“Because during it, 1966 through 1969, Mao purged over eleven thousand Naval officers, of which eleven were senior admirals. He closed down the submarine force and the submarine force languished.…”
“Languished?” Bernardo asked.
“It’s what you do afterwards when most men would tell her how wonderful it was and have a cigarette,” MacPherson shot back.
“Jenkins, bite me!”
“You two shut up and let Gentron finish,” Keyland ordered from above them.
“But since 2002, China has done a massive military buildup fueled in part by its gigantic economic growth. They either felt they couldn’t afford aircraft carriers, or believed their national interests would never be threatened sufficiently for them to have to project power away from their shores. So, they started building an oceangoing submarine force. Kind of reminiscent of Germany’s strategy of controlling England..”
“Germany?”
“Pope, keep quiet!” Keyland said sharply to Bernardo.
“… by building a gigantic submarine force. If you don’t have the antisubmarine forces capable of defeating them, then a country is unable to control the seas until those ASW forces reach a level of capability and competence to do it.”
“They’re still out there and they still can attack us, Seaman Gentron,” Agazzi declared.
“I don’t think they want to attack us unless we attack them. I think they’re just making a point.” Gentron nodded toward MacPherson and then his console. “When these UUVs reach a certain point, the submarines will disappear. The ones north of us may cross our bow heading back to the mainland, but most likely will disappear out to sea. The ones on our southwest will just disappear. We won’t know if they have left us or are just languishing…”
“Languishing…”
Agazzi put his hand on Bernardo’s shoulder and gave him a sharp look. Bernardo nodded and made a motion of zipping his lip.
“… outside detection range.”
“How do they know our UUVs aren’t torpedoes coming at them?” Keyland asked.
Gentron shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“I’ll tell you,” Calvins said from behind them, raising his hand as if still in high school.
“What is this, seaman intellectual day?” Bernardo asked.
“Petty Officer Bernardo, what are the contacts doing?”
“Same thing as before, Senior Chief. They are steady on bearings 225, 240, 010, and 080. No change in cavitations. They could be approaching, but if they are, they’re doing it at a constant speed. I have not detected any increase in decibel level to indicate they’re closing, but then I don’t know how far out they are.” He turned and looked at Agazzi. “How’s this for a guess? They fired torpedoes and the torps ran out of fuel?” “We’ve discussed that option already,” Keyland replied. “If they meant to sink us, they would have already fired another salvo.”
“Well, I think that is what they’re going to do.”
“You could be right,” Agazzi said, patting Bernardo on the shoulder. “Let’s hear what Seaman Calvins has to say.” Agazzi nodded at the sound-powered telephone talker. “Go ahead.”
“We’ve been conducting UUV operations for over five months. And during our fight with the North Korean submarine, we used UUVs. This isn’t our first contact that was a Chinese submarine. What if they’ve been shadowing us this whole time? If so, wouldn’t they have a database like the Office of Naval Intelligence database that Petty Officer Bernardo uses? Wouldn’t they know the difference between a torpedo and a UUV by now?”
Agazzi nodded. “Good logic trail, Seaman Calvins. You are probably right, but then they would also know that these UUVs have an explosive warhead of five hundred pounds that would sink them.”
“I think Tommy is right,” MacPherson added. “The Chinese know we have UUVs in the water. They also know the speed of them and the speed of the UUVs is slower than a torpedo. They have an idea how far away we are, probably a better idea than we do as to their location because we are on top of the water. Since they know where we are and they know when we launched our UUVs, they can extrapolate the speed from the cavitations of the screw and know how far away the UUV is from them.”
“When they think we’ve come as close as we should, they’ll disappear,” Gentron added quietly.
Agazzi looked at the young seaman.
Calvins pushed the right side of his helmet against his head.
Then he pushed the talk button on the cumbersome mouthpiece. “Roger, Combat.” He looked at Agazzi. “Senior Chief, they expect the helicopters overhead to contact in the next couple of minutes. Then, the helicopters are going to launch a sonobuoy barrier prior to dipping their sonars. They are going to pinpoint the submarines’ locations.”
Gentron turned in his seat. “Are they going to attack them?”
Calvins shrugged. “There are two helicopters per submarine. At least one in each of the four formations has a Mark-45 torpedo.”
Gentron looked at Agazzi. “If we go active on those submarines, Senior Chief, they are going to think we are preparing to launch an airborne torpedo against them. They know our tactics.”
“That should make them disappear quicker,” Bernardo said.
“That could also make them launch another salvo.”
“Just because we go active?” Bernardo asked, disbelief in his voice.
“They may not fire when we go active,” Agazzi said. “But they’ll recognize when a torpedo is dropped and it goes active. They’d still have sufficient time to fire another eight.”
“They could fire 32,” Gentron said.
“32?”
“Yes, Senior Chief. They have eight torpedo tubes each in the bow. What if they fixed all of them at once?”
“We couldn’t stop 32 torpedoes,” MacPherson said.
“Senior Chief, wouldn’t you say that is another reason that shows Seaman Gentron is probably right?” Keyland added. “If they had wanted to sink us, they could have fired a massive torpedo attack against us.”
“It’s hard to fire eight at one time. Too much intensity in the bow, but they could have fired them one after the other,” Agazzi added.
“We shouldn’t fire on them, Senior Chief,” Gentron added. He looked up at Agazzi, his eyes shiny.
The young man has scared himself, Agazzi thought. He has also frightened all of us.
Agazzi eased by the consoles to the ladder leading up, quickly climbing to the top level and moving to the intercom system connected with Combat. A moment later, he was talking with Commander Stapler.
Zeichner walked across the canopy of Sea Base, heading toward the hatch they originally came up. It had been easy to take back leadership from Montague when they discovered Dr. Zheng was not in the crow’s nest. He knew when they entered the tower that Dr. Zheng would be elsewhere, but the exercise pulled them back together as a team with him in charge. He had to get them to willingly follow him. Not run off on wild-goose chases or unorganized searches.
“Where are we going, Boss?” Gainer asked from his left.
“If he wasn’t in the crow’s nest and not in Combat Information Center, where do you think he is?” Montague added.
Zeichner smiled at both of them. “I have no idea.”
“No idea! Then we should stop and think about where we think he could be, prioritize the options, and search each one in order,” Montague said, slowing her walk.
Zeichner kept ambling forward toward the hatch. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gainer glance at Montague and then back at him. When Gainer disappeared from his peripheral vision for a moment, Zeichner thought the impetus had shifted back to Montague, but the man quickly regained step with Zeichner. Zeichner let out a mental sigh. A second later, Montague joined on the right.