"It would make their designs on Taiwan more realistic, that's for sure," Garrett said. "I gather then that you're saying I can take on submarines working for the AQ to my heart's content, but that I'm not supposed to go after Chinese submarines."
"That's about the size of it."
"Shit, Stevens! How the hell am I supposed to implement that as a mission order? Sonar targets do not advertise their nationalities!"
"You are expected to defend yourself, Captain. If you are fired upon, or have a reasonable expectation that you are about to be fired upon, you have weapons free, and can take whatever tactical action you consider appropriate."
"Those are part of an attack boat's standing orders, Mr. Stevens. If attacked, we strike back. But without knowing who is who out here, some Chinese boats might be hit."
"Part of Washington's idea here, Captain, is to use this incident to send a very strong message to Beijing. 'Do not provide assistance to the AQ or other terror groups.' If it takes sinking one or two of their submarines to send that message, well… we just expect you to be discreet about it."
Suddenly, surprisingly, Garrett laughed, long and loud. To Stevens' ear, it sounded as though a great deal of pent-up frustration and stress was behind the laugh, which stopped just short of becoming touched with hysteria.
The outburst, from a submarine skipper, was unsettling, to say the least.
Garrett leaned forward in the command chair, hands clasped, studying the scene displayed on the big control room monitor. Jorgensen stood to his left, Stevens to his right. All conversation in the control room had ceased, as those not immediately focused on their duties watched the scene as well.
"Holy shit," Jorgensen said softly after a long moment. "That is one hell of a marina."
The television monitor showed an image picked out in infrared, and so was a grainy monochrome picture in various shades of green, ranging from almost yellow to dead black.
The structure was enormous, raised on pylons above the sea. It was low tide, now, so bits of the coral atoll showed above water. Most of the four-story main building was elevated above the coral, however, looking like the crew facility for a remote seabed oil rig which, in fact, it almost certainly was. Light gleamed brightly from several dozen windows, and from the off-center helipad raised above the flat top of the building.
To one side, however, was a huge structure nearly as large as the building, if not quite as high. It possessed no windows, but the western face was pierced by an enormous set of sliding doors, opening onto a cavernous, brightly lit interior that was clearly designed to shelter boats or small ships.
"Do you think we could get closer?" Stevens asked.
"Take us in closer, Weps," Garrett said. "I'd like to see inside if we can."
"Aye aye, Captain," Lieutenant Bill Carpenter said. "I'll see what I can do."
Carpenter was not conning the Virginia, though the view on the big control room monitor might have conveyed that impression. The weapons officer was seated at his console against the control room bulkhead to Garrett's left, using a joystick and touchscreen to control a torpedo-sized extension of the submarine, an AN/BLQ-11A LMRS Mod 4 reconnaissance/monitor platform, or "Junior," for short. The initials LMRS stood for "Long-term Mine Reconnaissance System," and referred to a remote-piloted Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, or UUV.
Junior was a torpedo without a warhead. Instead, it had an extremely sophisticated command control system and a sensor/camera suite. It was a bit shorter than a Mark 48 ADCAP, but the same width, so it could be released through a torpedo tube; a completely retractable Photonics mast let it cruise just beneath the water's surface while gathering electronic and visual data. Images, sensor data, and position information were relayed back to the Virginia either via a satellite relay, or directly through the water using a low-frequency coded acoustical data link. Carpenter's fly-by-wire control instructions were transmitted to the UUV the same way. Virginia's torpedo tube one could be fitted with a long, telescoping arm that could literally reach out, snag Junior, and haul him back inside at the completion of his mission.
The LMRS had originally been conceived as a means of investigating minefields and strange objects on the bottom that might be mines; Junior was certainly more expendable than a billion-dollar attack submarine and crew. By the time Virginia had been launched, however, UUV technology had advanced to the point that Junior was capable of handling a broad range of remote reconnaissance missions. It could detect and scout mines, yes, but it could also creep close to an enemy harbor or base and return detailed images of what it saw there.
That was what the control room crew was watching now. Virginia was submerged at periscope depth a safe ten miles northwest of Small Dragon Island, while Carpenter used his joystick to send low-frequency acoustical data link signals — or L-FADs — to Junior, nudging the remote closer to the open hangar door on the side of the Chinese base.
Using L-FADs in these waters was a calculated risk, of course. The acoustical signals were, in fact, active sonar signals, and emitting them could call unwanted attention to either Virginia or Junior or both. Those signals were not conventional sonar pings, however, and they were masked by seemingly random patterns of noise that were filtered out by the computers that processed the signals at both ends. They were also transmitted in frequencies outside of the range generally monitored by antisubmarine passive sonar systems. Chances were that the occupants of that base were totally unaware of the streams of data flowing back and forth across the miles, and that they'd have no idea what they were listening to if they did hear anything.
Junior accelerated slightly, moving at less than three knots to avoid putting up a wake. It was completely submerged except for the slender Photonics mast extending above his hull, about where a sail would be on a conventional submarine. The darkness masked the UUV's approach, as did the layers of radar-absorbent materials coating the mast. Slowly, it crept closer.
"Looks like some kind of activity inside," Jorgensen said. "Hard to see, though."
Rain earlier in the day had given way to something midway between mist and drizzle. The light spilling from the open hangar tended to blur and smear the infrared image, making details fuzzy. But it did look as though something was moving inside.
Alphanumerics on the lower right-hand corner of the display gave Junior's coordinates, speed, depth, and the range to the target — determined by a tiny infrared laser mounted on the Photonics mast. When they were eighty meters from the near side of the hangar, Garrett said, "All stop on the UUV."
"Aye aye, sir," Carpenter said, tapping out a command on his touch screen. Junior drifted forward a few more yards before coming to a halt, partly on inertia, partly on the time delay as acoustical signals traveled from Virginia to the UUV. The sea state was considerably lower than earlier in the day, but there was enough of a swell to make the transmitted image roll and pitch slightly with the waves. Carpenter was doing an amazing job of keeping the camera platform reasonably steady.
"We definitely have a new contact, Captain," Carpenter announced. "I'm getting screw noises. Twin screws, moving dead slow."