“Also, there’s no sign of a target. And if there were, there would be a lot of ships out here monitoring the whole event. My conclusion, therefore, was it was a non-warhead trial…but meanwhile I’m going a bit further off-track. I want to creep around behind that Kilo, hang around for a bit, ready for a second firing if there’s gonna be one. I’d like to get a full recording of the noise of the tubes being prepared and the firing sequence.
“And Linus, old buddy, have faith, willya?”
Judd Crocker was trying to catch three or four hours’ sleep in his sparse, but private, cabin when someone knocked sharply on the door three times and then came straight in, the light from the companionway outside shining in on the sleeping CO.
“Sir, wake up,” called Frank. “I think you should see this. The Xia’s moved…cleared Huludao at nine last night. She’s making twenty-five knots through the Yellow Sea heading southwest on the surface, straight for the choke point.”
The captain’s brain whirred. “What time is it, Kyle?”
“’Bout oh-one-twenty, sir.”
“That means it’s been running for, what? Six hours. That’s one hundred and fifty miles. She’ll be right off Dalian now. What’s that…four hundred and fifty miles north of us…we wanna be looking for her around eighteen hours from now, right? Say around nineteen-thirty this evening.”
“Yessir. That’s what I have on this piece of paper, ’cept it took me ten minutes to work it out.”
“Okay. Access the satellite again at oh-six-hundred, check her course and speed. Call me at oh-five-fifty-five.”
“Yessir.”
By midday it was apparent that the Xia was running toward the eastern reaches of the Yellow Sea, down the shores of South Korea, and on into the first reasonably deep water, where Judd Crocker and his men awaited her.
Five hundred miles west of the lurking Seawolf, Admiral Zhang Yushu, Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy (PLAN), had placed the entire Eastern Fleet on high alert for a prowling American nuclear submarine. His own overheads had seen Seawolf clear Pearl, but they had not spotted her since, which was not a great testimony to their skill with the stolen American sub-spotting system from the satellites.
And now he sat in the office of the Eastern Fleet Commander, Admiral Yibo Yunsheng, himself a former commanding officer of the first, disastrous Xia. They were ruminating, over endless cups of fragrant China tea, on the problem of getting the gleaming new 13,000-ton Xia III safely under the water, away from the prying eyes and, they hoped, the sonars of the U.S. Navy.
“You just know they’re going to be out there somewhere,” said Admiral Zhang, scowling, his dark eyes at the same time hard and irritated behind his heavy, hornrimmed spectacles. At the age of 59 he was, without question, the most forward-thinking C-in-C the People’s Liberation Navy had ever had. A tempestuous man of six feet, he was tall for that country, and he wore his thick black mop of hair longer than is customary in the Chinese military.
But he had the ear and the trust of the Paramount Ruler of China. Zhang was enormously powerful, and if he had a mind to mobilize the entire fleet, to seek out and destroy any American interlopers, then that command would be carried out to the letter.
A former commanding officer of a Luda-class guided missile destroyer, Zhang was a worthy opponent for Captain Judd Crocker, and indeed for Admirals Arnold Morgan and Joe Mulligan, half a world away, strangers at arms, their minds locked on to the precise same subject, China’s new submarine, with its menacing cargo of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“Where do you think they’ll wait?” asked Admiral Yibo.
“We have to assume in the first available deep water, out east off the Japanese coast…but it’s a vast area, and if they have sent the Seawolf, she’ll be extremely hard to locate. That’s a very, very quiet ship. They say she’s virtually silent under twenty knots.”
“Hmmmmm,” replied Admiral Yibo. “Not good.”
Just then a uniformed secretary came in with a single sheet of paper that she handed to the Eastern Fleet commander. “For you, sir, I think quite important, from Naval Intelligence, Ningbo. Captain Zhao.”
The memorandum was brief: “Received signal from Kilo 366 1700 yesterday June 26. ‘Suspected transient 10-second contact from nuclear underwater boat while tracking torpedo test firings.’ We have no data on Chinese submarine in area. No further contact. Alerted all surface ships in East China Sea.”
He read it aloud to Admiral Zhang, whose scowl became, if anything, darker. “That’s it,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s Seawolf. The question is, where?”
“Why are you so sure about the ship?”
“Oh, I’m not that sure. But the coincidences are strong. We took the reactor critical in Xia III and within twenty-four hours we have America’s top nuclear boat leaving Pearl in the middle of the night. According to our sources on the island, her destination was unknown. She’s out there, Yibo. Trust me. She’s out there.”
“But what harm can she do us?”
“Aside from unlocking all of our systems, finding out the Xia’s capabilities in every respect, and gauging the power and effectiveness of her missiles, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Xia could just disappear in deep water. You don’t know those devils in the Pentagon like I do. They’ve done it to us before, and they’ll stop at nothing to retain their position as the world’s dominant power.”
Zhang, a man known as the supreme pragmatist of the High Command of the Chinese military, actually changed physically at the very prospect of conflict with the Pentagon. His stern but passive expression grew immediately dark and vengeful, as if someone were threatening his immediate family.
It was not so much the advent of an obvious opponent, it was this particular opponent, the all-powerful United States of America. It seemed that whenever there was a standoff, China came off worse, especially in matters naval. The big American Carrier Battle Groups, forever prowling close to Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, were literally the bane of his life, always too strong, too fast and too threatening.
And how could he ever forget the terrible weeks two years previous when the U.S. Navy decided to eliminate seven of his new-built Russian submarines, the elusive diesel-electric Kilo-class boats? The colossal cost of trying to protect them, the sheer helplessness he felt in the face of the pitiless underwater marauders from the Pentagon — no, Zhang would never forget those days.
He would never forget the ultimate humiliation, the ruthlessness of the U.S. Navy. And he would never forgive either; not for the gigantic cost in losses to China’s military, nor for the loss of so many of the PLAN’s leading submariners. Worse yet, he, Zhang, would never forgive the U.S. for the loss of face he had suffered, both before his peers and in his own warrior’s soul.
“Zhang, would you sink Seawolf, if you could?”
“I might. I just might.”
“But how?”
“I think two Kilos might do the job very satisfactorily. Should we ever locate her again.”