Child checked his watch for the hundredth time and looked at the GPS presentation and once again took his seat. He tried to relax, to think about the mission and all the myriad of contingencies, which were things that could go wrong.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. No good. The boat was writhing like a living beast. So he sat and rode it, just like the six men sitting behind him in the dark.
Waiting is the hard part. Seems like most of life is spent waiting.
What was it the admiral had said? “Your mission is to sink that aircraft carrier. The Chinese will know we did it, so do whatever you must to make that happen and get all your people out. You can’t leave anyone behind. We can’t give them a live man or a dead body to display to the press. That is of utmost importance.”
“SEALs don’t leave people behind,” Child answered brusquely.
Rear Admiral Hulette “Hurricane” Carter scrutinized his face and nodded. “Do what you have to do to accomplish your mission and bring your people back. Whatever it takes.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Good luck,” the admiral said, and shook his hand.
Whatever it takes. God, they were really pissed at the Chinese.
It was about ten in the evening, local time, when the coxswain blew the water from the tanks of Joe Child’s Sealion, lifting it from its semi-submerged condition and exposing the full length of the deck. The SEALs opened the hatches and came out on deck. They were wearing black wet suits with a balaclava, and goggles that magnified ambient light or saw in infrared.
In short order they inflated two rubber rafts, called Zodiacs, got them in the water, and began passing weapons to the man in the boat. One of the SEALs went into the water carrying a rope. He swam ten yards to the rocks of the breakwater, the mole, that formed the outer edge of the harbor, climbed up on it and began pulling a loaded Zodiac toward him.
Ten minutes after the Sealion arrived, the SEALs had a Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod on the mole and ammo belts ready. A petty officer manned this gun and Child was his loader and backup. The other four spread out. One carried an M-3 Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, a “Goose,” that fired an 84 mm warhead — portable artillery — while his teammate carried a half-dozen warheads and a silenced submachine gun. The other two SEALs carried a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle with a starlight scope.
Their job was to keep any Chinese patrol boat that found the other Sealion occupied, if necessary, as a diversion.
Joe Child stood by the machine gun and used binoculars to examine the ships in the harbor, which were lit with night running lights, as usual. The carrier was quite prominent, easily the biggest ship in the harbor. She was about a kilometer away, moored against a long, well-lit quay filled with warehouses and cranes.
Other naval vessels were at other piers — three destroyers, some patrol craft, several supply ships.
Joe Child turned on his portable com device. The screen was backlit, as were the keys. He could type a message and the device would scramble it, then send it in a burst transmission to bounce off a satellite, or he could receive scrambled burst transmissions, which would be unscrambled and displayed in plain English on the screen. Finally, he could just use the device as a conventional handheld radio.
He typed in his message, a mere code word that told all recipients that his team was on station and all was going as planned. He hit the SEND button, which fired it into cyberspace.
Aboard USS Hornet, Admiral Hurricane Carter looked at the message on the big computer presentation in the Combat Information Center, and nodded. Aboard USS United States, Admiral Toad Tarkington did the same thing. Then both officers asked their aides for another cup of coffee.
Both ships were at Flight Quarters, which meant the flight decks were manned and flight crews were dressed and standing by in their respective ready rooms, ready to fly. Hornet had six AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters, sometimes called Zulu Cobras after their SuperCobra parent, armed and ready to launch.
Carter asked his operations officer, “How far are we from Qingdao?”
One hundred twenty nautical miles, he was told.
“Close to a hundred,” he said. With a full combat load, the Zulu Cobras would sweat every mile if they had to launch. Carter prayed that they wouldn’t be needed.
Aboard the large carrier, sixteen F/A-18 Hornets and two EA-18G Growlers were fueled, armed and ready for engine start. United States, call sign Battlestar, was just south of Cheju Island, northeast of Shanghai. Qingdao was within the combat radius of her air wing. Still, she had two tankers on deck, ready to launch if necessary.
Half a world away from the Yellow Sea, in Washington, it was midmorning. At Sal Molina’s request, Jake Grafton joined him in the White House Situation Room, which was, appropriately enough, in the basement of the executive mansion. Admiral McKiernan and the marine commandant were there, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The president was not in sight.
Jurgen Schulz, the national security adviser and erstwhile Harvard professor, was in a foul mood. He lit on Grafton like a starving mosquito. “You talked him into this,” he said accusingly, the “him” of course being the president.
“You gotta take your medication every morning,” Jake said. “Don’t forget those pills.” He turned his back on an enraged Schulz and wandered over to the coffeepot.
“Where’s the prez?” Grafton whispered to Molina.
“Fund-raising in California. Squeezing in a little golf.”
“Great.”
Peter Ciliberti, the coxswain of the Sealion that was supposed to deliver the demolition charges to Liaoning, informed Howie Peavy that there was a problem. “They got a net around this thing, sir. We can’t get any closer.”
Lieutenant Peavy looked at the picture from the photonics mast. “We’re still, what? A hundred yards away?”
“About that, I think.”
“Seen any patrol boats?”
“One. He went by the carrier as we were coming in and went on toward the dry dock off to the north.”
“Well, better lift her up so we can open the hatches and get the charges out. If you can put us alongside the net, we’ll hop over it.”
He and Ciliberti rotated the photonics mast in a 360-degree circle, looking at everything they could see in ambient light, then did it again in infrared. The carrier was tied up sideways to the quay, her bow to the south, Peavy’s left, and well lit up. In infrared she had all the usual hot spots, as did most of the ships at pierside, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, alarming.
Magnifying the image, Peavy could see two machine guns along the rail, one forward, one aft, each manned by one sailor. The guns seemed to be on swivel mounts, so they were probably of a fairly large caliber, the equivalent of a .50 caliber Browning machine gun. The problem was the gunners. He wondered how vigilant they were.
The carrier’s masthead and deck lights were behind the gunners, so they couldn’t see more than fifty or sixty yards from the ship, he thought. However, there were four lights on cables dangling from the catwalks, hanging down to about twenty feet above the water. Each cast a nice circle of light on the water. If a swimmer came up in one of those circles of light, and the gunner saw him, well …