U.S.S. Seawolf (26 page)

The SAS commander, Colonel Mike Andrews, was sympathetic to the idea of three of his troopers playing a part in this highly classified American mission. He liked it for the camaraderie it would build between the regiments, and he thought it would be a tremendous shared experience in terms of strategy and operational methods. Also, he knew the politicians would love it, because the Conservative Prime Minister of the day had a relationship with President Clarke much like that between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Spiritually close. Philosophically unbreakable.

But most of all, he thought his men could really help Admiral Bergstrom, whom he knew, liked and respected. He had men who had fought and killed in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Kosovo, among other places. Iron men who had moved through rough terrain like panthers, experts with knife, gun and explosive. Men who had operated under the harsh SAS Rule OO1—kill or be killed, with only a split second to decide. Mike Andrews’s boys would be priceless in the Chinese tropical jungle. And both he and Admiral Bergstrom knew it.

“Only one minor hurdle, Admiral,” he said. “They would have to volunteer. I could not order them in to fight on behalf of a foreign power—not even you. And if they did volunteer, I’d have to clear it with the Ministry of Defense, probably as high as the Chief of Defense Staff. However, I do not anticipate a problem. I’ll be back inside three hours. Same phone number? Excellent. ’Bye.”

Admiral Bergstrom had already made up his mind who would lead the team in for the assault on the jail,
wherever it was: Lt. Commander Rick Hunter, a former team leader from Little Creek, six feet three inches tall, not one ounce of fat on his steel-muscled 215-pound frame. Rick was a native of Kentucky, a big, hard farm boy from the Bluegrass State, son of Bart Hunter, a well-known breeder of thoroughbred racehorses out along the Versailles Pike near Lexington.

Bart naturally thought his son was insane to select a career that might bring him face to face with death on a regular basis when he should have been home on the farm, raising the yearlings, preparing them for the Keeneland sales. However, watching baby racehorses slowly grow up, studying pedigrees, talking to vets and spending a lifetime with other local “hardboots,” all talking about the same subject, simply did not do it for Rick.

He dropped out of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where he was a collegiate swimming champion, and a year later he enrolled at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. From there he had never looked back, climbing the ladder of command and finally being accepted as a Navy SEAL, a job to which he brought outstanding talents. As a third-generation farmer, he was naturally a brilliant marksman with the strength of a full-grown polar bear. He was also a tireless swimmer and an expert in demolition, unarmed combat, and landing craft. As Bart Hunter’s oldest son, he was used to exercising authority on the 2,000-acre horse farm. Men sensed that and turned to him as a natural leader.

A couple of years earlier he had led a sensational SEAL mission deep inside Russia. The operation had been “black,” nonattributable, and few people knew anything about it. But John Bergstrom knew, and he was also aware that after such a mission it was customary not to use the same personnel again, but rather to use the men to train up the next generation.

However, in this case, the rules were somewhat different. This one
must
succeed. And direct from the presidential level, he had been told he
must
use the very best men.
Lt. Commander Hunter was the best he had ever had. He was going to end up an admiral…maybe sitting in this very chair.

And Admiral Bergstrom had no hesitation in calling his commander at Little Creek and requesting that he dispatch Rick Hunter immediately to Coronado, in company with 20 more hand-picked SEALs, preferably veterans, possibly BUD/S instructors with special skills in jungle warfare, surprise attacks, explosives, “and jail breaks, if there’s anyone around.”

The BUD/S instructors were, of course, the toughest men in all the SEAL platoons. They were the granite-hard regulars who ran the training “Grinder,” whose job it was to drive men physically and mentally into the dark uplands of total sacrifice, to take them to a place where unbearable pain becomes bearable, where fear vanishes, and where achievement is all. The BUD/S instructors drove men into a place they did not know existed, a place where, having given their all, they came back from the dead, from total exhaustion, and found more.

Of course, they did not all find more. Some collapsed, some hit a mental brick wall and just sat slumped on the ground, some just gave up, others did not really see the point. But when the dust cleared, there were a few men who still stood tall, chins out, shoulders back, eyes forward. Still defiant. Upon these few, these precious few, would be pinned the golden Trident badge of the U.S. Navy SEALs, the badge that sets them apart from all other combat troops in the United States Armed Forces.

The 21 SEALs who made the flight west from Little Creek to San Diego were a diverse and eclectic group, mostly veterans from every walk of life. Some had started in big-city tenements, others in wealthy suburban households. They were from the North and from the South, and they were black and they were white. And some were secretly scared, and others weren’t. But they were united in spirit, prepared if necessary to die for one
another. They were SEALs. And that is unlike any other calling.

Lieutenant Commander Hunter sat up front next to a younger officer, 30-year-old Lt. Ray Schaeffer, a native of the Massachusetts seaport of Marblehead who had gone straight from high school to Annapolis. Ray was a real seaman, a superb swimmer, expert navigator, yachtsman, fisherman, and the platoon middleweight boxing champion. His family had lived in Marblehead for generations. His father, a local sea captain, lived in a medium-sized white colonial house down near the docks. In one corner of the living room was an ancient illustrated family tree that showed that a Schaeffer had pulled one of the oars when the men from Marblehead had rowed General Washington to safety after the lost Battle of Long Island.

Ray had served with Rick Hunter on the mission in Russia. They had been detailed to that operation as complete strangers, but they returned as lifelong friends, and everyone noticed. Plainly they had faced immense dangers together, and whatever had happened, it now bound them in mutual respect. When Lieutenant Commander Hunter had been asked to begin naming the SEALs he would take with him to Coronado, the first name he uttered was Lt. Ray Schaeffer.

Behind them sat Lt. Dan Conway from Connecticut, another graduate of the Naval Academy. The son of a Navy frigate captain, grandson of a World War II submariner, Dan understood the folklore of the underwater warriors, having lived in the old family home in New London all his life. A tall, dark-haired man of 29, he had risen rapidly through the ranks as a SEAL, and was within months of becoming a team leader.

A former high school all-star baseball catcher, he juggled his career options between Fenway Park and Annapolis. The Navy won in a tight finish, and his father approved the choice of a long-term profession in dark blue. His mother, however, almost had a heart attack when he announced he was going to join the SEALs.

Dan Conway was a born athlete, with wide shoulders and a right arm that could hurl a baseball to second base like a howitzer. In unarmed combat he learned to be a master. In armed combat exercises, well…stay well clear of his right hand if it happens to be holding one of the SEALs big fighting knives. In the relentless training of “Hell Week,” the physical endurance tests that break 50 percent of all applicants, Dan finished first.

He had been on the verge of collapse that day, sobbing for breath after the seven-mile beach run and the long swim in the Pacific. And he did not believe he could keep going for another five seconds, and one of the instructors ordered the remaining group to start running back to base. Two men went down, and returned on stretchers. Dan Conway drove himself forward, praying not to pass out. He threw up before they reached the gates, and when he got inside he fell onto the concrete. And another instructor stood over him and roared at him to get up, and go one more time through “the tunnel”—the huge flooded rowing boat, which required an underwater crawl
under
the seats.

Dan was gasping for air, his lungs throbbing, and the thought of going under the water for more than a minute was too much. And he shook his head, and he knew it was over…and then he got up, and drove himself through the tunnel, under the water, wriggling his way under the seats, tearing the skin on his knees, but still going forward. When he finally climbed over the gunwales, he blacked out and two instructors caught him as he fell. The last words he heard were, “Right here we got a real live Navy SEAL…”

Next to him sat Lt. Junior Grade Garrett Atkins from California. Garrett was two years younger than Dan, and had started his Navy career training to be a combat systems officer in a Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine. He was good at it, too, but Garrett was an outdoorsman, loved the beach, loved the mountains, drove all over the place in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, and grew to dislike the terrible confines of a big attack submarine.

Garrett was a tall, rather shy sportsman, an outstanding high school football player, and a baseball player. He wanted to leave the submarine service, but he did not want a soft option, and he decided to try something even tougher. They presented him with his golden Trident one year later, and he lived for the day when he would go into action with a SEAL combat platoon. It was a day not so very far off. Both he and his pal Conway sat in silence as they flew over the flat farmland of the Midwest, guessing that something big was about to break out.

Back in the main group were two outstanding petty officers, both experts at fighting in the mountains, both veterans of the Kosovo campaign seven years previous. From North Carolina came Catfish Jones—no one ever found out if he had a more formal name. Catfish came from a family that had lived in or around Morehead City for nine generations, right out there on the last mainland before the Outer Banks.

Catfish’s aunt owned a bookstore right opposite the marina, but he had never taken to that line of commerce. Instead he tried a career as a deck hand on a big fishing trawler, working the rough Atlantic waters out beyond the Shackleford Banks, which guard the shores of Carteret County. Just southeast of here, the banks abruptly turn northeast and rename themselves the Core Banks, sweeping narrowly for 80 miles past Ocracoke Island on up to the storm-tossed waters around the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

These are tough seas in which to make a living, and men drown out there every year. They were not, however, apparently rough enough for Catfish, a 28-year-old, fair-haired, blue-eyed bull of a man. He stood five feet ten inches tall, with a 19-inch neck, and he had the strength to have once lifted the rear of a sports car clean off the ground with his bare hands while his buddies changed the wheel, in the pouring rain, in the middle of the night.

Catfish had a group of friends at the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base a few miles down the coast from
Morehead, and before he was 49, he had retired from fishing and enrolled in the Corps. Eighteen months later he applied to join the SEALs and finished second in his intake group.

It was said he had a harrowing time fighting in the Kosovo mountains north of Pristina, alongside the man who now sat next to him, 30-year-old SEAL veteran Rocky Lamb, a black career serviceman from the Bronx who had joined the Navy immediately after leaving high school.

Catfish and Rocky had worked together in those mountains for three weeks. And shortly after the American aircraft went down, they had pulled off two impressive rescues involving both American and British Special Forces, all of whom were surrounded by nearly overwhelming numbers. No one knew how many Yugoslav troops they had taken out in order to cleave a safe route out through the heavily patrolled wooded hillsides. But a lot of soldiers had a lot of gratitude for the two American SEALs. Both of their names were on Rick Hunter’s list of top 10 choices for the mission in the South China Sea.

Also in that group were two young SEALs, both age 24, both country boys from way down in the bayous in St. James Parish, west of New Orleans. Riff Davies and Buster Townsend joined the Navy right out of high school rather than go to college. Riff ended up on an aircraft carrier, and Buster on a guided missile cruiser.

But these were a couple of guys who craved real adventure, and three years after they made their pact to join the Navy, they made another one, to try to gain entry into the SEALs. They were both from tough Louisiana families that for generations had ground out a living raising sugar beets in the hot swampy lands around the Mississippi Delta. From first grade they had been rivals as well as friends, playing football and basketball for their high school.

That rivalry drove them on through the rigors of the SEALs Hell Week, drove them through the BUD/S
course, drove them to find reserves of strength and determination they never knew they had! In the months after they won their golden Tridents, they went on SEAL courses in various tropical locations, which caused them to rise to great heights in the estimations of their instructors. Riff and Buster could operate in the kind of oppressive, steamy heat they had known since birth, and both men were tireless on land and in the water. Everyone knew the strapping, powerfully built Buster had killed an alligator with a hunting knife at the age of 15, mainly because Riff told them all about it: “Big ole sonofabitch it was, too…ole Buster just rammed that long knife o’ his straight into its eye and through its brain…just as well. I thought that sucker was gonna eat him right up.”

But the legend of the two combat troops from the bayous really took root when young Davies, on an overseas exercise, stepped right into the range of a large, angry spitting cobra. Two other SEALs with him literally froze at the sight of it, swaying not eight feet in front of them. They stayed frozen, too, until Riff slammed it into a tree with a bamboo stick and blew its head off with his Sig Sauer pistol. According to one SEAL colleague, “It was like watching John Wayne nail a rattlesnake.” The description earned Riff the memorable nickname of “Rattlesnake” Davies.