Payback

12

Murdock, Ching, and Jaybird darted out of the bridge, flew down two flights of steps, and came to the promenade deck. Standing in front of them were three North Koreans with their hands in the air. Their submachine guns lay on the deck at their feet.

“Tie them,” Murdock called to Ching, and he and Jaybird ran on to the center of the long and mostly dark promenade where they say a group of people. The SEALs slowed and came up behind a dozen middle-aged men and women in pajamas and robes. Murdock slouched so he wouldn’t tower over the others, and stared between them. Six men and women in their robes were lined up against the bulkhead. A man stood in front of them wearing the off-blue uniform of the North Korean Navy. Then Murdock saw the submachine gun he carried and aimed at the six. The Korean shouted something in English, but Murdock couldn’t understand it. He worked through the crowd to get closer.

“I told you once,” the Korean shouted. “I want a motor launch out the dockside hatch and I want guaranteed free passage to the boat and on to shore. Otherwise these six die here and right now.”

There was no ship’s officer there. The man talked to the crowd. He turned looking at the people behind him.

“I’ll shoot them down, believe it,” he shouted. “I am Captain Kim, and I’m used to being obeyed. Who can speak for the boat captain?”

A small woman with a long robe stepped from the group of people ten feet behind Kim.

“I can help you,” she said.

He turned to look at her. “Little woman of Korea, I remember you from before. Don’t bother me. I spoke with you already and you were not polite. Go away.” He shrugged and turned from her. Before Murdock could make a move, the small Korean woman lifted a heavy .45 pistol from the folds of her dress.

“This is for killing my husband,” she shouted, and at once fired the heavy gun. It kicked high. The bullet slammed into Kim’s right shoulder and spun him around. Before he could bring up the submachine gun, she brought the pistol down and fired again. This round jolted into his chest just over his heart and knocked him down, the sub gun skittering away from him on the deck.

The small Korean woman stepped up near him. Murdock pushed people aside and rushed toward the woman.

“You’re not dead yet, Kim,” the woman screamed. “You should be.” Before Murdock got to her, she fired four times more from point-blank range above where he lay on the deck. All the rounds hit him in the chest.

Murdock lunged the last three feet and grabbed the weapon before she could fire again. “He’s dead,” Murdock said.

Susie Jamison nodded, stepped closer to the body, and kicked it three times. “May your soul wander for all eternity in the nether regions of the unforgiven and may your ancestors deride you and scream at you for a thousand centuries for disgracing them and making them lose face.” Mrs. Jamison turned and walked away through the gawking vacationers.

Murdock used his drill-field command voice. “All of you passengers. This has been a shocking sight. Now please clear this area. Return to your cabins and lock the doors. There are still more than two dozen armed and dangerous North Korean Navy killers on board who could strike at any time. Go now and stay in your cabins until Captain Van Derhorn gives you an all-clear.” He watched as the people took a last look at the dead man, then slowly filtered into the inside of the ship. The six people against the wall surged out and gathered around Murdock, thanking him, glancing with fright at the man who had almost killed them. Murdock urged the six to hurry to their cabins.

Murdock and Jaybird went back to the bridge. The captain reported that fifteen of the hostiles had surrendered.

“We’re getting survivors from the frigate at the dockside hatch. So far we’ve brought twenty on board. I’ve called the nearest Coast Guard station to send out two rescue choppers to transport some of our most seriously injured passengers and crew to a hospital. They say twenty minutes. They also will send three cutters to come and take the North Koreans off our hands. They can have the wounded ones too. Not sure how many survived the sinking.”

“Good work, Captain. The Coast Guard should take the bodies too. As soon as we get the ship cleared of all the Korean live ones, we’ll gather up the corpses and take them down to the hatch level. The North Korean government will want the bodies returned, I’m sure.”

Murdock talked to the Motorola. “Okay, team. Maintain one guard at each of the vital areas. The rest of you report to the top deck and we’ll start a sweep of the decks to find any reluctant North Koreans. May be some trouble, may not.”

They made the sweep. On the top deck they found no one. Two Koreans came out of a closet-type room on the second level and surrendered. Then it went faster, and they found only six more Koreans, and none offered any resistance.

When they finished the last passenger-area sweep, Murdock checked his watch. Almost 0300. He didn’t think it had taken that long to cleanse the big ship.

His Motorola sounded in his earpiece.

“Murdock, this is Socha. The dockside hatch wasn’t open when we finished our exercise, so we swam for shore. We’re all present and accounted for. How is the job there moving?”

Murdock told him. “About ready to call in our Forty-Sixes. You want a pickup?”

“Roger that, Murdock. Let us know when our chopper is coming and we’ll use some red flares to mark our beach. We’re almost due east of the ship. Nice and quiet over here. Understand that frigate is bottomed out somewhere out there.”

“Affirmative, Socha. An F-86 christened it with a Harpoon missile. The old tub broke in half and went down.”

“Good. Let me know when our pickup is.”

At 0420 the Coast Guard choppers arrived and transported the six critical passengers to the closest hospital. Cutters came soon after that and swallowed up sixty-nine North Koreans, alive and dead. The cutters would transport them to shore to be turned over to the county sheriff to be jailed awaiting possible prosecution, or pickup by federal authorities. The other two cutters began a systematic search of the still-dark waters for survivors. They estimated there could be as many as fifty or sixty more North Korean sailors out there in the water.

Murdock asked Verbort to contact the fly guys again. The plan had been for the two Forty-Six choppers to wait at the ballpark until they were needed. They set up an 0530 pickup off the fantail of the big luxury liner. The captain was anxious to get under way. He pulled in his sea anchor, and had been instructed by his company to return to San Diego, where the passengers would be released and given vouchers good for another trip. The ship would go in for repairs, which the captain estimated would take at least four months.

At 0530 one Forty-Six landed on the golf tee on the stern of the Royal Princess, and the other one stopped by at the beach. The chopper crews were refreshed after four hours of sleep, and turned their craft toward San Diego and Coronado.

They had just passed Oceanside, and it was daylight, when the chopper pilot called Murdock up front.

“Not sure what is going on, Commander. Suddenly my radio reception went dead. Now I’m getting one transmission from a SATCOM my CO is using outside his office. He told me that the whole base and San Diego is blacked out. It’s not a rolling blackout. The whole county is black. My CO said he’s getting SATCOM traffic from Los Angeles and San Francisco. From what they say, the whole damn West Coast is running without the aid of electrical power. Everything electrical except battery power is shut down.”

“Terrorists or a nuke explosion in the atmosphere that blanked out all electrical?” Murdock asked.

“Can’t be the nuke, or my whole electrical system would be down regardless of the battery.

“Sounds like a power grid went down. That would flash through huge surges on the rest of the West Coast power grids and they all could blow. Remember when five or six of them went down in Northern California and Oregon when a transformer island blew up a few years ago?”

“Heard about it. So far nobody is reporting any enemy action.”

“We just might not have heard of it yet. I’d guess the satellites are still up if we can talk through them. At least the SATCOM satellite is still there.”

The pilot shrugged. “My skipper says to come home. We should land in about twenty minutes. Plenty of fuel. I’m going to stay over the ocean all the way down instead of cutting across. All of the commercial flights must be down. Good thing it’s light enough for them to land.”

Murdock went back to the troops and shouted the news to them. Sadler scowled. “Who the hell did it?” he asked.

“Could have been a power grid accident, explosion, almost anything to put down the whole West Coast grid,” Lam said.

“Who has our SATCOM?” Murdock asked.

“Back at the base,” Sadler said. “Didn’t think we’d need it.”

“Looks like we do, Senior Chief. But I don’t know if we could use it inside this bird or not. From here on out, I want that SATCOM glued to somebody’s back. Wherever we go, training or an operation. We have waterproofing for it?”

“No, sir,” Jaybird said.

“Everything except training swims and wet operations, we take the set. Senior Chief, get it waterproofed as soon as possible. Must be some gear that will do the job.”

“Copy that, Commander.”

DeWitt slid in beside Murdock. “Suppose this is some more of the North Korean attack?”

“Hadn’t thought about it, but sure as hell could be. Doesn’t take much to throw the whole grid into a blackout. All they would have to do is pick the right relay stations and a few major transmission lines.”

“How long was the power out before?” DeWitt asked.

“Don’t remember exactly. They found the problem almost at once and fixed it. As I recall, ten or twelve hours. Caused a horrendous mess.”

“Yeah, and now with the Internet and e-mail, think of the trouble it will cause. All business is shut down at the git-go. Can’t run a store without lights and cash registers. Oh, little places can get by, but not the big ones. Any on-line outfits are dead for the day or the week, and the stock market is deader than last year’s Super Bowl tickets.”

“Thanks, and the market was just starting on an upward trend,” DeWitt said.

Murdock went back to the pilot. “Check to see if there will be a bus or trucks waiting for us at your field.”

“My commander told me that the bus is there waiting. Has been since you took off. It can drive through Coronado, but there’s a huge traffic jam there with folks coming to work at North Island. No traffic lights. He says there are two radio stations still on using emergency generators. They keep telling people that when they come to an intersection to treat it like a four-way stop. Coronado has cops at the major intersections, but the whole thing is one huge mess. You might get back to your quarters faster if you hiked.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant. We’ll see the lay of the land when we get there.”

A few minutes later, the twenty-four SEALs stepped out of the CH-46 after it had landed at North Island Naval Air Station, six miles from the SEALs headquarters. Murdock looked around. It was a little after 0745. He didn’t see the usual activity around the big base. The SEALs trooped fifty yards to the Navy bus waiting for them, and boarded with all their gear.

“Can you get us through the traffic?” Murdock asked. The Navy second class driving the bus shrugged. “Don’t have the faintest. The station sent most of the civilian workers home as soon as they got here, and that’s caused a reverse traffic jam. We’ll work it out and go around the ocean side. Might work.”

A half hour later the bus stopped in the NAVSPECWARGRUP-ONE parking area, and the SEALs traipsed over the Quarter Deck and into their quarters. Murdock and DeWitt stopped to talk with Master Chief Petty Officer Gordon MacKenzie. They had known each other for over six years.

“Well, Commander, lad, sir. A fine mess you’ve got us in this time. No juice at all, up the whole damn coast. Nobody has a shot glass of an idea what caused it, and evidently no idea about how to fix it.”

“You using your SATCOM?”

“Aye. Picking up lots of transmissions on all frequencies. Most are just short of panic calls.”

“Anything official?”

MacKenzie pulled out a small radio and turned it on.

“So, this is KFMB, one of two radio stations in San Diego still functioning. Our big turbine is spinning away driving the large generator and providing our station with power. So far we have received little information from the network. We have some receivers on covering many bands and frequencies. Up to now this is all we know for sure.

“Power is out all along the coast from the top of Washington State to San Ysidro. Most stores and businesses are closed. Traffic is snarled. No TV stations in town are on the air. Television takes a tremendous lot of power. We’re trying to get our sister TV station up, but so far no luck.

“What caused it? Nobody knows. Some emergency government agencies are swinging into action. We understand the county emergency radio system overlooking El Cajon has been staffed and will soon be operational. Power is out in what is called the Pacific Electrical Grid, which covers the coast states and most of Idaho, part of Montana, and all of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. It could be a long day and a horrendous night if they don’t figure out the problem.

“I have just received a call from a ham radio operator. All of you hams out there get your sets into operation and see what you can find out. This is a transmission from a woman north of Redding who says she witnessed a gigantic explosion in a huge electrical substation near her home. Redding is in the Central Valley about a hundred and ninety miles north of San Francisco. It’s a center where high-voltage power lines come in and power goes out in several directions. She said she’s seen a transformer explode on a pole.

“She assured my contact that it was a hundred times that big and loud. The whole area was covered with sparking wires and snapping and smoking for a half hour before it calmed down.

“Now, the question is, was there just one explosion like this one? Was it done deliberately or was it an accident? Could one large power substation blow out the entire electrical grid to seven-and-a-half states? I don’t know.

“A small update for you. Yes, most telephones are working. However, if you have a cell phone, it probably won’t. The cell phone repeater antennas need electricity to function. If you have a cordless phone that plugs into a socket and transmits your voice from handset to base, it probably won’t work. Ordinary phones use a very small amount of electrical power and are not connected to the electrical lines. So, you can call, but most circuits are so jammed that you can’t get through. Just sit tight, hang on, welcome your day of vacation, and hope they put the grids back on line soon. By the same logic, most long-distance calls won’t go through since they are often sent through microwave relay stations. Those stations here in the affected area are also down and out, so no long-distance calls.”

Murdock and DeWitt listened to the radio. Murdock shrugged. “Hey, I have an after-action report to do. I can write it on my battery-powered laptop, but won’t be able to print it. So I’ll print it out later.”

Murdock had just sat down in his small office at Platoon Three when his phone rang. It startled him. He grabbed it. “Murdock here sir,” he said.

“Good, you’re back.” It was Commander Masciareli, Murdock’s immediate superior. “I have my SATCOM on and just received a mission-well-done from the CNO. He also said nobody knows much about the power blackout. He suggested that your platoon be on standby. He had just come from a meeting with several federal agencies and they were concerned with the power blackout. By now they concede that it is sabotage, probably by the same North Korean elements who attacked San Francisco and shot down the jet passenger liner.”

“Yes, sir. I’d say that’s a good assumption,” Murdock said.

“He said one of the large power stations blasted is in the desert north of Palm Springs near Yucca Valley. Two witnesses saw the huge power substation there blow up; then two cars full of men drove off into the desert south toward the Little San Bernardino Mountains. So far nobody has tried to chase them down. He wants your men to get airlifted up there and use your choppers to locate them and capture them if possible. The report said six to eight men in two vehicles.”

“Sir, we just got back.”

“At ease, mister. I know where you’ve been. You’ll have two hours of prep time, then lift off North Island at 1000 in two Forty-Sixes. Take all the ammo and weapons you can carry. The choppers will be your horses. Each will have a door gunner. That’s a go, Commander. You better get cracking.”