“It’s done, sir. They’ve taken the submarine. We are ordered to clear the area and continue on our primary mission.”
“That seemed too easy,” Lei said.
“We now know what happens when a submerged vessel takes the shock wave broadsides from less than two miles, sir. Even though they were outside the octagon, warhead number two was close enough to do this.”
“Any insight about the possibility of being able to salvage the submarine?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Perhaps that’s a question that we would be wise to remain ignorant about.”
“Agreed, sir.”
Lei checked his monitor. The remainder of his squadron had cleared the minefield. He shifted his voice to his entire squadron.
“Congratulations on a victorious egress operation,” he said. “We have lost many comrades, and for them we shall mourn at the appropriate time. But now, we must complete our mission and guard the straits.”
He double-checked the numbers in his head.
“Crafts Ten through Fourteen, you are now the Luzon Task Force. Craft Fourteen, you have command of the Luzon Task Force. Head south and patrol the Luzon Strait. All other vessels follow me east.”
Lei tapped a button on his console to bring up a view of the Japanese Ryukyu Island chain. The line showing his nation’s undersea hydrophone array gave him hope.
He faced a challenge covering all mainland submarine passages between the islands, but he expected that his squadron would succeed in placing the Philippine Sea under his navy’s control and making it safe for the merchant shipping his nation would need to endure.
CHAPTER 23
The base at Qingdao a days-old memory, Dao Chan sniffed the stolen North Korean Romeo’s cramped confines. His recollection of the East China Sea’s moist salted aroma had yielded to the dry metallic taste of carbon dust from rotating electrical machines.
His executive officer ducked through the forward door, brushed by seated sailors, and overpowered the staleness with the stench of rancid meat and formaldehyde.
“A bag is leaking in the torpedo room,” he said. “I’ve already ordered the body moved to a spare bag.”
“That’s the proper action, Gao,” Chan said. “Have you yet determined if the leak was due to a failure in the bag or by an accidental tearing?”
“I’ve not yet made that determination, sir.”
Chan doubted that Gao had recognized the importance of the distinction.
“If the bags are failing due to a design flaw,” Chan said, “then we face a problem of limited replacement bags and preservation fluid. If a sailor tore the bag by accident, we must seek a better way to stack the bodies out of the way.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gao appeared defeated. Chan dismissed him with a nod and a stern index finger toward the door.
He turned his gaze to the chart and watched the lighted crosshair walk under translucent tracing paper. His ship appeared alone in the sea, but he realized that maintaining his ten-knot pace kept him deaf to his surroundings. If a capable submarine were trailing him, it did so as a ghost.
As he approached the Ryukyu Islands, penciled arcs proclaiming Japan’s twelve-mile national water boundaries pinched down on him. He checked his ship’s bearing to verify that he drove between Yakushima to the north and Kuchinoshima to the south. He intended to grab another satellite fix to assure his location prior to violating a sovereign nation’s water.
A line paralleling the island chain represented the expected location of a Taiwanese undersea surveillance array. The system’s sensitivity remained an unknown since the Taiwanese had restrained their reaction to detections of any submarines, but Chan expected the system to be online and listening, and the lack of orders warning him to slow while passing over the hydrophones concerned him.
Either his faceless masters assumed the Taiwanese system to be offline, his stolen Romeo its hopeless victim at any speed, or worse. He entertained thoughts of being expendable — perhaps a decoy for a larger operation.
He quelled defeatist thoughts by reminding himself of an evacuation plan that included leaving the submarine burning on the surface with its former crew’s charred corpses aboard. Planted evidence of North Korean misdeeds, he assumed.
Plus he had drafted the son of a ranking party member to his team. Gao, despite his mediocrity, shielded him from expendability.
Startling him, his executive officer appeared.
“Sir,” Gao said. “The torn body bag resulted from a sailor slicing it with wire wrap. He confessed to dragging the wire accidentally across the bag while he was en route to locking a valve stem. He said he inspected the bag and didn’t notice any leaks, but he must have weakened the bag to begin a slow leak.”
“Or he was in too great a hurry to correctly assess the damage,” Chan said. “He was certainly in too much a hurry to properly carry his wire wrap.”
“I shall see that he is disciplined,” Gao said.
“Better yet,” Chan said, “let him explain his errors to the entire crew so that they recognize the hazards of careless haste.”
Gao’s eyes widened.
“The shame,” he said.
“See to it, Gao,” Chan said. “My methods are effective. Each sailor will think twice before compromising what little capability this submarine has.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gao departed, and Chan returned his attention to the chart. Running his finger between the Japanese islands and over the Taiwanese hydrophone array, he considered his speed options.
He could slow and try to sneak over the arrays unnoticed, or he could concede being heard and attempt to pass at high speed to the eastern side of the islands. A flash of inspiration told him to go as fast as his submerged Romeo would take him — an anemic thirteen knots — and put the issue behind him.
His grip tight around the handles, Chan staggered and arched back from the periscope. Swells bucked the Romeo to the side, and the submarine plummeted.
“The head valve has shut,” Gao said. “The diesel engines have secured.”
Chan looked down to his executive officer who braced for balance by the navigation chart.
“Get us back up,” Chan said. “One meter shallower than before.”
“You’re risking exposure of our conning tower, sir.”
Chan suppressed an impulse to chastise Gao for challenging him and welcomed his underling’s courage to voice an independent thought.
“You’re right, Gao,” he said. “But that’s a risk I must take. We need air, we need to charge our battery, and we need a geographic fix. Get us up.”
The Romeo’s battery charged and its air clean, Chan felt the rocking subside as the deck angled downward. He slid by a polished railing to join Gao by the navigation chart.
At the narrowest point of the strait, the twelve-mile curves surrounding the Japanese islands crossed. He realized that his would be the first Chinese crew to violate Japanese sovereignty during the campaign to reclaim the renegade Taiwanese province.
Projecting battery depletion curves in his mind’s eye, he jabbed one end of dividers into the trace paper and spread the other across the track he would drive through the Tokashi Strait. He grunted as he lifted spread pointers and placed them on the scale to measure the distance to the island chain’s far side and the Pacific Ocean’s Philippine Sea.
“Our battery won’t support it,” he said. “Not at maximum speed. Not even at twelve knots.”
“Sir?” Gao asked. “I think the battery curves would support twelve knots.”
“You’re correct, assuming a clean hull and new battery cells. But we’ve seen that we perform less than optimum in both areas. We must get closer to the center of the strait before accelerating.”