“Then, Yushu, I do not think my advice and instincts are of any value to you. Because I believe you are deeply troubled by the situation. I see in you the ancient Chinese saying, reguoshang demayl…like ants on top of a hot stove…you are full of worries. And I have known you for many years. When you are so worried, you have to make your own actions. And I understand you. If the chances of a sudden American reprisal are, in my estimation, ninety-nine to one against, you are simply not concerned with the ninety-nine, only with the one.”
Zhang smiled. “Jicai, I cannot leave the prisoners in the jail on Xiachuan Dao. It is vulnerable to the sea. To an attack from the sea.”
“But we have an entire Navy an hour or so away to fight them off. We have many troops. Land-based attack aircraft. What can they do that we cannot rebuff? The most they could do, thousands of miles from their own shores, would be to bring in a carrier battle group. But we now have four Kilo-class submarines. We could sink the damn thing. It’s been done before. We would surely overwhelm them.”
“Perhaps. But that CVBG has the fire power to wipe out half of China.”
“But Yushu, they aren’t going to do that. They will not bring the world to the brink of a world war for the sake of one submarine and a few sailors.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But I have to move those prisoners fast, somewhere deep in the interior…where no one will ever find them. Because if the Americans can’t find them, they won’t attack. Because they are soft, and they value each human life in a way we would regard as absurd. So long as we have that crew, and they have our word no harm will come to them, I think they will keep their distance. But if they find them somehow…that’s what I’m afraid of. I cannot think we have more than ten days’ use of Xiachuan Dao. By then we must have another alternative prison camp. Away from the sea.”
Admiral Zhang had been in the office since 0500 pondering his problem, a jail in the interior, so far from anywhere that its inhabitants would simply cease to exist, and over the years they could be silently removed without anyone ever knowing their fate. It was strange, but all day long he had drawn a complete blank. But now, stimulated by his own thoughts about the possibility of an American attack, he came up with a plan.
Zhang did not know the word “Eureka!” but if he had he would have exclaimed it right here in the office of the Southern Fleet commander. Because Zhang was presently so utterly absorbed with the chance to copy the Seawolf, he had entered an ancient Chinese condition known as zuojing guantian, which means, looking at the sky from the bottom of a well, not seeing the whole picture.
And now he moved into a higher gear, focusing his mind on a place he had only once visited — Chongqing, the great gray Chinese city that clings to the mountains above the confluence of the wide Yangtze and Jialing rivers, more than 650 miles northwest of Zhanjiang where he now stood. This was the deepest interior, a city of 15 million people in the innermost province of Sichuan, 700 miles from Shanghai, 800 from Beijing, bordered to the west by the massive 1,000-mile-long range of mountains that separate China from much of the Asian world.
Chongqing was for centuries almost inaccessible except for those who could navigate the Yangtze for 1,000 miles. Blisteringly hot in the summer, the city spends almost the entire winter under a deep blanket of fog. Its airport, set between mountains, is unsuitable for international flights, and even now it takes an excellent domestic airline pilot to make a landing there. The train takes 12 hours running south down the Tuo River and through the mountains from Sichuan’s capital, Chengdu, a distance of 180 miles. From Kunming, 400 miles to the south, it takes 36 hours by train, because you have to go all the way north to change at Chengdu.
Chongqing was the capital of China during World War II, headquarters of Chiang Kaishek’s Kuomintang military, and what those ruthless anticommunist twentieth-century tartars needed was jails in which to incarcerate hundreds of political prisoners. They built them well outside the city, mostly to the west, and Admiral Zhang Yushu knew precisely where they were.
He knew also they were a sprawling archipelago of prisons, some more remote than others. Tourists were admitted to see some of them on bus trips from the city, but it would take the C-in-C of the Navy one phone call to isolate an entire complex.
“Chongqing, Jicai,” he said. “That’s the answer, the remotest jail, in the remotest city, almost unapproachable by air, a nightmare by road, and no ocean. Not even the Americans could storm that place. And anyway, they would never, never find their prisoners. No one ever has, not in the old jails of Chongqing. Ten weeks from now the place goes under a blanket of fog. The American satellites would find that nearly impossible, even if they knew where to look.”
“But, Yushu, those jails have not been used for a half-century — they will be in disrepair…what about water and electricity?”
“Jicai, let me ask you a general knowledge question: What lies three hundred and fifty miles downstream along the Yangtze from Chongqing?”
“At Yichang? Well, the Three Gorges Dam, of course. I don’t quite see what that has to do with it.”
“Because, Jicai, on that massive project there are a half-million of our workers, many of them skilled. There are billions of tons of cement and steel and machinery. Technicians working on one of the biggest hydroelectric projects on earth…one good shipload of men and material, and I’ll have one of those jails up and running inside one week. Off limits to all tourists for a hundred years.”
“I’ll say one thing, my great leader,” replied Admiral Zu. “It has never been a problem for you to think big. Really big. And I agree. If you could make those arrangements, I don’t think the Americans would ever find their submarine crew.”
Admiral John Bergstrom was putting together his SEAL strike force as if the mission were taking place tomorrow. Which it most definitely was not, because no one knew where the crew of Seawolf was located.
Nonetheless, he was operating on two assumptions: One, that the location would be somewhere near the sea, in accordance with the intelligence theories being advanced by Admiral Morgan and Colonel Hart. Two, there would have to be a detailed reconnaissance, probably sending in a dozen SEALs to wherever the hell the crew were discovered.
All day he and Admiral Morgan had conferred, and the President’s security adviser-was growing more and more irritated at the intelligence community in Fort Meade, which had been working flat-out six-hour shifts all through the night. Right now the situation was approaching dire. Admiral Bergstrom had his team in order, under the driving force of Lt. Commander Rick Hunter. But they were operating in a vacuum. Detailed plans for the assault were being drawn up, involving the best men among the 2,300 SEALs, but no one knew what they were supposed to assault. It was hugely frustrating.
Four hours from now, at 1600 (local), the now 64-strong SEAL attack force would fly from the U.S. Naval Air Station at North Island, San Diego, to the air facility the U.S. has maintained at Okinawa, one of the remote Japanese islands that stretch for 540 miles southwesterly from the final mainland of Kyushu down to within 100 miles of the northeast coast of Taiwan. Okinawa is situated about halfway down the island chain, 950 miles east-nor’ east of the Pearl River Delta.
From Okinawa, the SEALs were scheduled to be ferried by one of the Navy’s giant Sikorsky CH-53D Sea Stallion assault helicopters to the flight deck of the 100,000-ton Nimitz-class aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan. The Sea Stallion helicopter carries 38 troops and would make three journeys between the airfield and the carrier, bringing in the 64 SEALs and all of their gear, plus Colonel Frank Hart, who was expected momentarily in Admiral Bergstrom’s office.