Gordon could only nod understanding. The E-2C Hawkeye was essentially identical to the C-2, a twin-turboprop design with folding wings for carrier stowage, but with most of its interior space taken up by electronics. The naval equivalent of the big Air Force E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft, Hawkeyes mounted a powerful APS-125 radar inside a rotating radome above the fuselage and served both as radar pickets and to coordinate combat communications among ships and aircraft.
"Don't worry, Captain! We'll have you down in one piece and airborne again in a jiff!"
He nodded again and wished the copilot would leave him alone. He was trying so hard not to be sick.
The string of muttered obscenities from the pilot grew fiercer. "Where the fuck is that damned postage stamp?" he heard the man say aloud, and decided he must mean the aircraft carrier they were hunting for. It was tough enough to spot something as tiny as a carrier in the middle of all this ocean. Add midnight darkness and a howling storm…
"Okay! Okay! Got 'em!" the copilot said. "Call the ball."
"I'll give them a fucking ball. Okay. On track.
Easy… "
Gordon tried to peer past the pilot's shoulder but could see absolutely nothing except blackness. What the hell were they looking at? The Greyhound slewed sharply sideways and the swearing upped a notch, the pilot battling the wind through his yoke and rudder control pedals.
Suddenly, it felt as though the seat dropped away beneath Gordon, then slammed up hard to meet him coming down. There was a shriek of tires on steel, a surge of acceleration as the pilot threw the throttles full-forward just in case they missed their catch… and a final, violent yank as the Greyhound's tailhook snagged a taut arrestor cable on the deck.
The pilot cut back the throttles and began taxiing the aircraft through the storm. They were down, and Gordon still couldn't see much outside but blackness. No… wait. There were some lights, high up and to the right… probably the pri-fly bridge overlooking the flight deck.
"Told you we'd get ya down in one piece, sir!"
"Just fucking wonderful" was all Gordon could say.
Because now that he was down, he had to change aircraft and go up into that mess again.
Some days it didn't pay to get out of bed… particularly those days when you never got to go to bed in the first place.
19
At forty knots, Seawolf cruised east across the stretch of shallow ocean between Hong Kong and Taiwan in less than eight hours. The Penghu Islands — until recently known by their Portuguese name of the Pescadores, or Fishermen's Islands — were a scattering of low, flat islands and atolls stretched across the Formosa Strait about halfway between the mainland and the southern tip of Taiwan. They were of little importance to anyone save the local tourism industry and as a median strip in the strait, dividing it into the broader west channel along the mainland coast and the narrower but deeper east channel next to Taiwan.
Garrett had been seeking the deeper water of the eastern passage. The average depth offshore from Hong Kong was fifty meters or less; west of the Penghu Islands, the bottom averaged twenty meters and shoaled to as little as ten meters — far too shallow for the Seawolf to remain submerged.
Which meant those waters were too shallow for Chinese subs as well, and they would be looking for the same, deep waters. The undersea valley between the Penghu Islands and Taiwan would be prime hunting grounds for PLA Navy Kilos.
The sun was high when Seawolf came to periscope depth. Garrett walked the scope, confirming that the horizon was empty. A recent line of storms had passed through on their way into Asia, and the broken clouds caught the golden morning colors and scattered them across the sky.
The sky was filled with radio waves as well as color. As soon as Seawolf's radio mast broke the surface, the radio shack began recording multiple repeated calls. Most urgent was a series of coded messages giving Sea-wolf a forward controller contact, code named Crystal Ball. When contact was established via UHF, Crystal Ball turned out to be a Navy E-2C Hawkeye off the Stennis, serving as a forward battle controller and as coordinator for the Stennis's far-flung air squadrons.
Garrett was not surprised when he heard the voice at the other end of the line as he pressed a radio handset to his ear. "Commander Gordon! What the hell are you doing out here?"
"Trying to get what is laughingly called 'the big picture' by the Beltway insiders," Gordon replied. His voice sounded worn and very tired, and Garrett guessed the Naval Intelligence officer had been awake for a long, long time.
Well, Gordon had been a submariner once, and he knew what port-and-starboard watches were like.
"And what does the big picture look like so far?"
"Like shit. The PLA is out to prove that they rule the Strait of Formosa, and is threatening everyone else with death and destruction if they try venturing through. Four hours ago they closed the strait to all shipping, military and civilian, and set out to prove it by sinking a Filipino freighter and a Japanese oil tanker."
"Missile attacks?"
"Negative. Submarines. We think the Kilos have just started earning their keep. Which is what you're going to do. Confirmation just came down the line. You have temporary command of Seawolf."
The words scarcely sounded real. Even a temporary command was more than he'd been expecting. There were, he imagined, plenty of people back in the World who'd have preferred to see another skipper flown out to the Seawolf, but this was war, and every moment counted.
"Thank you, Commander. So… it sounds like the Seawolf is going to go sub hunting."
"Affirmative… but you have another mission first."
"That being?"
"A platoon of U.S. Navy SEALs — sixteen men — plus ten Taiwanese commandos are stranded on the mainland near Xiamen. J-SOCOM is organizing an extraction with Mark-5s, but we want Seawolf to move in and offer support. The Mark-5s may not be able to penetrate the coastal defenses."
"That is damned shallow water in there," Garrett said. "Seawolf may have to walk in."
"You can fly in if you have to, but get those people out of there."
"What's the rush? I thought you'd want SEAL teams on the ground right now."
"These boys went in just ahead of the current unpleasantness and were basically overlooked when State began playing kissy-face with Beijing. Their Taiwanese opposite numbers walked into a firefight, our boys bailed them out… and they're coming out now with wounded and low ammo."
"We'll get them, Commander."
"Good. I know you will. Retrieving those SEALs is your primary mission. Your secondary mission — which you will pursue so long as it does not interfere with your primary mission — is to find every goddamn Kilo you can run to ground and blow it out of the water. We suspect at least one Kilo is in the AO near Kin-men. She took part in the sinking of the Jarrett last night and is believed to be positioning herself to interdict traffic in the Xiamen area. We want that bastard sunk."
"Aye aye, sir. Any other good news?"
"Only this: You have two carrier battle groups coming into the theater within the next twenty-four hours — the Stennis and the Kitty Hawk. Kitty Hawk will be taking up station off the northern tip of Taiwan. Stennis will be stationed off the south tip. Neither carrier can be allowed to enter the battle zone until we are certain the submarine threat has been eliminated or greatly reduced. The CBGs have their own ASW assets, of course, but they will not be able to cope with ten Kilos. We want you to cause some attrition on the enemy forces before the big boys arrive on the scene."