Authors: Patrick Robinson
Even the SEALs were shaken at the speed at which it had happened. Commander Hunter turned to Bobby, whose prime task it was to protect the SEAL leader, and he just nodded, confident the noise from the turbines had suppressed any possibility of the shots being heard outside.
Lieutenant Allensworth said, “Sorry I had to do that, sir. But I was afraid one of them might have had a button or an emergency beeper. Just didn’t wanna give ’em no time. No time. Nossir.”
“Thanks, Bobby. There was no alternative. I agree. Come on, let’s get after that main shaft.”
And still their luck appeared to hold, and they located the shaft two minutes later at exactly 0310, at which precise time the telephone was ringing forlornly in the guardhouse out on the fence.
Lieutenant Bo Peng, an engineer in the moored destroyer, was trying to call his brother Cheng who was on
duty on the perimeter. He usually called him when they were both on the midnight watch, and they sometimes shared tea in the ship’s wardroom when the watch was over. Lieutenant Bo could not for the life of him understand why Cheng was not replying, or alternately, why the answer-and-automatic-relay machine was not connected. It was a golden rule among the guards, and Bo was baffled by the silence out on the boundary guard-house.
He was a persistent and ambitious young man of 24, and he called the duty officer of the base, reporting that there was no reply to the telephone in the guardhouse. And why was that? There was not even a way to leave a message, and that was disgraceful in a military complex.
The duty officer was not altogether crazy about Bo’s tone, but he was also wary that a warship officer with a serious complaint about the shore personnel would be listened to. In a few minutes he could be on the line to the destroyer’s CO, a chore he was not prepared to deal with.
So he answered crisply, “I’m sorry about that, Lieutenant. I have no idea what could be wrong, but I’ll play it by the book, and send a full night guard-patrol down there, right away.
Three minutes later, a complement of six Naval guards, all armed with Russian Kalashnikovs, was piling out of the accommodation block and boarding a waiting jeep. It was the first time they had ever been summoned to do anything after dark, and they almost went the wrong way.
Rattlesnake and Buster watched them leave, burning rubber outside the building and then making a U-turn, heading wrongly for the dry-dock inlet. At the end of the first throughway between the buildings, they swung right, down between the power station and the main workshops. They shot through the gap between the warehouses and the ordnance store, and then made a corrective right turn along the jetties. Lieutenant Bo, high
above on the upper deck of the warship, watched them go roaring down the blacktop toward the guardhouse.
And there, of course, they discovered that the place was strangely empty. No duty guard. No duty night engineer. All six men jumped out and began to look around outside, spending several minutes calling out for the missing men. However, the patrol leader, Lt. Rufeng Li, went back into the little outpost’s control room and took a look at the television screens.
And at that precise moment in the power station, Rick Hunter, noticing a scanning camera in the corner of the steam-entry room, took it out with a volley of bullets at 25-foot range. Lieutenant Rufeng was thus watching the screens when one of them just blanked right out. It did not even fizz, or show interference. It just blacked into nothing.
The Lieutenant, however, did not suspect something drastic was happening. He just thought instantly that the two missing men were working wherever that screen had failed. And he took a close look at the wording below, which told him the camera was located on the upper southwest corner of the main shaft room in the power station.
He walked outside and summoned his patrol. He took his time, and lit a cigarette and told them laconically that he had solved the mystery: the two missing men had gone to attend to some kind of machine failure in the power station, and while it was irregular to leave the guardhouse unmanned, the problem may have been quite serious. They had obviously gone to deal with it together. After all, no guard had ever been called to deal with a prowler of any kind since the base had opened six months ago. He, Lt. Rufeng, understood those kinds of priorities, which was only to be expected.
He held his cigarette in his front teeth, an affectation just learned from a tobacco commercial on the Internet. He smiled languidly. It was a smile that said, “Don’t
worry, gentlemen. The reason I have achieved a position so superior to your own is my natural penchant for using the little gray cells rather than running around in a frenzy.” At this particular moment, Lt. Rufeng, in his own mind, was the Hercule Poirot of the Orient.
It was 0325, and Rick and his team were working furiously in the shaft room, trying to shut off the lower valve, the one three thousand feet down, right above the boiling steam lake. They had located a control board and made the switches, three big ones, which Rick and Dallas believed had shut down all three valves.
The main one, located on the huge pipe where the steam divides off into the separate turbine feeds, was certainly closed. The turbines were already slowing. Any second now the reserve diesel generators would kick in, and it would not be long before the failure of the power plant was noticed.
The massive control valve at the head of the shaft, located at floor level in the lowest room, was also closed. But the SEALs could not read the most important one of all, constructed in cast concrete, high in the roof of the lake, the first line of defense, if for any reason the steam had to be halted. However, the switches were all three in the same position, and they could do no more. In any event, they now opened up the top two valves and let the remaining steam escape.
Lieutenant MacPherson observed that if they were wrong about the switches, they’d probably blow up most of East Asia, including themselves. “And wouldn’t that be a blast?” he added. Dallas always found time for irony even when he was working flat-out. It was impossible not to like him.
Right now Lt. MacPherson was sweating like a Burmese panda. He had just blown out two sections of pipe right below the center and upper valves, and there was steam leaking, but it was not pressurized.
The bottom valve, right over the underground cavern,
was plainly shut. The opening of the top two for several minutes had allowed the pressured steam to rise up through the system and then die out.
It was hot, but not diabolically so. Dallas and Mike Hook were feverishly trying to fix the first bomb inside the fractured shaft, winding it tight with det cord right below the center valve.
There were only 17 minutes left to tie up the second bomb through the hole in the shaft below the higher valve, directly above. That, too, had to be secured with det cord. Then, when the first detonater popped the cord, the lower bomb would scream down the shaft, arrowing through the remaining steam and slamming into the bottom valve with terrific force. It just might split the entire main shaft asunder.
Thirty seconds later the second det cord would pop, and a large hunk of white semtex explosive would blow the cast-iron upper valve to pieces. And this would release the second bomb to drop down the shaft, gaining speed for three thousand feet, then exploding somewhere in the rubble at the shaft base, or even in the waters of the underground lake itself; maybe even in the
floor
of the lake, slightly north of Hell, presumably.
Dallas thought if that happened it might actually cause a brand-spanking-new volcano to erupt from the core of the earth. “I always told my daddy I intended to leave a mark on this earth, but I bet he never thought I was gonna change its goddamned shape!”
Even without the wit and imagination of Lt. D. MacPherson, this was a drastically complex and dangerous set of linked explosions, and no one knew what on earth the result would be.
But whatever happened, the colossal forces of the steam, sufficient, it is always said, to blow a four-ton rock 400 feet into the air, would now be unleashed to roar furiously into its only escape route, straight up the remains of the shaft. It would most definitely blast off the roof of the power station, and probably rupture the
entire foundation of the structure. The milk white superheated plume of steam, thundering into the sky, from the floor of the generating plant, would probably reach 3,000 feet.
It would take weeks to cap it, especially if the concrete foundation was split, and even this would take special equipment unlikely to be available within 1,000 miles. But the main issue was, from the U.S. Navy’s point of view, that the Chinese base in the eastern waters of the Bay of Bengal should become history.
Meanwhile, Dallas MacPherson, assisted by Mike Hook and Catfish Jones, was manhandling the second bomb up to the huge upper valve, the one that had to be obliterated. It was 0330, and they had the bomb well secure on its moorings. They eased it through the gap and made it fast, hanging in the shaft, swinging in the spooky plumes of white steam still drifting up from below.
Dallas wound in the last of the det cord, wrapping it around the spokes of the red wheel on top of the valve. Then they placed the C-4 plastic explosives in three places on the cast-iron casing of the valve itself. Just below them Rick checked his watch, it was 0334. They had to get out of there before the base started to explode. And they didn’t dare to set the timers in the power plant for anything less than a half hour from the moment they began to head for the marshes where the boats were waiting.
The leader’s mind raced.
Say 40 minutes from now…gives us ten minutes to get clear of the building…then a half hour to get clear of the island…is that enough? Don’t wanna get killed by flying masonry…I’m gonna make it forty minutes from now. Just hope to hell it’s not too much time for the Chinks to discover the plot
.
“Set that clock for zero-four-one-five, Dallas,” he said. “That’s thirty minutes after the ships, the fuel and the buildings blow. There’s gonna be a lot of chaos. Hopefully the blast from the control and comms build
ing, plus the ships, will blow the ordnance store as well. But we have to get outta here in one piece. And we’re not committing suicide. My daddy wouldn’t like it. Nossir.”
At this exact time, 0334, the night-patrol jeep was running back down the blacktop from the guardhouse. When it arrived at the point where the road swerved right along to the jetties, the driver swerved left and headed directly for the power station, driving across the rough ground.
Rattlesnake Davies, lying in the grass with the machine gun, nudged Buster, and they turned around and saw the lights of the jeep coming toward them—not directly, but approximately.
“Jesus Christ, have they seen us?” he whispered.
“No. But I hate the coincidence,” replied Buster. “What do we do?”
“Nothing. Keep our heads down. I think they’ll go by. First sign they ain’t goin’ by, we take ’em out with the ole MP-5s, all of them, however many.”
By now the Chinese jeep was almost on them, still making a straight line, at a narrow angle toward the southern wall of the power station. If it did not stop, it would pass 25 feet in front of them.
Buster and Rattlesnake, now gripping their small submachine guns, followed the vehicle with their eyes, every sense alert. If it stopped, there were going to be six dead Chinese guards, no question about that, because they would not see the prostrate SEALs until it was much, much too late. But Buster and Rattlesnake both knew the real problem would come after that, after the base rippled into life at the sound of gunfire. Ten minutes later it would ripple into death at the sound of high explosives. It was 0335.
And events were moving rapidly. Rick Hunter and his team were moving swiftly back through the power station toward the exit room through which they had arrived. And, to their horror, Rattlesnake and Buster were
watching the Chinese patrol’s jeep pull up right outside that door.
There was no sense of urgency, but it was obvious they were going in. The SEALs’ rookie lookouts were flying across the grass back to the rendezvous point. They hit the ground together right next to Buster. “Jesus Christ,” said one of them, “the bastards are going in. They’ll be behind the guys…oh, shit…Buster…they’ll fucking kill ’em.”
By now the guards were climbing out of the jeep, and Rattlesnake Davies, without a word, wriggled left to the standard M-60 machine gun they had set up in the grass. Buster had already laid the 100-round ammunition belt in the clip. And it was aimed right at the power station door. Lieutenant Rufeng and his deputy were on the steps, the other four right behind them. Each one carried his Kalashnikov. And without a word Rattlesnake Davies, the SEAL from the Louisiana bayous, opened fire with the M-60.
The range was only 70 feet, and the fatal 7.62-NATO rounds tore a path straight at the steps, killing the man now opening the door, and virtually taking Lt. Rufeng’s head off. The other four guards, stunned at the explosion of blood running down the steel door in the dim light of the bare bulb, wheeled around, trying to see where the gunfire was coming from. They tried to raise their Kalashnikovs, but they were facing Rattlesnake Davies directly now, and that was a very poor strategy. He blew all four of them away; the force of those big shells, almost four inches long, slamming into them, actually knocked them sideways into the jeep, one of them hurtling backwards over the hood, his uniform riddled with bullet holes.
It was 0336 in the morning, the darkest time, and the sound of the SEALs’ machine gun, rattling away in the night, had echoed around the base. A light went on in the accommodation block, someone came to the win
dow of the communications room. Up on the foredeck of the Chinese destroyer, two seamen on their watch looked up in surprise. It was gunfire. Unmistakable machine-gun fire. And it was only 160 yards away. Both of them raced aft toward the near-deserted comms room below the aerials.
At which point, 175 yards away, Commander Hunter opened the door to exit the power station and nearly fell over the blood-soaked bodies of Lt. Rufeng and his colleague.