“Gentlemen,” said the CO as he closed the door, “I have asked you to come in for a briefing on the nature of our mission. In short, we are going to China, to the eastern waters of the Yellow Sea, where we are trying to pick up their brand-new ICBM submarine, the new Xia, track it south, and then ascertain its precise measurements from keel to upper casing.”
“How exactly do we do that, sir?” asked Rothstein. “They probably won’t invite us over with a tape measure.”
“Cy, we have to get under its keel, directly under, and then use an upward sonar to get a complete picture of the underwater shape and depth of the submarine, from surface to keel. Then we range her from surface to casing and that way we have a dead accurate measurement of her precise height.”
“Yes, I see. But what exactly do you mean directly under its keel — you mean a couple of hundred feet below?”
“Cy, I actually mean a hell of a lot closer than that.”
“Can you tell us why we’re doing this, sir?”
“Yes, Brad, I guess so. Inside that submarine will be the very latest intercontinental ballistic missiles, the one they’ll throw at L.A. should they ever decide on such a course of action. For obvious reasons, we must know the precise range of that missile, how far it will go and whether they really could hit our West Coast from the far side of the Pacific Ocean. Basic intelligence, really. We’re on a top-classified spying mission, and we must not get caught.”
“Presumably, sir, we’re discussing the technology they stole from the USA in the final years of the nineties?”
“And a bit before that, Cy. Anyway, you all know the theory. We can’t measure the missile, but if we measure the submarine that carries it, we’ll know its height. Which I’m guessing will be around forty-five to fifty feet. There’s probably around nine feet of engine in there, and maybe four feet of warhead. The rest’s fuel, and our guys can ascertain within about a hundred yards how far that baby will fly.”
“How about the diameter, sir?”
“They have that. Picked up the hatch measurements from the satellite photographs.”
“Sir, I’ve known you for a lot of years,” said Brad Stockton. “And I can tell you’re holding back the bad news…”
They all laughed, and the CO continued, “There’s so much of that I’m not sure where to start!
“First of all we have to find the submarine, but we’ll have plenty of assistance from the overheads so long as she’s on the surface. Second, they’ll guess the Americans are watching, so they’ll be pretty vigilant watching for us. Third, Fort Meade is afraid they have stolen our most up-to-date ASW system, which will allow them to spot us underwater from space, from their own satellite. Which would make us pretty easy prey if the water’s not deep and they send ship after ship to look for us.”
“Jesus Christ. Do we know if they have this stuff operational?”
“No. We only know that they have it. We’re not sure whether they know how to use it. Anyway, if we stay in deep water, we’re fairly safe. They have nothing that will catch us, nothing remotely fast enough.”
“And sir, if we had to, could we blow ’em out of the water?”
“Andy, that would be frowned upon. If they hit us, they’d probably get away with it — a marauding American nuclear boat creeping through Chinese waters, et cetera. But if we hit them, I’m afraid it would be regarded as an act of war, since we really have no reason to be there, four thousand miles from our home base.”
“You mean you’d just let them destroy us?”
“No, Andy, if it came down to a straight us or them, well, there could be only one answer to that.”
“Not us. Right, sir?”
“Not us. That’s correct, Andy. But officially, we’re not allowed to do that. Our orders are to stay undetected.”
“But that, as we all know, may be easier said than done,” said Cy Rothstein quietly.
“Correct. But we have to try. And we have to get our mindset straight. We are in a devastatingly powerful attack submarine. We could probably take out half the Chinese fleet if it came right down to it. But that’s not our job. We will be thanked profoundly at home only if we come back quietly with information, photographic evidence of what the hell the goddamned Chinese are up to…and how much of our stuff they have stolen and utilized.”
“Is that our only mission, sir?”
“Not quite. The Chinese have recently commissioned their third and newest Luhai-class destroyer, a big six-thousand-ton gas-turbine ship with an endurance of fourteen thousand miles, and guided missiles they can project to seventy miles. The Pentagon thinks the damn thing may have a ballistic trajectory ASW weapon. It’s called a CY-1. They want us to locate the destroyer and take a look. But we’ll need to be careful. CNO thinks it might be fitted with China’s first decent towed-array, developed from the stuff they stole from us.”
“Guess we better be careful,” said Lt. Pearson. “Especially if they got the ole CY-1 into action.”
Seawolf ran swiftly underwater into the approaches to the East China Sea on Friday morning, five days after leaving Pearl. The journey through the great Pacific wilderness had been uneventful. They never even heard another ship. Nine times during the journey Seawolf’s periscope came jutting out of the water, but the one-second signal from the satellite was always the same: The new Xia was still moored securely alongside in Huludao, her reactor still running.
Judd Crocker slowed to 20 knots as they picked their way through the tiny Japanese islands, with 1,500 feet of water beneath their keel. Up ahead was the unseen line of the south-flowing Japanese current that forms the seaward frontier of the China Sea.
Seawolf was not going that far, and when Pearson called out their position at longitude 129 degrees, the CO ordered, “Right standard rudder…make your course three-six-zero…speed twenty knots…depth two hundred feet.”
To Clarke he added, “We’ll make our patrol area just south of the entrance to the Korean Strait — the water’s deep and Japanese. We can hang around here until something shakes loose, then we can creep up to the one-hundred-meter line and wait for the Chinaman. That’s if I’m right about the course he’s bound to take over here to the east. If he’s on the other side, we’re in trouble, because we can’t track him underwater. Alternately, if he’s over there he’ll be on the surface anyway, so the overheads can track him, and we’ll catch up with him later.”
And so they slid along the eastern side of the Yellow Sea, off the far southern coastline of Japan’s 130-mile-long province of Kyushu. This is the last major land before the flag of the Rising Sun peters out into its lonely chain of remote Pacific islands, running southwest for 540 miles, almost to Taiwan.
But around these islands is the only deep water in the entire area, before the great continental shelf of the People’s Republic of China rises up to meet incoming submarines, driving them inevitably to the surface, or at least forcing them to leave behind the giveaway trail of a swirling wake.
Seawolf’s CO planned to do neither, and in 350 feet of water they patrolled silently below the surface, their speed now down to only 10 knots, the senior officers hoping to God the Chinese had not yet mastered the satellite sub-spotting techniques they had hijacked from the laboratories in California.