WHAT DOES HE WANT? That was the final question. And Zhang Yushu could not answer that, either.
He walked disconsolately back to the house, listening to the sounds of the midsummer night. But to him the clockwork chirp of the cicadas was the pinging of a distant sonar. The whisper of the wind through the palm trees was the swish of a submarine’s blades through the water. And the sound of the waves breaking on the shore was the sound of his barefoot youth in the nearby city of Xiamen, living on his father’s boat, moored right off the beach.
He’d come a long way in a relatively short time. But he had to find that submarine. And the longer the chase, the more determined he was to blow a hole in Captain Judd Crocker’s Seawolf. Or, better yet, sink it.
The admiral crossed the wide porch and softly entered his study through the French doors. He poured himself some iced tea and sipped it slowly. Then he had an idea, he picked up the telephone and dialed his secure line to Admiral Zu, who would not complain at being awakened. Not this week, with tensions running so high in the People’s Navy.
Jicai picked up on the third ring, and with good grace accepted his Commander-in-Chief’s apology for the hour.
“I called because we must not be beaten by this submarine,” he said. “And because I know you want it removed as deeply as I do.”
“Probably deeper, sir. How about a thousand fathoms?”
Admiral Zhang chuckled. “Jicai,” he said, “we have tried every conventional sonar and radar system we own. We have been close but never close enough, fast but never fast enough. I am drawn to the conclusion that we have access to only one system that may detect the American ship in time for us to strike.”
“Sir, it is entirely untried. We don’t even know if it will work.”
“The Americans plainly think it does. They have it fitted to all of their most advanced warships.”
“Yessir. But they have the original. Ours is…well, in the nature of a copy.”
“Yes. But it’s only a towed array. And we know how to make towed arrays that work very well.”
“Yessir. But we’ve never made one this long. And we’ve never even tested it yet.”
“That may be so. But our scientists have been very thorough, and the report says it will work better than any towed array we have ever had. The report says it will work as well for us as it does for the Americans.”
“Well, sir, it is one thousand yards long, which seems to me phenomenal…they say it will pick up every sound in the ocean for miles and miles.”
“If it will really do what our people say it will do, Jicai, it might find the American submarine for us. It is currently fitted to the new destroyer.”
“Yessir. It’s in a special housing on the stern. Under guard at the jetty in the Pearl River.”
“Can it be deployed right away?”
“Yessir. It’s completely ready for its final trials. Scheduled to start in two days.”
“Send it to sea, Jicai. Send it out to the area where the Luda picked up their mast, then have it start an area search pattern based on that position. The American probably thinks we’re hopeless at ASW, and he may not have cleared that datum. If he runs, we cannot catch him; but if he underrates us and stays, we might. The only ship we have that could catch them is the one with the new enlightened towed array.”
“When do I send it, sir? First light?”
“No, Jicai. Not first light. Send it now. And tell Colonel Lee to find the Seawolf. Personal orders of the Commander-in-Chief.”
They cast off all lines at 0235, and two tugs hauled the 500-foot-long Luhai-class warship out into the wide south-flowing stream of the Pearl River. Her new name, Xiangtan, could be seen, freshly painted in black, high on her light gray hull. A sweeping, blood-red stripe at the waterline was reflected in the dock lights that glistened in the dark shadows of Canton’s ancient river. Colonel Lee ordered, “All-ahead half speed.”
The Navy tugs escorted her downstream for 15 miles to the great Delta, even though she ran on her own enormous power, two Ukrainian-built turbines. The tugs positioned themselves on either side of her bow, acting more as pilots than extra engines and brakes. And they steered her through the tricky shallow waters of the southern fork of the river.
Xiangtan was a warship in the old-fashioned sense, armed to the teeth with antiaircraft guns, torpedoes, and missiles, surface-to-air, and surface-to-surface, the latter a phalanx of sea skimmers with a range of 70 miles. She was the most modern frontline fighting ship in the Chinese Navy, and she could make 30 knots through the water, a crew of 250 manning her, two heavily armed Harbin helicopters on her stern, to increase the speed and reach of her ASW capability.
Her radars and sonars were the finest that PLAN could purchase, but tonight they were overshadowed by the giant towed array, an ultrasensitive underwater acoustic cable that would soon be strung out behind her, trailing deep astern of China’s finest warship, listening to the strange acoustic caverns of the ocean, distilling the noises, filtering the fleeting contacts, but listening hardest of all for the least suggestion of Seawolf’s machinery.
Xiangtan’s crew had answered the call of their commander, many of them racing in from their homes around the dockyard, to take up what amounted to “action stations” in the middle of the night. No one knew what was happening, except they were going downriver to the open ocean, two days ahead of schedule. Whatever it was, it must be big. “They’re saying Admiral Zhang Yushu ordered it personally.”
Through the darkness they swept southward, the tugs with big probing spotlights above their bridges, in addition to regular running lights. As the Delta grew ever wider, the escorts peeled away, leaving the destroyer to run down the strictly marked channel to the west of Lan Tau Island. She then steamed past Guishan Dao and Dhazizhou Dao, leaving Macao seven miles to starboard, heading straight into the defined navigational routes that lead all ships from Canton out to the China Sea.
By 0500, in the pearly predawn light of Wednesday, July 5, Colonel Lee had his ship running fast through the still-calm waters, in light rain, almost 100 miles south of the Pearl River Delta. He could not of course know it, but Lt. Commander Linus Clarke was conning USS Seawolf slowly back toward the east, some 15 miles off his starboard bow.
Colonel Lee was pleased at his progress so far. They’d made good time into the search area, and his crew had deployed the towed array perfectly, and now it hung off the stern, riding back in the water for 1,000 yards, a grotesque electronic tail, five inches in diameter, black in color, its core the most advanced acoustic electronics in all the oceans.
If there was an element of doubt, it was only in the Chinese scientists’ ability to hook it up to the onboard computers, to process the array’s astonishing acoustic capability. The technique they had yet to master was that processing, because the Americans had improved it by a factor of 100. Nothing in all the history of modern naval warfare had ever been so good at identifying specific target frequencies from the monstrous background noise of the ocean. Admiral Zu Jicai knew its capability, knew it could hear a clockwork mouse scampering under the Tower of Babel — from 20 miles away.
Seawolf was at peace. Nothing was coming up on sonar, Captain Crocker had finally gone to bed, and Linus Clarke had the conn. It was not until 0525 that Frank’s operator began to pick up faint engine lines, faint but getting stronger as the hard-charging Xiangtan ran toward the Americans’ chosen course.