Dangerous Grounds

by Don Keith

  “FONOPS?” Chapman asked, a deep furrow forming in his brow. “She was on the surface and they can’t find here?”

  “Yep. Surface and air search are both coming up cold,” Witte answered as he slumped down into the narrow bench seat jutting out of the stateroom’s forward bulkhead. “We’ve been ordered to make an emergency sortie and get down to the South China Sea as fast as we can. Then we’re to search for Corpus.”

  “She’s supposed to be on the surface,” Chapman argued. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Read the message board, Skipper,” Witte answered. “Someone pretty high up asked the same question you did and came up with a real bad answer. Damned bad answer. They think pirates might have taken Corpus. Pirates! Can you believe that? If they’re running submerged, there’s nothing they can do from the surface or air. Not even satellites. We’re the only ones who can find her.”

  Chapman’s face clouded.

  “Damn! Pirates stealing a nuke sub? A United States nuke sub? What the hell?” The full depth of the situation slowly sank in. He almost shouted as he said, “XO, get the engineer to button up whatever he is doing back in the engine room. I want an emergency start-up. Be off shore power and ready to go in two hours. And tell the COB to stop the stores load immediately. Whatever is onboard right now is what we go with. Tell him I want the boat ready for underway.”

  He suddenly remembered the phone he still held in his hand. He pulled it back to his lips.

  “Weps, button that system up. We’ll finish working on it when we’re out of here. We gotta go find something.”

  The tug and barge seem to drift lifelessly about two thousand yards off the Higgins’s starboard beam. Commander Paul Wilson, her skipper, held his 7X50 Bausch and Lomb binoculars to his eyes and scanned the derelicts carefully. Except for the sea birds, there was no sign of life on them at all. Another victim.

  The captain watched as Joe Petranko guided the RHIB alongside the big barge. Wilson could see the Gunner’s Mate lift a radio microphone to his lips, then heard the crackle of the radio speaker.

  “Skipper,” the sailor reported. “No one left alive over here. Something big and black was tied up alongside this barge. There are big streaks of black paint all down this side.”

  Wilson nodded glumly. Another pirate victim. And it looked bad for Corpus Christi. If the big submarine had been tied up alongside the derrick barge, it almost certainly meant that pirates had taken her. And it would explain why they hadn’t found the sub when they first searched this area a couple of days before. The derrick was perfect cover.

  But it left one burning question. Where the hell was Corpus Christi and her crew?

  As was the custom, Dr. Samuel Kinnowitz led the way into the White House situation room. Tom Donnegan lumbered in behind the National Security Advisor and plopped down in one of the high-backed red leather chairs.

  It had been a most difficult seventy-two hours. First, there were the nuclear weapons sneaking out of North Korea. And now Corpus Christi disappearing from the face of the planet with all hands.

  What the hell did it all mean? Did it all tie together? Donnegan kneaded his forehead and absently chewed on the remnants of his cigar. He couldn’t afford to jump to conclusions but his gut told him there was a connection. Tom Donnegan had long since learned to rely on his most ample gut.

  The pair had just sat down when the door at the far end of the room sprang open. President Adolphus Brown strode in, his shirt collar undone, his tie loosened, his shirt unbuttoned at the sleeves. He was clearly at work.

  The president stopped at the far wall and stared at the giant map of Asia projected there. After a few seconds, he turned to face Kinnowitz and Donnegan.

  “What’s the latest?” he asked.

  “Mr. President,” Dr. Kinnowitz began, “we’re searching for the two freighters that are carrying the nuclear weapons. Both are somewhere on the Indian Ocean at the moment and….”

  “What do you mean, we’re searching?” Brown interrupted. “And what the hell is ‘somewhere?’ We’ve got several billion dollars worth of space junk up there whizzing around over our heads. The National Reconnaissance Office brags to me all the time that they can read the fine print on your car lease from a hundred and fifty miles up in the damn sky. You telling me we can’t see two things the size of a freighter?”

  Tom Donnegan slowly rose and walked over to the map to stand next to the president. He purposefully waved his hand over the broad blue space between Indonesia and the east coast of Africa.

  “Mr. President, you have to remember that these are the busiest shipping lanes in the world right here. There are literally thousands of vessels out there running around every day. And it’s monsoon season. Most of this area is totally cloud-covered. The only thing that gets through cloud cover is radar surveillance. That takes a lot longer and the data isn’t nearly as good as sat data. I’m afraid the only hope here is to make sure we intercept those two when they get to port.”

  “You mean we have to place absolute trust on our in-country asset?” Brown queried, his eyes narrow and doubtful.

  “Yes sir, that’s precisely what I mean,” Donnegan rumbled. “Put the SEALs on the ground as a welcoming committee and take delivery of those damn things.”

  President Brown rubbed his chin and mumbled, “Well, that presents some problems, admiral. There’s no way we can trust the Saudi security forces with something like this. Every terrorist group in the Middle East will know about this before our SEALs can brush their teeth, much less get airborne over that little slice of the world. This has to be a covert operation. No one in-country is to know anything about it. Get in, get the weapon, and get back out clean. Understood? And if it goes sour, we don’t know anything about it.” Kinnowitz and Donnegan exchanged worried looks. The Saudi half of the operation just got a whole lot harder. And if the SEALs failed, who knew what the bastards would end up doing with the nukes. The president wasn’t finished. “And pretty much the same goes for India. We have to stop these things right there before we lose them again. I don’t want some other terrorist group thinking that all they need to do to get a nuke is to shove a bundle of cash at some North Korean general like they’re buying tampons for momma at Wal-Mart.”

  Tom Donnegan pulled himself up to his full height and removed the cigar butt from the corner of his mouth.

  “If those nukes are on those boats, our guys will get ‘em, sir.”

  “And if they’re not?”

  Donnegan didn’t answer. He put the cigar back between his lips and allowed his eyes to scan the width and breadth of the map.

  No place on there was safe. No place on the whole damned planet.

  Those nukes were two mighty tiny needles in one hell of a big haystack.

  31

  Sui Kia Shun had once been a man of immediate and forceful action, with the action usually delivered personally. Of course that time had long since passed, lost in the mist of time somewhere in his transition from ambitious young man to powerful warlord. Now he had minions to do his dirty work for him, men who through greed, loyalty, or a combination of the two were more than willing to do his bidding.

  But the sudden unprovoked attack on his castle had instantly changed that. Scurrying down the mountain away from the fight like some terrorized animal was too much a loss of face for him to ignore. Action was needed. The castle was his family, his power. So was his image of omnipotence to those who were willing to fight and die for him.

  Sui seethed with a hot, burning anger. Reprisal and revenge must be completed. He would have to show to all that he had not become a weak, vulnerable old man. Show his men. Show his enemies, whoever they might be.

  The aged drug lord slid down the narrow mountain path, mostly on the seat of his pants, already planning the reprisal. “Path” was more title than the precarious trace deserved. Granite boulders, coated with slimy green moss, interspersed with short stretches of slick, brown mud led steeply downward. High above, back f
rom where he had been forced to flee, Sui could still hear shouting and occasional bursts of gunfire. Thick jungle and the steep descent had made his escape possible.

  Down below, another few kilometers away, sat the local village. He had men there, enough men to fight back up the mountain and make the fools pay. Only a very imprudent man or a suicidal maniac would dare such effrontery against Sui Kia Shun. Either way, whoever had unleashed this attack on his lair was about to realize the error of his decision.

  Caught up in his thoughts, he stumbled across a small rock and fell forward. He landed face first on the ground. The mud was like slick grease. Sui shot down the trail on his chest like an uncontrolled rocket. He caromed off one boulder and slammed into another. Pain shot through his shoulder. The blow spun him around and he landed on his back, kidney first, against the next rock. Sui reached out to grasp something before he was knocked senseless or, even worse, slid off the track and dropped to the valley far below. He desperately grasped a handful of a small tree and held on.

  Sui clung to the little bush, his heart pounding. He tried to heave great gasps of air into his lungs to replace what had been knocked from him by the fall. Slowly, he struggled erect, still holding onto the sapling. Finally, recovered enough to let go, he stood and scraped some of the mud from his face and shirt front. There was a deep burning pain when he tried to move his right arm.

  He felt his pockets for the satellite cell phone, pulled out the tiny device, and flipped it open in one move. Thankfully, the thing blinked on, no damage from the fall.

  With a few seconds of rapid Cantonese, Sui had fifty armed fighters racing up the mountain to meet him.

  The City of Corpus Christi glided silently through the ocean depths, up the Palawan Deep into the South China Sea. Jim Ward sat silently, helplessly, as he watched the Filipino pirates manhandle the crew into doing their bidding. The submarine’s control room was quiet, virtually empty. There were only enough people on watch to operate the boat and an armed thug watched over each one. The rest of the crew, those not doing something, had long since been herded into the crew’s mess.

  The one called Shehab seemed to be in charge, ever since that crazy murderer Nurizam jumped off Corpus moments before they dived. Thirty armed thugs had somehow stolen one of America’s mightiest warships, and they clearly intended to use it for their own purposes. Ward didn’t want to consider what those purposes might be.

  The whole scenario was totally unbelievable. He still expected to awaken from this awful, vivid dream.

  One thing was obvious. Whatever their plan was, it involved the two torpedoes the bad guys had brought aboard. It seemed like a lot of effort, bringing their own weapons when the torpedo room was already filled with the best ordnance modern technology could produce.

  Ward was supposed to be the quartermaster of the watch. Somehow Shehab had gotten the idea that Ward could navigate the big sub, so he had been chained to the port plotting table.

  The big, powerful-looking terrorist—the one they called Erinque Tagaytai—had stabbed a finger down on a point in the middle of the South China Sea and grunted, “We go there. You steer to get there.”

  Ward decided his best plan was to follow orders until he could hatch a better one. He plotted a course that threaded them safely through the shallow water.

  Now it was time to change course to the northeast. If they stayed on their present heading much longer, Corpus would drive right into shallow water.

  “XO, recommend you come left and steer course zero-four-seven, depth one-five-zero feet,” Ward said.

  Lieutenant Commander Brad Hilliker was steering the boat and acknowledged Ward’s words with a grunt. Shehab wouldn’t have anyone but Hilliker or Devlin guiding the vessel. Shehab sat in the captain’s seat, idly toying with a large pistol. Ward couldn’t quite see the weapon from where he was, but it was easy to tell that the terrorist was inordinately fond of it. Shehab seemed to never sleep. He was always sitting in the chair, watching, fiddling with the weapon.

  Ward stole a glance forward into the sonar room. Neil Campbell and Petty Officer Stumpf each sat in front of one of the display panels, watching the glowing green snowfall that pictured all the noise that the sub’s sensitive hydrophones were gathering from the raucous ocean around them. A tall, heavyset terrorist sat behind the two, pretending that he was watching and fully understanding what they were doing.

  These guys could be beaten. Ward knew it. He simply had to come up with a plan. These terrorists were too well armed to attempt to fight with them. Maybe, just maybe, there was another way.

  He watched Stumpf and Campbell for a few seconds longer. The pair were totally silent. There wasn’t any of the banter the two usually shared while they played with their favorite multi-million dollar toy. They simply sat there, staring sullenly at the dots scrolling down their screens.

  Then a glimmer of an idea flashed through Ward’s mind. Maybe he could drive Corpus up on the rocks. It would be easy, just mis-plot a couple of positions and then steer toward a shoal without the terrorists figuring out what was going on. By the time they realized the danger, Corpus Christi would be high and dry and useless. Shehab and his band of thugs would then be powerless to carry out their plot.

  Ward glanced at the ESGN readout and jotted down the inertial navigation system’s estimated position. A quick glance at the chart and he calculated that the nearest shoal was about twenty nautical miles to the east of their projected course. A couple-of-mile error to the west and then a course-correct should do it. Corpus would be aground in a couple of hours and then she would be no good to these bastards at all.

  Ward plotted the sub’s position on the navigation chart, carefully drawing the open “hat” symbol for an estimated position and marking the time, just like Brad Hudson had taught him. He couldn’t suppress a shudder as he remembered the navigator’s bleeding, shattered body up on the bridge.

  He pulled over the parallel arm protractor and measured the new course. He was just opening his mouth to call out to the XO when the big terrorist hit him hard in the back of the head with the heel of his hand, viciously slamming Ward’s face into the chart table.

  “Do you think I am a fool?” Tagaytai bellowed. “I was plotting positions on charts when your mother first started selling herself on the street.”

  Jim Ward blinked hard to try to clear the fuzz from his head. There was a sharp taste of blood on his lips, dripping down from his nose.

  As soon as he could see through his involuntary tears, he wiped at the drops of blood on the chart with the tail of his shirt and began plotting the proper course to point them to the spot the terrorist had indicated.

  Lee Dawn Shun sat on the ridge, leaning back against a tree, and watched the short battle across the way. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. This was the one development she had not anticipated. Whoever was in those choppers had taken an awful chance, attacking her father’s castle, and being crazy enough to do it in broad daylight. The firing died down quickly after the initial assault, but the burning hulk of one of the choppers billowed black smoke high into the mountain sky. Through her binoculars, she could see bodies lying about, sprawled on the stone walks around the ancient castle.

  The trucks were destroyed, but what happened to the heroin? She knew that she needed to make sure that the product was either destroyed or that she had it in her hands. The success of her whole strategy depended on making sure that her father did not have any produce to sell. With his finances as overextended as they had to be by now, the loss of one more major shipment should send his fortunes tumbling down. Such a failure would also ruin once and for all his relationship with his very demanding clientele, men who expected delivery, on time and as promised.

  She stood suddenly and pointed to Sun Rey.

  “We need to get closer. We have to make sure everything is destroyed. Quickly!”

  Then she turned and trotted down the steep, rocky trail they had just climbed. The Montengard and his companions
hurried to catch up before Lee Dawn disappeared into the jungle growth. Within minutes, Rey raised his hand to signal everyone to stop. He quickly waved them off the trail.

  Someone was coming their way, coming quickly, and they weren’t being very quiet about it. Either somebody was trying to escape in panic or they were supremely confident that no one was around who would be a threat to them. It would likely be the frightened remnants of Sui Kia Shun’s men, or else a patrol from the attackers.

  Rey’s men automatically dispersed into a perfect pocket ambush. Whoever it was would be cut to ribbons by a deadly crossfire before they had time to realize they were under attack.

  Minutes later, a ragtag band of frightened young people came into sight, their cameras jangling around their necks. A bedraggled, middle-aged, red-haired woman and a slim, dark man led them up the trail. They ran, helter-skelter, right into the ambush. Rey rose from his hiding place and shouted for them all to raise their hands and drop to their knees.

  The group immediately complied, falling as if shot. It was the woman, the only one of the bunch who looked up at Rey, who spoke first.

  “Please don’t shoot. We’re Americans, just a college group, here to study orchids. We’re no threat to anyone.”

  Lee Dawn Shun stepped from her cover and stood in front of the woman. She raised her pistol, cocked it, and placed it inches from the bridge of Ellen Ward’s nose.

  “Who are you and where are you from?” she demanded.

  “I’m Doctor Ellen Ward. These are my students. From Virginia. The United States. We’re Americans.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Lee Dawn Shun, and gently touched the snout of her gun to a spot between Ellen Ward’s eyes.

  32