Besides, Hong Kong and Taiwan both were the commercial jewels of the west Pacific Rim. Strangling their economies for the sake of ideology would quite literally be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Garrett decided that was the most comforting thought. The PRC wasn't about to start a war when they could win what they wanted through negotiations, persistence, and patience. Seawolf would be safe enough inside Victoria Harbor; after all, an attack on her would bring down upon the PRC the full weight of America's military, a confrontation that Beijing simply could not afford to face.
He did wish, though, that he could shake some of the scenes from last night's movie… especially those about an American warship isolated far up a Chinese river, surrounded by hostile forces.
The tug led them to the left, into the harbor in front of the district known as the Admiralty, beneath the former Government House and the looming towers of the Bank of China and the Bank of America. Other warships, Garrett noted, were already at their moorings— the British carrier Hermes, a Russian Krivak II-class frigate, and the Jean de Vienne, a French guided-missile destroyer.
He noticed another foreign vessel in port… not a warship, exactly, but an interesting visitor nonetheless. She was a Russian Onega-class GKS vessel. GKS stood for Gidroakusticheskoye Kontrol'noye Sudno, meaning "Hydroacoustic Monitoring Ship," a seagoing sensor platform designed specifically to detect, record, and measure the acoustical signatures of other ships. A number of her crewmen were on deck as the Seawolf cruised slowly past, watching the American submarine. He wondered if they'd learned the Seawolf was paying a visit and arranged to be here just so they could listen to the submarine's near-silence. Maybe they were here by chance.
Seawolf's deck party swarmed smartly up out of the hatches and stood by to handle lines. With Captain Lawless giving commands over the intercom hookup from the sail bridge to the control room, the submarine gentled herself up to a pier, port-side to, where a Chinese shore party waited with monkey fists ready. As the Seawolf edged in close enough, the monkey fists — large balls of heavy, knotted cable attached to slender tethers called "small stuff" — were tossed across the water and the sub's deck, where the line handlers could grab them and haul in the heavier mooring lines waiting coiled on the pier. Within a few moments Seawolf was spring-tied to bollards fore and aft, and Lawless had given the order, "All stop, now secure engine."
A small cluster of Chinese government officials, customs police, and military officers stood at the head of the pier, quietly waiting. "I'd better get the formalities out of the way, XO," Lawless said. "If you would address the matter of security?"
"Aye aye, sir."
He clambered back down the sail hatch, descending the ladder to the control deck.
"Mr. Garrett?" One of the kids from the radio room was waiting for him as he stepped off the ladder and into the control room.
"Yes, Zollner. What is it?"
"We went ahead and started taking in radio traffic as soon as we surfaced. Got this for you. It's a family gram."
"Oh?" He accepted the message printout from Zollner.
Family grams had evolved as a means of letting submarine crew members stay in touch with family and loved ones ashore. Normally they were reserved for enlisted personnel and their families, especially for crews aboard the big boomers that might be at sea for months at a time without surfacing to permit normal ship-to-shore communications. On a typical cruise, each man was allowed to get about eight fifty-word family grams. Sometimes they arrived in code that only the captain could decrypt… so that he could decide whether to give the crewman news from home about a death or a dear John.
This one was dated May 17—yesterday — which was pretty quick. Sometimes, censors ashore would hold up family gram transmissions, again to check them for news that might adversely affect a member of the sub's crew.
DEAREST TOM. JUST LEARNED ON WCN YOU'RE GOING TO HONG KONG. I HAVE LAYOVER THERE MONDAY NIGHT THROUGH WEDNESDAY, CAN WE MEET FOR DINNER AND A LION? NO ROOMMATES THIS TIME. I'LL BE AT AIRPORT REGAL, LANTAU, AFTER 2000 MONDAY CALL WHEN YOU CAN. ILY. KAZUKO.
Garrett took a deep breath. Forty-six words, just under the limit, filled with promise. "ILY" was standard family gram code, turning the three words of "I love you" into a single word. The reference to the lion, however, was purely their own, personal code… a reference to the time when Garrett had stalked on all fours across the bed, roaring like a lion, before pouncing on the squealing Kazuko.
And the no-roommates bit was delightfully self-explanatory.
Kazuko was going to be in Hong Kong? It would be good to see her, assuming he could get an evening free. They'd done this before several times when he'd been traveling on ONI business to the Philippines, Bangkok, and Singapore, and she by coincidence was working flights to those same cities.
The one thing that was disquieting about the message was her reference to WCN. He didn't like the idea that the World Cable Network news had learned and announced Seawolf's visit to Hong Kong almost at the same time that the 'Wolf herself had received the orders. What the hell was going on?
It was something he would have to take up with the skipper. For now, though, he needed to make sure that Seawolf's security detachments were clear on their orders. No one was going to get close to the Seawolf while she was in port.
Not without a hell of a fight.
"Aw, man, it was one hell of a fight!" Chief Toynbee leaned back against one of the mess tables as he regaled the sailors gathered around on the recollected joys of liberty in Hong Kong. "The British Royal Marines, they're pretty good, see. As good as our Marines, or at least that's what they'll tell you. Our jarheads claim descent from the Royal Marines.
"Anyway, there we were, toe-to-toe with the queen's finest, and neither of us about to back down. One of 'em made a crack about 'colonials living in sewer pipes,' and that was it. We waded in and decked 'em!"
"How many Brits did you say there were, Chief?" Quartermaster Chief Thompson asked.
"Five of them, against the four of us. And we gave as good as we got, let me tell ya!"
"Now, the way I heard it," Thompson said with a laugh, "was that it was you and three other guys against two British Marines. And they mopped the deck with you!"
"That's a damned lie! Who said such a thing?"
"Doberly, for one. He was there!"
"Shit! Dobie can't count to two without using the fingers of both hands. And he transferred out when we were at Yokosuka. You gonna believe me, or a lying sonuvabitch who ain't even here?"
"Dobie said he got fifteen stitches in his scalp when one of the Brit jarheads clobbered him with a bottle. And he said you ended up in the sick bay aboard the Inchon for a week with a concussion!"
"It was only three days, damn it. I told ya he was a lyin' sonuvabitch!"
"So after you mopped the deck with them," HM1 Ritthouser said with a grin, "what happened?"
"The SPs showed up and cleared the joint out."