Force of Arms

The SEALs would drop their lead-weighted sinker line every twenty-five yards to get the depth, which would be marked on their plastic thigh plates. Then they would work in grids to check systematically for any undersea obstacles, making a note of these on the slate and getting their exact position by waterproof GPS, or global positioning system.

The divers could then place a magnetic pinger, with a battery life of at least four days, or they could use malleable lumps of C4 plastique with primacord inserted. Then all the primacords could be attached to a master detonating cord.

* * *

It was a long, painstaking job in the darkness, particularly as the men found a fence of “hedgehogs”—six- pointed steel tripods, Chinese versions of the old Normandy landing’s Belgian gates — where a wall of twelve-by- twelve-foot cross sections of steel girders was supported by a large, backward-sloping, and flat-based system of girders. With floating contact mines attached to the top of the obstacle, they could blow a landing craft right out of the water. While the officer made his way toward the so-called “shark” net — in reality a sub net — the other seven swimmers in his team found over fifty of the China gates that made up an almost solid line of obstacles across the deepest channel at high tide.

The officer in charge had crossed the shark net of the middle beach and threaded it with primacord and Hagensen packs of C2 explosive and affixed his primacord to the master cord, which in turn was attached to a subsurface floater or bladder buoy, which would not be bobbing around on the surface but which was anchored by means of a Danforth anchor and which would be marked on the grid system as the detonation point for any incoming force.

When they returned to the sub — they had been out for over four hours — every SEAL was dog tired reentering the chamber, which had to be pumped free of water before they could dry off and earn a well-deserved rest in the sub. When the last man let go of the hatch too quickly and its bang resonated throughout the sub, the passive sonar operator tore his headset off. “Jesus Murphy!”

Brentwood heard it, too. In fact he doubted whether anyone else on the watch hadn’t heard it. There was one, the assistant cook, but he’d had his head stuck in the freezer, moving around heavy lumps of frozen beef.

The Chinese Navy had heard it. It wasn’t one of their few nuclear subs that had picked up the sound racing through the water at four times the speed it would have in air, but the Perch, a refitted diesel electric, one of the early Russian clankers known as “honeymoon machines” for all the noise they made — like a toolbox on the move. Normally the Reagan would have picked her up had she been under way with her diesels, but the Chinese sub was still, on station, diesels shut down, maintaining her position only by means of her battery power. As such she was silent as a tomb, much quieter man the pump of the nuclear sub Reagan, which had to be kept on at all times.

The question for the Chinese captain was whether the other submarine would give off any more noise “shorts.” And yet his battery power would last for only another hour. Should he move in closer to shore or wait? It was unlikely the other sub would be going in any closer to shore but would rather be egressing into the gulf.

He decided to wait. Meantime, all his torpedo tubes were loaded with warshots. Besides, the gulf was relatively quiet, so that subsurface sea clutter should be at a minimum and make any unusual noise easier to detect.

* * *

When the ship’s writer let it be known the familygram burst messages had arrived, the atmosphere aboard the Reagan immediately seemed infused with a festive air as crew members eagerly, yet trying not to seem overly excited, waited for news of home. All they needed to hear was that the family, wife, or sweetheart was fine. “Everything’s fine” was all their psyches needed. Anything else — a newborn having put on weight, a student getting honors, a football team in good spirits, victorious or not— was what the officers and men of USS Reagan considered the icing on the cake. “Puss in boots is waiting” almost ousted Andrea Rolston’s anonymous “I need meat. Can you bring home the bacon?” as raunchiest ‘gram of the month.

When Rolston saw a duplicate of it, unsigned, pinned up on the notice board as ‘gram of the month, he shook his head, tut-tutting, “Geez, what some gals will write. Disgusting.”

“Oh no, sir,” a torpedo man first class said. “That’s beautiful.”

“You’re sick, Mulvaney,” Rolston joshed.

“Well, I’d sure like to meet whoever the gal is.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It was too bad it wasn’t summer, the young man explained to Alexsandra. “In summer you can go to Kiessling’s.” It was a delicatessen where you could get pastries and scallops.

“Have you ever been to prison?” she asked him, her taut body tired and swaying rhythmically in what was for the young man a seductive way in tune with the clickety-clack of the rails crossing the sleepers.

“Once,” he replied.

“For how long?”

“Ten days. It’s all they could hold me on if they had no charges that would stick.”

“What were the charges?”

“Hooliganism,” he said proudly. “I was accused of writing some of the dazibao at Beijing University, but there were dozens of such notices and proclamations of our solidarity and support for the goddess of democracy and they couldn’t prove which one was mine.”

“Did it matter?” she asked him, her voice fatigued.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Did what matter?”

“Whether they could prove it or not. If they wanted to keep you they would have — proof or no proof.”

“Ah, but not this time,” the student said. “Some of the dazibao said ‘Arrest without proof is fascism!’ This shamed them.”

The prospect of Nie’s followers being ashamed of anything struck her as being peculiarly unlikely. It made her nervous in fact, and for the first time since being trundled out with the dirty linen she was alert to a possible danger— that the boy was a plant, a collaborator who had exchanged a long prison term for being an informant. To talk to her — to have her confess to him anything she had done against the PLA — and then they would have a star witness.

He was not a worker’s son but one of the middle class that wasn’t supposed to exist. They cracked much more quickly than most, she knew. Put a middle-class kid in a cell overnight, take away his shoelaces, belt, anything with which he might hang himself, leave the light on all night, stale rice and water, a bucket for a toilet, and you never saw morale collapse so quickly in all your life. It was as if they were on another planet. It was the way the Public Security Bureau and indeed so many other police forces throughout the world got so many confessions. Everyone felt guilty about something they’d done in their life, and it was this free-floating anxiety that interrogators gave shapes and names to.

He saw the concern in her eyes and immediately divined her alarm. “You can trust me,” he said. She nodded. Another hour and they would be near Beidaihe.

What else could he say, she thought, if she’d shown she suspected him?

“I would do anything for you,” he said, and she knew that what he meant was that, apart from anything else, he would like to have sex with her. Puppy love. She smiled gracefully but beyond that did not answer, thinking of Aussie Lewis, of how she longed to be with him and under his protection. She was so weary of being the champion of the minority, the June Fourth Movement, and the Goddess of Democracy Movement. She wanted her own champion to take away her fears, her constant anxiety from being hunted.

“Come here,” she told the boy, and the next moment he was sitting stiffly, flushed, by her side. She put her arm about him and drew him to her, his eyes closing as his head rested on her bosom. They sat like this, rocked to and fro by the mesmerizing action of the train. She was looking out the window at green rice fields and beyond toward the sea. “Have you betrayed me?” she asked softly. “Hmm?” she said, pulling him even closer to her. “Have