20 May 2000, 0900LT (1700Z)
Jon Hunter shook his head ruefully. The Monday morning call to hustle over to SUBPAC for a pre-mission briefing was as a complete surprise. Even more surprising, only he and Fagan were allowed to attend. But a mission, any mission, was an answer to Jon Hunter’s prayers. Finally, something real, something to test his crew and prove they were as good as anyone.
The small Special Compartmented Information Facility, the SCIF, briefing room was almost empty when Jon Hunter stepped through the heavy vault door. Rear Admiral Mike O’Flannigan, COMSUBPAC, occupied the seat at the end of the small wooden table. Physically a big, florid-faced Irishman, Mike O’Flannigan had a reputation as both a deep strategic thinker and a superb tactician who really cared about his men.
The Chief of Staff, Capt Sam Hughes, sat at his right, chewing on the inevitable unlit cigar. The only other person in the room was the SUBPAC Special Operations Officer.
O’Flannigan jumped up and bounded across the room to grab Hunter’s hand. “Jon, bet you’re wondering what’s going on,” he said in his deep baritone.
“Yes, sir,” Hunter answered, flexing his fingers to get some blood flow restored after O’Flannigan’s bear-like grip. “I’m hoping this is better than a couple of weeks upkeep and a 3M inspection.”
Sam Hughes spat out the well-chewed cigar remnants and chuckled, “Careful what you wish for Commander. You may find this interesting, but probably not fun.”
He waved toward the briefing officer. “Let’s get started. Time is short here. First off, everything said here is Special Compartmented Information, strictly need to know. No one outside this room is cleared to know the purpose of this mission.”
The Special Ops Officer began his briefing. He flashed a slide up on the small screen and spoke, “Essentially, one of the “three letter agencies” has caught wind of someone buying several shipments of specialized laboratory equipment and smuggling it into Indonesia. The equipment; incubators, sterilizers, containment hoods, and the like, is ideal for developing biological weapons.”
He flashed up another slide, this one with pictures of several men, some dressed in lab coats, others in ill-fitting suits. The pictures looked like they had been taken without the subject knowing he was being photographed.
“At the same time, several top biological weapons experts from the Middle East and the old USSR have dropped out of sight. What links them together is that they all worked on weaponized smallpox.”
Another slide flashed up. This one was the outside of a large red-brick building. It looked like a university classroom.
“And just to make things really interesting, someone broke into the Australian Research School of Biologic Studies. All that was missing was some genetic material derived from some mousepox research. Doesn’t sound very threatening until you understand that the material makes the pox resistant to all known vaccines.”
The screen went blank.
Capt Hughes spit out his cigar and growled, “It all adds up to give some very high level people some very sleepless nights.”
“I don’t need to tell you that Indonesia is the home of the world’s largest Muslim population,” O’Flannigan grunted. “And with the current political unrest there, it is extremely volatile. We have some very dubious HUMINT that points toward a small, uninhabited island in Indonesia called Nusa Funata. You are to go in and check it out. Your cover, for what it’s worth, is to be the ESSEX Strike Group’s eyes.”
Hughes added, “Given the classification and the sensitivity of this information, you are not to brief anyone on your crew until well after you are underway. And nobody is to know anything about possible biological weapons. Ever.”
24 May 2000, 1830LT (25 May, 0230Z)
Jon Hunter walked down the long cement pier. They would get underway this evening. On Monday the place had been in lazy tropical torpor. Now the pier fairly hummed with excitement. A lot had been accomplished in the ensuing week, but a lot remained to be finished before SAN FRANSISCO could slip her mooring lines.
The crew worked around the clock for the last three days to get the boat underway. Trucks and forklifts bustled up the pier to stack pallet after pallet of stores. Every carton was laboriously hand-carried from topside to its storage locker somewhere deep in the bowels of the boat. Every piece of onboard equipment was checked, groomed, calibrated, and rechecked.
The crew and the wardroom officers had been told that they were heading out on weekly ops, but the added stores and locked canisters had not gone unnoticed. You just didn’t need that many groceries for a week at sea.
The SEAL Team loaded their complete combat stores on Wednesday. Four torpedoes were off-loaded, replaced with lockers filled with weapons and explosives, as well as the myriad of other gear the SEALs would need.
As the sun was descending over the Wainea Mountains, Captain Calucci summoned Hunter and Fagan to his office. Together, the pair took the short, brisk walk down the waterfront to the historic headquarters building overlooking the submarine piers and the vast Pearl Harbor complex. From Calucci’s ornately paneled office Dick O’Kane, Mush Morton, Gene Flukey, and a host of other heroes of the great submarine battle of World War II had left to face death. Some returned to report victory, too many stayed on eternal patrol.
As Hunter and Fagan entered the office, the large picture window behind the Commodore framed the sun sinking below the Wainai Mountains in a glorious splash of vibrant oranges, reds, and gold. Calucci did not rise from behind the ornately carved koa wood desk to greet them. He merely grunted and waved them toward two straight backed chairs arranged in front of his desk. Hunter couldn’t help but think of respondents before the
