Anyway, I’m on my lunch break, and even that’s turning into some kind of hell.”
“Hello, Admiral Morgan’s office…may I ask who’s calling?
“Arnold,” she said, pressing the HOLD button. “It’s for you…you’d better take it.”
“IS IT THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES? If not, I am formally at lunch. No calls.”
“No, it’s not the President. It’s Admiral Morris.”
“WHAT!” Admiral Morgan bounded across the room like a starving panther who had sighted a roast beef sandwich.
“George…”
The voice on the other end was brief and clipped. “Arnold, I think we’ve found ’em. I got the photographs. Helicopter right outside. I’m on my way in. See you in twenty.”
Arnold Morgan almost died of happiness. He lifted his right leg and flashed his shiny right shoe back and forth, pumping his right arm.
“GEORGE!” he exclaimed, chuckling. “George Morris. Doesn’t seem too swift when you first meet him, mind. But he’s careful, painstaking and misses nothing. The perfect detective intelligence officer. What a stroke of pure genius when I appointed him to replace me…pure genius.”
“I thought you just said he was a moron,” said Kathy, swishing across the room toward the door to order his tunafish sandwich and coffee for two.
The ensuing 20 minutes were almost more than the admiral could endure. He completely lost his appetite and, leaving even the coffee, he walked outside to the helicopter pad to wait with the security guards for the chopper from Fort Meade. And he saw it coming a long way out.
It made one small pass over the White House lawn, checked in with the control room, manned as always by Marines, and came clattering down onto the concrete square. A Marine guard moved smartly over to open the door, and Admiral George Morris disembarked clumsily, holding his briefcase and two big files, one spilling over with a Navy chart.
“Hi, George,” said Arnold Morgan. “We cracked it?”
“I think so, sir. If we haven’t, we’ve discovered something even bigger.”
“There isn’t anything bigger.”
The two men hurried to the West Wing, where one of the agents momentarily fussed about a badge for Admiral Morris. That lasted for almost three seconds, before Arnold Morgan snapped, “I do not have time for that crap, y’hear? Get the badge and bring it to my office…that upsets you or your boss, run along to the Oval Office and tell the President.”
And with that he hustled Admiral Morris through the door and on down the passage to his own office, never even hearing the agent mutter, “Yessir.”
Inside the big carpeted headquarters of the National Security Adviser, Kathy waited with coffee. George Morris opened a file and laid a line of 8 x 10 photographs on Arnold Morgan’s desk.
“Okay, sir. Let me take you through this in sequence…that way you’ll know as much as we do. Now, take this picture shot from the overhead about three weeks ago…this is one of our benchmarks…a direct shot of a couple of islands around eighty miles west of the Pearl River Delta…see, we got almost nothing on it. The place is just about uninhabited save for this cluster of probably empty buildings in the north.
“Now, sir. I put a man on this. Pulled up photographs for the past five years. There’s never been so much as one person in any picture we’ve ever had in that time. Of course I had other people studying other places along that coast…but this is where we got a development.
“In the past we’ve photographed it irregularly, but subsequent to your orders last weekend, we have intensified all our photography from the overheads, taking in this stretch of coast eighty miles east up to Houmen, and along here westerly to this island. It’s called Xiachuan, and quite frankly it was right at the limit of the range you gave us…but we’ve zoomed in on it and done blowups that I’m working toward.”
Arnold Morgan picked up the first two pictures and studied them, then moved on to the next.
“Now, sir. Take a look at this. See the difference? Right here…right here…”
“Where?”
“Here, sir…this little white spot near the buildings.
“It’s too small, George. Gimme a magnifying glass, will you?”
The admiral leveled the magnifier over the spot and peered through it. “Holy shit! It’s a helicopter.”
“Right, sir. Now have a look at the other white mark down by the water…”
“Christ, George…it’s a Navy ship.”
“Right. Now take a look at the next picture…see, right here, the white mark’s gone…but up here we can see it again…right off the coast…heading for Canton…then here, sir, we got another shot four hours later and it’s back…see, right here.”
Arnold Morgan nodded. “And what the hell, you asked, is all this military activity doing on this deserted Chinese island?”
“Right, sir. So we blew up the photographs, showing every aspect of the place. And here is the first picture. Those old buildings represent a jail…see…there’s the watchtowers. And suddenly, right here, we have an outcrop of radio aerials…and the boat’s back. Looks like it patrols for four hours and then returns. Here’s a sequence of photographs taken approximately every four hours…and here’s the blowup. We identify it as one of those Chinese fast-attack crafts…Huangfens…guess they weigh about two hundred tons…so far as I remember, they’re fitted with Russian guns.”
“George, we’re getting warm…I feel it.”
“Right, sir. But I have not finished. Now look at this…these are shots of the central yard in the jail. There are people, quite a lot of them, in this shot. What would you say? Maybe a dozen, wandering around…see this colored shot…they’re wearing full uniform, with shouldered arms…dark blue…Navy. These guys are on duty…in the middle of a deserted island. In company with a military helicopter, new communications, and a two-hundred-ton patrol boat. Right inside the range you and Colonel Hart gave us for the ferryboat last Sunday. Sir, we’ve found ’em. No doubt.”
“George, if they’re not guarding our prisoners, they’re guarding someone else’s. But the key is the set of pictures you have from last Thursday, this one here…no radio, no chopper, no patrol. By late Saturday, the infrared shots, right here, the stuff was all in place. That night, Saturday, the ferry leaves Canton with our guys, arrives Sunday morning…and your next picture sequence shows a dozen guards patrolling every time the camera clicks…”
“And, sir…in this photograph taken in the small hours of Monday morning…look here…you can see the lights in the towers are on, sweeping across this courtyard…”
“By God, George, you’re right again. We got ’em.”
Admiral Morris gathered up the photographs, left some for reference for the National Security Adviser, and made his exit, “back to the factory.”
Arnold Morgan switched on his big illuminated computer screen and pulled up the chart that featured the entire area around the Pearl River Delta. He needed to think before he contacted John Bergstrom, and he needed to give himself a detailed picture of the tiny island the Navy SEALs must now assault.
He called Kathy in and asked her to bring her notebook, writing down his thoughts as he called them out.
“Okay. It’s called Xiachuan Dao. It’s six miles long and three at its widest point. It’s set about four miles to the west of the island of Shangchuan, which is approximately twice as big. Chart reference 21.40N 112.35E. The jail is situated way up in the northeast corner of the island, which is almost on the edge, since the island is set diagonally in shallow water, northeast to southwest.
“Chart shows one big mountain in the south called Guanyin Shan, thirteen hundred feet high. There’s another peak rising to sixteen hundred feet guarding the entire northern end. There’s a long flat peninsula in the southwest jutting almost a mile out into the ocean.
“The western side is dominated by a long marshy mudflat, so whatever we do, we won’t make any kind of a landing there. The only deep water, close in, lies between the two islands, which is how the ferry got in. And the patrol boat. There’s probably twenty feet in that area, which means we probably go in from the south, and get out to the east using inflatables, four of ’em.
“Incoming from the South China Sea my chart shows a depth of forty-two feet a half mile off the southern
