severely.
Lieutenant Commander Gandy just shook his head.
And they all felt the slight lurch as USS
Nonetheless, within 20 minutes they were back on station at 26.36N 56.49E, facing the right way, 17 miles southeast of the Chinese refinery, and the underwater deck crew was wrestling the ASDV out of the flooded shelter and clear of the big submarine’s casing.
Rusty Bennett proved an enormous help to the four-man team, and they shoved the miniature submarine out in near-record time. It was on its way before they blew out the dry-deck shelter, and up in the bow Lt. Brian Sager was conning the little ship in, on instruments only, assisted by his navigator.
Behind them the SEALs were dry but cramped, and they traveled mostly in silence. The journey was made at six knots all the way, and Brian Sager kept on going well beyond their estimated point of departure at 26.45N 56.57E. He pushed on for another mile and a half, just below the surface, until they gently brushed the soft, sandy bottom, less than three miles from the beach. The sonar on the ASDV had picked up no vessel within 10 miles.
It was exactly 1900 and growing dark when Lt. Commander Ray Schaeffer, wearing his wet suit, hood up, goggles and flippers on, Draeger connected, attack board in his left hand, slid down into the dry compartment, ready for the flooding. Three minutes later he dropped through the hatch into the warm waters of the Strait of Hormuz.
Ray stared at the compass, breathed steadily and was grateful that his limpet mine, Draeger and weapons seemed to weigh nothing. He tried not to think of the abrupt difference there would be when they hit the shallows.
Moments later, one rookie combat SEAL, Charlie to his colleagues, knifed downward through the water next to him. Breathing carefully, he placed his right hand on Ray’s wide shoulder. The Lieutenant Commander from Marblehead swung around until the attack board compass told him EAST, and then the two SEALs kicked toward the oil refinery owned by the Republic of China.
The extra distance covered by Lt. Sager meant the swimmers would essentially run aground inside of two miles. And the two lead SEALs kicked and breathed steadily, swimming about nine feet below the surface, covering 10 feet each time they snapped their flippers. After 30 minutes Ray estimated they had covered 1,200 yards, two- thirds of a mile, and right then nothing was hurting.
Behind them on Attack Board Two came Lt. Dan Conway, guiding another rookie; Clouds Nathan swam powerfully five minutes back; then Rob Cafiero, then two rookies, both ace swimmers. Last of all swam the tall Petty Officer from North Carolina, Ryan Combs, both hands on his attack board, leading his rookie, who dragged the machine gun in a special waterproof container, which made it nearly weightless.
The entire operation would have been a thousand percent easier if they had been able to row inshore in a couple of big eight-man inflatables. But senior management at SPECWARCOM had dismissed that as a possibility out of hand…
As Admiral Bergstrom had mentioned at the time, “Guess I’d rather have a dozen tired SEALs wallowing around in the surf than twelve dead ones floating faceup in the fucking Strait of Hormuz.”
Ray Schaeffer had sat in on that meeting, and he smiled to himself as he thought of the diabolical difference between planning in an air-conditioned room in Coronado and making a swim like this thousands and thousands of miles from home.
Ray kicked and counted, kicked and counted, keeping his eye on the compass, staying on zero-nine-zero. They’d been going for an hour and a half now, and by Ray’s reckoning that spelled 3,600 yards covered, which was two miles, give or take the length of a submarine. There was a rising moon now, and phosphorescence in the water. He thought he could make out the ocean bottom right below, but he was unsure and he did not want to waste energy, or his precious air, in finding out.
Also he was asking serious questions of his granite-hard body, and there were nagging pains high up in both thighs. His calves and ankles were mercifully fine; that was where the pain usually hit on a long swim. And there had been times when it had hurt like hell.
The kid behind him was only twenty-one years old, and there was no way Ray was going to betray tiredness, so he gritted his teeth, dug ever deeper and forced himself forward, ignoring the lactic acid now flooding into his joints and muscles, making every yard an ordeal.
Seventeen minutes after the two-mile mark, Ray felt his board sliding through sand. Instinctively he straightened up and was surprised to find himself standing up to his chest in about four feet of water, still holding the attack board. Charlie bobbed up right beside him and they both shut down their Draegers, reclining back in the water, resting their aching limbs.
They took their mouthpieces out and stored the air lines neatly. “You all right, sir?” asked Charlie.
“No problem, kid,” replied the Lieutenant Commander. “Let’s take five, then walk forward slowly for another five and wait for Dan to show up.”
“Sounds good…. Can you see anything up ahead, sir?”
“I thought I could just then, a dark shoreline directly in front, maybe a half mile. But the moon’s gone behind that cloud, and I can’t see a fucking thing now.”
By now the lead SEALs had removed their flippers. They were walking slowly forward, and they were quickly in less than three feet of water. The Draegers were beginning to weigh heavily; so were the mines. They were comfortable with the rest of their gear.
About 100 yards back, Dan Conway and his teammate broke the surface, and began to walk forward. By the time they caught up with Ray and Charlie, Clouds was in, then the rookies, only two minutes behind. Big Rob Cafiero and his rookie were in next, but they had to wait 10 minutes for Petty Officer Combs, who was of course carrying the M-60 machine gun, which might save all their lives in an emergency.
Ray Schaeffer aimed them all east, and they set off on the stretch they had all been dreading, wading, now in 18 inches of water through the long shallows, each man hauling 80 pounds plus. After 100 yards it was like walking through glue. No one complained but it was a muscle-throbbing exercise, and there was no efficient way to do it, except to keep pushing forward, lifting their feet just enough to take the real “tug” out of the water.
However, it was pleasantly warm, there was no surf to speak of and up ahead they could see the shore. And that was the good news. This walk could have been a mile and a half. As things looked, it would be only a little more than 1,000 yards. Ray ordered them to fan out and draw their weapons, which made a long line of black- hooded figures 30 yards apart. When they reached the beach, assuming it was deserted, they would close in to Lt. Commander Schaeffer’s central position to check the GPS. The numbers they were looking for were 26.47N 57.01E.
The last 100 yards were easily the worst, and they struggled through a kind of kelp field, knee-deep and clinging. But eventually they walked up onto a completely empty beach of coarse sand and occasional rocks. There was not a light, and certainly not a person, to be seen. The numbers on the GPS were right on, which explained a lot. Nothing on this particular stretch of wasteland had been picked up after a hundred satellite passes carefully logged and studied at the top-secret National Reconnaissance Office in Washington. The even more beady-eyed operators at Fort Meade had found nothing either. One mile dead ahead, across slightly hilly terrain, was the sprawling Chinese crude-oil refinery.
It was 2130, and Lt. Commander Schaeffer ordered the SEALs off the beach and into the rougher ground behind. With exquisite timing the moon came out again, and they could more or less see where they were headed without using night goggles. Up ahead they would be approaching the southwestern corner of the refinery, and somewhere before that they would make the rendezvous point, dumping most of their gear.
Four SEALs only would enter the refinery that night. Two more would cut and fold back the wire, and Petty Officer Combs would ride shotgun over the operation with the big gun, and also join the wire cutters as lookouts. No one knew what to expect in the way of guards, or even lights. They knew only that Ray Schaeffer, Dan Conway and Clouds Nathan were going through the wire perimeter fence, assisted by Charlie, to lay down the pile-driver explosives contained in the limpet mines, which they would attach to the inside-facing walls on the big gasoline holding tanks.
Chief Petty Officer Rob Cafiero would take charge of the base camp, when they found it, unloading groundsheets, setting up the radio, posting sentries, preparing the mass of explosives for the main assault the
