Tien turned to the guard: “Turn on the pier floodlights and prepare the buses. Get the prisoners offloaded immediately. I want these buses out of here in ten minutes.”
Murphy began to protest.
Tien ignored him as he produced a pistol and put the barrel into Tarkowski’s right nostril. After a moment’s pause, he pulled the trigger, filling the small stateroom with a crashing report. Tarkowski’s head blew apart, the back of his skull flying back against the far bulkhead. Slowly, he sank to the deck, his knees buckling.
Tien’s pistol was still upraised at the place where Tarkowski’s face had been a moment before. Finally he holstered the pistol and disappeared into the passageway, leaving Murphy alone in his room with the corpse of Greg Tarkowski.
CHAPTER 18
“Conn, Sonar,” Chief Jeb’s Tennessee accent drawled, “Transients from Friendly One. The Tampa is shutting down her engine room.
“What do you make of that, Captain?” Keebes asked from the deck near the attack center.
Pacino shrugged.
“Lookaround number-two scope,” he called as the periscope pole came out of the well, the optic control module clunking to a halt as it cleared the well sill. Pacino snapped the grips down, pushed up his eyepatch and put his eye to the scope trained to the bearing of the P.L.A piers.
He had expected to have to peer into the dim light, but the brilliance of the pier floodlights burned his retina. When his eyes adjusted he could see the floodlit pier and the dark shapes of the superstructures of the warships tied up pier side Between Target Three and Four the buses were lit up inside. Both buses visible in the line of sight between the Udaloy and the Jianghu had drivers waiting inside them. Pier guards wandered on the narrow strip of concrete visible between the ships, rifles at the ready as if they were expecting something. The decks of the Udaloy, between Tampa and the pier, were lit up.
There could be only one thing going on with the pier activity and the engine room shutdown, Pacino decided. The Chinese were moving the Tampa’s crew to a POW camp.
The divers had been locked out for almost forty minutes.
With fifteen minutes to get to the P.L.A pier, that had given them less than half an hour to set up the explosive charges on the surface ships. And Morris had predicted between a half-hour and an hour to lay the charges. He had also promised to keep an eye on the pier for any off load of the crew. Were his VHF walkie talkies up and waiting for him to communicate?
“Radio, Captain,” Pacino barked into his lip mike, “patch in the VHP freak to the SEAL team to the conn and line up the transmission on the Type-20.”
“Conn, Radio, aye … Captain, you’re patched in. Type-20’s ready to transmit.” The periscope antenna was not usually a transmission device, but the radiomen had wired in the SEALs’ walkie-talkie VHF frequencies into the antenna and rigged it for transmission, thereby avoiding Pacino having to raise the huge Bigmouth antenna for transmitting.
Pacino pulled a coiled-cord microphone from a console hanging on the aft stainless steel conn handrail, punched a toggle switch on the console, spoke into the mike:
“Whiskey, this is Bourbon, over.” He listened while looking out the periscope at the pier. Any minute the prisoners would be moved, he thought. He had to act which meant launch the missiles. He fought for control as he called into the microphone a second time.
“Whiskey, Whiskey, this is Bourbon, over. I say again. Whiskey, this is Bourbon, come in, over.”
Still nothing from the SEALs. There was the off chance that they couldn’t transmit, could only listen.
Pacino decided to send his message and hope they received it. He didn’t want to think what would happen if they didn’t.
“Whiskey, this is Bourbon, break. I am executing Plan Juliet. I say again, I am executing Plan Juliet, break. Bourbon, out.”
What else could he do? The satchel charges were not laid in time, the SEALs had not yet opened fire on the pier, and they didn’t answer the radio call. Plan Juliet, “J” for Javelin, was the fallback.
Pacino snapped up the grips on the periscope and rotated the control ring, sending the pole back down into the well. He turned to stand at the railing and looked out at the assembled battle stations watch standers The time had come. The show was his now.
“Attention in the firecontrol team. We’re executing Plan Juliet; the Chinese are getting ready to off load Tampa’s crew onto buses waiting at the pier. Firing point procedures. Javelin missiles, tube one Target Three, tube two Target Two.”
“Ship ready,” Tim Turner said.
“Weapons ready,” Feyley reported from the weapon-control panel.
“Solutions ready,” Keebes said in front of Pos Two.
“Tube one,” Pacino ordered.
“Shoot.”
“Fire,” Feyley barked from the WCP, pulling the trigger. From the deck below the violent blast of the tube belching the missile into the sea popped the eardrums of the men in the control room.
“Tube two. Shoot.”
“Fire,” Feyley said again. Again the tube ejection mechanism filled the ship with a roaring boom as the ultra-high-pressure air loaded a piston that pressurized a water tank surrounding the torpedo tube, the pressurized water pushing the Javelin’s capsule out of the tube like a schoolboy’s spit wad flying out of a straw.
“Tubes one and two fired electrically,” Feyley reported.
“Conn, Sonar, own-ship’s units, normal launches.”
Pacino wondered what the Chinese on the pier were thinking at that moment.
“Off’sa’deck,” Pacino ordered Turner, “train the thruster to two seven zero and turn the ship around to the east. Let’s get the hell away from the end of the pier.”
“Aye, sir.”
Somewhere above them two solid fuel rockets were igniting, sending two cruise missiles at two of the surface warships. It would not do for them to remain too long under the rocket plumes, two fingers pointing at their position.
“Conn, Sonar, we have rocket-motor ignition, units one and two.”
Javelin Unit One was ejected from the starboard side of the Seawolf by the water pressure of the tube. Silently it glided from the tube, accelerating as it slipped past the skin of the ship and emerged fully over sixty feet below the murky surface of the Go Hai Bay. As the stern of the encapsulated missile came out of the tube door, twin fins snapped down into place and acted as elevators, turning the missile toward the surface above. The missile was moving at thirty feet per second as it angled upward, reaching the surface three seconds after it left the tube. The nose cone of the capsule broached, sensing balmy May air on its surface, drying out two of the electronic sensors that proved it was no longer underwater. Next, the nose cone of the capsule blew off, exposing the nose cone of the Javelin missile inside.
For a moment the capsule bobbed in the water, the lid spinning in the night air twenty feet overhead. In the next instant the missile streaked out of the capsule, its rocket motor’s white-hot flames sinking the capsule and hurling the missile clear of the water toward the overcast sky, the moonlight glinting off the flat black of its paint. The rocket’s trail of flame extended vertically several thousand feet above the water, vanishing into a cloud.
Seconds later the Unit Two capsule of the second Javelin penetrated the surface, the second nose cone blowing toward the sky, a prelude to the second missile’s liftoff sequence. Milliseconds later the second unit roared out of its capsule and flashed toward the sky, its flame trail illuminating the end of the supertanker pier and the water of the slip between the tanker and P.L.A piers. The second unit flew up into the night sky as if chasing the first unit, the twin missiles’ exhausts blindingly bright, their noise deafening.