CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
In Beijing, General Cheng was about to switch off his reading light above the antimacassar-topped lounge chair that was the only luxury he allowed himself. He was reading transcripts of General Schwarzkopf’s press conferences during the Iraqi War. Most of it was routine stuff — silly questions by silly reporters who had no idea of the complexity of war, but one answer of Schwarzkopf’s was burned into Cheng’s memory, and he had it marked for the red box — the documents that would be taken to the military Central Committee. Schwarzkopf had said,
There’s black smoke and haze in the air. It’s an infantryman’s weather. God loves the infantryman, and that’s just the kind of weather the infantryman likes to fight in. But I would also tell you that our sights have worked fantastically well in their ability to acquire, through that kind of dust and haze, the enemy targets. And the enemy sights have not worked that well. As a matter of fact, we’ve had several anecdotal reports today of enemy who were saying to us that they couldn’t see anything through their sights, and all of a sudden their tank exploded when their tank was hit by our sights.
Cheng had made an immediate rush order via La Roche’s front companies in Hong Kong for the infrared night vision, particularly the thermal-imaging sights that could cut through smoke and dust, plus additional supplies of smoke thickener that had caused Freeman’s tanks so much trouble when Yesov had used it up around Lake Baikal before the cease-fire. The other thing Cheng was banking on was that delivery of the newer Abrams M1A2 tank, which had two gun sights — one for the gunner and one for the tank commander, to track two targets simultaneously, unlike the M1, in which both commander and gunner had to share the same sight. The delivery had been delayed by the widespread sabotage carried out in the United States from dockside to communications.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The two U.S. destroyers, 430-foot-long Knox-class warships of 3,900 tons each and manned by 280 seamen, along with a Canadian Tribal-class destroyer, whose previous twin, angled stacks were now one in order to reduce her line-of-sight infrared signature, moved at flank speed on patrol, slicing through long Pacific swells. They were heading toward the last-reported SOS position of the disabled factory ship, the MV Southern Star, which had reported earlier that she might have seen a submarine in the area being fished by her four trawlers.
The three investigating destroyers were three miles apart, seventy-one miles out, southwest of Long Beach on Vancouver Island on the main egress, or navy exit, “track” for U.S. and Canadian warships coming out of the Pacific Northwest. Suddenly there was a feral roar, enormous mushrooms of foaming water, both Knox-class destroyers ripped apart, sinking within minutes. The only reason some survivors, thirty-seven in all were plucked up from the oil- and debris-scummed water was that the Canadian destroyer was slower and running three miles astern of the Americans when the pressure-activated mines blew, gashing the destroyers open, the modern ships’ thin armor plate a concession in the constant tug-of-war between more equipment and speed. Five hundred and seventy men and twenty-six women aboard the U.S. ships perished.
Tragic as it was, the loss of the destroyers to the U.S. Navy was hardly something in itself to undo the strategy of the chief naval officer in Washington. But the damage was far worse than at first supposed, for the entire egress channels for the northwest were now an unknown factor, meaning that each cargo vessel, submarine, or U.S. warship setting out to sea off the Pacific Northwest had to make a one-thousand-mile southern “detour” loop to avoid the suspect area, thus effectively bottling up and/or delaying large sections of COMPAC’s West Coast fleet.
The sinkings became a crisis because of the cluster of questions pressing the CNO. Why didn’t the U.S. Navy know about the mines? How could a submarine, recalling the Southern Star’s sighting, mine such a huge area, if it was huge and not merely local? Just as alarming, how could an enemy submarine get so close in undetected? If enemy submarines could do this with impunity, “within a stone’s throw of our coastline,” the New York Times had asked, what were the implications for the desperately needed resupply of Freeman’s Second Army?
The CNO’s spokesperson gave a terse “No comment at this time” to the scrum of reporters dogging her and the CNO as the admiral prepared to enplane the helicopter in Washington to report directly to the president at Mount Weather.
As he was whisked across the line into Virginia, CNO Admiral Horton was now giving much more credence to the Southern Star’s initial report, and ordered COMPAC–Commander Pacific — to have his chief of naval intelligence send someone immediately out to the Southern Star to interview her captain and crew before she limped back to dock and before airborne “experts” were rushed out by the TV networks and La Roche’s tabloids.
This proved impossible. There was no difficulty locating the Southern Star, despite the failure of the navy and the factory ships’ four trawlers to make radio contact in surges of static afflicting the northwestern states. The problem was that the ship wasn’t where she was supposed to be, the southern-flowing Californian current taking the disabled vessel to a point sixty miles off the Olympic Peninsula, the swells lethargically moving the big ship to and fro like a wallowing whale who had lost all sense of direction.
When Lieutenant Eleanor Brady, a vivacious redhead who COMPAC’s intelligence officer craftily gauged would elicit much more response than her male counterparts, was lowered by harness onto the Southern Star’s aft helicopter deck, there was no one to greet her. Southern Star was far from a ghost ship, however; the bodies of the two hundred men who had crewed her were painfully visible — strewn all over the ship in the galley, walkways, others having been shot down in midmeal, others murdered in their bunks, the officers on watch and the lookouts found sprawled amid the debris of shattered glass on the bridge, the ship’s telegraph still set for “Full Ahead,” though the engines, while still warm, were dead. The commandos, who, Eleanor Brady supposed, had obviously taken over the ship, had moved with grotesque swiftness and thoroughness. In the cavernous engine room, over twenty men, many more than usually would be on shift, had sought frantic refuge and now lay dead.
To say Lieutenant Brady’s discovery shocked her would be an understatement. When other naval intelligence officers arrived aboard the ship from Bangor, they found her ashen-faced. The ammunition used was quickly ascertained to be depleted-uranium-tipped 7.62mm of the kind used by Spets.
At first the theory was that Spets aboard some other merchantman had somehow taken over one of the four trawlers and, once aboard the Southern Star, had been the ones to radio in the sighting of a submarine — in order to lure the Americans into the mine field, thus inciting a massive panic attack amid the navy brass and precipitating an equally massive lack of confidence in the navy throughout the country. Pressure mines, the CNO informed the president, would not have shown up on the sub-chasing Orion’s magnetic anomaly detector, as the mines were often manufactured of nonmagnetic plastic composite.
The supposition that the Spets had sent out the message to lure the Allied ships made sense, but then questions were asked about where they had come from in the first place. Satellite pictures showed no other surface vessel within a hundred miles of the Southern Star. Had there been a sub as the Southern Star first reported? A sub carrying Spets commandos?