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“Katy,” she corrected. She opened her robe and let it fall to the floor. Her body was wonderful, not as tight and firm as it had been when they were young, but in McGarvey’s eyes, even more wonderful than he remembered.

“Make love to me, my darling,” she said, coming back into his arms. “No compromises this time. I want you. Plain and simple, no strings attached, no promises, no questions. Just us.”

SEVEN

Seawolf

Thomas Harding cocked an ear to listen to the sounds of his boat. It was 0900 GMT, which put them three hours into the first morning watch, the time when the crew, the majority of whom had too little to do, began making mistakes. Twenty-four hours ago, after they had deployed listening sensors on a forty-mile track, he had ordered the Seawolf rigged for silent running, which meant no unnecessary noises. Their job was to make like a hole in the water and simply listen. So far he’d heard nothing inside his boat, nor had sonar heard anything outside. It couldn’t last forever.

He stood at one of the plotting tables where their present position was marked twenty-five miles off the North Korean coast in relationship to the downed MSDF submarine and the tracks of the two P-3s that had overflown them yesterday. They’d expected to hear the splash of sonobuoys being dropped in the water, but it had never happened. If the Orions were looking for a submarine it wasn’t them. At least not for the moment.

“Conn, sonar.” Lieutenant Karl Trela, officer of the deck, answered it.

“Conn, aye.”

“We have two possible targets, one submerged, but very faint.”

Trela glanced over at Harding, who motioned that he would check it out. “Okay, good work. The captain’s on his way.”

Harding got a cup of coffee and went forward to the sonar compartment located starboard and below the weapons loading hatch. Chief sonar operator Seaman First Class Mel Fischer was studying displays on two consoles, the three other operators working as backup.

Fischer’s division officer, Lieutenant Charles Pistole, stepped aside to give the captain some room. “We don’t have an identification on either target yet, Skipper.”

“Are they North Korean?”

“Probably not, they’re well east of us, and possibly inbound. Maybe Japanese.”

Fischer suddenly held his earphones tighter. He adjusted a control on his BSY-1 console. “Conn, sonar. Designate first target Sierra one-seven. Konga class destroyer. Target bearing zero-eight-seven, range twenty thousand yards plus, making screw sounds for twenty knots. I’m not sure of the course yet, but it’s definitely closing.”

A printer behind Fischer spit out two lines of data, and he reached back and pulled it off.

“Conn, sonar, I have a positive ID now. She’s the Kirishima, DD174 from Sasebo.” He adjusted his controls again. “Course steady on two-six-seven, speed steady at twenty knots.”

Harding used a growler phone to call the conn. “Karl, start a fire control track.”

“Already on it, Skipper.”

Fischer had switched to another console. He made a grease pencil mark on the Busy-one display, adjusted the controls and made another mark. He looked over his shoulder at the captain. “It’s a submarine, Skipper. Real faint, a few miles south of the Kirishima, but closer to us.”

“What’s your best guess, Mel? Japanese?”

Fischer stared at the display, tweaked the controls and made another grease pencil mark. “She’s a Yuushio class, I’ve got that much, but coming up with a sail number is going to be dicey until she gets closer.”

“Inbound?” Harding asked.

“Definitely, making eight knots, maybe a little better, but very quiet. She’s not advertising her presence, and the noise the Kirishima is making isn’t helping.”

“Are those the only two targets?”

“So far, Skipper.”

“Don’t lose them,” Harding said, and he went back to the control room where Trela and Rod Paradise were hunched over one of the plotting tables. The computers would automatically plot the course, speed and position of the targets fed into the BSY-1 consoles, but paper tracks were kept manually as a backup.

“Unless the Kirishima changes heading, she’s going to pass about twenty miles north of us,” Paradise said. “Same for the submarine.”

“They sent scouts yesterday, and now this,” Trela observed. “What do you suppose they’re up to, Skipper?”

“Good question, Karl, but I think this just may be the beginning.”

“Conn, communications.”

Harding answered it. “This is the captain.”

“We just received a one-group ELF message from COMSUBPAC. Reads, AAA.” ELF, or extremely long frequency, was the way in which U.S. submarines submerged at sea could be contacted anywhere in the world. The drawback was that the ELF bandwidth was so narrow that only extremely brief messages in one-time cipher codes could be transmitted, and even at that it took a minute and a half just to transmit one three-letter grouping. In this case AAA was the order for Seawolf to go to periscope depth for a longer message sent burst transmission via an SSIX satellite in geosynchronous orbit. There was little danger that the approaching Japanese destroyer would pick up their burst transmission — it was still too far away — but it paid to be careful. They would only spend a minimum time near the surface with their masts up.

“Take us to periscope depth and prepare to dive on my order,” he told Trela, then he turned back to the phone. “I’ll have one to send as soon as we’ve received the incoming.”

“Aye, Skipper.”

As they headed up, Harding wrote the first part of his message for the commander of Pacific Fleet Submarine Operations at Pearl Harbor. He phoned sonar. “Have you identified that submarine yet?”

“Just came out of the computer, Captain. She’s the Sachishio from Sasebo.”

Harding added that bit of information to his message and sent it forward to the communications shack across the passageway from sonar for encryption and preparation for transmission. The radio operator would add the proper headings.

When they were settled at sixty feet, Harding called ESMs. “This is the captain. I want to know if those Orions are still around.”

“Standing by.”

“Prepare to dive,” he told Trela, then raised the search periscope, ESM antenna and the UHF antenna which would link them with Pearl via the satellite.

It was late afternoon on the surface, and although the sky was still somewhat overcast, the seas had dropped considerably. He made a quick 360-degree sweep but saw nothing.

“Conn, ESMs. We’re showing a faint radar signal to the southeast, but nothing else. The P-3s are gone.”

“Good.”

“We have the incoming,” the radio operator called.

“Send our message.”

A few seconds later the radioman was back. “Message sent and confirmed, sir.”

“Very well.” Harding lowered the periscope and masts. “Karl, take us to three hundred feet and move us about ten miles north. I want to be a little closer to the action when these guys pass us.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Paradise brought the message back from the radio shack. “The ante has just been raised a notch,” he said, handing it to Harding.

Z090712ZAUG

TOP SECRET

FM: COMSUBPAC

TO: USS SEAWOLF

INFO: CINC7THFLEET

A. USS SEAWOLF Z172111ZAUG

CHINESE FLEET OPS

1. NRO ADVISES CHINESE NORTHERN FLEET DEPLOYMENT, FROM BASES AT QINGDAO, LUSHUN AND XIAOPINGDAO XX POSSIBILITY THIS DEPLOYMENT IN RESPONSE TO REF A XX INTENT UNKNOWN.