The Electronic Support Measures operator cried out.
“AN/APG-67 radar — high signal strength! Bearing zero-four-two. Probable enemy Fighting Eagle combat aircraft.”
“There’s nothing probable about it,” Kye said. “It’s the combat air patrol. They’ve finally taken note of us. Remain calm. This is expected.”
The executive officer moved beside him and whispered.
“Expected, sir. But now what? If attacked, we can’t shoot back outside a range of three miles. And even if we engage successfully in combat, we sacrifice the stealthy progress we’ve made infiltrating enemy waters.”
“It’s quite simple,” Kye said. “We hide in plain sight. Bring us within twenty meters of the trawler.”
“Twenty meters? The low-pressure water between us will risk drawing our hulls together.”
“What of it? The aircraft won’t hear such a collision. I’ll take bumps and scrapes to my hull before letting airborne radar systems see the separation between my ship and the trawler. But you make a good point. This will be difficult maneuvering. Join the lieutenant on the bridge to oversee his ship handling.”
The executive officer departed, and Kye watched him and the lieutenant glaring at the ominous darkness of the trawler. Then he heard the rudder order from the lookout emanate from the bridge’s loudspeaker.
Three degrees left rudder.
Kye concurred and let his officers continue with the tricky maneuver. As the trawler’s blackness spanned a wider section of his bridge windows, he heard the rudder shifted to three degrees to the right. Then the rudder went amidships, followed by fine corrections to manage oscillations in the gunboat’s course.
Content that high-flying aircraft would mistake the trawler-gunboat tandem for a single fishing vessel in the night, Kye lifted the bridge-to-bridge radio to his mouth.
“Bridge, forecastle watch,” he said. “Over.”
“Forecastle, this is the bridge,” the trawler’s captain said. “Go ahead. Over.”
“Do you see any aircraft with your night vision, bearing zero-four-two?”
“No, but I haven’t looked. Give me a moment.”
Kye realized that the trawler lacked the sensors to recognize the increased power of his adversary’s airborne radar system. He felt his heart begin to pound when the trawler captain’s voice came back in a higher pitch.
“Forecastle, bridge. Low-flying aircraft, bearing zero-four-two. I see two of them, coming right towards us.”
“How low?”
“I’m just now picking them up on surface search radar, if that tells you how low. Speed two hundred and fifty knots. They’re coming for us, low and slow.”
“When do you expect them to overfly us?”
“I’m checking now… Three minutes.”
While Kye ran mental calculations on his next moves, a voice squawked over the loudspeaker asking the trawler to identify itself. As he hoped, the trawler’s captain followed his instructions to ignore the request.
“Seal the bridge windows,” he said.
Sailors began affixing covers to the windows, blinding them to the outside but preventing the red light from escaping to watchful airborne eyes. He went to the port bridge wing.
“I have the conn,” he said. “You two, head to the starboard bridge wing. I need skilled eyes on both sides of the ship.”
As his executive officer passed him, he grabbed his arm.
“I’m going to place us on the other side of the trawler as the aircraft pass over us. When I’m blinded on this side, I will pass the conn back to you. When I do, you will push us back up the trawler’s starboard side as fast as possible so that the pilots can’t see us, if they happen to look over their shoulders. Nighttime or not, I don’t trust the darkness to hide us from their night vision.”
Kye barked to his lookout.
“All stop! All engines back full!”
The trawler began to slide ahead of the gunboat.
A look sternward revealed his fantail jutting behind the fishing ship.
“All stop!”
Silencing his propellers removed the damning visual evidence of churning water, and he expected his stern’s unlit smallness relative to the fishing vessel to pass unnoticed.
The increasing whine of flying engines rose to a crescendo overhead, and he felt two aircraft overfly him.
“All back full!”
With his steering control made erratic with a backing bell, he watched his bow gravitate towards the trawler. The impact was unavoidable, and a thump echoed throughout Taechong Twelve’s hull. The bow lurched from the impact, but suction dragged it into the escort vessel a second time before the gunboat cleared.
As his forecastle slid behind the whitened churning foam below the looming wall of the trawler’s stern, he considered his exposure maximized — a condition he wished to minimize.
“All ahead flank! Left full rudder!”
The trawler walked to his starboard bow and began to glide down his starboard side. He lost sight of the distance separating the ships.
“Shift the conn to the executive officer!”
He entered the bridge and felt confined within its red light and shadows. Blinded to the trawler’s position, he had to trust his officers on the starboard bridge wing. As he crossed to his gunboat’s other side, he heard the expected order to shift the rudder to starboard, angling his bow back in line with the fishing ship.
Reaching the starboard bridge wing, he regained his sight of the trawler. After easing the rudder amidships, his executive officer had positioned the ship within meters of its escort.
“Keep the conn,” Kye said. “You’ve done well, but learn from my mistake and open range to avoid another collision.”
“Do you think it worked, sir? Do you think they saw us?”
“Time will tell.”
Minutes passed as Kye’s heart rate receded, but the lack of further harassment irked him.
“They’re gone, sir,” the executive officer said.
“That’s a problem. They must have taken photographs of the trawler for identification purposes. Someone will come for us again when they realize we are not part of their fishing fleet.”
Kye returned to the darkened room.
“Secure from sealed bridge,” he said.
The window coverings came down, and his temporary claustrophobia waned. He risked the bridge-to-bridge radio.
“Bridge, forecastle. Over.”
“Forecastle, bridge. Over,” the trawler’s captain said.
“Do you see the aircraft? Do you have any abnormal radar activity?”
“I’ve lost the aircraft on radar and visual, and they are no longer hailing us. However, there’s a ship moving towards us, leading us, actually, on an intercept course. It’s in the west moving at almost thirty knots.”
“Enemy frigate,” Kye said. “I need its location.”
“Bearing two-six-one, range twenty-two miles.”
Kye placed the radio on the navigation table and watched a lieutenant scribble the adversarial combatant’s data onto the trace paper.
“If we turn to intercept the storm at its closest point, how long until we reach its edge?”
“Fifty minutes, sir.”
“And how long until the frigate reaches us on that geometry?”
“Just over an hour, but it’ll be in weapons range before we reach the storm.”
“This will be tight, but it will work out.”
Half an hour later, the trawler reported seeing the frigate, and Kye had grown weary of the enemy combatant’s repeated, unanswered hails to the fishing ship.
“Seal the bridge,” he said.
Exiting the darkness, he stepped onto the starboard bridge wing. The angle of approach to the frigate required that he move closer to the trawler’s bow to hide behind the escort ship’s bulk.