wreck anyone’s life in the Pentagon if the SEALS wiped that out too. But that would depend on how much “kit” the SEAL swimmers could carry.
Admiral Bergstrom, himself a SEAL veteran, made a key recommendation here. “I don’t think we need ‘blow’ the third Kilo at all,” he said. “If we could somehow smash all four shores on her starboard side, she’d crash down on her own, probably take out the entire wing wall of the dock, and possibly drive her way straight through the floor. Two and a half thousand tons is a pretty good weight to drop — it would certainly smash the dock to pieces, and put the whole lot on the bottom of the harbor with very little explosive effort on our part.”
“Yes,” replied Commander Ray Banford, “but those things are damn finely balanced. She may not fall immediately, and the noise we make blowing the shores might just alert them, maybe give ’em time to bang in another shore if they happen to have a few spares around. Just one could stop her falling.”
“She’d go if I blew a damn great hole in her starboard holding tank at precisely the same time we took out the shores,” said Lieutenant Bennett. “I guess the slightest tilt of that dock would do it. And that big float tank, full of seawater, would tilt her over half a degree in about one minute flat. She’d go then.”
“Yes, I guess she would,” said Commander Banford. “Actually I think our real problem here is the amount of guys we might need to get those shores out.”
“One man on each,” said Rusty. “That’s four. I’ll go in first, under the dock, and attach some kind of a mine to the tank. Then I’ll stand guard while the guys wire up the shores. We’ll use det-cord. We’ll hook up the explosives to the same detonator, give ourselves time to get clear, and the whole lot will blow together. She’ll go. No doubt, she’ll go.”
“Right here, we’re talking a lot of guys,” said Banford, the exsubmarine commander, who would oversee the mission. “We need four men for the floating Kilos. Four for the shores. Couldn’t two guys do two each?”
“Too dangerous, sir. Don’t forget we’ll be working close to the guard on the deck of the submarine, but just out of his sight-range. If he hears one sound he’ll start looking, then I’ll have to take him out, then someone else might hear, then we’ll end up taking a dozen of ’em out, with all hell breaking loose.
“No, sir. I think we should move at twice the speed, with four men, one on each shore working simultaneously.”
“Yes, Rusty. I do see that, it’s just the number I’m worried about. Four men on the two floating Kilos, four men on the shores, you blowing the float tank and standing guard — that’s nine, plus the driver of the SDV. That’s ten, and the SDV only holds eight.”
Admiral Bergstrom spoke next. “Well, Ray, we do have a new Swimmer Delivery Vehicle, delivered in the past few weeks. It does hold ten. They call this one an ASDS, an Advanced Swimmer Delivery System, electric-powered, made by Westinghouse. It has a longer range than the old Mark VIII, probably twelve hours, and it does hold ten guys.
“If you assume three hours to get in and three hours back, plus four hours waiting, that’s ten hours, if nothing goes wrong. She only makes five knots, but she’s nearly perfect for us. Trouble is, I don’t know whether she’s operational yet. And I believe we only have two SSN’s fitted to carry her…. Tommy!” He beckoned over to Lieutenant Tommy Schwab, asked him to check out the submarine situation with SUB-PAC, Vice Admiral Johnny Barry, Commander, Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet.
Meanwhile they agreed in principle to a ten-man team. And Lieutenant Rusty Bennett then threw another curve ball. “I think we should blow the boat in the dry dock at the earliest possible time,” he said. “It is likely they will have a sentry patrolling the walkway around the top of the floating dock. If we leave that det-cord in place for one and a half hours while we get away, he’s got a good chance of spotting it if he’s sharp. He only has to notice it on
“I think we should set the det-cord to blow ten minutes after we hit the water. We’ll be a few hundred yards away by then, and we’re not talking huge underwater explosion, just the minor blast on the float tank. That won’t affect our eardrums. The rest of the explosives are high up in the dock, and the damage is going to be slow motion, zero-blast underwater, all in the same place.
“If we just let the submarine crash through the dock, they won’t even suspect they were hit by anything military. And there will still be chaos in the base when the other two Kilos blow. We can set them to go two hours after we leave, by which time we’ll be back in the SDV and well on our way across the bay. I’m figuring they’ll want an hour to get their act together and come after us with a patrol boat. We’ll be in the SSN before they get a sniff.”
“Good thinking,” said the admiral. “It sure would be goddamned irritating if we set the whole thing up and then they found the det-cord before we blew out the shores.
“One question…have you guys thought yet how you’re going to work up high, on the side of the submarine? I mean A, how are you going to get up there? B, how will you avoid being seen? And C, what protection do you have?”
One of the senior instructors, a Chief Petty Officer, stepped forward. “According to these drawings we have here, the shores will be positioned about thirty feet from the floor of the dock,” he told the group.
“Well, we can’t climb the curved sides of the submarine, nor can we risk going up onto the walkway around the top of the dock. So we have to go straight up a rope to each shore. We’ll use fairly thick black nylon, with a big foothold knot every two feet, and a small, padded black steel grappler on the end. The guys will twirl and throw the grapplers from the floor, up and over the beams. When the hook grabs and digs into the wood, they go, straight up, and straddle the beams.
“They’ll work close in, maybe five or six feet from the hull of the submarine. That way the sentry
“Most of these big floating docks have steel ladders at the ends and one about halfway along the wall which goes from the floor up to the walkway. Rusty will position himself as far up there as he needs to be, just enough to train his sights on the sentry’s head. Rusty’s gun will of course be silenced.
“The guys will wind the det-cord around the beams probably about six times, that means they will each want about forty feet of the stuff up there, with another forty feet hanging down and another eighty feet to connect to the next beam. Our stuff is dark green in color, and det-cord’s not too heavy. It’s thin, and we can wrap it tight. It’ll be awkward swimming in, but we’ve done much worse.
“I estimate the guys will be up on the wooden beams for no more than four minutes. Rusty can make the joins, and fix the detonator and timing mechanism as soon as he gets down the ladder. He says ten minutes, maximum.”
“Thank you, Chief,” said the admiral. “You starting practice today?”
“Nossir, I’m fixing up for us to use AFDM-14, the big floating dock right here in San Diego. They have a submarine in it right now, on shores. I thought we’d spend two days over there, by which time this team will be world experts with a thirty-foot throw with rope and grappler.
“Most of them have done it before, sir, but we must eliminate every possibility of a mistake. What we don’t want is for one of those ropes to fail to fetch the beam, because then the damned grappler will fall and thump on the steel floor of the dock, and then Rusty may have to kill the goddamned sentry.”
“Guess so, Chief…”
Just then the door flew open and Lieutenant Tommy Schwab rushed in. “Sir,” he said, “we just got lucky. Real lucky. The SSN we want is one of those old Sturgeon Class boats,
“Perfect,” said the admiral. “What about the ASDS?”
“Yessir. She’s about ready for ops, but she’s still right here in San Diego. So we’ll have to fly her out in a C5A with the SEAL team. But the
“Now that’s great,” replied Admiral Bergstrom. And turning to the Chief Petty Officer in charge of training, he said, “We can get the SEALS familiarized with the new vehicle right away. When do you reckon they’ll be ready to go?”
“Well, we have swimming and weight tests, plus the rope training. Weapons testing. A couple days’ instruction on operating ASDS. Plus a day coordinating everything. They’ll be ready to fly out next Thursday night on the regular Navy flight out to DG, you know, the old C5A Galaxy right out of San Diego.”
