Into the Fire

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

From the starboard bridge wing of Milwaukee, Kate Bigelow watched as the two big Zodiacs, under the supervision of Master Chief Wilbur Crabtree, shuttled personnel from the ship to the rocky shore. There were bundles of supplies in each shuttle, but the priority was on the crew. Once they were safely ashore, they could send back teams to gather provisions — if the ship was still there. Milwaukee had a fifteen-degree starboard list, which made getting people and supplies over the side a little easier. Ashore, there was an orderly file of the ship’s company in helmets and foul-weather jackets making their way across the gravel beach and over the berm to the abandoned cannery.

An hour earlier, artillery rounds began to drop around the island and had begun to range closer to Milwaukee. For a while, none had come closer than two hundred yards, but the whistle and boom of the incoming shells terrified the captain and her crew. For these sailors, it was their first artillery barrage, and it was terrifying. Then a round landed on the beach just twenty yards off Milwaukee’s port quarter, sending a wave of rocky shards pinging along the side of the ship. No one was hurt, but everyone on the weather decks dove for cover. Only the threats of Master Chief Crabtree and the senior petty officers got the crewmen up and moving again. That was when Kate Bigelow decided it was too risky to remain aboard Milwaukee. She had to move her crew ashore to the abandoned cannery.

Now on the port wing of the bridge, Bigelow felt the pressure wave of the shell and singing of rocks as they rippled along the side of the ship. She was rooted in fear, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. My God, I can’t take this. She might have remained there immobile longer had her XO not appeared at her elbow.

“Status?” she managed, trying to sound normal.

“About three-quarters of the crew are ashore, including most of the wounded. There are two Chief Picard says just cannot be moved. She’s asking to stay behind to tend to them. I told her we’d make that determination when the rest of the crew was off the ship. When everyone’s in the shelter ashore, the master chief will begin the supply-shuttle runs.”

“Very well. How’re things ashore, Jack?”

“It’s pretty Spartan, but the structure is solid reinforced concrete, like it was built to withstand a tsunami or something. The crew’s scared, Captain, and this artillery is not helping.”

O’Connor’s reminding her of the crew seemed to bolster her. “We’re all scared, Jack, including me. I want you ashore and at the cannery organizing things there. You’ll be in charge until I get there. And, Jack, good job in getting things prepared and everyone off the ship.”

“Understood, ma’am. I’ll see you ashore.” And because it somehow seemed the thing to do, he offered her a salute, which she returned. “Good luck, Captain.”

“And to you, Jack. I’ll be off with the last shuttle. Hold down the fort until I get there.”

The artillery rounds continued to fall. It was only a matter of time before they caught one of them. I’m on my own, she thought, and help is not going to be arriving anytime soon. Now that they were hard aground, leaving the ship for cover ashore was their only option.

There was little left for her to do on the bridge. The ship was dead but for the battery-powered emergency internal lighting. One of the portable generators was being wrestled ashore while the other was still aboard to service the wardroom turned casualty center. She had just left the pilothouse, headed for the wardroom, when an enemy artillery shell struck the bow just forward of the 57 mm gun. The explosion unseated the gun mount and blew off a portion of the port bow. Those still on board and moving about the ship, like Kate Bigelow, were thrown to the deck by the impact. For those few still aboard, all was darkness and terror.

While Kate Bigelow struggled to her feet and shakily made her way on down to the wardroom and what had become the surgery suite on Milwaukee, the Air Force H-60 Blackhawk helicopter carrying Brian Dawson and Jesse Carpenter set down gently on a vacant stretch of concrete near a corrugated metal building at the end of the pier in the early evening hours. It was a nondescript building like many along the waterfront at the White Beach naval complex. What was different was that this building had unusually large hangarlike sliding doors. The sign at the personnel entrance read SEAL DELIVERY TEAM ONE, OKINAWA DETACHMENT.

“Sir, you want us to keep turning or shut down?”

“Go ahead and shut her down, Captain,” Dawson said into the intercom mic. “We might be a while.”

Before they left Kadena for the short ride to the Navy base, Dawson had managed to get a call through to Chase Williams, who in turn put in a call to the duty officer at the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. At selected operational, component, and geographic combatant commands, Williams had protocols set in place that any request, within reason, would be executed immediately with follow-on notifications through normal command and administrative channels. The U.S. Special Operations Command was one of those commands.

The duty petty officer stepped outside the hangar entrance to meet the helo’s arrival. He was dressed in swim trunks, sneakers, and a utility blouse and cover. He came to attention and saluted.

“Afternoon, sir. We just got a call from higher headquarters to expect you. The detachment commander, Lieutenant Denver, is over on the other side of the base. I just spoke with him, and he’ll be here in a few minutes. Would you like to come inside?”

The open bay of the hangar was bathed in florescent lighting. The painted and polished concrete floor looked like something out of a high-end NASCAR mechanic bay. There were tool trolleys with sliding drawers, stands of metered test equipment, and an intricate overhead traveling crane system. In the middle of the hangar on custom designed mobile cradles were two fat black torpedolike minisubs, complete with bow and stern planes, and two propellers bisected by a finlike rudder. They were just over twenty feet in length and had the look of slumbering hippos.

“These things look a little small,” Dawson said quietly to Carpenter.

“Not these, sir. These are the Mark 8 boats. They’re the wet, tactical submersibles. We want to see if they have one of the advanced dry minisubs available.”

“There’s my officer,” the SEAL petty officer announced. “Give me a minute to brief him, and he’ll be right with you.”

Following what Dawson and Carpenter took to be an animated discussion between the two SEALs, the detachment commander approached them. He was dressed in faded blue jeans, a 49ers sweatshirt, shower shoes, and tattered ball cap with an unreadable logo.

“Gentlemen, I’m Lieutenant Tom Denver.” He offered a firm handshake to both. “Excuse the attire, but I wasn’t expecting you. My petty officer tells me that you’re here with command blessing, both from the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Naval Special Warfare Command. But it might help if you tell me just who you’re with and how you think we might be able to help you.”

The two SEALs and the two Op-Center men retired to a corner of the hangar, where Dawson and Carpenter were offered coffee. The four sat on folding chairs around a pedestal table. Denver and Petty Officer Collins drank bottled water while Dawson gave them a crash course on Op-Center, an update on the situation in the northern Yellow Sea, and the plight of the crew of Milwaukee.

“So we have a stranded crew under the guns of the North Koreans,” Dawson concluded, “with no way to rescue them without a major and costly fleet action, and that action just might put them at further risk. Jesse here thought you might have a clandestine way to get to the island and rescue them, but”—he looked at the Mark 8 submersibles—“I’m not sure these craft are capable of meeting our needs. Do you have anything bigger?”

Denver was quiet for several moments and then turned to his petty officer. “Collins, could you go over to the nav locker and dig out a chart of the northern Yellow Sea?” Then he turned to Dawson and Carpenter. “You’re right; the Mark 8s are too small and too cold for what you have in mind. But we do have another option. There’s the Advanced SEAL Delivery System, or ASDS. It was a program to develop a dry minisub for use by SEALs — a boat that had a range and on-station loitering capability well in excess of the wet submersibles. The program was canceled due to cost overruns and reliability issues. The boat was, and is, a maintenance pig. We kept a single boat from the program to use as a test bed and to work on technologies that could support future dry-submersible craft and operations. It’s still a prototype boat, but we’ve got most of the bugs worked out. But it’s a dry boat, and it can carry up to twenty SEALs or, in this case, twenty evacuees.”

Dawson looked around. “But where is it?”

“It’s in a hangar on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor.” The disappointment showed on Dawson’s face, but Denver continued. “But the boat, in theory, is air transportable by C-17. And Kadena has the longest runways of any base in the Pacific. The ASDS can be piggybacked on a Los Angeles — class nuclear submarine. Can we use the ASDS to evacuate the LCS crew on that island? Maybe. Collins and I and the ASDS crew from Hawaii have some serious planning to do before we can give you an answer to that. There are a lot of ifs and maybes that have to be worked out. One of those is the getting it here and the other is the availability of a Los Angeles — class submarine to get the ASDS to the operational area.” Denver paused, looking from Carpenter to Dawson. “You two seem to have a lot of pull; you sure got my commanders to move quickly enough in getting you cleared and into our facility here. Think you have the juice to whistle up a C-17 and a nuclear attack submarine?”

Collins arrived with a chart of the Yellow Sea, and the four of them pored over it. “In answer to your question,” Dawson replied, “if you think there’s even a chance you and your ASDS can get that crew off that island, then you’ll get your aircraft and your submarine, and you’ll get them sooner rather than later.”

At the White House, President Midkiff met nearly nonstop with his national security staff and his senior military advisors. For the moment, there was nothing to do but stage military assets, pursue answers through diplomatic back channels, and prompt the United Nations Security Council to convene an emergency session. Around the table, there was much hawkish sentiment to “do something” to North Korea but still no solid plan to rescue the LCS crew. Politically, the president felt cornered.

At Op-Center, the Geek Tank was working at top speed around the clock; empty pizza boxes and a littering of aluminum soda cans documented the all-out effort they had begun the evening before. Williams and his senior staffers digested the raw data from a variety of intelligence-community feeds, the OC analytic product, and communications from the LCS and military commanders near the scene. Williams continued to press his staff for answers: why this, why now, what’s next, and who’s behind it all? Aaron Bleich remained silently camped in front of his computer searching for answers. After hours of painstaking search, a single name fluttered across his screen: North Korean General Lee Kwon Hui. Bleich sensed he might be onto something, and now he was out to prove it.