Dangerous Grounds

by Don Keith

  Neil Campbell sat in front of the BQQ-5E sonar display console, staring intently at the screen. The flickering pixels that only a couple of days ago had so fascinated him now looked like nothing more than meaningless gibberish. The summer’s glorious adventure, riding a nuclear submarine around the South Pacific, had gone so horribly wrong. Young Campbell barely suppressed a shudder when the picture of the Nav’s bloody corpse flashed across his mind’s eye.

  There had to be a way to beat these animals. Whatever their game was, it was certain that they were bent on some horrible terrorist attack and that the Corpus played a key role in their plan. Equally certain, this was a suicide mission. The terrorists had no intention of freeing the crew once they had done whatever they had set out to do.

  Campbell dropped his head into his hands. The thought of dying scared him, but the thought of these bastards getting way with some kind of brutal attack against innocent people made him damn mad. Anger won out over fear.

  In an instant, he saw what he had to do. Surely, the only reason to go to all the risk and trouble to steal a submarine was to use its stealth for a sneak attack of some kind. The surest way to stop a sneak attack was to let the Navy know where they were, to remove the advantage of stealth. By now, the Navy would be out looking for them with every asset in the arsenal. There had to be a way to help that cause.

  Campbell glanced up at the WQC unit sitting just above his console. The underwater telephone was designed so that submarines could talk to each other while submerged. In normal use, it projected the speaker’s voice a few kilometers through the water by using a pair of transducers, one mounted on the top of the sail and the other below the boat’s keel. But the WQC also had a tone generator that had the capability of broadcasting a continuous pulse signal. It was meant to be used to transmit old-fashioned Morse code when voice communications weren’t possible. And on the Corpus Christi, the key always stuck. It was one of the thousand small jobs that needed to be done, but the new part had not yet come in. If the key was pushed down, it stayed down unless the operator manually pushed it back up. The problem made sending Morse code awfully slow and cumbersome, but they rarely used the feature anyway. It had not been a priority to get the glitch repaired.

  That tone would make a great homing beacon.

  All Campbell needed to do was to blank the frequency band on the sub’s sonar so no one onboard would hear it. His hands flickered across the keyboard as he flitted through the displays until he found the one he wanted. A couple of keystrokes and it was done. No one onboard Corpus would hear the distinctive, high-pitched screech once he managed to set it off.

  Campbell stood slowly. He glanced over his shoulder at the terrorist sitting behind him. The man was barely awake, bored with the whole concept of babysitting a couple of sonar geeks while he made his journey to martyrdom.

  As he reached up to flip the key down, Campbell glanced at Jim Stumpf. The young sonarman shook his head slightly and blinked his eyes, just enough to be noticed but not so much that the terrorist would see him. Campbell stopped. What was wrong? What had he forgotten? Clearly, Stumpf had seen him make the adjustments to the sonar and deducted what he was up to. He followed the sonar man’s eyes as the sailor looked up at the WQC, obviously trying to convey a vital message.

  Campbell looked intently at the box. Then he understood what Jim Stumpf was telling him. The volume control. The sonar gang always kept the volume control all the way up, just in case someone came along out there unexpectedly and tried to talk to them. If he pushed the key down now, everyone in the sonar shack would hear the God-awful screech.

  Campbell casually reached up and turned the volume all the way down, as if he was making some kind of innocent adjustment. He stole a glance at Stumpf as he again reached for the key. Once again, the young sonarman blinked and barely shook his head while staring up at the WQC. Campbell was stymied again.

  Then he remembered something that had come up while he was studying for his qualification. The WQC had a blanking circuit in it that cut out the listening hydrophones when the active transducer was broadcasting. That wouldn’t cause any problem. So what else could be this time?

  Campbell sat back down. No sense standing there arousing the guard’s curiosity until he had figured out what Stumpf was trying to tell him.

  Just then, Jim Stumpf stood abruptly and turned toward the guard. The terrorist came instantly alert. He whipped his AK-47 down, jamming it hard into Stumpf’s gut. The sonar man groaned, then grimaced, pointing toward his bladder.

  “Hey, man, I just have to piss. You know, urinate. A man can only sit here so long before his bladder explodes.”

  “You stay here,” the guard growled. He tossed an empty coffee carafe to Stumpf and said, “If you must urinate so bad, use this.”

  Stumpf turned around, setting the carafe on the narrow console desk. He leaned his right hand on the WQC as he unzipped and relieved himself into the container. Campbell watched Stumpf’s fingers on his right hand as he slowly unscrewed a little, red light bulb on the front of the unit and deftly palmed it when it sprang from its socket.

  Now he understood. If he had pushed the key down before, the red light would have instantly flashed on. The guard might not have known exactly what Campbell had done, but he would surely have recognized enough to know that Campbell was up to something. And he would probably have died right there.

  Cold sweat rolled down his back as Campbell stared down at his own shaking hands. He had been so very close to dying and only Jim Stumpf’s couple of blinking warnings had saved him.

  The sonarman had completed his task and sat back down after carefully placing the carafe on the deck, jammed between a book locker and a safe. He sighed loudly.

  “Ah, better. Much better.”

  “Didn’t leave any room in the pot for me, did you?” Campbell grunted, forcing a crooked grin.

  “Sorry there, shipmate,” Stumpf said with a nervous chuckle. “Guess I filled that old pot right up. Sure hope the Chief doesn’t come up here and mistake that for a pot of bug juice. That’d give him a nasty surprise.”

  Campbell stretched his arms high over his head and groaned pointedly.

  “Well, I don’t have to piss half as bad as I need to do something about this back.” He groaned again and said, “These stools just aren’t meant for sitting in for very long at a time.”

  He prayed the terrorist didn’t notice his hand as it brushed the underwater telephone key when he dropped his arms back to his lap.

  Lieutenant Brian Walker leaned back in the seat. The small passenger compartment on the C-17 was pitch black. He could just make out the vague shapes of the rest of his small team. He only had four guys for this mission, but he couldn’t possibly have picked a better four. Mitch Cantrell, Lew Broughton, Tony Martinelli and Joe Dumkowski were the best the SEALs had to offer. And they had all been with him in North Korea.

  “Lieutenant.” One of the air crewmen stooped done and spoke to Walker, his voice just above a whisper. “Mission Commander says to tell you that we are thirty minutes out from the drop zone. Time for you to get ready.”

  Walker nodded into the darkness. Then he muttered, “Thanks.”

  He stood and stretched his tired muscles. The long flight from Yakota Air Base had taken almost seventeen hours. It became a truly long way from Japan to Saudi Arabia when it was decided not to get over-flight permission from anyone but to stay over water the entire route.

  “OK, cowboys,” he yelled in his best imitation of Chief Johnston. “Time to saddle up. We got work to do.”

  He could hear the standard muttered complaints and rustle of rousing bodies. A dim blue light flashed on, giving just enough glow to discern shapes without ruining the SEALs’ night vision. They would need that very soon.

  The five men descended out of the passenger cabin, into the huge plane’s cavernous cargo bay. There they donned their equipment and carefully checked each other’s gear.

  The Air Force jumpmaster y
elled out, “Everyone on oxygen! Depressurizing the cargo bay in one minute.”

  Walker could hear the air whistle out as the cargo bay equalized with the outside atmosphere. At forty seven thousand feet, without the O2 bottles they would pass out within a few seconds. And, at minus one hundred and fifty degrees, they would quickly freeze to death, too, without the special black, high-tech, micro-fiber jump suits they wore.

  Walker looked carefully at his jump computer. The device, strapped to his wrist, would guide the young SEAL all the way from the jump point to the landing zone. Tonight the plan was to do a HAHO or “high altitude, high opening” jump. The team would depart the C-17 from 47,000 feet out over the Persian Gulf. Then they would “fly” their specially designed aerodynamic chutes, which were really closer to an inflated wing than a parachute, drifting over two hundred miles to a precise GPS position at an isolated spot in the Arabian Desert.

  The large stern door ground open. The combination of the jet roar and the hurricane of wind was near deafening, but Walker could hear clearly through the tiny radio stuck in his ear. The jumpmaster called out, “Green light for cargo. Stand clear.”

  The large box that had filled the center part of the cargo bay rumbled back and dropped off the ramp into the darkness. If all went according to plan, the PEGASYS drop system would fly their desert all terrain vehicle and other equipment automatically to the same position toward which the SEALs would aim.

  Walker remembered his training. The cargo always went first. It could ruin your whole day to have a pallet load of stuff fall from the sky and land on top of you.

  “Green light!” the jumpmaster suddenly yelped. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Walker sauntered down the ramp and stepped off into nothing. Seconds later he felt the pop of his chute deploying. He glanced up just long enough to make sure he had a good chute ballooned above him and then he studied his jump computer. It called for a course of two-two-seven and a descent rate of one hundred and twenty feet a minute. Walker pulled on the guide lanyards to swing the chute around to the required heading and adjusted the dump panel to slow his descent.

  He was all alone in the cold, black night. Above him, the stars shone brightly, even more than he could see on the darkest night back at his dad’s West Texas ranch. The only lights below were from the port city of Dubai, over a hundred miles to the South. Directly ahead, there wasn’t a single light on the ground to show if man had ever traversed the desert.

  “Cowboy, you OK?” The scratchy voice in his ear brought Walker out of his reverie. Mitch Cantrell was making sure everyone got out and was on the way to the drop zone. Walker mentally kicked himself. It was his job, but he had been too busy stargazing.

  “Yeah, Mitch.” Walker answered. “All systems showing a good drop. Lew, Tony, Joe, you guys good?”

  “Yeah, Cowboy. We’re lined up behind you like one of them old fashioned wagon trains.”

  “Good, sit back and relax. We’ll be on the ground in twenty-seven minutes according to this computer.”

  Cowboy Walker trimmed the dark gray chute’s guide vanes, carefully steering the computer-generated glide slope toward an empty piece of desert sand. Nothing disturbed the darkness below his feet, although the computer told him that the ground was rushing up to meet him at better than eighty miles an hour.

  The quiet gave the young SEAL lieutenant time to reflect over the last few days. After the debacle in North Korea, he was sure that either the team would reject him or Bill Beaman would send him home in disgrace. He had failed everyone on his very first mission, risking his teams’ lives while accomplishing nothing. His failure had given a North Korean, General Kim Dai-jang, the time he needed to ship the nukes off to parts unknown. Now Walker was dropping through the Saudi night on his way to capturing one of those nukes before General Kim could use it to ignite the entire Arab world. Walker silently vowed that he would succeed this time. Or he would die trying. There was too much at stake not to.

  The flight computer screen flashed. It was already time to flare out for a landing. Walker hauled down on the guide lines, flaring the chute up to dump forward speed and slow his descent to a gentle pace. Without warning, his feet touched down. He immediately fell forward, slamming his face hard into the rocky ground. The place was like a gravel pit, not quite the soft sand dunes he had expected.

  “Not exactly a picture of grace,” he muttered to himself as climbed to his feet and began to gather up the billowing chute.

  “You say something, Cowboy?” his earpiece crackled,

  Mitch Campbell dropped out of the night sky and landed at a run, just a few feet from Walker.

  “Naw, nothing important, Mitch,” Walker muttered into his boom mike. “Team, muster on me. Let’s get rolling. We’ve got to get that ATV in gear and out of here before the Saudi’s have a chance to figure out we’ve dropped in without an invite.”

  Lee Dawn Shun considered the situation. Her plan to steal or burn her father’s heroin would have to wait for a bit. These Americans could prove useful, even if she didn’t know exactly how yet. She needed time to think, to carefully plan out the next move. Her father had once told her that her deliberative style was an asset. She still considered it to be so.

  “Sun Rey,” she called. The wiry Montengard moved quickly from where his band of fighters was guarding the Americans. The group sat, huddled together, under a giant teak tree that grew out of the side of the mountain. Sun Rey sprang to where his mistress sat, several meters up the steep trail.

  “We need to move quickly,” Lee Dawn Shun ordered. “Get the hostages to our base camp, then we must discuss what to do with them.”

  “We should kill them immediately,” Sun Rey replied at once. “They will only slow us down. And if the American government finds out that we are holding a bunch of their children, these mountains will be crawling with Marines. We won’t have a chance to escape without the entire world knowing we are here.”

  Lee Dawn didn’t like the way this conversation was going. She appreciated Rey’s counsel but right now, her instincts told her the captives held more value for her and her cause if the were alive rather than dead.

  “And what do you suggest?” she asked dryly. “Surely the American embassy knows they are up here. If we kill them now, their bodies will point at us.”

  “Not if we do this right,” Sun Rey answered. “Move them over to the castle and kill them there. Make it look like they were caught in the firefight. Then the Thai Army and your father will be the ones who will be blamed.”

  Lee Dawn Shun thought for a few moments before she spoke. Finally, she said, “Move them to the castle. I will decide their fate after we get there. Now, let’s stop debating and move quickly.”

  Sun Rey nodded and moved back to his men. He said something in Montengard. The men prodded the Americans erect and shoved them along the trail.

  Lee Dawn Shun watched the older man try to protect the woman as the troops nudged at her with their rifles. His chivalrous impulse only got him slapped down with the butt of an AK-47. The man slowly pulled himself erect, wiping blood from his mouth, but he still moved as if to shield the woman.

  Chivalry or romance?

  What quaint notions! Lee Dawn Shun suppressed a smile as she followed her captives down the steep trail.

  33

  “Captain to Combat!” The rattle of the 1MC speaker blasted urgently across the bridge. “Captain to Combat!”

  Commander Paul Wilson jumped out of his chair on the port side of Higgins’ bridge. He had been idly enjoying a cup of coffee as he gazed out at the empty blue sea. The USS Higgins (DDG 76) was steaming placidly along north of Luzon, Philippine Islands, conducting a search for the missing USS City of Corpus Christi. There had been absolutely no sign of the vanished submarine. She seemed to have disappeared from the face of the planet. They had searched and re-searched a spiraling circle out from Corpus Christi’s last known position without any sign of her. No emergency pinger, no debris, nothing.

 
Wilson was confused and frustrated. Something as big as a nuclear submarine couldn’t just disappear. She had to be out there somewhere. But where?

  If she had met with an accident, Wilson figured there would at least be some signs of it. At best, they would find the boat crippled and unable to communicate. At worst, there would be one hell of an oil slick from the 30,000 gallons of fuel oil the sub carried, or a bloom of floating rubbish that would mark her grave. Even if most of her was on the bottom, parts of her would have floated to the surface. And they would have found them by now.

  Then, the night before, just as the sun was setting, a sudden thought hit Wilson. Maybe the sub wasn’t sunk at all. Maybe something far more sinister had happened. Could Corpus be a victim of the same pirates that he had been fruitlessly chasing for the last several months? God knows it wouldn’t be the first attempt. There had been several unsuccessful pirate attacks against surfaced nuclear submarines in the area over the last decade or so. Always put down to mistaken identity in the dark of the night; pirates preying on fishing boats suddenly encountering far larger prey. Maybe this wasn’t a mistake.

  But if pirates now had Corpus, what would they do with it? Why would they try to hide her? And where? Wilson didn’t know for sure, but they certainly wouldn’t stay in the area. Any bad guy crafty enough to swipe a nuke boat would be smart enough to head for deep water if he wanted to keep the boat for some nefarious use.

  With nothing more to go on than her skipper’s hunch, Higgins had streamed her towed sonar array out behind her and had been steaming north, toward the nearest deep water. She had now been doing an ASW search for almost fourteen hours.

  There was still no trace of the missing sub. Wilson was beginning to suspect that they were engaged in a fool’s errand. He had played with enough submarines to know that when they wanted to stay hidden, they generally did, unless the searchers were very lucky. So far, Paul Wilson’s luck had not been good.