Payback

nugget, a new pilot, for having given what Cuso had characterized as “a sloppy, indifferent wave” rather than a salute that was an “unambiguous signal” to the catapult officer. Seeing Armstrong’s no-nonsense salute, the pilot’s hands off his plane’s controls, the shooter pushed the launch button in his pod, ungating — that is, releasing — the pressure-driven pistons, jerking the fighter ninety yards down cat 1, hurling it aloft, the rapid acceleration from zero to 120 miles per hour in under two seconds shoving Armstrong’s eyeballs back into their sockets before he took hands-on control of the aircraft.

Ninety-five seconds later Manowski clipped off his salute and felt the tremendous rush that unfailingly gave him an erection, “like a pipe cleaner pulled through your ass,” as the pilot of the big twin-jet Viking sub chaser had indelicately described it to the newest member of his four-man crew, the S-3C being the latest upgrade of the original Viking S-3. As a precursor to this mission, the S-3C’s pilot unfolded his Viking’s wings aft of the jet-blast deflector on cat 2, waiting for the last two of the JSF quad who would protect his crew and the team of five in the carrier’s E-2F Hawkeye. Though the already airborne prop-driven Hawkeye was relatively slow, it was the eyes and ears of the American battle group, its long-range electronics and raised two-thousand-pound rotodome capable of detecting bogeys more than 250 miles away from McCain and the carrier’s shield of ships.

The ability of the Hawkeye’s three “moles”—radar operator, combat information officer, and air controller — to have their systems simultaneously track more than 654 targets, while controlling in excess of 45 strikers and interceptors, dazzled any newcomer, nuggets and deck crew alike. The flying “dish on a stick” Hawkeye was an awkward-looking aircraft with none of the sleek “you talkin’ to me?” assurance of a fighter, but its effectiveness as an airborne early-warning station was unquestionable.

Although the sub-chasing Viking was carrying Harpoon antiship missiles and retractable MAD — Magnetic Anomaly Detector — in its tail, and sonobuoys that could, like RS’s waterfall of black lines on a green surface, detect noise shorts and other sounds emitted by submerged submarines, McCain’s SES had already pinpointed the ChiCom HAN. It was assumed that the four Joint Strike Fighters swooping down through the bruising, bulky clouds of the storm front at Mach 1 plus would serve notice to the ChiCom skipper that he should indeed follow the Mandarin plain-language directive from Qingdao to withdraw post haste!

The problem was, as SEAL and RS “pilot” Eddie Mervyn told Freeman, the HAN had not moved.

“It’s still on the surface?” asked the general.

“Yessir.”

“Disobeying orders?” opined Bone Brady, whose black face, unlike the war-painted Choir Williams, Salvini, Freeman, Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez, Aussie, and Johnny Lee, needed little camouflage, only the lively gleam of his eyes visible in the RS’s redded-out interior.

“Son of a bitch could be disobeying orders,” Freeman conceded, “or this whole plain-language gig could be a setup to give us false confidence, encouraging us to move faster than we should, to surface and plane it flat out to the beach.” He thought for a moment. “Scope depth!” he ordered, and they could hear the ballast tanks releasing air for the RS to rise to sixty feet below the surface.

“Search or tactical, sir?” inquired Eddie Mervyn.

“Ah — search,” answered the general in what for him was a rare moment of embarrassment. His momentary pause had demonstrated that the legendary leader of conventional and SpecOp warfare perhaps hadn’t realized that the RS had two scopes, one for long-distance scanning, and the tactical scope for closer-in torpedo and evasive maneuvers. Or had the general, famous for his attention to detail, merely forgotten it in the tension, shared by all eight of them, caused by not knowing whether the possibly hostile HAN was willfully or unwittingly disobeying orders from Qingdao because of nothing more than a mechanical malfunction?

The SpecOp team heard the soft whine of the larger search scope sliding up through its sheath, Aussie watching the six-by-four-inch flat screen that was forward of copilot Gomez and pilot Mervyn, immediately to Gomez’s left.

“It’s raining,” said Gomez, his source of this information not the scope, which was only now breaking surface, but rather the RS’s foot-square sonar “waterfall,” the “fry wave” of the falling rain creating a narrow vertical band of static on the screen whose green color had been drained of much of its luminescence by the RS’s “rigged for red” lighting. The latter would help the team’s six-man hit squad once they landed—if they landed — on Kosong’s Beach 5, Eddie Mervyn and Gomez remaining behind on the RS for the exfil — exfiltration.

On the computer, pilot Eddie Mervyn could see nothing on the scope’s relayed computer-screen pix but a heaving rain-and wind-lashed sea of whitecaps as the Force 9 storm pushed south from Siberia.

On McCain, over a hundred miles east-southeast of Kosong, the SES’s meteorological screen clearly showed that the storm had rapidly picked up speed ever since its front had passed over the natural brake of the land situated a hundred miles west of Vladivostok, the storm now having only the unobstructed “flat” surface of the sea with which to contend.

The “Pan ’n’ D,” as the quick pop-up-and-down search-scope scan was referred to by the Navy submersible instructor who had trained SEAL technical specialists Gomez and Mervyn, confirmed nothing more than it was pouring rain in the darkness. The difference in temperatures between the rain and seawater was creating a crazy dance of phosphorescence and “rain-scratch” on the screen, Gomez assuming that the island of Ullung and McCain’s battle group southeast of Kosong were probably not yet hit by the full fury of the Force 9 gale winds.

“Waste of time,” said Freeman by way of apologizing for having risked a search-scope scan and thus the RS possibly being spotted by a fishing trawler, or even the HAN.

“Not really, sir,” Gomez assured him. “I mean, it wasn’t a waste of time. With our radio aerial breaking surface with the search scope, we’ve picked up clearer plain-language radio traffic between the HAN and Vladivostok.”

Freeman looked nonplussed. “You mean between the HAN and Qingdao?”

“No, sir. Vladivostok’s getting into the act. Seems that the Russian fleet there is getting ticked off with the ChiCom sub encroaching in their patrol zone.”

“Why?” asked Aussie. “The Russians go where they want. Why shouldn’t the Chinese?”

“ ’Cause,” said Salvini, “Russia still thinks it’s a superpower — like when it used to tell China and the Dear Leader that the Soviet Navy ruled the waves. Besides, Beijing and Moscow are having one of their tiffs.”

“Tiffs?” challenged Brady. “That’s a Limey word.”

“So?” said Salvini. “I must’ve picked it up from Aussie or Choir.”

“You’ve been hanging out too long with Brits and Aussies,” Brady joshed. “Tiff — you mean Beijing and Moscow are having a fight!”

“Yeah,” said Salvini, “a row. Flexing their muscles. Staking out their territory.”

“Their territory!” said Johnny Lee. “It’s international waters. And any further west, the HAN’d be within North Korea’s two-hundred-mile economic zone.”

Freeman ignored the others’ patter. The legal niceties of maritime law were fictions of academe insofar as underwater operations were concerned. Every man in the team understood this, and all of them had known at least one SEAL who, during the Vietnam War, had participated in the clandestine “officially deniable” missions into North Vietnam’s Haiphong Harbor. From the littoral, they had made their way undetected into the very sewers of Hanoi, where sudden unexplained explosions, suspected by NVA officials of being caused by gas leaks, occurred in the vast subterranean system beneath Hanoi.

The question now for Freeman was, had any vessel — warship, surface, or commercial—“pinged” the RS and alerted the North Korean coastal guard? One of the general’s better traits, as recognized by all who had served close to him, was his readiness to consult subordinates, his willingness to ask advice ironically only adding to his reputation as a leader who knew more than most. Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and Choir, who had served with Freeman the longest and so could read him quicker than the others, sensed that the general was wrestling with uncharacteristic indecisiveness. But they understood why — there was nothing quite as unsettling in an RS or any other submersible as the feeling of having been pinged by a possible hostile. It meant having your range of possible reactions thwarted by the fear of massive retaliation should you “jump the gun,” react too quickly. In so doing, you’d give your potential adversary the inestimable advantage of knowing your precise latitude and longitude, not to the nearest mile, as in the days of World War II, but, in a world of global positioning satellites, to the nearest