stretchers. Dan Conway drove himself forward, praying not to pass out. He threw up before they reached the gates, and when he got inside he fell onto the concrete. And another instructor stood over him and roared at him to get up, and go one more time through “the tunnel”—the huge flooded rowing boat, which required an underwater crawl
Dan was gasping for air, his lungs throbbing, and the thought of going under the water for more than a minute was too much. And he shook his head, and he knew it was over…and then he got up, and drove himself through the tunnel, under the water, wriggling his way under the seats, tearing the skin on his knees, but still going forward. When he finally climbed over the gunwales, he blacked out and two instructors caught him as he fell. The last words he heard were, “Right here we got a real live Navy SEAL…”
Next to him sat Lt. Junior Grade Garrett Atkins from California. Garrett was two years younger than Dan, and had started his Navy career training to be a combat systems officer in a Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine. He was good at it, too, but Garrett was an outdoorsman, loved the beach, loved the mountains, drove all over the place in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, and grew to dislike the terrible confines of a big attack submarine.
Garrett was a tall, rather shy sportsman, an outstanding high school football player, and a baseball player. He wanted to leave the submarine service, but he did not want a soft option, and he decided to try something even tougher. They presented him with his golden Trident one year later, and he lived for the day when he would go into action with a SEAL combat platoon. It was a day not so very far off. Both he and his pal Conway sat in silence as they flew over the flat farmland of the Midwest, guessing that something big was about to break out.
Back in the main group were two outstanding petty officers, both experts at fighting in the mountains, both veterans of the Kosovo campaign seven years previous. From North Carolina came Catfish Jones — no one ever found out if he had a more formal name. Catfish came from a family that had lived in or around Morehead City for nine generations, right out there on the last mainland before the Outer Banks.
Catfish’s aunt owned a bookstore right opposite the marina, but he had never taken to that line of commerce. Instead he tried a career as a deck hand on a big fishing trawler, working the rough Atlantic waters out beyond the Shackleford Banks, which guard the shores of Carteret County. Just southeast of here, the banks abruptly turn northeast and rename themselves the Core Banks, sweeping narrowly for 80 miles past Ocracoke Island on up to the storm-tossed waters around the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
These are tough seas in which to make a living, and men drown out there every year. They were not, however, apparently rough enough for Catfish, a 28-year-old, fair-haired, blue-eyed bull of a man. He stood five feet ten inches tall, with a 19-inch neck, and he had the strength to have once lifted the rear of a sports car clean off the ground with his bare hands while his buddies changed the wheel, in the pouring rain, in the middle of the night.
Catfish had a group of friends at the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base a few miles down the coast from Morehead, and before he was 49, he had retired from fishing and enrolled in the Corps. Eighteen months later he applied to join the SEALs and finished second in his intake group.
It was said he had a harrowing time fighting in the Kosovo mountains north of Pristina, alongside the man who now sat next to him, 30-year-old SEAL veteran Rocky Lamb, a black career serviceman from the Bronx who had joined the Navy immediately after leaving high school.
Catfish and Rocky had worked together in those mountains for three weeks. And shortly after the American aircraft went down, they had pulled off two impressive rescues involving both American and British Special Forces, all of whom were surrounded by nearly overwhelming numbers. No one knew how many Yugoslav troops they had taken out in order to cleave a safe route out through the heavily patrolled wooded hillsides. But a lot of soldiers had a lot of gratitude for the two American SEALs. Both of their names were on Rick Hunter’s list of top 10 choices for the mission in the South China Sea.
Also in that group were two young SEALs, both age 24, both country boys from way down in the bayous in St. James Parish, west of New Orleans. Riff Davies and Buster Townsend joined the Navy right out of high school rather than go to college. Riff ended up on an aircraft carrier, and Buster on a guided missile cruiser.
But these were a couple of guys who craved real adventure, and three years after they made their pact to join the Navy, they made another one, to try to gain entry into the SEALs. They were both from tough Louisiana families that for generations had ground out a living raising sugar beets in the hot swampy lands around the Mississippi Delta. From first grade they had been rivals as well as friends, playing football and basketball for their high school.
That rivalry drove them on through the rigors of the SEALs Hell Week, drove them through the BUD/S course, drove them to find reserves of strength and determination they never knew they had! In the months after they won their golden Tridents, they went on SEAL courses in various tropical locations, which caused them to rise to great heights in the estimations of their instructors. Riff and Buster could operate in the kind of oppressive, steamy heat they had known since birth, and both men were tireless on land and in the water. Everyone knew the strapping, powerfully built Buster had killed an alligator with a hunting knife at the age of 15, mainly because Riff told them all about it: “Big ole sonofabitch it was, too…ole Buster just rammed that long knife o’ his straight into its eye and through its brain…just as well. I thought that sucker was gonna eat him right up.”
But the legend of the two combat troops from the bayous really took root when young Davies, on an overseas exercise, stepped right into the range of a large, angry spitting cobra. Two other SEALs with him literally froze at the sight of it, swaying not eight feet in front of them. They stayed frozen, too, until Riff slammed it into a tree with a bamboo stick and blew its head off with his Sig Sauer pistol. According to one SEAL colleague, “It was like watching John Wayne nail a rattlesnake.” The description earned Riff the memorable nickname of “Rattlesnake” Davies.
“Gotta watch out for them goddamned things,” he said in his slow Louisiana drawl. “But they ain’t near so quick as you think…just need a long stick and a good sideswipe…that way they take their eye off you…been killing snakes all my life, matter of fact.”
Lt. Commander Rick Hunter as yet had no idea where they were headed after Coronado, but he was happy with the men he had chosen to fight with. So far as he could remember, there had never been this much haste, expenditure and urgency about any mission. In his mind that meant only one thing. They were either going to blow something very big to smithereens, or they were going to take out some form of enemy of the United States. Possibly both. But either way, Rick smelled combat. He doubted it would be easy, and he wondered if some of them might be killed. Still, he was confident in the guys. And he took comfort in one of the old SEAL maxims: “There are very few of life’s problems that cannot be solved with high explosives.”
Nonetheless, he knew they were not invincible. SEALs bled and agonized like everyone else. It was just that it took about seven opponents to make this happen to one SEAL. “
The ferry eased its way next to the old stone jetty, which was set into sloping rocks on the south side of the wide northeastern peninsula. Behind them the prisoners could see a long, flat, sandy beach, washed today by warm, gentle seas. Up ahead the terrain was different, steeper, and Pearson noted the twin mountain peaks, one, the higher of the two, around a mile and a half west of the ferry. The other was more than a mile to the north.
It was hard to imagine where they were going, since the place seemed uninhabited by civilians. There was not so much as a fishing boat along the water, not even those long narrow bamboo rafts favored by the ancient people of this part of China. There was no sign of life save for a few seabirds, many of which had followed the ferry in. There was, however, already moored on the long jetty, a newly arrived 200-ton Huangfen fast-attack patrol craft, a Chinese-built Type Osa 1, capable of 39 knots, armed with four Russian 25mm guns, plus twin surface-to- surface missile launchers. Its diesel engines, with drive three shafts, were still running.
Everyone heard the ferry bump against the dock. The Chinese guards were out on the port side, yelling at a shore crew that emerged mysteriously from the wooded foreshore. The lines were thrown and made fast to old iron rings embedded in the concrete of the jetty. It was a drop of maybe six feet to dry land, but the guards had brought with them the big gangway from Canton. They secured it, and Commander Li materialized from nowhere. He stood
