"In which case, God help us all."
Tse's men left the commando hide in the afternoon, long before sunset. Twice, PLA helicopters — big, lumbering Mi-8 transports — passed overhead, circling above the hills as if carrying out a search. Tse thought that those transports might be looking for the commando team and ordered his men to move off through the woods. "We cannot wait any longer, Commander," he told Morton. "If we stay here, the enemy will sniff us out. I strongly recommend that you get your people back to the beach as quickly as possible. Wait for dark, then swim across to Kinmen. You have the passwords and security information…."
"I don't like this, Commander Tse," Morton told him. "We're trained not to leave our own behind."
Tse smiled. "Thank you for including us with your company, sir. We are honored. However, this is something my people must do… for ourselves, whether we have your country's help or not."
"I understand."
Morton watched the Taiwanese commandos slip off into the woods, almost invisible in their bracken-camouflaged jackets and gear, as silent and as tightly disciplined as any SEAL platoon. He was still waiting to hear from the World but had little hope that Washington or SOCOM would be able to clarify this muddle. From the sound of it, the SEALs had been deployed across the Formosa Strait, then forgotten.
Or were they part of some larger picture, something SOCOM hadn't bothered to share with the men on the ground?
The worst of it was, the SEALs were not equipped to fight a major battle. The whole idea of covert ops was to stay covert, to stay hidden, to carry out your mission and, ideally, never even let the enemy know you'd been there, until it was too late.
And nothing could screw a good covert op faster than a cluster fuck somewhere back in the rear echelons. That was what every SEAL, every SEAL commander, dreaded above all else: being sent into a hot operations area with bad intelligence, with no clear idea of what was going on, with a poorly conceived or fuzzy set of mission parameters, without adequate backup and support.
Morton and the SEALs were now running completely blind, deep in hostile territory with no idea what their status might be. Their contact with the folks back home was intermittent and frustratingly piecemeal, and from the sound of it, they didn't know what was going on either. Not good. Not good at all.
They waited. Tse's advice — to pack up and move out — was good, but Morton didn't want to dismantle the satellite dish until he'd heard from Randall. It was a lot safer to move at night in any case. The SEALs didn't know the ground here the way the Taiwanese did.
Damn it all, what was going on back in the States?
A loud clatter sounded overhead, coming from above the woods to the east. A moment later another Mi-8 transport thundered low above the SEAL OP, flying toward the town of Tong'an. What the hell was going on down there?
He didn't think they would have to wait much longer to find out.
"Cast off all lines, fore and aft," Lawless said over his radio headset. He and Garrett stood in Seawolf's narrow weather bridge, high atop the sail, looking down on the deck party in their bright orange life jackets as they took in the mooring lines.
"Cast off all lines, fore and aft, aye, sir," the response came back over the radio speaker on the small sail console.
It was late afternoon, and the sun was hovering low above the mountains to the west — Victoria Peak and Mount Davis. The harbor, as always, was crowded with small craft, junks, yachts, sailboats, fishing craft, and shipping of every size and description.
"Maneuvering, Bridge. Slow astern."
"Bridge, Maneuvering, aye. Slow astern, aye aye."
Three blasts from Seawolf's whistle warned craft astern that she was backing down. Gently, the Seawolf began moving away from the pier. The trucks they'd used to escape from Kowloon had been left on the dockside. A cursory radio message had just been sent to the Hong Kong Port Authority informing them that Seawolf was under way. A longer and far more detailed message had been sent to COMSUBPAC, informing them of the incident in Kowloon and of the need to get Seawolf clear of the harbor and into the safety of deep water. No submariner felt truly secure on the surface, and Seawolf would not be able to submerge until she reached open blue water, around the curve of Hong Kong Island and well past Cape Collinson.
There was no reason to think that the authorities would try to stop the Seawolf now. And yet…
"It'll be good to be in blue water again," Lawless said. "What did you think of Shtyrov?"
"He seemed to be a decent enough sort. He was trying to warn us that the Russian GKS had given the Chinese our signature. I'd guess that they sold them the data, along with that boat. Part of a package deal."
"Yes."
Seawolf might be the most silent of all submarines in the sea, but all vessels made some noise, simply by having their screws turn through the water. GKS acoustic listening vessels like the one in Victoria Harbor now were designed to make recordings of the sounds other ships made, specifically for the libraries in Russian sonar shacks. Evidently, the Russians had sold the Sierra to the Chinese Navy and included sound tapes of various American vessels the sub might one day soon be facing in combat. They would, of course, have recorded the Seawolf's acoustical signature as she entered the harbor on Sunday, and that would have been part of the package.
If the Chinese had Seawolf's signature, it would be easier for them to track her, to pick out the little sound she did make from the background noises of the sea. It would also help them with weapons targeting, by giving acoustical homing torpedoes a specific sound to track.
Seawolf was well out into the harbor now. "Maneuvering, Bridge," Lawless said. "Left full rudder. Come to zero-nine-zero. Make revolutions for five knots."
Seawolf began churning slowly forward through the crowded harbor.
"Listen, sir!" RM2 Knowles said. "Gunfire!"
Morton heard it, a far-off chatter of automatic weapons fire. A lot of it.
Among SEALs and other Special Forces operators, it was an axiom that, for most missions, if you had to open fire, the mission was already a failure.
At a guess, Tse and his parafrogs had just put their collective webbed feet deep in the middle of it.
Morton crawled out of the communications hide and made his way across the forested slope to another roofed-over trench, where his 2IC was waiting. "Hey, Jammer."
"Yessir. I hear it."
"We can't stay here. Chinese helos have been circling around all day. I don't want to wait for the word from SOCOM."
"Roger that, Skipper. What about Tse's men, though?"
He nodded. That was the problem. Technically and officially, the Taiwanese parafrogs were on their own, especially after they'd strayed from the operations plan.
But the SEALs and the commandos had worked and trained together, shared the mission this far together, sweated out the wait together. It would be just plain wrong to light off for the sea, abandoning Tse and his men to their fate.
"Jammer, we're going back to help Tse."
"Aye aye, Skipper. I don't like it, but aye aye."