Everyone wanted to get out of the RS’s two hatches, whose “lids” were flush with the craft’s superstructure to decrease drag at high speed underwater. But now the RS was crawling toward the beach like some metallic slug, its electronic probes absorbing such a flood of incoming data that, like the driver of the latest computerized auto or the pilot of a brand-new Joint Strike Fighter, Eddie Mervyn and Gomez felt simply overwhelmed by the cascade of information. Right now, two hundred yards from the surf, the RS’s computers were giving myriad readouts of wind speed, outside temperature, inside temperature, fuel remaining, electric motor range using MUSCLES system only, jet-pulse range, humidity both inside and outside the RS, and the sea’s salinity content, the computers accordingly making the necessary algorithmic corrections for possible torpedo or decoy firing. Ballast tanks’ status, circuitry verifications, and aerial and hydrophone arrays status were also being integrated to calculate the course of least resistance amid the myriad crosscurrents and rips of the surf. Most of the displayed data was being ignored by the RS’s pilot and copilot, except for four readouts: the precise distance to beach, the angle of beach incline, the water’s decreasing depth, and the graph line showing the exact point at which the RS would become visible. When they reached that point, Eddie Mervyn, with Gomez double-checking, would lift the hard black plastic safety guard over the zebra-striped button that would deploy the RS’s tractorlike treads. Like the wheels of a light aircraft suddenly descending from their previously fuselage-covered wells, the RS’s two forward and two rear miniature oval caterpillar tracks would allow the RS to keep moving forward
Sal tore open a Trojan packet, took out the condom, and stretched it over the end of his shotgun’s barrel. The reversible-submersible was designed to take them in very close, from the sea’s continental slope or littoral into shallows no deeper than three feet, but Sal’s motto for such amphibious landings had been taken from a sign he’d read as a young boy on holiday in Maui: “All Waves Are Dangerous.” He’d seen more than one SEAL accidentally “baptized by full immersion,” as the instructors called it, the SEAL at the point of disembarkation necessarily turning his back to the sea, loaded with full combat pack one second, underwater the next, felled by a wave that normally wouldn’t have challenged a ten-year-old.
On the infrared search scope’s flat screen they could see the phosphorescent dancing of surf and rain, the rushes of foam going farther than usual across the sand of Beach 5 because of the gale-force winds. Immediately beyond the undulating line that marked the dip and rise of sand dunes was another line. This varied in height from 50 to 130 feet, delineating the jagged crest of steep, scrub-covered cliffs. The latent heat of the land, relative to the colder sea, was emitting tendrils of mist that spiraled up here and there, resembling the vapor columns from hot springs, of the kind SATPIX intel had revealed in the Nine Moon Mountains southwest of Pyongyang.
“Tracks deployed,” announced Eddie Mervyn, the small Kit-Kat-sized SOC — status-of-craft screen — informing them that they were now 138 yards from the lacy foam of exhausted surf. The SOC’s data block also informed them that in precisely one minute and forty seconds, the top of the teardrop bow would be visible to “EXT VWS”—external viewers — at a point between two of the big X-shaped beach defenses, meant to be an impediment to the big American Wasp-class LHDS’—Landing Helicopter Dock Ships’—landing craft.
“Hope any external viewers are in bed,” said Aussie.
No one answered him. Mervyn checked the data block again and announced, “Hatches opening in two minutes. I say again, lids opening in two minutes.”
“Hatches opening in two minutes,” acknowledged the general, adding, “Aussie, you and Choir follow me through hatch one. Sal, you lead Bone and Johnny through two. Confirm.”
Aussie and Choir gave a thumbs-up, answering in unison, “Follow you through hatch one.”
“Good,” said Freeman, upon which Sal, Bone Brady, and Johnny Lee answered, not in unison but in staggered response, “Hatch two.”
“Very good,” said Freeman. They’d rehearsed this confirmation drill at least a dozen times en route to
The only thing that mattered was that he, Aussie, and Choir, upon exiting through one, and Sal, Brody, and Lee through two, remembered every detail of the attack plan. Speed and precision were paramount. Five minutes after “hatches open,” the general, Aussie, and Choir should be racing up the Y’s stem and turning left on the Y’s southern arm, Salvini, Bone, and Johnny Lee swinging right, onto the Y’s northern arm, the general’s trio responsible for entering the warehouse at its southern end. At the same time, the plan called for Bone to position himself on a SATPIX-chosen rise closer to the coast road, near the northern entrance of the warehouse. There, he should be able to provide covering fire for teammates Salvini and Lee at the northern end of the building and be able to sweep the coast road with his squad automatic weapon should any PITAC, pain-in-the-ass civilian, be up and around on the predawn road between Kosong, a mile to the north, and the DMZ, ten miles to the south. Meantime, the general’s trio at the building’s northern end would also be provided with suppressing fire from Choir Williams’s SAW.
However, whatever happened, aboard the RS Gomez and Eddie Mervyn had been told by Freeman to allow no more than twenty-five minutes for the operation: “Five minutes up, ten minutes to shoot and loot evidence of MANPAD storage, five minutes back to the beach. Five minutes max for unseen contingencies.” If they weren’t back at the RS by then, Gomez and Mervyn would reverse from their submerged though shallow surf-hide into deeper water, execute a quick 180-degree turn, and head back to the
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The General’s night-vision goggles were jarred by his leap from the RS’s roughed “step-off” that Gomez had dutifully deployed starboard below hatch one. But the blur caused by the jarring was quickly countered by the NVGs’ MEDs — microscopic electronic dampeners — and he had as good a picture of the half-mile-long banana-shaped beach as he was going to get. Its foreshore was littered by gale-blown flora, including bushes and ghostly tree trunks whose bark had been stripped, the trunks tossed and driven farther south from Siberia in the storm’s surge. Aussie, gripping his Heckler & Koch submachine gun, and Choir, his SAW, followed the general out of hatch one, and off the RS’s starboard side Salvini led Bone and Johnny Lee off the port side of hatch two, the six men crossing the beach, linking up in single file at the base of the Y, a fifteen-foot gap between the first three, led by Freeman, Salvini’s trio behind.
The only sound was that of surf and the steady pouring of rain, the Vibram-soled combat boots of the six men barely audible in the soft, course sand, then the slightly noisier footfalls on the crushed-gravel yard-wide stem of the Y trail and — they weren’t sure.
Freeman didn’t hear it, the legendary general loath to admit that in recent years his hearing in the 2,000-plus hertz range wasn’t what it used to be in the days when he could hear the squeak of a Soviet tank’s treads in soft snow a mile away in the taiga. But Aussie Lewis heard something other than the rain pelting down on the hard leaves of camphor laurel trees and the sustained roar of the sea a hundred yards behind them. He stopped, tapped the general’s shoulder, and gave the hand signal for the others to halt.
With the sound of their footfalls silenced, everyone in the two three-man squads of the hit team could also detect the faint yet distinct two-stroke lawn-mower-like whine, whose persistence could be heard above the sound of the unrelenting rain upon the dense bush of the slope and the pounding of the surf. A blur dashed across the trail in front of the general — a hare. Now the noise was not confined to one engine but a number of them. “Motorbikes,” Aussie whispered to Freeman in front of him, then signaled the same to the four men behind by using the American Sign Language Freeman had insisted they all learn.
Bone Brady nodded, recognizing the sound of all-terrain vehicles, reckoning there must be at least half a dozen of them, or more. Were they one-rider ATVs, Freeman wondered, or two-man vehicles? If the latter, the odds were already two to one against the team if the ATVs, which sounded to the general as if they were about a
