As the last man entered, Morris gave the order to go. The second platoon assignments paired platoon leader Lieutenant “Pig” Wilson with platoon chief “Python” Harris. They would act as a two-man team and head for the torpedo room on the forward end of the lower level. A misdirected bullet or ricochet could detonate a torpedo’s self-oxidizing fuel or explode a warhead, and if that was to be the flaw in the operation it would be a fatal one for everybody aboard.
“Cowpie” Clites and “Droopy” Games were also to go to the lower level and take the aft end including the auxiliary machinery room, then cover Pig and Python.
“Mad Dog” Martin and “Red Meat” Reynolds would take the critical middle level, critical because the bulk of the guards were expected there, as were the hostages, since the middle level contained the crew spaces. That left Morris paired with “Bony” Robbins to take the upper level, including the radio room, navigation space, the control room, sonar and the captain’s and XO’s staterooms. The assault would have to be surgical, to avoid damaging equipment. Only a few physical systems could take a bullet and survive. A bullet hole in a sonar equipment cabinet would mean they would be deaf on the way out. A bullet hole in a periscope optics module would make them blind.
After checking the radio room and the fan room, Jack Morris and Bony Robbins advanced to the door to the control room. Morris peered in through a small round red-glassed window, and seeing no one, kicked the door open.
At that moment the Chinese guards in the control room opened up, all ten AK-47s bursting into violent life at once, the blast of the Chinese bullets shattering the door and cutting it to ribbons.
Chief Baron von Brandt raised his head after the helicopter rotor noises subsided. The fly over had been a reconnaissance, at least on the first pass. As the choppers flew back to the east a half-mile away, von Brandt sighted his sniper scope on the man who seemed to be in command of the P.L.A troops on the pier. No head shots. Baron thought, only hearts. He put the commander’s upper left chest in the crosshairs, exhaled slowly and steadily and slowly squeezed the trigger, hoping to make the shot a surprise even to himself, to keep him from jerking the rifle. The unit barely recoiled as it sent the heavy grain HydraShok bullet toward the commander at thirty-eight hundred feet per second.
The bullet spun out of the barrel, dropping slightly as gravity dragged it down toward the pier and the water of the slip. After a total flight time of twenty eight milliseconds, the bullet penetrated the fabric of the man’s tunic two inches from the central seam. The fabric vaporized as the round contacted it, its kinetic energy at the tip the equivalent of an acetylene torch.
The skin below the fabric yielded next, then the thin layer of fatty tissue before the muscle that lined the chest. The bullet entered a cavity between two ribs and proceeded on through the lung, blowing apart several airways, then on to the outer layer of the man’s heart, where it severed two coronary arteries before entering and destroying the right ventricle.
The damage from the bullet by this time would have been enough to kill the P.L.A commander, but the HydraShok round was specially designed to resonate within the cavity of the man’s abdomen, setting up a shock wave in his chest area, the pulsations causing what ballistics scientists called hydraulic shock. The effect of the shock wave was the immediate traumatization of the entire abdominal cavity, shutting down every organ, shorting out every nerve, cracking several ribs and vertebrae, bursting veins and arteries. The effect of the nerve-shorting trauma was an instantaneous overload of the brain stem receiving the electrical impulses from the spinal cord.
As life was being extinguished, the bullet, now wobbling and misshapen, passed out of the body, flew out over the north end of the pier and splashed into the water of the slip. As it sank, steam boiled from it for just an instant, its surface temperature elevated from the friction of the flight. On the pier the P.L.A commander’s face froze as he collapsed onto the oily concrete.
He never knew what had hit him.
By the time the P.L.A commander’s knees had begun to buckle, von Brandt had drawn a bead on the vice commander and fired, then targeted the lieutenants on the pier. As their officers died, the troops hit the concrete.
The only problem now, von Brandt thought, was that there was no antidote to the tanks. They hadn’t planned on using LAW rockets on this OP — who could expect tanks on a warship raid? Now it looked like they were going to pay for that mistake. On the pier, two of the tanks rotated their turrets, their guns aiming at the Tampa’s sail. Von Brandt ducked back into the cockpit, not sure how to break the news to Lennox that they had only seconds until the tank fired.
The sound of the helicopter rotors rose into a crescendo as the two Dauphin choppers returned, swooping in from the northeast, their flanks bristling with large-bore guns. The bullets from their guns blasted across the top of the sail, sparks flying from the impact of the heavy bullets against the high-tensile steel.
Once the helicopters flew by, one of the tanks on the pier opened up, the sound from its gun echoing across the calm water of the slip, a whoosh marking the flight of its projectile as the round flew overhead and dropped down into the water, the first explosion rocking the submarine.
Von Brandt shouted into his lip mike: “Stinky? If you’re up talk to me. We’ve got trouble up here—”
“BARON, THIS IS STINKY. WE’VE GOT PROPULSION — GIVE US AN ENGINE ORDER.”
“Go,” von Brandt yelled at Lennox.
“Get us the hell out of here!”
Lennox lifted his head up over the starboard aft lip of the sail, looking for the position of the Jianghu fast frigate, which was nowhere in sight. Only the gentle waves in the slip testified to its rapid departure. Off in the smoke-filled distance to the south, toward the supertanker pier, Lennox thought he saw the superstructure of the frigate. It would be going after the Seawolf, he thought.
As Lennox began to speak the second round was fired from a tank on the pier, this shot grazing the forward lip of the sail, its explosive force dissipating over the grave of the neighboring Luda but the force still enough to smash Lennox and von Brandt into the deck.
“All back full,” Lennox shouted.
“ROGER, ALL BACK FULL,” his earpiece replied.
Lennox waited, hoping the ship would move, the agonizing seconds ticking off as the first tank adjusted the aim of its gun at the sail, the third shot guaranteed not to miss. Lennox thought he could hear helicopter rotors again, but the sound no longer bothered him-the ship was moving, it was really moving. The pier and the burned-out hulls of the destroyers were fading forward of them, the open water of the bay approaching from aft. For a moment he couldn’t tell whether the shout of exultation he heard was his or Baron von Brandt’s.
The tank on the pier, now almost a ship length away, fired and missed, its aim now off, the Tampa’s motion confusing the turret operator. Lennox popped his head up to watch the end of the pier sail by, the wake of the ship’s motion white and glowing from phosphorescence in the water of the slip, the warm salty breeze over the sail dissipating the smells of the gunfire.
The sail neared the end of the pier, the tanks and troops now far away.
“Right full rudder. I say again, right full rudder.”
The helicopters zoomed in low for another pass, their bullets strafing the sail. Lennox ducked as the bullets whizzed by, amazed that again he’d survived a strafing run. For the first time in years he felt totally alive. Coming this close to death enhanced the sense of life. There was something about the approach to death, especially the evasion of it, that was unique.