Authors: Patrick Robinson
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.”
“Jesus.”
“Okay, guys…let’s just check out this hillside with the binoculars another couple of times…then we’ll edge over to the ridge and see if we can’t get ourselves organized…by the way, I’m as hungry as a sonofabitch.”
“Don’t worry about it, sir,” whispered Lieutenant Merloni. “I’ll just get rid of this machine gun and then I’ll nip down below and order up a couple of plates of sweet and sour pork…you want fried rice or plain?”
The urge to laugh out loud was almost overwhelming, but no one did. They just stood against their trees shaking, with their hands over their mouths like naughty schoolboys in the presence of the headmaster.
Rattlesnake Davies made it much worse. “No need for that, sir,” he whispered. “I’ve got the radio. I’ll whistle ’em up right away…I expect they do takeout.”
“Make mine chicken chow mein, willya…with extra soy…”
Lt. Commander Bennett knew it was all just a release for men who had been on the edge of their nerves for many hours, suppressing natural fears, wondering if they would ever get away, knowing that if they were caught unawares they would be shot dead on sight. Rusty didn’t think he could give them a hard time over a few jokes about a Chinese restaurant.
“Just make sure they don’t take
us
out,” he said softly. “Come on…get low and over to that ridge…they just might have some asshole with a pair of binoculars like ours, and they’d pick us up very easily.”
It thus took them fifteen minutes, crawling through the grass in standard SEAL operational mode. You could have stood 20 feet from them and never known they were there, until one of them killed you.
The thick bushes along the ridge were perfect for their task. They could cut small clearances and watch the jail
night and day from their high position, counting the sentries, watching the guard change, timing the patrols, timing the lights, noting the time the interior jail lights went on, assessing the function of each building, establishing the building that contained the communications—the one that would go in the first SEAL assault, the one they had to obliterate, or else die when Chinese heavy-duty reinforcements came in.
To their great delight they found two low granite rock faces right in the middle of the clump. Behind these they had real cover. The jail was no more than 200 yards below them, but unless they had diabolical bad luck they would be unlucky to get caught out here. The foliage was so dense, their camouflage so professional, they would scarcely be visible even from the air. Certainly not from behind.
“Of course, we don’t know whether they patrol this hill and if they do, we may have to move,” offered Merloni quietly. “I know I would. If this was America and I was holding captive Mao Zedong’s illegitimate grandson, I’d have guards all over this area all the time.”
“So would I,” agreed Rusty. “But they may not. It just might be beyond their imagination that the U.S. would launch an operation like this…but then, they don’t
know
they have Linus Clarke in the slammer, do they?”
“And that’s the key,” said Dan Conway. “It’s the key to why we’re doing this…and why we have a big chance of getting away with it.”
Not for the first time, Bennett believed that young Conway was going right to the top in Coronado…if they could just get out of here alive.
And now he issued his first formal orders. “Split into two teams. Lieutenant Conway, Bill and Buster with me. Lieutenant Merloni, Chief McCarthy, Rattlesnake, and John. The second team will now prepare a bit of food, regular cold rations for us all, then sleep until oh-four hundred. I’ll take the first watch with Buster after we cut a peephole. Dan and Bill will establish the machine gun
and keep watch behind our redoubt. Find the laptop, someone, and have a camera ready for first light. The sun set just before twenty hundred, and at this latitude there should be ten hours of darkness, so dawn will be around oh-six hundred…”
Buster Townsend moved into the bushes with the pruning shears and quietly cut two gaps in the foliage.
They all used some more insect repellent, drank some water and ate some of the high-protein bars that would sustain them for the next 24 hours.
Then Rusty Bennett moved forward into the thicket, propped himself on the rocks and focused the night-sight binoculars, stopwatch in his right pocket. Buster sat behind with the laptop, ready for the commentary that Rusty would begin in around 10 minutes.
“Okay…there are two guards in each of the watchtowers, one of them working the light…the beam from each tower is activated every four minutes…interlocking with the others…it’s taking forty-five seconds to traverse the yard, which allows a window of two minutes and fifteen seconds when there are no beams at all.
“There are other lights down below, midway up the tower. There are ladders leading from the roof of the long building. That’s the north wall of the compound and we are observing from the west…range two hundred and twenty yards.
“Right now, at oh-one hundred, I’m observing a patrol of four guards in the courtyard moving in twos along the inside wall of what I think is the main cell block. It takes them two minutes and nine seconds to walk from end to end, one pair heading east while the other heads west. In four crossings, the four men have stopped to talk together three times, which increased the time of the journey by three minutes.
“Dead ahead of me, to the right of the main block, there is a square single-story building with all its lights on. This building is situated immediately to the right of the main prison entrance. The door has been open since
we got here and there have been people in and out, five out and three in, during the last twenty-five minutes, but they could have been the same people. They were all in uniform. I thus conclude this is the guard room.”
Rusty spoke slowly, in an impersonal but clear and steady monotone, so that his throat microphone to the tiny laptop could synthesize his voice correctly and record written words for later transmission on their portable satellite link.
“At oh-one ten I observed a group of four lights moving south a half mile east of the jail. I’m looking right across the jail toward the sea, and the jail has a marginally higher elevation than the shoreline. The four lights were on some kind of a patrol boat. I watched it head south, we must check to see if there’s a jetty somewhere down there…action star right there.”
For the next hour, Lt. Commander Bennett logged down the buildings Judd Crocker and Shawn Pearson had noted—the small building with the aerials, lit only on the first floor, the much bigger one, with seven windows lit and two dark, on the walls Rusty could see, the west and north.
He spotted two helicopters on the big round cleared area, with the fuel dump immediately to its north. His main difficulty was an inability to see what guards patrolled outside the jail. The trees below were just too close to get a view, and he could see nothing whatsoever on the west wall. The heavy jungle foliage also obscured most of the south and north walls, and the east was beyond his vision.
“I’m seeing one pair of guards walking across the entrance to the prison, always from west to east, every eleven minutes…therefore I’m concluding the patrol is walking right around the jail, but we’ll have to go down there and get a better look a bit later. I can’t tell if there are just the two or four of them. Action star right there.”
The hours ticked on, and at 0355 there was the first noticeable activity. It was plainly a guard change. The
first thing Rusty saw was four men emerge from the guard room in formation and march across the courtyard to the cell block. The guards Rusty had been watching for almost four hours had also formed into a square, and he observed them salute as the new men came forward. Then he saw them march off the courtyard, back into the well-lit building with the open door.
Immediately afterward the main gate to the jail was opened and four more guards emerged, obviously relieving the midnight watch. “Okay, Buster, the outside patrol is definitely four men. They changed at one minute before oh-four hundred…the main gate opened inwards, and I thus conclude it’s the only gate into the prison from the outside, otherwise they would have used a smaller one. Check in daylight. Action star, Buster.”
The SEALs too changed their watch at 0400. Rusty and Buster were tired to the point of exhaustion, and they wrapped themselves in their waterproof ponchos and crashed out on the ground sheets.
Chief McCarthy and Lieutenant Merloni stepped up for duty, moving to the front of the ridge, Paul with the glasses, the chief with the computer. They took time to read the boss’s notes written on the laptop screen, nearly word-perfect. And they too settled down to record every last movement of the prison that held President Clarke’s son, Linus.
One hour later, at a few minutes after 0500, Paul watched the lights of the patrol boat return. There was a light southwesterly breeze off the water now, and the lieutenant had picked up the beat of engines a mile out. He also could not see where the boat docked.