All right, the CNO asked, but what or who had laid the mines? A “mini” or “midget” sub? If mines had been laid from an unmanned mini, where was the mini being controlled from? All U.S. and Canadian submersible companies had been cleared. And if it had been a manned mini or midget sub, then where was its “milch cow,” its mother supply ship?
Amid the winking of scores of rescue boat lights in the mist-shrouded strait, the sailors, offloading wounded into a Coast Guard cutter, saw one of the lights for a second become as bright as a struck match. It was the backblast of a missile streaking toward the huge gash on Turner’s aft port side. The speed of the missile registered by the computers on the Aegis nearest Turner was Mach 1.9, which meant it reached the already gravely wounded carrier in.3 seconds, the blink of an eye. Even so, the Aegis’s Phalanx close-in weapons system, with its state-of-the-art, superfast radar-guided response, did intercept. It was disastrous however, the impact of the incoming missile and outgoing 20mm ordnance resulting in a fiery rain of white-hot debris that showered Turner’s island, knocking out its cluster of vital antennae and radar dishes. For this reason, a second missile, fired a millisecond later, was able to disappear into the cavernous V cut, exploding at the waterline. Six minutes later the order was given to abandon ship. She would not hold.
At 0431 the 95,000-ton carrier, tow lines attached, began a twelve-second death roll to port. Two tugboats — one out of Vancouver, the other from Seattle — were unable to release their lines quickly enough. One was dragged under, and the other, its line already taut, whipped through the air like a toy as the Turner’s stern inverted, the oceangoing tug slamming into the carrier’s prop like a box of matchsticks, the tug’s crew flung into the maelstrom of the carrier’s immense propellers.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
From China’s coast province of Fukien, the PLA’s sixty Xian H-6 medium bombers that attacked the offshore Nationalist island of Kinmen, about one-eighth the size of Rhode Island, did not come directly from the west, as expected. Following the PLA’s thousand-gun artillery assault, a prelude to what Kinmen’s Nationalists anticipated would be the invasion, the ChiCom bombers, augmented by 120 Q-5 ground attack aircraft and protected by three hundred-plane swarms of PLA Shenyang J-5 Fresco interceptors, flew south of Fukien, not east toward Kinmen.
The ChiCom pilots, using their own hilly Amoy Island, ten miles directly west of Kinmen, as a screen, turned their fighter-protected bombers westward in a sixty-mile crescent, sweeping in low over the arc of Liaolo Bay on the island’s forty-mile-long southern coast, thus attacking the Nationalists’ heavy fortifications on the island’s northern shore from behind. Only now did Taipei and Washington realize that the fast Chinese attack boats, seen earlier on SATPIX as white scratches heading east from the Chinese mainland, had been a feint, making the Nationalists on Kinmen think the ChiCom fast attack patrol boats were the forward elements of a head-on invasion of the island from the west. This had duped the Nationalists on Kinmen to rush the bulk of their north coast garrison to the southernmost shores, thus leaving their flank exposed.
As Freeman and the rest of the Army’s USO team packed up for their flight back to the States, the general sent an e-mail to David Brentwood, who was to be sent home from Tora Bora for R&R, telling him, “I’ll come to see you back in the States. Fort Lewis is pretty close to this Northwest chaos, and I’d like to have a look-see for myself. Washington sure as hell doesn’t know what’s going on. It just occurred to me that probably the best place to meet would be in Port Townsend, right on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Will confirm later. By the way, I don’t think the towelheads are behind this at all.”
If that last phrase didn’t get him the attention of Homeland Defense, Freeman thought, he’d eat his Afrika Korps cap.
Army surgeons at Tora Bora, eschewing the kind of false hope that some of their well-meaning civilian colleagues often felt compelled to give patients, told David bluntly that his military career was over. “The lower part of your nerve plexus in the right arm has been destroyed, unfortunately — so badly damaged that even the best vascular surgeon can’t repair your arm beyond forty percent of its function. Better to face that now, Captain,” said one of the specialists, who, as an afterthought, asked, “You a religious man, Brentwood?”
“Foxhole convert,” David quipped, a little too flippantly, given his sardonic smile, for any of the three surgeons to believe him.
“Religion sometimes helps patients to adjust,” the surgeon said.
David resented his tone. He saw it as an atheistic condescension toward someone the doctor considered simpleminded. “I don’t believe in miracles,” he responded, and immediately regretted giving ground.
“Well, I think you’ll enjoy your R and R at Fort Lewis.” An awkward silence ensued until the doctor added, “The Pacific Northwest is big timber country. Lots of logging — one of the most accident-prone jobs in the world. A lot of good surgeons and rehab right at Fort Lewis’s doorstep.”
“Ah, I think he wanted his rehab in Hawaii!” joshed one of the other doctors. “Somewhere a little warmer.”
David gave them the smile they expected.
“You ever been in the Pacific Northwest, Brentwood?”
David wondered where he should begin. Obviously they hadn’t read his military record. “Yes,” he said simply.
Approaching Washington State, the military transport was escorted in from a hundred miles out by two F-18s out of McCord, the Northwest under the highest alert since the Cuban Missile and 9/11 crises.
After landing at SeaTac, David walked past the Fort Lewis driver who was holding the BRENTWOOD sign, consulted “Surgeons” in Seattle’s yellow pages directory, and caught a cab downtown.
Dr. Paul Gonzales, a surgeon from the famed Brazilian clinic used by many Hollywood celebrities, was more suave than the three doctors at Tora Bora and disagreed with their diagnosis. Surgery, he told David, could not be expected to restore more than a maximum of thirty percent use in his right arm—“in the fingers, no more than twenty-five percent.”
“Shit!” said David, in an uncharacteristic outburst. “How about physiotherapy — you know, rehab and—”
Gonzales shrugged. “You’ll have to do that just to maintain the minimum range of movement you have. If you don’t, you’ll lose it.”
Brentwood knew the doctor meant his arm, but he already felt as if he’d lost everything. A one-armed soldier.
“Of course,” Dr. Gonzales continued, “your left arm will take over some of the functions of your right. A squeeze ball will help somewhat. Keep exercising the stiff hand as much as possible to retain what motion remains.”
“A squeeze ball?”
A stunning print of Cot’s Storm hung on the doctor’s pastel-gray wall, the glances of apprehension on the faces of the two lovers fleeing through the foreboding and beautiful forest arresting David’s attention. Despite the danger all around them, there was hope in their eyes. And he needed hope now, the kind Melissa had given him through the long months of separation. He needed her now, but the nightmare of the cave, the death of his six comrades, was too heavy upon him to go to her yet.
Gonzales’s second examination was merely an act of courtesy. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Douglas Freeman, true to his e-mail, turned up in Port Townsend’s East-West Café for lunch. It was the only place open since the scare. But David Brentwood wasn’t in the mood to eat, and neither was the general, beset by what seemed an endless MTV video blaring from the TV in the corner of the restaurant. Agitated, but trying not to show it, the general was convinced that Washington, D.C., was merely spinning its wheels while the West Coast burned, and that more attacks could be in the offing. “They think,” he told David, “that this damn minisub, or whatever the hell it is, has shot its bolt.”