Seawolf Class

12

Thundering through the night, the line of Huey UH-1 helicopters clattered scant feet above the waves, unseen in the darkness below. Jack Morton sat on the edge of the cargo deck of the lead helo, his feet braced on the landing skid as the warm, wet wind slapped and tugged madly at his assault gear.

Four helicopters, thirty-two men, eight to a bird. Sixteen men from Third Platoon, First Company SEAL Team Three, and sixteen more from the Taiwan parafrogmen commando unit. It was a larger insertion than Morton liked. While he'd trained in large-scale assaults, the SEALs were at their best in small-unit deployments, usually in eight-man squads or, at most, a sixteen-man platoon. More men than that and the operation could become badly confused real fast, especially if you weren't sure where all of your men were at any given moment.

This was a lot worse, too, because half of the assault force was made up of strangers, the Taiwanese parafrogs. Oh, there was no question whatsoever that they were good. Their training was closely modeled on the insanely rigorous BUD/S training the American SEALs went through. But the Third Platoon had the advantage of having worked and trained together for a long time, to the point that every man knew every other better than a brother, knew him so well you could damned near tell where he was and what he was doing by some arcane sixth sense.

But the SEALs were also trained to take part in hasty insertions, and this op was about as hasty as they came. Fortunately, it was relatively straightforward. Get in, find the PLA mobile launchers a few miles inland, wham-and-scram, and exfiltrate.

They were riding heavily on trust on this one — trusting Tse and his people to be as good as they were supposed to be, trusting the Taiwanese helo pilots to be as good as they were supposed to be, and trusting a Taiwanese patrol boat to meet them at a certain point with a certain signal to get them the hell out of Dodge when the time came. That level of trust came damned hard for SEALs. They knew they could count on one another… but who the hell were these guys?

Morton had been a kid running around with his shirttails out at Swissvale Elementary School during most of the Vietnam War, but he'd heard plenty of stories, especially from TEAM old-timers, now retired, about the love-hate relationship the Teams had developed with intelligence bureaus in general and with the CIA in particular. Intel on enemy movements, deployments, and strength had been so piss-poor dreadful that the SEALs had swiftly formed their own intelligence networks, relying on their own people to deliver when the cowboy hat and shades-sporting boys from the Company had nothing to offer but guesses and hot air.

The situation here was similar — depending on sources of intel about enemy strength and presence that were reputedly good, but untried by Third Platoon. Only the parafrogs' reputation among the SEALs, thanks to other Team members who'd worked with them, made this operation even conceivable.

The copilot of Morton's helo turned in his seat, reached back, and slapped Morton on the shoulder, before holding up three gloved fingers. Morton nodded his understanding and gave a thumbs-up in reply.

Three minutes.

He nudged Chief Bohanski at his left and passed on the three-minute warning. Each of the eight SEALs aboard the Huey began giving one another a final going-over, checking for hanging straps, unhooked buckles, or loose gear.

The SEALs were in full war paint, their faces heavily coated with black and green swaths of an oil-based paint that would not come off in seawater. They wore diving gear — Draeger rebreathers and masks — over combat vests tightly packed with explosives and demo gear, spare magazines, sheathed knives, plastic-wrapped main weapons, and personal radio equipment.

They'd made a final check with USSOCOM by communications satellite relay that afternoon, and received the command "Red Dragon takes flight." The op was a go, their last set of intel downloads on the objective still good.

For a time over the past forty-eight hours, Morton had wondered if the mission might be called off before they deployed. Taiwan television had been full of news reports for the past couple of days of a "friendly visit" by an American nuclear submarine to Hong Kong. That sort of flag-showing happened from time to time, but only rarely in times of crisis as tight as this. The news also carried stories of the possibility of new talks with Beijing, aimed at defusing the Taiwan crisis. Taiwan, however, had not been invited to join those talks, at least not yet, and until that happened it was still business as usual for the ROC parafrogs.

He felt the Huey swerve slightly and slow. The pilot, in the right-hand seat, was wearing a heavy, masklike headset that covered his eyes, with night-vision goggles that let him pick out details of surface and surroundings in near-total darkness. According to Tse, these helo crews were expert at finding their way to particular unmarked patches of ocean in the middle of a moonless night with uncanny precision. He just hoped their sense of altitude was good in those things; they were flying at something like twenty feet above the waves, way too low for the altimeter to be at all useful, low enough that the slightest miscalculation could slam them into the water and end their mission right then and there. The other three helicopters should be strung out behind the leader, staggered in echelon formation so that jumpers from one helo wouldn't come down on top of other jumpers already in the water.

If these guys knew what they were doing.

Their speed should be dropping to about twenty or thirty knots, no more. Any faster and the SEALs would slam into the water hard enough that it would feel like a stone wall. Men had been killed in training accidents when pilots had signaled the helocasters to jump and were flying too high or too fast. Morton leaned forward, looking down into blackness. The moon had set several hours before, and the night was overcast and dark. He could just make out a glimmer of light reflecting from a black, oily surface, but it was almost impossible to gauge altitude by eye alone.

Time for a final equipment check, to pull masks down over painted faces… and turn on the gas flow from rebreathers.

The copilot reached back again, gave a clenched-fist signal, then pointed. It was time… now!

Two by two, from the open cargo deck doors on either side of the Huey, the SEALs planted their feet on the helicopter's runners and pushed themselves off backward into black emptiness. Morton shoved hard with his feet, holding his breath and squeezing his mask down hard against his face. An instant later a cold, explosive collision engulfed him when he hit the churning black water.

Helocasting was only a slightly updated form of the original UDT deployments off patrol boats or landing craft during World War II and Korea. Frogmen trained to jump off the side of a speeding boat into a raft secured to the boat's side, and then on command to roll over the edge of the raft and into the water. The maneuver permitted them to deploy with considerable precision, carefully spacing the combat swimmers out in a line.

This was much the same, but from a low, slow-flying helicopter instead of a boat. Aircraft gave them considerably better maneuverability than boats would have allowed. Their flight path had been carefully contrived to take them north from Kinmen toward the mainland, then swinging west parallel to the invisible border between ROC and PRC territory. Kinmen was only about four miles off the Chinese coast; the line of UH-1s would have been apparent on every PLA radar screen from Xiamen to Shenhu. The watchers along the coast might even suspect that a frogman insertion was under way, but they would have no way of telling exactly where the commandos had dropped off.

Kicking gently, Morton approached the surface. When his head broke through to open air once more, he could hear the dwindling flutter of the helicopters continuing to fly west, parallel to the border. Eventually they would swing south, out over the strait, and make their way back to Taiwan.

But thirty-two black-clad combat swimmers remained, moving through the inky darkness with slow, silent kicks. The luminous LED compass on Morton's wrist gave him his bearing of 325 degrees; the mainland coast ought to be just over two miles ahead, that way… an easy swim.

And a lonely one. He knew there were thirty-one other men out there, but he could see nothing, could hear nothing but the hiss of his own breathing, the thud of his own heartbeat in his sea-muffled ears. Slipping back beneath the water, he concentrated on holding his stroke to a measured beat per second, counting each kick in order to estimate his progress.

At a yard per kick, seventeen hundred and some yards per mile… call it an hour to cover two miles. Kick…kick… kick…

His progress was helped by the inflowing tide, and a two-knot current along the coast, running east to west, had been accounted for in the op planning. Now was the time, though, to wonder what they'd missed, what factor, forgotten, was going to turn around and bite them.

Kick…kick… kick…

SEALs were trained to be patient, to hold on, to endure. Thrusting steadily along, he stayed just beneath the surface. Once, thirty minutes into the deployment, he heard the growling rasp of a boat's engine growing louder, and he jackknifed at the waist, going deeper. He had to be careful of his depth. Draeger units had the unfortunate habit of causing oxygen poisoning at depths much below thirty-two feet. The growl grew louder, louder… then faded away behind him. Presumably, the PLA had boats out on patrol, guarding against just such a visitation as this one. They would also have listening devices of various sorts planted… and possibly mines as well. They would not have motion detectors, since those could be triggered by any large, passing fish. And there might be nets, but they couldn't encase the entire coast in antiswimmer netting.

He heard a sudden, dull thump and felt a quick pressure in his ears. He stopped, hovering in the darkness, listening. Another thump, farther off this time. Those were explosions…probably hand grenades tossed into the water. He felt a stab of concern, then pushed the emotion down. Almost certainly, a PLA surface patrol was tossing grenades into the water at random, hoping either to catch enemy swimmers by chance or to bluff them into showing themselves. If they'd actually spotted some of the Red Dragon swimmers… well, there wasn't a lot that could be done, save to press on. After another three distant explosions the thumps ended.

Morton kept swimming.

Almost an hour after the helocast, his flippers brushed against stony bottom. He swam on a few more yards, then carefully maneuvered himself upright and again broke the surface.

He was adrift in a gentle offshore swell. He could see the coast clearly a few hundred yards ahead, the city of Xiamen was close, a mile or so to the southwest, and the sky glow reflected off overcast and water made the surroundings visible, especially to eyes dark-adapted by an hour of swimming in pitch-darkness.

For a long, long time Morton floated there, watching the coast. He could see the beach as a gray streak edged by the slash and churn of rolling surf. Above the beach was forest, black and impenetrable. There were lights on a hill in the distance — a house, perhaps, or a small building. There were no nearer signs of habitation.

Ten minutes passed. He could feel himself being dragged east by the current and kicked slowly to hold himself in place. This was one of the crucial points of the insertion. Somehow, thirty-two swimmers who'd jumped into the ocean an hour ago and two miles away from that beach had to rendezvous with absolute stealth and silence. The only way to do that was to have two men — Petty Officer Second Class Li Ho and PO First Class Chiang Soon — go in first and alone as pathfinders. Once they found the right spot of beach and made sure it was clear, they would—

Yes! There! A light winked briefly above the beach to the right — two shorts and a long, the agreed-upon signal. Morton began kicking again, striking out toward the indicated section of beach.

He felt the bottom rising beneath him, felt the surf grow stronger, more turbulent, roiling the surface and propelling him forward. He let an incoming wave lift him and send him gliding forward; he hit wet sand and clung there as the wave burst over his back and head and shoulders, hissing, then trickled away, leaving him on wet and gleaming sand. He crawled forward, staying flat, as another wave broke across his legs and splashed around his face.

Reaching behind him, he unsnapped the Chinese Type 73 assault rifle and pulled the plugs sealing barrel and receiver. Dragging back the charging lever, he chambered a round, carefully studying the dark forest ahead as the surf continued to splash and hiss around him.

To his left a barely seen shadow, black against the black of the water, moved forward in a crouch. A second shape joined the first. Another signal light winked from the forest, and the SEALs, death-silent, moved forward.

The body of a PLA sentry lay at the edge of the beach, the back of his neck pierced and his spine severed by a swift stab from a diving knife. Li was in the process of dragging the body back into the woods where it could be hidden.

The Team members were already fanning out through the night, silently taking up positions on a large perimeter, facing all directions. As more and more of the SEAL and Taiwanese commandos arrived, rising out of the surf like black, shapeless sea monsters, they began forming up into squads of eight men each, the better to move quietly and efficiently through the woods.

Before they set out, however, Chief Merriam assembled the compact SATCOM dish, connected the power supply, and punched out a coded signal to USSOCOM, a brief message meaning, simply, We're here.

The answer came moments later. Go.

Still in utter silence, the SEALs and Taiwan commandos slipped deeper into the forest, leaving the splash and wash of the surf behind. They had a long way to go.

There were no two ways about it, Chief Toynbee thought. Ken Queensly hadn't been to many bars in his life, but Toynbee and another sonar tech, ST1 Keller-man, had insisted that if he was going to see Hong Kong, he had to see the watering holes of Kowloon. Hell, forget the usual tourist sights — the tram up Victoria Peak, Government House, Hong Kong Park, or the Space Museum. You hadn't seen Hong Kong until you'd seen the Bottoms Up.

Kowloon, with its business district of Tsim Sha Tsui, lay directly north across the bay from Hong Kong proper, occupying a blunt peninsula thrusting south into Victoria Harbor. Until the new airport had been opened on Lantau Island in 1998, all of Hong Kong's air traffic had been handled by the old Kai Tak Airport on Kowloon's southeast corner — a single runway extending out into the harbor, which had offered stomach-dropping views of the city during the precipitously daring landings and takeoffs.

Kai Tak was closed now, but Kowloon murmured and jostled and festered as enthusiastically as ever, a seething anthill of people, shops, tenements, high-rise condos, market places, and mercantile mayhem. The skyline wasn't as modern, as thrilling, or as high as Hong Kong's; incoming aircraft had to skim Kowloon's rooftops during their approaches, resulting in stringent height restrictions to the buildings, though most of the development money had migrated anyway to the financial district across the harbor. Still, the sheer busyness of the place had Queensly wide-eyed and a bit dazed. Toynbee had to take his elbow to guide him through the looming doorway of the Bottoms Up.

Queensly's experience with bars had been limited to the joints along the main drag outside of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center during his boot leave, and to an identical stretch of bars, tattoo parlors, uniform tailoring shops, strip clubs, tobacconists, and massage parlors outside the sub school complex at Groton. Some of those places had been pretty sleazy— shockingly so for a wet-behind-the-ears kid from Zanesville, Ohio — but none of them had been as sleazy as this place.

Tobacco smoke mingled with other, curiously exotic and alien scents filling the air, making both breathing and navigation difficult. Grease, spilled drinks, and dirt covered the floor and most other surfaces in sight; garish red lighting and pulsing disco strobes made it hard to see the larger-than-life James Bond posters on the walls.

There were seven Seawolves in the shore party— Toynbee, Queensly, Larimer, Bennett, Shaeffer, Haskell, and Ritthouser. They were wearing civilian clothing, as was expected on liberty nowadays in a world where military personnel were told to keep a low profile, but it was easy enough to pick them out as Navy, with their short haircuts, loud banter, and good-natured camaraderie. More, it was possible to pick them out as submariners. Their skins were uniformly pasty under the garish bar lighting.

"This place is real big on Bond… James Bond," Toynbee said with a snicker. "One of the Bond movies had some scenes shot in here, and they never let you forget it!"

"They've done some redecorating since the last time I was in here," Haskell said. "But it still looks pretty much the same."

"The Communists promised hands off for fifty years," Larimer pointed out. "They can't shut decadent places like this down until 2047."

"So we got that long, at least, to enjoy!" Ritthouser said. "Decadent is good!"

"I thought we were going to that other place you were talking about," Queensly said as a hostess led them to a table almost lost within the caliginous, smoke-wreathed recesses of the place.

"The Fuk Wai?" Haskell said, scraping his chair back and taking a seat. "Don't worry, Queenie! We'll get there!"

"Queenie's a little anxious, huh?" Bennett said.

"Wouldn't you be?" Shaeffer said, laughing. "His first real liberty?"

"Patience, Queenie, patience!" Toynbee said. "There's a proper order to these things. First, a few drinks here. Then we mosey up the street to the Fuk Wai and find out why…."

Shaeffer laughed. "I remember my first time ashore. Wow! It was in the Patpong in Bangkok—"

"Ha! Did you dip your dong in the ol' Patpong?" Toynbee asked.

"What's the Patpong?" Queensly asked.

"Red light district," Shaeffer explained. "Where all the bars and whorehouses are. Oh, man! There was this sweet, sweet little Thai girl, couldn't've been more than fifteen—"

"I don't want to even hear that shit, man," Ritthouser warned.

"Aw, it's the way things are there, Doc! You know! Cultural differences!"

"Don't make that kind of thing right," Bennett said.

"So?" Shaeffer said, eyebrows raised. "You tell that to a fifteen-year-old kid who comes in from the sticks, ends up alone in the city and has to find a way to eat!"

"We've got that back in the States," Ritthouser said. He nodded toward a cage where a teenage Chinese girl in a G-string gyrated to the thump of western hard rock. "And maybe here, too!"

Their waitress arrived and took their drink orders… scotch or bourbon for all but Toynbee, who ordered beer, and Queensly, who asked for kekou kele — a Coke — to the guffaws and good-natured jibes of the others.

"Maybe that's a cultural difference!" Haskell said, laughing.

"Speaking of cultural differences," Toynbee said, "get a load of them!"

Another party of westerners was being ushered into the back of the bar, eight men in white naval uniforms that showed horizontally striped T-shirts under the jumpers' V-necks. Their haircuts were distinctive as well, their scalps as closely shorn as those of any punk-rocker skinhead. The black patches giving their ship's name on their sleeves were picked out in Cyrillic letters.

"What are they, Russians?" Bennett asked, squinting through the smoke.

"Off that GKS in the harbor, I'll wager," Larimer said, nodding.

"I don't think so," Toynbee said, his expression turning serious.

"How do you know?"

"GKS vessels don't have names, they have numbers — GKS-83, GKS-95, like that. Those name patches read… can't quite make them out from here. Looks like Admiral… something."

"Admiral G. L. Nevolin," Larimer said, squinting hard. "Maybe the GKS ships have names now?"

"Or that's the name of that Krivak Two we saw in port," Shaeffer suggested.

"Nah," Toynbee said. "Krivaks all have names like

'Lively' or 'Wrathful.' One-word names, and they wouldn't be Admiral Somebody-or-other."

"They're submariners," Ritthouser said.

"How can you tell, Doc?"

"Look at their skin, Bennett! Those guys haven't seen the light of day for months!"

"Makes sense, I guess," Larimer said. "Wasn't Nevolin a Soviet sub guy?"

"We'll need to check that with the skipper when we get back aboard," Toynbee said. He watched the Russians for a moment more. They were loudly ordering drinks in a mix of Russian and badly broken English.

"So what Russian sub is in Hong Kong?" Shaeffer wanted to know.

"The G. L. Nevolin?" Haskell asked.

"Asshole. No, I mean there wasn't any Russian sub in Victoria Harbor when we came in."

"Maybe they just got here today," Bennett pointed out.

"Negative," Larimer said. "We'd have seen her posted on the port arrivals board on the 'Wolf."

"Or they could be visiting up the Pearl River, at Shanghai," Toynbee suggested. "There are military bases up there, and a big fleet facility."

"That could be. But I wonder why a bunch of Russki submariners are in port now, just when we get here."

"Chief, you're paranoid," Larimer said.

"And you're ugly. What's your point?"

"Uh-oh," Haskell said. "They've noticed us."

Several of the Russian sailors were openly staring at the Americans now. One laughed and said something in Russian, unintelligible, but loud enough to be heard… and to sound insulting. Two others stood up, grinning, then sauntered toward the Seawolves.

"You were staring too hard, Lar," Ritthouser said.

"Stay cool, people," Toynbee ordered. "This is a friendly night out on the town, we have a right to be here…and so do they."

"I saw a Star Trek episode like this once," Bennett said. "Klingons and Federation on a space station. Ended in a bar fight."

"There will be no fighting," Toynbee said. "Best behavior, remember?"

"Even if they draw their phasers first," Ritthouser said. "Where's a damned tribble when you need one?"

If the Russians heard or recognized the Star Trek reference, they didn't react. "You are Americanski navy, da?" one of the Russians said through a shallow, crooked-toothed grin. He slurred the words a bit. He'd been drinking hard for some time and was already approaching the proverbial four sheets to the wind. Drunken Russian sailors. This was not good.

"We are Americanski navy, da!" Larimer said. He raised his glass of scotch. "Dasvidanya, comrade!"

The Russian's eyes narrowed and the grin vanished. "It is not 'comrade.' There are no comrades any more!"

"But there are tovarischii, da?" Larimer asked. "Friends?"

Toynbee raised his glass. "To the end of the Cold War! And to new friends!"

The two Russians studied the Americans at the table for a moment, and then, magically, the grins returned, deep and sincere this time, and the moment's tension evaporated. "Da! Da! No more war! No more enemy! You join us at table, da?"

"Whatcha say, guys?" Toynbee asked.

"Suits me!" Shaeffer said.

"Let's do it," Larimer said. "I'm curious, anyway." They ended up pushing the two tables together and spreading out around them both. This is about a quarter past bizarre, Toynbee thought ruefully as he carried his beer over and sat down. Times do change. Sitting in a bar in Communist Hong Kong sharing drinks and jokes with Russian sailors…

"So, what ship?" Larimer asked one of the Russians as the women left. He touched the man's shoulder patch. "Shtoh sudno?"

"Eta podv—"

"Is frigate," one of the Russian sailor's companions said, interrupting hastily, with a sharp look at the man. " Admiral Nevolin. Out of Vladivostok. We hunt American submarines for fun!"

The other Russians at the table laughed, but Toynbee thought he detected a trace of nervousness. What had that first Russian been about to say? Toynbee didn't speak Russian — not as well as Larimer, any-way — but he knew a few technical words that had a bearing on his career. The word podvodnaya, for instance. Submarine.

Had that guy been about to admit that the Nevolin was a sub?

And why was it so important that the American submariners not know this?

He joined in the laughter and offered to buy the next round of drinks. It might be interesting, he thought, to listen closely to what else they had to say.

After all, the chances were excellent it was exactly what the Russians were doing with them.