Kilo Class (1998)

by Patrick Robinson

  “What the hell does he mean, mea maxima culpa? What kinda bullshit’s that?”

  “You ever been an altar boy?” asked the staunchly Irish Catholic head of the US Navy.

  “A WHAT?”

  “An altar boy—you know, a kid who assists the priest during the mass, rings the bells, lights the candles…holds the water during the consecration.”

  “Hell no. In my part of Texas we played baseball on Sunday mornings. Mea catcher.”

  “Arnie, I accept that my great office requires that I fraternize with those of a heathen persuasion, such as yourself. However I think you should know the routine of a God-fearing family such as mine. Each Sunday at the foot of the altar, another boy and I placed our hands upon our breasts, and prayed: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…I have sinned, I have sinned, I have greatly sinned.”

  “You mean Boomer’s admitting he overstepped the mark?”

  “He sure is. And that’s the mark of a fine officer. A man big enough for his rank. And not threatened by the admission of a mistake.”

  “NOT THREATENED? I’LL FUCKING THREATEN HIM. THAT BOY’S NOTHING SHORT OF A DUMBASS SONOFABITCH. WHAT IF HE’D HIT THE FUCKING TYPHOON?…Good morning, Mr. President, we just had a bit of bad luck in the Pacific. One of our best submarine commanders blew up and sank a big Russian nuclear submarine in Russian waters by mistake. The nuclear cloud from its twenty inter-continental ballistic missiles is in the process of wiping out most of the Orient…ain’t that a gas?”

  Joe Mulligan chuckled at the brutal irony of Arnold Morgan’s words. “Steady, Arnie. In an operation like this, there’s a ton of risk, every step of the way. Why don’t we just think ourselves lucky? Boomer has removed one of the goddamned Kilos on a thirty-three percent chance of starting World War III. And he seems to have gotten away with it. That makes him a very lucky commander. But you need luck in the game we’ve asked him to play.”

  “Christ, I know that. But our signals to Columbia never stopped stressing the fact that he MUST HAVE POSIDENT. Therefore his actions were in direct contravention of his orders. He not only did not have POSIDENT, he had no fucking IDENT whatsoever…POS…NEAR-POS, OR FUCK-ALL POS.”

  Admiral Mulligan blew coffee down his nose, trying to stop laughing at the infuriated NSA. “Come on, Arnie, if we send off a blast to Columbia, which others may see, humiliating their commanding officer, we will do nothing except hurt the morale of his ship.

  “Just remember what Commander Dunning has done. He’s actually sunk three of those Kilos. He’s made a trans-polar run under the North Pole, and he’s still operational. Undetected.”

  “Don’t gimme his fucking life story, for Christ’s sake, Joe. I’m not talking about what he’s done. Any good nuclear submarine officer could have done the same. Right here, I’m talking about what he could have done. Like started a goddamned world war. Nothing serious. Because he is, apparently, unable to obey a simple order. Like GET POSIDENT. Nothing earth shattering. Just routine sense. He’s a dumbass sonofabitch.”

  “What would you have said if his signal had claimed he did have POSIDENT on the Kilos?”

  Admiral Morgan grappled for words, but for once in his life found none.

  “Commander Dunning could have said that. And we would have been none the wiser. And if, as you are now implying, we give him a severe reprimand, he might also remind us that we kept telling him the Typhoon was gone. Oh, I know we can look at the small print and say we did not quite say that. But we did, and we advised him so several times. Let’s face it…none of us knew the Typhoon was still there. Never even suspected it. In my view the Commander behaved in an exemplary way, and to tell the truth, I’d probably have done the same.”

  “So would I, fuck it,” replied the NSA. “But I’m still not prepared to listen to reason.”

  Joe Mulligan laughed. “Come on, old buddy. Fight the battle you’re in. We got clean away with it. Beautiful, right? What’ll we do now. Given that K-10 is still on the fucking loose.”

  “Okay. I agree. You need not haul Boomer over the coals. But I do insist you make my thoughts clear to him. And I don’t want him promoted. You can’t have officers like that becoming Captains. He’s a fucking maniac.”

  Admiral Mulligan grinned and said, “Yes, of course, Admiral. As much of a maniac as we were, in our youth. I wish to Christ we had a few more like him. But…down to business. Right here, we can’t do much. It’s no good hanging around and shadowing all the way to Shanghai. The Typhoon will now almost certainly stay as well.”

  “Right. That bastard Rankov has been too clever for his own good. His stupid ships made too much noise. Boomer couldn’t get a classification, but the Typhoon turned out to be no deterrent, because they failed to make it obvious that the sonofabitch was there. But I’ll tell you one thing…it does show how determined they are to get the Kilos through to Shanghai.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, the Kilo’s split,” replied Joe Mulligan. “That’s what I would have done. Which means that right now we haven’t got a chance of picking him up because the trail’s gone cold. He’s making a run for home. We’re not going to get him…and I think we may as well send Columbia to Pearl for maintenance. It’s only three thousand miles from where he is now. It’ll take him six days, and he can spend some time getting his ship into top shape. CINCPAC could use him to patrol with the new CVBG in the Arabian Sea in mid-October. But right now, I guess he and his crew could use a little R and R.”

  “Okay, Joe. Let’s do that. We’ll just have to keep a weather eye out for K-10, as and when we can. Still, of the seven we went after, we got six, right? Not bad.”

  The SUBLANT signal to Commander Dunning in Columbia was transmitted within the hour. Columbia sucked it off the satellite at 0900, local, the next day, September 11. It read: “Personal for Commander Dunning. Received your signal. Well done. Proceed to Pearl. Lack of POSIDENT: NSA assessment—D-A SOB…Mulligan.”

  Three hours later, running deep now, due south down the Northern Pacific, Boomer read the signal ruefully. He had expected worse. They might even have relieved him of command. He had been instructed to get POSIDENT. But he was not the first front-line commanding officer to reflect upon how damned easy it is to sit in a Washington armchair, and how very much different things appear when you’re actually out there, trying to attack, trying to keep your ship safe, trying to do the business of your higher command.

  How typical of the Navy, he thought, to accept cheerfully the demise of the Kilo, and to intimate guarded approval of the attack. And yet to leave a commanding officer in no doubt that he will be held to account, should they consider he exceeded his orders.

  “That’s known, Admiral Mulligan, as having your cookies, and eating them,” he murmured. He wondered, quite seriously, whether he would ever gain the promotion to Captain that was so important to him. How, with an apparent enemy like the mighty Admiral Morgan watching his every move? He also wondered, reflectively, how long it actually was since anyone had been brave enough to call him a dumb-ass sonofabitch, even in code, even from the other side of the world.

  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 mil
lion 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 Admiral 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 smug
ness 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.