“It sounds like you have this all figured out.”
“Not me. Mike must have had an entire team working on this day and night. He’s got everything planned down to the tiniest detail.”
Chapter 4
Paphos, Cyprus
Cheryl and I landed in Paphos International and went directly to the Trident Hangar on the cargo side of the airport. It was a mild, sunny winter day, and because we couldn’t find a taxi, we decided to roll our bags the half a mile around the airport perimeter fence to the Trident Hangar entrance.
“I’m glad I didn’t wear heels,” Cheryl said.
“We’re operational. Nothing but combat boots from now on.”
“Does Ferragamo make combat boots?”
“This is going to be your first time out with the team on an operation. You’re going to find that when I’m in the role as captain of a fighting ship, I’m a different man, not the easy-going guy you know and love. I run a tight ship. I’m not sure if you can handle the discipline of being on a ship of war with me.”
“Your ship of war has a better wine cellar than the Queen Elizabeth II.”
“We don’t sacrifice our comforts, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have you keelhauled if I get any of that backtalk you’re so famous for.” Cheryl just smiled.
“You don’t scare me, Captain.”
We entered the hangar from the side door. Once inside the cavernous metal hangar, we found the team sorting and inspecting equipment inside a fenced-off area on the far side.
Migos was driving a forklift with a sea sled, a STIDD DPD, balanced on the front of the tines. When he saw us, he stopped the forklift and got off to meet us. The rest of the team noticed us and began to amble over. McDonald was next, followed by Savage and Sorenson. The seven of us are an eclectic team. Migos is a former special forces operator, his Greek heritage evident in his face and heavily muscled Mediterranean physique. McDonald is a retired Navy special warfare medic with years of experience with the DEVGRU, the SEAL Teams, and SWCC. McDonald is my second-in-command. He’s a Midwesterner with quiet mannerisms and the countenance of a small-town gentleman. Savage and Sorenson are both new to the team. Both came out of the Combat Actions Group in Fort Bragg, my old Army unit. Savage is from Hawaii; he’s biracial, a mix of Pacific Islander and African American. Savage is about six feet with the lean hard features of an NFL defensive end. Sorenson is from Wisconsin and looks like the Viking King in the kids’ cartoon How to Train Your Dragon; Sorenson’s nickname is Shrek. The rest of them just go by their last names.
We spent the rest of the day provisioning and loading the boat. I keep the Sam Houston in the Paphos Marina, which is just a few miles from the airport. The boat, an Azimut 64 motor yacht, was going to be cramped with all six of us aboard. The Azimut is a very high-end luxury yacht made in Italy— a performance yacht built to handle the toughest seas. It’s a comfortable ride with three well-appointed staterooms in the lower deck, a salon, galley, and wheelhouse in the main deck, and a helm station and lounge area on the top deck. Migos and McDonald would share a stateroom as would Sorenson and Savage. Cheryl and I would be in the owner’s cabin at the bow. The yacht originally came with two additional bunks in the crew quarters, but I converted that space to fuel storage. Eliminating the crew quarters allowed me to extend the range of the yacht to over two thousand nautical miles.
Most of the stern deck and the hydraulic ramp perched on the back were packed with equipment. We had racks of gas cylinders filled with air and normoxic tri-mix for the deep dives. We had two underwater sleds, an underwater scooter, a Seabotix ROV and a Gavia AUV. A thirteen-foot RIB tender was lashed to the hydraulic ramp. Across from the racks of cylinders were our diving rigs, dry suits, and the buoyancy kits needed for salvage. With all of the gear, there was very little room to move on the stern deck.
We were underway by mid-morning the day after we arrived in Paphos. What took the most time was stocking the galley with food. Cheryl took over the culinary side of the operation and she had very strong ideas on what was needed. I decided not to quibble about a few lost hours.
The late fall weather was mild as we made our way south and east through the Suez and the Red Sea. We only had to wait two days to enter the canal thanks to a generous donation I made to the Egyptian harbormaster’s retirement fund. The narrow strait between Yemen and the Horn of Africa has always been a challenge because of pirates, but now with Houthi, Iranian, Saudi, and Emirati forces all facing off in the waters, the path was even more daunting. We ran day and night at a cruising speed of twenty-four knots until we reached the open waters in the Gulf of Aden.
We crossed the Arabian Sea and refueled in Colombo, Sri Lanka. From Colombo, we headed due east and then passed through the crowded Malacca Strait between Malaysia and Indonesia to the South China Sea. Once we reached the South China Sea, it was a five-hundred-mile straight shot northeast until we reached Sabah, Malaysia. We made the trip in eight days operating day and night. McDonald and I took turns at the helm while the rest of the team readied the equipment.
We refueled at the Sutera Harbour Marina in Sabah. I gave the crew a night of shore leave and stayed on the boat with Cheryl. It’s a crowded marina and we didn’t draw too much attention. Cheryl brought in a cleaning crew and we changed out the linens and refilled the water tanks. I went to the marina grocery store and bought some fresh groceries. When I returned, it was late afternoon and the cleaning crew was gone, I found Cheryl in the salon watching a movie.
“When are you going to brief the guys?” she asked.
“Tomorrow morning, once we get underway.”
“Any updates from Mike?”
“Everything’s a go. The payload will be dropped today; everything is on schedule.”
“What are we going to do tonight?”
“I’d like to go to dinner and get a room at the Shangri La down the street. But we can’t afford to leave the boat unattended. If a piece of equipment walked away, we’d be in serious trouble. Better to stay on the boat.”
“I’ll have something delivered to the boat. You can find a bottle of wine. I’ll make you happy you stayed on the boat with me,” she said with a smile.
“It’s nice to be alone.”
“No kidding. The boat’s never been so crowded.”
The next morning everybody was back on board by seven and we set sail for Antelope Shoal which is located about twelve miles west of Quezon, Palawan. The trip was five hours at cruising speed. At lunch, McDonald was at the controls in the wheelhouse and the other three guys were seated in the galley directly behind. Cheryl was serving hamburgers.
“Up until now, I wasn’t authorized to disclose the mission. Now that we’re on the last leg, I can fill you in on the purpose of this trip. I gave the team a detailed rundown of the backstory with the US Navy and the Chinese in the Gulf of Aden and later in the South China Sea. I told them about the upcoming deployment and timing. None of the guys had any questions about the why; they were only concerned about the how, what, and when. I gave a detailed timeline and operations order. I provided written instructions for each person and the tasks they had to perform. After lunch, Cheryl took the wheel and I showed the simulation of the tsunami to the team on the big screen TV in the salon.
“How much damage is the tsunami going to create?” asked Migos, who was sitting on one of the pale leather couches.
“The wave, when it reaches land, is going to be over thirty feet. The reef islands are only a few feet above sea level. The wave is going to pass completely over each of the islands and destroy the runway, the planes, the hangars, and the buildings. There will be at least two smaller waves following behind the first that will do further damage.”
“How far will the wave go? Will it reach Vietnam or China?”
“You saw the simulation. Yes, it will, but won’t be near the force of what will hit the target islands. A tsunami warning will be issued and they’ll have hours of warning. The damage isn’t expected to be muc
h.”
“What about on the target islands? Will they get a tsunami warning?”
“They will; they’ll have at least an hour of warning, which will give the people time to protect themselves and maybe allow some of the aircraft to get away.”
“This is like Pearl Harbor. We’re going to attack them without warning,” said McDonald.
“We’re going to give them warning. The UN has already ruled that China has violated the territorial rights of the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, and a bunch of other countries. We’re going to end their violation of the sovereign territorial rights of those other countries and we’re even going to give them an hour’s warning. It seems likely there will be Chinese deaths, but they’ll be kept to a minimum and unlike with Pearl Harbor, when it’s over, if we do this right, the Chinese will believe it was caused by Mother Nature and it won’t lead to a world war.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked Migos.
“Yes, I do. The only thing I don’t one hundred percent believe is how less than thirty thousand pounds of explosive is going to cause an earthquake.”
“You’re not totally sure this will work?”
“Neither is the CIA. Computer models are one thing, but we won’t know for certain until we try it. Creating an earthquake and generating a tsunami of this size are two things that have never been done.”
“Never?” asked Migos.
“In 1944 the US did some experiments with conventional explosives in New Zealand and found they could generate mini tsunamis, but nothing as big as what we’re talking about here. They called it Operation Seal and it was very hush-hush at the time.”
“So, this could work,” said McDonald.
“If we do everything right—if we get the explosives to the right depth and the right coordinates and detonate everything simultaneously, we’ll have done our job. Whether or not the science is going to work is well beyond my pay grade,” I said.
Chapter 5
Antelope Shoal, South China Sea
We anchored in sixty feet of water above Antelope Shoal, which is a submerged sandy ridge located just to the west of Palawan Island. We were thirteen miles off the Philippines coast in the disputed area between China and the Philippines. It was dusk when we arrived, and the bright orange glow of the sun was touching the South China Sea on the western horizon. The sea was a little rough and Migos almost got tossed in when he was leaning over to place the yellow torpedo-shaped autonomous unmanned vehicle (AUV) into the warm ocean water.
The AUV was on a pre-set course to find our explosive cache and then provide detailed imagery of the detonation points, located in caves along a massive sea cliff only two hundred yards west from our anchor point. The sea cliff is the end of the continental shelf and it extends all the way down to the Palawan Trench, the third deepest spot in the world. The base of the cliff we were working on is six thousand feet deep. In one spot, known as the Galathea Depth, the Palawan Trench is 34,580 feet deep. We were going to place forty-two hundred pounds of HBX-1 explosives into five different shallow caves along that sea cliff. The depths of the caves ranged from 387 to 511 feet beneath the surface.
We recovered the four-and-a-half-foot-long AUV three hours later. It was easy to spot the white strobe light in the night sky once it breached the surface. I was already very confident we were over the explosive cache because the yacht’s sonar was reflecting an image of a rectangular box with the same dimensions as a forty-foot container. The explosives had been delivered by a US Navy nuclear submarine earlier in the day.
I spent the next two hours with Cheryl and McDonald looking at what the AUV had found. The AUV was equipped with an obstacle avoidance sonar, a side scan sonar, a camera in the nose, and a magnetometer. I was mostly interested in the sonar mapping of the cliff. We’d been given coordinates by Mike for the placement of the explosive, but we needed to confirm them with the sonar images. Once confirmed, we uploaded the dive plans into the four dive computers and the two ARNAV navigation systems on the STIDD DPD sleds.
At the depths we were going to be working, every move had to be planned in detail—not just the depth, but the rate of ascent and descent as well as the duration of each stop. The dive computers on the Poseiden7 tech closed-circuit breathing systems, which can be used to a depth of six hundred feet, are state of the art. At the depths we were working, the most time one person could spend at a detonation point in a single day was forty-five minutes, which meant the four of us were going to have to make maximum use of our time. The job was going to take five days, which is why our cover story as treasure hunters was so important.
Migos, Sorenson, and Savage reviewed the footage on the laptop located on the galley table and then verified it against the data entered into their dive computers. The dive computer on a rebreather connects to the rig. The dive computer is the brain that determines gas flows and other critical operating functions beyond just navigation, depth, and decompression data.
I woke up early the next morning filled with nervous energy. Cheryl was still asleep when I went upstairs to make coffee. I found McDonald already awake sitting at the galley table reviewing the AUV data on the control unit’s laptop.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Migos snores. It was better on the voyage out when I was on night shift and he was on day shift.” I laughed.
“He snores terribly; sometimes he even talks in his sleep. He’s a terrible roommate. I’ve spent more time with him than with Cheryl.”
“Anyway, I came up here to get away from the man-sized Ken doll and decided to check our work last night. That’s when I found this.”
“What this?” I asked, as I slid in next to him on the bench next to the table.
“It’s a magnetometer reading taken between demolition point three and demolition point four.”
“Can you see anything on the camera or sonar?”
“No, but there’s definitely something in that general area that has some heavy metal.”
“When we get done today, we should launch the AUV to have another look. Make it do a search pattern from above and zig zag it down the wall of the cliff.”
“I’ll do that.”
“If nothing else, when the Philippine Navy or the Chi-Coms come by, we can show them that we really are searching for stuff, being treasure hunters and all.”
Sorenson showed up a while later wearing his drysuit.
“Aren’t you dying in that thing?” I asked.
“I am, I just wanted to make sure it fit over the thermals.”
“Looks like it does. You may want to take it off before you stroke out on us.”
“It’s a good quality suit. How did you know my size?”
“I didn’t. That came from the CIA; they know everything about you because of your former life with the boys.”
After breakfast, Migos and I put our rigs on. The Poseiden7 looks like a black plastic backpack with two gas cylinders on each side. The mouthpiece is on a loop, and the air doesn’t escape on a closed-circuit breathing system, but instead gets recycled. The system monitors the oxygen level in the loop and scrubs out the C02 and adds oxygen to maintain a consistent level of air, or in our case for this deep dive, trimix. The hydraulic ramp was crowded. The thirteen-foot tender that is usually perched on the ramp was already in the water, tied off to the stern tow mounting to make room for the two sleds that crowded the ramp. With the tender off the deck, there was at least enough room to move around. It was 85 degrees and I was sweating up a storm as I put on my fins and stepped into the water. Migos and I gave each other a thumbs up before releasing the air in our buoyancy compensator vests and slowly descending to the shoal sixty feet below.
Several minutes later we were swimming above the explosives. The top of the metal container was a green, black, and sand camouflage-patterned plastic tarp. We untied the tarp and folded it back. Inside the container box were thirty metal pods that each looked like a big aircraft bomb. The pods were stacked in ten rows a
nd three columns. There was one box in the container that had pre-cut lines of detonation cord packed in five bags for each detonation site. I removed one bag and clipped it to my vest. Migos and I then positioned six pods outside the container on the sea floor in a row.
I watched as a STIDD sled glided into position next to the pods we had lined up. The second sled piloted by Sorenson parked next to it. Migos and I moved to the closest pod and attached it to the hitch on the back of the closest sled. Then we attached a second pod to the second sled. The pods were STIDD cargo pods filled with seven hundred pounds of explosives each. Under the water with the flotation foam in the pods, it was easy to manipulate them into position and attach them. Despite weighing seven hundred pounds each, they were neutrally buoyant and light as a feather.
I moved to the first sled and gave Savage a thumbs up. He got off the sled and I got on, lying head-first horizontally on my stomach. When I saw Migos was on his sled, I hit the go button on the ARNAV systems. The sleds have three settings; manual, autopilot, and autonomous. For this leg of the journey, the sled moved on autopilot based on the settings we inputted last night.
The water at sixty feet was blue and clear. I could see the hull of the Sam Houston above and beyond the golden rays of the sun. Moving at three knots, it took only a few minutes to reach the edge of the shelf. Suddenly, the sea floor disappeared and below me was absolute darkness. I monitored my dive computer to make sure the sled was descending at the prescribed rate. It took over five minutes to reach a depth of 478 feet. The headlight of the sled illuminated the wall of the sea cliff. I found the opening to the cave and verified the coordinates with the internal navigation system on the ARNAV. Migos pulled up beside me. I put the sled in manual mode and drove it into the mouth of the cave. Migos followed behind. Ten yards into the cave, I stopped the sled and landed it on the cave floor. I got off and detached the pod. Migos did the same. We backed the sleds out of the cave and switched them to autonomous mode. We sent the sleds back to Sorenson and Savage.
Rising Sea Page 3