U.S.S. Seawolf

do we get more’n a hundred of ’em out of there?”

“Skip the details, Joe. Right here I’m talking principle.” And without missing a beat, he picked up the phone and growled, “Kathy, get me SPECWARCOM in Coronado on the line…I want to talk to Vice Admiral Bergstrom. Right away. Wherever he is. Whatever he’s doing.”

By now, it was 2:00 P.M. on the East Coast, which put Admiral Bergstrom in his office talking to two of his top Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) instructors, the hardest men in the world’s hardest regiment, the standard-setters of the U.S. Navy SEALs.

“Hey, Arnold, how are you, sir? Haven’t talked for a few weeks.”

“John, quite frankly I’m desperate. I must talk to you.”

“Fine. Shoot.”

“No, here.”

“Where?”

“Washington.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“What, right now?”

“Right now.”

“How do I get there?”

“Any aircraft you have.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“Andrews?”

“Right.”

“Six hours.”

“I’ll have a chopper waiting.”

“See ya.”

One thing, Admirals Bergstrom and Morgan knew each other well.

“He, of course, being our great Special Forces pragmatist, will be even more pessimistic than I am,” suggested Joe Mulligan.

“Yeah. But he’ll say, Okay, let’s do it, but how? You’re saying, Let’s not do it, because it’s impossible.”

“Well, Arnie, it is.”

“I know.”

“It would be as if we had a hundred important Chinese prisoners in a state penitentiary in, say, the middle of Atlanta. And a dozen armed Chinese insurgents tried to get ’em out. We’d wrap those guys up in a matter of hours.”

“Not if they made their move in the dead of night. And not if they’d been trained by Bergstrom’s guys out in Coronado. And they brought with them all the right gear. Because that might prove very tough indeed.”

“Okay, Arnie. I guess it might.”

“And that’s our chance, Joe. And we gotta try. Did you see the President this morning? The poor guy was close to tears. We have to do something. I’m just not prepared to tell him we won’t even try.”

1900. Friday. July 7.

The Situation Room. The West Wing. The White House.

The meeting had been running for four hours now. And the arguments swayed back and forth. Every time the military members of the committee suggested any form of attack, Harcourt Travis pointed out the appalling consequences of war with China. He stressed the Asian fixation with “loss of face.” And he made no concessions whatsoever—“If the USA begins killing Chinese citizens in order to free the submarine and the prisoners, the Chinese will hit back, no question in my mind.”

“But surely that would apply to any nation we considered had to be punished?” said General Scannell.

“Maybe,” replied Harcourt. “But the Chinese are different. They have so many people. If we hit them a devastating blow and took ten million of their citizens off the face of the earth, their mindset would not alter. They would shrug and say, Irrelevant, we still have twelve hundred and forty million people left.”

“Kinda scary, when you think about it,” said Bob MacPherson. “But unless we are able to do something, I guess they’ll soon be able to rampage about the world doing anything they please, just because no one feels big enough to fight them.”

“I don’t really think that’s so,” said Arnold Morgan. “The real issue is, who is prepared to risk a Chinese nuclear missile coming screaming out of the skies, aimed at the US of A?”

“Well,” said the President, “who is?”

“I am,” said his National Security Adviser.

“You are?”

“Sure I am,” growled Morgan. “Remember a few other things about them. Not just their gigantic population of goddamned rice-growing peasants, slopping around in fucking paddy fields. Remember their lack of sophistication. Last time they tried launching an ICBM it nearly blew up their own ship. Every time they launch one of these programs they screw it up. So what could they hit? Pearl Harbor with a big missile, nuclear-headed? No, they couldn’t hit something that small. And would they want to? I don’t think so. They’d be having a discussion like this one. Guided by their political commissars, backing off, backing off, running scared.

“They’d make old Pung Yang Travis here look like Alexander the Great!”

“Thank you, Arnold,” said Harcourt urbanely. “Inside every conservative Secretary of State there’s always a noble savage trying to get free.”

They all laughed at the light relief. And just then Admiral Brett Stewart, COMSUBLANT, arrived, apologizing for his lateness, explaining that he had been at sea when the signal had come through summoning him to Washington.

“I for one am delighted to see you, Brett,” said Harcourt. “As the current commander of our Atlantic submarine strike force, you might be able to prevent our esteemed chairman from declaring war on China in order to get one of our submarines back.”

“I already heard,” said the admiral. “And I don’t think we’re going to get it back. Not even if we took out half the Chinese Navy. They want that submarine. They probably want it more than they’ve ever wanted anything. My guess is that right now they’re in the process of moving in their engineers and scientists, probably with reinforcements from Russia, all getting ready to take Seawolf apart. Judging from the signals I’d say they’d opened fire on Judd Crocker’s repair crew on the stern of the submarine. I expect you’ve gone over all that, and I’m sure you agree, they really want that submarine. Opening fire on an American Navy crew isn’t something anyone does lightly.”

“My thoughts entirely,” said Admiral Morgan.

“Fact is, we cannot get the ship out of Canton,” said Admiral Stewart. “Anyone know if they’ve shut down the reactor?”

“We think so,” said the CNO. “Next satellite pass will show us.”

“It would make sense if they had shut it down,” said Stewart. “Then when they get their team in place, they’ll take it critical, moving everyone through the process, step by step…telling us, no doubt, that there’s some kind of a radiation leak and it’s not safe yet to return it to us.”

“Admiral Morgan thinks if we want to preserve the high technology in Seawolf, we have to blow it up.”

“Correct,” replied Admiral Stewart instantly. “Otherwise there’s gonna be a dozen of ’em, flying the flag of the People’s Republic, dominating all of the Far Eastern oil routes, and some in the Middle East. China’s become expansionist in the past five years. If you want my opinion, they must not have a fleet of Seawolf submarines. And that means we gotta take out the original.”

“Who agrees?” said Admiral Morgan. “If you do, raise your right hand, like I’m now doing.”

Admiral Mulligan raised his, General Scannell also. So did the Defense Secretary, Bob MacPherson. Admiral Stewart raised his. The two CIA men raised theirs. Harcourt Travis said that such a military operation was so far out of his realm, he would abstain, but would not vote against.

The President himself stood up and asked if he might be excused for five minutes, but he too would abstain