Kilo Class (1998)

by Patrick Robinson

  “Who’s clandestine?” asked Kathy.

  “The goddamned Taiwanese.”

  “Why? What have they done?”

  “Nothing yet. But I don’t like ’em creeping around in a goddamned submarine when I don’t know what they’re at.”

  “Well, why should you? America doesn’t own them…do we?”

  The Admiral smiled and drew deeply on his cigar. “Kathy,” he said, “they are sneaky little sonsabitches.”

  “Yessir…”

  As she spoke two phones began ringing on her desk, and she walked quickly back through the open door. And then the President himself stopped by. “Morning, Admiral,” he said. “Unofficial visit. How’s things east of the Himalayas?”

  “Morning, sir. Not too bad, I’m certain the Taiwanese are hiding something significant from us. They seem to be running submarines back and forth from the Southern Ocean. And if they’re hiding something from me, they must be doing something wrong.”

  “Well, what do you think they’re doing?”

  “I don’t know. But when you have a small offshore nation like Taiwan, which exports more stuff annually than the whole of the Chinese mainland, you gotta watch ’em, just because they’re so rich and potentially menacing. The place is awash with cash, and those submarines of theirs are up to something…down south, in a frozen hellhole called Kerguelen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We had a couple of sightings right in the islands, sir. But Kerguelen is a place no one would be, not on a regular basis, unless they were up to something. You see, it’s so lonely down there they could not be on a military patrol, so they must be either on a supply run, or on some kind of an exploration project…I ought to know, but I don’t. Also it’s just possible they may have attacked and sunk the Cuttyhunk.”

  “The Woods Hole research ship that vanished more than a year ago?”

  “That’s the one, sir.”

  “Jesus. Have you asked them about it?”

  “No point. If they did it, they’ll deny it. If they didn’t, they’ll just think I’m nuts.”

  “Did they do it?”

  “I think so, sir. But I’m much more concerned with what the hell’s going on in Kerguelen.”

  “What kind of thing could it be?” asked the President.

  “Well, you have to try to get inside the Taiwanese mind. Here you have a hard-working people who have lived for centuries with very little. Now, thanks to the protective arm of Uncle Sam, they are mopping up riches that would have been beyond their dreams fifty years ago. Suddenly they have a whole world of their own to conserve and protect. I mean money, industry, a growing infrastructure…a population that hardly knows what poverty is. They have their own banks, their own culture, their own universities. They are ninety-four percent literate. Out of a population of twenty-one million, they have five hundred thousand students, a third of them studying engineering. They have their own armed forces. An Army and a Navy and an Air Force. They have taken their place right up there with the big hitters of the world.”

  “Yes,” said the Chief Executive slowly. “When you think about it, they are in really good shape. So what are they doing creeping around in submarines?”

  “Sir,” said the Admiral, gently. “As we all know, they have, just beyond their backyard, a hundred miles away, one fire-eating dragon called China, which is massively jealous of their success and would like to retake them militarily if possible, and make them once more a part of the mainland, under strict rule from Beijing.”

  “Which they would hate.”

  “Correct. So right there you get a people who are desperate to protect themselves, worried that America will not always look after them. In any rising nation like Taiwan, you eventually get a government that will try to work out ways to protect themselves and their wealth.”

  “Like a very big bomb.”

  “Yes. But less dramatically, in the event of a sudden, successful attack by China, probably by air, and then by sea, they would want to evacuate their senior politicians and military leaders. Those submarines we are attempting to track could be surveying remote areas of the world, with a view to constructing safe, luxurious hiding places. Fixing up communication systems.

  “On the other hand Taiwan may have discovered China is up to something, somewhere down in the Southern Ocean, and the submarines are prowling around trying to get to the truth.

  “I suppose it is possible that Taiwan is trying to develop its own nuclear deterrent, which would be impossible in their own island. Someone would find out in about three days. They may be looking for a site to open up a nuclear weapons plant. But that would be a hell of a thing to do in a place like Kerguelen, which is without power of any kind, and completely desolate…I guess if I thought about it, I could come up with a lot of schemes Taiwan could be up to. Right now I’m not sure…however, I am going to make a note to send a warship down there for a proper look around, as soon as possible. And I don’t mean a frigate, I mean a nuclear submarine, which can operate indefinitely and can probe those long, deep waterways…maybe find something real interesting.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” said the President. “As ever, my short visit was highly instructive. Catch you later, Arnie.”

  The big man left, and then Kathy stuck her head in Morgan’s office. “You need anything else, sir? I was wondering if I could go home now.”

  “Okay. I’ll put that down to a total lack of interest,” growled the Admiral. “See you in the AM…and don’t be late. If you see Charlie tell him to mark time…I’ll be another hour.”

  “YESSIR.”

  Arnold Morgan paced the room for another ten minutes, trying to decide if the Kerguelen situation was urgent. He decided it wasn’t. The worst-case scenario was that the Taiwanese were making “a fucking hydrogen bomb” in secret, in order to obliterate China. But he decided that was barely credible. Whatever they were doing was probably going to take years, so he would file a report away in his computer and he would remember to get a nuclear boat down to the Southern Ocean at the first opportunity.

  Meanwhile he’d better check with Morris to see if there was any activity in Severodvinsk on the remaining two of China’s seven Russian Kilos. When they moved, the solids were going to crash into the fan, from all directions. “And Rankov is unlikely to be so goddamned dozey this time.”

  The Presidential Office Building, which stands imposingly in Taipei’s grassy civic district, east of the Tanshui River, had rarely been under such strict security. Army guards patrolled the main street entrance and foyer of the building. There were Navy guards on each landing and in every corridor. A whole section of Chungching South Road

  was cordoned off by the police. Traffic in the area was chaotic.

  Out-of-town Taiwanese might have been excused for mistaking the date for October 10, National Day, when the civic district is swamped with rallies and military parades. But this was most certainly not the Double Tenth. This was June 29, and the reason for the ironclad security was to be found on the second floor, where thirty-six guards protected one locked room, in which there were just ten men.

  It was a big, carpeted room containing two giant portraits of the late father-and-son Presidents, Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Chingkuo. Below their benevolent gazes sat the current President and his Prime Minister, Mr. Chi-Chen Ku, Head of the Legislature. Surrounding them was the Head of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Chien-Pei Liu; the newly appointed Minister for National Defense, General Jin-Chung Chou; and the Chief of the General Staff, for the Republic of China Navy in Taiwan, Admiral Shi-Ta Yeh.

  Essentially these were the men being so vigorously protected. But there were five others in attendance, who were also not without their enemies. There were two senior professors from the National Taiwan University, both nuclear scientists, George Longchen and Liao Lee. Present was one of the biggest construction moguls in Taipei, Mr. Chiang Yi. Plus two military men, one the commander of the Amphibious Regiment attached to
the Marine Corps’ Sixty-sixth Division; the other, a submarine captain.

  The marine corps commander and the submarine captain had flown up earlier that morning by helicopter from the great Taiwanese Navy Base of Tsoying, Headquarters Fleet Command, Headquarters Naval Aviation, Headquarters Marine Corps, home to the Taiwanese Naval Academy. This is a relatively small, shielded place, standing quietly in the suburban shadows of Taiwan’s second city, Kaohsiung, the fourth largest container port in the world. But to military men, Tsoying stands defiantly, housing the offensive and defensive capability of its motherland, right on the Strait of Taiwan, right on the sloping southwest coastline of this defiant island, which faces China head-on. It is a place so secret, so mysterious, it is not even mentioned in the national guidebooks.

  The real reason for the security on this sweltering late June morning was not so much the eminence of the politicians and the senior Commanders, nor even the vast knowledge of the other visitors. It was their combined knowledge, in a city crawling with Chinese spies, in which no restaurant, no barber’s shop, no laundry, no taxi, was free from suspicion.

  These ten men, bound together by the greatest national security program in the history of Taiwan, met rarely. Today they were meeting for the first time in two years. Their session would hereinafter be referred to as the June Conference. But only among themselves. No secretary, no assistant, military or otherwise, would be admitted to the privacy of the agenda. The President had chosen his team well. After five years of operations, not one word of their astounding activities had leaked out. At least, not in Taiwan it hadn’t.

  The meeting was one hour old, and the forty-six-year-old millionaire builder Chiang Yi was concluding his report about the safety and continued steadiness of the huge network of tunnels his men had dug into the base of the shoreline rock below three-thousand-foot Guynemer Peak, at the sheltered western end of the eight-mile-long Baie du Repos in Kerguelen. The massive concrete columns, two feet in diameter, supporting RSJ’s, were holding up perfectly. They had been made on site, from a concrete mix transported south by submarine.

  Through the year-long drilling operation, Chiang had stayed on station, supervising the removal and clearance of thousands of tons of granite rubble, the mechanical diggers dumping it straight over the side, into three hundred feet of water. All power requirements were met from the nuclear reactor on board the 2,600-ton Rubis Class French submarine Emeraude, which had made the journey from Brest to Kerguelen without once surfacing. It was now moored underwater, where it had been for five years, sitting between two old, rusting gray buoys, spaced about four hundred feet apart, fifty yards off the western lee shore. Only occasionally did the Emeraude ever come up for stores or ventilation.

  Its reactor was still running sweetly, powering with ease the generators in the 180,000-square-yard factory-hotel. It powered its lighting, its heat, its water converters, its air intakes, and all the tunneling machinery. It also powered the electrical systems for the future pressurized water reactor, which would ultimately replace the Rubis itself.

  The aging Rubis was the workhorse of the entire project—it powered the fifty big metallic “spinners,” the gas centrifuge systems that over a period of years would slowly, laboriously, breathtakingly expensively separate Uranium-239 from Uranium-235, that most sinister metal, with its highly unstable nucleus…the bedrock of a nuclear warhead.

  Chiang had been invaluable to the Taiwan government. When the tunnels were finally completed, and the electricity, air, and waterlines laid down, he returned to the Baie and spent another six months supervising the building of the U-235 plant, the preparation for the PWR itself, and the protection of the workforce from its lethal contents. He actually drove the big mobile concrete mixer himself during the construction of the long jetty. For this he designed a special slate gray, automatic steel curtain, which would cover the docking area when it was not in use. Chiang Yi would not accept one penny for his labor or for the labor of his men. He would, instead, forever have the pick of all government building contracts in Taiwan.

  Chiang’s report today pleased everyone in the locked room in Taipei. There were no stress fractures. All systems were operating perfectly, and even the richly carpeted bedrooms for the professors were still in excellent condition. The two Dutch-made submarines that ferried supplies every three months made living bearable if not luxurious. The tours of duty were long, the work slow and difficult, with little time for recreation. No one looked forward to returning for a second eighteen-month spell. But each of the professors was paid a half-million-dollar bonus for their time. No one had ever refused to work for the Taiwan nation, deep inside the deserted island at the end of the world.

  In winter, conditions were appalling. It was light for only a short while every day, and the weather was so vicious it was impossible to walk even a short distance on the rare occasions anyone was allowed out. The summer months were slightly better, but it was dangerous to move far from the base because the howling gales could bring raging seventy-mile-per-hour winds screaming up the fjord in moments, and these winds were sometimes accompanied by sleet and even snow. The katabatics, the fluke circular winds that swing off the tops of the surrounding mountains and then “suck under” like a wind tunnel, from an unexpected direction, were able to frighten even experienced ocean navigators operating inshore.

  The President of Taiwan, nominally the Commander in Chief of all the Republic of China’s armed forces, now thanked Chiang Yi formally for his report, and spoke to the gathering carefully. He reported that twice in the previous twelve months, the Navy of China had brought warships very close to Taiwanese coastal waters in a gesture which had been perceived by everyone to be threatening in the extreme. There had been two additional live rocket tests, each involving the firing of the lethal HQ-61M surface-to-air missile from a “Jiangwei” Class frigate. Both incidents were designed to intimidate. The Chinese, he said, had continually sent destroyers and frigates in close to the Spratley Islands—the fifty-three rocks, shoals, and reefs in the South China Sea that Taiwan claims as its own, and indeed occupies with a military force on the largest of the islands.

  “We do, of course, enjoy the theoretic support of the United States in these matters,” said the President. “But in the past two years we have been singularly unsuccessful in our efforts to build up our own submarine capability. We have tried to order from the French, the Dutch, the Germans…every time we have an acceptance from the shipbuilders, the project is overruled by the respective governments. They are, quite simply, afraid of damaging their trade relations with mainland China and will not supply us. Even the Americans will not sanction a submarine sale to us. Nor will they provide us with their Aegis missile system, even thought they know we constantly face the known threat of a massed air attack from mainland China. We are within range of their fighter bombers.

  “I conclude that we must make our own arrangements. These military exercises by China are nothing less than a threat to our survival…letting us know that if they so wished they could blockade the Strait with a surface and submarine force. This threat, in my judgment, is ever present.

  “Gentlemen, as I have said so many times before, we cannot count on the USA to help us. Things are changing. The United States may one day value China more than it values us. A new American President may feel his armed forces have no business engaging in military adventures in the Far East. Who knows what they may conclude?

  “During my time at Harvard, I learned much about American flexibility. It is a nation that will adjust its views as the tides of history ebb and flow. You will doubtless recall that in the late 1980s Saddam Hussein went from being America’s Great Stabilizing Hero of the Middle East, to Public Enemy Number One in less than three years.

  “Gentlemen, I have said so many times. If we are to resist China’s attempts to bring us back into their fold, which means we would be occupied by them, militarily, we must have the means to frighten them. And since the West will not sell effective
military hardware to us, the only way we have to guarantee our survival is to possess our own nuclear deterrent. This is not a weapon of war. It is a weapon of peace. It will not be deployed but will always be in the back of the minds of the mainland’s politicians, and indeed the Chinese military commanders. They will know that if Taiwan were to be pushed against the wall hard enough, we have the ability to unleash a weapon of such terrifying power, it could obliterate a major mainland city in one strike.

  “No one has ever used such a weapon, not since Nagasaki. And I doubt anyone ever will. That is why even the most powerful military forces in the world have contented themselves with minor wars during the last half-century,…skirmishes, nothing on the grand scale with hundreds of thousands dead. This is simply because no one dares. Gentlemen, I say to you again, there is nothing more important to this nation than our nuclear project in the Southern Indian Ocean.