The President’s National Security Adviser was beside himself with anxiety. For three days now the American satellites had been photographing the shores of the South China Sea in search of any clue there might be as to the whereabouts of the crew of Seawolf. The fact was, there was nothing. No sign of a major group of men where previously there had been nothing, no sign of military activity, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. If he could have, Arnold Morgan would have spun the Earth on its axis even faster to give the overheads a few extra passes.
With every passing hour, his frustration mounted. He had personally sanctioned the spending of millions and millions of dollars, sending in one of the biggest and best Special Forces teams ever assembled in peacetime. And now, he knew, they were due to land in Okinawa and then make their way out to the Ronald Reagan, presently 60 miles offshore in the company of her entire Battle Group.
He had snatched Colonel Hart from the London embassy to take overall command of the operation. He had spent God knew how many thousands of dollars relocating the colonel’s family back to Washington. He had made promises to the President of the United States. And, far from having to report failure, he couldn’t even find the fucking target.
“Jesus Christ!” groaned Arnold Morgan. “What the hell did I ever do to deserve all this bullshit?”
Just then the serenely beautiful Kathy O’Brien slipped into the room and inquired, “Darling. Do I detect you might be working yourself up into an absolute lather?”
“Yes,” he growled. “Leave me to my misery. Can I have a cup of coffee?”
“Would you like some salad or something? You’ve been here since four A.M.”
“You mean as well as every damn thing, I’ve got to pretend I’m some kind of a goddamned rabbit?”
“You can have some lovely vinegar and olive oil dressing on it. Rabbits eat it plain.”
“BEEF, WOMAN!” he roared, laughing at his own ridiculous imitation of Henry VIII. “Bring me beef—rare slices cleaved by my master-at-arms, between mighty slices of rye bread, with a sizeable dollop of mayonnaise right in the middle…and mustard.”
“You’re not having beef. You eat too much of it. You can have tuna, the chicken of the sea.”
“I don’t want TUNA!” he yelled, still laughing. “I loathe the chicken of the sea. I want the roast beef of the land. With mayonnaise. And mustard.”
“Well, you’re not getting it.”
The admiral stormed to the window, gazed out onto the White House lawn, and raised his arms heavenward, like Sampson. “My undying love for you, Ms. O’Brien,” he said, pompously, “does not give you the right to deny me my reasonable share of the finer things in life…”
“The finer things in life do not include roast beef sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise and devoured about seventeen times a week.”
“Fifteen,” he chuckled. “Where’s George, Kathy? Where is the moronic admiral who is supposed to bring me glad tidings of the battle in the South China Sea?”
“I can’t say I am able to answer that,” she replied, and just then the phone rang. Expertly she pirouetted around and picked up the pastel green receiver from his desk.
From the window he growled, “I speak only to the President. I’m too depressed to deal with anyone else. Anyway, I’m on my lunch break, and even that’s turning into some kind of hell.”
“Hello, Admiral Morgan’s office…may I ask who’s calling?
“Arnold,” she said, pressing the HOLD button. “It’s for you…you’d better take it.”
“IS IT THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES? If not, I am formally at lunch. No calls.”
“No, it’s not the President. It’s Admiral Morris.”
“WHAT!” Admiral Morgan bounded across the room like a starving panther who had sighted a roast beef sandwich.
“George…”
The voice on the other end was brief and clipped. “Arnold, I think we’ve found ’em. I got the photographs. Helicopter right outside. I’m on my way in. See you in twenty.”
Arnold Morgan almost died of happiness. He lifted his right leg and flashed his shiny right shoe back and forth, pumping his right arm.
“GEORGE!” he exclaimed, chuckling. “George Morris. Doesn’t seem too swift when you first meet him, mind. But he’s careful, painstaking and misses nothing. The perfect detective intelligence officer. What a stroke of pure genius when I appointed him to replace me…pure genius.”
“I thought you just said he was a moron,” said Kathy, swishing across the room toward the door to order his tunafish sandwich and coffee for two.
The ensuing 20 minutes were almost more than the admiral could endure. He completely lost his appetite and, leaving even the coffee, he walked outside to the helicopter pad to wait with the security guards for the chopper from Fort Meade. And he saw it coming a long way out.
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.”
Ar
nold 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 lef
t, 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.
U.S.S. Seawolf Page 27