But the legend of the two combat troops from the bayous really took root when young Davies, on an overseas exercise, stepped right into the range of a large, angry spitting cobra. Two other SEALs with him literally froze at the sight of it, swaying not eight feet in front of them. They stayed frozen, too, until Riff slammed it into a tree with a bamboo stick and blew its head off with his Sig Sauer pistol. According to one SEAL colleague, “It was like watching John Wayne nail a rattlesnake.” The description earned Riff the memorable nickname of “Rattlesnake” Davies.
“Gotta watch out for them goddamned things,” he said in his slow Louisiana drawl. “But they ain’t near so quick as you think…just need a long stick and a good sideswipe…that way they take their eye off you…been killing snakes all my life, matter of fact.”
Lt. Commander Rick Hunter as yet had no idea where they were headed after Coronado, but he was happy with the men he had chosen to fight with. So far as he could remember, there had never been this much haste, expenditure and urgency about any mission. In his mind that meant only one thing. They were either going to blow something very big to smithereens, or they were going to take out some form of enemy of the United States. Possibly both. But either way, Rick smelled combat. He doubted it would be easy, and he wondered if some of them might be killed. Still, he was confident in the guys. And he took comfort in one of the old SEAL maxims: “There are very few of life’s problems that cannot be solved with high explosives.”
Nonetheless, he knew they were not invincible. SEALs bled and agonized like everyone else. It was just that it took about seven opponents to make this happen to one SEAL. “Still,” pondered the lieutenant commander, “we haven’t gone in for a while, and we must remember all our lessons — if there’s an attack, we gotta be in first before our enemy knows what’s happening, we gotta be well prepared, we gotta know the precise plan, we gotta know our enemy’s strengths and his weaknesses, we gotta be 100 percent ruthless, and we gotta watch out for each other at all times. Above all, we gotta be quiet and quick.”
The ferry eased its way next to the old stone jetty, which was set into sloping rocks on the south side of the wide northeastern peninsula. Behind them the prisoners could see a long, flat, sandy beach, washed today by warm, gentle seas. Up ahead the terrain was different, steeper, and Pearson noted the twin mountain peaks, one, the higher of the two, around a mile and a half west of the ferry. The other was more than a mile to the north.
It was hard to imagine where they were going, since the place seemed uninhabited by civilians. There was not so much as a fishing boat along the water, not even those long narrow bamboo rafts favored by the ancient people of this part of China. There was no sign of life save for a few seabirds, many of which had followed the ferry in. There was, however, already moored on the long jetty, a newly arrived 200-ton Huangfen fast-attack patrol craft, a Chinese-built Type Osa 1, capable of 39 knots, armed with four Russian 25mm guns, plus twin surface-to-surface missile launchers. Its diesel engines, with drive three shafts, were still running.
Everyone heard the ferry bump against the dock. The Chinese guards were out on the port side, yelling at a shore crew that emerged mysteriously from the wooded foreshore. The lines were thrown and made fast to old iron rings embedded in the concrete of the jetty. It was a drop of maybe six feet to dry land, but the guards had brought with them the big gangway from Canton. They secured it, and Commander Li materialized from nowhere. He stood on the concrete, barking orders.
Up on the viewing deck, the guard lieutenant who had been with them literally since they first arrived in Canton was now screaming at the Americans, ordering them to stand up and begin filing off the ship. They were of course still handcuffed behind their backs, and they walked forward to the gangway in lines, one long bench at a time, all under the leveled guns of the Chinese Navy jailers.
It took a half hour to disembark, and they were instructed to form a long double line, Captain Crocker and Lt. Commander Lucas in the lead. Finally, with six guards out in front, they set off, marching into the jungle down an old track, wide enough for an army jeep, but obviously recently cleared. It was dark, hot and shady beneath the tall trees. There were a lot of mosquitoes and other insects, and the air seemed to have a permanent hum to it. The guards marched beside them at 15-foot intervals. Pearson, the resident navigator, calculator and observer, thought there were more guards now than there had been on the ship. He also thought that no one would ever find them here on this godforsaken island in this godforsaken corner of the South China Sea, and for the first time he began to despair of ever seeing his family again.
They marched through the hot sweaty terrain for a half mile, and now the ground began to rise. The men were tired and beginning to weaken front lack of food, not to mention water. The guards were yelling at them to keep up, and it was with some relief that they noticed the track was suddenly swinging right-handed, and they were headed down a long hill, at the bottom of which they could see sunlight, but nothing else.
Shawn Pearson calculated it had been about one mile from the jetty to the clearing, but as they marched out of the jungle onto flat open ground, everyone in the lead group was shocked at the sight that lay before them, because it was the unmistakable exterior of a military jail, complete with two tall bamboo watchtowers containing searchlights, rising starkly above gray stone walls 15 feet high.
The double doors to the main complex were set into the southern wall, which faced them. They were 12 feet high, made of jagged bamboo, and plainly brand new. To the left, dead ahead, were two other buildings, both stone with sloping roofs, the nearest one approximately three times the size of the other. Every window was barred, and there were two armed sentries outside the door to the biggest. The Americans could not yet see the entrance to the smaller building, but they could see radio masts jutting from its roof.
On the right, there was a concrete helicopter pad on which was parked a Russian-built Kamov Ka-28 Helix, an ASW helicopter capable of firing three torpedoes or depth bombs. Right in front of it, nearer to the main complex, opposite the biggest of the two outside buildings, was a major fuel dump containing two 5,000-gallon cylinders mat looked new, as if they had been brought in overland by helicopters. There was no other way to have gotten them there, so far as Judd Crocker could see.
And so the little captive army of American prisoners marched toward a Chinese jail shortly before 0900 on the sunlit Sunday morning of July 9. The doors were opened inward as they approached, and the guards ordered them to keep going straight into a wide courtyard. Dead ahead was the main prisoners’ block, a single-story building that stretched the entire length of the prison. Above it, on each outside corner, were the two watchtowers. To the left and right, abutting the main block, were two other buildings.
Directly inside the gates there were also buildings to the left and right. Sentries stood on duty outside the one on the right, which seemed busy, occupied by many Navy personnel. The bigger building on the left appeared deserted. Indeed, the door was open and no guards were anywhere near it.
The main courtyard itself, in full view of the searchlights on the watchtowers, had once been concrete, but over the years it had cracked. Now there was grass growing on it, and because this was rainy July, the surface was wet, with long puddles reflecting the drab, morbid heart-lessness of the surrounding buildings.