Payback

Cold War, when they had welcomed either the blue-water U.S. or Soviet navies to protect them, were now trying to move away from being mere local and regional powers to blue-water status overnight.

In a hurry, combatants in any navy who hadn’t thought their plans through could be dangerous, and that’s what Freeman was worried about now. If the junk’s skipper had thought this cat-and-mouse game through, he should have already left the area, because no matter how important it was for the Payback mission to be kept under wraps until it was over, until Freeman got the box back to McCain, Freeman knew, as the junk’s skipper should have realized, the U.S. Navy would never permit such a revolutionary vessel as the RS to fall into enemy hands, either damaged or captured. He knew that if Ray Lynch and the others in McCain’s Blue-Tile supersensitive Signals Exploitation Space closely monitoring the RS’s infil onto and now its exfil from Beach 5 thought for one second that the RS might be captured, its crew perhaps already depth-charged into insensibility and unwitting surrender, Admiral Crowley would act quickly. His entire carrier battle group of thirteen ships would unleash everything in their considerable arsenals to destroy the RS so utterly that it would be nothing more than carbon fiber.

“Sixty feet, periscope depth!” reported Eddie Mervyn.

“Scope depth,” acknowledged the general, adding in a hurried but nevertheless carefully measured and modulated voice, “Pilot has the con.” At this, Mervyn became OOD, officer of the deck, and instructed Gomez, “Up search scope. Closing the eye.”

“Up search scope. Closing the eye,” said Gomez, as Freeman watched his distorted bean-string image in the oil-polished sheen of the search scope’s column.

“Ten to one they’ve buggered off,” said Aussie.

No one would take the bet.

“Relay visual to screen,” Gomez informed Eddie.

“Relay to screen. Magnification?”

“One point five.”

“One point five. Very good.”

Everyone was watching the screen, the shutdown of the eye resulting in a momentarily blank screen before the search scope’s circle came online to show, they hoped, a magnified vista of the surrounding waters. Instead, all they saw were foam-riven gray walls of water crashing in on the scope, visually highlighting their vulnerability. Nothing but an angry sea.

“Reducing magnification,” said Eddie Mervyn. The never-ending walls seemed less intimidating but just as relentless. The important thing was that there was no sight of the junk or its two depth-charging rigid inflatable boats. Gomez cursed the malfunctioning sonar, which was unable to confirm their conclusion, based as it was on nothing more than their search scope’s digital pics of a heaving ocean. A ship, junk, or other vessel could easily be missed, as Freeman well knew.

Given the crazy change in vectors involved, one second the scope would be atop the crest of a huge wave, giving a 45-degree snapshot of the ocean for miles, the next all that would be seen was a solid wall of water, as trough replaced crest. But as yet, no junk was in sight. What made it worse for Freeman was that, as confident as he was that the junk had withdrawn, he was able to only partially concentrate on the intermittent views of the search scope. The reason: things weren’t right. The grip of his obsession about the sweet onions and the MANPADS had not been cast off by his frank acknowledgment of doubt to the crew. It was bad luck that the HAN sub showed up before the attack and the junk shortly after, but was it pure chance? The littoral waters were vigorously patrolled by the PLA and NKA navies. Or had someone somehow got a fix on their course? Someone at the beach who’d seen them racing off, at least the RS’s wake, and quickly extrapolated from the straight-line course? It was impossible to tell.

“Clear through 180 degrees,” Eddie Mervyn informed the team. “Beginning second 180 now.”

Freeman was sure that the scope’s 360-degree sweep would be clear as well, because his suspicion was growing. During the half-hour wait, he’d had time to chew over several other things that had also surprised him: the lack of any NKA beach patrol, which every member of the Payback team half expected to be there, near such a high-priority target, and there was only one tank. You used tanks in platoon sizes — maybe a pair, one covering the other, and more often three, but rarely only one tank. And how come there were no more armored vehicles, Chinese-made armored BTR-60 and BMP amphibious personnel carriers?

“All clear through 360,” came Eddie Mervyn’s assurance.

“Run CC check,” said Freeman.

“Running counterclockwise sweep,” confirmed Eddie. “Through 360.”

“Three-sixty” made Freeman think of another absentee. With the vital MANPAD storehouse relatively close to the DMZ, how come there’d been no Deng-type fast attack vehicles with the roof-mounted 360-degree-sweep 23mm chain gun and pintle-mounted 7.62mm up front? If he remembered correctly, the Deng 355 FAV had a 24-7 day-night-sighting sleeve above the chain gun. And a T-55 instead of the ChiCom 98 laser-guided missile tank. Or was his glass-half-empty mood feeding on itself? Maybe with the storm lashing the coast, Pyongyang had put out a “Defend the Fatherland” alert, which braced all their units along the 148-mile-long DMZ for an impending all-out U.S./South Korean breach of the line? And he knew that such an alert used up the NKA’s liquid gold, as Johnny Lee referred to the NKA’s expensive oil, which they’d received as payment from Middle-Eastern terrorists in return for MANPADs and other weapons.

And of course the boys in Blue Tile country on McCain had jammed every damn frequency the NKA had tried to use, and how long had the Payback team been ashore? Twenty-five, maybe twenty-six minutes maximum. It had seemed a lot longer to the team — always did when you were being shot at — and so what time did the NKA have to rush reinforcements to Beach 5 when for starters they were unable to talk to one another?

Ah, thought the general. He was Monday-morning quarterbacking, his mood understandably mordant because of the loss of Bone. The fact was, he reminded himself, that the storm was so ferocious it would have grounded any NKA antisub aircraft, and the seas were so high that any sonar echoes the NKA spy junk might have hoped for had probably been degraded by the storm-churned tumultuous sea.

“All clear on countersweep,” pronounced Eddie.

“Thank the Lord for that,” said Aussie.

“Amen,” said Sal.

“All right,” said the general. “What’s ETA for McCain?”

“Forty-three minutes at maximum underwater speed,” replied Gomez.

“Sir,” put in Mervyn, “with our sonar mikes shot, I’d rather plane it. It’ll be rough, but with more speed and maneuverability we’ll—”

“I agree,” said Freeman, his mood more upbeat. He looked at Choir Williams. “Sorry, Choir, but if we go faster we’ll get there quicker.”

“In twenty-five minutes,” added Eddie encouragingly. “Two-thirds max surface speed.”

Choir nodded.

“Op’s over, Choir,” said Aussie. “You can pop a Gravol.”

“I have.”

The general turned to Salvini. “Moment we’re aboard McCain, Sal, you can open the box, but not in this turbulence. Besides, as I said before, we can’t disturb anything that CIA forensic might be able to use.”

“Roger that,” said Salvini, trying to hide his impatience and annoyance. Yes, yes, he knew the old man was right, but “stone the crows,” as Aussie would say, hadn’t they earned the right to have a peek? All right, he told himself, he’d be a good little boy and wait till they reached McCain.

Eddie was already making the turn, the seats reversing in concert, with the RS’s wedge end becoming the bow once more. But Salvini couldn’t shake the conviction that the general, the cool legend of the Siberian taiga, was having an attack of nerves, delaying opening the box as long as possible, as if he was afraid there mightn’t be anything worthwhile inside after all. Sal didn’t say anything, but his eyes, looking down at the box, told Aussie what he was thinking.

“Tighten your harnesses!” ordered Eddie, who still had the con. “This mother’s gonna be an ass-busting ride, old buddies.”

When the RS surfaced in a blow of dense spray that struck them like a car wash’s opening deluge, all seven