He fought the darkness, the pain, the dizziness, trying to roll over, but he was aware now that two of the intruders were hammering at him with their rifles. He tasted the sharp, salty tang of his own blood.
Suddenly, the blows stopped. Squinting through the pain, he could make out one of the men showing something to the leader… his military ID, it looked like, and Kazuko's passport and JAL identification card, pulled from her pocketbook. The leader scowled as he thumbed through cards and papers, then barked an order.
The one holding Kazuko didn't like the order. He snapped back, and slid his hand between Kazuko's thighs. The leader slashed out with his pistol, catching the man on the side of the face and spinning him away.
Kazuko crumpled to the floor next to Garrett, holding him. The leader stared down at them a moment more, as if trying to make up his mind…then whirled and strode for the door. The other three followed.
Garrett tried to say something comforting, but his brain was no longer working.
Helpless, he sank into oblivion….
14
The composite SEAL-Taiwan commando team had hidden in the forest throughout the first day, taking turns standing perimeter watch while the rest slept, exhausted, concealed by the heavy underbrush filling the clearing opened by the fall of a monster tree. Four of Tse's men pushed on ahead, with orders to reconnoiter the objective.
With nightfall, they'd begun moving once more, covering ground swiftly as they moved deeper inland. Four hours before dawn they reached their planned hide, a hilltop at the edge of the woods overlooking the village of Tong'an from the east. There, they used entrenching tools to dig fighting positions, roofing them over with logs, earth, and tree fronds until they were effectively invisible.
And then they settled down to wait.
SEALs were very good at waiting. During their forging as the most elite of America's fighting units, in Vietnam, they were notorious — and dreaded by the enemy — for their ability to force-march a hundred miles, then wait, more patiently than any cat by a mouse hole. SEALs were trained to deliberately place themselves in uncomfortable positions in order to stay awake, to outwait the enemy, to always — above all else — do the unexpected. SEALs who were questioned about why Navy personnel were carrying out operations so far from blue water learned to reply that the water in their canteens was all they needed.
Tong'an was a relatively small town tucked in beneath the loom of the mountains to the north and a swift-flowing river to the west. South lay farmland and open fields; east, the wooded mountain foothills. A large encampment, obviously military, had been erected on the southern outskirts of the town, complete with supply dump and a small airfield, and surrounded by entrenchments, barbed wire, and guard towers. They could not see their objective — a collection of vehicle-mounted IRBM launchers — but were confident that a search of the area would turn them up. Tse's men had been out searching the surrounding hills and forests for them for two days now.
Once the launchers were spotted, they would break out the laser target designator and call in the air strike. It would be ROC aircraft making the hit, but they would be launching laser-guided munitions that would home in on the LTD's reflected light to destroy the targets, no matter how well hidden or protected they might be.
At least, that was the idea. The first thing they needed to do was find out where the enemy launchers were actually hidden. Satellite reconnaissance had identified the camp next to Tong'an as the base nearest the probable launch site, but so far no one had produced an actual mobile launcher… or even a tire track.
One of the first bits of housekeeping Morton took care of at their new location was setting up the satcom link. A small, dish antenna was aimed at a particular spot in the southern sky, the location of a military communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth's equator. RM1 Haggarty and RM2 Knowles, the team's radio men, set up the LST-5 radio, plugged it into the antenna, and powered up the unit.
The LST-5 operated on two channels simultaneously, one for transmission, one for reception. The Team was to maintain radio silence unless specifically ordered to communicate with headquarters. They switched on every other hour on the half hour, listening for a steady relay tone from the satellite. That tone was their lifeline to headquarters. If it were to stop…
Morton lay at the slit opening to the hidey-hole designated Team HQ, peering through a set of binoculars at the encampment below. He heard a slither of loose earth and turned as Commander Tse scrambled down. "The recon has returned," he said.
"Anything?"
Tse nodded. Moving to the slit, he pointed past the encampment, past the town, and up into the forest-clad slopes of the mountains beyond. "In those hills," he said. "Just there. Four mobile launchers at an old logging camp clearing. They're heavily camouflaged."
"They would be, of course." The PLA would be most concerned with U.S. Navy or Taiwanese air strikes taking out their launchers, and with American spy satellites finding them in the first place, and would have hidden them accordingly. The general location had been identified using spy sats equipped with infrared tracking gear that had picked up the heat flash of launch and followed the trail of each missile as it hurtled across the Strait of Formosa.
"The recon team has located a good site for an OP. We could move there tonight."
"Good. I'd like—" Morton stopped as MN2 Grollemeir crawled into the bunker. "What is it?"
"Message from Knowles, sir. We've lost the signal."
Shit. "I'll be right there." Morton looked at Tse. "It seems someone wants us to phone home."
Tse's eyes widened behind his grease paint. "We've gone to a war footing, perhaps?"
"That I doubt." Morton nodded toward the slit opening and the military camp beyond. "There's been damned little activity down there. If war had broken out, I'd expect the place to be buzzing like a kicked-over bees' hive."
"It won't be a recall, not now…. "
"Let's go find out, shall we?"
Tse nodded and wormed his way out of the hide. Morton followed.
The communications bunker was another covered-over hole in the ground a few dozen yards away, on the reverse slope of the hill away from the town. The LST-5 satcom antenna was perched on top of the branch and earth covering, carefully aligned with the satellite, invisible in the southern sky.
RM2 Chuck Knowles was crouched inside the hide, crouched over the radio. He looked up as Tse and Morton slithered into the bunker. "Hey, Skipper. Commander Tse. Incoming traffic." He handed Morton the headset.
Morton pressed the receiver against his ear, listening to the decrypted transmission. Once the steady tone had stopped, Knowles sent a coded, burst transmission, relayed by the comsat to SEAL Team Three headquarters at Coronado. Moments later a burst transmission had come back down on the receiver frequency.
"Red Dragon, Red Dragon," the voice on the headset was saying, "Cincinnati, Cincinnati…Red Dragon, Red Dragon, Cincinnati… "
"Acknowledge."
"Yes, sir," Knowles replied.
Morton looked at Tse. "It's an abort."
"No… " The word was soft, a hiss of indrawn breath.
"The negotiations might have borne fruit," he said with a shrug. "At any rate, they don't want us screwing up the—"
"We have our orders," Tse said quietly. "Yes. We're to abort the op."
"No. I mean my people. The parafrogmen. We have orders of our own. We are not operating under the umbrella of USSOCOM or SEAL Team Three."