"Yes, sir."
"Would you tell us, please, in your own words, what happened?"
It was all in the report he'd already submitted, and in his opening statement to the board at the commencement of the inquiry two days before. But the formula had to be followed all the way through to the end.
"The wheel was turning free," he told them. "We were in a rough following sea, and my first thought was that we could broach to. I guess, considering what happened, that might have been a good thing… another way of stopping the freighter without actually blowing her up. But I didn't think about that at the time.
"My orders at that point were to contact SOCOM via the Pittsburgh's communications suite, but we were out of communication with the Pittsburgh. My interpretation of my orders was that I was to take such action as I deemed necessary to delay or prevent the delivery of contraband military cargo to the continental United States, either by destroying that cargo myself or by arranging for Coast Guard or other U.S. forces to take control of it."
"You've already explained that you were unable to establish contact with higher command authority," Randall said. "Tell us about why you decided to put the Kuei Mei's helm hard over to the right."
"Everything was happening at once. The Kilo surfaced just as we were sorting things out on the bridge, and she presented all sorts of complications to the mission, of course. She was pacing us maybe fifty yards off our starboard beam. We couldn't outrun her. She was probably already radioing for help, if her skipper'd figured out something was wrong aboard the freighter. I assumed she surfaced because she'd picked up sounds of gunfire on her sonar and popped up to investigate. Maybe she tried to radio the freighter and came up when we didn't answer. Anyway, I didn't see too damned many options. Sir."
The man sitting in the middle of the trio facing him looked up from his papers to meet Morton's eye. He was Captain Edward Chaffee, and he'd come all the way out to Coronado from the office of the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon to sit on this board. He was, Morton sensed, the most critical of the three board members… and he was certainly the most senior. "And what, Lieutenant," Chaffee asked, "did you see as your options at the time?"
"Well, sir, I could have waited until the sub put a boarding party across. In that eventuality, I could have directed my men to fight them off, though they were already involved in close-quarters combat with the crew of the Kuei Mei. Or I could have ordered the VBSS party to E and E immediately."
"And why didn't you take that option?"
"Because it would have left my men sitting ducks on the water. There were still a number of heavily armed men on board the freighter, and the Kilo could have maneuvered to a position to take our CRRC under fire. We might have been able to slip away in the rain and heavy seas, but that didn't seem to be a viable choice at the time. In any case, the Chinese would have been able to secure the freighter and her cargo intact, leaving my mission only partially complete. Sir."
"What about opening fire on the Chinese boarding party?" the third man behind the desk asked. He was Captain Samuel Polowski, and though considerably
Chaffee's junior in seniority, he pulled a fair amount of weight on the board. He was from the Naval Amphibious Base's SPECWAR division office and, though he was no longer in the teams, he wore the SEAL Budweiser.
The fact that two of the three men on the board were SEALs was comforting. They'd been there, at the sword's point. They knew what an op was like, what it was like to be under fire, what it was like to have men under you whose lives depended on your clear thinking. Morton knew Randall slightly; he had a rep for pulling through as 2IC on a rough covert op in Lebanon a few years back. Morton didn't know Polowski personally but knew his rep. He'd been CO of Team Three until his promotion several years ago, and before that he'd racked up an impressive list of decorations and commendations. Chaffee was the only real unknown.
He would also be the most political of the officers on the board, and the one Morton would have to convince.
But right now Morton wasn't sure what Polowski was getting at. "Sir?"
"You could have had your men open fire on the Chinese submarine from the decks of the freighter. They would not have been able to board under those circumstances."
"Well, sir, at the time that seemed like just the sort of provocation we'd been ordered to avoid. We were there to ascertain whether the Kuei Mei was carrying contraband cargo and to take appropriate action as directed by a higher command authority once our inspection was complete. Our orders did not encompass the possibility of getting into a firefight with a foreign national submarine. The idea was to avoid military confrontation. In any case, our ammo loadout was pretty light. We wouldn't have been able to sustain a firefight against any kind of odds for very long."
Polowski made a note on the paper in front of him. "I see. Go on."
"But it did look at the time as though the sub was going to put a boarding party across. If I didn't want to E and E, if I didn't want to fight, then all I could do was make it hard for the crew of the sub to get aboard. That's when I took the wheel."
"Were you considering outrunning the Kilo, Lieutenant?" Chaffee asked.
"Well, it crossed my mind, but I knew I wouldn't be able to play that game for very long."
"Why not?"
"Sir, the Kuei Mei was a Zhandou 59-class cargo ship, with a length overall of 328 feet, a beam of forty-three feet, and a deadweight tonnage of something like forty-seven hundred tons. Top speed of maybe twelve, twelve and a half knots.
"A Kilo-class submarine — the standard Russian export model — has a length of 241 feet, a beam of about thirty-two feet, and a dwt of twenty-three hundred tons on the surface. She also has a top speed of twelve knots on the surface… about twenty submerged. With two diesel engines to the cargo ship's one, half the tonnage, and three-quarters of the length, she has a lot more power-to-mass. With a narrower beam and a shorter loa, the Kilo is a lot more maneuverable. Only reasonable, of course. The Kilo is a combat vessel, while the cargo ship is, well…a truck."
"So you weren't actually trying to ram the Kilo?" Polowski said. "Just what was it you were you trying to do?"
"I'm not actually sure, sir," Morton replied. "I couldn't outmaneuver the sub, I knew that. Couldn't outrun her. I could make it hard for her to put a boat with a boarding party across… at least until the sub skipper got tired of playing games with me. I guess that's what occurred to me first."
"When you put the helm over," Chaffee asked, "were you trying to ram the Kilo then?"
Morton let his attention stray to the wall behind the board. Early morning sunlight spilled through two tall windows, framing an array of framed photographs— President Clinton, the Secretary of the Navy, the CNO — as well as a large print of a famous battle in the Age of Sail, the USS Constellation against the French Insurgente off the island of Nevis in 1799. There was a sense there of longstanding tradition, of military duty, and of the hierarchy of command responsibility.
His reply to the question, he knew well, could end his naval career. Whatever the details of the operation, of the freighter's cargo, of the overall political situation, the United States was not at war with the People's Republic of China. But the outcome of the incident— the Kuei Mei had sunk in heavy seas four hours after the collision — had provoked serious international repercussions between Washington and Beijing, and this after tensions between the two were already extremely serious.