It would have been ideal if the SDV could have taken them all the way to the Chinese capital, but Cole knew this wasn’t practical; the Yongding didn’t actually reach Beijing, and they would have had to divert along the Chaobai New River. But dams and shallow waters would make progress along the Chaobai impossible for the SDV past a certain point, even if its batteries were capable of travelling the two hundred kilometer distance.
And so Cole had planned to discard the SDV in a section of deep water of the Yongding and then swim using the rebreathers to a rendezvous point near the G25 Changshen Expressway. Here, they would liaise with the CIA contact, provided that all was well.
Cole knew that this was another potentially fatal part of the mission — they could be discovered leaving the water, or meeting the agent’s vehicle, or else the agent might not even turn up. Another possibility was that the agent had been caught and divulged the route, and Force One would be met by a battalion of soldiers.
Well, Cole thought, that’s what he’d brought the M4 along for. Just in case.
But even if they liaised successfully with the CIA agent, they still had to travel by road and then enter the city itself, and Cole had left this up to the CIA man, bowing to his superior knowledge of the area and the obstacles they might face.
Cole hoped the man knew what he was doing.
But as always, Cole reminded himself, it was first things first; and with that, he nodded at the other members of his team and passed through the access hatch into the DDS transfer trunk.
The operation had commenced.
PART THREE
1
Despite the enormous pressure, Captain Hank Sherman was not sweating; his skin was dry and cool, his respiration perfectly normal, his heart rate barely above resting.
The US Navy selected their submarine captains for their incredible cool under operational conditions, and Sherman was among the most experienced of that nation’s skilled submariners. And even now, in the middle of the Bohai Sea, his craft crawling along underneath a cavalcade of merchant marine traffic while the radar and sonar operators of the PLA coastal defense forces tried to distinguish friend from foe, Sherman looked like he was an executive sitting down for a sales meeting in a comfortable office — an everyday occurrence, and all business.
Sherman had piloted the sub through the narrow strait which separated the Yellow Sea from the Bohai just a few hours before, coming into the enclosed sea in the late afternoon — perfect to make his position in time for the nighttime dispersal of the SDV.
He had avoided the wider northern section of the strait, knowing that it was busier and monitored far more closely than the waters around the southern islands, and had instead travelled completely undetected between the Miaodao Archipelago and Tanglang Island.
It had been a nerve-shredding journey, so close to elements of the Chinese coastline, and Sherman had been forced to admit that — despite his years of operational success — this was the first time he’d had to infiltrate the territory of a technologically competitive nation. It was one thing to patrol the waters of the Persian Gulf and deliver special ops teams into Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, but it was an altogether different prospect to invade the waters of an enemy which had a real chance of detecting him.
But despite his reservations, he knew that the Virginia-class sub he commanded had been designed exactly for missions such as these, and if any submarine in the world was capable of performing such a task, it was the USS Texas.
He was well into the Bohai now, his sonar operators picking up such dense traffic in the waters above that Sherman felt certain that — even if the Texas wasn’t discovered — the SDV was sure to be seen by someone. The waters of the bay were shallow, the rivers that ingressed into the mainland even more so.
Intelligence reports also estimated that there were up to three Soviet Kilo-class submarines currently patrolling the waters of the Bohai Sea, under the banner of the PLA Submarine Force’s East Sea Fleet. However, Sherman’s crew hadn’t found signs of any, and his own analysts suggested that they might have left the close coastal waters to project power further out to sea, possibly as far as Taiwan. And anyway, with their diesel-electric engines, Sherman was confident that his crew would detect them before they could detect the Texas.
Sherman had already given the order for the special ops team — he still didn’t know who they were, or which branch of the military they represented — to enter the DDS and prepare for disembarkation.
He now received confirmation that the team was in place within the SEAL Delivery Vehicle, and the DDS had been flooded and pressurized.
Some of the divers from SDVT-1 were also now in the DDS, while others exited from the lockout trunk to help control things from outside.
Sherman looked around the combat direction center, checked for another update from his sonar operators, and consulted his large-screen monitor one last time. In place of a traditional periscope, the system used fiber optic imagery to generate above-sea views of the surrounding area.
The live images of the nighttime sea confirmed what the sonar said — there were cargo ships to both port and starboard, but not close enough to interfere with the release of the SDV, and further to stern were two fishing trawlers.
The area directly around the Texas was all-clear.
He looked across the CDC to the SEAL lieutenant in charge of the SDVT-1 squad and raised an eyebrow.
The commando looked back and nodded his head.
Sherman turned to his intercom and gave the order.
‘Launch SDV. I repeat — launch SDV.’
He sighed, at once relieved and terribly nervous.
It was out of his hands now.
Cole watched through his underwater night vision goggles as the SDVT-1 divers unlocked the circular hatch at the end of the DDS, opening it with the assistance of the team members waiting outside.
Cole was sitting in one of the two pilot’s seats, holding himself clear of the frame slightly and looking back so he could see where he was going as Collins reversed the SDV back out of the tubular Dry Dock Shelter, helped by the expert hands of the release team divers.
Cole and Collins were fully open to the elements, the pilot area simply two recessed gaps in the fuselage. There were sonar and GPS tracking and navigation systems, but the SDV was so small and maneuverable that skilled operators often relied on sticking their heads out and simply piloting by direct line of sight, using a manual control stick for the rudder, elevator and bow planes. Not too bad in shallow waters during the day, but far more problematic at night when the undersea kingdom was entirely pitch black and operational security demanded the absence of electric lights. The night-vision gear they had was good, but Cole was glad Collins would be doing most of the driving.
Still, he reflected as the battery-powered all-electric propulsion system slowly pulled the vehicle into the open waters of the Bohai Sea, at least he could see where he was going, a luxury that his four colleagues in the passenger compartment sadly didn’t have.
Navarone, Davis, Grayson and Barrington were all going to have to sit in the cramped, flooded, dark compartment behind Cole and Collins for the duration of the journey, a fact for which Cole didn’t envy them. But the ability to cope with the demands of such claustrophobic environments was one of the hallmarks of the special forces operator; it wasn’t just how well a person could fight, but their willingness and capacity to withstand the appalling conditions in which they often had to operate.