Stevens nodded slowly. "That does make sense."
"Damned right it does. And here's some more sense. If you were the Chinese, sitting here in the Spratlys encouraging your new Muslim allies to take on the whole world, what would you expect would happen next?"
"Well… I don't know. I guess I'd expect the United States to strike back somehow."
"Right. How?"
"A naval task force…" Stevens's eyes widened. "The Seventh Fleet. The Roosevelt carrier battle-group."
"Does it strike you as interesting that the Chinese would arrange things to get the U.S. Navy involved in these waters? Imagine. We come stomping in with a battlegroup, looking for terrorists. And if a couple of torpedoes took out our carrier… would we blame the Chinese? Or the terrorists?"
"You're saying it's a trap."
"I'm saying I'm damned suspicious of this whole setup. The Chinese may be political opportunists, but they are not stupid, and they do not engage in foreign military adventurism without very good, very practical, very pragmatic reasons behind it. Right now, they're nursing a grudge because of the Taiwan incident a couple of years ago. Maybe some of them see this as a way to strike back without getting themselves involved in another open war. Or maybe the idea is to get us to abandon our support for Taiwan."
"I'm afraid that makes entirely too much sense," Stevens said, thoughtful. "I'm going to want you to write something up to that effect for me to transmit."
Garrett nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself. The report would present yet another opportunity for the Rear-Echelon Micromanagement Freaks to engage in their favorite pastime.
Still, given that they would find a way to micromanage no matter what he did, Garrett thought it better that they do so being fully informed. If the revolution in computer technology and communications made it easier for the REMFs to run things in real time from the comfort of a Pentagon basement, at least they also made it possible for them to do it knowing what the front-line people knew about the situation.
"Captain Garrett" sounded over the 1MC speaker on the mess hall overhead. "Captain Garrett to the control room."
"Damn." He stood. "Katie, you let these people grill you for another ten minutes, max, and then tell them where to get off. Do you read me?"
She smiled. "Aye aye, Captain, sir!"
He caught Stevens's eye. "Ten minutes."
"I think we're almost done here, Captain," Stevens said with a shrug.
Moments later, Garrett walked into the control room. Falk, the OOD, wore a worried look. "Whatcha got?"
"Sonar reports a new target, Captain. Sounds like a diesel boat running on its snorkel. Bearing zero-three-zero. It may be making for Small Dragon Island."
"Hot damn!" He swung into his command seat, swiveling to check the big navigation plot board on the control room's aft bulkhead. Zero-three-zero. Northeast, close enough.
Katie Milford had reported that the Muslim-crewed submarine was currently at Small Dragon. She'd seen it at the dock as the men were being led ashore from the Al Qahir.
If this contact was coming from the north, there was an excellent chance that it was the one that had taken a shot at Virginia two days earlier.
And Garrett wanted that sub, wanted it almost as badly as he wanted the Muslim-crewed sub at Small Dragon.
He was in a difficult place. His current task was to keep station with the Al Qahir until that Sea Stallion could arrive — an event that would not happen for at least another five hours, might not even happen until tomorrow.
His heart wanted to go after the submarine inside the enclosed pen at Small Dragon. That would be the Pakistani sub.
That was the boat that had shot down a civilian aircraft, the passenger plane with Kazuko on board.
But Garrett the tactician knew that chance had just handed him a golden opportunity. That diesel boat— probably a Chinese Kilo — was coming into Small Dragon on her snorkel, doing so to recharge her batteries. Snorkeling was an appallingly noisy procedure, one easily tracked by a good sonar crew. This was his chance to nail the bastard that had taken a potshot at Virginia, and, just maybe, to even the odds against them a little bit.
The down side: They were not officially at war with China yet, and while Virginia's orders allowed her to fire back if fired upon, Garrett could not prove, incontestably, that the Kilo out there was the same sub that had fired at him. Besides, firing back when fired upon didn't usually include a forty-eight-hour delay between the two salvos.
But in combat, victory generally goes to the side that makes the fewest mistakes, and that other sub skipper out there had just made a big one.
"Mr. Falk, sound battle stations," Garrett announced.
He was going to take that bastard down.
"Captain! A message from Small Dragon Island!" The messenger handed Jian a printout. He accepted it and scanned down the columns of computer-printed ideograms.
Zaki's yacht, Al Qahir, appeared to be in trouble. The boat had left the Small Dragon enclosure before midnight the night before last. At a point just twenty kilometers west of the island, Al Qahir, as tracked by radar from Small Dragon, appeared to have gone dead in the water. There'd been a confused radio broadcast — something about hitting a reef… and then silence for thirty-seven hours.
The presumption was that the yacht had struck a reef, and damaged her radio in the process. Yinbi's orders, signed by General Han, were to proceed west to the yacht's radar-plotted position and investigate. If the yacht was damaged, he was to provide assistance. If the craft could not be repaired, he was to bring Zaki and any of Zaki's key personnel back to base.
Jian did not like the orders. Had he been submerged, of course, he would not have had to acknowledge them, since Yinbi couldn't even receive radio signals once she submerged. However, with the snorkel above water, the UHF and broadband radio antennas were as well. The problem with technology, he decided, was that the chair-bound self-declared strategists back at a safe, cozy headquarters office somewhere could decide what the people on the front lines needed to do, directing them like so many expendable pieces in a game of chess.
Jian walked to the navigational chart table and studied the depth soundings west of Small Dragon.
No… no… no. It didn't fit. Much of the Spratly Island region was poorly charted, true, and there were indeed areas made deadly by reefs and shoal water. But the general area around Small Dragon had been fairly well surveyed when the base there was constructed. If submarines were going to be coming and going to the island, the waters had to be well charted.
And his charts showed open water to the west, with the bottom plunging sharply to a depth ranging between eight hundred and twelve hundred meters. There was no way they could have missed a coral reef that close to the construction site. It just wasn't possible.
If Al Qahir had not hit a reef, then, the only reasonable explanations were either some sort of fire and explosion, or enemy action. That fragmentary message hadn't mentioned an explosion. What they'd thought was a reef in otherwise comfortably deep water might well have been some sort of snare designed to stop them preparatory to a boarding action.
At least Jian had to assume that to be the case.
And then something else occurred to him.
Consider. The Al Qahir had gone dead in an otherwise empty ocean. If the terrorist yacht had been boarded by enemy commandos, those commandos must have come from somewhere… and, since no other radar targets had been detected, no ships or small craft, no aircraft, that somewhere must be an American submarine.