Commander Thomas Harding sat at the tiny desk in his cramped compartment writing a letter to Suzanne, his wife of twenty-three years. It was a few minutes after 10:00 A.M. Greenwich Mean Time, the time zone they kept aboard while on patrol, which made it around 7:00 P.M. local. The sun would be setting soon, but three hundred feet beneath the surface there was no such concept as night or day, only the watch system.
He’d been on duty almost continuously since the nuclear explosion and he was starting to get short-tempered, though it didn’t show in his letter, nor would his crew ever suspect. COMSUBPAC’s orders had been precise: Stand by and monitor.
It was exactly what they were doing. But it bothered Harding that if Washington was taking the incident seriously the word hadn’t filtered down to the Seawolf yet. In some respects it was as if the Pentagon had expected something like this to happen. Even the North Koreans were making no response, though something would have to be happening ashore.
He’d moved them twenty-five miles farther southwest where they hovered just off the continental shelf. If the need arose they could go deep and hide in the subsea canyons that paralleled the Korean coast. So far there’d been no need.
Twelve hours ago a lone Japanese rescue vessel showed up and in six hours had pulled the crew off the stricken submarine, doing absolutely nothing to hide the reason they were operating so far inside North Korean territorial waters.
Harding put down his pen and leaned back in his chair. Something funny was going on out here, and he had a gut feeling that it wasn’t over by a long shot.
He was the son of an MIT professor of engineering who taught that every cause had an effect, and every effect had a cause. But the world wasn’t quite as neat as it was taught in science classes. Especially if man and his institutions were figured into the equation.
The Japanese MSDF had apparently sent a party ashore at the supposedly abandoned nuclear facility, and through either sabotage or an accident had set off a nuclear explosion. And nobody was doing anything about it, except wait and see. That made absolutely no sense.
He pulled down the growler phone. “Conn, this is the captain. Anything new from sonar?”
“Negative, Skipper,” officer of the deck Lieutenant Karl Trela said.
Harding wasn’t satisfied. Something was gnawing at his gut. “Tell them to look again, real close. I’ll stand by.”
“Yes, sir.”
He glanced down at the unfinished letter to his wife. It would have to wait until later. The Japanese simply did not throw away valuable assets such as a submarine worth several hundred million dollars. Nor did the North Koreans ever miss an opportunity to rattle a few sabers. But none of that was happening now.
Trela was back. “Nothing, sir. Water’s clear all around us. Do you want to start a search pattern with the twenty-three?” The TB-23 was a thin-line sonar array that could be unreeled more than three thousand feet behind the slowly moving submarine. Consisting of an array of hydrophones, itself nearly a thousand feet in length, the system could detect low frequency noises at extremely long ranges. But the submarine had to be moving in order for the system to work.
Harding thought it out. “Not yet. Bring us to periscope depth. I’m on my way.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harding pulled on a fresh shirt, grabbed a cup of coffee from the officers’ wardroom and went up one level to the control room. The boat was already on its way up and everybody aboard knew that something was going on. The captain was on the prowl, things were happening. But the mood radiating outward from the control room was one of calm. Always calm. Harding insisted on it.
“Passing two hundred fifty feet,” Trela reported unnecessarily.
“Very well,” Harding said. Trela was new to Harding’s crew, but he’d come from the Mississippi highly recommended. He was still trying to prove himself on the Seawolf. Harding called the radio shack. “This is the captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“As soon as you can raise your masts, I want a passive all-band search. But it’s going to have to be a snapshot, because I’m not going to give you much time.”
“Aye, Captain.”
The executive officer Lieutenant Commander Rod Paradise came in, buttoning the top button of his shirt. “Am I missing something?”
“I’m going up to take a look.”
“I see,” Paradise said, a faint smile at the corner of his mouth. “You’re supposed to be getting some rest.”
“There’s no traffic, Rod.”
Paradise shrugged, but then realized the point the captain was making. “Should be some commercial traffic to the southeast.”
“Nothing,” Harding said.
“Passing one hundred feet, Skipper,” Trela reported.
Paradise pulled a phone from the overhead. “Sonar, this is the XO. How’s it look?”
“Nothing, sir. My displays are all clear.”
“Very well.”
“Level and steady at six-zero feet, sir,” Trela said.
“Prepare to dive on my command,” Harding said. He raised the search periscope and made a quick 360-degree sweep. The western horizon was tinged red. The seas looked as if they were in the eight to ten foot range, and the weather looked cold.
“Conn, ESMs, I have two contacts, designated Romeo One and Romeo Two. Orions, bearing one-six-five, course three-four-five, estimated speed four-two-zero knots.”
“Are their search radars active?” Paradise asked.
“Roger.”
Harding retracted the periscope. “Get us out of here, Karl.”
“Dive, dive, dive,” Trela ordered.
“Make your depth three hundred feet.”
“Aye, Captain, make my depth three hundred feet,” Trela responded crisply.
The boat’s deck canted sharply forward. Harding called the radio shack. “ESMs, this is the captain. Were we detected?”
“Negative, Skipper. At least I don’t think so. They were fifty miles out and making maximum speed. They weren’t doing any serious looking, they were beatin’ feet.”
“Sonar, this is the captain. Are we still clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
Harding and Paradise went back to one of the plotting tables where the captain laid out the course and bearing of the two sub-hunter aircraft. They were American made, but Seventh Fleet would not have sent them out here, which meant they were Japanese MSDF.
“They know where their submarine is sitting on the bottom, which means they’re out here looking for someone else,” Harding said. “Us?”
“Could be,” Paradise said, studying the chart. “Or it could be that they’re expecting a response from the North Koreans now that the sub has been abandoned.”
“They’ll be sending help.”
“Most likely.
Harding smiled gently. “In that case we’ll have a ringside seat. I kind of like that.” He turned to Trela. “Belay the dive, and prepare to bring us back to periscope depth.”
“Are we going to phone this home?” Paradise asked.
“We’ll give them time to get past us first. They shouldn’t be looking over their shoulders.”
DCI Murphy’s Lincoln Town Car limousine pulled up at the west portico a couple of minutes before 9:00 A.M. His bodyguard Ken Chapin opened the rear door for him and escorted him inside, where he took the stairs down to the situation room. This morning he felt every minute of his sixty-five years, and for the first time he could remember he thought about his retirement. He had served four presidents, this one no better or worse than the others, and he was fairly well insulated from Beltway intrigues, but the pressure of his position was finally wearing him down. Like McGarvey said, maybe he too was an anachronism. Maybe all the Cold War warriors needed to be put out to pasture. New enemies, new problems, new imperatives were looming on the horizon, trouble spots like Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and now North Korea and perhaps even Japan, were blossoming all over the globe.