"I don't think so, sir. Looks like a local protest."
"Slant shitheads," Lawless muttered.
Garrett didn't reply. Greenpeace was an international organization that frequently tried to rally local protests against American nuclear presence throughout the world, but they tended to be well-organized and equipped… usually with high-speed Zodiacs, chase boats, and plenty of news coverage. That looked like a drunken boat party. They didn't even have running lights on.
Shitheads those people might be — that was a given if they were mixing alcohol with a cruise on Tokyo Bay at twilight — but the racist epithet bothered Garrett, as had the earlier comment in the captain's office.
Japan had a long history of protest against nuclear power, though the Tokyo government continued to flirt with some highly suspect technologies, like breeder reactors. The carrier currently homeported here at Yokosuka was the Kitty Hawk, one of America's non-nuclear carriers, precisely because the Japanese wouldn't tolerate a nuclear warship based in their territory. They were less stringent with visiting nuclear warships, like the Seawolf, and the U.S. Navy maintained its custom of never admitting whether any of its vessels had nuclear weapons on board. Still, protests occurred from time to time, assembled by citizens with sincere beliefs… and an occasional appalling lack of understanding.
"What do you intend to do, Mr. Garrett?" Lawless asked.
He thought about it. There was no threat from the intruder, and the harbor patrol craft astern was already coming up abeam to intercept the trespassers.
Still…
"Control Room, Bridge. Alert the harbor pilot that I intend to pass him to port."
"Aye aye, sir."
"I think I'd like to put some distance between us and them, Captain," Garrett explained. "Sometimes they stage little surprise ambushes… Ah! Like that!"
They were passing a headland at the edge of the naval base, just beyond the spot where the cabin cruiser was trying to get under way. A number of other civilian boats were there, sheltered behind the headland.
"If they can get in our way, they will," Garrett added.
"Show them our heels, Mr. Garrett."
"Aye aye, sir. That was my intention." He opened the intercom channel again. "Maneuvering, come left ten degrees. Make revolutions for fifteen knots."
"Bridge, Maneuvering, come left ten degrees, aye, sir. Make revs for fifteen knots, aye."
Seawolf's prow slid farther from the land to starboard and farther from the tangle of civilian boats. She accelerated smoothly through the dark water, gliding up on the tug. At Garrett's command they gave one toot on the horn — passing to port — and continued on past. It was a kind of football play, Garrett thought, with the Seawolf making the end run while the tug and patrol boat blocked the opposition.
It was a hell of a way to start a deployment, though, having to dodge the forces of people theoretically on your own side.
He wondered if it was an omen of rough waters ahead.
9
"You mean the entire ROC has only four submarines?" Jack Morton was only now receiving a personal briefing on the readiness state of Taiwan's parafrogman program from Commander Tse. "I would have thought that would be your strongest force!"
Tse shrugged and manage to look apologetic. "It is a political thing," he explained. "In China — I mean, in Nationalist China — all things are political to one degree or another."
Morton looked at the two aging submarines moored to the Kaohsiung Naval Facility docks. "But those two are relics!"
"Indeed. U.S. Guppy II class submarines. The one on the left is the Hai Shih… formerly the USS Cutlass, SS-478. She was launched in 1944 and in service by March 1945. The other is her sister, the Hai Pao, originally the USS Tusk, SS-794. She has been in service since 1946. Both vessels were transferred to the Republic of China in 1973 for antisubmarine warfare training… with their torpedo tubes welded shut, I might add.
"We have only two other submersibles in our navy. Both are modified Dutch Zwaardvis-class vessels." Tse stumbled over the alien name and made a face. "They are Hai Lung and Hai Hu — the Sea Dragon and the Sea Tiger. They were ordered by Taiwan in 1980, over Mainland China's strong protests. Sea Dragon was not delivered to us until 1986 and then only as deck cargo on a heavy-lift freighter.
"There were orders for two additional submarines of the class," Tse continued, "plus options for a fifth and a sixth. All were cancelled by the Dutch after heavy political pressure was brought to bear on them by Beijing. Does this tell you anything?"
"Beijing doesn't want you to have submarines," Morton said, nodding.
"We are at war, Commander," Tse said with matter-of-fact bluntness. "We have been at war with the Communists since the beginning of our civil war in 1927. Taiwan has stood alone against the Communist monsters since we were forced to withdraw here in 1949."
Morton raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing. Taiwan had not exactly been alone throughout the long years of the Cold War, and the U.S. Navy still served as buffer and guarantee for the holdout island's freedom. And… he'd done some reading up on the history of the Chinese Civil War, which, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, had ended in 1949. It had begun in 1927 with the Shanghai Massacre — when Chiang Kai-shek turned on his erstwhile Communist allies in a surprise attack, capturing and executing five or six thousand of them on the spot. The blood feud between Nationalist and Communist in this war-sick country was old, bitter, and exceedingly deep, and neither side held the moral high ground any longer— indeed, if either had ever held it.
A pox on both your houses was what he wanted to say, but his orders were to cooperate with his Taiwanese hosts and assist them in the upcoming op. The question was how that op was going to be deployed. The best idea for such a mission would have involved insertion by a submarine outfitted for commando-type operations close inshore.
But that wasn't going to be possible with this submarine fleet. operation Dragon Slayer had been assigned to SEAL Team Three during the flurry of excitement over Beijing's sudden, restless churnings in the western Pacific. The missiles fired at Taiwan had so far been of two calibers — Long March ballistic missiles fired from a test center west of Beijing, and a new, uprated version of the venerable Silkworm surface-to-surface missile, fired from a group of mobile launchers clustered near the coast opposite Taiwan at a village called Tong'an.
The Long March sites were deep within China's borders and well out of reach of anything but a U.S. air strike or an extremely large and complex covert operation. The mobile launchers, however, offered mission planners in Washington an almost irresistible temptation — a high-profile target within easy striking distance by a small team of Special Forces operators. Hitting those launchers would send a clear political message to Beijing: stop the bombardment of Taiwan or face a much larger, much more devastating response.
Satellite reconnaissance had pinpointed the mobile launcher site. of course, the fact that those launchers were mobile made them an ephemeral target; Operation Dragon Slayer had to be what was known as a hasty strike, an attack put together from scratch with almost no preparation time at all. That was why the decision had been made to join elements of SEAL Team Three with their parafrogman counterparts in Taiwan.