South China Sea

“Periscope depth, aye, sir.”

The captain quickly, quietly, took the PA mike from its cradle. “This is the captain. I have the con. Commander Rogers retains the deck. Up search scope.”

“Ahead two-thirds.”

“Scope’s breaking,” reported one of the watchmen. “Scope’s clear.”

The captain and the search scope’s column became one, moving about, looking for a dot on the flat metallic- colored sea.

Now the sub’s sonar had picked up the cavitation, or sound of water bubbles caused by the turning propeller of the unknown ship. At first it was suspected that it might be one of the destroyers of the carrier battle group, but within seconds the noise, having passed through the acoustic spectrum analyzer, suggested the craft was either a fast 32-knot Luda-class destroyer or a Jianghu-class frigate. In any case, her speed was now 23 knots, the details on the computer screen quickly giving the two classes’ dimensions and armament, both equipped with antisubmarine depth charges, surface-to-surface HY2 missiles and mines. The ship was now on a heading not for the Santa Fe, whose presence she had probably not detected, but in the direction of the Enterprise carrier battle group, an enemy mission that clearly fell under the Santa Fe rules of engagement and within the parameters of the sub’s mission orders to protect the CVBG.

“Make the tube ready in all respects,” the captain ordered.

“Make the tube ready in all respects, aye, sir.”

The Luda class had now increased her speed to 25 knots.

The sub’s captain stopped moving the scope. “Bearing. Mark!”

“Range. Mark! Down scope!” He heard the soft whine of the retracting M-18 search scope equipped with infrared. “I hold one visual contact. Range?”

“Seventeen point two miles.” On the green “waterfall” of the display screen the target’s sound was represented by a vertical white line. Forward in the torpedo room, 650 pounds of explosive in the nose of a Mark 48 advanced-capability torpedo, equipped with twenty miles of control wire — capable of 67 knots and a range of twenty-five-plus miles, and known by Santa Fe’s crew as “heavy freight”—was loaded and ready in number 7 tube on the port side.

“Range?” asked the captain.

“Seventeen miles — decreasing.” Every man on the boat went about his business with a deft, quiet approach to everything, including the placing of the compacted garbage container into a freezer. Any ejection of it could immediately have signaled the sub’s position to the enemy, and the captain did not know if the Chinese ship was alone. There could be another one lying silent, its cavitation not yet picked up by Santa Fe’s passive sonar.

“Torpedo in port tube one, sir.”

“Very well. Angle on the bow,” the captain said. “Port, three point five.”

“Check,” came the confirmation.

“Range?” the captain asked.

“Sixteen point seven miles.”

“Sixteen point seven miles,” the captain repeated. “Firing point procedures. Master four five. Tube one.”

“Firing point procedures, aye, sir. Master four five. Tube one, aye.. solution ready… weapon ready… ship ready…”

“Match bearings and shoot.”

The Mark 48’s ram jet shot the torpedo into the sea. At 65 knots, given the varying salinity of the water and the relative speed of the two ships, it would take the torpedo plus or minus fifteen minutes to reach the target.

* * *

Now, in the predawn darkness, the Vietnamese welcome seemed as if it had never happened. Gone were the lines of villagers, whether sent out by the Hanoi government or not, and in their stead there were only the flitting images of the night, a constant stream of misbegotten shapes that, with a little fear and imagination, could be anything and everything, from a Chinese T-59 tank to a squad of PLA moving up ready to fire. But except for the noises of the aging trucks, it was a quiet ride for the EMREF spearhead for whom the only indication of battle was the occasional thump of distant artillery from the direction of Lang Son.

“This is far enough,” Vinh’s interpreter told Freeman, who quickly alighted from his Humvee, the first two vehicles in the following ten-truck convoy also slowing to a stop. Tail boards were lowered rather than dropped, as quietly as possible, and now what was called the “great humping” began, as each soldier prepared to “saddle up” for the reconnaissance patrol to probe the Lang Son line.

General Vinh’s intelligence reports, as good as they might be, hadn’t provided Freeman with enough information for any confident and immediate deployment of Second Army once it arrived. And as Freeman told Robert Cline, he couldn’t afford a mistake because of something lost in what the interpreter might or might not say. He had to find out for himself, and so eighteen miles northeast of Hanoi, just before the town of Ba Ninh, the 127- member spearhead of the EMREF task force company split into four platoons of thirty men each. Freeman’s intention was to proceed toward the Lang Son front in clover-leaf pattern, seven-man patrols from each company constantly moving out on the flanks, circling to prevent ambush as the whole company of four platoons, one behind the other, moved forward. A five-man radio and rifle squad remained with the trucks already helping the Vietnamese drivers and guards to camouflage the vehicles, mainly against the possibility of Chinese recon planes from the border area seventy-eight miles away, beyond Lang Son.

Vinh introduced Freeman to a group of five Vietnamese guides before he shook hands with Freeman and stepped into a Long March staff car to take him back to Hanoi, from whence he’d rejoin the battle on the western front.

In one of the strangest verbal exchanges in his career, General Freeman was engaged in a whispered “shouting” match with Marte Price of the Des Moines Register. “General, give me one good reason for me not going — a reason you can give that CNN cameraman and that CNN reporter.”

“Ms. Price, I don’t have to give reasons to the press. You stay with the trucks. You should have gone back with Vinh, goddamn it! I’ll have you disbarred from the press pool.”

“There is no pool, General.”

“Goddamn it, you could get shot!”

“I know the risks.”

“You certainly do not.”

“General, when you said, ‘Stay by the headquarters group,’ I assumed that was all the way up to the front.”

“Well, you assumed wrong, goddamn it.”

“Give me one good reason, General, and I’ll stay behind.”

“You’re a woman, goddamn it!”

“You’ve used women chopper pilots before, and I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that.”

“Well, you are a woman — aren’t you?”

“I mean saying ‘damn it’ all the time.”

“All right,” Freeman said. Major Robert Cline thought the general was about to give in, but Freeman took a breath and said, “You smell!”

“I what?’

“The Vietnamese guides,” he said, nodding in their direction, “have complained that you’re a hazard to the operation, and I agree. They told me they could smell your perfume before the first truck rounded that curve a hundred yards back. Chinese regulars’d sniff us coming from a hundred yards away.”

For a moment Marte Price was lost for words, but then suddenly she knew she had a counterattack. “General, I can smell cigarette smoke, and none of your troops are smoking now. Ever walk into a motel room where there’s been a smoker? You can smell it right away.”

“I’m not in the habit of going to motels,” he replied grumpily. But she had him and he knew it. Despite all their instructions in training Special Forces like the Delta Force and SAS about not using deodorant and so on, a smoker carried the stale smell of cigarette or cigar smoke wherever he went.