Dangerous Grounds Read online

  The itch seemed to go away now as Kim idly ran his hand over the smooth metal surface of the deadly capsule.

  After all the work, all the scheming, it was finally time to set the world aflame.

  Don Chapman swung the scope around slowly, looking carefully at the surface of the sea sixty two feet above his submarine. Nothing to see but the last glimmer from the sun as it slid below the horizon. They were all alone in this bit of the Sea of Japan. That was a good thing.

  Chapman spoke into the open microphone just above his head.

  "ESM, picking anything up?"

  The early warning receiver was quiet, but it was still a good idea to have his experts make sure no one was looking for them.

  "Captain, picking up a shore-based surface search radar," the ESM watchstander answered. The man was sitting in the forward corner of the radio room, twenty feet aft of Chapman, watching a graphic display on his computer as it continuously built and shifted while his sensitive equipment searched the airwaves for probing radar signals. "Signal strength two. Probably on that mountain below Najin. Ten percent chance of detection."

  Ten-percent chance of detection? Chapman wondered idly. How did he come up with that number? Why not fifteen percent or twenty? Or better still, why couldn't he be definite and just say they ain't gonna see us?

  Chapman shook his head. Not a good time for idle wondering. There was a job to do. He continued his sweep of the horizon. Just one more check to make sure that no North Korean gunboat was going to come roaring over the horizon at them. He quietly ordered, "Officer of the Deck, surface the ship. Send the SEALs up into the bridge trunk."

  Lieutenant Marc Lucerno glanced around the Topeka's control room. The watch standers were sitting on the edge of their seats, nervous but ready. Lucerno rubbed the sweat from his palms onto the legs of his blue poopie suit. Everything looked ready. The SEAL team leader, Brian Walker, stood at the base of the ladder to the bridge, waiting for his order to scurry up. The man, his blackened face hidden in the shadows, was dressed in a black wet suit with a heavy pack on his back and a wicked looking M-4 rifle in one hand. He looked ready to go to war.

  The fire control team was hunched over their computer panels, waiting and ready, just in case Kim Jae-uk sent a welcoming party out to spoil their little surprise. Two of Topeka's four torpedo tubes were loaded with Harpoon missiles, ready to roar out and slam into any ship foolish enough to get in the way. The other two tubes had ADCAP torpedoes to blow their bottom out.

  Everyone aboard the submarine hoped it would never come to that. Such an occurrence was, plain and simple, war. They were trained to go to war, to fight an enemy, but not a man onboard the boat had ever done it for real. Now, here in this part of the world and with the mission before them, they would be damned close.

  "Diving Officer, surface the ship," Lucerno ordered with a lot more confidence than he felt. "Mr. Walker, stand by the bridge access hatch."

  Lucerno watched the SEAL commander disappear up the ladder as he felt the boat take a slight up angle. The diving officer was using the planes to drive the sub up to the surface before he put air into the ballast tanks to hold her up.

  "Thirty-eight feet and holding," Lucerno called out.

  The diving officer ordered, "Chief of the Watch, conduct a ten second normal main ballast tank blow."

  The chief of the watch stood and reached up to grab a pair of switches high up on the vertical panel in front of him. He flipped one marked “Forward Group” and then another one marked “After Group.” The roar from the forty-five-hundred-pound high-pressure air rushing into the ballast tanks almost drowned out his report.

  "Blowing the forward group,” he yelled, then followed it with, “Blowing the after group."

  The big sub bobbed up to the surface of the ocean as the air pushed seawater out of the huge tanks forward and aft of the “people tank.” The chief of the watch locked his stare on the clock as it ticked off exactly ten seconds. He flipped both switches up. The roar stopped.

  "Completed ten second normal blow. Three-four feet and holding. Half inch pressure in the boat."

  Lucerno nodded and ordered, "Crack the bridge access hatch. Half inch pressure in the boat."

  A green light blinked out on the ballast control panel.

  The chief of the watch called out, "Bridge access hatch indicates intermediate."

  Almost immediately, Lucerno felt his ears pop as air whistled out past the bridge access hatch, equalizing the sub's atmosphere with the air pressure outside the boat.

  "Open the upper hatch," Don Chapman called out. "SEAL team to the bridge. All stop."

  Topeka's screw slowly stopped turning. The boat slid forward for another thousand yards before it stopped dead in the water. In the meantime, Brian Walker had climbed up into the bridge cockpit. He threw a rope ladder down over the vertical steel side of the sub's sail. The ladder just reached down to the round, slippery, rubber-coated deck of the sub. He dropped down the ladder and immediately clipped himself in to the deck traveler. No sense falling overboard. At least not just yet.

  Two more SEALs, Tony Martinelli and Joe Dumkowski, followed Walker down the ladder. They clipped in as well and quickly headed aft. As the sub came dead in the water, they opened the engineroom escape trunk hatch and manhandled the two inflatable boats up onto the deck. Five minutes later, two black, six-man, inflatable assault boats sat on the deck, full of air and ready to go.

  The rest of the SEAL team, Chief Johnston, Jason Hall, Mitch Cantrell, and Lew Broughton, helped by the sub's crew, passed the team's gear up the bridge trunk to the sail and down the rope ladder to the deck. Five minutes after the boats were ready; they were fully loaded with the black-clad SEALs sitting inside them.

  The men could hear the bridge hatch clang shut. Each SEAL felt the same tinge of loneliness. They were out here on the open deck alone and the sub's hatches were closed.

  Still, they sat quietly waiting. A few seconds later, the night was pierced with the low-pitched roar of twelve foghorns close aboard. Pressurized air blew columns of mist and water high into the sky as it rushed out of the ballast tanks through the vent valves atop each ballast tank. Topeka slowly settled lower and lower into the sea until the SEALs' boats floated free from the deck. There was no trace of the sub except for a few lingering bubbles and the tiny periscope sticking up from the water a few feet ahead of them. Slowly that, too, disappeared into the night as the sub moved silently away from them like some giant leviathan.

  Chief Johnston was the first to speak.

  "Okay, toads. Time to quit lollygagging. Man the paddles. I want a hundred feet between these two boats. Cantrell, you and Hill break an IR Chem-lite each and hold them up. The sub skipper is going to need something to steer by if he’s gonna snag us clean."

  Chapman had already driven the Topeka a thousand yards from where the SEALs and their boats bobbed above them. He carefully turned her around and again looked through the periscope. He could just see the dim red glow of the Chem-lite beacons through the scope's IR lens. He spoke calmly.

  "I'm going to call the mark on bearing to the left light and then the right. XO, get them plotted and give me a course. There ain't a whole lot of time to screw around fairing up here, so be quick about it."

  Chapman couldn't actually see the bearing read-out through the periscope. Instead he would put the cursor he could see in the scope on the left light the SEALs were holding up, call "Mark," and let the XO read the bearings. Then he would repeat the procedure on the other light. The XO would have his team plot the bearings and yell out the course Chapman needed to steer.

  Lieutenant Commander Sam Witte looked up from the chart he had taped down on the navigation table.

  "Yes, sir. We'll split the difference, just like kicking a field goal to win the Rose Bowl in overtime."

  Chapman shook his head and smiled. The XO seemed to come up with these football similes in every conceivable situation. Chapman was willing to bet the awkward, slightly over
weight man had never donned pads in his life.

  "Very well, XO. Officer of the Deck, lower the outboard and shift to remote."

  The “outboard” was a small electric motor and screw that could be lowered out of the after ballast tanks. The motor, only a little over three hundred horse power, could only push the big sub along at a couple of knots. Its big advantage was that it was trainable so that it could push the boat's stern around faster than the rudder could. That was a real advantage when Chapman needed to maneuver quickly.

  "Left bearing, mark!" Chapman called out, then swung the scope a tiny bit to the right. "Right bearing, mark!"

  "Course three-two-four," Witte called out.

  The sub swung around slightly to follow the new course directly between the two rubber boats.

  "Left bearing, mark. Right bearing, mark."

  "Course three-two-three."

  Slowly the lights he was watching grew brighter and further apart as Chapman drove the sub back toward the SEALs.

  "Left bearing, mark." Swing the scope. "Right bearing, mark"

  "Course three-two-one."

  Sweat trickled down Chapman's back as he made the meticulous maneuvers.

  "Captain, plot shows one minute," Witte called out.

  The lights were almost one hundred and eighty degrees apart now.

  "Left bearing, mark." Chapman lugged the scope around, now swinging it almost a full half-circle. "Right bearing, mark."

  "Looking good skipper. Right through the uprights."

  Chapman watched as the two black boats seemed to swing astern and then come together behind the submarine. The men in the boats were little more than black shapes against an even blacker sky. One of the SEALs, and there was no way to tell who it was, flashed an IR light at the periscope.

  Chapman read the Morse code out loud.

  "Snag good. Now for a Nantucket sleigh ride."

  Fifteen time zones away, Admiral Tom Donnegan leaned back and stretched mightily, trying to ease the agony of his aching back.

  "Looks like they're away okay."

  "Yeah, and now the waiting really begins," Dr. Samuel Kinnowitz replied.

  The two men sat at the end of the big walnut table in the White House Situation Room and watched the Global Hawk UAV feed live images as the SEALs headed ashore. The composite IR and synthetic aperture radar image, taken at night from sixty-five thousand feet and through a dense cloud cover, was still clear enough for them to see individual SEALs as they lay in the boats, being tugged toward shore.

  "I still don't like it," Donnegan said, chewing on a stub of a cigar. "It'll take us over an hour to get any air cover over those boys if anything happens."

  Kinnowitz puffed on his pipe. Like Donnegan, he had been around so long and wielded so much power that no one in the White House had the nerve to tell either man it was a non-smoking area.

  "Look, Tom, we agreed. Any ratcheting of the birds in the air could warn the North Koreans. Even putting planes on strip alert without a good, public excuse could cue them something was going on. We've got a flight of F-16s on ‘ready fifteen’ at Kunsan in South Korea and a couple of F-15 Eagles on ‘ready fifteen’ at Kadena Air Force Base in Japan. That's the best we can do."

  Donnegan chewed some more on the ragged stub of his unlit cigar.

  "Damn it, Sam. I know all that,” he growled. “But you still can’t make me like it."

  “Admiral, I would never try to make you like anything you didn’t want to,” the security advisor said with a hint of a smile. But there was no humor in his words.

  Both men turned and watched silently as the images spilled from the monitor before them. Neither wanted to even consider the awful implications of what might happen out there in the next few hours.

  17

  "Chief, how much longer?" Brian Walker asked, his voice a bare whisper.

  The night was impossibly dark. The SEAL team commander could just make out the shadowy Chief, although the man was only three feet away. The tiny inflatable boats pitched and rocked along through the ink-black sea. In front of them, the forbidding mountainous coast of North Korea reared out of the water, the land mass little more than an even blacker form silhouetted against a dark night sky.

  "Ain't no need to whisper yet, Lieutenant,” Chief Johnston replied. His black face blended into the darkness. “Nobody’s gonna hear you but us fish. I figure another five minutes, then we'll be paddlin' for a bit."

  Walker nodded, as if the chief could actually see him, and then remained quiet. The sliver of a moon had long since disappeared below the horizon, leaving them in near total darkness. The two black rubber boats were lashed together as they were pulled toward the shore by the submarine's periscope. The SEALs had been up here, being tugged toward the North Korean coast, for most of the night. The novelty had worn off for them shortly after the first cold ocean wave slapped the boats.

  Although the sub was only a few feet beneath them, it seemed they were alone in the world. They were separated from the warmth, light, and safety it offered. More importantly, information and communications was cut off. There was too much chance of some North Korean snoop intercepting any radio transmissions and discovering them before they even got ashore. The sub's skipper came up with an improvised solution to pass a little, limited information by used a flashing IR light aimed through the scope optics.

  Cantrell nudged Walker.

  "Cowboy, sub's sending us a message."

  The young lieutenant glanced up toward the periscope. Even with their eyes accustomed to the darkness, the ‘scope was barely visible rising out of the water fifty feet in front of them. Sure enough, he could see a blinking pinpoint of red light through his infrared goggles. The Morse code spelled out the message: "Drop off point. 1000 yards to feet dry. Bearing 286. Good hunting."

  The ‘scope disappeared below the surface. The sub had brought them as far as it could. Now they were on their own.

  Johnston called out, "All right, toads. Easy life’s over. Let's get paddlin. Ain't got all night."

  The boats moved slowly toward the dark land. As they drew closer, mountains loomed high above them. The thunderous roar of the surf crashing onto the rocky shore drowned out Walker's hearing. He tried to visualize the chart they had spent so much time studying. Most of this stretch of coast consisted of high rocky bluffs that dropped several hundred feet straight into the water. The terrain served as a natural barrier to anyone attempting to penetrate the country’s borders so there probably was little chance of encountering a patrol once they were ashore. No need for the DPRK to waste troops when nature made it so dangerous to venture ashore.

  The charts had indicated that there was one narrow slice of beach, barely wide enough to stand on, where it should be possible to land a small boat. But to reach it, they would have to carefully thread their way through a jumble of jagged boulders. And trust the chart was correct and the beach was really there.

  Walker stole a glance at his watch. 0315. Low tide was at 0327. They had a ten-minute window either side of low tide when the surf should ease enough for them to navigate through a maze of boulders without getting themselves smashed to pieces. Ten minutes maybe.

  The surf churned and foamed as it broke violently over the rocks, dashing against them momentarily, painting them a dirty gray before the water seethed back down and another surge of cold ocean rolled in.

  Johnston watched and carefully timed the rise and fall of the waves. Finally satisfied, he called out, "Stroke now! Give it all you got!" A wave rose behind the boats, shooting them forward. The SEALS had to cover as much distance as they could while the in-bound wave pushed them while avoiding being smashed against the granite teeth emerging from the foam.

  The SEALs paddled madly toward the first boulder. Broughton sat in over edge of the first boat, using his legs and paddle to push it clear of the rocks as they raced past it. The boat was shoved inexorably forward by the might of the waves. Hill sat up in the second boat and shoved it clear as the in-ru
shing surf raced them past the rocks.

  Then they had to paddle furiously to keep from being pulled back out with the out-rushing surf as it tried to slam the boats against the rock they had just passed. Walker lungs burned like fire and his shoulders ached from the effort, but he pulled at the oar with all his might.

  The next wave picked them up and pushed them forward once again. Almost there, just past the last couple of treacherous rocks that were poking up through the roiling surf. Then the sea fell back once again and they were fighting against the tidal race just to remain in one place. The next wave obligingly picked the boats up and dropped them neatly, right in the middle of a tiny, stony beach.

  Broughton jumped out and yanked the short painter to get the rubber raft up onto the beach and above the surf before it could drag them back out again. The rest of the team piled out and manhandled the boat up, dropping it at the base of a vertical rock bluff that overhung the narrow beach. Johnston and his boat arrived seconds later and repeated the procedure.

  The granite wall before them rose straight for the black sky, climbing over a hundred feet to where they knew the shore road ambled along the edge above. A tiny, narrow crevice appeared to offer be the only foothold on the smooth, aged rock face. There was no other way off the beach but straight up. It would be a tough, treacherous climb.

  "Hill, get your butt up that rock," Johnston growled, as if ordering his team member to take out the trash. "Rest of you, get these boats out of sight and the gear ready to go. We ain't got time to fart around. When Jase drops the rope, I want you monkeys climbing."

  Jason Hill was the team's climber. They were all trained and comfortable moving on the rocks, but Hill was like a spider. He loved to free climb the rock faces in the mountains back home around San Diego. Pitons and rock cams were for amateurs. He just needed the slightest grip for a hand or foot and he could scale any obstacle. His expertise at free climbing meant the team didn't need to carry all the heavy rock cams and other gear some would need in order to make a belayed ascent.