Lennox waved his fist in the air at the troops on the pier and at the receding silhouettes of the choppers.
He even shouted: “You missed me, now you can kiss me.” He looked over at von Brandt, to share the moment, when he noticed that Baron wasn’t moving, and that a dark stain was spreading over his face. Lennox’s balloon was instantly deflated.
CHAPTER 21
Jack Morris looked over at Bony Robbins, both men’s faces pressed down on the cool tile of the deck aft of the control room. Gunfire from the control room had suddenly stopped. Every weapon had exhausted its clip of ammunition at the same time. Stupid, Morris thought, to shoot at shadows and use a whole clip at once. He gave Robbins a shrug as he reached for a stun grenade, pulled the arming pin with his index finger and rolled it into the control room. The stun grenade sounded, and soon after, the panicked coughing of a room full of Chinese guards.
Morris grabbed a second grenade and tossed it in after the first one. As it went off he heard the sound of weapons clattering to the deck. He reached into his vest’s side pocket and pulled out swimming goggles and a spongy filter mask similar to a surgeon’s except that it had no straps and was moist — a wet filter. He slipped the mask under his balaclava hood and strapped on the goggles over his eyes. A glance at Bony confirmed that his teammate was similarly equipped. Morris gave the order to go in.
He rose up slightly and ran into the room, cutting to the right. The place was completely filled with the smoke of the stun grenade, traces of it leaking through the gaskets of Morris’s goggles and making his eyes water. Actually the grenade was a simple smoke bomb surrounded by the stun solution, which was nothing but the juices of pepper, including jalap enos the pepper juices had the effect of causing mucous membranes to water and swell. An exploding stun grenade within twenty feet of a man’s face would literally shut his eyes with a painful watering, cause his nose to run and nearly close off his throat. The gunmen would be on the deck, grabbing their throats, gasping for breath, blinded. The grenade was far more effective than tear gas, though within some thirty minutes a victim would be normal. The major problem was keeping the mucous membranes of the attackers from suffering the same effects as the targets.
Morris heard the spasms of men coughing as he ran forward along the attack center row of consoles. He could make out the shapes of the enemy on the deck, still suffering from the stun grenades. Morris aimed his machine gun, careful that his bullets would not hit equipment or ricochet into consoles. A scene like this would never play well in Hollywood, he thought — too cold-blooded. The movies would show the commandos roping the Chinese together as prisoners. Bullshit, he thought as he fired. This was real time, real life. A killing job. Them or us.
The ten guards were dead. Morris ejected his clip and replaced it. He looked up at Robbins, who nodded back at him. They moved to the door on the forward bulkhead, on the centerline, which led to the captain’s and XO’s staterooms, the sonar display room and forward to the weapons-shipping hatch and the sonar equipment space. The two crouched on either side of the door. As Morris was about to kick the door open, a rumbling sound began, followed by a deep growl. The room’s smoke vanished in a blast of cool, clean air. The nukes back aft must have gotten the reactor restarted, he decided. He kicked the forward door open, and saw that down the passageway the captain’s stateroom door was opening. He aimed his weapon at the doorjamb, and as the Chinese officer came out of the door he prepared to fire — when he saw something that stopped him.
“Hold it,” he whispered into his lip mike to Bony.
The P.L.A officer was holding a hostage, one of the ship’s officers, and had an automatic pistol up against his hostage’s head. By the look on the hostage’s face he was in bad shape, perhaps unconscious.
“I’m holding the ship’s captain,” the P.L.A officer said in an odd accent, the lilting sound of it partly Chinese, partly aristocratic British.
“Withdraw or I will be forced to kill him.”
“Go for it,” Morris said.
“You realize you’ll never make it to—” And interrupted himself by opening fire.
He had been through hundreds of training scenarios like this one, and had connected with the terrorist ninety-eight percent of the time. He would have been dead-on with this shot too, if the ship had not unexpectedly lurched just as he was firing. The good news was that the Tampa was obviously underway, accelerating backward away from the P.L.A pier, the mission to free the ship now into its second phase.
The bad news was that Jack Morris, inadvertently, had just hit the hostage.
The sound of a faint rumbling noise could be heard through the hull of the control room. Pacino looked up at the sonar monitor sele>.i.ed to the hull array and noted the noise streaks on the screen.
“Sonar, Captain,” he said into his boom microphone, “what’ya got?”
“Conn, Sonar,” Chief Jeb drawled, “explosions bearing three four eight, bearing to P.L.A piers. Sounds like secondary detonations after the two main explosions.
Tough to tell.”
Pacino raised his voice to the watch standers in the room: “Lookaround number-two scope.” The Diving n iriicituci Lfiincrvunv
Officer reported their depth at seventy-nine feet, speed zero knots.
The periscope seemed to take a full minute to climb out of the well. Impatiently Pacino crouched, snapping the grips down as soon as the optic module came up at the deck level, putting his eye on the eyepiece before the unit rose to knee level.
The view was black, the scope lens only breaking the oily water of the bay as the optic module thumped into the stops at the overhead. Pacino had moved the ship two thousand yards down the channel to the southeast of the supertanker-piers, then turning so his bow faced the action at Xingang, hoping to be positioned to get a better view of the P.L.A piers than he had had of the tanker-pier point. But when the lens cleared Pacino saw nothing but orange-and-white flames, the massive balls of fire sent up by the impact of the Javelin explosions. As he watched, a secondary explosion flared from the P.L.A piers, this fireball’s diameter a ship length wide, the glow from it making the scene seem lit by the sun at midday. Pacino could only hear one thought in his head: I sure hope that’s not your ship I see burning, Sean.
“Down scope,” Pacino called reluctantly.
Now that his window to the outside world was again shut, Pacino paced the periscope platform, frustrated.
For the moment the operation was out of his hands.
He had to trust that the SEALs could pull this off.
But what about the Javelins? Had the SEALs realized what was happening in time? Or had the explosions fried them as they had the ships at the pier? And what if the missiles had ripped into the Tampa? What if the detonations had killed the SEALs in the water, or set off their contact charges while they were still diving beneath the hulls of the destroyers? And what if the Chinese were now sending warships to kill the Seawolf, now that her position was compromised from the Javelin launches? There was no way of knowing, short of more periscope exposure, which would imperil the crew of Seawolf.
He itched to get the Seawolf into action, a chance to do something to save his friend, something other than pace the conn in suspension — suddenly, his headset crackled.