They had a radio frequency between themselves and their new base camp, but it would never be used unless something absolutely shocking happened. SEALs don’t speak much. The two most lightly packed members of the team, Paul Merloni and Rattlesnake Davies, carried the big machine gun between them. Chief McCarthy and Buster had the machetes, and Rusty led the way with the compass.
It was 2104 when the red-haired lieutenant commander from Maine turned north up the peninsula, checked the bearing three-six-zero, and led his team into the sopping-wet jungle. In fact, they could have walked the first one and a half miles along the beach, but Rusty had dismissed that out of hand after studying the map. He knew it would probably have been quicker, but it also made them vulnerable to any observation from a Chinese patrol boat cruising the shoreline checking for intruders. They might even have run into a Chinese foot patrol, which would have spelled the end of the entire mission.
And so the SEALs did it the hard way, walking through the rain forest, a hundred yards inshore, out of sight, almost nonexistent. They traveled in single file except for the two men with the big machine gun, who brought up the rear. And it was very difficult terrain, heavily overgrown every yard of the way for the first half mile. They were almost ready to start swinging the machetes, but the noise factor was uppermost in their minds, and they just kept pushing forward, stopping every 100 yards to listen. But there was always silence.
Rusty signaled a course change to zero-four-five at the head of the southeastern bay, and they moved on, keeping the ocean to the right, but remaining under the cover of the forest. It was at this point that the going became noticeably easier, with very little undergrowth beneath a canopy of extremely tall trees. However, an all-encompassing darkness made it difficult not to walk into the trunks, and Rusty kept his left arm outstretched in front of him, pushing on into the great unknown. So heavy was the overhead cover that Rusty doubted it would have been much lighter at midday.
Underfoot the ground was very wet and soft. It was impossible to avoid long muddy puddles, which turned up frequently, and each man was glad of his waterproof boots. Once they almost blundered into a fast-flowing stream, but Rusty managed to call a halt just in time, which was a considerable feat since they were all confined to the merest whispers.
The water in that first stream was quite fast-flowing, and they risked a tiny flashlight to look at the map, ascertaining that the stream must have rushed down from the Guanyin Mountain, which rose to 1,300 feet somewhere up ahead to their right. This was an unnecessary obstacle and Colonel Hart had marked a route through a long flat coastal plain, bordered out to the left by wide mud flats before the sea.
Privately, Rusty might have chosen the mountain rather than a possible journey through very wet marshland. But the colonel had been insistent. If the Chinese were going to have lookout posts anywhere, they would establish them in the mountains, on the high ground to the north that dominated not only the jail, but also most of the island. If there were outposts up in those hills, it would be impossible to make a journey like this during the day. At night it would be the height of folly to risk running into one by mistake.
The colonel’s legendary high intelligence often caused him to speak graphically. “Sailor,” he had said to Rusty, “I’m not real happy about you and your guys getting your feet wet, but I expect you’d rather that than your ass shot off.”
“I think that would be a very fair assessment, sir,” the lieutenant commander had replied.
And so the flat wet plain between the mountains it was. Thus the eight SEALs were able to cover the first half of the journey without tackling any steep hills. But it was treacherous walking through deep, soft, grassy mud. At one stage as they squelched along through what seemed like an abandoned paddy field, Buster came forward and spoke in a stage whisper, “Sir, permission to draw my knife…this is fucking alligator country.”
“Granted,” hissed Rusty. “And for Christ’s sake stay near to me in case I tread on one of the sonsabitches.”
Everyone had to suppress his laughter at this banter. “We gotta come back this way?” asked Paul Merloni.
“Not if we can help it…we’ll have a chance tomorrow to see if the Chinese have any guards beyond the complex. If they don’t, we’ll take to the hills next time.”
Meanwhile they found themselves suddenly on slightly rising ground, firmer and with a definite steepness. Rusty told them softly that it was the start of the biggest mountain on the island. It was unnamed but high, and it towered over the jail, according to the pictures taken from the overheads.
The SEALs’ designated route would take them right between the two ranges, north of Guanyin Shan. They now headed due east, back toward the sea, and when they reached it they angled directly north again, into the foothills, hopefully to emerge right above the complex.
And now they were into the last mile and it was almost midnight. Both Rusty and Dan Conway were using night-sight binoculars, stopping frequently, checking the terrain, watching the infrared sensors, heat-seeking, battery-operated. They never found so much as a rabbit.
At four minutes before midnight Rusty drew them to a halt, and whispered that in his view they might see the jail right over the next hill. Right now they were walking through big trees again, and they began to move extremely carefully, moving from tree trunk to tree trunk, soft ghostly figures in the Chinese night, like a scene from a children’s horror story.
Rusty had the GPS system in his hand, a dim green glow illuminating the numbers. He was looking for 21.42N 112.39E. They were sufficiently far north, but the east number was flicking back and forth between 112.38 and 112.39. When that last number hardened up, Rusty reckoned they’d be in the goddamned jail, never mind outside it. They kept moving stealthily between the trees, and suddenly, dead ahead, were the lights of the prison where Captain Judd Crocker and his men were held captive.
Rusty saw the big searchlights first, the beams lancing out from the two high towers, which seemed to be otherwise in darkness. The beams were also moving slowly across the courtyard, which meant there were almost certainly two men in each tower, the light operator and an armed sentry.
“Pain in the ass,” muttered Rusty, going to work instantly. “That means we gotta get up there and kill four people before we start, otherwise there’s gonna be all hell breaking out, with us still outside the goddamned jail. Fuck it. We have to get rid of them.”
“What now?” whispered Merloni.
“Silence, smartass…I’m thinking. How about over there, Dan? A little lower down the hill. See that line of bushes on the ridge with the big tree in front? We could get in there. It’d be impossible to see us from below, and we’d have a pretty damn good view of the place. I bet we could see right into the courtyard.”
“We really could only be seen if someone walked up here and tripped right over us,” said Lieutenant Conway, in a voice only just audible.
“Right, and we’d see him a long time before he got anywhere near…”
“I wonder how many Chinese there are down there?”
“Hard to say,” whispered Rusty. “But if they’ve got one-hundred-plus prisoners, they’re gonna have a guard force of thirty on duty at all times, twenty-four hours a day…that’s one hundred and twenty people right there. Then you got all kinds of other turkeys wandering around, drivers, patrol boat crew, helicopter crews, cooks, orderlies, communications “guys and Christ knows what…I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple of hundred Chinese down there.”