Warriors

CHAPTER 60

A solitary and unblinking eye, black and hooded, emerged from the cold sea. The night sky was black, the sea was leaden, and that is all there was, save the eye moving slowly a few feet above the surface, leaving a rippled wave in its wake.

The eye slowed, then stopped.

It began to swivel counterclockwise, very slowly, making two complete revolutions. Then it paused and disappeared again, slipping unseen beneath the waves. The hooded eye had seen nothing interesting or threatening on the desolate North Korean beaches, nor any surface vessels on the sea. Nothing, and that was just enough.

It had been just ten days since the secret meeting at Fort Whupass.

Lurking below the surface, stationary at periscope depth, the USS Florida (SSGN728) was ready to commence operations. She was an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) recently converted to a guided missile sub (SSGN) in order to insert SEAL platoons into hostile environments to conduct clandestine missions for extended periods of time ashore.

A stealth platform, she was designed, to use the SEAL motto: “To equip the man, not man the equipment.”

“Prepare to launch two SDVs, Bash,” the sub’s skipper, Captain Ben Malpass, said to his young XO, Lieutenant Bashon Mann.

“Aye, sir. Launch SDVs.”

Bash radioed the men working on the submerged deck. He then sent the periscope sliding back down into its well, a slight hydraulic hiss in the quiet of the control room.

“Prepare to launch, aye!” a crewman operating on deck replied over the intercom.

A minute later, Lieutenant Mann said, “Coming up on five minutes to launch, Skipper.”

Five minutes later, a small, dark shadow slipped away from the submerged sub and headed for shore. It remained submerged, en route to a place code-named Half Moon Bay. A few minutes later, a second shadow slipped into its underwater wake. Two twenty-one-foot-long submersibles, known as SDVs, or SEAL delivery vehicles, would rendezvous on the deserted and frozen coast of North Korea.

Launched from a tubular dry-deck shelter on the submerged sub’s deck, the SDV carried its crew and passengers exposed to the icy water, breathing either from their scuba gear or the vehicle’s compressed air supply. Aboard the two submersibles were a team of twenty-one men tasked with a mission that had been the subject of cabinet-level debate in Washington and at the highest levels of government in London.

The mission had very nearly been canceled until a courageous President David Rosow gave the last-minute go-ahead. The British prime minister, along with the director of MI6, had finally convinced everyone that this particular team of counterterrorist operatives actually had a fighting chance of pulling this thing off. All despite terrible odds and in the face of scathing resistance within the Pentagon and Naval Intelligence headquarters in Britain.

Rosow had made his decision based only on the heroic quality of the men he was sending into harm’s way. The price of failure was incalculable. But these men, all of them, were a different breed. Hawke and his teams had long demonstrated a way of overcoming impossible odds; they had a track record of snatching victory from the jaws of certain defeat, and they’d done it time and again, year after year.

And now he was sending them into a country with which the United States was not technically at war, at a time when the slightest miscalculation could send the world hurtling toward catastrophe. “Godspeed, Hawke,” Rosow had said the night before, speaking with the team leader on the eve of their mission.

“We can do this, Mr. President,” Hawke assured him. “You made the right decision. Sleep well, sir. I’ll keep you informed of our progress.”

Hawke, Stokely Jones, Fitz Mccoy, and Colonel Cho were the first four men ashore. They split up and made an immediate recon of the landing zone, making sure the designated LZ area was as deserted as their photo recon had indicated. Fitz went right, Stoke left, while Hawke and Cho went straight ahead up and over the sand dunes.

Hawke had wanted a dark night to go ashore and he’d gotten his wish. Stumbling once going up the sand hill, he flipped down his NVG optics. The world turned fuzzy green, but at least he could see where to put his boots. At the top of the dune he paused, turned, and looked back to sea with his binoculars.

USS Florida was way out there, her conning tower a thin black blip of a silhouette on the grey horizon line. Hawke could just make out two of the sub’s five primary navigation lights: the rudder (white) and the port (red), winking at him in the distance. He swung back round to check out his objective.

His objective, the camp, was just on the other side of that mountain range.

Looking at the dense, endless blackness, he recalled a press unveiling of a U.S. Defense Department satellite image of the Korean Peninsula at night. The photograph showed the northern half of the peninsula completely in the dark except for a speck of light indicating the location of the capital, Pyongyang. South Korea’s portion, in contrast, was aglow, its myriad cities alive with light. It was a dramatic depiction of the economic miracle that is Communism.

He smiled at Cho, and the two men turned to return to the beach.

When he stormed down the dune, he saw all the heavily armed men from both SDVs assembled on the beach. Hawke asked the men to count off and then radioed the minisubs. The two minisub drivers were standing by one-half mile offshore just in case it got spicy and he required an immediate exfil. He told them the mission team onshore was good to go, and that they could safely return to the mother ship. He reconfirmed the time and place set for the team’s extraction and signed off.

He turned to the men under his command.

“You all know what to do. So let’s go goddamn do it.”

The little twenty-one-man army began the silent march inland. Their route would take them up through the mountainous region and across a narrow barren plain before they came to the dreaded kwan-li-so.

Number 25. The death camp.

Hawke raised the flat of his hand and brought the entire squad to a halt. They were halfway down a mountain, picking their way through ice-encrusted rock, loose boulders, and scrub. The temperature hovered around freezing. Fifty yards below was a small copse of trees, big enough to shield them from prying eyes; it was the last bit of cover they’d have for a while.

“Recon,” he said. “Ten minutes R&R.”

The men moved down into the woods, grateful for a few minutes’ rest after the night’s march. Hawke got behind a large boulder, rested his elbows on it, and looked through his binocs. The sky was turning pink. He could see the gulag-style work camp with some clarity now.

At the main gate, a giant portrait of the late, unlamented Kim Jong-il looked out over acres of wooden barracks. This perimeter fence was studded with six tall wooden guard towers. Three men in each one with binoculars and automatic weapons, according to Cho. Hawke swung the glasses, searching for the sign the CIA had told him would confirm his arrival at the camp where the Americans were believed to be held. He saw it. A giant banner with huge red Korean letters that exhorted the workers: “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to Victory!”

He calculated the distance from the tree line across the narrow plain to the camp perimeter.

They’d have to fan out and crawl on their bellies across a half mile of open ground.

He smiled to himself.

Nobody’d ever said this stuff was easy.