out the entire Chinese night patrol, but Rick was amazed by what he saw. He jumped over the two bodies, followed by Catfish, Bobby and Dallas, grabbed the rail and jumped the steps in two bounds. In front of him was the jeep, three more bodies lying around it, and one lying on it.
“What in the name of Christ?…” he muttered, just as Rattlesnake, Buster and the three rookies came charging in from the rough ground, Buster saying too loudly, “We had no choice…let’s GO-GO-GO…down to the marsh…do we take the jeep…?”
“Hell NO!” said Rick. “It’s too easy to follow. We’re better off in the dark, running on our own. Get my fucking attack board off my back, will you? We need the compass…. Okay…let’s go, that way…make a diagonal back to the fence at the jungle end…
And with that, the SEAL leader grabbed the M-60 from Rattlesnake and one of the rookies and tucked it under his arm, checking the belt to see what was left — about 36 rounds. He was the only one of them strong enough to handle it comfortably alone.
“DALLAS! Quick. Blow that fucking jeep up, willya? It’s faster than us and they may follow. Catfish’s got the grenades.”
But Catfish was off and running. Dallas, who had once considered an athletic career at 200 meters — an ambition abandoned only when he failed to make the 1992 U.S. Olympic team at the age of 14—could still run like hell, and he caught Petty Officer Jones in short order. He ripped the pin out of the grenade, and hurled it back at the jeep. Six seconds later, with the SEALs in full flight heading for the woods, it exploded in a fireball.
And it attracted the attention instantly of all four half-dressed but fully armed guards running out of the accommodation block. The light from the jeep illuminated the 11 black-hooded figures pounding across the rough ground making a southwest course toward the trees. And the frightened but disorganized Chinese instinctively opened fire. They were shooting almost blindly into the dark, in high but flickering light from the gasoline flames. But a bullet caught Buster to the right of his shoulder blade, paralyzing his arm, and knocking him flying to the ground.
The Chinese saw the SEAL go down, but they did not see Commander Hunter rumbling along 30 yards behind his men with the M-60 poised. Rick stopped, steadied the weapon, then opened fire at the four running Chinese, cutting them down, dead in their tracks in a bloody scream of anger and fear. Then he turned the machine gun onto the accommodation block itself and blew out all the side windows, in an attempt to discourage anyone else from giving chase.
Meanwhile Dallas and one of the rookies had the wounded Buster on his feet with both arms around their necks. But the pain in his right side was agonizing and he screamed as they tried to carry him to the trees. Rick Hunter finally caught up with them, ordered everyone to stop for 20 seconds, and then he injected a shot of morphine right into the stricken SEAL’s right shoulder.
“Let’s go…,” he said. “Fast as we can…Buster…that shoulder’s gonna ease in a few minutes, old buddy. Don’t worry about it…” Buster Townsend, blood pouring down his back, nodded and smiled. “Thanks, guys,” he said.
And so they struggled on, plunging into the woods, glad of the dark, glad of the cover.
Behind them they had left abject chaos. The fact was that the Chinese Navy was fully aware the base was under attack. They had no idea, yet, of the scale of the attack. Nor indeed who was mounting it. They knew only that there appeared to be a gang of madmen running around murdering people.
The air was alive with the transmissions of cell phones as the comms rooms in the two warships talked both to each other and to the main control center of the base. The Commanding Officer of the Jangwei frigate was fastest into his stride. He hit the buttons to the destroyer suggesting they get helicopters into the air, with lights and pilots with night goggles. It was plainly essential to locate the killers as soon as possible.
The CO of the destroyer reacted equally quickly. Both of his helicopters were in a ground-crew service area, way over beyond the fuel farm. It was a workshop complex, with fuel pumps. But the choppers rarely used it, and the U.S. satellite trackers had scarcely bothered with it. The Captain knew they were there, and he moved fast to alert his air crew.
And this was just as well, because it was 0344 when the destroyer’s CO was on the phone, and his ship was just about 23 seconds away from being blown sky-high. And so was the frigate directly astern of him.
12
On an academic level, it was the limpet mine of Commander Rick Hunter, expertly clamped flat among the barnacles on the port side of the Luhai destroyer’s keel, that exploded first. Buster Townsend’s mine exploded two and a half seconds later. The viciously tailored “shaped” charges magnified the power of the detonation fivefold, and the limpets blew two gaping holes, one on either side of the keel, the blast slicing through the steel hull of the 6,000-ton warship.
Generally speaking this was all bad news for the People’s Liberation Army/Navy, but not quite as severe as it would become four seconds later when the Luhai’s torpedo magazine went up with a thunderous explosion, killing half of the ship’s company.
Any onlooker might have been dumbfounded at the scale of the explosion, stunned by the flames and billowing jet-black smoke. But it would nonetheless have been difficult to focus attention strictly on the destroyer, because eight seconds after the torpedoes blew, the 2,000-ton Jangwei II frigate, moored dead astern, did a passable imitation of Hiroshima 1945, when the limpet mines fixed by Petty Officer Catfish Jones and Chief Mike Hook detonated with massive force right under the guided-missile magazines.
The little Jangwei, only 360 feet long, a ship that punched a lot harder than its size, paid the penalty for that and literally blew itself to pieces. The entire complement of guided missiles, the SSM 6 YJ-1 Eagle Strikes, the CSS-N-4 Sardines, the 1-HQ-7 Crotales, all contributed to the crushing explosion, and the docks shuddered, lit up with two towering fires that could be seen 10 miles away.
Only six men would survive in the frigate, only 50 out of 250 in the destroyer. Automatic fire alarms began to howl throughout the base, but they were drowned out by the colossal explosion in the fuel farm as one million gallons of diesel and jet fuel detonated into a raging furnace, courtesy of the Louisiana SEALs Rattlesnake Davies and the now-wounded Buster Townsend. Their carefully timed Mk-138 satchel bombs had blown apart a total of five holding tanks, and within moments the other seven had formed a gasoline inferno.
The roar from the fire almost, but not quite, drowned out the noise of the two other bombs blasting apart the fuel control center. In the middle of all this the coils of det cord, wrapped around the main electricity cables by Dallas MacPherson and Mike Hook, exploded with sufficient force to blow the manhole cover 60 feet into the air and permanently wreck the electronic fuel-control system.
And way over on the other side of the inlet, an unbelievable blast right by the main boiler in the basement of the control-and-communications center paid further tribute to the smooth black skills of Buster and Rattlesnake. The explosion literally caused the entire building to cave in, crushing all of its five occupants to death.
Residents of the base, at least those not gunned down in their tracks by the marauding U.S. Navy SEALs, believed they were witnessing the end of the world. Any other explanation seemed utterly inadequate. And the whole spectacularly awful scenario had erupted in under two minutes; out of nowhere. There was zero evidence of an attack either from the air or the sea. The place just seemed to be blasting itself to pieces.
Meanwhile, struggling through the woods on the north side of the base, the SEALs were still 1,200 yards from the edge of the marsh. Buster was losing blood, and he was still in pain despite the morphine. Rick Hunter ordered them to stop while he examined the wound, and to his dismay he discovered the bullet was still lodged in the flesh on the right side of Buster’s upper back, and he was losing blood fast.
He took Dallas MacPherson aside and told him to bring out the rest of the medical kit. Between them they had sticky and plain bandages, plus disinfected swabs for just this kind of wound, plus more disinfectant. But they had no groundsheets and they had to kneel Buster down, and he kept losing consciousness, and Rattlesnake held his head and splintered shoulder. Dallas held the tiny pinpoint light beam they had brought, and Rick Hunter gritted his teeth, and using a large pair of tweezers, designed for this particular task, gripped and pulled the bullet out.
