"Roger that." Hell. Every Chinese submarine along the coast would be eager to score an American carrier. Once they knew those CBGs were on the scene, the underwater stretches of the Formosa Strait were going to look like rush hour.
"You'll have some help from other U.S. submarine forces in the area. The Jefferson City and the Salt Lake City will be arriving ahead of the Stennis CBG. They should be in your AO within the next eight hours. The Cheyenne is en route from the Indian Ocean and should be in your area late tomorrow. Ah… and your old friend, the Pittsburgh, will be attached to the Kitty Hawk group. Try not to run into her with the Seawolf."
"Fuck you, sir," he replied in a deadpan voice. "Fuck you very much." He saw the radioman, who was jacked into the conversation, struggling to control his expression and wondered how long it would take for the story to spread throughout the boat.
"This is where we find out if all the money we spent on the Seawolf was worth it," Gordon said. "Good luck, Tom."
"Thank you, sir. We'll do our best."
"I know you will, Tom. Congratulations on your confirmation."
"Thank you." He didn't let himself think about the possibility of temporary becoming permanent. There were too many variables, too much in the way of politics involved. They wouldn't let him keep the Seawolf once this fracas was over, but another command, perhaps? Another L.A. boat?
This was at least a golden opportunity to get his career back on track. The promotion boards might select him for O-5 yet.
That was a worry for the future, though. Right now, it sounded like Seawolf was the only submarine asset in the Strait of Formosa, and that was damned thin odds. Ten to one? Worse, when you counted the Chinese Akula loose out there, the former Nevolin, and infinitely worse when you remembered that even before their recent Russian shopping spree, the PLA Navy had boasted a submarine fleet of ninety-one old Romeo-class diesel boats, fifteen even more ancient Whiskeys, plus eight or ten of their more modern Han- and Ming-class nukes. Whiskey and Romeo attack boats might be antiques by today's standards, but in a defensive role, dashing out from coastal hides to strike at shipping or passing American naval forces or lying in silent ambush among the tangled labyrinths of coastal islands from Hainan to Luda, they were still deadly. The People's Republic was not yet able to project her submarine force across oceans as easily as the United States, but her submarine forces made her a dangerous regional player and the obvious mistress of her corner of the world ocean should the United States decide to pull back from the western Pacific.
Not an option. Quite aside from any vital interests the United States possessed in the region, Garrett had strong personal reasons not to want to see the Chinese dragon swallow this quarter of the planet.
Kazuko would be back in Tokyo by now. He was glad she was out of the fire zone.
"Mr. Simms," he said as he left the radio shack and reentered the control room. "Plot us a new course."
"Aye aye, sir," the navigator said, looking up from his chart table. "Where to?"
"Into harm's way, Mr. Simms. Into harm's way…. "
They called him Sinbad.
Hai-tziun shan-tzo Hsing Ling Ma — the rank was the equivalent of a Russian kapitan pervogo ranga or an American naval captain — was something of a celebrity within the ranks of the PLA Navy. He was an ethnic Hui, for one thing, a Chinese Muslim of Eurasian descent, from the province of Yunnan, near China's border with Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. Such high rank rarely came to non-Mandarin officers, and only exceptional performance through the course of an exceptional career could have brought him to the post he now held — commander of the Akula-class nuclear attack submarine Changcheng, the Great Wall.
His nickname actually was the Chinese equivalent of Sinbad — Ma Sanbao, a figure unknown to the West but something of a historical icon to people in southern China, Burma, and other parts of southeast Asia. The original Ma Sanbao had been born in 1371 and, like Hsing, was also a Hui from Yunnan. "Ma" was the Chinese equivalent of "Mohammad," and Sanbao's original name had been Ma Ho.
As a child Ho had been castrated by Chinese troops chasing Mongols out of the southern provinces — a curious custom they'd evolved to pacify the male locals, whether Mongol or not — and made an orderly in the Chinese army. Perhaps because of the hormone imbalance, he had grown to great height — probably not the eight feet legend attributed to him, but a giant, certainly, among his own people. By the time he was twenty-five, he'd won influence as chief of all of the emperor's thousands of eunuchs, made powerful friends within the imperial court, and been given the name "Cheng."
In 1405, three years after the ascent of a new emperor to the nascent Ming throne, he was made an admiral. Eighty-some years later, an obscure Genoese navigator in the service of Spain was given the grandiose title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," but that admiral had only three ships in his command; Cheng Ho's fleet numbered 317 vessels, many of them far larger and more seaworthy than Colombo's caravels.
The Ming Empire was undeniably the world naval power of its day. They possessed enormous fleets, with magnificent ships far larger and more modern than anything yet developed in the primitive backwaters of Europe, vessels with three decks and towering masts capable of ocean voyages of thousands of miles. Between 1405 and 1433, Admiral Cheng Ho set forth on seven separate voyages — the original "Seven Voyages of Sinbad" — which took him to Ceylon and the Persian Gulf, to Arabia, to Egypt, and perhaps as far as the southern tip of Africa.
There were even rumors that the Ming fleets discovered new lands far to the east as well; certainly, they reached the southern shores of Africa from the east fifty years before Vasco da Gama did the same from the west and were within a historical footnote of discovering Europe. Had they done so, world history undeniably would have been vastly different, and the whole long, sad, and bloody chronicle of European colonization of Asia, of opium wars and puppet governments, of western hegemony, the Boxer Rebellion, and centuries of shame and national loss of face would never have happened.
For one brief, gleaming moment of history China had unknowingly held within her grasp the key to world domination. The ascent of a new emperor to the Ming throne in 1433, however, ended all possibility of that. Turning inward, suspicious of foreigners and foreign-barbarian ideas, the Ming Dynasty had ceased its explorations, disbanded its fleets, and even passed laws against building ships of more than one deck. The magnificent fleet that might have circumnavigated a world rotted on the beach, and Cheng Ho vanished, his name erased from the records by jealous, vengeful, or fearful enemies.
China could have discovered the West rather than the other way around, and how might that have changed the course of world history? Hsing Ma had used that argument frequently while campaigning for a stronger, deep-water navy for the PRC and especially for a stronger submarine force, one that could project Chinese power as far afield as Europe or the American West Coast. That, undoubtedly, at least as much as his religion and ethnic heritage, was why he'd received the nickname of Ma Sanbao.