The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  “I fail to see—”

  “Never interrupt an empress,” Xingzhen cut him off. “The point is that with each defeat, Alfred learned something. With each frustration, he found out something new about his enemies. The day finally came, after all those defeats, when he turned the tables. He had learned. After that he could not be beaten on land or even at sea, even though his enemies were a great seafaring people.

  “And Alfred also became the first and only king among his people to be called, ‘the Great.’

  “The short version of which, General, is snap out of it. You have a job to do.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?

  —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

  Combat Information Center, BdL Dos Lindas,

  Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  This far down, Fosa could barely feel aircraft taking off and leaving, and that only sometimes. He could not, of course, see them. CIC was the second most well-protected part of the Dos Lindas, after sick bay. He found he spent more time down here now than up in the island. His chief of the air wing could handle air operations well enough. He needed to be down here when the threat was finally revealed.

  Archangel, the Volgan submarine tracking system, had, like its Federated States counterpart, been designed for an earlier day and noisier submarines. The Zhong subs, being nuclear, were inherently noisier than diesel electric boats or air independent boats. But they weren’t all that noisy, hence the continuing inability of the passive system to confirm the presence and exact location of more than two at any given time, which two disappeared regularly amidst the clutter on the ocean floor. Oh, Archangel could pick up more hints than that, but whether those were real, echoes, shadows, or big, bloody carnivorous fish . . . well, without something extra, who could say?

  They did have something extra though. Among the other things the legion had done in preparing their defenses, they’d used a variant on an old technique for fortress artillery, the acoustical survey. By this method, through setting off explosions at sea, they’d managed to map the ocean floor to a considerable degree of accuracy. Since they had it so accurately mapped, they were also able to employ an old technique, “SOFAR,” Sound Fixing And Ranging. This was also a double entendre. The short version of all that was that, by this point, they could set off a couple of booms of a given size at a couple of known points and have some chance of finding any new anomalies off shore. It was an imperfect system, given the vagaries of wind and wave, especially under littoral conditions. It was also fairly unlikely to spot a sub in any number of places along the ocean floor.

  On the other hand, given the limited number of targets out there, the system at least gave Fosa some idea of where to look. Though, even with the training wing aboard the other “carrier,” the stationary BdEL1, he really didn’t have enough aircraft for the search mission. This was so, even in the near and constricted waters.

  That said, if he happened to find one of the Zhong subs, he had enough to rain death upon it. In total, Fosa’s aviation assets ran to forty Yakamov YA-72 helicopters, ten of them equipped for antisubmarine work, the rest perfectly capable of carrying light torpedoes, plus another sixty fixed-wing aircraft, twenty-four for attack and thirty-six for recon, though not all of those were available at any given time. Indeed, the number of aircraft available had been dropping slowly but steadily for a while now. It was beginning to worry him, too.

  The attack birds—Turbo-finches—could also carry torpedoes. The ones they did carry were light ones—strictly for antisubmarine work, basically depth charges with attitude—because Balboa didn’t have anything really except for fairly heavy antiship torpedoes and rather light, antisubmarine ones. Still, if medium had existed, something under two tons, say, in the Balboan inventory, they could have been carried. The ’Finches could also carry substantial depth charges both in number and power. A few of them were on standby with mine pods slung underneath. There was a large number of concrete training “bombs” lined up, too, more or less as an afterthought, since one never really knew what might work . . . and because they were available in plenty. Meanwhile the recon aircraft, modified Crickets, were kept pretty busy keeping sonar buoys out there, for the ASW Yakamovs to track.

  Sometimes, Fosa thought he knew where as many as four of the five submarines were. Unfortunately, since one of those was a de facto hidden ally, the Yamatan, he couldn’t do a damned thing with the knowledge since he couldn’t tell who was who.

  “Get me Fernandez on the secure link again,” he said. “I’ll take it in my day cabin.”

  “Yes, Rod,” said Fernandez, before Fosa even had a chance to ask. “The Yamatans agreed—you know how they are; without ever admitting anything—to remove their sub, and, by the way, we’re ‘very welcome.’ But their sub, which, of course, is a figment of our imaginations, is on a fixed schedule to check in, and the time’s not up yet. Or wouldn’t be up, if, in fact, there were a Yamatan submarine off our coast, which, of course, there is not.”

  Fosa sighed. Yeah, he knew the Yamatans. Not for the first time he felt a wave of grief wash over him for his mentor in naval warfare, Tadeo Kurita, whose mortal remains—an outline of a small man waving a sword—had been flash burned into the hull of his ship. The sword, his family’s ancient heirloom, from Old Earth, itself, was welded to the hull. Both were protected by a frame of steel and thick sheets of polycarbonate. Barring a direct hit on them with something substantial, the ship would go down before the shadow or the sword were lost.

  It was the holiest place on a ship all the crew considered holy. It was the final stop on every new shipmate’s tour of the vessel.

  Before Fosa quite managed to formulate an answer, there was a knock on the hatch to his day cabin.

  “Come in,” he ordered.

  “Sir, message from Archangel.” The rating handed the sheet over.

  Fosa read and said, “Crap!”

  “What is it, Rod?” asked Fernandez.

  “There are,” answered Fosa, “apparently six subs out there now.”

  Fernandez coughed in surprise. “Unless the Yamatans have two on station—and I’m sure they have made a point to deny there were two when I suggested one—there’s really only one other good probability of just who that sixth sub is.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Fosa. “May as well tell the Yamatans to stick around; the Federated States Navy is here. And, unless they’re forthcoming as to why very quickly, I am starting the classis to Santa Josefina.”

  “Nah, Rod, let’s get rid of our problems as we can. And turning tail is premature. I’ll have the foreign service folks ask the FSC’s ambassador,” said Fernandez, “but you can’t count on the FSN keeping their diplomats informed when subs are at issue.”

  “All right, I’ll hang on a bit longer. But I can’t wait forever.”

  “You could try spooking the Zhong, you know,” suggested Fernandez. “The key, though, especially if the FSC is observing, is to get the Zhong to fire first. Never mind if they fire because we’ve put them in an impossible position; the ruling Progressive Party, down south, will only care about who shot first.”

  “Yes, Omar; now go teach your mother to suck eggs. I know that’s the intention. Getting them to do it is the tricky part.”

  Zhong Submarine Mao Zedong, Mar Furioso,

  north of the Isla Real, Terra Nova

  About forty-three miles north of the Isla Real there was an east-west-running underwater ridge. Just south of that was a not inconsiderable trench. South of the trench rose an escarpment beyond which the ocean floor leveled off. It was there, over the ridge, that Captain Liu turned to port, or east, and brought his boat above its lowest and quietest speed. He proceeded ahead some twenty-eight thousand yards, then stopped. He let his passive sonar and nav people figure out precisely where he was. Then he took on a bit of ballast and let his boat sink, using the planes to glide to the northern side of the ridge. He trimmed his ta
nks for as near-to-perfect neutral buoyancy as could be obtained, then waited there, stationary and as quiet as a nuke boat could be, for a full six hours, just to see if anyone would show up to play. When no one did, Liu executed a supremely slow one-eighty until his boat was aimed due west. He moved west then, still as slowly as possible, for eighteen thousand yards, then turned south and came to a complete stop. There, he took on a little ballast—just a tad—and let his boat sink very gently almost to the sea floor.

  Liu could hear the enemy fleet, roughly halfway between the escarpment and the big island that was Objective One for the invasion fleet, when it arrived. It was hard not to hear them. Apparently they’d been listening to someone who’d told them that the days of purely passive sonar were over, because at least one of their ships was pinging like mad. He could only hope that if they’d tracked his approach, he’d lost them when he dropped below the ridge.

  Despite the active pinging, the Balboans apparently hadn’t quite given up on passive means. Over the course of the next three hours, a double row of sonar buoys was laid over the trench. Their distinctive plonks were plotted on the chart in the con, along with estimates of their endurance.

  “Do they know we’re here, Captain?” Liu’s chief of boat had asked.

  The captain shook his head and answered, “I don’t think so. We don’t make much nose, albeit more than a diesel electric or AIP. We’re behind the ridge. We’re under the layer.” He shook his head more emphatically. “No, I don’t think so.”

  The chief of boat was skeptical. “Then why put out that double row of passive sonar buoys, sir?”

  “It’s just a logical place to put them.”

  “Skipper,” said Sonar, “we’ve got an unidentified submarine, I make it a Yamatan Teruzuki class, exiting the area at very high speed.”

  “Show me a plot,” Liu ordered. The presumptively Yamatan sub, its course, depth, and speed, appeared on the plotting table.

  “Why did they leave so quickly?” asked Liu.

  His exec had the answer. “They were near the surface . . . near enough for communications back to home. They were probably ordered out of the area. As to why . . . ?”

  “Yamato and Balboa are thick as thieves,” said Liu. “Have been for years. If they’ve been tracking us—and that’s the way to bet it—they’ve been doing so on Balboa’s behalf. If they left in a hurry . . . it’s likely because the Balboans wanted them out of the area so they could go hot on our asses.”

  FSS Oliver Rogers, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  That there was both a Federates States Navy submarine and a Balboan coastal defense artillery battery both named for the same man was a source of considerable amusement to those who were aware of it.

  “No question, sir, that was Akizuki, turning tail in decidedly unYamatan fashion.”

  The Rogers had been tracking the Zhong undersea flotilla since they’d left the Sea of Hangkuk. The Yamatan was harder; indeed, they hadn’t known about it until it stopped off at an FSN base in the Mar Furioso for replenishment. Since then, they’d been tracking it, too. Though they hadn’t been privy to the conversations, they’d seen every time the Akizuki had come up to communicate with home, every time it had voided waste, and every change in course.

  “Why?” asked Oliver’s skipper, Meredith.

  “Best, guess, Skipper,” offered Intel, “is that they’ve been warned the Balboans are about to engage and to get the hell out of the area. You just don’t see Yamatans turn tail and run unless someone tells them to.

  “Ummm . . . Skipper,” added Intel, “maybe we should assume they know something we don’t and follow their example.”

  “Awfully tempting,” said the captain, “but doesn’t fit our orders. Any chance that home didn’t note that Yamatan leaving the area?”

  “None, Captain. Looks like they deliberately gave it away.”

  “Okay, base can make the decision about what to do then. For us, we sit here, observe, and report.”

  Kurita Memorial, BdL Dos Lindas, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  The gun deck had been repaired. Rather, the old one had been cut away, except for a lip to provide a decent weld. The replacement had been obtained by removing a twin 40mm, mount, and platform from the BdEL1 and welding the latter to the lip. No one, of course, touched the steel that was Tadeo Kurita.

  Fosa sometimes came here to think . . . or just to reminisce. For the nonce, he sat in the trainer’s seat, to the right side of the gun, nearest Kurita’s shadow, with his arms folded over the trainer’s handwheel and his chin resting on his arms. Fosa thought long and hard about the next step; how to get the bloody Zhong to fire the first shot, without at the same time also firing the last shots at sea, with his fleet somewhere under the sea when the smoke cleared.

  I’ve got eight of the thirteen Meg boats available, the other five being scattered at various spots along the Shimmering Sea. When number fourteen finishes its shakedown I get that one, too. Though it won’t really be any good that quickly. Of the ones I have, they’ve limited endurance and are hard as hell on the crews, so at any given time I’ve got four or five available: One replenishing, sometimes two, one in transit, coming, and one in transit, going. I could push them harder but that will leave them weak when I really have to push them harder.

  I could send the Megs north and have them sweep the escarpment, trench, and ridge. They’re the quietest things around, at least in glide mode. And they’re unusually resistant to detection with active sonar, too, what with the smooth plastic hulls and the cones and pyramids that connect the inner hull with the outer.

  Okay, so let’s suppose I can do that and that the Megs can find the Zhong hunter-killer boats; does that get me much? Probably not. At the first sign we’re on them the Zhong take off and the Megs have neither the speed nor the endurance to keep up. Then, too, there’s no way for me to really control them, and they can’t tell me what they’ve found or not found. They can’t even do a maneuver to let me know since I can’t detect them for beans, either.

  I fucking told Patricio we needed something that can track subs from above, without risking a major combatant . . . something like those drone boats the FSN has. But would he listen? Nooo!

  Odds of a Meg being able to take on a Zhong Dynasty class? Not good. Our successes so far were against, on the one hand, a Gaul who probably had no idea the things were even armed, and, on the other, a warship that had no clue it might be engaged. Most modern Zhong subs around? Megs having sonar taken off Volgan boats of the old generation? No surprise? No fucking way. Or, at least, no certain fucking way.

  Well . . . we want them to shoot first or, at least, for it to appear that they’ve shot first. What if I send the Megs out to hunt, and put one or two really fast surface ships, one or two of the Lycosa class corvettes, to search along the ridge and escarpment in as threatening a manner as possible. If the Zhong open fire the Lycosas have a fair chance of outrunning a torpedo or diverting it or simply outmaneuvering it.

  What if they don’t fire?

  Fosa grappled with that for no little time until he had a truly wicked idea. If one of the Megs can find even one of the Zhongs, the Meg can fire at the Lycosa from very close to the Zhong. To the FSC, that will look like the Zhong shot first.

  Ah, no . . . the problem there is that the FSN, the state-of-the-art as far as navies go, might see the Meg, despite gliding and despite the plastic, the cones, and the pyramids.

  Or maybe . . . and then, too, a little distraction might help.

  Fosa stood up and grabbed the sound-powered phone affixed to the hull behind the gun. “Get me the following people, in CIC, in four hours, for orders . . . yes, yes . . . use the Gertrude to get all the Meg skippers up. And connect me to Carrera.”

  Because this requires authorization higher than my own.

  Submarino de la Legion 1, Megalodon, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  They’d worked most of the night; the crew were half exhausted. Even so, it was the most experienced crew
the classis had.

  Would have been worse, thought the skipper, Captain Chu, except that both the other boats on rest and replenish back at the pens kicked in to help. Well, they could afford to; they don’t do a damned thing, hardly, until we accomplish our mission or fail to. They’ve got their boats tied up to the docks inside the big island’s south coast, and, no doubt, themselves racked out in bunks.

  Chu’s mission was to find the sixth submarine, or, rather, the fifth, now that the Yamatan had taken off. But it wasn’t enough just to find it. They had to find it without being spotted themselves, and they had to do it in such a way as to be absolutely sure the gringos hadn’t seen them. Moreover, they had to do all that in such an obvious way that the FSN would see them if they were at all detectable.

  He and his crew had been trained by Volgans and Yamatans, good men, good submariners, all with that requisite touch of the pirate, to boot. But one thing he’d taken away from his training was a vast respect for the FSN, generally, and its own submariners, in particular. The Volgans and Yamatans made no bones about it; they were the class of this world.

  “I don’t think they’re better men than we are,” a Volgan had once told Chu, “but they are very damned good men in boats we can only sigh with envy at, with technology in those boats we don’t even know enough about to sigh over.”

  The Yamatans, who worked with the FSN on very friendly terms, were at least as profound in their praises.

  There were deep mine barrages laid east and west of the island. A small area had been left, between the Isla Real and the Isla San Juan, which was unmined. Sure, an enemy ship could pass through the same gap. And be engaged by rifles, machine guns, tank cannon, mortars, heavy artillery, torpedoes . . . no, the gap wasn’t a weakness in the defense, any more than any fortress with a sally port considered that sally port a weakness.