peninsula. Following the 112.30-degree line of longitude, I’m showing a very gentle shelf into deeper water, six miles before it gets to seventy-five feet, then another three miles to one hundred feet depth, twelve more miles to one hundred and fifty feet…as submarine country goes, it’s approximately fucking lousy…sorry, Kathy, I thought you were John Bergstrom.”
Kathy giggled at the steely-eyed tyrant she adored.
“To find really decent water, two-hundred-foot-plus depth, you have to be sixty miles out, which means the submarines are probably going to end up on the surface during the takeout, but by then the Chinese Navy is going to be totally involved with a nuclear catastrophe in their own dockyard. Any problems with a Chinese patrol, we sink the sonofabitch, right?”
“Right,” said Kathy.
“Okay, sweetheart. Print that out for me, will you…then get John Bergstrom on a secure line.”
He continued staring at the chart, trying to imagine the terrain the SEALs’ reconnaissance party would encounter. Since the place had been uninhabited for so long, he assumed they would hit primary forest, a landscape dominated by tall, uncut trees, which creates darkness below and thus reduces undergrowth. That was good. What was also good was an ocean bottom that appeared sandy rather than rocky. If the submarine commanders wanted to take a few minor chances creeping in, in the dark, deep as possible in shallow water, they wouldn’t do much worse than scrape off a few barnacles. That was also good.
The secure phone rang. Admiral Morgan picked it up and someone said, “Just a moment, Admiral Bergstrom is right here…”
“Arnie…what news?”
“We found ’em, John. Island, 21.40N 112.35E. I’ve made my first observations…Kathy’s just printing ’em out…get ’em off the satellite in ten. George has a lot of good pix…you should have ’em electronically inside thirty.”
“Perfect. The guys have landed. It’s around oh-one hundred Thursday. They should all be on the
“Is the submarine ready?”
“Yessir. Right on station. Five miles off the carrier’s bow, my last report. ASDV’s prepared, in the shelter on deck.”
“According to my charts, John, we’re nine hundred and fifty miles out — which means that if we leave right away the guys will be in the area, say sixty miles south in deepish water, by Friday afternoon…they go in as soon as it’s dark…and we want ’em out by oh-two hundred Sunday morning…Operation Nighthawk starts Sunday night. It’s tight. Too tight. But it’s now or never.”
“You got it, sir…we’ll talk in an hour. I got Frank Hart on the other line…secure from Okinawa…we’re all set.”
Arnold Morgan smiled darkly, picked up his green telephone and hit a button connecting him to the President’s secretary. “Hi, Miss Jane,” he said. “Arnold Morgan here. Would you tell the President to cease whatever the hell he’s doing for the next ten minutes, and report to my office with the utmost speed and stealth.”
Miss Jane laughed, despite the fact that it was entirely possible no one in the entire history of the White House had ever issued such a blunt command to a sitting President of the United States.
She relayed the message verbatim to the Chief Executive, who also laughed, as much as he was capable of laughing these days, and excused himself from a meeting with Harcourt Travis and the Israeli ambassador. Then he made his way to Admiral Morgan’s office with the utmost speed and stealth.
“Hey, Arnie…how do we look?”
“Sir, we look just about as good as it’s possible to look, given our awful circumstances.”
“Have we found ’em?”
“Yup, we found ’em.”
“Have we got a shot at rescue?”
“It’s under way, sir. Siddown. Let me fill you in.”
When President Clarke returned to the Oval Office 20 minutes later, he no longer felt that the burden of the catastrophe in Canton was entirely on his shoulders. Right now he felt he was sharing it with a lot of very, very good guys, and that in the end, there was a real chance Linus would make it home. He had not felt that way before.
The huge Sea Stallion helicopter came thundering, out of the night for the third time, hovering and then touching down gently on the runway lately vacated by the Galaxy. Off to the left, standing outside in the warm air blowing southerly off the Philippine Sea, were Lt. Commander Rick Hunter, Chief Petty Officer John McCarthy, and a half-dozen other SEALs who had been supervising the loading of the gear and their 40-odd colleagues who had already made the journey out to the
Colonel Hart was working high in the tower with Lt. Commander Bennett and a small staff setting up the operational headquarters on the carrier. These were excellent quarters, because Admiral Art Barry, the battle group commander, had decided the SEAL commander should work in conjunction with his own 70-strong staff in the admiral’s own ample-sized ops room.
This was principally because Operation Nighthawk would be relatively short, just a few days, and it would not be worth installing a brand-new set of comms and computerized naval charts. Besides, Admiral Barry was longing to know precisely what was going on, and he very much wanted to work with the legendary Colonel Hart, around whom an unmistakable aura of mystique revolved.
Anyway, Art Barry now had the carrier under way, moving southwesterly in a long swell toward Taiwan at around 25 knots. When Rick Hunter and his men arrived they would have made by far the longest of the three helicopter journeys. But the Sea Stallion had a range of almost 600 miles and clattered along at 130 knots, eating up the now 90-mile journey from Okinawa in 45 minutes.
It touched down on the gigantic 1,090-foot-long flight deck of the carrier at 0430, and the SEALs set about unloading the last of their crates, the ones with the high explosive. There were two forklift trucks and four ordnance staff from the carrier to assist in the removal of the C4, the limpet mines, and the 40-pound satchel charges, and to ensure that they were safely stored, ready for transportation to the island of Xiachuang.
Chief John McCarthy went down in the aft lift on the port side with the forklifts in order to check and mark the explosive cases in their designated area. Several of the other SEALs, already regarded with some awe by the deck crew, stood around looking at the lines of fighter/attack aircraft, placed neatly around the perimeters of the flight deck, with the great central runway left clear for landing on at all times. The carrier’s giant steam catapults can have these fighters away at 20-second intervals if necessary.
Flight crew pointed out the aerial cavalry gathered on the deck of this ferocious example of front-line United States naval muscle: the 20 F-14D Tomcats, ranged in two lines on the starboard side. Toward the stern, the SEALs could see four EA-6B Prowlers, four Hawkeyes, six Vikings, two Shadows, and six helicopters.
In two long lines to starboard was a total of 36 F/A-18 Hornets, the lightning-fast workhorse of the U.S. naval attack strike force. Out here in the black of the Pacific night, the
But the subtleties of modern checks and balances of power, and the appalling ramifications of war on a global scale, sometimes render such monstrous examples of brute strength back to the age of the dinosaurs. Sometimes it works, but not always. And this was one of the tricky ones. The SEALs’ silent methods, involving high planning and low cunning, more often than not left an enemy utterly bewildered as to the identity of the culprit.
God willing, this weekend would see them carry out their deadly work in secrecy. And it was paradoxical that the most terrifying secret of all was already standing unrecognized, less than 100 feet away, from the on-deck SEALs. No, one noticed two F/A-18 Hornets, armed, parked separately at the end of the line, both ready to go, the second in case the first failed to start. No chances taken.
Clipped underneath the fuselage of each Hornet was a 14-foot-long, dark green, laser-guided armor-piercing
