Attack of the Seawolf

While Morris waited for the second platoon he turned his mind to calculating how long it would take to lay the satchel charges, letting his thoughts drift to the days when he had been first trained in Spec War techniques, to how they had practiced diving in enemy waters. He had been a platoon leader of Team One when his platoon had been ordered to lock out of the Silverfish in Severomorsk Harbor in the Soviet Union back in the eighties. He had been newly frocked to lieutenant then, still finding his style, and there he was diving in the sovereign waters of Russia, where he would have been shot or imprisoned if he were caught.

The job had been to tap a submerged phone cable with an NSA device to record all the phone conversations.

He should have been scared or at least anxious, but instead had felt only a rush of pleasure. Maybe it was sick, as some suggested, but it was what he lived for.

Six years after the Soviet bay dive he was in command of SEAL Team One out of Little Creek, Virginia, when the CIA asked them to insert into Libya and destroy a chemical plant known to be making biological weapons. His SEALs had been inserted by unmarked black helicopters, converging on the plant from all points of the azimuth, and had watched until the plant operator patrols had passed. Once the sentry had retreated to the control building the SEALs wired up two dozen explosive charges to the 120-foot-tall distillation column, wired in their detonator charges and retreated to watch the fireworks. When they were a half-mile away in the sand, the column blew apart, the white-hot fireball mushrooming into a brilliant, poisonous cloud that rose over a thousand feet into the air. The resulting secondary explosions and fires took out the remainder of the site, killing every Libyan within a thousand-yard radius of the column. His team had escaped, using their Draegers for gas masks, and vanished into the Mediterranean, where a second set of helicopters picked them up and brought them to the carrier Nimitz. The operation had earned him a Bronze Star and the admiration of the Spec War community, and had finally led to his command at Team Seven. It was also after Libya that he had been given a free hand — unquestioned budgets, the finest commandos in the fleet, and the choicest — most dangerous — operations.

So much for his professional life. By contrast, things at home were SNAFU. He had never married-women only made life complicated — and had drifted from bed to bed. In the last ten years he could recall only a handful of women who had turned down his many advances, including the married ones. He had wondered why he lost interest in women after he bedded them and had even talked to a unit psychologist, who suggested it was a “self-esteem problem,” and had asked him how he felt about his mother. Morris had nearly knocked out the man’s front teeth. Still, for all his macho self-image, a woman he had picked up in a bar and gone to bed with over two months before and forgotten was calling him and telling him she was pregnant.

“Sounds like you have a problem,” he said, but the problem was now getting to be his, because he had, in spite of himself, started to think what it would be like to have a little boy. Of course, it would be a boy. He had almost called the woman and told her to have the child and he’d live with her.

He had stopped himself from calling, but now here in this goddamned Chinese bay with an OP in front of him, he kept thinking about her. And the kid that maybe was his … As he watched, the first and second platoons locked out and unloaded their equipment from the escape trunk. Finally the third platoon was locked out and the hatch was shut for the last time. Morris swam down the line and tapped the men on the shoulders-saddle-up time. It took a few moments for the men to tie the equipment onto their lanyards and adjust their buoyancy. The two hundred yards to the P.L.A piers might look like a short walk from the periscope, but hauling underwater enough ammo to blow a flotilla would be no piece of cake, never mind what he had told Pacino. He checked the men again, shining his hooded penlight into each face, getting an “okay” sign from each of them. He tied onto his own load, an RPG with six reloads, and tied his own lanyard to the tie line When he tapped the man next to him, the signal was passed down the line to the men at the end, who untied the tie line from the submarine and looped the line onto their belts. Now all twenty-four men — the three platoons of seven plus Bart, Morris, and Lennox — were tied onto the line and could swim to the targets together without getting lost or separated. Also, should one of the lungs fail, the closeness to a swim buddy would allow buddy-breathing off a spare regulator.

And instead of having two dozen lighted compasses tempting detection, there was only Morris’.