Attack of the Seawolf

Morris stepped away from the trunk to allow the other men of the second platoon to follow him, while he crouched down, his weapon seeking guards who could come from the radio room door, the fan room, or forward. For a moment he thought back to Norfolk Naval Air Station, where Admiral Donchez had given him the full picture of the Go Hai Bay operation and assured him that he and his men could liberate the Tamp a.

Now he wasn’t so sure. Something inevitably went wrong with every operation — nothing was ever all right. What was it this time? The screw up with the cruise missiles? Something else waiting to mess them up? Now that his men’s footsteps were coming from the escape trunk the time for worrying was over.

As the last man entered, Morris gave the order to go. The second platoon assignments paired platoon leader Lieutenant “Pig” Wilson with platoon chief “Python” Harris. They would act as a two-man team and head for the torpedo room on the forward end of the lower level. A misdirected bullet or ricochet could detonate a torpedo’s self-oxidizing fuel or explode a warhead, and if that was to be the flaw in the operation it would be a fatal one for everybody aboard.

“Cowpie” Clites and “Droopy” Games were also to go to the lower level and take the aft end including the auxiliary machinery room, then cover Pig and Python.

“Mad Dog” Martin and “Red Meat” Reynolds would take the critical middle level, critical because the bulk of the guards were expected there, as were the hostages, since the middle level contained the crew spaces. That left Morris paired with “Bony” Robbins to take the upper level, including the radio room, navigation space, the control room, sonar and the captain’s and XO’s staterooms. The assault would have to be surgical, to avoid damaging equipment. Only a few physical systems could take a bullet and survive. A bullet hole in a sonar equipment cabinet would mean they would be deaf on the way out. A bullet hole in a periscope optics module would make them blind.

After checking the radio room and the fan room, Jack Morris and Bony Robbins advanced to the door to the control room. Morris peered in through a small round red-glassed window, and seeing no one, kicked the door open.

At that moment the Chinese guards in the control room opened up, all ten AK-47s bursting into violent life at once, the blast of the Chinese bullets shattering the door and cutting it to ribbons.

Chief Baron von Brandt raised his head after the helicopter rotor noises subsided. The fly over had been a reconnaissance, at least on the first pass. As the choppers flew back to the east a half-mile away, von Brandt sighted his sniper scope on the man who seemed to be in command of the P.L.A troops on the pier. No head shots. Baron thought, only hearts. He put the commander’s upper left chest in the crosshairs, exhaled slowly and steadily and slowly squeezed the trigger, hoping to make the shot a surprise even to himself, to keep him from jerking the rifle. The unit barely recoiled as it sent the heavy grain HydraShok bullet toward the commander at thirty-eight hundred feet per second.

The bullet spun out of the barrel, dropping slightly as gravity dragged it down toward the pier and the water of the slip. After a total flight time of twenty eight milliseconds, the bullet penetrated the fabric of the man’s tunic two inches from the central seam. The fabric vaporized as the round contacted it, its kinetic energy at the tip the equivalent of an acetylene torch.

The skin below the fabric yielded next, then the thin layer of fatty tissue before the muscle that lined the chest. The bullet entered a cavity between two ribs and proceeded on through the lung, blowing apart several airways, then on to the outer layer of the man’s heart, where it severed two coronary arteries before entering and destroying the right ventricle.

The damage from the bullet by this time would have been enough to kill the P.L.A commander, but the HydraShok round was specially designed to resonate within the cavity of the man’s abdomen, setting up a shock wave in his chest area, the pulsations causing what ballistics scientists called hydraulic shock. The effect of the shock wave was the immediate traumatization of the entire abdominal cavity, shutting down every organ, shorting out every nerve, cracking several ribs and vertebrae, bursting veins and arteries. The effect of the nerve-shorting trauma was an instantaneous overload of the brain stem receiving the electrical impulses from the spinal cord.

As life was being extinguished, the bullet, now wobbling and misshapen, passed out of the body, flew out over the north end of the pier and splashed into the water of the slip. As it sank, steam boiled from it for just an instant, its surface temperature elevated from the friction of the flight. On the pier the P.L.A commander’s face froze as he collapsed onto the oily concrete.

He never knew what had hit him.