“We have a firing solution now on four targets, but there’re just too many of them,” Paradise said. There was a lot of tension in the control room.
“Nobody’s going to shoot at us,” Harding told him calmly. He was swinging the search periscope in a complete 360-degree circle. There were slowly moving navigation lights in every direction, but at the moment none of the ships was heading toward him. He picked out the stacked lights of an ocean-going tug, and moving the periscope left he found the Natsushio wallowing in the three-meter seas. He could imagine the captain on the bridge, fuming that he had lost this time.
He stepped back and called the comms shack. “This is the captain. Did you get the message off?”
“Aye, Skipper. We have confirmation, but there’s been no reply so far.”
Paradise gave him a questioning look from across the control room where he hovered over the BSY-1 computer displays. Harding shook his head.
He’d taken a big chance, surfacing like that, not only risking crashing into a ship but having some excited, trigger-happy weapons officer fire off a snap shot in the heat of the moment. After the first couple of minutes, however, the situation had settled down. Sonar was painting a picture of eleven surface ships, plus the damaged Natsushio, slowly circling, while electronically illuminating the Seawolf with everything they had. It was exactly what Harding had hoped for. Now there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind what type of submarine the Seawolf was and what country she belonged to. The Japanese could no longer maintain a pretense that they thought the Seawolf was a Chinese submarine.
“Conn, ESMs.”
“This is the captain.”
“Skipper, I’m receiving four airborne radar units. Two of them are Japanese Orions, but the other two are ours. Hornets.”
“What are they doing, Ballinger?”
“Sir, it looks like our guys are just flying back and forth right over us. They’re putting themselves between us and the Japanese navy.”
“Very well,” Harding said. They were maintaining steerage way, but nothing else. The entire flotilla with the Seawolf in the middle was slowly moving south.
He switched back to the communications shack. “This is the captain. See if you can raise the George Washington. I want to talk to Admiral Hamilton. In the clear.”
“Aye, Skipper. We’re picking up some of their signals now.”
“Have any of the Japanese ships tried to communicate with us?”
“Negative, Captain.”
“Okay, get me the admiral.”
“Stand by, sir.”
Harding gave Paradise a faint smile. The hard part had been getting his boat and crew out of immediate harm’s way. But the next step wasn’t going to be very easy either. He was just glad that poker hadn’t caught on with the Japanese as big as American baseball had. It was going to put the MSDF at a definite disadvantage. But he needed every edge he could get just now.
“Skipper, the admiral is on the open channel for you.”
Harding switched phones. “Admiral, thanks for the help. The timing couldn’t have been better.”
“Glad to do it, Tom,” Hamilton said. “I’m told that you made quite a big splash. What’s your situation now?”
“Did you get my flash traffic?”
“Just in time to give you a little assist.”
“We’re right in the middle of it here,” Harding said, letting a note of desperation creep into his voice. The admiral knew him well enough to understand why he’d called on a nonen-crypted circuit and pick up the completely out-of-character tone of voice.
“Okay, take it easy. We’re less than six hours out. Can you hang on that long?”
“I’m not sure, Admiral. I have half the Japanese fleet staring down my throat and the Chinese flotilla not too far away either.” He gave a big grin for the benefit of his control room crew. “But I’ll tell you one thing, I’ve got every one of them targeted, and all my tubes loaded. If one of those ships so much as farts, I’m going to fire everything I have. I won’t get them all, but I sure as hell will make a serious dent in their fleet.”
“Take it easy, Tom,” Hamilton said. “There’s going to be no further gun play down there.”
“If I’m threatened, I’ll shoot.”
“Not unless someone fires first.”
“I hear you, Admiral. But, goddammit, the Japanese are supposed to be our allies.”
“They are, and we’re working on getting this straightened out, you have my word on it. In the meantime I’m sending you some more air assets.”
“Very well.”
“Tom, can you hold out just a little longer?” Hamilton asked. “I want you to be part of the solution, not the problem.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do what I can for as long as I can.”
“I know you will. And we’re with you.”
Captain Tomita, his rage nearly uncontrollable, played the powerful beam of the spotlight along the length of the American submarine less than two hundred meters away.
His fleet was arrayed all around him, but they were impotent to do a thing against the bastard. These were Japanese waters, and he’d been sent to defend them against any and all intruders — that included Americans. Now he was being ordered again, in most emphatic terms, to stand down, and the shame was nearly unbearable. He was glad that his young son was not here to see it.
Two figures appeared on the bridge of the Seawolf. Tomita locked the spotlight on them, then raised his binoculars. The shorter one on the left was Capt. Thomas Harding. Tomita could not make out the man’s facial features from this distance, but he’d studied his entry in the Foreign Warship Personnel Profiles on the computer below, and he was certain now that the men he was looking at were Harding and his executive officer Rod Paradise.
He gripped the binoculars so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
“Kan-cho,” his third officer prompted respectfully at his elbow. “Tug three-one-two advises they are ready to get underway.”
Tomita continued studying Harding and Paradise.
“Kan-cho—”
Tomita’s jaw tightened, and he gripped the binoculars even harder. He counted slowly to five, then nodded. “Proceed,” he said.
“Hai, kan-cho,” the relieved officer replied.
When the Natsushio’s spotlight was extinguished, Harding studied the bulk of the MSDF submarine through his light-intensifying binoculars. He could make out two ghostly green figures on the bridge as the warship’s bows turned slowly to port.
Paradise was doing the same thing. “Looks like he’s heading out.”
Harding shifted to the ocean-going tug well out ahead of the submarine. The sea at her square stern boiled with phosphorescence as her massive propellers dug in against the strain of getting underway with a two-thousand-ton tow.
“He wanted to stay and fight,” Paradise said. “His two forward tubes were loaded and flooded.” He lowered his binoculars. “He would have lost.”
“We all would have lost,” Harding replied tiredly, relieved that the tough part was over with. No one was going to open fire now.
The ship’s com buzzed, and Harding answered it. “This is the captain.”
“Skipper, this is the radio shack. We just received a for-your-eyes-only encrypted message for you.”
“From who?”
“The Joint Chiefs, Captain. An Admiral O. Rencke.”
“On my way,” Harding said, and put the phone back. “Ever heard of Admiral Rencke, Joint Chiefs?”