The Seawolf was running south through the Strait of Formosa, midway, roughly, between Taiwan and the coast of Mainland China. She had arrived on-station that morning after an all-night passage south from Yokosuka. She was submerged, moving at a depth of three hundred feet, while her various sonar arrays strained useful data from the welter of noise around her. Contact Sierra Five-five was about six to seven miles to the east-north-east, in the direction of the Taiwan coast.
Garrett handed the headset back. "Good listening, Queenie," he told the third-class sonar tech. "That's a tough one to differentiate."
"Th-Thank you, sir!" He blinked owlishly behind his glasses. "Thanks a lot!"
"Stay on the bastard," Toynbee added. "I don't want him to so much as stealth-fart without our hearing the bubbles."
In the control room, Lawless was giving orders to come to periscope depth. The command was relayed back from Lieutenant Tollini, "Make my depth, periscope depth, aye aye, sir." He then spoke quietly to the sailor on duty at the dive planes station; the sailor pulled back gently on the aircraft-style control yoke, and the deck tilted slightly beneath their feet. Seawolf was moving up out of the darkness, gradually approaching the light of day far above.
Lawless looked across the control room as Garrett walked toward the chart tables behind the periscope housings. "I'll want to radio this one in to Mother Hen," he said. "They can decide whether that trawler is a PLA decoy or an innocent fisherman being used by that Kilo."
"I'd put my money on the former, sir," Garrett said. "That trawler has his nets down, but he's going at a hell of a clip for fishing. He must be doing twelve knots, maybe a little better."
"Agreed," Lawless said. "But it's not our job to sort 'em out. That's a job for the Taiwan Navy."
Garrett could see that Lawless was playing this very strictly by the book. Submarine officers were by nature conservative, unwilling to take risks with the lives of their men and the safety of their boats on the line. But they also tended to temper that conservative nature with a daring commensurate with their skill, the daring that in World War II had let Gunter Prien slip the U-47 into the heavily guarded British base at Scapa Flow to torpedo the British battleship Royal Oak… or a host of American sub skippers to penetrate Tokyo Bay itself. In the Cold War, U.S. submarine skippers had repeatedly taken their commands deep inside Soviet territorial waters to spy on their arch rival… and to glean bits of intelligence firsthand that might have proven invaluable if war had ever broken out between East and West.
Garrett had no doubts about Lawless's skill as a submarine skipper, but so far he hadn't shown the initiative, the sheer guts, that Garrett associated with good attack boat drivers. He was acting more like a boomer skip-per — the captain of a ballistic missile submarine, which was supposed to stay hidden, out of sight and off the enemy's sonar displays, with survival as the watchword.
His assessment, of course, wasn't entirely fair. Garrett knew that Seawolf's mission required stealth, patience, and a hunter's cunning… which included the ability to observe without being observed, to watch without being seen.
He couldn't help watching Lawless command the Seawolf without wondering what he would do in the same situation. In this case, he thought his best option would have been to approach the new contacts — especially the surface contact, Sierra Five-four — and take them under direct observation through Seawolf's Mark 18 scope. Were the crewmen aboard that trawler fishermen, or would he see uniforms? Weapons? A hightech radio mast that had no business being mounted on board a civilian fishing junk? The visual inspection by a good, old-fashioned Mark I Mod 0 human eyeball could provide invaluable additional data that went a long way toward expanding the wealth of purely electronic data gathered by the Seawolf's sensor suites.
And yet, Lawless was right. By simply identifying the trawler as a possible PLA screening vessel, he'd given the local navy something to go on. It was Taipei's responsibility now to stop and board that ship, or let it continue on its way.
He felt the deck leveling beneath his feet. "Leveling off now at five-eight feet," the diving officer announced. "Periscope depth."
"Very well," Lawless said, stepping to the periscope platform. "Up scope."
The periscope slid up in its housing, and Lawless rode the handles as they opened, walking the scope in a complete circle as he scanned the surface overhead. "We're clear," he said. "Radio Shack! Let's raise Mother Hen."
"Radio Shack, aye!"
Mother Hen was the code name for the submarine command facility on Taiwan, which was linked electronically and via satellite both with elements of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and with Pearl Harbor. They would relay Seawolf's sneak-and-peek discoveries to the appropriate channels.
"Conn, E-2 sensor suite. We're being painted. Can't tell if they've fingered us yet, but we're getting a lot of military-grade radar out there."
"Roger that. Keep monitoring."
"Conn, Radio Shack. We're patched through to Mother Hen."
"Very well." Lawless began rattling off the specs of the two latest sonar contacts, giving ranges, bearings, and probable identification, and recommending an overflight by local ASW assets.
"Are we going to track that Kilo, sir?" Garrett asked.
"If your intelligence is accurate, Mr. Garrett, there are nine other Kilos out here and possibly an Akula as well. We can't waste time following one lone PLA boat. We'll wait for the ASW people to pick them up and continue with our assigned patrol. By the book, Mr. Garrett, by the book."
By the book. Garrett had about decided that if he heard the captain's pet phrase one more time, he was going to Section 8 right out of the service — that mythological medical classification that said you were too nuts to be in the military. He shook his head ruefully at the thought. He'd had his chance to get out with some remaining measure of dignity three years ago and turned it down cold. It was way too late to think about that now.
"Captain, Radio Shack" came over the 1MC. "This is the captain. Go ahead."
"Sir, we have incoming SATCOM radio traffic. It's headed 'Titan Spear,' 'Top Secret,' and 'Urgent.' "
"On my way."
Lawless left the control room. Leaving the OOD in charge, Garrett returned to the Sonar Shack to listen to the subtle thud and rumble of the presumed Chinese diesel sub. A Titan Spear message meant something from Washington and from pretty high up on the chain of command. Garrett wondered, though, why the message had been sent by UHF transmission, especially if it was Top Secret.
Staying in touch with the Navy's fleet of submarines, especially when they were submerged, had long been a tough technical problem. There were a variety of communications modes: VLF, LF, HF, UHF, ELF, and even blue-green OSCAR laser pulses fired from geostationary communications satellites.
Extremely Low Frequency transmissions could penetrate the upper levels of the ocean and be received by a submarine at depths of a hundred meters or more. Because the wavelength of an ELF signal was so long— about four thousand kilometers — the transmission rate was painfully slow. It could take hours to send just a few characters, and the method was usually reserved for "bell-ringer" messages, an alert to come to shallow depths and receive a longer message by VLF or other means.
Other modes of communication required the sub to trail a long antenna in its wake or to use a buoy that drew the antenna up to within a few meters of the surface. Very Low Frequency transmissions were routinely received this way, and most communications with submerged submarines on a deployment were handled through this mode. Low-frequency, high-frequency, and ultrahigh frequency transmissions could only be picked up by the sub when its radio mast was extended above the surface, from periscope depth. Optical Submarine Communications by Aerospace Relay— OSCAR — was still experimental, expensive, and limited in scope, but the Seawolf was equipped to receive blue-green laser messages and could do so without trailing long receiving antennae or buoys.