U.S.S. Seawolf (29 page)

Commander Li decided to try one more time. “Lieutenant Commander,” he said, “let me give you an example of the very simple questions we need to ask…TLAM-N…we know the range is about fifteen hundred miles, but we have questions about the inertial navigation system.…Also, we are uncertain of its speed through the air. We want you to tell us the circular error probability. Our scientists think
Seawolf
carried two versions, one of them the TLAM-C/D.…Does this missile have added GPS backup or can it work just on its own inbuilt system?…Come, Lieutenant Commander, think how much easier it will be for all of us if we just sit here and have a talk…Why not tell me now a little about that high-explosive warhead…What is it? Four hundred kilograms? Maybe five hundred…why not tell me and make it easy on all of us?”

Cy Rothstein said nothing. He stared directly ahead, at which point, Commander Li stepped over the unseen line, and nodded to one of the guards.

Cy Rothstein saw him coming, slowly, a half-smile on his face, just to his left side. They say a soldier never sees the bullet that kills him, and the lieutenant commander never saw the vicious punch that slammed into his mouth, splitting open his lower lip and dislodging his two upper front teeth.

Stunned, unprepared for the pain, he briefly closed his eyes and gasped for air through his bleeding lips. He thus did not see the butt of the guard’s gun come slashing into his ribs, fracturing two of them with one blow.

He fell sideways off the chair, crashing to the floor, feeling the crunch of the guard’s boot raining kicks into his righthand ribs, feeling the staggering blow to the back of the head, which mercifully robbed him of consciousness. The lights went out in his mind, as well as the cell,
as Commander Li left, in company with his two henchmen and the visiting scientist.

Out in the corridor there were now loud recordings being played of men screaming in agony. Linus Clarke had never been so afraid. And now his door crashed open, and Commander Li, with the two guards, made a swash-buckling entrance, all business. They siezed ropes from one of the three chairs and bound his legs to the legs of the chair. Then they bound his manacled hands to the bar across the backrest of the chair.

Commander Li stood in front of him and said, “Lieutenant Commander Lucas. You will answer each of my questions accurately and immediately, otherwise I am going to have you killed, not by summary execution, in the way I believe you witnessed with one of your colleagues, but in a more slow and deliberate way, which you will not enjoy…”

Linus was unable to stop trembling. Relentlessly Li continued, “Bruce Lucas, I understand you are the executive officer of the ship…correct? The second-in-command?”

Linus was too petrified to answer. He sat there unable to believe what was happening to him, an American naval officer in the opening years of the twenty-first century. He debated just telling the truth, answering the damn questions, then revealing who he really was in an attempt to save his life. Surely they’d never dare harm him if they knew who his father was?

But Li was becoming impatient. “BRING THE TOWEL!” he snapped. And the guard fetched a large white bath towel from the other chair, walked forward and draped it carefully over the head of
Seawolf
’s XO. For an insane moment Linus felt like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, without the eye slits.

He knew there was a large water barrel in the corner of the room, from which he had not been able to steal even a mouthful. And now he sat here under the towel, parched, hot and afraid, and he heard the tread of the guard’s shoes
as he walked across the room and dipped something into the water.

He heard the slow walk of the man back toward him and then he felt the cool splash of water on the towel, right at the top of his head. Generally speaking it was not unpleasant. And then he heard the ladle dip in again, and again the water poured onto the towel. Then again, and then again.

By now the towel was becoming waterlogged, and it started sticking to his face, and he was trying to jerk it off his mouth and nose in order to suck in air from below. The more water, the heavier the towel became. And the heavier it became the harder it was to get it away from his mouth. Every time he sucked in, the towel sealed off his mouth and nostrils.

Linus began to panic. He understood he was in danger of either choking or suffocating, because by now the towel was so wet that the water was getting into his mouth and nose. Desperate now, he tried to stand, but that was impossible. He managed to get the towel off his mouth for a split second and gulped air, but the towel instantly smacked back across his face.

He had barely any air in his lungs, not sufficient even to blow the towel off his face. He flung his head forward and gasped air into his lungs. But it took all of his strength, and there was not enough air to exhale with any force.

“
Jesus Christ
!” he thought. “
They’re trying to choke me, and they’re doing it…they’re just going to watch me die
.”

He used the last of his energy to jolt forward and get the towel briefly off his face, enough for some air. But it came back, sealing his mouth and nose, and he somehow was pulling water out of the fabric and into his lungs. He tried to cough, but he had no air. And the towel was rammed against his face, and they were pouring more water.

Linus could not cry out. He could not breathe, and he
could not fight the iron-hard clinging of the sopping wet bath towel. He lolled his head back and hurled it forward, but the towel was too wet now and it stayed right where it was, over his entire face. Suffocating him, very fast.

At which point Linus blacked out, toppling sideways, cracking his forehead on the floor, still tied to the chair. Only then did Commander Li stoop down and pull the towel off the bleeding head of
Seawolf
’s XO, in a truly grotesque sense saving his life.

1600. Monday, July 10
.
Zhanjiang Naval Base
.

Admiral Zhang Yushu now had his message of thanks and courtesies from the U.S. Navy’s CNO. But he remained in a state of general disquiet. It was all so utterly uncharacteristic of the arrogant men who ran America’s armed services. In his mind he believed it impossible that the admirals who had so imperiously removed his very own Kilo-class submarines from the face of the earth a couple of years earlier were now going to stand up for the plain and obvious kidnapping of a big United States attack submarine and its entire crew.

Zhang was nobody’s fool. He knew the American satellites were photographing
Seawolf
every few hours, and he knew the American admirals must be absolutely seething with anger. And yet they were now treating Ambassador Ling Guofeng like an old friend, believing messages from the People’s Liberation Army/Navy that no one in their right mind would take seriously.

But there was a ring of authenticity to the American
communiqués. Almost as if they were
willing
the Chinese explanations to be true, as if trying to avoid the possibility of confrontation, as if trying to avoid at all costs any harm coming to their precious crew.
The West
, he thought,
so childishly preoccupied with the one disposable asset they too have by the millions and millions
.

It was a bewildering situation, but the senior crew members were proving to be stubborn. Except for one. And he had insufficient technical data in his mind. Time was of the utmost importance. Zhang could only go on lying to the Americans for maybe another 10 days. Either that…or the Americans might attack, storming the Canton dockyard, with world opinion on their side. Admiral Zhang knew he could mount some kind of defense, but in the end the Americans would smash their way in using vastly superior weaponry.

Zhang never removed the thought from his mind of the war 15 years earlier in the Gulf of Iran. After all the precombat talk of the strength and battle-hardened skills of the Iraqi elite commandos, the Americans made them look like children, obliterating their forces, their land, their bridges, their armaments, and anything else that got in the way. He was struck with fear at the prospect of the Pentagon turning serious attention to the naval base at Canton, and then possibly Zhanjiang, Haikou, Humen and perhaps even Xiamen. But he wanted a fleet of Seawolves, and he had the wherewithal, right now, to achieve that aim. But he had to be very, very careful and take no chances. Especially with American prisoners. They must never be allowed to get out of China alive.
And, above all, the Americans must not find them
.

Zhang paced the office of Admiral Zu. “Are you still sure, my Jicai? Still certain the Pentagon believes us?”

“Yushu, I have said it many times before. You have in your hand the personal message from Admiral Mulligan, conveying to you his compliments, thanking you for your assistance, assuring you of his friendship. It’s like the old
days when President Clinton was in power. They seem to value our friendship, they want our support and trade. And will do anything to avoid offending us.”

“Zu, I cannot explain to you strongly enough the vast gulf there is between this Clarke administration and the one led by President Clinton. It’s two different worlds. One friendly, appeasing, cooperative, and soft. This one hard, suspicious, protective, and cynical in the extreme. This man in the White House listens to his military commanders, and as we all know, military commanders, at least the best of them, are the only people in either country who are truly worth listening to in international politics. Unless the politicians happen to be ex-revolutionaries, like the great men who shaped the Republic of China. There haven’t been proper revolutionaries in the United States for two hundred and thirty years.”

“Then, Yushu, I do not think my advice and instincts are of any value to you. Because I believe you are deeply troubled by the situation. I see in you the ancient Chinese saying,
reguoshang demayl
…like ants on top of a hot stove…you are full of worries. And I have known you for many years. When you are so worried, you have to make your own actions. And I understand you. If the chances of a sudden American reprisal are, in my estimation, ninety-nine to one against, you are simply not concerned with the ninety-nine, only with the one.”

Zhang smiled. “Jicai, I cannot leave the prisoners in the jail on Xiachuan Dao. It is vulnerable to the sea. To an attack from the sea.”

“But we have an entire Navy an hour or so away to fight them off. We have many troops. Land-based attack aircraft. What can they do that we cannot rebuff? The most they could do, thousands of miles from their own shores, would be to bring in a carrier battle group. But we now have four Kilo-class submarines. We could sink the damn thing. It’s been done before. We would surely overwhelm them.”

“Perhaps. But that CVBG has the fire power to wipe out half of China.”

“But Yushu, they aren’t going to do that. They will not bring the world to the brink of a world war for the sake of one submarine and a few sailors.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But I have to move those prisoners fast, somewhere deep in the interior…
where no one will ever find them
. Because if the Americans can’t find them, they won’t attack. Because they are soft, and they value each human life in a way we would regard as absurd. So long as we have that crew, and they have our word no harm will come to them, I think they will keep their distance. But if they find them somehow…that’s what I’m afraid of. I cannot think we have more than ten days’ use of Xiachuan Dao. By then we must have another alternative prison camp. Away from the sea.”

Admiral Zhang had been in the office since 0500 pondering his problem, a jail in the interior, so far from anywhere that its inhabitants would simply cease to exist, and over the years they could be silently removed without anyone ever knowing their fate. It was strange, but all day long he had drawn a complete blank. But now, stimulated by his own thoughts about the possibility of an American attack, he came up with a plan.

Zhang did not know the word “Eureka!” but if he had he would have exclaimed it right here in the office of the Southern Fleet commander. Because Zhang was presently so utterly absorbed with the chance to copy the
Seawolf
, he had entered an ancient Chinese condition known as
zuojing guantian
, which means,
looking at the sky from the bottom of a well
, not seeing the whole picture.

And now he moved into a higher gear, focusing his mind on a place he had only once visited—Chongqing, the great gray Chinese city that clings to the mountains above the confluence of the wide Yangtze and Jialing rivers, more than 650 miles northwest of Zhanjiang where he now stood. This was the deepest interior, a city of 15 million people in the innermost province of
Sichuan, 700 miles from Shanghai, 800 from Beijing, bordered to the west by the massive 1,000-mile-long range of mountains that separate China from much of the Asian world.

Chongqing was for centuries almost inaccessible except for those who could navigate the Yangtze for 1,000 miles. Blisteringly hot in the summer, the city spends almost the entire winter under a deep blanket of fog. Its airport, set between mountains, is unsuitable for international flights, and even now it takes an excellent domestic airline pilot to make a landing there. The train takes 12 hours running south down the Tuo River and through the mountains from Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, a distance of 180 miles. From Kunming, 400 miles to the south, it takes 36 hours by train, because you have to go all the way north to change at Chengdu.

Chongqing was the capital of China during World War II, headquarters of Chiang Kaishek’s Kuomintang military, and what those ruthless anticommunist twentieth-century tartars needed was jails in which to incarcerate hundreds of political prisoners. They built them well outside the city, mostly to the west, and Admiral Zhang Yushu knew precisely where they were.

He knew also they were a sprawling archipelago of prisons, some more remote than others. Tourists were admitted to see some of them on bus trips from the city, but it would take the C-in-C of the Navy one phone call to isolate an entire complex.

“Chongqing, Jicai,” he said. “That’s the answer, the remotest jail, in the remotest city, almost unapproachable by air, a nightmare by road, and no ocean. Not even the Americans could storm that place. And anyway, they would never, never find their prisoners. No one ever has, not in the old jails of Chongqing. Ten weeks from now the place goes under a blanket of fog. The American satellites would find that nearly impossible, even if they knew where to look.”

“But, Yushu, those jails have not been used for a half-century—they will be in disrepair…what about water and electricity?”

“Jicai, let me ask you a general knowledge question: What lies three hundred and fifty miles downstream along the Yangtze from Chongqing?”

“At Yichang? Well, the Three Gorges Dam, of course. I don’t quite see what that has to do with it.”

“Because, Jicai, on that massive project there are a half-million of our workers, many of them skilled. There are billions of tons of cement and steel and machinery. Technicians working on one of the biggest hydroelectric projects on earth…one good shipload of men and material, and I’ll have one of those jails up and running inside one week. Off limits to all tourists for a hundred years.”

“I’ll say one thing, my great leader,” replied Admiral Zu. “It has never been a problem for you to think big. Really big. And I agree. If you could make those arrangements, I don’t think the Americans would ever find their submarine crew.”

1200. Tuesday, July 11
.
SPECWARCOM HQ
.
Coronado, San Diego
.

Admiral John Bergstrom was putting together his SEAL strike force as if the mission were taking place tomorrow. Which it most definitely was not, because no one knew where the crew of
Seawolf
was located.

Nonetheless, he was operating on two assumptions: One, that the location would be somewhere near the sea, in accordance with the intelligence theories being advanced by Admiral Morgan and Colonel Hart. Two, there would have to be a detailed reconnaissance, probably sending in a dozen SEALs to wherever the hell the crew were discovered.

All day he and Admiral Morgan had conferred, and the President’s security adviser-was growing more and more irritated at the intelligence community in Fort Meade, which had been working flat-out six-hour shifts all through the night. Right now the situation was approaching dire. Admiral Bergstrom had his team in order, under the driving force of Lt. Commander Rick Hunter. But they were operating in a vacuum. Detailed plans for the assault were being drawn up, involving the best men among the 2,300 SEALs, but no one knew what they were supposed to assault. It was hugely frustrating.

Four hours from now, at 1600 (local), the now 64-strong SEAL attack force would fly from the U.S. Naval Air Station at North Island, San Diego, to the air facility the U.S. has maintained at Okinawa, one of the remote Japanese islands that stretch for 540 miles southwesterly from the final mainland of Kyushu down to within 100 miles of the northeast coast of Taiwan. Okinawa is situated about halfway down the island chain, 950 miles east-nor’ east of the Pearl River Delta.

From Okinawa, the SEALs were scheduled to be ferried by one of the Navy’s giant Sikorsky CH-53D Sea Stallion assault helicopters to the flight deck of the 100,000-ton Nimitz-class aircraft carrier
Ronald Reagan
. The Sea Stallion helicopter carries 38 troops and would make three journeys between the airfield and the carrier, bringing in the 64 SEALs and all of their gear, plus Colonel Frank Hart, who was expected momentarily in Admiral Bergstrom’s office.

In fact, he arrived at 1300, and John Bergstrom was glad to see him. The colonel’s reputation had not been sullied among the military, only among certain left-wing politicians and their followers, usually referred to, affectionately, by Arnold Morgan as “the goddamned know-nothings.”

“Glad to see you, Frank. How you been?”

“You ever done a couple of days solid with Admiral Morgan in his lair?”

John Bergstrom chuckled. “Coupla times. He’s something, isn’t he?”

“Well, aside from the fact that he misses nothing, out-thinks everyone, doesn’t need sleep, forgets to eat, forgets to go home, yells at people, and is probably the rudest man ever to work in the White House, except for Lyndon Johnson forty years ago…well, it was a breeze.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“Everything.”

“Frank, I am glad to have you aboard. If the admiral hadn’t recruited you, I’d have gone myself. It’s gotta be one hell of a dangerous mission, especially if the guys have to fight their way out and we have to get ’em off the beaches. That’s likely to be one helluva job.”

“I know it. What time are we leaving?”

“Takeoff at sixteen hundred from North Island. Using a big Galaxy on its way to DG. There’s a few things you and I should go over right now: the list of gear, lines of communication, procedures if we have to abort, details of your principal commanders, makeup of the reconnaissance team, all of which I’ll spell out for you. We’ve done our preparations on that. I have a file on it.”

“Okay, John. All we need now is to find out what we’re attacking, and where the recon goes in.…I just hope the water’s not too shallow. The new ASDVs have a good long range, but I doubt SUBPAC wants its ships on the surface if it can be avoided.”

“They sure don’t, Frank. But as you know, this mission carries with it some spectacular baggage. And if it’s humanly possible, we have to get it done. Meantime, I’ve asked your recon team leader to come in and meet you in the next few minutes.”

“Great, John. Who is he?”

Too late. The door opened and through it walked a legendary SEAL, Lt. Commander Russell Bennett, senior
BUD/S instructor at Coronado, veteran team leader of a diabolical attack on the Iranian submarines in Bandar Abbas four years previous, veteran of the Gulf War, veteran member of the SEAL team that memorably blew the engine of General Noriega’s presidential yacht 100 feet into the air above Balboa Harbor. “Mark one-thirty-eight demo charges, right on the shaft,” reported SEAL Bennett.