pushing the beeper, mad at himself again. He should have been able to fell the Spets with one shot and not got mad when he was doing it. His old instructor in Hereford would have chewed him out for that, but then the old instructor wasn’t dog tired and on the run.
“No excuses!” he told himself. “No bloody whining, Lewis. Now come on, you air cav. Where the fuck are you?”
They — two Blackhawks — were locked onto the beeper via an AWAC feed, and they were coming in low over the Mongolian sand with.50s nosing out the doors and four F-15 Eagles flying cover, and within eleven minutes a Blackhawk’s rotor was stinging Aussie with small stones the size of marbles.
“Jesus Christ!” he complained as he jumped aboard. “Fucking nea
r stoned me to death!”
“Welcome aboard,” the corporal said.
“Thanks, mate,” Aussie said, shaking his hand. “You saved my bacon.”
The corporal, shouting over the roar of the rotors as they headed across the DMZ to the U.S.-Siberian territory east of Baikal, handed Aussie two envelopes. One was from Freeman’s headquarters, telling him to report there to Major David Brentwood immediately upon his return. The second was from Salvini and Brentwood. The note was terse: “You owe us a bundle. We were hoisted aboard Talon quicker than you.”
“Bastards!” Aussie said.
“Who?” the corporal yelled, his voice barely audible.
“My mates,” Aussie answered.
* * *
David Brentwood had suggested to Freeman that Aussie Lewis be excused participation in “Operation Front Door.”
“He wounded?” Freeman asked.
“No, sir, but he’s been on the run for—”
“Then he’ll have his second wind,” Freeman said. “This isn’t a lunch break. Operation’s so important, every man designated is needed, especially with a commando’s experience. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well I want you to go over the plan once more — fill in Lewis once he gets here or en route to the target. I’ll leave the decision to you. He’ll have six hours to sleep before the mission.”
David Brentwood was about to say that Aussie would appreciate that but his discretion got the better part of cheekiness with Freeman. One thing you couldn’t fault Freeman for: work. And one thing that drove Washington up the wall was the general’s determination to lead his own men into action. He’d done it at Pyongyang, over Ratmanov Island, at Nizhneangarsk, and now he was willing to do it again. Like Patton, Rommel, and MacArthur before him, he had a fatalism in the face of fire that either awed men or struck them as bone stupid.