The SEALs woke up for the food. The box lunches had double sandwiches, oranges, a turnover apple pie, and two cookies, and there was a thirty-cup-sized urn of coffee. The boat stayed until the coffee was drained, then pushed off heading back to the base. DeWitt kept four box lunches for the Humvee-driving SEALs.
Murdock ate his meal, then went back to sleep. He knew he’d better grab some snore time while he could. Hard telling what would happen next on this crazy mission.
He came awake when the Humvees boiled up on the road and shut down in the parking lot. Then an hour later, just at 2005, the minesweeper steamed into the bay and stopped two hundred yards offshore. By that time it was totally dark. Murdock used his flashlight and sent a Morse code word out. It was “Murdock.”
A few minutes later they heard a small motor, and a gig came in to the point.
“Is Murdock here?” someone called from the boat as it grounded.
“Here and ready,” Murdock said. He, Lam, and Dobler stepped into the gig and it powered back to the ship. The Chief turned out to be 224 feet long. The deck was crammed with machinery and equipment of all kinds. The SEALs went up a ladder and the gig was winched on board.
The ship’s captain, Commander Lawson, met them at the rail.
“Glad to have you on board, Commander Murdock. You’re welcome to observe everything we do. This is not a swift operation like the sonobuoy trick the choppers just worked.”
“Understood. If we get in the way, boot our tails. You have any divers on board?”
“No, sir. I’d imagine that’s where your men will come into play. What we do have is SLQ-37(V)3 magnetic/acoustic-influence sweep equipment. That’s what should do the job. We can only sweep a relatively small section at a time and we move rather slowly, so we have time to evaluate any readings we get. Probably the best spot for you to view the process is at our readout screens. This way.”
“Ever hunted a nuke before, Commander?”
“So far our record is perfect on that score, Commander Murdock. Which is to say, this is the first nuke that we’ve looked for.”
In a map room, Murdock and the captain plotted out a search area. It came out a hundred yards due west of the land on the point, out six hundred yards, then a six-hundred-yard square including that one-hundred-yard point where the witnesses thought they saw the bomb dumped.
“Is that too large a search grid?” Murdock asked. “How long will it take to search that whole area?”
“Twelve to fourteen hours. If we don’t run into too much garbage in the water.”
“Could be too long,” Murdock said. “We don’t know for sure if the Chinese have a method to detonate the bomb underwater without a surface antenna. Could you start at the most likely spot in the center and work outward from there?”
“That’s the way we usually work, Commander. Settle back and enjoy the show.”
They all watched the readout screen. Within fifteen minutes a small bell rang. They had picked up metal, but it turned out to be the rusting hulk of an old motor car. The machines whirled and the ship moved along slowly.
There was no camera on the search. It was all electronic with a readout. Any metal found had to be a certain size to register. Old tin cans did not show up.
A sailor came into the compartment with a message for the captain. He read it and handed it to Murdock.
It was from CINCPAC. “Negotiations with the Chinese have broken down. The Chinese now threaten to set off the bomb at 1200 tomorrow. Suggest all possible speed in the search.” It was over the name of Admiral R.D. Bennington.
Commander Lawson shook his head. “Damn, there is no way we can make this equipment work any faster. Twelve hours, unless we get lucky on the sweet spot in the center.”
Murdock scowled and took a deep breath. This was the part he hated. The whole damn world was about to be blasted into hell and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do about it.
17
A half hour after the sweep by the big ship began, a sailor came to tell Murdock he was wanted in the radio room.
“CINCPAC is calling for you,” the seaman said. “We don’t get many messages from the top man in the Pacific.”
Murdock took the handset and responded.
“Murdock here, sir.”
“Yes. Good. Thought you would be on board the Chief. We’ve had some reaction from Admiral Magruder on the Jefferson. He’s had some of his antisub choppers on a search pattern around the waters off Kaneohe Bay. Says there’s a chance that the mini-sub was brought in by a regular Chinese sub latched to the deck. Then when they got into the shallow water of the bay, or near it, they sent the little guy in to look for the bomb.”
“Yes, sounds like a good possibility.”
“Now that the mini-sub is gone, the Chinese will have to use some other tactic. Chances are that the regular sub will come into the bay hunting the bomb, or it will send in divers or small boats. Magruder wanted you to be aware of this possibility and figured you might have some ideas.”
“Yes, sir. Those sub-killing torpedoes are the best idea. Did the admiral say that they had any indications that there was a sub off the coast?”
“From their searches they have had some readings, but they fade out too fast. He says definitely there is at least one Chinese sub in this area, but they aren’t sure exactly where.”
“Sir, there’s been some talk about the bomb threat as being a hoax. Any thinking on that?”
“We’ve worked it over a dozen times. The radiation we found where the bomb package had been could have been planted, or allowed to leak from some other radioactive material in that big box. Then, on the other hand, they have done a lot of work to plant the thing and move it. Feeling is here that we have to treat it as a real threat until somebody finds it and proves it’s not a nuke.”
“We’ll go on that assumption, Admiral. Anything else?”
“Do what you can for us, Murdock. All we can ask.”
“Do our best, Admiral Bennington.”
They signed off and Murdock went back to the compartment where they had the readout.
“Nothing so far,” the ship’s captain told Murdock. “We’re still working in what we call the hot zone. We could pick it up any minute if it’s still there.”
“Kind of hard to move that beer truck and the big box without some divers and a good tugboat,” Murdock said. “Divers couldn’t do it alone.” They watched the readout.
A half hour later Murdock had a question. “Commander, if you needed to drop a package into the bay here and intended to come back for it, how would you do the job?”
“How? Equipment?”
“That and anything else that would help you locate the package.”
“I don’t know. A marker buoy would be good, but then anyone could find it. Maybe put a sonobuoy on it activated, then locate it with a line of sonobuoys.”
“I thought they picked up signals for detecting subs. Could one sonobuoy find another one?”
“I don’t know. I never tried it.”
“How else could you mark a spot in the ocean and come back to it?”
“A radioactive leak?”
“It would get spread all over the place and not tell your Geiger counter where the leak came from.”
Commander Lawson shook his head. “I think you have something there, Commander. Just what the clue is I don’t know. If I wanted to drop something in the bay and come back for it, I’d mark it somehow, at least take its precise location with a mugger.”
“So how was that Chinese mini-sub going to find the bomb?” Murdock asked.