Huston, James W. -2003- Secret Justice (com v4.0)(html) (49 page)

Tick nodded.

“So maybe it’s all a head fake and the real threat is still aboard that other ship. What’s it called?”

“The
Sea Dragon
.”

“Maybe the whole LNG thing is just to throw us off. It’s what we’ve got, but the Coast Guard or someone had better be watching for anything else that looks suspicious. They jamming the mouth of the Chesapeake?”

“Every ship that can float is heading out. Norfolk Naval Base is like a firehouse. Thank God for turbines instead of steam. They’re getting under way pretty fast. They’ve even got fighters up from Oceana and the Air Force is flying out of Langley. We’re checking and ID’ing every ship out there. But it’s not that easy in the pitch darkness.”

Rat folded his arms. “The P-3 hasn’t ID’d the LNG ship yet. Right?”

“Not positively.”

“Nobody has.”

Tick pondered. “I guess that’s right. Except the Japanese radioman’s call—”

“Which was probably staged—”

“So what are you saying? If we disregard that transmission, where are we?”

“How do we know the LNG ship isn’t still heading for the Chesapeake? How do we know the radioman isn’t on the
Sea Dragon
?”

“I guess we don’t.”

“He’s trying to draw us out to the east, it’s so we leave the gate open.”

Tick nodded. “Could be.”

Rat put on his helmet and checked his machine pistol. “I say we take up a position over the entrance to the bay, and be ready when someone IDs this ship. Then we hit it. If it turns out to be the ship out to the east, we can go get it later. The farther east it goes, the less of a threat it is to us.”

Tick nodded, and looked at the faces of the other men. They all agreed with Rat, especially Groomer, who was nodding vigorously and bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. “I agree. Go get ‘em.”

The helicopter lifted off noisily and headed out over the dark Chesapeak. The Air Force pilots stayed low and fast. The Pave Low’s GPS system and its three-dimensional image screen showed them flying east over the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay. They raced into the Atlantic Ocean fifty feet above the waves. The twelve Navy SEALs sat in the back of the helicopter in silence. They had gone over the plan before leaving. There was nothing more to be said. They had all rehearsed similar operations numerous times and knew what to do. They had reviewed the diagrams of the ship that had been sent to them by the Japanese shipping company, and knew how to take the ship down. Rat had given assignments to each of the members of his team, but emphasized he would be the first one on the ship and the last one off.

Rat unstrapped and walked up to the flight deck where the pilots sat and looked out of the front of the helicopter. “You have your ISAR radar on?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything yet?”

The copilot glanced at him. “We’re checking them all out. Nothing yet.” He concentrated the radar energy on the next ship.

Rat nodded. “Doesn’t look like a tanker. The one we’re looking for doesn’t look like a regular LNG ship. Doesn’t have those big tits—those big balloon-looking things sticking up out of the deck. It’s mostly flat, like a tanker. You have an IR with a zoom or a low-light TV?”

“Sure.”

“Approach the ship from the stern. Stop about two miles out, and let’s take a look at this thing.”

The helicopter slowed to sixty knots as the copilot zoomed the infrared lens in on one of the ships ahead of them. “Nope. Not it.”

Rat was anxious. “Keep looking. Let me know as soon as you see anything. They got other planes out here looking?”

“Not over fifty,” the copilot said as he looked at Rat through his night-vision goggles. “I just hope we don’t run into one of them.”

“Nobody watching the air picture?” Rat asked concerned.

“Yeah, there’s an E-2 up from Norfolk. We’re good,” he said, smiling.

Rat went back to the belly of the helicopter and sat down. “Shit,” he muttered, wondering how they would find the
Galli Maru
in the dark, in time to stop it.

Captain Pugh looked through his periscope. It was very difficult to see in the dark, but running lights were clearly visible. What perplexed him was that the ship they had on their sonar had no running lights. The entrance to the Chesapeake Bay was just over the horizon twenty-five nautical miles away.

“All ahead one-third. Port ten degrees.”

The enormous submarine maneuvered closer to the ship.

Pugh reached for the squawk box. “Sonar, Bridge.”

“Sonar, aye.”

“You sure this ship is still the one we picked up at the rendezvous?”

The third-class petty officer hesitated. “Yes, sir. Nine out of ten that’s our boy. There were a lot of ships around and the sonar picture got a little confused, but at least nine out of ten, sir. We heard them scrape together, and you said to stick with the one that went west.”

Pugh frowned. He liked ten out of ten. He moved his ship to a course paralleling the dark ship to his starboard. It had decreased its speed to twelve knots; he found that curious. It had been racing westward at twenty knots and had suddenly slowed. He saw it as an attempt to disguise its maneuvers, to look like a normal oil tanker. But he had a digital photo that Washington had transmitted to him of the
Galli Maru
. He had studied it. The L N G on the side of the ship would be impossible to hide and impossible for him to miss if he got close enough. It was a very distinctive ship, at least in the daylight. But the periscope had night-vision capability.

They waited silently seventy feet below the surface. The
Galli Maru
passed by. Pugh studied it in the periscope. He strained to see the outline of the dark form and the huge white letters on the side. He zoomed in. No lettering. Nothing. Just a dark hull. He looked carefully. No LNG at all. He was sure. But everything else about the ship looked right. Right size, right superstructure, it looked just like the
Galli Maru
. But why no letters? Nothing a little paint wouldn’t take care of. Son of a bitch. And why else would a ship turn off all its lights? He thought again of the Japanese radioman’s transmission that the LNG ship was heading east. No it wasn’t. He had it right here in his sights.

He yelled over his shoulder. “Get off a flash message. We have the
Galli Maru
twenty-five miles off the coast. Give them the position, heading, and speed, and tell them we’ll trail her. If they want us to sink it we’d better do it now. And get the weapons officer up here.”

The crew chief motioned for Rat, who was sitting back down with his men in the belly of the Pave Low helicopter. He hurried to the flight deck and put the headset on to talk to the pilot. “What’s up?”

“Sub found the LNG ship. It’s heading for the Chesapeake, about five miles from here.”

Rat’s heart raced. “What’s its position?”

The copilot pointed to the navigation system. They had a radar contact that was being shown on the screen. It matched the latitude and longitude that had been given to them, and showed a speed vector indicating the heading and speed the sub had relayed.

“He’ll be inside the Chesapeake before we can stop it.”

The pilot nodded. “That’s the way I figure it too.”

Rat thought about his options. “We’d be better off with rubber bullets. We’ll probably set this whole ship off and we’ll go up in a vapor cloud.”

The USS
Winston S. Churchill
(DDG 81), an
Arleigh Burke
class destroyer, saw the
Galli Maru
. Captain Lee Palmer confirmed the identity with his binoculars. “That’s her. Flank speed.”

The four GE turbine engines on the
Churchill
responded instantly, sending one hundred thousand horsepower to the two screws. The
Churchill
lurched forward leaving a huge rooster tail behind it as it accelerated to its maximum speed.

There were numerous ships around the
Galli Maru
but none seemed to appreciate the danger they were in. The
Galli Maru
was about to enter the Chesapeake Bay at ten knots, now with its running lights on, looking every bit like the tanker it was trying to imitate. But Palmer had received the
Louisiana
’s message. They knew the LNG had been painted out on the side of the ship and it was trying to pose as a tanker heading toward Washington, Philadelphia, or Baltimore, or somewhere else inside the bay.

Palmer had no idea how he might stop the ship without causing a catastrophe in the process. If he fired on it, the whole thing could go up, spreading radioactive material. Even if he stopped the ship by sinking it, it might still blow up before it went down, and would certainly create an environmental disaster probably resulting in the closing of the entire bay. His orders were simple—stop the ship. No one had told him
how
he might do that.

The
Churchill
raced toward the LNG ship at thirty-five knots. Palmer considered shooting out the bridge with his five-inch gun. But he didn’t have sufficient confidence in his ship’s gunnery to hit
only
the bridge, only the superstructure, and not the rest of the ship. He also did not know how explosives might be set or rigged in the ship and wasn’t prepared to take the risk that the shell hitting the superstructure might trigger more than he had bargained for. But he had to try something.

He turned to the Officer of the Deck. “Fire a warning shot across her bow. Be careful not to hit her or any of the other ships out there.”

Moments later the five-inch gun barked, sending a tracer round across the bow of the
Galli Maru
from three miles away. Palmer watched the ship for any reaction. The
Churchill
was clearly visible, clearly antagonistic, and clearly intending to do whatever it could to stop the ship, but nothing changed on the Japanese ship, which was ten times larger than the destroyer. No movement, no change of course, and no apparent concern. The ships continued to close.

A faint pink line highlighted the horizon as the helicopter hurried toward the
Galli Maru
. There were ships everywhere. Rat peered through the windscreen toward the bay and watched the tracer round from the
Churchill
. Rat saw another muzzle flash from the
Churchill
. Then another. They were getting close. He waited to see any impact of the shells on the
Galli Maru
but was confident the captain of the destroyer that was firing was trying not to hit the target. Rat looked one last time out the windscreen of the helicopter, and went back down to his men. “Get ready!” he said angrily, realizing the ship was already inside the bay. Whatever submarine was following wasn’t going to sink it in the bay. It would cause the very thing they had been trying to avoid. The politicians were probably unwilling to sacrifice the Japanese crew.
If they had been an American crew . .
. he thought to himself.

They unstrapped, stood up, and hooked the fast rope lines to the hard points on the deck of the helicopter. It was still dark, but not dark enough to need night-vision devices. They wore helmets, gloves, Kevlar vests under their uniforms, and carried their weapons on straps around their shoulders anchored to their chests.

The helicopter banked sharply to come in from the stern of the ship. The
Galli Maru
accelerated to twenty knots as it passed over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The LNG ship was now surrounded by the
Churchill
and numerous Coast Guard boats dashing around it angrily, unsure how to stop a huge ship with so much momentum. Even if the
Churchill
’s commanding officer drove his ship into the bow of the tanker, it would only result in the sinking of his ship and could cause the LNG ship to explode.

Rat stood on the flight deck between the pilots.

“Where you want it?” the pilot yelled.

Like the oil tankers it resembled, the
Galli Maru
had a long flat deck from the superstructure to the bow, impeded only by some piping. It would be the easiest place to land on the ship, but would also be the most vulnerable to gunfire from the terrorists. “On top of the superstructure. We’ll take our chances with the wires.”

The pilot nodded his agreement. “You got it.” Rat joined the other SEALs who were standing, waiting.

Suddenly they were over the superstructure of the ship. The helicopter’s nose went up at a dramatic angle as the huge rotor blades stopped the forward movement of the helicopter. The nose came back down and the helicopter hovered over the white superstructure of the Japanese LNG ship.

Chief Petty Officer Wilkinson, the senior enlisted man of the team, kicked the two fast ropes out the door. Rat jumped out on one of them, grabbing the rope with his gloved hands. He slid down the rope unchecked until he neared the deck on top of the superstructure. He squeezed hard, slowing his descent, and stepped onto the ship. He pulled the rope away from the antenna to make sure no one got tangled in the electronics gear sitting on top of the ship. The other rope, six feet away from the first, lay on several wires. Groomer descended too quickly and his left leg jammed into the steel deck after it had been turned by a wire. He could feel the ligaments snap as he sprained his ankle badly. He cursed as the pain shot up his leg. He got to his feet quickly though, looked over, and limped away from his landing point to pull the rope from the wires so Robby and the others would have a clear field. The rest of the SEALs threw themselves out of the helicopter onto the ropes and down to the deck in quick succession. In less than thirty seconds they all stood on the top of the ship with their weapons ready.

Rat jogged toward the edge of the deck. He took his MP5N in his hands and covered the ladder where he expected someone to come up after them any second. As soon as the last SEALs touched the deck, the Pave Low helicopter pulled up and away from the ship. The Air Force crewmen pulled in the fast-ropes as the helicopter dropped down to the water level and raced away from the ship.