“Yessir. But I can check again…checking right now, sir…”
The red light kept coming, and Judd kept watching, until eventually ELINT returned.
“Sir, now that we look more closely, that radar signature is a bit different. There’s a degree of fuzziness on the PRF. It’s either off-line, or they’ve modified. But I’m still certain it’s the land-based one we know about.”
The captain kept checking through the glass, watching for the red light, when suddenly, to his horror, it turned to green and red, which meant he was now seeing both running lights. The Chinese warship was, incredibly, steaming straight toward him in the pitch dark, from about 1,000 yards, on the calm ocean.
“Captain-Sonar. Contact has reduced speed. He now has turns for twelve knots. Active short-range sonar transmissions on the bearing. Transmission interval fifteen hundred yards.”
Judd Crocker knew what the damned thing looked like. And he knew that the 3,500-tonner, with its sharp, rising steel bow, could put Seawolf on the bottom if it was determined to ram. He had no idea how the Luda knew they were there, but he knew how quickly he had to move…he had roughly 60 seconds to get deep to avoid collision.
“THIS GUY’S CLOSE ABOARD,” he snapped to Linus. “HEADING STRAIGHT TOWARD…WE’RE GOING DEEP…TEN DOWN!! ALL AHEAD TWO-THIRDS TWO HUNDRED FEET…CHECK ALL MASTS RIGHT DOWN…RIG FOR COUNTERATTACK.”
The American submarine, now angling fast through the water, 10 degrees down from the horizontal, her mammoth turbines accelerating, was 100 feet below the surface in 30 seconds, 150 feet in 45 seconds.
“TWO HUNDRED FEET, SIR…”
“Captain-Sonar. We passed through a layer at ninety feet, sir, his old sonar will be virtually useless beyond a thousand yards…”
But Sonar’s words were almost drowned out by the outrageous roar of twin screws overhead, as the Luda came thundering past, right above, and started to fade astern. A few tightly held breaths were released.
But Judd Crocker’s main concern was the dreaded click-and-bang of a depth-charge attack. Naturally he kept these fears to himself.
But now the sonar room had detected a change, and Lieutenant Frank called: “She’s turning, sir…the Luda’s turning…I think she may be coming back. Transmission interval still fifteen hundred yards, sweeping. Not in contact.”
“Hope you’re right, Kyle. I’m staying deep and quiet…what’s your prediction for her sonar range in these conditions?”
“Captain-Sonar…range prediction above layer seventeen hundred plus yards to first surface reflection. Below layer twelve hundred at optimum evasion depth…that is one-forty feet.”
“Captain, aye. Make your depth one-forty.”
Seawolf slipped quietly up and away, the engineers deep in the ship watching the computer screens, the planesmen holding her level, steady at 140 feet below the surface. Sonar heard the sound of the Luda’s obsolete sonar gradually grow fainter as the Americans continued their stealthy way east, riding the deep waters on Lt. Commander Mike Schultz’s 90,000-horsepower turbines. Seawolf could go nearly twice as fast underwater as the 30-year-old Luda could on the surface, but not in these shallow waters.
Twenty minutes later, die Luda’s transmissions had faded away completely to the southeast. Forty minutes later, Judd risked coming above the layer to hear better. But there was nothing. And once more Seawolf was prowling in lonely waters. For the first time the captain had a moment to gather his thoughts, and he asked Kyle Frank, Linus Clarke, Andy Warren, Shawn Pearson, and Cy Rothstein to come into the control room.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “something real strange just happened. I am getting a distinct impression that someone out there doesn’t like us!”
“Funny you should mention that, sir…”
“Yeah, I was just thinking the same…”
The tone was light. But the subject was deadly serious…how did that damned Luda find them, miles from anywhere at periscope depth, in the middle of the night? Not using any of its own sensors? Why had it changed direction so suddenly, while the captain was looking through the periscope, watching the starboard green running light turn to green and red? Who the hell had vectored it onto the precise correct course to ram them?
They all knew the Luda’s sonar was hopeless at 25 knots, even in a calm sea in the layer. There was no way she could have navigated herself onto Seawolf.
“No, sir. She was being vectored from outside her own ops room. Someone must have picked up our mast in this flat water…must have been from the shore…” Cy Rothstein looked concerned.
“It has to do with the curve of the earth,” said Frank. “No one can operate shore radar from a range of more than twenty-two miles.”
“We can.”
“Yes, but no one else has technology even approaching that.”
“They didn’t used to have. But the Chinese plainly have it now,” said the CO.
“How far?”
“I don’t know exactly,” said Shawn, the navigation officer. “But I think the nearest of the islands outside Zhoujiang Ku would be around forty miles north of here, and that’s where they must have been scanning from.”
“Then I am drawn to the conclusion that the Chinese have stolen our most advanced radar secrets as well as everything else,” said the captain.
“Jesus Christ. It would be just our luck to have them use it personally against us.”
“Hey…forty miles…that’s one hell of a way for shore radar…they into some satellite hookup or what?”
“Who knows? But we’re gonna have to be damned careful, that’s for sure.”
“I’m too young to die,” said Shawn, his voice rising to a little girl’s squeak. “And I hate the Chinese, and I can’t find my way home.”
Judd Crocker laughed as always at his young navigator, but a shadow quickly crossed his face when he spoke. “We have to face it, there is a certain Chinaman in that damned Navy who is determined to get us. He’s been trying to do it for three days.
“He’s twice mobilized half the fleet trying to blow us apart with charges and mortars, he’s had Navy fliers circling around trying to hit us with torpedoes from the air, he’s had sonobuoys in the water, and a half hour ago he ordered one of his elderly destroyers to run flat out through the night and try to sink us by ramming.
“Gentlemen, we have to take this fucker seriously or he’s going to whip our asses…and we have to remember that every time we raise the periscope anywhere near the shore, he’s gonna be watching. Remember, a half hour ago, he wasn’t guessing…he knew where we were, and as far I’m concerned, that’s a first.”
0100. Wednesday. July 5.
The home of Admiral Zhang Yushu.
Again the C-in-C could not sleep. He’d been walking alone on the beach, staring out to sea, his thoughts cascading through the deep waters. Where was the American submarine? What kind of a devil was driving it, and how did he manage to evade capture, and why did he not just leave? Admiral Zhang was completely bewildered. That man has somehow avoided contact with an entire battle fleet, destroyers, frigates, fast attack craft, ASW helicopters, and aircraft. He’s dodged depth charges, depth bombs, sonobuoys, and mortars. And last night, he showed up again, not so far off Guangzhou. We actually had his mast on the radar, but we never got near him.
WHAT DOES HE WANT? That was the final question. And Zhang Yushu could not answer that, either.
He walked disconsolately back to the house, listening to the sounds of the midsummer night. But to him the clockwork chirp of the cicadas was the pinging of a distant sonar. The whisper of the wind through the palm trees was the swish of a submarine’s blades through the water. And the sound of the waves breaking on the shore was the sound of his barefoot youth in the nearby city of Xiamen, living on his father’s boat, moored right off the beach.
He’d come a long way in a relatively short time. But he had to find that submarine. And the longer the chase, the more determined he was to blow a hole in Captain Judd Crocker�
�s Seawolf. Or, better yet, sink it.
The admiral crossed the wide porch and softly entered his study through the French doors. He poured himself some iced tea and sipped it slowly. Then he had an idea, he picked up the telephone and dialed his secure line to Admiral Zu, who would not complain at being awakened. Not this week, with tensions running so high in the People’s Navy.
Jicai picked up on the third ring, and with good grace accepted his Commander-in-Chief’s apology for the hour.
“I called because we must not be beaten by this submarine,” he said. “And because I know you want it removed as deeply as I do.”
“Probably deeper, sir. How about a thousand fathoms?”
Admiral Zhang chuckled. “Jicai,” he said, “we have tried every conventional sonar and radar system we own. We have been close but never close enough, fast but never fast enough. I am drawn to the conclusion that we have access to only one system that may detect the American ship in time for us to strike.”
“Sir, it is entirely untried. We don’t even know if it will work.”
“The Americans plainly think it does. They have it fitted to all of their most advanced warships.”
“Yessir. But they have the original. Ours is…well, in the nature of a copy.”
“Yes. But it’s only a towed array. And we know how to make towed arrays that work very well.”
“Yessir. But we’ve never made one this long. And we’ve never even tested it yet.”
“That may be so. But our scientists have been very thorough, and the report says it will work better than any towed array we have ever had. The report says it will work as well for us as it does for the Americans.”
“Well, sir, it is one thousand yards long, which seems to me phenomenal…they say it will pick up every sound in the ocean for miles and miles.”
“If it will really do what our people say it will do, Jicai, it might find the American submarine for us. It is currently fitted to the new destroyer.”
“Yessir. It’s in a special housing on the stern. Under guard at the jetty in the Pearl River.”
“Can it be deployed right away?”
“Yessir. It’s completely ready for its final trials. Scheduled to start in two days.”
“Send it to sea, Jicai. Send it out to the area where the Luda picked up their mast, then have it start an area search pattern based on that position. The American probably thinks we’re hopeless at ASW, and he may not have cleared that datum. If he runs, we cannot catch him; but if he underrates us and stays, we might. The only ship we have that could catch them is the one with the new enlightened towed array.”
“When do I send it, sir? First light?”
“No, Jicai. Not first light. Send it now. And tell Colonel Lee to find the Seawolf. Personal orders of the Commander-in-Chief.”
0200.
Canton Naval Base.
They cast off all lines at 0235, and two tugs hauled the 500-foot-long Luhai-class warship out into the wide south-flowing stream of the Pearl River. Her new name, Xiangtan, could be seen, freshly painted in black, high on her light gray hull. A sweeping, blood-red stripe at the waterline was reflected in the dock lights that glistened in the dark shadows of Canton’s ancient river. Colonel Lee ordered, “All-ahead half speed.”
The Navy tugs escorted her downstream for 15 miles to the great Delta, even though she ran on her own enormous power, two Ukrainian-built turbines. The tugs positioned themselves on either side of her bow, acting more as pilots than extra engines and brakes. And they steered her through the tricky shallow waters of the southern fork of the river.
Xiangtan was a warship in the old-fashioned sense, armed to the teeth with antiaircraft guns, torpedoes, and missiles, surface-to-air, and surface-to-surface, the latter a phalanx of sea skimmers with a range of 70 miles. She was the most modern frontline fighting ship in the Chinese Navy, and she could make 30 knots through the water, a crew of 250 manning her, two heavily armed Harbin helicopters on her stern, to increase the speed and reach of her ASW capability.
Her radars and sonars were the finest that PLAN could purchase, but tonight they were overshadowed by the giant towed array, an ultrasensitive underwater acoustic cable that would soon be strung out behind her, trailing deep astern of China’s finest warship, listening to the strange acoustic caverns of the ocean, distilling the noises, filtering the fleeting contacts, but listening hardest of all for the least suggestion of Seawolf’s machinery.
Xiangtan’s crew had answered the call of their commander, many of them racing in from their homes around the dockyard, to take up what amounted to “action stations” in the middle of the night. No one knew what was happening, except they were going downriver to the open ocean, two days ahead of schedule. Whatever it was, it must be big. “They’re saying Admiral Zhang Yushu ordered it personally.”
Through the darkness they swept southward, the tugs with big probing spotlights above their bridges, in addition to regular running lights. As the Delta grew ever wider, the escorts peeled away, leaving the destroyer to run down the strictly marked channel to the west of Lan Tau Island. She then steamed past Guishan Dao and Dhazizhou Dao, leaving Macao seven miles to starboard, heading straight into the defined navigational routes that lead all ships from Canton out to the China Sea.
By 0500, in the pearly predawn light of Wednesday, July 5, Colonel Lee had his ship running fast through the still-calm waters, in light rain, almost 100 miles south of the Pearl River Delta. He could not of course know it, but Lt. Commander Linus Clarke was conning USS Seawolf slowly back toward the east, some 15 miles off his starboard bow.
Colonel Lee was pleased at his progress so far. They’d made good time into the search area, and his crew had deployed the towed array perfectly, and now it hung off the stern, riding back in the water for 1,000 yards, a grotesque electronic tail, five inches in diameter, black in color, its core the most advanced acoustic electronics in all the oceans.
If there was an element of doubt, it was only in the Chinese scientists’ ability to hook it up to the onboard computers, to process the array’s astonishing acoustic capability. The technique they had yet to master was that processing, because the Americans had improved it by a factor of 100. Nothing in all the history of modern naval warfare had ever been so good at identifying specific target frequencies from the monstrous background noise of the ocean. Admiral Zu Jicai knew its capability, knew it could hear a clockwork mouse scampering under the Tower of Babel — from 20 miles away.
050500JUL06.
20.30N 113.45E. Speed 10. Depth 150.
Course zero-eight-five.
Seawolf was at peace. Nothing was coming up on sonar, Captain Crocker had finally gone to bed, and Linus Clarke had the conn. It was not until 0525 that Frank’s operator began to pick up faint engine lines, faint but getting stronger as the hard-charging Xiangtan ran toward the Americans’ chosen course.
Normally, the approach of any warship — never mind a big Chinese destroyer — would have necessitated an immediate call to the captain to return to the control room. But Linus Clarke did not think he was personally having a good patrol. There had been three times when he had betrayed nerves of a kind no XO who hopes one day to have a command should ever display.
In his mind, he had only betrayed natural human reactions to extreme danger: the flooding of the torpedo room, deep beneath the surface; straying right into the path of incoming underwater missiles; being spotted by the big Chinese ICBM submarine. Linus knew that Captain Crocker was a top-class commanding officer, but he also knew their orders forbade them from getting detected. And so far they had been detected three times, once off Taiwan, obviously, once by the Xia, and again last night by shore radar. Judd might be tough, experienced and gifted, but he wasn’t Superman, and Linus thought it was about time he showed some of his own mettle, demonstrating that he too was capable of commanding an American nuclear boat on a highly classified mission.
He had a lot of CIA background now, and a lot o
f important contacts. He really wanted to take a look at this oncoming Chinese warship, and he ordered Seawolf’s team to reduce speed and slide up to periscope depth as the contact came within two miles. They might as well take a good look. If push came to shove, they could always go deep and outrun her, just as Judd had done to the much smaller Luda.
In the ops room of the Luhai destroyer there was a ripple of activity. One of the sonar operators, new to the screen that reflected the findings of the giant 1,000-yard-long American-designed towed array, thought he was getting something, but he could not tell what.
It was, however, a sufficient change in the levels for him to call out engine lines. And Colonel Lee, the very senior captain of the ship, instantly ordered a reduction in speed, as if silencing the water beyond the hull would make their contact more easy to identify. Xiangtan slowed almost to a halt while the Chinese technicians worked the computer keys, trying to tap into the new electronic system.
Meanwhile, now at periscope depth, Seawolf was 2,400 yards off the Luhai’s starboard beam. Clarke had his night-sight camera up and snapping, and he was visually able to see a large modification to the destroyer’s stern, an unusual housing, bigger than normal for foreign ships, though not entirely unusual in the U.S.
Linus’s mind raced. He knew what he was seeing. Everyone in the Silent Service knew that China had gotten its hands on that high-tech modern towed array, along with its processing computers. And right here was the evidence, a major Chinese warship with a big winch housing for a long towed array, the design and technology of which had been flagrantly stolen from the U.S.
“I’m going in closer,” he said. “Officer of the Deck, keep her straight and level, PD…I want to pass in across her stem and get some closeups of that housing. Might even catch a glimpse of the actual array in the water.”
“Steady, sir…” Andy Warren was issuing a veiled warning. “We don’t know how long that array is.”
“Don’t worry, Andy. I’m not going in closer than a mile. It won’t be that long, will it? And this is a destroyer…the array will be angled down in the water, not straight out behind like a submarine deploys.”
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