Kilo Class

by Patrick Robinson

  14

  THE STAFF CAR DREW UP TO THE LOCKED corner gate of the Garden of Yu the Mandarin, and the big man in the rear seat stepped out. Two officials in Mao Zedong overalls hurriedly unlocked the gate, and the powerful, uniformed military officer marched into the nearly deserted showpiece of Shanghai’s waterfront. It was 11 AM and the gardens would not open to the public until 2 PM but in China warlords have traditionally had an entirely different set of rules.

  The steel-tipped black shoes of the lone figure clicked on the concrete path as he passed the Hall for Gathering Grace, in a light September drizzle, and continued through the hedgerows to the long lake, striding toward the Tower of Ten Thousand Flowers. But he slowed, as he walked to the towering ornamental ginkgo tree that dominates this end of the gardens. And there he sheltered beneath the large fanlike leaves of the last species of a tree that grew in Northern China two hundred million years ago.

  He stood in solitary fury under the branches, breathing deeply, as if trying to control himself. He crashed his clenched right fist into the open palm of his left hand, and he hissed under his breath, “If I could, I would blow the Pentagon to pieces.” There were times when Admiral Zhang Yushu was Asia’s answer to Admiral Arnold Morgan. Right now he did not trust himself to fraternize with other human beings. Especially since he expected, imminently, a call from Admiral Vitaly Rankov, whom he now considered to be the biggest fool in all Russia.

  The satellite message had explained there had been some sort of an accident off the southern end of the Kuril Island of Paramushir, and that one of the two Kilos had disappeared. At the time it had been running at a depth of two hundred feet in a protected two-mile square between the three Russian destroyers and the ASW frigate Nepristupny. It had also been accompanied by the twenty-one-thousand-ton Typhoon Class submarine, and had been surrounded by a sound barrier, which would make its detection impossible.

  The Russians were mystified. Not one of the sonar rooms had detected the approach of a torpedo. And though three ships had reported a possible explosion in the immediate area of the two-mile-square box, none could be positive as to its cause. Suddenly the Kilo was not answering on the underwater telephone, and now, five hours later, the destroyers were combing the area, having summoned search-assistance from their base at Petropavlovsk. An oil slick and some wreckage had been found. At this stage, given the ironclad strength of the Russian escort, they suspected an accident, possibly a massive battery explosion inside the submarine.

  Admiral Zhang had never read anything more complacent and dull-witted in his entire life. When the signal came in, the Admiral had asked himself just one question: would it have been obvious to a potential enemy that the Kilo was accompanied by a Russian Typhoon? The answer had been no. The Typhoon was in attendance to deter an enemy and had, in his view, failed. Even Rankov must now understand that it had failed because the Americans did not know it was there.

  He had read the signal with incredulity, baffled at what he called the “boneheaded intractability of the Slav peasant mind.” Alone in his office he had been physically affected by the depth of his outrage. He felt claustrophobic, hemmed in—all he wanted to do was hurl something at the wall. Instead he had summoned the staff car and told the driver to arrange for the gates of the Yu Yuan to be opened for him.

  Zhang loved lonely places. He would not have dreamed of spending time in the gardens when the teeming masses were in attendance, and he walked around the wide ginkgo tree, repeating over and over a jumble of cascading thoughts. “Their obsession with secrecy…their sheer mind-blowing dumbness…all they had to do was TELL the Americans the Typhoon was there, and this would never have happened—the Americans would never have dared to fire a torpedo had there been a chance of hitting a Russian submarine carrying inter-continental ballistics as the Typhoon certainly was because that’s what she’s for…and she was in Russian waters.”

  Admiral Zhang Yushu was in no doubt. The men in the Pentagon had sunk the ninth Kilo, as they had blown apart Kilo 4 and Kilo 5…and as they had destroyed Kilo 6, and Kilo 7, and Kilo 8 in the canal. Zhang would not have bet a secondhand rickshaw on the arrival of Kilo 10 in the Port of Shanghai. He shook his head in exasperation and reflected in fury on the entire scene, which had taken place in that wide distant seaway south of Paramushir.

  He could imagine the roar of the cavitation as the shafts and blades of the escorts thundered around, one ahead, one astern. He knew the active sonars would add to the din, and he knew also that such a racket would present serious problems to a marauding US SSN.

  But he knew the Americans were forever improving their underwater weapons. They had long been able to program torpedoes to search and destroy any target more than forty feet below the surface. Such a weapon would plainly miss the surface escorts and hit the submarine below.

  Zhang knew also that the Russians would have been towing decoys off the stern of all four escort vessels, designed to seduce away any incoming torpedo. But he had also heard of a further tactical development in the USA—one that allowed the torpedo guidance officer at the other end of the wire to force the underwater missile right on past the decoys, then allow it to search and lock on to a target beyond, all under strict control from the firing submarine.

  This would even allow the torpedo, if necessary, to charge right through the “box,” and then turn to race back in for a second look, still searching for an underwater target using “active” to home in on its helpless prey. In Zhang’s view that had probably happened to Kilo 9. He was prepared to bow to advanced technology. What he could not bow to was the idiocy of running a thunderous sound barrier twenty-four hours a day, in the full knowledge that it would probably deny you the precious detection of an incoming “smart” missile.

  What he could not bow to was the Russians’ truly numbing decision not to make clear to the Americans that if they opened fire on the Kilos they had an excellent chance of starting World War III by slamming a torpedo into a cruising Russian Typhoon.

  In Zhang’s view, that was the key to this terrible situation. And he gazed upward through the little clusters of newly sprouting ginkgo nuts, which were such a delicacy in China, and he thought of the wide Baltic faces of the Russian Navy personnel with whom he dealt…and he heard in his mind the sonorous, triumphal military music of their vast gray neighbors to the west…sounds so utterly crass and discordant to the Chinese ear. And he wondered, quite seriously, precisely which he hated more—the dull, unsubtle, flatly predictable mind-set of the Russians, or the swaggering, high-tech outlaw sweetness of the United States Navy.

  He strolled over to the great arbor, with its views across the two-hundred-yard-wide Huangpu River, and decided that while he found the Russians contemptible, he detested the Americans.

  While his driver waited at the Fu Yu Street gate, Zhang walked along the wide boulevard of the Bund, which wound behind the seawall following the great right-hand bend in the river on its way to the Yangtze Delta. He stopped occasionally, listening to the sounds of China’s most prosperous and busiest seaport—its docks stretching thirty-five miles along Shanghai’s waterfront.

  Zhang heard the lifelong familiar sound of horns and sirens blaring out over the water, and he watched the packed ferries vie for space with old flat-nosed steamers and freighters. All the while, ancient sailing junks tacked against the tide, ducking between huge coal barges as trading families tried to maneuver their sampans, hauling on the big single oar, the yuloh.

  The professional head of China’s Navy shook his head at the gentle chaos of this quasi-commercial carnival taking place on the brown waters of the Huangpu. It was vibrant but not entirely typical, because Shanghai also represented the very heart of the Chinese Navy. Here, in the massive shipyards of Jiangnan, Hudong, and Huangpu, they built some of China’s finest warships—the four-thousand-ton Luhu Class guided-missile destroyers, the twenty-five Jianghu Class frigates, and the guided-missile Luda Class destroyers like the 3,670-ton Nanjing, which been home to Adm
iral Zhang for several years.

  He could see her now if he closed his eyes—her stubby, sloping funnels, her sleek 433-foot-long hull, the state-of-the-art antisubmarine mortar launcher, positioned up on the bow, just for’ard of the main 130 mm. gun. Captain Zhang could handle that ship all right, old Number 131. Such days they had been. And he imagined the 120 mortar rockets he used to carry. He would have given his life for the opportunity to fire those mortars into the waters somewhere east of the Kuril Islands, where he knew an American nuclear submarine ran silently and deep, waiting for a new chance to hit the surviving Kilo.

  He cast his mind back to the early morning of September 5, when the message had come in from Vladivostock, relayed from the Admiral Chabanenko off the Siberian headland of Ol’utorsky: “Short transient contact picked up on three sweeps radar, six miles off our port bow…possible US SSN.” And he recalled too the imprudent smugness of the Russian Captain: “No reason for additional defensive measures…sound barrier well in place…US powerless.”

  Yeah, right. Admiral Zhang walked grimly back along the Bund and into the gardens, returning to the huge ginkgo tree, which to him seemed to embody the ancient soul of his land. He loved to stand in its shadow, and he did so whenever he came to Shanghai…just to stand there, beneath a tree that had already lived for four hundred years and would live for six hundred more—a tree whose natural heritage in his beloved country made the dinosaur look like an upstart.

  The rain had stopped, and his anger was abating. He walked around the small lake to the Pavilion of the Nine Lions and strolled down the long east bank of the central lake, past the Tower of Elation, which did not reflect his mood. And he considered how he should deal with his masters. He could, he felt certain, buy some time if he could just obtain a private audience with the Paramount Ruler. Surely the old man would grant him that. Only one thing would change the tide in his favor—if sometime in the next two weeks Kilo number 10 would slide, unharmed, up to her berth in the port of Shanghai.

  Wearily he walked back to the gates of the Gardens of Yu the Mandarin, and he stepped into the Navy staff car. Now he must prepare to face the inevitable inquisition. It would end, inevitably, with him, Zhang, and his senior Admirals trying to explain to civilians why a simple delivery of a few submarines, conducted in peacetime, in the waters of their friends and allies the Russians, was proving to be so catastrophically difficult.

  Admiral Vitaly Rankov had been in the Kremlin for most of the night—ever since the signal had come in from the Pacific Fleet at 0200 that one of the two Kilos bound for China was lost off the northern Kuril Islands. He had tried to stay calm and had listened carefully to the reports of the Captains of the Russian escort ships, who noted that they could find no suspicion of foul play. But they would, wouldn’t they?

  They reported that no one had any evidence of an attack. The Americans could not have detected the Kilos on sonar, and could not have seen them either. No one could have attacked the Kilos—unless an American submarine commanding officer had recklessly decided to blast a torpedo straight past the escort, somehow dodge the decoys, and swerve past the world’s biggest submarine and crash into the Kilo. No, Admiral Rankov did not really understand that either.

  The giant ex-Russian Intelligence officer may not have been a submarine weapons expert or a scholar of Naval warfare like his Chinese counterpart, Admiral Zhang, but he knew the capabilities of the US weapons systems well enough.

  Nevertheless, despite the lack of evidence, he KNEW whose hand was behind this. It was the same hand that had somehow smashed three submarines, two Tolkach barges, and a sizable length of the Belomorski Canal in one diabolical strike three months ago. It was the hand of Admiral Arnold Morgan.

  Right now he would have loved to call the White House and remonstrate with Morgan, threaten him with everything, reprisals, the Court of Human Rights, the United Nations, humiliation in front of the world community. But he just could not face the inevitable degradation of a conversation with the stiletto-sharp Morgan, the awful, criminal-smooth tones of the Texan: “Hey, Vitaly…you gotta get your security beefed up…stuff happens.”

  No. He just could not bear it. Instead he must placate the Chinese. And above all he must do everything in his power to ensure the last Kilo would arrive in Shanghai. Despite all of the wicked efforts of the fugitive from justice who rejoiced in the title of the US President’s National Security Adviser.

  Columbia was 150 miles clear of the datum, moving swiftly south-southeast in twelve thousand feet of water toward the Midway Islands. Boomer had been driving men and machinery hard for over a month now, and he was happy to be heading to the American submarine base at Pearl Harbor. He and his crew would get some much needed R and R, and Columbia would receive overdue routine maintenance. They would shut down the reactor, replace supplies, load on stores, and check working parts. But they’d do it all alongside, because Columbia would not require a bottom scrape. The freezing waters in the Arctic do not support the warm-water crustaceans and weeds that always take root on the hull when the submarine is in warmer seas.

  Columbia made a peaceful seven-day voyage down the Pacific, passing to the north of Midway, and staying north of the Hawaiian Ridge. Boomer left the island of Kauai to starboard and then swung down the Kauai Channel past Barbers Point and along the rocky southern coast of Honolulu. They steamed into Pearl Harbor on September 17, exactly one week after dispatching K-9 to its six-hundred-foot grave off Paramushir.

  The crew of the Black Ops submarine was glad to stand in the bright sunlight of the island. They would remain here for four weeks while Columbia was restored and given her minor overhaul. Officers would catch up on paperwork; many of the crew would assist the Pearl Harbor engineers, and others would supervise the loading and logging of supplies. They would be permitted ample shore leave to visit the island and Honolulu’s legendary nightspots.

  Boomer telephoned Jo in Connecticut when he arrived, despite the appalling hour of the morning on the East Coast of the United States, and broke the equally appalling news that Columbia might be required to accompany the new Carrier Battle Group on a three-week patrol in the Arabian Sea in early December. However this was by no means definite. Jo received the news of another Christmas shot to pieces with equanimity. She was just so relieved that her husband was safe.

  He told her he was at Pearl Harbor for a while, and Jo ventured to ask him how the hell he got there. “I thought you were somewhere in the Atlantic, not the Pacific,” she said.

  “Sorry, sweetness, can’t tell you that,” he replied breezily. “Remember always, our business is classified”—he deepened his voice and added—“my name’s Dunning…Cale Dunning…double O six and three-quarters.”

  171630SEPT. 34N 142E. A hundred and fifty miles off the east coast of Japan, in thirty thousand feet of water, the Kilo Class submarine, Russian-built but now under Chinese command, was making nine knots three hundred feet below the surface, running south on its battery.

  Captain Kan Yu-fang, formerly commanding officer of China’s eight-thousand-ton nuclear Xia-Class (Type 093) submarine, was now expert at operating the Russian diesel-electric submarine that meant so much to his C in C. The most senior officer in the Chinese Navy still serving on operational submarines, Captain Kan had built a distinguished record in the notoriously difficult Xia, which had experienced countless problems with its CSS-NX-4s, the huge nuclear-warhead missiles.

  Admiral Zhang regarded Kan Yu-fang as the ideal commander for the new Kilo and this most dangerous voyage. A native of Shanghai, the Captain was a disciplinarian of the old school. When K-9 had vanished off Paramushir, he had told the Russian officers still on board that he was going to clear the datum, dismiss the escort, and move silently at five knots toward Shanghai, submerged. He instructed the Russian Lieutenant Commander on board to inform the Escort Group Commander what he was doing, and from there on Captain Kan ignored all other ships and signals, ordered a general decrease in speed for a day, and just crept
away.

  Thereafter they would make all speed to Shanghai. In a western phrase, Captain Kan had decided to go for it.

  He had no time for unnecessary heroics. And he had no wish to seek out and engage a possible US nuclear boat. Because he knew there was but one achievement for which he would be rewarded by the C in C—the safe delivery of the tenth Kilo to Shanghai.

  He was now well on his way, seven days farther south from Paramushir, and running free. For the first time in a long while he could take responsibility for his own actions. And he was going to deliver. He liked the new ship, which handled well. And he especially liked its overall feel of steadfast reliability. Captain Kan expected to dock in Shanghai on the afternoon of September 23. When he snorkeled east of the central Kurils on that first night, he accessed the satellite and informed the C in C of his intentions. Two hours later he went deep again and pressed south, with his torpedo tubes loaded, toward his beloved home city, in his beloved China. Captain Kan was a very dangerous man.

  Quite how dangerous was unknown to the Pentagon. But the fifty-two-year-old Kan had been handpicked for his command by Admiral Zhang himself, not merely because he was the most seasoned of China’s front-line submarine commanders but also because of his background and his political “pedigree.” Kan Yu-fang was a former Red Guard, one of Mao Zedong’s teenaged fanatics, back in the mid-1960s, when the Chairman had willfully and deliberately unleashed a bloody insurrection upon the Chinese populace.

  Kan was then, and was now still, a zealot in the cause of a greater China. In 1966, at fifteen, he had led the “First Brigade of the First Army Division” of Shanghai’s infamous “Number Twenty-Eight School.” This was a fearsome group of twenty young Red Guards who made national news when they tortured three of their own teachers, blinding two and causing two others to jump to their deaths from a sixth-floor window. Kan Yu-fang led what amounted to an armed street gang. He changed his name to “Kan, the Personal Guard to Chairman Mao,” he carried a gun and a stock whip, and he made nightly rampages through his poor local streets in the cause of the Cultural Revolution. He searched for those he judged were “enemies of the people,” or in Mao’s phrase, “capitalist-roaders”—which broadly meant anyone who was successful.