It was plenty of time, but Lieutenant Commander Bennett knew the closer to the wall the four climbers hid, the more time they would have. And now he urged his three colleagues forward again, into the long grass, only 60 feet from the base of the prison wall.
And as he did so, he hit the radio buttons to Lieutenant Commander Hunter, one short sharp bleep, almost ready. It was H minus 12, and the rain kept pouring down. Up in the watchtower he could see the four men in the reflected glow of the big searchlights that swept the prison yard. It looked even wetter up there. Just moving around the corner from the east was the four-man patrol, and the SEALs held their collective breath, flat in the grass. The Chinese passed, walking firmly, rifles over their shoulders, looking ahead, and using, Rusty noted for the first time, a flashlight to illuminate the wet ground, with its now deep puddles. He also noted that they were not using the beam to sweep across the rough low jungle on the righthand side. Which was excellent news. The north side of the jail was the darkest by a long way, out of range of any light.
Rusty watched the guard walk on toward the end of the wall. Then he hit the radio button twice…ready. Instantly the single bleep from Rick Hunter came back…GO.
“This is it, guys…we’re outta here.” Rusty’s words were typically SEAL, militarily unorthodox, sharp, to the point, with overtones of buddies, not officer to men. And with that they picked up their ladders, and raced silently across the rough ground, Rusty and John running diagonally west, Chief McCarthy and Bill to the other end of the north wall. They reached it in four seconds.
All four 15-foot ladders were placed against the wall within.0001 of a second of each other, and the SEALs climbed them in the dark at the pace they had been taught, fast but not too fast, no mistakes. They reached the top of the wall in 12 more seconds, rolling flat over the narrow parapet onto the jail’s long flat roof, into the pitch dark beneath the watchtowers. Each SEAL lay stone silent below the tower guards for 10 seconds, and then they reached back over the outside wall and pulled up their padded ladders.
Less than half a minute had elapsed since Rick Hunter’s beep, but now they had to wait until the two-man patrol passed by. It would be in just a few seconds, but they did not want to be working right above the heads of an armed foot patrol. The plan was to let the guards get back around to the west wall before they scaled the second half of the climb to the towers.
Timing was critical. Rusty Bennett peered over the wall, watching the guards walking by. In his hand he held his little radio, tuned to the frequency of Chief McCarthy.
The final guard turned the corner, and Rusty hit the button. John McCarthy’s radio light blinked. They each counted to five and placed the four ladders softly against the upper wall surrounding the guards at the top of the tower. And then they set off, climbing more slowly, more carefully through the rain, one man on each side of the crow’s nest where the Chinese worked the lights.
At the top, there was no more hesitation. Rusty Bennett could see the nearside guard with his back to him, and he pushed off the top rung, his fighting knife ready, jumped over the waist-high wall, rammed his arm around the man’s head and sliced his throat almost in half. Three feet away Bill did exactly the same to the second man. There was no sound, but the mess was awful as two Chinese jugulars pumped out blood onto the floor.
Bill was in charge of what Rusty called “blood control,” somehow dragging the two bodies into a corner while Rusty himself manned the light, keeping its pattern passing regularly across the courtyard.
Over in the other tower, Chief McCarthy and John were in exactly the same position, trying to stay away from the blood, the chief trying to synchronize his searchlight with that of Rusty in the other tower.
Back in the command post, Lieutenant Commander Hunter, watching through his night-sight glasses, knew the watchtowers were in American hands, which gave the all-clear for the guys to storm the wall. It was H minus 2.
And it was still quiet.
The two-man Chinese patrol was just passing the main gates, 15 seconds from the corner that turned onto the eastern wall, the wall the British SAS men were shortly to scale. Rick Hunter could see the patrol, but Buster and the men from Bradbury Lines could not. They had already signaled “Ready.” But they could not move forward with their grapplers and ladders until the bleeper bleeped on Buster’s radio. And right now there was silence.
The SAS troops waited in the grass. There was more light out here, and they saw the patrol as soon as it rounded the corner, flattened themselves into the ground, and gripped their MP-5 light machine guns. They were so close they could hear the guards’ boots on the gravelly area below the wall, and watch them walk past. There was no danger to life, because if the guards had made one move of recognition the SEALs would have shot them both dead, but then they would have been in a very different kind of mission, a standup firefight they would probably have won, but at what cost?
Syd, Fred, Charlie and Buster stayed very quiet indeed, holding their breaths while the rain beat down on their backs. They watched the guards walk on to the far corner, and as they rounded it, Buster’s “go-light” flickered on his radio. This signified two aspects of the attack: one, Rusty and the guys had taken the watchtowers, and the searchlights, which they now watched slowly sweeping the jail, were in American hands; two, this was it.
“Move it, y’all,” snapped Buster in his deep Louisiana drawl.
“Right-ho, y’all,” hissed Syd in his cockney dialect. “I’m just getting the old arse into gear…”
And with that the three SAS men flew out of the grass, and charged for the wall, leaving Buster half-laughing, half-petrified. The fate of the entire mission hung in the balance for the next 10 minutes. H-hour was right now.
It took Fred and his men 4 seconds to reach the wall, 3 more to put the ladders in place, and 10 more to climb to the top of the wall with the grapplers. The four-man Chinese patrol was still 28 seconds from the corner, and before they reached it, three more SEALs had raced out from the undergrowth and retrieved the ladders, because they could not have been left there, either knocked over on the ground or left against the wall.
Up on the parapet, Fred, Syd and Charlie lay flat in a long line, no one moving. In the watchtowers, Rusty and Chief McCarthy made minor adjustments to the range of the lights, stopping them short of the east wall where the SAS men were flattened into the shadows.
The trouble now was finding the patrol inside the jail, and right now no one could see anything. There was no reason to go over until they could at least see their target. Rusty and John McCarthy knew the problem: They couldn’t spot the Chinese guards at this moment, either. And they probed the inner shadows with their searchlights.
After two minutes they spotted two of them emerging from the building opposite the guardroom, the mystery building they had never been certain of. They were regular uniformed Navy personnel and they took up positions on either side of the main gate, lit up by the lights from the open door of the guardroom.
The SEALs knew there was a regular patrol crossing the long front of the main cell block, but it was taking its time arriving, and on top of the wall, Charlie had already muttered, “Bastards are on their tea break.”
He may have been correct, and it was 90 seconds later when the guards emerged from the shadows. Two of them quick-marched from west to east, then swung right up the short block at the end. The other two waited until they were ready to march back, much more slowly, and then they also set off. The two patrols would pass each other exactly in the center of the main block. Sergeant Fred Jones elected to take them out in pairs.