“We’ll see,” said the general.
“I hope they don’t see,” quipped Aussie Lewis, a comment that Johnny Lee thought particularly morbid, especially given Brady’s savage demise of only a short time ago, and the fact of his own wounds, a ruptured eardrum caused by the concussion from the RPG, and what had at first sight seemed only a flesh wound on his arm but which was now throbbing with the intensity of an unlanced boil.
“Anything from our eye?” asked Freeman.
“Heaving swells,” replied Mervyn. “No traffic visible.”
“Bring her to periscope depth,” ordered Freeman. “Slowly. We’ll take a closer look.”
“To periscope depth slowly, aye,” continued Eddie, who was as anxious as his seven comrades to get moving again after the half-hour wait on the gelatinous ooze of the sea bottom. Of necessity it had to be an “ultraquiet” wait, no one moving lest he create a noise short that would betray their position to the spy ship junk and its two deadly runabouts, which might still be around despite the silence, using the sea clutter that had now obscured the RS’s radar waves, as cover. It was hard on all of them — men of action forced to wait, exercising all the techniques to fight boredom that they’d been taught from Brecon Beacons on exchange programs with the British Special Air Service in Wales to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Even so, Aussie and Salvini especially detested the long waits, whether they were in the leech-infested jungles of Southeast Asia or in the relative comfort of the RS, Choir’s “upchuck” notwithstanding.
The RS continued to burp air bubbles from its ballast tanks as it rose from the black ocean depths toward the faintly lit upper layers of the Sea of Japan’s international waters.
“Cut red light to white — it’s daylight upstairs.”
Upstairs, Freeman knew, was by now international waters, its rules penciled out meticulously by bureaucratic gnomes in Geneva, Zurich, and Berne, rules that every blue water navy promised to abide by. But for Aussie, Salvini, Choir, and the others, the reality of international relations in the deep blue oceans that covered three-quarters of the world, hiding the great mountain ranges of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the deeps, such as the 28,000-foot-deep Marianas Trench to their south, could best be described as Saltwater Dodge where, like the Wild West’s infamous frontier town, the right of way belonged to the most powerful. The chaos was made worse by the stupid brown-water, that is, riverine and continental slope, “close-to-Mommy” navies, as Freeman called them, who, after the Cold War, when they had welcomed either the blue-water U.S. or Soviet navies to protect them, were now trying to move away from being mere local and regional powers to blue-water status overnight.
In a hurry, combatants in any navy who hadn’t thought their plans through could be dangerous, and that’s what Freeman was worried about now. If the junk’s skipper had thought this cat-and-mouse game through, he should have already left the area, because no matter how important it was for the Payback mission to be kept under wraps until it was over, until Freeman got the box back to McCain, Freeman knew, as the junk’s skipper should have realized, the U.S. Navy would never permit such a revolutionary vessel as the RS to fall into enemy hands, either damaged or captured. He knew that if Ray Lynch and the others in McCain’s Blue-Tile supersensitive Signals Exploitation Space closely monitoring the RS’s infil onto and now its exfil from Beach 5 thought for one second that the RS might be captured, its crew perhaps already depth-charged into insensibility and unwitting surrender, Admiral Crowley would act quickly. His entire carrier battle group of thirteen ships would unleash everything in their considerable arsenals to destroy the RS so utterly that it would be nothing more than carbon fiber.
“Sixty feet, periscope depth!” reported Eddie Mervyn.
“Scope depth,” acknowledged the general, adding in a hurried but nevertheless carefully measured and modulated voice, “Pilot has the con.” At this, Mervyn became OOD, officer of the deck, and instructed Gomez, “Up search scope. Closing the eye.”
“Up search scope. Closing the eye,” said Gomez, as Freeman watched his distorted bean-string image in the oil-polished sheen of the search scope’s column.
“Ten to one they’ve buggered off,” said Aussie.
No one would take the bet.
“Relay visual to screen,” Gomez informed Eddie.
“Relay to screen. Magnification?”
“One point five.”
“One point five. Very good.”
Everyone was watching the screen, the shutdown of the eye resulting in a momentarily blank screen before the search scope’s circle came online to show, they hoped, a magnified vista of the surrounding waters. Instead, all they saw were foam-riven gray walls of water crashing in on the scope, visually highlighting their vulnerability. Nothing but an angry sea.
“Reducing magnification,” said Eddie Mervyn. The never-ending walls seemed less intimidating but just as relentless. The important thing was that there was no sight of the junk or its two depth-charging rigid inflatable boats. Gomez cursed the malfunctioning sonar, which was unable to confirm their conclusion, based as it was on nothing more than their search scope’s digital pics of a heaving ocean. A ship, junk, or other vessel could easily be missed, as Freeman well knew.
Given the crazy change in vectors involved, one second the scope would be atop the crest of a huge wave, giving a 45-degree snapshot of the ocean for miles, the next all that would be seen was a solid wall of water, as trough replaced crest. But as yet, no junk was in sight. What made it worse for Freeman was that, as confident as he was that the junk had withdrawn, he was able to only partially concentrate on the intermittent views of the search scope. The reason: things weren’t right. The grip of his obsession about the sweet onions and the MANPADS had not been cast off by his frank acknowledgment of doubt to the crew. It was bad luck that the HAN sub showed up before the attack and the junk shortly after, but was it pure chance? The littoral waters were vigorously patrolled by the PLA and NKA navies. Or had someone somehow got a fix on their course? Someone at the beach who’d seen them racing off, at least the RS’s wake, and quickly extrapolated from the straight-line course? It was impossible to tell.
“Clear through 180 degrees,” Eddie Mervyn informed the team. “Beginning second 180 now.”
Freeman was sure that the scope’s 360-degree sweep would be clear as well, because his suspicion was growing. During the half-hour wait, he’d had time to chew over several other things that had also surprised him: the lack of any NKA beach patrol, which every member of the Payback team half expected to be there, near such a high-priority target, and there was only one tank. You used tanks in platoon sizes — maybe a pair, one covering the other, and more often three, but rarely only one tank. And how come there were no more armored vehicles, Chinese-made armored BTR-60 and BMP amphibious personnel carriers?
“All clear through 360,” came Eddie Mervyn’s assurance.
“Run CC check,” said Freeman.
“Running counterclockwise sweep,” confirmed Eddie. “Through 360.”
“Three-sixty” made Freeman think of another absentee. With the vital MANPAD storehouse relatively close to the DMZ, how come there’d been no Deng-type fast attack vehicles with the roof-mounted 360-degree-sweep 23mm chain gun and pintle-mounted 7.62mm up front? If he remembered correctly, the Deng 355 FAV had a 24-7 day-night-sighting sleeve above the chain gun. And a T-55 instead of the ChiCom 98 laser-guided missile tank. Or was his glass-half-empty mood feeding on itself? Maybe with the storm lashing the coast, Pyongyang had put out a “Defend the Fatherland” alert, which braced all their units along the 148-mile-long DMZ for an impending all-out U.S./South Korean breach of the line? And he knew that such an alert used up the NKA’s liquid gold, as Johnny Lee referred to the NKA’s expensive oil, which they’d received as payment from Middle-Eastern terrorists in return for MANPADs and other weapons.