“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.”
For the next hour, Lt. Commander Bennett logged down the buildings Judd Crocker and Shawn Pearson had noted—the small building with the aerials, lit only on the first floor, the much bigger one, with seven windows lit and two dark, on the walls Rusty could see, the west and north.
He spotted two helicopters on the big round cleared area, with t
he fuel dump immediately to its north. His main difficulty was an inability to see what guards patrolled outside the jail. The trees below were just too close to get a view, and he could see nothing whatsoever on the west wall. The heavy jungle foliage also obscured most of the south and north walls, and the east was beyond his vision.
“I’m seeing one pair of guards walking across the entrance to the prison, always from west to east, every eleven minutes…therefore I’m concluding the patrol is walking right around the jail, but we’ll have to go down there and get a better look a bit later. I can’t tell if there are just the two or four of them. Action star right there.”
The hours ticked on, and at 0355 there was the first noticeable activity. It was plainly a guard change. The first thing Rusty saw was four men emerge from the guard room in formation and march across the courtyard to the cell block. The guards Rusty had been watching for almost four hours had also formed into a square, and he observed them salute as the new men came forward. Then he saw them march off the courtyard, back into the well-lit building with the open door.
Immediately afterward the main gate to the jail was opened and four more guards emerged, obviously relieving the midnight watch. “Okay, Buster, the outside patrol is definitely four men. They changed at one minute before oh-four hundred…the main gate opened inwards, and I thus conclude it’s the only gate into the prison from the outside, otherwise they would have used a smaller one. Check in daylight. Action star, Buster.”
The SEALs too changed their watch at 0400. Rusty and Buster were tired to the point of exhaustion, and they wrapped themselves in their waterproof ponchos and crashed out on the ground sheets.
Chief McCarthy and Lieutenant Merloni stepped up for duty, moving to the front of the ridge, Paul with the glasses, the chief with the computer. They took time to read the boss’s notes written on the laptop screen, nearly word-perfect. And they too settled down to record every last movement of the prison that held President Clarke’s son, Linus.
One hour later, at a few minutes after 0500, Paul watched the lights of the patrol boat return. There was a light southwesterly breeze off the water now, and the lieutenant had picked up the beat of engines a mile out. He also could not see where the boat docked.
At 0600 the sun rose out of the ocean directly facing Paul. At this angle it was like a red searchlight in his eyes, right above the cell block, and it was impossible to see anything for a half hour until the sun climbed higher into the morning sky.
At 0700 Paul had a clear view of the complex, and he clarified the position of the buildings on the laptop plan. He also observed that although the outside patrol did appear to be walking around the entire jail, the main gate was constantly manned. Twice he had seen ground crew for the helicopters exit the jail, and both times the gates had been opened and shut behind them, the doors moving simultaneously. He thus concluded that there were two more guards in the courtyard at all times, on duty at the big wooden gates.
He could also now see that there were only two small windows in the main cell block, almost certainly providing only indirect light to the prisoners. From up here, staring down on a somewhat tranquil scene, it was almost impossible to image that the entire crew of a major American nuclear submarine was actually incarcerated in this place.
They changed watch again at 0800. Rusty came on duty, chewing another of the protein bars, while Dan Conway held the small computer. “We’ll hang around up here for another hour, then we’ll get in closer and get some accurate measurements.…We’ll have one team get down near the shore, check out that patrol boat and select a landing sight for the assault force to come in on Sunday night.…Guess I better do that, so they got someone to blame if it goes wrong!
“You all understand the main group wants to be a lot nearer than we were when they hit the beach. There’s gonna be sixty-four guys, and the quicker they deploy and get into position the better. I don’t want the boats more than a half mile away when they land—but we have to watch that fucking Chinese patrol boat, see what time it goes out and comes back all day today.
“Also, we have to select a pickup point…remember, these guys in the jail may be very weak…and there’s over a hundred of them, if no one’s been killed. It’s a huge task to get ’em down to the shore and on board the inflatables. I know the colonel and Rick want it done as secretly as possible, but I just have a feeling we’ll need to kill a goddamned lot of Chinamen to pull this one off. Anyway, we need to choose two Sites, one for the assault and one for the getaway, with detailed notes…”
At 0830 the main gates opened again, and through them walked three uniformed Chinese servicemen. Two of them wore caps and carried documents; the third of them wore just uniform shorts and an open-necked white shirt with epaulets. He was taller than the other two, with sandy-colored hair, almost unheard of among Chinese nationals. It was easy to see that he looked different, but from where Rusty stood it was impossible to identify Linus Clarke.
Since he had cringed in terror from the towel, he had been isolated from the rest of his crewmates, and flown up to Canton each day to assist the Chinese technicians in their efforts to copy Seawolf. So far as Linus could see, it was that or death, and every man, he reasoned, had a right to save his own life, by whatever means.
And now he took off again on this bright Saturday morning, flying overland, back to the billion-dollar submarine he had singlehandedly been responsible for losing, failing to accept the advice of either the Officer of the Deck, Lt. Andy Warren, nor indeed that of the vastly experienced Master Chief Brad Stockton. In his mind, Linus could still hear Brad’s voice that night: “You want me to let the Co know we’re groping around the ass of a 6,000-ton Chinese destroyer…I think he should know…Sir, we don’t know how long that towed array is…that towed array is…that towed array…”
The words echoed in his mind. They were the last words he heard before he slept, the first he heard upon waking. Sometimes he heard them in his sleep. They were words with which he must live for the rest of his life, however long that might be.
And he stared down at the hillside below, as the Helix Type-A clattered over the island, right above the “Hide” that contained the Navy SEALs who were attempting to rescue him.
A half hour later a new helicopter came in, making its approach from the northeast. Rusty watched it flying dead toward him and then at the last minute saw it swerve right over the jail and drop down over the cleared area from where the Helix had just departed. He watched four men disembark, two of them walking straight to the jail doors, which were immediately opened, the other two heading for the little house with the radio aerials. Both men carried metal toolboxes. Rusty guessed, both correctly and happily, that there was some kind of problem in the comm room.
“That little house is the biggest problem we have,” he pondered. “If we are seconds late taking it out, they will have a signal away that the jail is under attack, and that will be it. We’ll come under attack from the air and sea, and we may not get out alive.” And he emphasized his words into the computer.
“WE MUST HIT THE COMM HOUSE BEFORE WE DO ANYTHING—THAT’S OUR NUMBER ONE TARGET. WE MUST STOP THEM TRANSMITTING A MESSAGE NO MATTER WHAT.”
He checked the words out, and Lieutenant Conway, leaning on the rocks next to him, staring through the binoculars, added something else. “I’ll tell you some thing, sir. We have two other targets just as important. Maybe three.”
“We have?”
“The helicopters have radios.…I know they will not have anyone aboard…but if one of these Chinese officers is smart, and still alive when we blow the comm house, he’ll rush to one of those choppers and fire up the radio. Likewise the patrol boat…that’ll have satellite comms on board, as you know. There’s bound to be someone on it, and we can’t take the chance some smartass isn’t going to get on the horn to the Canton base.”
“You gottit, Dan,” said Rusty thoughtfully. “Sometimes things that are staring you in the face need saying, to clarif
y a task…and you, baby, just said ’em. And I’m going to note them down right now.”
“Remember one other thing, sir.”
“What’s that, kid?”
“If you hadn’t pointed up the main issue, that we have to kill the comms, I’d never have either thought of it, or said it.”
“That’s generous of you, Dan,” said Rusty, plainly admiring a young man who didn’t need personal credit for things, only the satisfaction of getting them right.
Rusty Bennett was a keen amateur military psychologist. Not as good as Colonel Frank Hart, but he was good, and everyone knew both he and Rick Hunter were being made commanders as soon as this mission was over. If they could get it over.
At 0900 Dan Conway reported high activity in the jail. Prisoners were being marched out of the main cell block and lined up in rows of 12 in the courtyard. Other prisoners were being escorted out from the two side buildings at either end of the block. But these men were brought out individually. Rusty Bennett judged that the main block contained communal cells, and that the side buildings were places to isolate individuals, probably men under interrogation.
U.S.S. Seawolf Page 30