General Carter nodded thoughtfully and said he’d like to make a few notes and then offer his opinion back in the Situation Room, where he could pull up a chart of the Pearl River Delta and “go professional on y’all.”
It was after 10:00 P.M. when Admiral Morgan finally had the meeting rearranged to watch General Carter make his recommendations in front of the large computer screen at the end of the Situation Room.
“Mr. President, Admiral Morgan, gentlemen, I’d like to start by saying we can most certainly hit and destroy USS Seawolf. The challenge, as I understand it, is that you don’t want anyone to know we did it?”
Admiral Morgan nodded.
“Well, that means we need to be real careful about how we deliver the bomb. The common misconception, however, is that the higher you are, the farther away from the target, as it were, the less chance you have of being detected. And that ain’t true. ’Specially near a naval or military base where there’s likely to be a lot of radar.
“Fact is, you’re more likely to be detected if you fly, high than if you fly really low. Now, using the terrain of the land surrounding the Delta, I’d say you’d be better with a low-level flight. Because if you stay at two hundred and fifty feet above the water, straight up the middle here, you will not be detected. You’ll be below the radars, which cannot find you, and you have the added cover of the land, which makes detection unlikely.
“Judging from where the navy base is, I’d say it was almost certain you would be detected flying at fifty thousand feet. Whatever stealth bomber we send, I think they’d catch it on the screen. I’m only guessing, but Chinese surveillance is probably on high alert while that submarine’s parked right there in the dockyards.
“So, gentlemen, I’m recommending we deliver the bomb in a regular Navy F/A-18 Hornet. I like the aircraft. It’s fast, makes well over one thousand mph, you can fly it off a carrier, and it’s capable of carrying a bomb underneath weighing almost eight tons. The weapon I have in mind is the laser-guided Paveway Three, type GBU-24, made by Raytheon. It’s about fourteen feet long and weighs only a ton, very nearly half of which is high explosives. That thing’ll rip right through the casing of a submarine and straight into the reactor room like spearing an ole crawfish.
“Your pilot should use the old technique of toss-bombing. By that I mean he wants to come on in up the Delta with his throttles open wide, two hundred and fifty feet above the surface, making one thousand knots plus. ’Bout five miles before the target I wanna see him raise the nose on that Hornet to about forty-five degrees, climbing like a bullet, then release that bomb at the highest possible speed. That’ll have the effect of throwing it high, maybe another three thousand feet. Right then it’ll turn over and start dropping quietly toward its target.
“Its guidance system’s gonna be seeking the reflected light from the laser, looking for the marker, adjusting its trajectory to hit the middle of it, adjusting its fins as it flies, making its corrections.
“Long before the bomb hits, the attacking aircraft will be out and away — past Hong Kong seventy miles to the south in a little over four minutes. And by the time he hits the open water of the South China Sea, the submarine and everything anywhere near it will be radioactive history.”
“Thank you, General,” said Admiral Morgan. “I really appreciate that.”
“However, there is one further problem you may or may not have considered,” said the Air Force chief.
“Lay it on us,” replied the admiral.
“You will have to illuminate the target. We can program the bomb’s strike zone accurate to fifty feet. But that’s no good to you, is it? You want it accurate to five feet, so it hits the reactor room. If it misses by, say, ten feet, you’ll just punch a big hole in the submarine and blow some of it up. But you won’t blast the reactor room. To do that you gotta penetrate it with the bomb. That means you have to light up your target. And I’m not sure if you have anyone to do that.”
“I’m not sure, either,” said Arnold Morgan. “Jake, how’re we placed in Canton?”
Jake Raeburn, head of the CIA’s Far Eastern Desk, spoke up for the first time. “Admiral, we have several field operators in the area, three in Canton, one of ’em in the base. He’s the best of them. He’s Chinese, hates the regime, had a cousin killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989.”
“Not in the Navy, is he?”
“No, he’s a civilian electrician, been very valuable for several years. But he wants to bring his wife and son to America, which he’s been promised. If he could pull this off, it’d be his last mission. I don’t want him to die of radiation sickness.”
“What kind of gear do we need in there, Cale?” asked General Scannell.
“The device is small, electronic, with its own power pack. Trouble is, it doesn’t last that long. Once it’s aimed and switched on, we got about six hours before it dies on us.”
“You mean we’re not talking about a hand-held device that a man would aim at the correct spot on the submarine?” asked the President.
“Nossir. Someone’s gotta get this little contraption hidden and fixed in place beforehand, then switch it on when we’re all set, then get the hell out before the bomb arrives.”
“Can we do it, Jake…I mean, illuminate the target?” asked Admiral Morgan.
“Yessir.”
The chairman was inclined to adjourn the meeting at 2300, because he wanted to spend a couple of hours with Admiral Bergstrom. But just as he began his summing up, there was a sharp knock on the door, and a uniformed guard entered with an envelope for the National Security Adviser.
He read the message swiftly, direct from Langley: “All prisoners observed leaving Canton jail by military trucks. Moved back to heavily guarded Navy dockyard — app. midday Saturday. Impossible to observe future movements in there. Our usual surveillance in place Pearl River.”
“Might be good, might be bad,” growled Morgan. “They’ve moved the prisoners out of that Canton jail, taken ’em back to the dockyard. And that’s not all bad. The Canton jail was just about the worst possible place for us to get ’em out, bang in the middle of a well-organized city with a lot of military personnel in residence. In my view they’re taking them somewhere else. And the only reason they’ve gone back to the dockyard is because they’re traveling by sea, otherwise they’da gone to an airport or straight on by truck, right?”
“Guess they could be keeping them incarcerated in the navy base,” suggested the President.
“If they’d had that facility, sir, they never would have moved ’em in the first place,” replied the admiral. “My judgment is they’re on the move to a military jail that’s been specially prepared for them.
“Jake, we have to find them. Fast.”
With that, the chairman called the meeting off for the night, and suggested they reconvene right there at 1100 tomorrow. “I want to get a few things done before we start,” he added. Then he stood, thanked everyone individually, and motioned for the exhausted Admiral Bergstrom to follow him down to his West Wing lair. “We got some serious talking to do. Same subject.”
Admiral Bergstrom rolled his eyes heavenward. And trudged after Arnold Morgan, who was now heading toward his second successive night without sleep. He sent for coffee and a couple of glasses of brandy to keep them awake. And then he spoke quietly to the SEALs boss. “John, you know my views about your guys. I’d rather have a couple of dozen SEALs than four thousand bombs.”
He referred of course to the elite warrior troops of the U.S. Armed Forces. SEAL stands for Sea Air and Land, and the U.S. Navy runs six teams, each comprising 225 men. Three of them work out of Little Creek, Virginia, numbered two, four, and six. Numbers one, three, and five operate out of the island of Coronado, San Diego, home of the U.S. Navy’s Special War Command — SPECWARCOM in the trade — which oversees all SEAL missions everywhere in the world.