Warshot

of the tender, exhausted from more than six hours in the water. Brentwood, though he didn’t show it, was sure he was the most fatigued. He was old enough to be some of these men’s father.

“What problem?” asked Dennison, reaching tiredly for a squeeze bottle of Gatorade. “None of us drowned!”

“Speak for yourself,” put in Rose, the California tan of the twenty-five-year-old contrasting with the stubble of what had been a full head of straw-colored hair.

“No,” conceded the chief. “Swimming was okay. But it was a screwup on the walkie-talkies.”

“Hell,” said Dennison, “ours worked fine. Didn’t it, Captain? Waterproof one hundred percent.”

“Oh, they all worked fine,” said the chief. “That’s the problem.”

“Did Pearl pick it up?” put in Brentwood. “On the hydrophones?”

“Pearl!” said the chief. “Captain, they heard you up off Diamond Head. Frightened the fish in Hanauma Bay.” He grinned. “So now you guys know why you were made to learn American Standard.” He meant the sign language used by the deaf and mute.

“Hold on!” said Robert Brentwood. “I don’t know anything about sign language.”

“Oh—” said the Bullfrog, clearly caught off base for the first time since the refresher courses had begun. “Special orders from General Freeman, sir. Thought you knew.”

“Hell, no!” answered Robert, who, despite the normal give-and-take of profanity in the service, wasn’t in the habit of swearing, even mildly.

“Then, Captain,” said the chief, “you’re going to have to learn, sir. Rose — you’re the best with a bunch of fives.” The chief turned back to the commander of the USS Reagan. “You have twenty- four hours, Captain.”

Brentwood gave an “Aye aye, chief — the only situation in which the captain of one of the most powerful warships in history would have done so, at least so obligingly. Besides, Brentwood’s momentary annoyance was mitigated by the growing conviction that he was now solving the puzzle of the mission’s precise location. Well aware, as a commander himself, of the “need-to-know” rationale for keeping an operation secret until the last, he couldn’t help taking pride in the certainty that he had divined Freeman’s plan. He wondered whether any of the enlisted men had put it together — a sub approach offshore, casting for obstacles, sinker line depth measurements, width of approach… General Douglas Freeman was about to do another MacArthur, another Inchon, launch a daring seaborne invasion across the China Sea. And unless he, Brentwood, was all wet, the SSN USS Reagan would be used to insert a survey UDT — underwater demolition team. And, once the underwater terrain was known, the Reagan would most likely use its torpedoes to clear any major underwater obstruction just prior to the amphibious assault.

The giveaway from Brentwood was the concern over the walkie-talkies. If they were going to be that close to shore that they had to worry about the walkie-talkie sound being picked up by a beach garrison, then it had to be a pre-invasion mission. The final clue was the sign language. It meant they were going to be very close to the enemy, plus sign language wouldn’t help you in the dark. A dawn invasion. He put this last conclusion to the Bullfrog without revealing any of his other deductions, and couldn’t resist a quiet satisfaction in seeing the chief completely surprised.

The chief looked quizzically at him, and Brentwood got the distinct impression the chief was thinking that perhaps at forty-four the sub skipper was getting a bit old for it. “Dark’s no problem,” responded the chief, explaining, “We’d have PVs.” It wasn’t equipment that they used on a sub much — unless they surfaced at night — and the Bullfrog could see Brentwood had been caught off base. “Infrared,” added the chief, unconsciously adding insult to Brentwood’s injured pride. “Same kind they used in the Iraqi War. Pick up hand signals no problem. Warm arms in a cold sea — stick out like you got a hard-on.”

* * *

For the Bullfrog it was a joke, but everyone else was too tired. Including swimming time, they’d been “refreshing” themselves with all the minutiae of SEAL underwater techniques for thirty hours without a break. Still, as fatigued as he was, Brentwood recalled the Bullfrog’s earlier mention of Tarawa. It mightn’t be that the SEALs would go in during the daylight, given the chief’s mention of the PV goggles, but you’d have to be crazy to try a massive amphibious landing at night. Then again, a lot of people had thought Freeman was crazy for making a night attack on Pyongyang — until he’d pulled it off.

“Right, gentlemen,” said the chief. “Six hours sleep and we start on some lovely abutments.”

“Where?” asked Rose. “Down on Waikiki?”

“Doesn’t matter,” put in Smythe, a tall string bean of a man. “What matters is how big these mothers are, eh?” He turned to the Bullfrog. “How big are they, chiefie?”

“Mothers are big,” answered the Bullfrog truthfully. “Quartermaster’s got us down for primacord with demolition knots, with three-foot trailer cords to tie your charge to the master primacord.”

“Be using bladders?” asked Smythe.

“Yup,” confirmed the chief. “We’ll all need tits.” He was referring to Schantz bag/basket flotation packs that would take most of the weight of the explosive charges off the swimmers.

“Heavy fuckers, then?” said Reilly. “If we got Schantzes.”

“What’s the load?” added Rose. Everybody seemed to come to life with the prospect of having to suffer more than they had already. “Fifty pounds?”

“A tad more, Rosie,” said the chief, smiling. “An even hundred.”

“Jesus!” said Rose, and Smythe whistled. “We gonna refloat the Arizona?”

“We’ll do a splash-run practice tomorrow,” announced the chief. “Oh five hundred. I’ll designate flank swimmers and fuse pullers. I’ll have it ready by breakfast. Remember now, light meal, gents — don’t want anybody sinking.”

“Light meal,” quipped Dennison. “If I’m still alive.”

As they dismissed, young Rose told Robert Brentwood that the scuttlebutt around Pearl was that the Chinese had some kind of long-range rockets by some lake in far western China and that the SEALs were going to hit them.

“Well, if it’s the scuttlebutt, you can be sure it’s wrong.”

“You got it figured out, then, skipper?”

“Well, Rose,” Brentwood answered, still unused to uttering his wife’s name so far away from her, “I’ll tell you what I think, providing you keep it to yourself. No use violating need-to-know before we have to.”

“Absolutely, Captain.”

“Freeman’s going to launch an attack from Korea— across the Yellow Sea — against China’s right flank. Shantung peninsula’s my guess. Just over two hundred miles due west of Inchon.”

Rose paled. “Jesus! But… they’d chop us to pieces.”

Robert Brentwood smiled. “To do that, the ChiComs’ll have to withdraw troops from their northern borders.”

Now Rose saw the light. “Take the pressure off our guys up there.”

“Right. ‘Course, we’ll have to skedaddle on out of there once they start pouring down from the north toward the peninsula.”

“What if they don’t go for it?”

“Rose, what would you think Washington’d do if enemy troops landed on the Baja peninsula? Way I figure it, Freeman’s going to do another MacArthur — the unexpected— and we’re going in at night to take out the underwater obstacles.”

Robert Brentwood would soon be glad he hadn’t told the others of his hunch. After all, being half right doesn’t get you the kewpie doll. He was a first-rate navy man, but was talking through his hat. He was no politician, and as things stood, Washington, virtually under siege at home, had no intentions of expanding the war further by invading China. Such a move would be implicitly taken by Taiwan as the green light for it to attack, and that flash point could ignite all of Asia.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE