‘You know, Dutch’ – Admiral Podulski lit up a cigarette – ‘we could have used that lad, back a few years. I think he would have fit in just fine.’ It was far more than a ‘few’ years, but Maxwell knew the truth of the statement. They’d been young warriors once, and now was the time of the new generation.
‘Cas, I just hope he’s careful.’
‘He will be. Just like we were.’
The sea sled was wheeled out to the flight deck by the men who had prepared it. The helicopter was up and running now, its five-bladed rotor turning in the predawn darkness as Kelly walked through the watertight door. He took a deep breath before striding out. He’d never had an audience like this before. Irvin was there, along with three of the other senior Marine NCOs, and Albie, and the flag officers, and the Ritter guy, seeing him off like he was goddamned Miss America or something. But it was the two Navy chiefs who came up to him.
‘Batteries are fully charged. Your gear’s in the container. It’s watertight, so no problems there, sir. The rifle is loaded and chambered in case you need it in a hurry, safety on. New batteries for all the radios, and two sets of spares. If there’s anything else to do, I don’t know what it is,’ the chief machinist’s mate shouted over the sound of the helicopter engines.
‘Sounds good to me!’ Kelly shouted back.
‘Kick ass, Mr Clark!’
‘See you in a few – and thanks!’ Kelly shook hands with the two chiefs, then went to see Captain Franks. For comic effect he stood at attention and saluted. ‘Permission to leave the ship, sir.’
Captain Franks returned it. ‘Permission granted, sir.’
Then Kelly looked at all the rest. First in, last out. A half smile and a nod were sufficient gestures for the moment, and at this moment they took their courage from him.
The big Sikorsky rescue chopper lifted off a few feet. A crewman attached the sled to the bottom of the helo, and then it headed aft, out of the burble turbulence of Ogden’s superstructure, flying off into the darkness without strobes and disappearing in a matter of seconds.
USS Skate was an old-fashioned submarine, modified and developed from the first nuclear boat, USS Nautilus. Her hull was shaped almost like that of a real ship rather than a whale, which made her relatively slow underwater, but her twin screws made for greater maneuverability, especially in shallow water. For years Skate had drawn the duty of inshore intelligence ship, creeping dose to the Vietnamese coast and raising whip antennas to snoop on radar and other electronic emissions. She’d also put more than one swimmer on the beach. That included Kelly, several years before, though there was not a single member of that crew still aboard to remember his face. He saw her on the surface, a black shape darker than the water that glistened with the waning quarter moon soon to be hidden by clouds. The helicopter pilot first of all set the sled on Skate’s foredeck, where the sub’s crew secured it in place. Then Kelly and his personal gear were lowered by hoist. A minute later he was in the sub’s control room.
‘Welcome aboard,’ Commander Silvio Esteves said, anticipating his first swimmer mission. He was not yet through his first year in command.
‘Thank you, sir. How long to the beach?’
‘Six hours, more until we scope things out for you. Coffee? Food?’
‘How about a bed, sir?’
‘Spare bunk in the XO’s cabin. We’ll see you’re not disturbed.’ Which was a better deal than that accorded the technicians aboard from the National Security Agency.
Kelly headed forward to the last real rest he’d have for the next three days – if things went according to plan. He was asleep before the submarine dived back under the waters of the South China Sea.
‘This is interesting,’ the Major said. He dropped the translation on the desk of his immediate superior, another major, but this one was on the Lieutenant Colonel’s list.
‘I’ve heard about this place. GRU is running the operation – trying to, I mean. Our fraternal socialist allies are not cooperating very well. So the Americans know about it at last, eh?’
‘Keep reading, Yuriy Petrovich,’ the junior man suggested.
‘Indeed!’ He looked up. ‘Who exactly is this CASSIUS fellow?’ Yuriy had seen the name before, attached to a large quantity of minor information that had come through various sources within the American left.
‘Glazov did the final recruitment only a short time ago.’ The Major explained on for a minute or so.
‘Well, I’ll take it to him, then. I’m surprised Georgiy Borissovish isn’t running the case personally.’
‘I think he will now, Yuriy.’
They knew something bad was about to happen. North Vietnam had a multitude of search radars arrayed along its coast. Their main purpose was to provide raid warning for incoming strikes from the aircraft carriers the Americans had sailing on what they called Yankee Station, and the North Vietnamese called something else. Frequently the search radars were jammed, but not this badly. This time the jammer was so powerful as to turn the Russian-made screen into a circular mass of pure white. The operators leaned in more closely, looking for particularly bright dots that might denote real targets amid the jamming noise.
‘Ship,’ a voice called into the operations center. ‘Ship on the horizon.’ It was yet another case where the human eye outperformed radar.
If they were dumb enough to put their radars and guns on hilltops, that wasn’t his lookout. The master chief firecontrolman was in ‘Spot 1,’ the forward fire-director tower that made the most graceful part of his ship’s profile. His eyes were glued to the eyepieces of the long-base rangefinders, designed in the late 1930s and still as fine a piece of optical gear as America had ever produced. His hand turned a small wheel, which operated not unlike the focusing mechanism of a camera, bringing a split-image together. His focus was on the radar antenna, whose metal framework, not protected now with camouflage netting, made a nearly perfect aiming reference.
‘Mark!’
The firecontrolman 2/c next to him keyed the microphone, reading the numbers off the dial. ‘Range One-Five-Two-Five-Zero.’
In central fire-control, a hundred feet below Spot 1, mechanical computers accepted the data, telling the cruiser’s eight guns how much to elevate. What happened next was simple enough. Already loaded, the guns rotated with their turrets, coming up to the proper angle of elevation calculated a generation earlier by scores of young women – now grandmothers – on mechanical
calculators. On the computer, the cruiser’s speed and course were already set, and since they were firing at a stationary target, it was assigned an identical but reversed velocity vector. In this way the guns would automatically remain locked on target.
‘Commence firing,’ the gunnery officer commanded. A young sailor closed the firing keys, and USS Newport News shook with the first salvo of the day.
‘Okay, on azimuth, we’re short by … three hundred …’ the master chief said quietly, watching the fountains of dirt in the twenty-power rangefinders.
‘Up three hundred!’ the talker relayed, and the next salvo thundered off fifteen seconds later. He didn’t know that the first salvo had inadvertently immolated the command bunker for the radar complex. The second salvo arced through the air. ‘This one does it,’ the master chief whispered.
It did. Three of the eight rounds landed within fifty yards of the radar antenna and shredded it.
‘On target,’ he said over his own microphone, waiting for the dust to clear. ‘Target destroyed.’
‘Beats an airplane any day,’ the Captain said, observing from the bridge. He’d been a young gunnery officer on USS Mississippi twenty-five years earlier, and had learned shore-bombardment against live targets in the Western Pacific, as had his treasured master chief in Spot 1. This was sure to be the last hurrah for the Navy’s real gunships, and the Captain was determined that it would be a loud one.
A moment later some splashes appeared a thousand yards off. These would be from 130mm long guns the NVA used to annoy the Navy. He would engage them before concentrating on triple-A sites.
‘Counterbattery!’ the skipper called to central fire-control.
‘Aye, sir, we’re on it.’ A minute later Newport News shifted fire, her rapid-fire guns searching for and finding the six 130s that really should have known better.
It was a diversion, the Captain knew. It had to be. Something was happening somewhere else. He didn’t knew what, but it had to be something good to allow him and his cruiser on the gunline north of the DMZ. Not that he minded, the CO said to himself, feeling his ship shudder yet again. Thirty seconds later a rapidly expanding orange cloud announced the demise of that gun battery.
‘I got secondaries,’ the CO announced. The bridge crew hooted briefly, then settled back down to work.