Page 12 of Cry Havoc

Quinn is on the ground. His squad is on the ground.

They are probably dead.

But maybe not.

Never leave a man behind.

See you for beers at Phu Bai.

Tom looked back to the smoke of the burning Kingbee and made his decision.

He curled his body in an inverted sit up and lashed out with his knife. His first slash missed the string. The helo began to lift higher.Last chance.He summoned his final ounce of strength and pulled his body upright. Reaching up with his knife, he sliced through the lifeline connecting him to salvation and plummeted into the Laotian jungle.

PART ICRACK THE SKY

“All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

—THE VIETNAMESE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, SEPTEMBER 2, 1945

CHAPTER 1

Four Months Earlier

USSPueblo

Off the coast of Wonsan, North Korea

January 23, 1968

THE USSPUEBLOHADdeparted Yokosuka, Japan, on January 5. Commander Lloyd M. “Pete” Bucher had decided on the southern route to avoid the notoriously rough winter seas north of Hokkaido. ThePueblofirst sailed south for Kyushu Island and then adjusted course north for Sasebo, where the United States maintained a naval base. There they had refueled and taken on additional provisions along with classified publications and documents to assist in their mission.

Officially an Auxiliary Cargo Ship, Light, the USSPueblowas in reality a spy ship. It was one of a proposed seventy ships commissioned under Operation Clickbeetle, a program conceived as a way to observe and report on Soviet ship and submarine movements while collecting their electronic transmissions. Commander Bucher was only aware of three ships commissioned under the program to date. His ship’s cover was as an oceanographic research vessel, though its mass of intricate antenna arrays indicated it might have other motives. At 176 feet long and a top speed of 13 knots, it did not look like a United States naval vessel. In fact, it hardly looked seaworthy.

ThePueblofirst hit the water in 1944 as a United States Army Freight and Passenger Ship, but was put into mothballs ten years later, where she sat until the Navy requisitioned her in the 1960s for Clickbeetle. She was redesignated as a Technical Research Ship and given a captain, former submariner Pete Bucher. ThePueblowas his first command.

The ship had been specially retrofitted with a Special Operations Department space called the SOD hut, a 20- by 10-foot container with a triple-locked door located just forward of the bridge. The hut was home to a team of communications technicians, called CTs, and the classified equipment designed and built for thePueblo’s mission as a signals intelligence collector. With its relatively new designation and top-secret charge, they did not yet have the requisite manuals specifying the range of protocols on how to deal with their particular assignment and its possible contingencies. As such, they were making a lot of it up as they went along.

For security reasons, Bucher had only received the specifics of their mission once they departed Yokosuka. Though envisioned as an intelligence collector focused on the Soviet threat, thePueblohad a different target on this voyage. They were directed to sail for North Korea’s border with the Soviet Union and then follow the coastline south, collecting signals intelligence and mapping coastal radar sites as they went.

Bucher had been uneasy from the start.

He knew that the ship carried too much classified material without a reliable way to incinerate it. Nor did they have dependable protocols in place for the destruction of their highly sensitive encryption machines.

We should be more prepared,the skipper thought.

He had asked a senior officer in Hawaii what to do if his ship came under attack and was told that his sister spy ship, the USSBanner,had operated off the North Korean coast without incident, though it had been harassed by the Soviets and Chinese.

We are fucking expendable.

When he requested new destruction systems for the sensitivematerial, his requests had fallen on the deaf ears of his superiors. As a result, he bought a small incinerator out of the crew’s recreation fund. It was nowhere near large enough to handle the mountains of classified documents that the ship carried, but it was better than nothing.

As they sailed toward their target, Bucher thought of his briefings at the Naval Security Group and National Security Agency after taking command of thePueblo.He worried about the encryption machines he was responsible for belowdeck along with their plans, manuals, and codes. He thought of the USSLibertyand the lessons of the previous June when sailors had struggled to destroy classified documents belowdeck in trash cans rather than using the topside incinerators, which would have exposed them to gunfire from Israeli jets and torpedo boats. Thirty-four Americans had been killed that day. TheLibertyhad been attacked in water too shallow to discard classified material overboard. That was only a few months ago. Why was nothing done? Nothing other than a directive that all spy ships be armed.

What am I supposed to do with two .50 caliber machine guns if we come up against the naval and air forces of North Korea, the Soviet Union, or China?

I tried to tell them. I should have made sure we got explosives in Japan, enough to destroy everything. I know better.

By January 16 the USSPueblo,its decks covered in ice, was in position collecting intelligence off the coast of North Korea just south of the Soviet border. To the dismay of Commander Bucher and the communications technicians in the SOD hut, there was almost no activity to keep them busy. ThePueblopushed south, staying in international waters so as not to provoke an international incident.