One evening Butler Spiers sat at home brooding over all this. He drank a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, then went to the basement and found a good piece of rope that he’d used several years ago to tie up his small fishing boat. He stopped in the kitchen, poured one more drink, then went to the garage and got out his big stepladder.
His wife’s car was missing, of course, so there was plenty of room in there. He erected the stepladder, climbed up on it and tied the rope to the highest beam he could find. He tied a noose in the rope and let it dangle.
Butler Spiers climbed back down and finished the drink as he eyed the height of the noose. He was going to have to keep his knees up. He put the glass on a little workbench he had against one wall. He climbed the ladder, put the noose around his neck with the knot under his left ear, took a deep breath, remembered his knees and jumped.
He had figured the drop just right. The noose snapped his neck like a dry twig and he died instantly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
War is very simple, direct and ruthless. It takes a simple, direct, and ruthless man to wage war.
In early January, Captain Joe Child was summoned to the Pentagon for a classified briefing. To Child’s surprise, the briefing wasn’t classified Secret, but Top Secret.
There were at least six admirals in attendance, and the CNO, Admiral Cart McKiernan. The interim DNI was there, along with Jake Grafton, the interim director of the CIA. They sat in the back of the conference room and didn’t say a word.
“Captain,” the CNO said, “your mission is to sink a ship, the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning.”
That ship was, Child was told, the former Soviet carrier Varyag. After the breakup of the old Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the Varyag, a ski-jump carrier of about fifty-nine thousand tons when fully loaded. But money was impossible for the Ukrainian navy to find, so she was stripped of engines and equipment, and the hulk was finally sold to a Chinese consortium from Macau that intended, they said, to turn her into a floating casino. That didn’t happen, but the PLAN got hold of her and decided to rebuild her as a carrier.
The briefer went into all of this at length, then got past the history lesson and discussed the PLAN’s first aircraft carrier. “She’s operational now, with an air wing and a capability that is superior to anything in the Philippine or Vietnamese navies.”
“You want me to sink her?” Child said incredulously.
“Yes.”
Joe Child turned to McKiernan, who was sitting off to one side. “Sir, may I ask why?”
“You know about the nuke we found at Norfolk” McKiernan said. “We are going to try to convince the Chinese navy that messing with us is a bad idea, and they’d better not do it again.”
Four days later Joe Child was in Pearl watching two high-speed stealth Sealions, being off-loaded from two air force C-5M Super Galaxies. A SEAL team had arrived a day earlier from Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego.
Sealions were experimental stealth commando boats and had never become operational. Each boat measured seventy-one feet long and required two sailors to operate it. Each was a semi-submersible, which meant that once loaded with SEALs and weapons, it could submerge until only the pilothouse, a stealth shape that dispersed radar waves trying to locate it, was above water, and carry its commandos and their weapons into a beach or other landing without the enemy being aware of its presence. Good for about forty knots in calm water and a bit less in an unsettled sea, Sealions were the armored personnel carriers of the naval commandos.
Captain Joe Child was in charge of the operation. The two Sealions were checked and, after necessary minor repairs were accomplished, taken out for night runs in Pearl Harbor. After more repairs and a minor modification to the internal lights, Joe Child pronounced himself satisfied, so the Sealions were loaded aboard USS Hornet, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship.
While this was going on, USS Utah, a Virginia-class attack sub, got under way. Roscoe Hanna, still the skipper, was delighted to get the chance to take the boat to sea one more time. The destination was the Yellow Sea, near the Qingdao naval base, home of the Chinese Northern Fleet.
Hanna consulted his charts and fretted over the problem. The Yellow Sea was shallow, and the naval base was at the end of the saltwater equivalent of a saucepan. Utah’s job was to make sure that there were no Chinese submarines near the area that might interfere with the SEALs’ mission.
Naval intelligence didn’t think the Chinese had either acoustic sensors at the mouth of the harbor or submarine nets. The Chinese did, however, have patrol boats equipped with sonar and searchlights, plus small depth bombs that were certainly adequate to kill submerged swimmers if they were detected or suspected, and all the usual machine guns and submachine guns.
“The problem,” Hanna explained to his officers, “is that the bottom is damned shallow way out into the Yellow Sea. The Chinese don’t think any fool would bring a submarine into water that shallow, and believe me, this fool wouldn’t if there were any other way.”
“Why don’t we just wait until the carrier sails, then torpedo her?” the XO asked.
“Orders. Washington wants demolition charges. SEALs will plant them. Washington wants them detonated under the keel, so the ship can’t be raised and repaired.”
“Sitting right at the pier?”
“Minimize the loss of life, yet break her back, sink her. That’s the mission.”
“Who did the Chinese piss off, Captain?”
“Just about everybody who is anybody.” Hanna didn’t know why Washington wanted the Chinese carrier sunk, but he suspected it had something to do with the recent debacle in Norfolk. No one had ever mentioned that a nuclear weapon had been found there, a fact that was highly classified and would never be confirmed by the United States government. But where there was that much smoke, one suspected there was at least a little fire of some kind.
“People way above our pay grade decided on this mission,” Roscoe Hanna told his officers, “so we’re going.” Orders are orders. Aye aye, sir.
While Utah ran across the western Pacific fifteen hundred feet below the surface at twenty-five knots, Hornet and her three escorts, all destroyers with guided missiles for protection from Chinese fighters, prepared to get under way.
Already in the East China Sea was an aircraft carrier, USS United States, with her battle group. Her aircraft were aloft day and night, around the clock. E-2s, satellites and shipboard radars were watching all the aerial traffic over that ocean, and the ships that sailed those waters. Every plane and ship was assigned a track number and watched. During the day, F/A-18 Hornets did flybys and photographed the ships, and occasionally intercepted aircraft that were thought to be Chinese military.
All this was out of the ordinary, and the admiral in charge of the battle group, Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington, worried that too much vigilance would make the Chinese suspect that something was in the wind. Still, with the recent aggressive moves by the PLAN against a P-8A Poseidon on patrol, and at Scarborough Shoals, maybe this was the expected U.S. reaction. He hoped so, anyway, and kept signing the operations plan.
The northern Pacific in January was a stormy ocean, with cold air, clouds, snow or rain, high sea states and low visibility. Many of the sailors on the ships in the small task force centered around Hornet became seasick. Captain Joe Child was one of them. He found the endless pitching, rolling and heaving of the amphibious assault ship impossible to endure inside, so he went to the flight deck and found a place behind a mobile crane where he could huddle out of the wind. The cold air and the openness seemed to help somewhat, but the howling wind and snow made even that refuge a miserable place. Finally he went to the doctor and got some pills. Threw them up. The third time he kept them down, and they seemed to help. The nausea stopped.