Power Play (30 page)

Mack did the push-ups effortlessly, as he did every morning, whether he was in the Mayflower Hotel or the Hindu Kush. He once set about this most punishing of exercises in a back alley in North Baghdad after being
motionless as a sniper all night and was very nearly shot in the backside by a wandering terrorist, age twelve.

But a SEAL’s merciless training regime lasts for all the days of his service. Anytime, any day, regardless of rank or length of time spent in combat, a United States Navy SEAL may be called upon to “go to Action Stations.” That means right now. Nothing else. It means everyone in the team. And it may mean that you will be required to die in the not-too-distant future. The fitter, the faster, and the stronger you are, the better your chances of survival. Every SEAL agrees with General George Patton’s eloquent summation: “There’s no darn glory in dying for your country—the idea is to make the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country.”

Peak fitness means peak speed, peak reaction time, peak awareness. The supreme tuning of the combat warrior’s body signifies wild-animal strength and agility. To face a hard-trained Navy SEAL is to face a crouched mountain lion with an M4 rifle and a combat knife.

That was why the battlefield veteran Captain Mack Bedford was pounding along the sand for four miles with the new class of hopefuls, running hard on the outside of the pack, bounding along with the instructors, pushing it, taking it to the limit with every stride, with no other ambition, except to be the best. Always the best.

He did not join in the oceangoing training involving the rubber boats and the rowing, and capsizing and swimming, dragging the heavy hull up over the rocks opposite the famous Coronado Hotel. He adjourned to the huge SEAL swimming pool back in the main complex, near everyone’s living quarters, and completed fifty laps in quick time.

He had lunch in the officers’ quarters, just a sandwich and fruit salad, and retired to the campus library, where he delved into the chart drawer and pulled up the ones from the British Admiralty that provided infinitesimal details of the waters that surround the long coast of southern Ireland.

He sat at a wide table and decided to work his way methodically around the Irish coast, starting with the vast natural harbor of Cork City—known in Gaelic as
Cobh
—the Harbor of Tears, the last sight of Ireland seen by hundreds of thousands driven from their homeland in the nineteenth century by famine and poverty. The ship that carried Patrick Kennedy, the great-grandfather of President John F. Kennedy, left from here, bound for Boston in 1848.

The headquarters of the tiny Irish Navy is located in this harbor, but for Mack Bedford it was too enclosed by cliffs and hillside. Basically, it faced the wrong way, southeast, toward northern Cornwall in England, not to the dark reaches of the GIUK, away to the northwest, across the land.

The simplest place to begin excavating for an American base was almost certainly the spectacular coast of West Cork, with its long and picturesque bays, lonely countryside, and many natural harbors. But again they were apt to face too far south.

Mack studied and rejected wondrous Irish seascapes all along that stretch of coast that encompasses the Old Head of Kinsale, Clonakilty Bay, Glandore Harbor, the islands before Skibbereen, Roaring Water Bay, and the near-irresistible harbors of Crookhaven and Barley Cove. There was Dunmore Bay, Bantry Bay, and the Kenmare River, all with deep water, all with anchorages and deserted coastal land, all facing the wrong way, southwest now, jutting directly toward the Azores.

The rest of Ireland’s southwest corner was composed of the mythical Kingdom of Kerry, the Shannon Estuary, and County Clare. Mack had never been anywhere near that area, and, surrounded by guidebooks, photographs, and charts, he pondered the places of great Irish legend, the Ring of Kerry, the Lakes of Killarney, Dingle Bay, and the pinnacled Skellig Islands, where mystical tales go back a thousand years before Christ. He read about the Viking raids and the long-abandoned monastery (
Jesus! Another one!
).

He read how Dara Down, king of the world, rested there on Skellig in the year AD 200 before sailing on north across the bay to Ventry to do battle with the giant Finn MacCool. This was a terrible conflict that, records show, lasted one year and a day, as might reasonably be expected by any enemy tackling MacCool, the chieftain of Irish legend who built the Giant’s Causeway.

The more he gazed at photographs and film of Kerry’s endless beaches and coves, the more he coveted the land. But the more he studied, the more hopeless it all became. Kerry, all the way north to the seventy-mile estuary of the River Shannon, was one of the world’s great tourist areas.

Mack scanned the list of hotels, built specifically to accommodate every last one of the 80 million Americans who claim Irish ancestry and may wish to gaze upon the land of their forefathers.

“We can’t build a base down here,” he decided. “Not even in northern Kerry, where the land looks more west. It’s just too busy, too many people wandering around, too many harbors, boats, and, I guess, buses.”

He checked out the county town of Tralee, which is sited up the River Lee with an excellent seaport ten miles west along the north shore. But the problems remained. It was all too busy, “civilized,” and sophisticated.

“For crying out loud,” muttered Mack, “Tralee Golf Course was designed by Arnold Palmer. We’d probably have to make him an admiral. And I guess he’d be a darned good one. But Southwest Ireland’s no place for a US Naval base.”

County Clare, which stands modestly between the two more celebrated counties of Kerry and Galway, is the site of the Cliffs of Moher, which is one of the most majestic sea-cliff spectacles of the world. Mack thought Clare had possibilities, except for its starry neighbors to the north and south, and the attention they inevitably brought to the area. But the coast was very rugged, and the water looked like it would be rough and exposed.

However, the Isles of Arran are part of County Clare, and these might suit just fine according to the Royal Navy’s Admiralty chart. Each of the three islands is really a limestone plateau, rising up from the sea at the mouth of Galway Bay: Inishmore, Inishmaan, and Inisheer converted to Christianity in the fifth century and are, to this day, places where time has almost stood still.

Mack studied the long lists of local shipwrecks down the years, the obvious slashing violence of the Atlantic on this rocky outpost. He noted the near-total lack of electricity, and the reliance on the steamer bringing supplies from Galway across that rough water, and decided this was a backward step too far. A new US Navy base could not be on an island because it would probably require more mainland supplies than all the rest of Ireland put together.

Northwest of the thriving city of Galway, deep into the ancient province of Connaught and along the untamed and wild coast up to Connemara, were the most realistic possibilities Mack had yet encountered. It was suitably desolate, with low population at any time of the year.

He studied the demographics, and he stared at the photographic evidence. So far as he could tell, there were miles and miles of peat bogs above which he could see black lakes, which gleamed in the sun. There
were lonely valleys with no signs of life, and high above, there arose the pale-gray mountain peaks of the Twelve Bens.

The coastal road running west out to Slyne Head twisted and curved around small bays and inlets. Miles of this corrugated coastline consisted of high, steep cliff faces. It was, however, the lack of population that was most striking. Mack estimated it would take about seven thousand years to put in a new dock.

“US Navy Station Connemara? I don’t think so.”

Heading north, the Irish coast runs up to sad and lonely County Mayo, jutting out into the Atlantic, its desolate beaches protected by places like Achill Island, the enormous Blacksod Bay, and the Mullet Peninsula. Again, it’s mountainous country with its best harbors mostly quiet.

Mayo, once described as “poor, dying Mayo” with its endless peat bogs, deserted beaches, and myth-shrouded peaks, never recovered from the mid-nineteenth-century potato famine, which devastated its population through starvation and mass emigration.

Every account Mack read pointed out the problems of this prolonged shortage of people. During the famine, Mayo’s population fell 29.5 percent in nine years, from 389,000 to 274,000. This was a time when 1 million Irish people died of starvation and another million emigrated. But County Mayo represented the most shattering misery and despair in all of Ireland: its people were 90 percent dependent on the potato for existence, and the crop failed. Twice. Even today, there are still only 130,000 people in Mayo, Ireland’s third-largest county.

Despite the geographic advantages of the place, its perfect coastline from which to hook up with SOSUS, Mack Bedford rejected it on the basis of its obvious lack of manpower. “US Naval Base Mayo” had the wrong connotation, and the last half hour’s reading had induced a sadness in the SEAL commander that refused to leave him. He suspected this universal melancholy might affect others if the United States decided to move in.

Which brought him even farther up the coastline to the top left-hand corner, County Donegal, which looks as if it should be a part of Protestant Northern Ireland but isn’t.

Donegal has the longest coastline of any Irish county. If it were measured in dead straight lines, it would be more than two hundred miles. If
you counted every one of the deep inlets, bays, estuaries, and harbors, it would probably be twice that. Its coastline is mostly spectacular, grandiose, but it has its share of superb harbors studding the contours of the coast all the way from Donegal Bay to the border of the never-ending coastline near Londonderry in the North.

Mack Bedford gazed at this colossal expanse of seascape and seaways and wondered where to start, dazzled as he was by the Irishness of the coastal names—Drumanoo Head, Rossnowlagh, Dunkineely, McSwyne’s Bay, Dunmore Head, Inishfree Bay.

He looked at the giant peninsula in the North, Inishowen, the largest in all of Ireland, with Malin Head jutting north into the Atlantic Ocean, the most northerly point in the entire country.

Mack noted that Inishowen was bordered by two giant sea loughs, to the east by the seven-mile-wide, twenty-mile-long Lough Foyle, and to the west by the narrower but twenty-five-mile-long Lough Swilly. “Captain Bedford,” he muttered, “if you can’t find a place for a US Navy base somewhere in all the miles and miles of coastline around Donegal, you probably should resign.”

For the next two hours, he pored over the charts, checking ocean depths, accessibility from the main roads, closeness of population, nearness of a sizable local town, but above all deserted coastal landscape where a huge building project could take place without upsetting local people.

In the end he had a short list of four, all of them completely suitable and geographically sound. All of them were ideal places for the SOSUS hookup. But one stood out, and Mack kept returning to it, a long seaway cutting back, deep into the land, at the eastern end of Donegal Bay, toward the south of the county. It was called Inver Bay and was protected by the most unlikely narrow finger of rock, ramming its way southwest out into the main bay for almost six miles and ending with the lighthouse on St. John’s Point.

This Donegal promontory seemed to Mack like the longest headland in Ireland, with a village at the mainland end, Dunkineely, and practically nothing all the way down to the lighthouse. He measured the promontory at about nine miles west of Donegal Town, with its population of twenty-five hundred and its majestic fifteenth-century castle, now rebuilt, having been torched by the local chieftain, Rory O’Donnell, in 1607 to prevent the English from getting their greedy little hands on it.

Mack thought that might have been a bit hasty—and would personally have favored a quick retreat in the face of the English army, but a return in the dead of night:
SEAL Team 10, in the Zodiacs, heavily camouflaged, rowing ashore and blasting the enemy to hell before they could locate their weapons.

“Not sure about this Rory character,” he muttered, in reference to the O’Donnell clan chief, now dead for more than four hundred years. “Might not have what it takes to command one of the teams. Probably wouldn’t have passed BUD/S.”

Say what you like about Captain Bedford. He could always relive a battle and nearly always win it.

Now he was preoccupied with an ancient but at the same time extremely modern problem: water depth in harbor approaches. And Donegal Bay represented a blue-water mariner’s wildest dream. Coming in off the Atlantic, there was almost 200 feet of water all the way.

Right off St. John’s Point the chart showed 171 feet. Moving northeast along the estuary the water was 120 feet, shelving up to 75 feet. The deep water ran almost the entire length of Inver Bay, except for the last mile, where it still showed 50 feet, to a point well beyond the ideal site for the proposed US base.

Tight inshore, there were shallow areas, but nothing that could not be quickly dredged, or built on, with industrial-size jetties and docks. He selected the spot on the chart and made his mark, informing the librarian he would be taking it with him and they could either make a copy or order another.

 

 

Air Force general Jack Myers had two reasons to be baffled this morning. The first was a picture of some Russian monastery with a giant golf ball on top of a sixteenth-century chapel. The second was a picture of a large Russian freighter turning out of the Black Sea into the fast, narrow waters of the Bosporus, the waterway that divides Europe and Asia.

The first was the biggest puzzle. General Jack, a forty-nine-year-old
former fighter pilot who now presided over this top secret arm of the US defense system, had simply never seen anything like this. The golf ball was about fifty feet in diameter and was parked on the chapel roof, surrounded by religious spires and symbolic statues. To the layman it looked as if some celestial adman had gone berserk.