The hiss of steam filled the section, and he felt heat waft over him. With his jumpsuit unzipped and flopped over his waist, a technician Cahill had recruited from a civilian power plant exposed a sweat-marked tee-shirt. He was examining gauges on a control station as his partner, an Australian Navy recruit, climbed up from the lower deck and joined him.
“Terry, what’s your opinion about this fake shell of a ship?”
“It’s fine, as long as it works.”
“What if it fails?”
“Then, we’ll take it off and fight our way out of whatever mess we’re in. But let’s give it a chance, shall we, mate?”
“Sure. I don’t see why not.”
“Secure all the MESMA plants except for plant one. Tell the rest to shut down in the next fifteen minutes. Let the guys get some sleep.”
Twenty-five meters and two MESMA plants later, Cahill bid farewell to his third MESMA team and ducked through another watertight door. He walked under the wide air ducts that supplied a large gas turbine engine.
A man in coveralls seated before a control panel turned and looked up. Cahill nodded, kept walking, and glanced at the top of the electric motor, which the Taiwanese builders had sunk into a custom recess for the Goliath. The motor drove the starboard shaft, which stretched below his view through the tapered keel and through the stern bearing at the ship’s tail.
He then opened a hatch above him that Renard had retrofitted onto the engine room’s slope, reached upward to handles, and pulled himself through.
Closing the hatch, he noticed the quietness of the weapons bay. He climbed a ladder and entered his ship’s aft space.
The railgun was unimposing, deceptive in its lethality. With its barrel aiming forward, the weapon system impressed him with its compact size.
A smallish man who reclined in a cot reading a book under a recessed curve in the hull looked to him.
“Hi, Terry.”
“Good evening, mate.”
“At least that fake ship doesn’t block the view back here.”
“Right. Pierre made the windows and the radar elements flush with the fake bulkheads.”
“True enough, but I hate to think what happens if we need the cannons.”
“You’d just blow holes in the plastic, wouldn’t you?”
“Roger that. That’s what you pay me to do — blow holes in things. I’m up for it.”
“Great. Everything’s in order. I guess I’ll hit me rack. Are you going to stay here and sleep?”
“It’s the quietest place on the ship when I’m not blowing things up.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Night, Terry.”
Four hours later, Cahill’s alarm rousted him from a forgotten dream. After freshening up, he joined Walker on the bridge. The facade surrounding his ship enshrouded him with an artificial blackness.
“Now I’m really feeling claustrophobic.”
“It was weird watching the cranes pile the containers over me,” Walker said.
“We’re in a coffin.”
“Want to see a picture from above?”
“Sure.”
Walker nodded and pointed at Cahill’s screen.
“Pierre sent it. Call it up.”
From above, the Goliath-Specter tandem appeared like a freighter with its bridge covering the Specter’s hidden conning tower and multi-colored containers spread over the decks.
“Impressive,” Cahill said. “Pierre’s outdone himself.”
“Give him a call. It’s time.”
Cahill opened the channel to the Specter.
“Pierre?” he said.
“Good morning,” Renard said.
“You’ve done an impressive job with the camouflage.”
“Thank you. Are you ready to deploy?”
“I am. I don’t like that this facade blinds me, but I suppose a submarine commander can’t complain about it.”
“You have cameras mounted to cover your every angle. I suggest you use them to avoid jagged rocks on the way out. And stay as deep as possible to avoid embedding my conning tower into the roof.”
“Good point. We’ll use the outboards.”
He sank the transport ship within a meter of the rocky bottom.
“Depth is twenty-two meters,” he said. “Engaging the outboards to drive us toward the exit. Coming to one and a half knots.”
As the ship crept forward, he pointed it at the black hole of the submerged egress tunnel. Shadows engulfed his fake freighter’s centerline bow.
“How big of a head start do we have?” Cahill asked.
“You mean over the Akula?”
“Yes.”
“A day and a half, roughly, by the time we break out of here.”
“Break out?”
“What else would you call it?”
Cahill pondered the actions he would take in escaping the island free of Chinese submarine, shipping, and satellite detection.
“It’s a perfect description. I just didn’t think I’d hear you call it that.”
“Believe me,” Renard said. “If I could come up with a better description, I would. But I’m afraid that breaking out is the best explanation of what we’re about to do.”
CHAPTER 5
Jake entered the Keelung command center and felt a dozen eyes rise from an electronic navigation chart. The Taiwanese military’s chief of staff stood straight.
“Welcome, Mister Slate,” Admiral Danzhao Ye said. “For once, we’re meeting free of a crisis.”
Ye nodded, and the officer who had escorted Jake into the command center departed.
“Maybe not a crisis,” Jake said. “But one false move and we’ll end up in one.”
“Let’s avoid that. Come see the chart.”
Jake traversed the floor, stopped beside Ye, and shook his hand. Ye ran his thumb across a controller, and bright icons representing shipping dimmed. A baby blue line marking an undersea hydrophone system rose to connect Taiwan to the nearest Japanese island.
“The sound surveillance arrays have remained operational since you were last here,” Ye said. “They’ll provide a line of protection for the Goliath-Specter tandem during its egress from the Pengjia islet.”
“How’s the Chinese mainland naval activity?”
As the admiral wiggled his thumb across the controller’s touchpad, red outlines of hostile surface combatants appeared.
“Calm relative to what you’re used to. We see the usual surface patrols in the straits, but we believe that they stopped dedicating a submarine to monitoring Pengjia two years ago.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“The concern is that they may have reversed that policy when we leased the space to Mister Renard.”
“So, there’s a submarine watching Pengjia?”
“Unknown. Our patrol craft haven’t detected anything, but a Yuan-class submarine has been added to their order of battle and remains unaccounted for.”
“It could be anywhere.”
“True, but we take precautions. Your operations off the Korean Peninsula weren’t unnoticed by the mainland.”
“What sort of precautions?”
“Just one, really. The hydrazine system at Pengjia has been modified to create diversions. Pipes have been run in a pattern fanning out from the egress tunnel. A submerged vessel can choose a corridor to depart the islet while surrounded by a wall of concealing bubbles.”
Jake recalled the chart around the islet.
“But the water gets too deep too fast to mount piping out to any useful distance.”
“We addressed that by using a light and flexile carbon polymer that’s neutrally buoyant. The piping floats and drifts slightly with the ocean current, and each corridor extends two miles.”