exhaustion of the swim, and the dread of having to do it again. Oh, of course he could — that wasn’t even a question. But he dreaded the prospect of the hours undersea again, fighting down the moments of worry, and waiting to be picked up. He did not anticipate any problems — he had done this too many times before, although not under these exact circumstances.
Ku made his way back to the edge of the water where he’d stowed his gear. Right here, high above the water line, well out of the reach of anything except a tidal wave. He walked confidently to the location, moved to the rock he’d picked as a landmark, and then stared.
No gear.
Had he somehow been mistaken? Perhaps it was the next one over — or the next. He searched location after location, wandering further and further away from his original spot, his concern growing with every moment. It was not possible that he had forgotten exactly where it was — no, not possible at all.
Then he stopped dead at the sound of someone clearing his throat, and turned, coldly certain at that moment what had happened. Behind him were five man garbed in camouflage uniforms. Even the camouflage paint could not change the shape of their eyes or the lanky structure of their bodies. Americans — not Taiwanese.
One of them spoke, and although Ku understood the dialect, he elected not to reply. He had been discovered — his mission goal had changed. With the missile beacons planted, his only remaining objective was to maintain his silence until he died.
One of the men stepped forward and secured Ku’s hands behind him with a plastic strap. Two others conducted a fast but thorough pat-down search, missing nothing. A fourth took his knapsack and searched it. Within minutes, they surrounded him and prodded him to move forward.
Americans. This would be easy. They were not trained, hardened warriors, at least not in the traditions of honor and mercilessness that Ku’s own culture demanded. Prison, even a military one, would be child’s play to endure.
But the Americans did not take him to their own facilities. Instead, he was tossed into a Humvee and taken to Taiwanese military headquarters in Taipei. There, surrounded by men of his own blood, Ku began to know fear.
Ku had dreaded the swim ashore. It was nothing compared to what he would experience in the next five hours. And, in the end, he died without speaking.
Outside the Taiwanese compound, the senior member of the American SEAL team powered up his portable, secure satellite communications set. His radioman scanned the horizon with the parabolic mike, then grunted when the link was at maximum strength and clarity. With a nod, he passed the headset to the lieutenant.
“Yeah, the Taiwanese have got him,” the lieutenant said, once he’d been quickly patched through to Don Stroh at CIA headquarters. “But we kept the gear we found. No maps, no charts, nothing like that. But what I got is enough.” He held up his hand and surveyed the small piece of equipment he’d found there. “Transmitter — he had one spare, maybe in case something broke. And from the looks of it, it’s got long-range capabilities.”
The lieutenant listened for a moment, nodding in agreement with the man on the other end. Stroh had been in this business of deploying covert forces to problem spots all over the world far longer than the SEAL officer had, and he understood immediately what was going on.
“No way we could search every building within range, and there’s no telling how long he’s been ashore,” the lieutenant said finally. He glanced overhead, as though already seeing the flights of missiles inbound. “But yeah, I gotta agree — there’s something up with this, and the missile test they announced last week looks like a good candidate.”
The other men in the squad moved uneasily. Armed men on the ground or in the water were one thing — dangerous business, but business they’d been trained to take care of. Missiles overhead were an entirely different matter. The only successful tactic was to be somewhere else, and each one of the SEALs had a deep aversion to cut-and-run.
The lieutenant handed the headset back to the radioman. “Okay, that’s it. Like we thought, they’re going to pass the buck to the Taiwanese forces. They may already know more than we do, if they got that bastard to talk.” The lieutenant remembered the cold, flat expression in the Chinese frogman’s face. “Or maybe not. He didn’t look like the talkative sort. Anyway, Stroh’s going to sanitize the source and dump the warning into all the normal channels. It’ll put the good guys on alert, anyway.”
“Alert for what, El-Tee?” the radioman asked.
“Good question, Barker. A very good question.” Without saying anymore, the lieutenant lead them back to their operations center.
TWO
Retired Master Sergeant Colin Waterson whistled softly as he studied the data on his screen. It was faint, but it was there — a heat bloom.
“Judy, Judy, Judy,” he said as he tweaked the gain on the screen. “You funning me, girl, or are we going all the way?”
Processing error? An innocent explanation, like a hot water geyser? Or the start of something that could get way, way out of hand?
Waterson glanced over at Jim Vail, the junior sensor analyst on this shift. As usual, Vail seemed lost in his own world, his eyes focused blankly on his screen but his thoughts clearly elsewhere. In contrast to Waterson’s stocky, bullet-shaped body, Vail was a slender man, one who looked more like a poet than an analyst. In the three months they’d worked together, Waterson had come to the conclusion that Vail needed to find the guts to quit and find something that suited him better. It wasn’t that Vail was a bad guy — to the contrary. He just didn’t have the fire in his belly that Waterson liked to see in an analyst.
After three decades in uniform as an Air Force intelligence specialist, Waterson had found that stalking elusive trout in his Montana hideaway hadn’t proved as fulfilling as he would have hoped. While his military retirement check covered all of his necessities, it couldn’t provide the one thing in life he was missing — the sheer raw excitement of his military career.
In his last tour, Waterson had been the senior enlisted man at Cheyenne Mountain, the facility dug deep into rock that controlled all strategic sensors and weapons. Waterson was a veteran of countless periods of increasing tension and had seen what happened when someone thought that the next world war was about to start. It was heady stuff, and despite the long hours, days and weeks during which absolutely nothing happened, he missed those moments when everything was on the line, when the slightest screw-up or hesitation could spell the difference between war and peace.
So he’d gone back to it, at least part-time. Not in Cheyenne Mountain, but as a senior analyst onboard the USNS
Cobra Judy was one leg of a detection triad that kept a close eye on every area of the world that possessed ballistic missile launch capability. Waterson’s Judy consisted of a solid-state based array fitted into the stern of the USNS
Waterson had been to Cobra Dane, the massive shore-based radar located at Shamir Air Force Base on Shemya Island. He’d stared up at the single, circular-phased array radar thirty meters in diameter. The face of the radar was covered with more than 35,000 elements and faced southwest, covering an arc of one hundred and twenty degrees. Initially operational in 1977, Cobra Dane was upgraded in the nineties to improve its capabilities. It could follow one hundred targets at once, as originally configured, and as part of an early warning network, could track two hundred targets.
