The Shark Mutiny

by Patrick Robinson

  The gantry was better lit than any other area, and Rick decided that if they were going to be seen, and caught, it was going to be as a team right in the middle of that illuminated bridge. He thus decided to regroup on the pontoon and send each man over the bridge one at a time, nice and slowly, attracting no attention. He sent Dallas MacPherson over first, and the young Lieutenant did as he was ordered, strolling nonchalantly over the metal bridge as if he owned the place.

  One by one they made the crossing, until 11 men were over. Then Rick Hunter picked up the big machine gun on his own and walked it over the gantry to join the others. And right then the pace stepped up about 200 percent. There were almost no lights on this side, just a low four-foot steel-railed fence to protect the fuel farm.

  Rattlesnake and Buster cleared it together, racing through the holding tanks and planting a powerful, high-explosive Mk-138 satchel bomb against each of the two central ones. They joined them with det cord and wired it into the detonator, setting the timer for 0345. Then they jumped the eastern fence and worked on two more bombs, carried in and left in position on the outer back wall of the control center by Rick and Bobby. Each satchel held 10 blocks of explosives. There was enough TNT against that wall to knock down Yankee Stadium, and Rattlesnake thought privately, I just hope to Christ no one finds it before H-Hour, 0345.

  Meanwhile Dallas and Mike Hook were edging around the control block searching for a main electricity inlet or outlet. The other team, Rick Hunter and Bobby Allensworth, was searching for the main fuel lines, which they never found. Dallas and Mike, however, were lucky. They opened up a big manhole in the ground and found a labyrinth of heavy-duty cable, coated with plastic, in brown, red and blue. Dallas said to wind six turns of det cord around the central point and set the timer on the detonator for 0345.

  “Okay, guys, we’re done on this side of the inlet,” whispered Rick Hunter. “Let’s round up the lookouts and head right back over that creepy little bridge.” Twenty minutes later they were back in the shadow of the accommodation block, their loads lightened considerably.

  It was 0225. And there were two targets left, the control and communications block, which represented about 5 percent of their problem, and the power station, which was the other 95 percent. The control block was important because, without it, the Chinese would be unable to contact the outside world. But the power plant represented a fighting chance of obliterating the entire Naval base.

  With incredible stealth, the SEAL team moved way back into the rough ground over which they had walked from the guardhouse. And now they could see the silhouette of the station, and as Dallas MacPherson oberved, “It looks a whole hell of a lot bigger right here than it did on the photograph.”

  And Dallas was right. The building loomed high, maybe five stories up. On its southern side it was 90 feet long, and it was plainly bigger than that on the western and eastern walls. The only door they could see was set into the wall on the west side, right-hand corner looking in. There was a high outside metal staircase running up the east wall, probably for use as an emergency exit.

  A high chimney jutted out of the roof, probably to release surplus steam.

  To the right of the station, as the SEALs lay watching, was the control and communications block, situated centrally between the station and the dockside warehouse. They would deal with that first, because it was relatively simple, the mere placing of two bombs strategically.

  The planners in Coronado had discussed the possibility of getting a couple of guys on the roof and winding a few coils of det cord around the entire bloom of rooftop aerials, but decided, in the end, against it: too hard to climb it without special gear, and the SEALs were already fully loaded; too much chance of being detected, even stranded up there if things went awry below; too little advantage gained, since there was soon to be no electricity whatsoever throughout the base. Or whatever was left of it.

  This time the bombs would be placed by Buster and Rattlesnake, both experts in such matters. Mike Hook, carrying the big gun for covering fire, accompanied them across the ground assisted by one of the rookies. They set themselves in position covering the main door of the building and the short southern wall. They could also cover the blacktop perimeter road.

  The two SEALs from Louisiana moved like lightning to the building, and their luck held. At the rear of the structure there was a short flight of concrete steps going down to a semibasement, and remarkably, the door was open. Buster and Rattlesnake crept in and placed their two satchel bombs right by the main boiler. They spliced in the wires, set the detonator for 0345 and moved briskly out of the area, shutting the door carefully behind them. And still no one disturbed their lethal tasks. It was exactly 0245. And they were now running a half hour late, not 20 minutes.

  But no one could deny that the Fates had been with them. The base, though occupied by a large number of military personnel, was, like all bases, quasi-civilian in character. One of the two duty guards had been an engineer/electrician. All the men on duty in the power station were civilians, and there was no duty guard whatsoever in there. They had seen no patrols along the docks either, presumably on the basis that no one was expected to attack a Chinese guided-missile warship with several hundred trained Navy staff on board.

  And now, late or not, the SEAL team was moving forward to its main objective, taking no chances, moving on elbows and knees through the rough grass. The plan had been perfectly memorized by each one of them. Commander Hunter would enter the station, backed by Lt. Allensworth, Catfish Jones, Mike Hook, Dallas MacPherson and two rookies. They would take in with them the two steel armor-piercing bombs and four sizable hunks of C-4 plastic explosive. Plus a couple of hammers, jammed in the rookies’ belts.

  In Commander Hunter’s opinion they would have to fight to take control of the power station, probably killing everyone who stood in their way. They knew from the television screens in the guardhouse that there were at least four, and possibly more, engineers on duty, but as it was a civilian installation that would probably be all. The problem with an assault like this was that anyone who got in the way had to die. There was no question of stunning, or disabling or even drugging with chloroform. What if the victim suddenly awakened and sounded an alarm. The stakes were too high for such a risk. Any risk, for that matter.

  Outside the power station, 20 yards into the rough ground, Buster and Rattlesnake would man the big machine gun, covering the door and the approach road. The rookies would be deployed as lookouts on the near corners of the building. At 0255 the seven-man SEAL assault force set off toward the raised door of the geothermal generating plant. It was pitch-dark, the moon having vanished behind low rain clouds, and there was just one dim bare bulb lighting the eight steps up to the doorway.

  The SEAL leader opened it carefully, but did not enter. No one moved, and certainly no one came to find out who had opened the door. One by one the team slipped into the building, weapons poised to cut down any opposition. If it was just one man or two, they would use knives. Any more, they would simply take them down with submachine-gun fire: noisy, and slightly risky, but the only option. They shut the steel door hard behind them, trying to contain any noise they might make inside the reinforced walls of the building.

  They knew what they were looking for. The engineers at Coronado had sketched it for them several times over—one massive shaft with a giant cast-iron valve on top, the kind of heavy-duty machinery that might feasibly be holding back a volcano, powered by the core of the earth.

  The room they now stood in was pure concrete, with a square exit into a room in which the noise was all-embracing. They could see huge turbines, with 10-foot-high wheels, spinning at a steady speed, plainly generating the electricity. The Coronado guys had said they should immediately look for a kind of mezzanine floor below, because the steam power was upwardly powerful. It would surge up the shaft and then find itself guided by the valve system, just below the turbines.

  What Rick Hunter sought was steps, downw
ard steps, and the seven men fanned out walking through the turbine room, hesitating as they came out from behind the giant machines, treating the room as if they were clearing a block in a conquered city.

  They moved stealthily, their MP-5s held out in front, trying to listen, trying to catch any additional sound above the hum of the machines. Up ahead they could see another opening in the thick, cast-concrete walls. And right in the center of that gap was a wide flight of stone steps, 10 of them, leading down, Rick thought, to the main geothermal shaft.

  So far the place seemed deserted. But no one imagined it could be, with millions of dollars of machinery working ceaselessly, apparently unsupervised. There had to be a team of guys in charge somewhere. But where were they? That’s what Commander Hunter wanted to find out.

  And the answer was not long in coming. Right at the bottom of the steps leading to the main shaft, three Chinese engineers suddenly appeared. In absolute shock, they stared up at the black-faced hooded giants who towered above them on the upper steps, armed with submachine guns. No one knew quite what to do, certainly not the engineers. One of them helplessly raised his hands, another called out loudly, a third shouted something in Chinese. And then Bobby Allensworth stepped in front of Commander Hunter and hit the trigger, firing from the hip, four short bursts. No one was as fast as Lt. Allensworth. In another life he’d have been at the OK Corral.

  Bullets from his MP-5 slammed into the three men, each of whom took at least three shots, either to the head, throat or heart. It was a whip-crack reaction from a trained professional killer. And no sooner had the bodies slumped to the ground when a fourth man came running around the corner, stopped dead in his tracks, then stopped dead in his life as the MP-5 held by Rick Hunter’s bodyguard spat a single round into his heart.

  Even the SEALs were shaken at the speed at which it had happened. Commander Hunter turned to Bobby, whose prime task it was to protect the SEAL leader, and he just nodded, confident the noise from the turbines had suppressed any possibility of the shots being heard outside.

  Lieutenant Allensworth said, “Sorry I had to do that, sir. But I was afraid one of them might have had a button or an emergency beeper. Just didn’t wanna give ’em no time. No time. Nossir.”

  “Thanks, Bobby. There was no alternative. I agree. Come on, let’s get after that main shaft.”

  And still their luck appeared to hold, and they located the shaft two minutes later at exactly 0310, at which precise time the telephone was ringing forlornly in the guardhouse out on the fence.

  Lieutenant Bo Peng, an engineer in the moored destroyer, was trying to call his brother Cheng who was on duty on the perimeter. He usually called him when they were both on the midnight watch, and they sometimes shared tea in the ship’s wardroom when the watch was over. Lieutenant Bo could not for the life of him understand why Cheng was not replying, or alternately, why the answer-and-automatic-relay machine was not connected. It was a golden rule among the guards, and Bo was baffled by the silence out on the boundary guard-house.

  He was a persistent and ambitious young man of 24, and he called the duty officer of the base, reporting that there was no reply to the telephone in the guardhouse. And why was that? There was not even a way to leave a message, and that was disgraceful in a military complex.

  The duty officer was not altogether crazy about Bo’s tone, but he was also wary that a warship officer with a serious complaint about the shore personnel would be listened to. In a few minutes he could be on the line to the destroyer’s CO, a chore he was not prepared to deal with.

  So he answered crisply, “I’m sorry about that, Lieutenant. I have no idea what could be wrong, but I’ll play it by the book, and send a full night guard-patrol down there, right away.

  Three minutes later, a complement of six Naval guards, all armed with Russian Kalashnikovs, was piling out of the accommodation block and boarding a waiting jeep. It was the first time they had ever been summoned to do anything after dark, and they almost went the wrong way.

  Rattlesnake and Buster watched them leave, burning rubber outside the building and then making a U-turn, heading wrongly for the dry-dock inlet. At the end of the first throughway between the buildings, they swung right, down between the power station and the main workshops. They shot through the gap between the warehouses and the ordnance store, and then made a corrective right turn along the jetties. Lieutenant Bo, high above on the upper deck of the warship, watched them go roaring down the blacktop toward the guardhouse.

  And there, of course, they discovered that the place was strangely empty. No duty guard. No duty night engineer. All six men jumped out and began to look around outside, spending several minutes calling out for the missing men. However, the patrol leader, Lt. Rufeng Li, went back into the little outpost’s control room and took a look at the television screens.

  And at that precise moment in the power station, Rick Hunter, noticing a scanning camera in the corner of the steam-entry room, took it out with a volley of bullets at 25-foot range. Lieutenant Rufeng was thus watching the screens when one of them just blanked right out. It did not even fizz, or show interference. It just blacked into nothing.

  The Lieutenant, however, did not suspect something drastic was happening. He just thought instantly that the two missing men were working wherever that screen had failed. And he took a close look at the wording below, which told him the camera was located on the upper southwest corner of the main shaft room in the power station.

  He walked outside and summoned his patrol. He took his time, and lit a cigarette and told them laconically that he had solved the mystery: the two missing men had gone to attend to some kind of machine failure in the power station, and while it was irregular to leave the guardhouse unmanned, the problem may have been quite serious. They had obviously gone to deal with it together. After all, no guard had ever been called to deal with a prowler of any kind since the base had opened six months ago. He, Lt. Rufeng, understood those kinds of priorities, which was only to be expected.

  He held his cigarette in his front teeth, an affectation just learned from a tobacco commercial on the Internet. He smiled languidly. It was a smile that said, “Don’t worry, gentlemen. The reason I have achieved a position so superior to your own is my natural penchant for using the little gray cells rather than running around in a frenzy.” At this particular moment, Lt. Rufeng, in his own mind, was the Hercule Poirot of the Orient.

  It was 0325, and Rick and his team were working furiously in the shaft room, trying to shut off the lower valve, the one three thousand feet down, right above the boiling steam lake. They had located a control board and made the switches, three big ones, which Rick and Dallas believed had shut down all three valves.

  The main one, located on the huge pipe where the steam divides off into the separate turbine feeds, was certainly closed. The turbines were already slowing. Any second now the reserve diesel generators would kick in, and it would not be long before the failure of the power plant was noticed.

  The massive control valve at the head of the shaft, located at floor level in the lowest room, was also closed. But the SEALs could not read the most important one of all, constructed in cast concrete, high in the roof of the lake, the first line of defense, if for any reason the steam had to be halted. However, the switches were all three in the same position, and they could do no more. In any event, they now opened up the top two valves and let the remaining steam escape.

  Lieutenant MacPherson observed that if they were wrong about the switches, they’d probably blow up most of East Asia, including themselves. “And wouldn’t that be a blast?” he added. Dallas always found time for irony even when he was working flat-out. It was impossible not to like him.

  Right now Lt. MacPherson was sweating like a Burmese panda. He had just blown out two sections of pipe right below the center and upper valves, and there was steam leaking, but it was not pressurized.

  The bottom valve, right over the underground cavern, was plainly shut.
The opening of the top two for several minutes had allowed the pressured steam to rise up through the system and then die out.

  It was hot, but not diabolically so. Dallas and Mike Hook were feverishly trying to fix the first bomb inside the fractured shaft, winding it tight with det cord right below the center valve.

  There were only 17 minutes left to tie up the second bomb through the hole in the shaft below the higher valve, directly above. That, too, had to be secured with det cord. Then, when the first detonater popped the cord, the lower bomb would scream down the shaft, arrowing through the remaining steam and slamming into the bottom valve with terrific force. It just might split the entire main shaft asunder.

  Thirty seconds later the second det cord would pop, and a large hunk of white semtex explosive would blow the cast-iron upper valve to pieces. And this would release the second bomb to drop down the shaft, gaining speed for three thousand feet, then exploding somewhere in the rubble at the shaft base, or even in the waters of the underground lake itself; maybe even in the floor of the lake, slightly north of Hell, presumably.

  Dallas thought if that happened it might actually cause a brand-spanking-new volcano to erupt from the core of the earth. “I always told my daddy I intended to leave a mark on this earth, but I bet he never thought I was gonna change its goddamned shape!”

  Even without the wit and imagination of Lt. D. MacPherson, this was a drastically complex and dangerous set of linked explosions, and no one knew what on earth the result would be.

  But whatever happened, the colossal forces of the steam, sufficient, it is always said, to blow a four-ton rock 400 feet into the air, would now be unleashed to roar furiously into its only escape route, straight up the remains of the shaft. It would most definitely blast off the roof of the power station, and probably rupture the entire foundation of the structure. The milk white superheated plume of steam, thundering into the sky, from the floor of the generating plant, would probably reach 3,000 feet.