"Next slide, please."
This photograph, taken from a different angle, showed the Huludao Shipyard again… and the same pier. Both Kilos, however, were gone.
"This one, as you see from the time stamp, was taken yesterday morning, at about zero-seven-hundred hours, local time. And next… "
Another repeat, this time Jiangnan. Again the two Kilos were gone.
"As of yesterday morning, gentlemen, the Chinese submarine fleet appears to have set sail. All of it. It's the same story at every port on the Chinese coast. Their attack submarines, both nuclear and diesel, and including all of their new Russian Kilos, are now at sea.
"And we don't know where they are headed."
"My God," someone in the audience said, the words startling in the shocked silence.
"Captain Oster has already told us about the missile fired at Chiang Kai-shek International this morning," Gordon continued. "Beijing has been steadily escalating the crisis over Taiwan for the past six months, and it is possible that this is the payoff. One of the scenarios they're looking at back in Washington right now is the possibility that the PRC is about to invade Taiwan. Ten Kilo-class submarines would be sufficient to shut down all commercial and military sea traffic in the Strait of Formosa. If they can block the Seventh Fleet from Taiwan waters, they could well have a free hand for an invasion.
"Another possibility we're looking at is the idea that the Kilos have all been dispatched to either the Paracel Islands or, more likely, the Spratly Islands, in order to secure the PRC claim to those regions.
"In either case, the Chinese are gambling on the American reluctance to engage them in a full, stand-up war. The War on Terrorism is tying down a large percentage of our military assets now, worldwide. Beijing may have decided that we're overextended and that this is the best opportunity they've had in a good many years to rush in and grab Taiwan out from under our noses. Once the PLA is entrenched on Taiwan, of course, we're not going to be able to evict them without a protracted and extremely bitter engagement on the land, something Washington wants to avoid at all costs. If we're going to stop the bastards, it has to be at sea, before they land.
"And that, we think, is why they have acquired those
Kilos. One carrier battle group could block a Chinese invasion force across the strait without too much trouble. But even a single Kilo, operating in stealthy mode, would be almost impossible to detect and could play havoc with our CBG. Ten kilos could destroy the Seventh Fleet."
"The hell they could," Admiral Kohl rumbled, but Gordon could still feel the wheels turning behind those angry eyes. Attack submarines were the greatest threat faced by a modern carrier battle group. A CBG had plenty of aircraft, missiles, and CIWS Phoenix Gatling mounts to take out incoming missiles, but the only counters to hostile submarines were the group's ASW assets — LAMP helos, Viking S-3 aircraft, and, most important, the pair of Los Angeles-class hunter-killer submarines attached to each group.
But the Kilos were so damned silent. Finding them all before they had the range on an American carrier might be almost impossible, even with the vast array of American military technology at the battle group's disposal.
"We have one more piece of bad news," Gordon told the group. He waited a moment for the murmur of conversation to die down before adding, "Slide, please."
Again the screen showed a satellite view of a busy naval facility, with cranes, docks, and pier-side buildings. A submarine was moored to one of the piers.
This one was different from the Kilos, longer, thicker, heavier, and with a long, low, and streamlined-looking sail. Aft, a teardrop-shaped nacelle rode atop a vertical fin.
"Gentlemen," Gordon said, "this is a Walker-class boat."
A few chuckles from around the briefing table greeted the weak joke. The nuclear attack sub on the screen had been first deployed by the old Soviet Union in 1984, just before the discovery of the treason by the infamous Walker Spy Ring.
John Walker had been a Navy chief warrant officer who, from 1968 to 1985, had quietly funneled to his Soviet KGB handlers over one million top secret naval communications and the decryption keys to read them. During those seventeen years, he'd recruited his brother, a lieutenant commander in the submarine service; his son, a communications specialist; and Jerry Whitworth, a Navy radioman. The Walker Spy Ring, as the family business became known, had produced a hemorrhage of the Navy's most vital secrets. The Soviet defector Vitaly Yurchenko had claimed to the CIA that had the Soviet Union and the United States gotten into a war in the 1970s or 1980s, Russia would have won simply because of the importance of the material the Walker Ring was channeling to Moscow. Walker's treason had been at least as important and as far-reaching for the Soviets in their understanding of U.S. secret communications as Ultra had been for the Allies in World War II.
A vital corollary of that understanding was that the Soviets had learned in detail from the Walker information just how vulnerable their submarines were to detection, how easily U.S. sonar and SOSUS nets could track them… and how far behind the Americans they were in submarine technology.
The Office of Naval Intelligence had been working for a long time to assess the damage done to the United States by the Walker ring. The full depth and breadth of that damage might well never be known, but one outcome of Walker's treason was on the projection screen now.
"The Russians call her the 'Barrakuda,' " Gordon went on. "NATO dubbed her 'Akula,' the Russian word for shark, after we ran out of phonetic alphabet code names like Sierra, Tango, and Foxtrot. Ten thousand tons' displacement submerged. One hundred thirteen meters long. Top speed submerged estimated at thirty-five to forty knots, but it may be considerably higher.
"And gentlemen, she is as quiet as Death himself. There are many in ONI and the CIA who firmly believe that the Russians built this submarine using technology made possible by the Walker Spy Ring — hence the name 'Walker class.' There are also some in the submarine community who believe the Akula is superior in all respects to our own Los Angeles boats, that it may even be better than the Seawolf."
Gordon didn't add what many in the room knew but was still highly classified — that he himself had faced a Soviet Akula back in 1987, during a sneak-and-peek mission with the Pittsburgh into the Soviet bastion of the Sea of Okhotsk. A Russian Akula skipper had been just a bit too eager and pursued him into Japanese territorial waters; the Russian boat had been destroyed, but it had been a near thing.
What still counted most in sub versus sub engagements, rather than the technology, was the skill and daring of the men on board, officers and enlisted alike.
"This photo was taken two days ago by a spy satellite over Guangzhou… that's Canton, up the Pearl River from Hong Kong. That is the Guangzhou Shipyard.
"What we do not yet know is whether this Akula submarine in Canton is a Russian boat on a show-the-flag visit or one the Russians have sold to the PRC. There have been rumors floating about lately that the Russians were putting together an arms deal with China, one worth trillions of rubles, and that the deal included a number of Kilo-class diesel boats and something else, something better and bigger and far more deadly.