It was imperative that no one see them and live more than three seconds. It was the opinion of the Coronado brains that the guardhouse would contain a bank of television screens, closed-circuit from all over the base. That way one man could watch over the entire complex, positioned down on the main perimeter fence that guarded the base from the outside world — one guard with access to a panic button that would summon heavy reinforcements immediately. The only colleague he would require through the night would be an engineer ready to attend to any problems in the electric generation plant, the refueling areas or anywhere else in the high-tech areas of the Naval yards.
The SEALs’ plan was almost primitive in its lack of subtlety, but everyone thought it would work. The one thing they must not do was cause a panic in the guardroom, which would cause the guard to hit the appropriate button. And they walked on, each man certain in his own mind of the sequence of their actions in the next 10 minutes.
At 0110 they picked up the lights inside the fence, and it was plain they were not designed as a security aid, but rather to light a blacktop interior path along which a jeep carried the guardhouse personnel. The lights were dim and focused on the ground, not the fence. The SEALs could see only one light along the fence, not high, about 100 yards from the guard-house itself.
It was thus dark as they made their approach, and they had no need to hit the ground and snake their way forward on elbows and knees until they were as close as 50 yards.
They reached the fence in good order, and Rattlesnake began to cut a hole in the wire in a dark area 40 feet from the little building. It took just a few minutes, and Buster Townsend folded it back away from his buddy’s hands as the thick strands were severed. The hole was five feet wide by the time Dallas MacPherson and Bobby Allensworth hauled the big gun through, followed moments later by the entire team with all their equipment. Thus the Chinese guard and engineer, watching the television inside the brightly lit room, were in fact sitting 40 feet from one of the most lethal platoons of fighting men in the world.
The only man not through the wire was Chief Petty Officer Mike Hook, and no one could see him crouched outside the fence in deep grass carefully aiming a silenced M-14 rifle, the only one they carried, at the light nearest the guardhouse on the wire. At 0130, right on time, the veteran SEAL pulled the trigger and shot the bulb out the first time, missing the metal cover. There was not a sound. But inside the guardhouse a tiny light flickered, confirming that a bulb had gone out somewhere along the south fence. Instinctively the young guard stood up and walked to the screen door, opened it, stepped through and looked along the fence, noticing immediately that the light they could see through the window was no longer there.
In Cantonese he called, “We have a light blown, Tommy — we may as well replace it now. The television program is awful.” At which point the engineer also walked out into the night, carrying a white box and a tall stepladder. It was obvious that the cheap Korean bulbs blew out on a regular basis, even without Mike Hook’s valuable assistance.
And now both men were outside in the dark, the guardhouse unmanned. And right then the SEALs pounced. Rick Hunter took the guard from behind, breaking his neck with a tremendous blow from the butt of his machine gun. The man fell dead without a murmur, mainly because the SEAL leader had a massive hand clamped across his mouth as he died.
The engineer never even saw it, because Bobby Allensworth slammed a blow into his throat at the same time as Rattlesnake rammed his kaybar into the man’s heart. Two down, the guardhouse in SEAL control. Not a sound as they fell. It was 0136.
Rick and Dallas raced into the guardhouse and stared at the screens. From there it looked as though the place was deserted. There was no sign of a human figure on the top line of three screens. On the second line there was also no sign of life. The trouble was the lettering under the screens was in Chinese, and the two SEALs were unable to read which television recorded which area.
They stayed watching for a few moments, and then suddenly there was life on screen six in the lower line, four men walking across a room, dressed in engineering overalls. In the background there was a tall construction, which seemed to have a large wheel on top, but the quality was not good enough for an accurate assessment. In Rick’s opinion it was almost certainly the interior of the electric power station.
No surprises. They had guessed there would be little night security, in a remote Chinese base in the middle of a Burmese river, literally hundreds of miles from any known enemy, like India. And thousands of miles from the known enemy, the USA.
Commander Hunter’s one problem so far was the possible discovery of the bodies. There would almost certainly be a watch change at 0400, but by that time the SEALs would be, hopefully, long gone, and the base would be, hopefully, nonoperational. Nonetheless there was a chance that a patrol might call at the little guardhouse sometime before 0400. Finding it deserted was one thing. Finding two plainly murdered occupants was quite another.
Rick’s instinct was to disable the televisions so that no one else could look at them, but he did not dare for fear the disconnection could trigger an alarm that would send more engineers down to the guardhouse. It was the lesser of two evils, but he elected to leave them operational, counting on no one else seeing the pictures before the 0400 guard change.
Rick watched the bodies being dragged out through the hole in the wire and hidden in the long grasses through which they had just walked, at least 50 yards away from the fence. They clipped the wire back into place. If a patrol did show up, it would be confronted with a mystery, but not with unmistakable evidence of an attack on the base.
It was 0150 when they began their advance on the Chinese dockyard. The 12 black-clad figures walked steadily toward the lights of the main complex, a distance of 200 yards. According to Rick’s map, there were five main buildings — the power station, the main control and communications room, a large accommodation block, a long warehouse facing the surface ship jetties and an ordnance store right next to it.
Beyond here was the wide sea inlet where the Chinese had constructed jetties for their patrol boats, and farther in, two large dry docks, the type that flood down and sink to allow ships to navigate in and then wait for the docks to pump out the ballast and rise again to the surface.
Opposite the patrol boat landings were the submarine jetties, but according to Coronado’s latest Intelligence, there was no underwater boat in residence. And then, even farther along the shore, was the fuel farm, containing 12 massive holding tanks, an area 200 yards long by 150, containing a million gallons of diesel. Between the fuel farm and the refueling jetties there was a main fuel-control block, a sizable three-story building 240 feet long. With that out of action, and possibly a bad fire among the holding tanks, the base would be totally diminished as a possible operations center. That fuel-control block was the farthest building from the SEALs’ point of entry. It was also their first target.
And Rick Hunter led his men on a 300-yard diagonal route across the rough ground between the outer fence and the accommodation block, deep in the interior of the base. It was all surprisingly badly lit, for which each of the SEALs was grateful, particularly the two rookies bringing up the rear, carrying the big machine gun and ammunition belts that Lt. Allensworth would handle in an emergency. A big weight like that always makes assault troops feel vulnerable, slow and less mobile than everyone else. And the two rookies, carrying the machine gun between them, preferred the dark to the light.