America was at war, and Seawolf was on point.
Rain hissed down through the forest canopy, soaking already swampy ground. Morton and three of his SEALs, plus Commander Tse, huddled beneath the partial cover of a south-facing rock shelter, an overhang that deflected the worst of the downpour. Knowles and Haggarty had set up the LST-5 with the dish antenna trained on the southern sky, relaying their transmission through the comsat to Coronado.
"You were dead right," Commander Randall's voice said, through crackles of static and the watery roar of the storm. "It is a cluster fuck, and some heads are going to roll all the way from Taipei to Washington."
"Copy that, sir," Morton said. "But it's not helping us here and now."
"I know. But I want you boys to know we have not forgotten about you. We're putting together a recovery effort now. And Navy Intelligence has a man going out to one of the carrier battle groups to coordinate things."
"That's good to know. What do we do now?"
"Continue your E and E to the coast. Check in at your scheduled times for updates. And for God's sake steer clear of the PLA."
"What about the Silkworm launch vehicles, Commander? We're still in a position to call in air strikes. As long as we're here, it would be a shame to waste an in-country asset."
"It would be a shame to lose that asset in a gunfight with regular army troops," Randall replied. "This thing is a lot bigger than one SEAL platoon, Commander, and way over our heads. Your orders are to get your people out of there."
"Aye aye, sir."
"Talk to you at your next check-in, Jack. Randall out."
They began packing up the satcom radio. "So?" Tse asked him. "What's the story?"
Morton sighed. "It sounds like one of those cases where the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. Some of your people decided it would be a good thing to involve SEALs in a ground op on the mainland. Some of my people, with business interests in Taiwan, decided that that would be a wonderful idea and approved it, but apparently the approval didn't go as high as J-SOCOM. The op was what they call 'compartmentalized,' with only need-to-know personnel in the loop.
"The only trouble with that was, they weren't expecting that last minute peace overture from the President. The State Department negotiators were off to Beijing, and nobody at that level knew we were on the ground here." He chuckled. "New Orleans all over again."
Tse frowned in the rainswept darkness. "Please?"
"Sorry. One of the great mistakes of military history. The Battle of New Orleans — one of the great military victories for the United States — was fought in 1815, something like six weeks after the Treaty of Ghent ended the war we were fighting against England at the time. Back in those days, news traveled by horseback or by ship, and battles could be fought between forces that technically were at peace but who hadn't gotten the word yet. You don't expect that to happen with satellites, computers, and high-speed data connections, but things have gotten so top-heavy lately, with departments and directorates and a hundred different headquarters, control hierarchies, and command structures…most of them not talking to one another." He sighed. "Commander, did you know that in 1983 the American invasion of the little island of Grenada nearly failed in complete confusion… because different branches of the U.S. Armed Forces were using different time tables? No one had bothered to check to see whether the orders were being issued for the Grenada time zone or for Eastern Standard time, an hour earlier. Units in different services couldn't talk to one another because they hadn't agreed on common communications frequencies. Some Navy SEALs died because they were dropped in the wrong place at the wrong time, in heavy seas, too far from land. We can fight any enemy in the world, but we can't master our own cumbersome chain of command."
"Perhaps," Tse said, "we need an electronic form of bureaucracy. To do for bureaucracy what electronics did for communication."
"Hmm. A way to do much more, even more slowly?"
"Or to do it more quickly, but with even more confusion."
"Sometimes I think the only thing that is standing between civilization and absolute disaster is the fact that bureaucracy gets in its own way. It's so damned clumsy it's not a serious threat to anyone."
Morton stared off into the rainswept darkness. "Let's saddle up, people. We can make good time in this storm."
"The PLA will not be anxious to track us in this," Tse agreed. He looked at Morton. "Commander Morton. Some of us will still be remaining behind."
"I figured as much. You have your own war…and your own orders."
"We appreciate your help back there. More than we can say. And we will ask you to escort some of us back to Taiwan, with our dead and wounded. But the rest of us… "
"Understood. But your men are low on munitions."
"If we could have some extra 5.56 and 7.62, that would help a lot. Until we can arrange for a resupply air mission."
"Damned if I want to lug that shit all the way back to Taiwan." Reaching down, Morton thoughtfully tapped a metal case resting beside the wall of the overhang. "You know, I haven't seen our laser target designator. We must have dropped it up the trail a ways. If you happen to see it, make sure it doesn't fall into PLA hands, okay? I mean, it has directions on how to use it, frequencies for calling air strikes, all kinds of sensitive information I wouldn't want the enemy to have."
Tse grinned. "We'll see what we can do."
Morton put out his hand. "You take care of yourself, Tse."
"And you, Commander. It has been good serving with you. Very good."
The two parties separated at that point, Morton and his SEALs, along with ten of the Taiwanese commandos, moving on toward the coast, while Tse and his men faded back into the storm.
Morton wondered if he would ever hear of those men again.
Captain Frank Gordon was miserable. The COD air-craft — the acronym stood for Carrier On-board Delivery — was a C-2A Greyhound, literally a bus for hauling personnel, supplies, and mail back and forth among far-flung naval air stations and bases and the U.S. carrier battle groups at sea. With two turboprop engines and a ferry range of almost 1,500 nautical miles at 260 knots, it was ideal for the job it was designed for… but not exactly the latest thing in comfort.
Especially while bouncing around the western Pacific in the middle of a class-two storm.
He was strapped into a passenger seat just abaft the cockpit. A Greyhound could carry thirty-two passengers in addition to its three-man crew, but this flight was empty except for Gordon, a distinction of sorts, he supposed. He wouldn't have been quite so worried if he wasn't seated directly behind the pilot, who was clutching the steering yoke and peering ahead past the steady thwick-thwick-thwick of the windshield wiper, as though trying to penetrate the murk by sheer force of will… and muttering obscenities under his breath.
This, he decided, was fitting punishment for any sin he'd ever committed in the line of duty. As the Greyhound bucked and side-slipped in the turbulent air, he was repeatedly glad he'd had little for dinner…and miserably sorry that he'd had anything at all.
"Okay, Captain Gordon!" The copilot had to shout to make himself heard above the roar of the engines and the howl of the storm. "Just got word from the Stennis! They'll have a Hawkeye ready to go airborne the minute we bite steel!"