“Seriously, Dan, I can’t see how we can make it in there on the surface…straight up the middle of the channel. They’ll surely have a patrol boat. And there’s not enough water to bring even the ASDV in submerged.”

“I got a few notes right here, Ricky. Apparently there’s an unmarked channel in there, maybe forty feet deep, enough water to get a diesel-electric submarine into the jetties.”

“You mean right in the center of the tidal stream? Jesus, that’s only about as wide as the home stretch at Laurel Park.”

“Guess so.”

“I don’t need a submarine. Be better off on White Rajah. He knows how to stay straight.”

“Well, at least you’re not gonna be driving. Last time you and I tried to stay straight in the middle of the night you hit a telephone pole with your dad’s truck and knocked out half the lights in Bourbon County.”

“Yeah,” said Rick. “But I was only eighteen years old.”

“Nonetheless, old buddy, your legend lives on. No one’s achieved anything like that with that particular pole since Arthur Hancock hit it in the middle of the night back in the 1960s.”

“Keep pretty good company, don’t I? The great Arthur Hancock and the future Admiral Rick Hunter. You want someone to put your lights out, you can’t do a whole lot better than us.”

“Well, I hope someone’s put ’em all out when you get into this Bassein River. You get caught, Chinese sailors slice off balls of aging Kentucky hardboot. First gelded SEAL reporting for duty, yessir.”

“Shut up, Dan, for Christ’s sake. You’re making me nervous.”

“Okay. No more jokee. Let’s have another look at that chart. Now, see this mark here, this is where your boss, Admiral Bergstrom, suggests we make the rendezvous point. We got one hundred sixty feet of water, and we can put Shark under the surface with room to spare. That’s 16.00N 94.01E, about twelve miles off the Burmese coast west sou’west of Cape Negrais.

“We launch the ASDV right there and steer one-two-zero straight into the mouth of the delta. It’s all of sixteen miles, and it’s going to take two and a half hours. That’s where it gets tricky, because you have to find the damn channel. We know it’s there, because we know they got a submarine in there. But we do not know where the hell it is, and right here we got a real issue.

“And a big question: Does it run north or south of this little island here…what’s it called? Thamihla Kyun. There’s a little deep water to the south, maybe sixty feet plus. But your men in Coronado think they dredged straight across this narrow shoal. It’s easier to drag silt out of the shallows. Your guys think the channel’s right in there…. see? Right here…by this fifty-foot trench northwest of Thamihla.”

Commander Hunter stared at the chart. “Okay, but what if they’re wrong? We’ll just plow the ASDV straight into the bottom, and we might never get it out. How are we supposed to do this?”

“Very, very slowly, my lad. Using your sonar, sounding the bottom, carefully checking the surface picture whenever you dare. See this mark here? That’s a red can, flashing light every two seconds…I want you to take a visual on the periscope…the guys think you’ll pick up the main entry channel, right here…less than a mile east of the can. And that’s where you alter course. Speed three knots, steer three-five-zero for two thousand meters and change course at 15.53N 94.16E. At this point you are going to be in patrolled waters, and you’re gonna be awful careful, hear me?”

“Yessir, Danny. Jeez, you really know this submarine crap, right? I can see why your boss handed the insertion over to you.”

“Nearly. I had to ask him. I just didn’t want you going in there briefed by anyone except me. Kinda surprising how easily he agreed, though.”

“Guess he recognizes a young master.”

“Guess so. Just keep paying attention to what I’m telling you. We got another hour before lunch. Then the first formal briefing of your guys starts at fifteen hundred hours. I’m sitting in on it, so don’t fuck it up. Don’t want to have to keep correcting you. So listen.”

“How ’bout you listen for a minute, shithead?”

Dan chuckled at the sobriquet, an ageless boyhood term of endearment. But Rick Hunter continued seriously, “What happens if we do bump the bottom and we can’t find the goddamned channel? What then?”

“Look, I realize you’ve been rolling around in the dirt strangling guards, killing terrorists and blowing things up all your life. But what I’m going to show you requires careful thought…now look here…this deep trench is very important because it’s a haven for a small submarine, moving through waters that are plainly too shallow to allow it free passage.

“You want to get a channel into this main lane, which your guys have marked here; you want first to get into the trench where you don’t have to dredge. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“Right. Now there are two ways into the trench. The long way, across here, maybe two and a half miles, dredging all the way, in water only fifteen feet deep. That’ll take months. Or, alternatively, you could take this three-mile detour, west of the island, in deeper water, and that way you only need to cut a channel three hundred yards long max, and you’re in the trench. What do you think?”

“I’ll take the three hundred yards cut, any time, any day.”

“And that’s what our oceanographers think the Chinese Navy will have done. Therefore your driver will take the ASDV around through the deeper water, and we think he’ll find the hole straight into the trench. When the water settles at, say, fifty feet, you guys go to PD and you’ll see the flashing light about a mile up in front. At which point you’re headed straight for the channel, and that’ll take you right in to where you wanna be.”

“What happens if some bastard’s coming the other way down this narrow ditch?”

“Edge hard to starboard. Drop down to the bottom and sit in the mud, act like a recently drowned pig. Whatever it is will go right by. If you hear anything, just lie very quietly on the bottom. Gently.”

“You keep saying ‘quiet’ and ‘gentle.’ You suggesting I’m some kind of a gorrila, young Danny?”

“Not really, but you’re the leader and you got a lot more in common with a gorilla than a sea wraith.”

“Well, anyway. I’m not driving.”

“Thank Christ. But what I was going to mention was the utter unlikelihood of your meeting another ship. I mean right now the latest satellite picture shows only two warships in there, plus a submarine, with two or three patrol boats running around some of the time.

“We have no pictures of any boats running around after midnight at any time. Personally I think you will find the channel easily, and you will make your landing with no trouble. After that, you’re in charge. But my guys will get you out, Rick. On that you can trust me. That’s a promise.”

“Who’s driving the ASDV?”

“The best man in the Navy. He’s a specialist. You might even know him. He’s Lieutenant Mills, and he can maneuver that little ship anywhere. He’s calm, expert and very instinctive about danger. Better yet, he’s done it before. And you could not be in safer hands. He’ll get you in, and if there’s trouble, he won’t get caught. You can’t ask for more than that.”

“Yes I can.”

“What?”

“Just for you and me to be sipping a coupla cold beers on my daddy’s side porch, listening to the music, watching the mares and foals moving across the paddocks in the evening. Instead of raising hell in some Chinese dockyard.”

“Yeah, doesn’t that sound great right now? Guess it’s because we’re right around the corner from real danger. But it’s too late now to think of our own world. It’s too late. We’re in someone else’s world, big time. And we gotta make it happen.”

Two hours later, Commander Rick Hunter stood before the team that would shortly embark for the eastern end of the Indian Ocean. They had taken over a brightly lit, concrete-walled ops room, with a five-foot-wide computer screen placed at the side of a long trestle table.

The eleven SEALs who would accompany the Commander into Burmese waters were seated casually along the other side of the table with notepads and pens. Each man was issued a map of the delta of the Bassein River, plus various views, shot from the satellites, of the Chinese base itself. Everyone had a blowup of the geothermal power station that sat almost in the center of the dockyard complex.

And behind the SEALs sat the additional, but critical, personnel: The XO, Lt. Commander Dan Headley, who

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