The second guard, Commander Li himself, dropped his rifle and put his hands in the air, just too late. Judd Crocker came through that doorway like a charging bull, fueled by the frustrated fury of almost two weeks of captivity. He rammed his left hand hard up under Li’s throat and carried him back ten feet from the wall, holding him suspended three inches above ground level, his feet kicking wildly.
Then the CO drew back his right fist and smashed it into the Chinese commander’s face, letting him drop to the floor.
“STAND BACK, SIR! RIGHT NOW. HE’S STILL ARMED…WATCH THAT PISTOL…SIR…SIR…STEP ASIDE!” Paul Merloni was not joking.
But Judd Crocker was not stepping aside for anyone. He drew Rick Hunter’s service revolver and shot Commander Li clean through the forehead, twice.
“That’s for a young friend of mine named Skip Laxton,” he said. “You murderous little bastard. Call it frontier justice.”
As he stepped away, Rick Hunter could see tears rolling down the CO’s bruised and battered face.
By now, Buster had cut the XO free and Linus Clarke finally stood up, throwing the towel to the ground. He did not look anywhere as beaten up as the rest of the crew, but it was clear that he had been through some kind of trauma. He was shaking, but he was clean and looked better fed than the others. Also, he was wearing a Chinese uniform shirt and shorts.
However, there was no one else left alive in the building, and Rick Hunter ordered everyone out, back into the courtyard to assess the damage done to Judd Crocker’s crew.
By the time they retraced their steps along the corridor, the lights were beginning to fail, and they kept fading, then surging back on again. This was scarcely surprising, given the general pounding the place had taken. Both searchlights had now gone out, and the lines of men now stood in almost complete darkness.
Judd Crocker shouted to ask if anyone had seen Lt. Commander Cy Rothstein, but no one had. He turned to Rick Hunter and said, “That’s the combat systems officer, cleverest man on the ship. He was under heavy interrogation…I’m extremely concerned about him.”
The SEAL leader asked if everyone was out of all three cell blocks. “Affirmative, sir,” replied Chief McCarthy.
“Make one more search, Chief…take flashlights…we gotta very important guy missing…Lt. Commander Cy Rothstein…start calling out his name.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Anyone else, Chief?”
“No, sir. All present and correct, sir. Except of course for Skip Laxton.”
“Anyone know if he could have been taken off by air?”
“Nossir,” said Lt. Shawn Pearson. “He and I were communicating through the wall until about three days ago. He’s been in the interrogation block, and I saw the same guard take him back there…it’s just that I haven’t heard from him since…”
“Jesus Christ,” said the CO. “The little bastards have killed him.”
A few more minutes passed, and then the searching parties began to arrive back. “There’s no one left in the cell blocks, sir. No one alive.”
“Well, there’s no one in the interrogation rooms, either,” said Rick. “We’ve checked them. The guardroom’s rubble. The comm room’s rubble, the dormitory badly damaged, but most of the personnel have been gassed, and anyway he couldn’t be in there. I must therefore conclude that Lieutenant Commander Rothstein has been killed. And in any event, I’m afraid we cannot remain a moment longer or else we’ll all end up dead. We have to get off this island.”
“Right, Lieutenant Commander. I understand that. Judging by their methods of interrogation, I hold out absolutely no hope whatsoever for his rescue.”
Just then a sporadic burst of gunfire burst from the hill overlooking the southern wall of the jail. The bullets flew into the big crowd in the jail yard and two seamen went down out on the left.
“IT’S THOSE TWO LITTLE BASTARDS WHO GOT AWAY FROM THE OUTSIDE PATROL!” yelled Bobby Allensworth.
“GET IN UNDER THE WALL, EVERYONE…TAKE COVER RIGHT NOW…BOBBY…GIMME ONE OF THOSE FLARES…” Rick Hunter was moving fast. He lit the flare and held it in his gloved hand, letting go at the last minute when it sparked and made liftoff. They all watched it head into the night sky, burst and illuminate the entire hillside.
Buster yelled first. “THERE THEY ARE, SIR, RIGHT UP THERE…LEFT OF THE TREES…”
“Paul, Rattlesnake, Buster, Steve…follow me. We have to get rid of them. Bring the big machine gun… otherwise they’ll try to pick us off all the way to the beach…take care of those two wounded men, Olaf…THE REST OF YOU STAY AGAINST THE WALL TILL WE GET BACK…”
Rick Hunter headed left, up the hill, in the cover of the trees, running softly through the dark, followed by four of his most trusted men. “Keep right on this treeline till we get above them…cut ’em off from cover…keep ’em pinned down on the hill…so their only way out is toward the beach…”
Rick issued his orders as he ran, and when he was high enough above the last known position of the two remaining Chinese guards, he told Paul to loose off another flare, this time through a proper launcher, rather than hand-held.
It arched like a big rocket high up over the hill, and burst in a dazzle of light. “There they are, sir…right down there…nearer the jail than when we last saw them…”
“TAKE ’EM OUT, STEVE…MACHINE GUN…”
The big petty officer opened fire immediately. Paul sent up another flare and they all saw the last of the patrol guards get up and run for higher ground. But they never made it, and the five SEALs packed up their flares and ammunition belts and headed back down to the jail.
In the mind of Admiral Zhang Yushu, all was lost in this ill-fated adventure. The American submarine was gone, indeed the entire Canton dockyard was almost gone.
And now it was obvious to him that the forces of the United States had landed on Xiachuan and taken the jail. There would be, he knew, many, many casualties, and much worse, no prisoners.
So far as he knew, only two of the Americans had actually died. And they were the only two Americans who were safe, so far as he could tell. The rest of them, if they escaped, which they now seemed certain to do, would sing out to the whole world what had befallen them after their ship had been essentially hijacked in international waters.
It was not, and had never been, the policy of the regime of Communist China to give a damn what the rest of the world thought. But increasingly, in the interest of international trade, they had tried to be at least agreeable to world opinion.
This looked to Zhang like trouble on a grand scale. In fact, this could turn out to be Tiananmen Square in the jungle. For the first time in his entire life, Zhang Yushu thought his career might be on the line here.
He was simply uncertain whether any C-in-C in any part of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy could afford to be the only person responsible for a disaster of this magnitude: nuclear catastrophe, many Chinese deaths; failure to incarcerate prisoners, many more Chinese deaths; loss of two massively expensive helicopters to foreign enemy on Chinese soil; loss of a highly expensive guided missile patrol boat in Chinese waters, on a Chinese jetty, to the same foreign enemy; and worldwide public condemnation of Chinese methods of interrogation of a most important friendly trading partner.
And only one solitary person to blame: Admiral Zhang Yushu himself, architect of the entire, hideous comedy of errors.
Admiral Zu stood up and walked across the room, wearing a deep frown.
“Is there any point speculating that the Americans may not actually have attacked our island, and that we are just experiencing some kind of major power cut?”
“None. No power cut would affect the radio or the satellites. The reason we are unable to contact Xiachuan is because the Americans have attacked it. There is no other explanation. And I know them so well.”
“But how?”
