`People of China,' he began, `I speak to you tonight about a crisis facing our country. I have no doubt that with the help of the great Chinese people we will succeed. Since the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century Western capitalism has never stopped its aggression against China and its plundering of China. Today our heroic forces are fighting to regain our sovereignty over the Nanshas [Spratly Islands] and the great waters that surround them preserve for the motherland riches that rightly belong to the people of China.
`Let me explain why. There is a vast sea to the south of the motherland e South China Sea which covers an area of 3,200,000 square kilometres of our territorial waters. The beautiful and bountiful Nanshas are located in the southern part of this vast sea. The Nanshas have belonged to China since ancient times.
`Yet the capitalist powers have never stopped casting their greedy eyes on the big treasure house of these islands. In the short period of sixty years since the first illegal survey of the Nanshas by a British ship in 1867, other countries occupied and plundered the archipelago on more than ten occasions. Even today, there are over fifty petroleum consortia from more than ten countries and regions that have long prospected for oil in the Nansha waters. Moreover, some forces have even attempted to turn the Nanshas into so-called international high seas and occupy the precious wealth.
`This brings me to the interference in the internal affairs of China by third parties. Any discussion of this can proceed only from the accepted principle that China brooks no interference in its internal affairs. We will absolutely not permit any foreigners to interfere.
`Even though the United States has the greatest national strength, it cannot have its own way to the point where it has the final say on world affairs. To maintain its status as the only superpower, the United States has to make a desperate attempt to contain other countries' development. US relations with foreign countries, such as with the European Union and Japan, are relations of cooperation rather than containment, while its relations with Russia and China are relations of containment rather than cooperation.
`The Chinese people desire peace. Why else would we have signed today in Beijing a Memorandum of Understanding with our South-East Asian neighbours? We do not want war. We want peace. Today's agreement was freely entered into by all parties. China's place in Asia is at the heart of Asia. Our friends in the region understand that. Like us they view with anger and dismay the resurgence of militarism in Japan. Japan is the biggest threat to regional stability we have. There are none more so than the Chinese who understand the true nature of the Japanese. Their despicable grab for territory in the 1930s, their slaughter of women and children in Nanjing and Shanghai, their use of opium to control our people in old Manchuria showed the Japanese to be the vilest of all the imperialists who gorged themselves while the Chinese people starved.
`Following the end of the Cold War, Japan changed its defence strategy from one concentrated on repelling potential Soviet attacks to one based on confrontation with China. But we warn Japan, as we warn the United States, whoever plays with fire will perish by fire. And I remind both countries of the words of Long March veteran Wang Zhen: "We have the experience of dealing with the Americans on the battlefield. They are nothing terrible. The war theatre may be selected by the Americans, in Korea or Taiwan. They have nuclear weapons; so have we."'
The water along the two main shipping lanes through the Mindoro Straits was only 60 metres deep in places. The Apo West Pass ran along the northern coastline of the Calamian Group of islands, rugged, poor, Philippine fishing outposts whose boats were ignoring the Chinese warnings and were out working. To the north-east was the Apo East Pass, which ran along the coast of Mindoro Island, and it was through here that the commander of the USS Peleliu steered his amphibious group towards the South China Sea.
The shallow water and the noise thrown out by dozens of small fishing vessels made it an ideal arena of battle for the Chinese diesel-electric submarines, waiting at 50 metres below the surface. Some were even resting on the seabed, their main motors cut and so completely silent that they were undetectable by even the most modern submarine equipment.
Yet the commander of Ming 353 knew exactly what he was looking for. Six hours earlier, when the Dong Fang Hong 6 Chinese military satellite was passing, the submarine had raised a satellite communications (SATCOM) mast to receive a message which was constantly beamed down from space. In less than thirty seconds the submarine went deep again. The order was to attack the USS Peleliu as soon as she entered the South China Sea. In the following hours, every other Chinese submarine in the South China Sea received the same instructions.
The fifty-seven officers and men had been cramped on board Ming 353 for more than three weeks now. They slept in narrow three-tiered bunks which were squeezed against the bulkhead, sharing sleeping bags and pillows. Only a filthy cloth curtain divided each bunk from the corridor. Even the patience of the Chinese ratings, recruited from the harsh mountain provinces, was being tested. They couldn't wash. They had no change of clothes. Everyone had sprouted thin beards. The whole vessel stank of cooking fat, diesel, and sweat. Equipment was suffering from the constant changes of humidity. Condensation flowed down everything.
The task of identifying the American warship would have been the envy of any submarine commander. He knew when she was coming through and the course she was sailing. He also had on file the complete acoustic signature of the USS Peleliu, meticulously copied on the several occasions she had called in at Hong Kong before the British left in 1997. Chinese military intelligence operating in the Pearl River Delta was able to record every sound the ship made. In an ideal military world, the propeller design, size, and speed of naval ships would remain a closely guarded secret. But the USS Peleliu had been operating in the Pacific for twenty years and China had her exact propeller characteristics. It had also pieced together details as intricate and unique as a human fingerprint. It had recorded the auxiliary power plants; the sewage plant; the hydraulic lifts which carried aircraft from deck to deck; the compressors which filled hospital bottles with oxygen and gas. All of these sounds made up the ship's acoustic signature, which had been copied onto CD-ROM with the signatures of dozens of other warships. The Chinese had equipped their antiquated submarines with Pentium-chip laptop computers. They were no more than off-the-shelf office equipment. But this was a world where civilian technology was outstripping the military. The sonar operators on the Ming 353 simply recognized the USS Peleliu's signature from their laptop screen.
The commander ordered the Ming up to periscope depth to try to confirm the target with Electronic Surveillance Measures. Within thirty seconds, the ESM mast had absorbed the electromagnetic spectrum around it, taking in the USS Peleliu's navigation radar, encrypted tactical communications, and satellite communications. The data made up the ESM fingerprint, which was analysed with the acoustic fingerprint in the Ming's own Tactical Weapons System computer. The submarine commander now had a near certain classification of his target and could take the decision to close within firing range.
When he was 1,700 metres away he had a strong urge to carry out a more dangerous, but also more accurate, `eyes only' attack using the periscope. He knew the American anti-submarine warfare detection equipment might find him before the torpedoes hit. But that was the risk of the job. He would use straight running torpedoes, of the old 1960s design, weapons which in naval jargon cannot be seduced by electronic countermeasures. Their rudimentary mechanical system would ignore the decoys thrown out by the USS Peleliu to change their course. The American commander would attempt to project a bogus acoustic signature of the USS Peleliu several thousand metres away from the real ship. Another countermeasure would simply be white noise, like the hissing of a fire extinguisher, which would appear louder than the ship itself.