Warshot

course. Send them the details — Most Secret, need-to-know basis only.”

“Yes, General. But they will have to know the specific target sooner or later.”

“Later. Not over the air — coded or otherwise. When he gets here.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

Robert Brentwood was passing through the USS Reagan’s “Blood Alley,” the redded-out narrow corridor between the banks of the Sea Wolfs missile fire-control computers, into the ethereal blue of the sonar room, where he had just been handed the millisecond “burst” transmission received via the long, trailing, low-frequency aerial. He preferred using the quick pop-up, high-frequency mast to receive transmits — the time needed to reel in the longer VLF could be the margin between life and death in the tight turning war of the Hunter/Killers. Besides, with sound passing through water at four times the speed it moved through air, the “reel- in” now under way could be heard miles away, despite the fact that the hydrophones’ spools were heavily insulated to prevent noise shorts from alerting the enemy. But after the catastrophic breakdown of the computer-phone networks in the States, the VLF had been his only bet of picking up the TACAMO aircraft.

Robert Brentwood was tense, but it was more the content of the burst message man the reel-in that made him so, and only Hale, his executive officer, could sense it. The message had been brief and to the point — pickup for transport to Pearl to be made by a carrier-borne chopper at 0400 the next morning.

“Don’t they realize we’ll be violating the first rule of a war patrol?” said Brentwood, handing back the decoded message to Hale.

“Must be important then,” said the XO, by way of making his skipper feel better about having to surface. “Besides, we have air superiority.”

“It’s not enemy air that I’m concerned about. It’s those Alfas. They can pick us up breaking surface a hundred miles away through the sound channel.” Brentwood turned around to the officer of the deck, Merrick. “What’s state of sea topside?”

“Beaufort scale — eight. Gale force,” said the OOD. “Should be enough turbulence to cover our bust-through noise. Might have to be a wet pickup for you, though, Captain.”

“Well, better me wet than you guys.”

“Have to agree with you there, sir,” responded Merrick easily.

“Any idea what they want you for?” asked Hale.

“No, but it’s from CINC-Far East, so I figure Freeman’s behind it.”

“Maybe more subs in Lake Baikal?” proffered Merrick.

“Possibly. I hope not. Too darn cold.”

* * *

The pickup by a navy Sea King helo, and the transfer to Pearl via one of Salt Lake City’s Mach 2.3 F-14 Tomcats, went much more smoothly than Robert Brentwood had anticipated. Apart from being told he was to be taken to the BUD school at Pearl Harbor, Brentwood was still in the dark about the operation, and on his arrival in Pearl he discovered that not even Chief Petty Officer Brady, the “Bullfrog,” the chief and most senior instructor at the Navy Special Warfare Group, knew much more than he and the six enlisted men who, besides the Bullfrog, would make up the SEAL team requested by Freeman.

“Well,” said the Bullfrog happily, “one thing we all know, gentlemen. BUD doesn’t stand for Budweiser.”

“Thought it did!” said one of the enlisted seven.

Basic underwater demolition training was essential for the SEALs, and was one of the prerequisites for wearing the coveted badge, a trident grasped in the eagle’s right talon, a flintlock pistol held in the other, the anchor between them.

“Beach clearance?” posited one of the men.

“Come on, chiefie!” pressed another of the SEALs, such informality allowed nowhere else in the navy except in the tightly knit band of elite UD teams.

“Honest to God, Reilly,” replied the chief. “I haven’t been told the specific area. None of us’ll know till week’s end. Freeman’s orders. Till then we’ll be doing a rerun of motivation week in Pearl.” He had everyone’s undivided attention. “Motivation week” was the sanitized naval version of what used to be called “hell” week. It meant a week of CDU — combat demolition unit — training, a week of deliberate sleep deprivation to slow your responses and wear you down, weed out the weak ones — if there were any. Drop-out rate was fifty-one percent.

Part of the treatment involved flying the men over to the outer island of Kauai, to the muddy taro fields around the Wailua River where the men would have to avoid detection by a squad of instructors, one of the methods being to stick a reed in their mouths while lying submerged in the mud, waiting for the searchers to pass by. Problem was, every now and then a leech draped itself over the straw and the air was cut off. In the past, some men came up purple-faced, gasping wildly for air, only to attract the attention of the instructors, thereby failing that part of the course.

The eight-man team — Robert Brentwood, the Bullfrog, and the other six enlisted men — knew, of course, that regardless of whatever the specific mission was, they’d be issued with special UBA — underwater breathing apparatus — specifically, the military version of the COBRA— closed-circuit oxygen breathing apparatus — a rebreather system which, apart from not issuing any telltale bubbles while you were going into a beach, for example, allowed the swimmer by means of the carbon dioxide filter canister to rebreathe the same gas, additional oxygen being bled as needed from a front waist tank into the inflatable bag. It was much better than the standard SCUBA, or scaphandreautonome, system. There were still problems, however, and during the motivation week, one diver, Seaman Michael Rose — his last name reminding Robert Brentwood of his wife Rosemary back in England — ran into what the chiefs report blandly designated as some “difficulty” at 120 feet in Pearl. Being in saltwater, the helium inject needed at that depth to prevent nitrogen narcosis, or “nitrogen drunkenness,” was bleeding in too slowly, and Rose, despite his wrist fathometer, lost all sense of direction, going down to 240 feet, thinking he was going up, before being located by the Bullfrog and Robert Brentwood.

On the third day, the team, under Brentwood’s direction, practiced egressing from a submerged sub’s forward escape hatch with the sub under way at one and a half knots. For Brentwood it was the first real indication of what their mission might be. On the fourth day, the eight of them were split into four two-man UDT-IBS — underwater demolition teams; the IBS, or inflatable small boat issued each of the four pairs, a thirteen-and-a-half-foot-long F- 470 fiberglass-hulled Zodiac. Each pair of SEALs was then assigned to a landing craft.

The first of the four two-man teams consisted of Brentwood and Dennison, a stocky man who, despite his shorter height, was probably the strongest swimmer of the group, and who possessed a wry sense of humor. As the landing craft started its run, he crouched low in the Zodiac on its outboard side and then, on the signal from Brentwood, rolled over the rubber boat’s outer tube into the roiling water on the landing craft’s port side, a quarter mile out from Pearl’s sub net.

Brentwood followed and they began casting, Dennison unreeling a.065-gauge nylon fishingline marked “for feel” every one hundred feet, at which point Robert Brentwood let a knot-marked lead sinker line down to the bottom, quickly recording the depth by scratching it on his plastic knee slate and noting any other underwater obstructions, apart from the sub net, that an amphibious landing might encounter, including the positions of channel markers and angle of breakwater to the beach. Each number-two man in the four two-man teams had to keep radio contact with the other team via waterproof cigarette-pack-size walkie-talkies, it being vital for the teams to act in concert to effect a proper “extraction” or pickup. If the Zodiacs didn’t cut out from the LCTs at the same time, on full throttle — the muffled thirty-five horsepower outboards streaking at right angles from the landing craft to pick up the swimmers, each man’s left hand raised high to mark his position — there wouldn’t be a second chance to be “snared” by the rubber loop held outboard from the fast-moving Zodiac. Once a swimmer’s arm passed through the loop, he would immediately bend his arm to a V and kick toward the Zodiac as an LCT crewman, grabbing his webbed belt at midriff, hauled him quickly aboard, where he would ready himself in turn to “snare” the second man, until all eight swimmers had been accounted for. The four rubber boats would then turn and head out to sea, away from the enemy shore, to await their submarine pickup.

“You did good,” Bullfrog told Dennison. “Remember, we lost more marines from drowning off Tarawa than we did from Jap shore fire. If we’d known just how deep some of them holes were in that coral, we could have saved a lot of guys.” The chief hesitated for a moment, then added, “But we still got a problem.”

For the moment the other seven men, including Robert Brentwood, said nothing, sitting back on the gunwales