“Is everything good to go?” Lisa Duncan asked.
Zandra was listening to radio reports. “Yes. The helicopters are on time and in the clear so far.”
“The Chinese aren’t onto them?”
“I can’t tell that from here,” Zandra said. “Their air defense units haven’t been alerted.”
“How do you know that?” Duncan demanded.
“I have an AWACS on station off the coast of China monitoring the situation.” “And if the helicopters do get spotted?”
“Then I will do what is necessary,” Zandra said.
“That’s rather vague,” Duncan said.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, but I don’t have to explain myself to you,” Zandra said in a calm voice.
“Who do you answer to?” Duncan wanted to know.
“We’ve already gone over that,” Zandra said.
“I want to know what you have done to protect those people on their way out,” Duncan insisted.
Zandra flipped a switch on the radio set in front of her. “Here. You can listen in to what’s going on as relayed from the AWACS. You’ll hear what I have done.”
Colonel Mike Zycki was the commander of the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane that Zandra had ordered into the air using her ST-8 clearance. As the modified Boeing 707-320B leveled off at thirty-five thousand feet, Zycki ordered the thirty-foot dome radar dish, riding on top of the fuselage, to be activated. The advantage the AWACS had over ground-based radars was its ability to look down. The radar signals emitted at altitude were not blocked by the curvature of the earth or terrain. Zycki and his crew had an accurate radar picture almost four hundred miles in diameter as the rotodome completed a revolution every ten seconds.
Unfortunately, even that coverage was insufficient to reach the area he had been ordered to take a look at. He could paint an accurate radar picture of the coast of China from Beijing almost to Shanghai, but the aircraft he was supposed to watch were over a thousand miles inland, near Xi’an.
Still, the AWACS could function in a command-and-control role by linking with a KH-14 spy satellite that was in geosynchronous orbit above central China and downloading the current data the various gathering devices on the satellite were picking up.
Quickly, Zycki’s crew began the process of identifying and coding out all known images the KH-14 was picking up in the air. Civilian aircraft liners were blanked off the screen. In a short while they had a manageable screen. There were only a few spots of activity left: some helicopter activity in the vicinity of Qian-Ling. And two blips moving quickly toward that spot.
The radar operator pointed. “That’s our aircraft right there. They’re flying right on top of the earth. Airspeed’s right for Black Hawks flying low level.”
“Punch in transponder code alpha-four-romeo,” Zycki ordered.
The operator did so, and four small dots appeared over eastern China, heading directly toward Qian-Ling. “Who is that?” the operator exclaimed. “They don’t show up on down-looking radar or”—he paused as he hit a switch to access another asset of the KH-14 spy satellite—“thermal imaging!”
“That’s our ace in the hole,” Zycki said, “four F-117 Stealth fighters to provide air cover for the exfiltration.”
CHAPTER 29
On board the USS Springfield Captain Forster was the senior commander among the three Los Angeles-class attack submarines hovering above the Greywolf’s position. The Springfield and the Asheville were at a standstill, power down to a minimum to keep life-support systems operating on board the boats. The Pasadena, the third ship of the flotilla, had all systems active and was monitoring the situation for the group.
The first indication that the foo fighters were moving again was from the Pasadena, which reported two foo fighters coming up from the depths.
Forster didn’t reply, still running silent as they had planned. The captain of the Pasadena had his orders.
On board the Pasadena the crew reacted as they’d thoroughly been trained to, rushing to battle stations. The firing crew began tracking the two targets.
On board the Greywolf Commander Downing watched the two foo fighters sweep by, heading up. The three that had been shadowing the submersible still remained on station. Downing turned and met Tennyson’s glance.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.
As the foo fighters passed the Greywolf’s depth, the captain of the Pasadena gave the order to arm the Mark 48, Mod 2 torpedoes.
“Fire!” the captain of the Pasadena ordered as the foo fighters passed through three thousand meters.
Four torpedoes launched with a hiss of compressed air, each foo fighter double-targeted. The torpedoes raced away from the sub, a spool of wire unreeling behind each one, allowing it to be continuously targeted by the submarine. Each Mark 48 weighed over 2,750 pounds and was ten feet long by twenty-one inches in diameter. The conventional warhead consisted of over a thousand pounds of high explosive.
“Tracking,” the weapon officer announced in the crowded control center. “I’ve got four good ones. All tracking clear, tracking two separate targets. Time to impact forty-two seconds…” He paused, his eyes widening at the information his computer was giving him. “We’ve got inbound!”
“Inbound what?” the captain demanded.
“Our own torpedoes!” the weapons officer exclaimed. “They’ve been turned.” His fingers were working the keyboard, trying to regain control of the weapons. “Time to impact, twenty seconds.” Every eye in the control room fixed on the commanding officer.
The captain was staring over the man’s shoulder, reading, interpreting. “Fifteen seconds!”
“Abort, abort, abort!” the captain yelled.
The weapons officer flipped up a red cover and pressed down on the button underneath. All four torpedoes detonated less than two hundred meters away from their launch point.
“Prepare for impact!” the captain ordered, knowing his order had been much too late as the shock wave from the four simultaneous explosions hit the sub.
Captain Forster, on board the Springfield, was listening passively through a hydrophone headset. He tore the headphones off when the thunderous noise of the torpedoes going off hit them. The submarine rocked in the water. Forster yelled for a damage report as he put the headphones back on.
He heard the sounds coming from the Pasadena every submariner feared the most: the screech of metal giving way, water rushing in, air being blown out under pressure. He even imagined he could hear the screams of the crew of the Pasadena as they were crushed, but that might simply have been his imagination.
There was absolute silence throughout the Springfield as even sailors not wearing the headphones could hear the faint sound of bulkheads giving way echo through their ship, like the sound of popcorn popping in the distance.
“Sir!” the first officer hissed. “What do we do?”
“We do nothing for now,” Forster ordered, turning away from the other men in the control room. He felt his hastily eaten breakfast threatening to come back up as he imagined the fate of the crew of the Pasadena. “We do nothing.”
On board the Greywolf they had heard the explosion and now they could also hear the sound of the Pasadena dying. Half a minute later they could pick up the noise of the battered hulk of the once proud submarine dropping by, heading for the ocean depths, more bulkheads shattering as the pressure increased.