disbelief and rank poison.
“Just so long as they don’t think for one moment they’re going to get away with this,” he growled. “They got the island. Needless to say they got the museum, which was why they went to war in the first place. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about any of it, short of going to war ourselves. But there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat, and we’re gonna make those little bastards regret the day they decided to fuck around with Uncle Sam.”
“Sorry, darling, lay that on me again, will you?” Kathy O’Brien had slipped into the study bearing orange juice and hot croissants with preserves.
The Admiral’s eyes were still glued to the screen, but he was hungry, having been there, on and off, all night. He said nothing but reached out absentmindedly for one of the croissants, and he let out a yell, it was so hot.
“Jesus Christ!” he cried, adopting one of his favorite mock-wounded expressions. “What the hell is that? A pastry grenade?”
Kathy was wearing a dark green silk robe, and she laughed as ever at the speed with which Arnold Morgan could coin original material.
He turned toward her, smiling in appreciation of the woman he loved. “I shouldn’t think this burn’s worse than second degree,” he said pompously, shaking both his head and his right hand. “I shall require ice, cold water, towels and the home number of my lawyer. You did keep your insurance premiums up? I do hope so.”
“You should of course have been on the stage rather than wasting your time trying to eliminate Red China,” said Kathy, expertly cleaving the croissant sideways with a serrated knife and spreading it with butter and strawberry jam. “Here, take this,” she added, offering the plate.
“Well, why the hell didn’t the damn thing burn you?” he demanded.
“Probably because I didn’t clamp my hand around the hottest part on top,” she replied. “Heat tends to rise, you know.”
Arnold then firmly informed her that as the former master of a large nuclear reactor on a U.S. Navy attack submarine, he was acquainted with the rudiments of physics, even if he had temporarily forgotten the heat- retentive properties of the common croissant.
She poured him some cold orange juice, and advised him to take the greatest care with the glass since he would probably get frostbite. But Arnold was no longer listening.
“Jesus, Kathy, will you look at that?”
She turned to the screen where the giant U.S. aircraft carrier
“The accident on board the
“The U.S. Navy has denied our request to put a camera team on board for the final miles of the journey, and they have denied us all requests for an interview to explain precisely what happened. Last night the Navy was showing no signs of any intention to clear up the mystery of what happened out there west of the Ishigaki Islands on the night of May twenty-second.”
Admiral Morgan ate his croissant thoughtfully. Like the Navy, he was of course keenly aware of what had happened. Two Chinese torpedoes, fired from one single Kilo-Class submarine, had crippled the 88,000-tonner. Which made her the fifth Battle Group leader to become unavailable for the protection of Taiwan. Counting the
“Maybe it was for the best,” offered Kathy. “Maybe Taiwan is ultimately better off as a part of mainland China. And maybe the carrier would have been drawn into a real shooting war if she’d been in her regular patrol area. And there might have been God knows how many dead, and we could have been sucked right into a long conflict.”
“Wrong,” replied Arnold, uncharmingly.
“What do you mean, ‘wrong’? You’re not always right about absolutely everything.”
“Wrong again,” replied Arnold, even more uncharmingly.
Kathy poured them both some more coffee and awaited the short, bludgeoning lecture she knew was on its way.
“Katherine,” he said, “a mighty navy, with nuclear weapons and a strike force of devastating guided missiles, has nothing to do with inflicting defeat and destruction upon another nation. It has to do with prevention. An all- powerful nation like ourselves has one useful purpose, and that’s to frighten the life out of anyone who might step out of line.
“That’s why this world is mostly at peace. By that I mean there has been no global conflict for years and years. It’s
“They attacked Taiwan because we were not there to scare ’em off. As we know, to our cost, they made damn sure we were not there. But it would not have happened if we had been.”
“Well, I suppose not. But I still have never understood why the carrier was so far out of its operational area, and how the Chinese were somehow lying in wait. I know that’s what you think. But I don’t really get it. It was almost as if they
“The media are probably going to find out that the carrier was hit. But I agree, it’s a real puzzle why the carrier was so far out of its area. I look forward to reading Admiral Holt’s preliminary report next week. So do a lot of other people.”
The aging black hull of the 5,000-ton Sturgeon-Class submarine moved slowly through the warm blue depths of the eastern Indian Ocean. She was just about at the end of her 2,000-mile journey from Diego Garcia, and she moved to the northeast, about 30 miles short of the great shelving Juanita Shoal, where the ocean floor suddenly rises up from 3,000 feet to 120 feet, to form a massive, almost sheer, underwater mountain wall of rock, shale and sand.
Lieutenant Pearson, watching the chart, in constant communication with sonar officer Lt. Commander Josh Gandy, would order
Lieutenant Commander Headley, now in sole control of the insertion of the SEALs, deliberately ordered their speed cut to 12 knots, which would put them on station at the RV point at 1800, approximately two hours before dark.
For the past four days they had steamed steadily, submerged all the way through the near-bottomless waters that surround the southern shores of the Indian subcontinent. It had been the busiest underwater journey Dan Headley could ever remember, with frequent satellite communications, while Fort Meade and the Pentagon battled for information about the Chinese base on Haing Gyi Island.
Lieutenant Shawn Pearson, like many navigators, was an excellent draftsman, and he provided immeasurable assistance to the SEAL commander, making detailed scale drawings of China’s newest Naval complex. By the third day, they had it pretty well nailed down. They had located a tough-looking chain-link fence that guarded the southern border of the dockyard. They also had located a guardhouse on the southern perimeter.
But as far as they could see, the fence ended abruptly at some dense woodland that protected the northwestern perimeter of the dockyard from the most treacherous-looking marshland area where the Letpan Stream splits and forms two wide channels. Each one runs straight through the swamp and out into the unnavigable Haing Gyi Shoal, which provides only four feet of water in some places at low tide.
The new satellite pictures being beamed into the submarine were grainy and of very moderate quality, but Lt. Pearson’s sharp pencil drew hard, accurate lines through the chart of the swamp. And
