Perhaps as a reward for his diligence in promoting the PLA Navy — or perhaps simply because he was a strong political supporter of Admiral Li Guofeng— Hsing had received the coveted command of the Changcheng and orders to take her into action against the Americans. The U.S. Seventh Fleet had intervened in Chinese affairs in the Strait of Formosa more than once since 1949. This time, it was vowed, the balance of naval power would be in the hands of the Middle Kingdom. Key to winning that power, however, was the destruction of the new American submarine Seawolf. Then other American submarines would have to move into the strait… and movement meant noise, and an advantage in any undersea game of xiang qi.
Seawolf, unfortunately, had eluded the Tai Feng at Hong Kong, where trapping and capturing her would have been easy, and recovery efforts simpler if the attempt had ended with the American's destruction. Now the enemy vessel was loose in the Taiwan Haixia — the Formosa Strait — and trapping her would be difficult. Fortunately, Hsing thought, he held several key advantages.
First of all, until the American carrier fleets arrived, the Seawolf would be largely alone, save for ASW assets flying off of Taiwan. With the Changcheng as the flagship of a wolfpack of Chinese submarines, supported by PLA ASW aircraft and vessels operating off the mainland, it should be fairly simple to cast a net that would snag the American vessel. Too, the operational area between Taiwan and the mainland was excruciatingly shallow — a disadvantage for Hsing's submarines, but a greater disadvantage for the American. There would be no thermal convection layers beneath which a submarine could hide from sonar, no deep trenches in which to lose pursuers.
And best of all, the American submarine's movements could be anticipated, even predicted with some precision. The Seawolf would almost certainly be hunting for the Hutiao, the Kilo-class diesel boat that had torpedoed the USS Jarrett yesterday. With the Tiger Leaping as bait, hard up against the Fujian coast, the Seawolf would be as vulnerable as a tortoise on its back.
Hsing planned his campaign like a carefully plotted game of xiang qi, the ancient Chinese version of chess that, like its western counterpart, used lesser pieces— pawns, guns, carts, horses, ministers, and officers — to trap and pin the opponent's leader, the red suai or the black jiang, a situation called jiang shi. He had already signaled three other Kilo-class subs to join his pack… and sent orders to the captain of the Tiger Leaping to remain in the vicinity of Kinmen.
And now, with almost leisurely deliberation, Hsing began to draw tight the net….
They'd reached their insertion point that morning, taking the risk of traveling by day in order to put yet more distance between themselves and any pursuit. The storm had moved on, but the ground was soaking wet, slowing travel to a slippery, uncertain-footed scramble through mud and dripping vegetation. All of them, SEALs and commandos both, were chilled and miserable despite the wet suits beneath their camouflage. The cold and the damp reminded Morton forcibly of the less pleasant aspects of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training — BUD/S — and of Hell Week in particular, when SEAL recruits were kept soaking wet and running on the thin edge of exhaustion, lucky to pull down forty hours of sleep total in an entire week.
The training was that grueling so that the SEALs knew they could survive such conditions, knew they would survive and continue to hurt the enemy. Knowing he would survive, however, was not the same as enjoying that survival. Just a little farther, he told himself. Just another few kilometers…
Morton crouched in the underbrush at the edge of the forest, studying the narrow channel between the mainland and Kinmen through his binoculars. They would not be going back that way. Half a dozen PLA patrol boats were crisscrossing the narrow channel, and it looked like heavier craft were bombarding the Kinmen defenses. The invasion of Taiwan had begun, apparently, and it had begun, as had long been expected, with landings on tiny, isolated Kinmen or at least with a heavy naval bombardment. Morton could see what looked like a Luda-class destroyer out there, plus several smaller vessels, probably Jianghu missile frigates. A pall of black smoke hung above Kinmen, and he could hear the thump and rumble of big guns across the water.
Their Draeger rebreathers and swim gear were where they'd left them, buried and hidden at the edge of the woods above the beach. They would not be able to make the crossing by daylight, however, not with those patrols out there. And the four wounded Taiwanese wouldn't be able to swim underwater in any case. They would need to wait for darkness… once more.
Morton accepted six volunteers for the perimeter watch and told the rest of the men to get some sleep. Shivering, he decided he would not sleep himself just yet. Instead, he worked with Knowles to set up the LST-5, pointing the antenna at the southern sky.
They were going to need help on this one, and lots of it.
The captain, Queensly decided, was being cautious. He liked that.
They'd crossed the Strait of Formosa at midday, but they'd taken their time, running at twenty knots and taking the 150-mile journey in seven hours. They could easily have halved the length of time necessary for the crossing, but the skipper had a paranoid streak about him, and he took it slow so the sonar team could actually have a chance to hear something.
At the end of the run, Garrett cut the speed even more, idling along the coast at five knots, trailing the TB-23 towed array astern and giving the boys in the sonar shack a really good listen. At speeds over twelve to fifteen knots, the efficiency of the boat's passive sonar arrays was reduced considerably. At speeds of over twenty knots, it was almost impossible to hear anything at all, because of the rush of water over the acoustical pickups.
In any case, even Seawolf made noise when she cruised along at better than twenty knots, and the skipper was being careful about any noise at all. The crew was padding around barefoot or in their socks, and the word had quietly been passed: Silent routine means silent, or the skipper'll see you walk home, see?
Queensly wasn't concerned with noise on the boat… not with the whispered conversations or the mounting tension. He was doing what he liked to say the Navy paid him to do, which was to see with his ears.
Everyone has their own modality, the means by which they best pull in information from the world around them. For most, that modality was sight, with hearing second and kinesthesia — the sensing of body position and movement — a distant third. Ken Queensly, however, had been born with a defect in both eyes that left him nearly blind, able to make out shapes and shadows. So far as the state of Ohio was concerned, he'd been legally blind. He'd gone to special schools, gone through special training, and for a time had even had a seeing-eye dog. Simply living in a world of gray and formless shapes had given him an almost magical way with hearing. It wasn't that his ears were that much sharper than those of sighted people; he'd simply been able to draw a lot more information from the sounds he heard than could most.