Attack of the Seawolf

CHAPTER 20

Ensign Ted “Buffalo” Sauer, the leader of the first platoon, was worried as he glanced at the forward deck of the Tampa. The first problem was the slick sonar dome of the ship at the bow — its surface was incredibly slippery, the combination of smooth plastic, slimy buildup from the ship’s days in port and the oily scum from the Chinese bay on top of the slime. The dome would be tough to climb, the only available path right up the centerline. But that would cause their insertion aboard the Tampa to be a single-file climb, leaving them naked. That led to the second problem, the guards on the deck. One guard had been smoking a cigarette, leaning on the forward leading-edge of the sail. At least one other guard, perhaps two, was visible on top of the sail in the bridge cockpit, and they had an excellent firing position for killing off the first platoon.

Buffalo could only hope Morris would come through, and that the Javelins would fly straight and not forget to explode.

Buffalo pulled his MAC-10 out of his vest while still floating in the bay and unplugged the muzzle, motioning to Chief Buckethead Williams to do likewise.

The sudden roar of the Javelin explosion on the destroyer to their right slammed their eardrums, the mushroom cloud lighting up the sky. The platoon ducked underwater, waiting for the second impact.

Soon the second Javelin hit, the crippled destroyers filling the sky with pulsating fireballs. The second detonation, stronger than the first, blew flames and shrapnel onto the deck of the Tampa, even knocking one of the guards by the sail overboard. Buffalo and Buckethead opened fire on the guards, shooting in three round bursts, and Buffalo dropped the two remaining guards on the deck.

It was then that the RPG exploded on the port lip of the cockpit. Buffalo could see one guard drop to the deck. He didn’t wait for the second. He motioned the platoon on, and as he kept his machine gun aimed at the deck, four of his shooters made their way slowly up the slick slope of the bow, gaining ground at the more level hull near the hatch. They crouched under the cover of the sail, rapidly pulling gear out of their combat vests. The SEALs were vulnerable but it had to be done. When the four shooters from his platoon had their weapons deployed, he and Buckethead tucked their guns in their vests and climbed the slope of the sonar dome. Once on deck, Buffalo pulled out his ski mask, radio and MAC-10, replacing the clip with fresh ammunition. He tested his radio, then ordered the platoon to go below.

As usual on a SEAL OP the commander of a unit went first — SEALs did not believe in leading from the rear. Buffalo took the ladder rungs two at a time and dropped silently to the deck, leveling his machine gun at the approaches to the ladder. The space seemed deserted. He was in a narrow passageway running fore-and-aft.

At six feet five inches tall and two hundred and fifty pounds, “Buffalo” (short for “Water Buffalo”) Sauer was the proverbial gentle giant, except on an OP. His moniker and radio handle came from his inordinate need for water — drinking, not swimming, although some thought the latter was linked in some mysterious fashion to the former, and hence his joining up with the SEALs. Unlike Morris, Buffalo Sauer seemed quiet to passive on the outside, but Morris and those around Sauer knew that that had nothing to do with the toughness inside, all of which Sauer needed now.

He ordered the assembled platoon to go, and covered the ladder way to the hatch above while the men proceeded up the stairs to the middle level. As he joined them he thought he heard something in the captain’s stateroom, some sort of struggle, but his orders were to stick to the plan. The upper level of the forward compartment was Commander Morris’ assignment To stay here would put the team in danger of being in the path of Morris’ bullets. Buffalo continued down the steep staircase to the middle level, emerging into a narrow passageway that ran the length of the compartment.

He sent a two-man team into a door leading to the petty officers’ quarters, a second team to the port crew berthing rooms, while he and the remaining men continued aft along the passageway to its termination at the crew’s mess. For a space that should be holding the entire ship’s crew, the level so far had been life less, as had the upper level. It wasn’t possible that all the guards had been killed when he and the platoon had come aboard … or could the Chinese have evacuated the ship before the SEALs got there?

Buffalo and Buckethead slowly approached the mess, one of the largest spaces aboard, roughly the size of a small restaurant. The last time Buffalo had raided a 688-class ship the men in the mess had been watching a movie. Taking it had been easy. But now the room could be a holding pen for several dozen prisoners, guarded by ten or more armed Chinese. Buffalo looked into Buckethead Williams’s eyes. No question, the man was pumped, his forehead broken out in sweat, his pupils dilated.

For a moment Buffalo wished he could just lob a stun grenade into the mess. He had considered it when he and Morris had drawn up the assault plan but Morris had vetoed it. The prisoners would be suffering from lack of food, respiratory infections and weakness.

A stun grenade that would paralyze a Chinese guard for a half hour might well kill a man suffering from pneumonia and starvation.

As Buffalo neared the end of the passageway, he could see men in the crew’s mess. He waved Buckethead in behind him as he accelerated into a sprint and ran into the room.

The next seconds seemed hours, the effect of the shot of adrenaline as he crashed into the room, a world of slow motion. Every bench was full of seated men, all wearing blue coveralls, most with their heads on the table tops. The floor space between tables was crammed with bodies, also wearing the blue submariner’s coveralls. Their faces were paper white, thin, emaciated. A memory was keyed in his mind; the faces reminded him of the pictures he’d seen depicting the prisoners in Nazi death camps. The next impression that hit him was the awful stench. The men had been in a sweatbox for days, sitting in their own filth. It was like a stockyard.

Buffalo looked up to the aft bulkhead. Along the wall a row of Chinese guards stood at semi-attention, all wearing Mao jackets and liberty caps with the red star in the center. The guards’ faces were starting to move in reaction to the entry of the SEALs. The next sound Buffalo heard was automatic rifle fire, the cough of a close MAC-10. The sound was coming from his own gun, his body reflexively aiming and firing. The chests of the guards spotted red as the bullets smashed into them. Surprise had neutralized them — for a moment.

He heard a rapid series of shots from over his right shoulder, gunshots that were not the rapid blips of the silenced MAC-lOs but the deep-throated barking of an AK-47. He pivoted, bringing up his weapon, and saw a guard standing against the forward bulkhead in the blind corner along the port side. The guard was emptying his clip, shooting every round he had, not at the SEALs but at the helpless, prostrate men on the deck and at the tables. Buffalo, in a rage, leveled his MAC-10 at the guard, and fired ten rounds into the man’s chest, knowing he should have budgeted only three but the fury of the moment had taken over. He had a brief impression of the other SEALs targeting the guard, the man’s chest exploding, yet he continued to fire into the prisoners, as he sank to the deck. At least a dozen men had been hit or killed.

Buffalo started to call Doc Sheffield to attend them while he and Buckethead took the remainder of the middle level deck. The call was interrupted by the sound of rifle fire coming from the starboard side of the middle level. Officers’ country. He reloaded, checked Buckethead and ran forward to the passageway and toward the door to the wardroom. He took a deep breath, allowing himself just a moment to try to clear his mind of the awful scene he’d just left and prepare himself for what was coming.

Jack Morris shielded his eyes as “Cowpie” Clites’ acetylene torch burned through the side of the forward escape trunk. They were forced to cut through it rather than exit by the lower hatch, which led down to the crew’s mess. With the hostages being held there, an entering team would be shot by the guards. Finally, Clites and “Pig” Wilson pulled in the circle of steel cut by the torch. Morris stepped into the navigation room, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the comparative brightness of the compartment’s fluorescent lights. He felt the strange sensation of his mind fissioning into two separate but parallel parts, one side focused on the action of the present, a second on recording and analyzing. The forward compartment, as Morris knew from his raids on other 688-class submarines, took up roughly the forward forty percent of the submarine.

It was separated from the reactor compartment by a thick-shielded steel bulkhead with only one door in the middle level. So even though he came from the forward escape trunk, he was now in the furthest aft portion of this part of the sub. The port end of the room led to the fan room, the starboard to the radio room. A forward door led to control. A ladder way dropped to the lower decks.

Morris stepped away from the trunk to allow the other men of the second platoon to follow him, while he crouched down, his weapon seeking guards who could come from the radio room door, the fan room, or forward. For a moment he thought back to Norfolk Naval Air Station, where Admiral Donchez had given him the full picture of the Go Hai Bay operation and assured him that he and his men could liberate the Tamp a.

Now he wasn’t so sure. Something inevitably went wrong with every operation — nothing was ever all right. What was it this time? The screw up with the cruise missiles? Something else waiting to mess them up? Now that his men’s footsteps were coming from the escape trunk the time for worrying was over.

As the last man entered, Morris gave the order to go. The second platoon assignments paired platoon leader Lieutenant “Pig” Wilson with platoon chief “Python” Harris. They would act as a two-man team and head for the torpedo room on the forward end of the lower level. A misdirected bullet or ricochet could detonate a torpedo’s self-oxidizing fuel or explode a warhead, and if that was to be the flaw in the operation it would be a fatal one for everybody aboard.

“Cowpie” Clites and “Droopy” Games were also to go to the lower level and take the aft end including the auxiliary machinery room, then cover Pig and Python.

“Mad Dog” Martin and “Red Meat” Reynolds would take the critical middle level, critical because the bulk of the guards were expected there, as were the hostages, since the middle level contained the crew spaces. That left Morris paired with “Bony” Robbins to take the upper level, including the radio room, navigation space, the control room, sonar and the captain’s and XO’s staterooms. The assault would have to be surgical, to avoid damaging equipment. Only a few physical systems could take a bullet and survive. A bullet hole in a sonar equipment cabinet would mean they would be deaf on the way out. A bullet hole in a periscope optics module would make them blind.

After checking the radio room and the fan room, Jack Morris and Bony Robbins advanced to the door to the control room. Morris peered in through a small round red-glassed window, and seeing no one, kicked the door open.

At that moment the Chinese guards in the control room opened up, all ten AK-47s bursting into violent life at once, the blast of the Chinese bullets shattering the door and cutting it to ribbons.

Chief Baron von Brandt raised his head after the helicopter rotor noises subsided. The fly over had been a reconnaissance, at least on the first pass. As the choppers flew back to the east a half-mile away, von Brandt sighted his sniper scope on the man who seemed to be in command of the P.L.A troops on the pier. No head shots. Baron thought, only hearts. He put the commander’s upper left chest in the crosshairs, exhaled slowly and steadily and slowly squeezed the trigger, hoping to make the shot a surprise even to himself, to keep him from jerking the rifle. The unit barely recoiled as it sent the heavy grain HydraShok bullet toward the commander at thirty-eight hundred feet per second.

The bullet spun out of the barrel, dropping slightly as gravity dragged it down toward the pier and the water of the slip. After a total flight time of twenty eight milliseconds, the bullet penetrated the fabric of the man’s tunic two inches from the central seam. The fabric vaporized as the round contacted it, its kinetic energy at the tip the equivalent of an acetylene torch.

The skin below the fabric yielded next, then the thin layer of fatty tissue before the muscle that lined the chest. The bullet entered a cavity between two ribs and proceeded on through the lung, blowing apart several airways, then on to the outer layer of the man’s heart, where it severed two coronary arteries before entering and destroying the right ventricle.

The damage from the bullet by this time would have been enough to kill the P.L.A commander, but the HydraShok round was specially designed to resonate within the cavity of the man’s abdomen, setting up a shock wave in his chest area, the pulsations causing what ballistics scientists called hydraulic shock. The effect of the shock wave was the immediate traumatization of the entire abdominal cavity, shutting down every organ, shorting out every nerve, cracking several ribs and vertebrae, bursting veins and arteries. The effect of the nerve-shorting trauma was an instantaneous overload of the brain stem receiving the electrical impulses from the spinal cord.

As life was being extinguished, the bullet, now wobbling and misshapen, passed out of the body, flew out over the north end of the pier and splashed into the water of the slip. As it sank, steam boiled from it for just an instant, its surface temperature elevated from the friction of the flight. On the pier the P.L.A commander’s face froze as he collapsed onto the oily concrete.

He never knew what had hit him.

By the time the P.L.A commander’s knees had begun to buckle, von Brandt had drawn a bead on the vice commander and fired, then targeted the lieutenants on the pier. As their officers died, the troops hit the concrete.

The only problem now, von Brandt thought, was that there was no antidote to the tanks. They hadn’t planned on using LAW rockets on this OP — who could expect tanks on a warship raid? Now it looked like they were going to pay for that mistake. On the pier, two of the tanks rotated their turrets, their guns aiming at the Tampa’s sail. Von Brandt ducked back into the cockpit, not sure how to break the news to Lennox that they had only seconds until the tank fired.

The sound of the helicopter rotors rose into a crescendo as the two Dauphin choppers returned, swooping in from the northeast, their flanks bristling with large-bore guns. The bullets from their guns blasted across the top of the sail, sparks flying from the impact of the heavy bullets against the high-tensile steel.

Once the helicopters flew by, one of the tanks on the pier opened up, the sound from its gun echoing across the calm water of the slip, a whoosh marking the flight of its projectile as the round flew overhead and dropped down into the water, the first explosion rocking the submarine.

Von Brandt shouted into his lip mike: “Stinky? If you’re up talk to me. We’ve got trouble up here—”

“BARON, THIS IS STINKY. WE’VE GOT PROPULSION — GIVE US AN ENGINE ORDER.”

“Go,” von Brandt yelled at Lennox.

“Get us the hell out of here!”

Lennox lifted his head up over the starboard aft lip of the sail, looking for the position of the Jianghu fast frigate, which was nowhere in sight. Only the gentle waves in the slip testified to its rapid departure. Off in the smoke-filled distance to the south, toward the supertanker pier, Lennox thought he saw the superstructure of the frigate. It would be going after the Seawolf, he thought.

As Lennox began to speak the second round was fired from a tank on the pier, this shot grazing the forward lip of the sail, its explosive force dissipating over the grave of the neighboring Luda but the force still enough to smash Lennox and von Brandt into the deck.

“All back full,” Lennox shouted.

“ROGER, ALL BACK FULL,” his earpiece replied.

Lennox waited, hoping the ship would move, the agonizing seconds ticking off as the first tank adjusted the aim of its gun at the sail, the third shot guaranteed not to miss. Lennox thought he could hear helicopter rotors again, but the sound no longer bothered him-the ship was moving, it was really moving. The pier and the burned-out hulls of the destroyers were fading forward of them, the open water of the bay approaching from aft. For a moment he couldn’t tell whether the shout of exultation he heard was his or Baron von Brandt’s.

The tank on the pier, now almost a ship length away, fired and missed, its aim now off, the Tampa’s motion confusing the turret operator. Lennox popped his head up to watch the end of the pier sail by, the wake of the ship’s motion white and glowing from phosphorescence in the water of the slip, the warm salty breeze over the sail dissipating the smells of the gunfire.

The sail neared the end of the pier, the tanks and troops now far away.

“Right full rudder. I say again, right full rudder.”

The helicopters zoomed in low for another pass, their bullets strafing the sail. Lennox ducked as the bullets whizzed by, amazed that again he’d survived a strafing run. For the first time in years he felt totally alive. Coming this close to death enhanced the sense of life. There was something about the approach to death, especially the evasion of it, that was unique.

Lennox waved his fist in the air at the troops on the pier and at the receding silhouettes of the choppers.

He even shouted: “You missed me, now you can kiss me.” He looked over at von Brandt, to share the moment, when he noticed that Baron wasn’t moving, and that a dark stain was spreading over his face. Lennox’s balloon was instantly deflated.