The single ping from the active sonar reverberated through the boat, and a split second later the final range and bearing to the target showed up on the BSY-1 combat system. An instant later the firing solution came up.
“Weapons presets completed,” the fire control technician reported.
“Fire one, fire two,” Tomita ordered.
“I have two torpedoes in the water,” Fischer called out. He eased the headphones off his ears and looked up.
“How long ’til impact?” Harding asked.
“Twelve seconds.”
Harding glanced at his watch, then reached up with his left hand to brace himself against the overhead. At twelve seconds one explosion, followed almost immediately by a second, hammered the Seawolf’s hull.
Fischer turned back to his sonar set, pulling the earphones back over his ears. After a few seconds he adjusted a control. “I’m getting breakup noises. The Han is on her way down.” He listened a half minute longer, then nodded. “She’s definitely dead.”
“What’s the Natsushio doing?” Harding asked.
“She’s turning to port, sir, and diving.”
“Keep a close watch on her, Mel,” Harding said, and he went back to the conn. “Hard over to starboard and get us out of here.” He went to the plotting table as the Seawolf banked to the right. “New course one-three-zero, all ahead one-third.”
The officer of the deck was relaying the orders, and Paradise came over. “We have to call this one home, Tom.”
“As soon as we’re in the clear,” Harding said. “I don’t want to get into a pissing contest with the Japanese until somebody tells me what the hell is going on.”
TWELVE
It was a few minutes after 9:00 A.M. when Tony Croft, his letter of resignation in his pocket, shambled down the corridor from the Executive Office Building to the Oval Office. The President’s appointments secretary Dale Nance had called and told him to come over on the double, and in Croft’s present state of mind he had to wonder if his secret had gotten out. He was a traitor, and he didn’t know how he could face the President at this moment. Or how he was going to face his wife and children and his friends and colleagues. He didn’t know how he could explain himself, because even now he didn’t know how it had happened, except that at the time he thought he was protecting the President and the nation.
At the very least he would be severely criticized for walking out at this most difficult of times, but he was part of the problem, and therefore he could not be part of the solution. At the worst, and that’s how he was thinking this morning, he was going to federal prison for a very long time. That possibility was terrifying, because he was sure he would be doing hard time at some institution like Leavenworth, and not one of the country club lockups that the media loved to poke fun at. He was sure that he wouldn’t be able to hack it, and that made his present state of depression even worse. Where had it all gone wrong for him?
Roland Murphy came down the corridor in a big hurry from the opposite direction, a tight scowl on his bulldog features. “What a goddamn mess,” he said.
“What’s happened?” Croft asked, his gut tightening.
“It’s the goddamned Japanese. One of their subs destroyed a Chinese submarine last night. Haven’t you heard?”
“No.”
The Oval Office was filled with people, telephones rang, the television was tuned to CNN, the sound low, and Croft noticed gratefully that they were doing a report from what looked like Havana, so at least for the moment this incident hadn’t hit the news. But he briefly wondered why they weren’t meeting downstairs in the crisis room. The President and Howard Secor were in deep discussion by the bowed windows, while Secretary of Defense Landry and General Podvin were speaking on telephones. Thomas Roswell came in right behind them. Like Murphy, he carried a bulging briefcase, which he opened. He spread several satellite photographs, some of them in infrared, on the President’s desk.
“These came in from the NRO early this morning,” he told Murphy.
The President looked up, clearly angry. “Not such a good morning, gentlemen. Roland, can you fill us in on the latest?”
“Perhaps we should go downstairs, Mr. President,” Croft said. He was seething with a mix of emotions, guilt and fear.
“No time, Tony. I’m going to call the Japanese ambassador over here, and I want to know what to say to the bastard.”
The President rarely spoke that way, and it got their attention.
“Tom’s brought over the NRO shots taken overnight. And we got a break with the weather this time,” Murphy said. “The battle took place three hundred feet beneath the ocean, but you can see that something definitely blew up.”
They gathered around the desk to look at the pictures. “There’s absolutely no doubt what happened?” President Lindsay asked.
“We got it direct from the Seawolf,” Landry assured him.
“What did we miss?” the President asked.
“Sir?”
“The two submarines China sent weren’t due to show up so soon. Which means we missed this submarine. What else have we missed?”
“There’s no way of telling for the moment,” Roswell had to admit, and it didn’t make the President happy.
“Roland?”
“In a nutshell, a Japanese submarine, the Natsushio out of the MSDF base at Maizuru, showed up last night, started a search pattern and discovered the Chinese submarine. For whatever reason, the Japanese submarine fired two torpedoes, both of which hit the target, and the Chinese submarine was destroyed.”
“Did they give any warnings?”
“There’s no way of knowing that,” Murphy said. “But Harding, the Seawolf’s skipper, said it had to have come as a surprise to the Chinese captain because he didn’t try to evade, nor did he try to fight back.”
“Then what happened?”
“The Natsushio bugged out, and Harding retired to a safe distance and radioed in his report. He’s standing by out there for now.”
“One confused captain, I would suspect,” Landry said.
“What did we tell him?” the President asked.
“To stay put and continue to monitor the situation,” Landry said. “Admiral Mann wants to pull him out of there. He can head north and join up with the Seventh Fleet.”
“I want him to follow the Japanese submarine,” the President said. “For now he’s the only one with the capability of telling us what’s going on.”
“If I may make a suggestion, Mr. President, why not have John put some pressure on Enchi,” Croft said. This situation was getting way out of hand, and he felt partly responsible.
“They’re giving him the runaround,” the President said.
“Does he have this latest information?”
“It’s on the way, but it’s not going to make any difference,” Landry said. “They’ve stonewalled him this far, they’re not going to suddenly open up because of this.”
“Maybe he should go to Beijing,” General Podvin said. “I was wrong about the Japanese not tangling with the Chinese navy, so the Seventh Fleet might be sailing into the middle of a mess a lot bigger than we think.”