“Conn, sonar, two explosions in the water, bearing 079. The Mk 48s just detonated.”
Mack acknowledged the report, but he wasn’t as elated as he’d have liked. He’d made a mistake, and against a better opponent that mistake could have been deadly.
He wondered how things were going on the surface, and whether any of the other American captains had made similar mistakes.
They hadn’t. Not a single shot had gotten through Independence’s defenses.
Of the attacking Chinese fleet, not a single surface ship remained undamaged. The few surviving Chinese sailors had been forced to abandon their sinking warships and drifted in lifeboats. Around them, strewn in an unorganized pattern in between many of the small ships, lay the remnants of the Chinese fighters and their air defense effort, which had attempted to stop the American antishipping attack. The Chinese action had failed — miserably.
The Americans attacked the Chinese ships and aircraft so effectively that not one American fighter had been lost. Thirty-four high-performance Chinese aircraft were destroyed in the battle, along with eighteen surface ships. Now the hope of the Chinese navy lay with their six remaining submarines: three Romeos, two Mings, and one Kilo.
The explosions had stopped and, with the exception of the occasional Chinese ship sinking beneath the waves, the water was again quiet beneath the South China Sea. As the background noise faded, Cheyenne was once again able to use her passive sonar and to begin to build a picture of what they faced.
“Conn, sonar, we’ve got numerous sonar contacts — probable submarines. We can’t tell quite how many at this point, but it’s definitely more than two. The contacts sound like they may be operating close together.”
“Sonar, conn, aye.”
Mack had made one mistake based on overconfidence. He wasn’t about to do that again.
“Okay,” he said to the communicator, “let’s get some help here. Draft a message to Bremerton and the SEC (submarine element coordinator). Ask them if they could give us a hand with these numerous submarine contacts.”
Fifteen minutes later, word was sent to Bremerton. Cheyenne’s sister submarine, upon receipt of the message over her floating wire and concurrence of the SEC, began running at flank speed in an effort to meet up with Mack and his crew.
The Chinese diesel submarine captains knew that they were in trouble. Once their refueling points were destroyed, they’d lost all hope of striking a significant blow against the Americans. Without the chance to fully fill their diesel fuel tanks at their base in the Spratlys, each of the submarines was running low both on fuel and on battery power.
Communicating with each other as quietly as possible, they all agreed that their best chance now was to simply try to survive. A slow, quiet run for their home waters might get them back to mainland China. If they were lucky. But, as Mack had found out earlier, luck was a fickle, fragile thing, and never to be counted on.
Once Bremerton arrived on the scene in her assigned depth zone, she established communications with Cheyenne via underwater telephone. That allowed Mack to pass the word that a large Chinese submarine group had been detected some distance away and that the Chinese group had begun to head back in the direction of China, bearing 010.
Bremerton and Cheyenne conferred and laid their plans. Then they separated, Bremerton on course 300 and Cheyenne on course 040. The two American submarines had begun stalking their prey.
One by one, Cheyenne and Bremerton found the fleeing diesels. The Chinese submarines, however, were so low on battery power that they could put up no fight at all. Mack found it almost like shooting at anchored ships. All the Chinese could do in defense of their lives was to launch a few decoys. The decoys failed, and after they had run out there was nothing left for the Chinese captains to do but just wait, one by one, until they were destroyed by the American submarines.
The last submarine to be attacked by Cheyenne was the venerable Kilo, and her captain gave it all he had. In a last-ditch, desperate attempt, he tried to surface after Cheyenne had launched her torpedo.
His efforts were noble, but they were doomed. The Mk 48 followed the Kilo, Master 111, all the way up before blowing a hole in the boat’s stern and sending it straight back to the bottom.
Mack and his crew on board Cheyenne had never had a mission like this. Three submarines had been destroyed by Bremerton and four by Cheyenne in this one action alone. Independence and her Battle Group had, during this battle, destroyed over sixty ships and submarines, more than thirty aircraft, and inflicted irreparable damage on the military installations on the Spratly Islands. The tide in the war against China had now turned completely in America’s favor.
But Mack didn’t take much satisfaction in that. He knew that glory faded quickly, and tides had a way of turning when you least expected it.
12. Strait Up
The battle royale was over. Mack still could not believe the losses that Independence and her entire group had inflicted upon the Chinese. That battle, he was sure, would go down in history as the single most one-sided battle in naval history.
Cheyenne was currently running at periscope depth, with new information on their latest orders coming in over SSIXS. As soon as the new orders were decoded and printed out, Mack took them and went directly to his stateroom, where he could look at them and analyze the details of his upcoming mission in a quiet surrounding without any distractions.
As soon as Mack finished reading the new orders, he called a meeting in the wardroom with Cheyenne’s executive officer, the communicator, the combat systems officer, the navigator, and the sonar officer.
Within minutes, the officers Mack had requested were waiting in the wardroom. As Mack entered, all conversation cut off abruptly.
“Gentlemen,” Mack said, “I have just received our new orders. We have been tasked to detach from the Independence Battle Group and head north. We will have a long transit of over one thousand miles ahead of us. Our destination is the Formosa Strait, in between China and Taiwan.” Mack paused to let that last sentence sink in.
“Let me fill you in on what’s been going on in the world around us. Things have been going very well for the United States. Jiang Zemin, the Chinese president who was overthrown in the July coup, has recently surfaced in Taiwan after the USS Seawolf smuggled him out of mainland China.”
Mack knew that would come as a surprise to his officers. He gave them a moment to absorb that and then continued, “Cheyenne has been asked to ’delouse’ and reconnoiter the Formosa Strait so that Jiang can be transported back to China when the moment for him to return to power arrives.”
Mack looked around at the officers present, making eye contact with each of them. “Naval intelligence does not have a firm grasp on what type of enemy warships are in the area. They are expecting large numbers of Luda destroyers and possibly several very dangerous Akula or Kilo submarines. Naval intelligence also reports that large areas of the Formosa Strait are heavily mined, so let’s watch our step.”