Terminal Run

by Michael Dimercurio

  Far over the horizon to the west, the nuclear submarine Leopard had come to periscope depth and had sent a brief situation report, a “sit-rep,” copied to Admiral Ericcson’s task force. Admiral Ericcson was awakened during the night to read the message from Leopard.

  “I wasn’t asleep, goddammit,” he said in his gravelly voice to the messenger of the watch.

  The admiral sat up in his rack and pulled a new Partagas

  cigar out of his humidor and lit it in the dimness of the stateroom, illuminated only by his desk lamp. He handed the pad computer back to the messenger of the watch and snarled at him to take the news to the ship’s captain and the battle group operations officer. Too wound up to return to sleep, Ericcson rose to his six-and-a-half-foot height and pulled on his khaki uniform. On his left breast pocket were eight rows of ribbons, topped by the gold wings of a fighter pilot. Below the ribbons Ericcson wore his surface warfare pin, and below that his fleet command gold emblem, a downward angling dagger framed by tidal waves. He ran his hand through his closely cropped full head of platinum-blond hair, the fierce frowning expression interrupted briefly for a yawn. Ericcson coughed, swearing to himself for the tenth time this trip that he would quit his constant cigar smoking. He was rarely seen at sea without one in his fist, insisting on chewing them unlit in places where smoking was prohibited. The bridge of the aircraft carrier was such a place, the advanced electronics of the phased array radar systems too delicate to be bombarded with cigar smoke. The Viking had accused the electronics of being sissies, and insisted on smoking anyway.

  He took three cigars to the bridge, where he decided to spend the rest of the night, reclining in the fleet commander’s chair and smoking. He spent one in three nights in the chair, the nicotine and the weight of fleet command making him an insomniac. The deck inclined upward precipitously as the ship rode an incoming wave, then rolled sickeningly down the crest to slam into the trough, all the while rolling far to port, then back to starboard, the ship corkscrewing through the mountainous waves. Ericcson lit the first cigar, stoking it up to a mellow cloud in front of him, listening to the music of the spray on the windshield and the howl of the wind in the rigging, the low tones of conversations on the bridge and the whine of the high-speed gyros. The Viking puffed on the Partagas, his eyes half shut, feeling the roller-coaster motion of the deck, a deep contentment filling his soul, his battle fleet under his combat boots, sailing into harm’s way on a ship

  christened John Paul Jones, the greatest American naval officer in history.

  Ericcson smoked the cigar and let his mind return for the dozenth time to Patton’s underground bunker briefing.

  “We’relate and I’ve got orders for you both. Vie, you first, since we need to get you on the plane to Pearl before you’re missed. For the next six days, get ammunition loaded and put out rumors that there are a number of exercises coming, quick scramble-to-sea-type things. This is the hard part, because you have to have your ships ready to go without anyone thinking they’re being readied for an extended emergency deployment. Shut down any heavy maintenance your repair organization’s doing. Button up all the ships, and give the repair boys some excuse—a readiness inspection or an audit of their records and procedures. Then next Saturday night you’re to have one of your customary big all-hands parties. Invite all your fleet’s commanding officers and their executive officers, their wives and girlfriends, husbands and boyfriends. Make damned sure everyone comes, get it catered, open bar, but get a slow waiter. Early in the evening get all the captains and XOs together in the basement, put on some music, give them each two of these handheld computers, a main unit and a spare. Brief them on the Red-Indian flap. Don’t release anything on the loss of security of the network —you can tell them we’redoing an exercise to see what happens if we use it for disinformation purposes, as a security exercise. Then, as another exercise, scramble the whole fleet to sea. Slowly. A few ships at a time. Go to sea by ship type, destroyers, then frigates, then cruisers, rather than as a coordinated battle group No one is to know the whole fleet is pulling out, it has to be a complete surprise to the men. You’ve got two weeks. In fourteen days I want the Nav ForcePac Fleet steaming at maximum revs for the Indian Ocean, fully loaded out with war shots and provisions for a long haul, but I don’t want any satellites to suspect, no pier side prostitutes reporting anything, no wives or husbands squawking, no word at all. It’s just another day playing in the

  Pacific, and we need to see if our toys will work. That’s all. We’ll be back next Tuesday, honey, so pick up a few steaks and plan to put the kids to bed early. Get the picture?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Vie, your ships will not be sailing in formation. You’ll all be far over the horizon from each other, so any spy satellites just see one of you at a time. Meantime I will be mobilizing the mothballed fleet under robotic control, using NSA’s electronics instead of the command network, and the decoy ships will be sailing all points of the compass, so to anyone in orbit it will look like an exercise. You will be doing a zigzag on the way, so a photograph won’t show you always headed the same direction.”

  “An eye-in-the-sky will see the preponderance of ships heading for the Indian Ocean, sir, on their base course.”

  “We can’t help that. At the end of the day you still command surface ships. They’ll never be as stealthy as McKee’s boats, but the ocean is a very big place. And that’s all I have for you, Vie. Get back to Pearl Harbor. There’s a jumbo jet waiting for you topside. Takeoff before the sun rises, and get back to the golf course before the Reds or the Indians know you’ve been gone.”

  Ericcson had risen from his seat, the briefing obviously over.

  “Good hunting, my friend,” Patton said. “You’ll have the mixed blessing of a target-rich environment.”

  “One last thing for you, sir,” Ericcson said. “Don’t bother about the demotion. With a mission this heavy, I might as well have the title as well as the headaches.”

  The cigar was down to a soggy nub. Ericcson lit a second, his thoughts returning to the present. He squinted at his watch, frowning deeper as he realized he couldn’t see the face. He looked around the dim lights of the bridge, making sure no one was watching him, then sneaked out a pair of frameless reading glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on to see the Rolex face reading 11:50 pm local time, which was 1750

  GMT or 1250 pm on the U.S. East Coast. He quickly put the reading glasses away and called the officer of the deck over.

  “Get the ops boss and the captain to flag plot in ten minutes,” he said quietly.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Ten minutes later, the Partagas was half smoked, and Ericcson left the bridge out the hatch to the ladder way below past air operations to flag plot, a full-island-width space filled with displays and land maps and ocean charts, the central table a map of the entire Indian Ocean in relief. Over on the port side the Gulf of Aden emptied into the Arabian Sea from the Red Sea north to the Suez Canal. A fleet marker showed the Royal Navy Fleet making its way in the eastern Med toward the Suez Canal. In the early hours of daylight Eastern Europe Time the fleet would make its approach to the canal. Their entrance into the Arabian Sea would happen fifty hours later at a speed of advance of thirty-five knots, but he gave them another eight for the speed restriction at the mouth of the canal. That put the Brits in-theater in sixty-two hours.

  The Viking walked a pair of dividers across the surface of the map, measuring the distance from their position to the Strait of Malacca before he noticed Captains Casper Hendricks and Dennis Pulaski standing behind him. Hendricks was a Harvard grad, an ugly officer with a long thin nose, eyes much too close together presiding over thin lips and a weak chin. He was tall, thin, and awkward, with one of the deepest mean streaks Ericcson had ever seen in the fleet, but the man was sharp and incisive when it came to grasping a tactical situation, which led to bitter arguments over tactics. The admiral loved to mix it up with the ship’s captain, but the rai
sed voices obviously bothered Hendricks. Ericcson had wanted to stop in a liberty port and get the man drunk and laid to see if it would loosen him up, but there had been no time during the flank run from Pearl. Captain Pulaski, the battle group operations officer and Ericcson’s acting chief of staff, was Hendricks’s opposite. Pulaski was short and solid,

  his thick arms and legs carrying a barrel chest with a hairless bucket for a head, his pockmarked features blunted by four years of brigade boxing at the Academy, his fists appearing capable of driving nails without a hammer. He spoke with a thick Chicago accent, every syllable sounding tough and intimidating. His thuggish appearance fronted for a tactical intelligence as honed as Hendricks’s or Ericcson’s. In contrast to the ship’s captain, Pulaski loved the tactical flaps with The Viking, sometimes breaking into language even more colorful than Ericcson’s. At their last tactical session, Pulaski had erupted, crossing the line by roaring, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Viking—my second-grade daughter can deploy a fleet better than that.” Flag plot had gone completely silent, Hendricks’s face had gone white, and Ericcson had drawn himself up to his full height, a murderous look coming to his face before he roared in laughter and clapped Pulaski on the shoulder. Hendricks looked like he eagerly awaited the day when both officers would leave his ship far behind them.

  “Morning, gentlemen,” Ericcson said. “Pour yourselves some coffee and get your asses over here and look at the chart. We have serious problems.”

  “Same problems we had last night, Admiral,” Pulaski said, filling his coffee cup and rubbing his eyes, the ops boss looking rumpled, wrinkled, and tired.

  “Exactly, sir,” Hendricks said in his cultured accent.

  “Except that today I’ve had an idea. One of those inspired middle-of-the-night ideas that can get you fired. Look at it like this, men.” The Viking jabbed a finger at the fleet marker at their position in the Philippine Sea. “This is us.” Then he pointed a finger at the marker outside the Suez Canal. “The Royal Navy.” At the far end of the chart, the East China Sea ended and the South China Sea began near the island of Taiwan. The admiral placed a red marker in the South China Sea between Taiwan and the Philippines. “Red Chinese Northern Fleet Battlegroup One, making way at thirty-five knots.”

  Ericcson put his chin in his hands, thinking. “Listen, the Royal Navy Fleet is going to be here too soon. Allowing the Brits in-theater is a loser. We need to attack them the minute they exit the Gulf of Aden, or maybe as soon as they leave the Red Sea and enter the Gulf of Aden, here at the choke point “That would take a miracle, sir,” Hendricks said. “The East Coast submarines are inbound, but at least six days out. Besides which, we don’t have direct operational control of them. They still report to McKee.”

  “Not the point,” The Viking said. “Look at the chart. What do you see?”

  Pulaski pointed at the Suez Canal. “If we hold the Royal Navy Fleet at the Suez for six days, we can set up an ambush for them when they come out of the Gulf.”

  “Exactly,” The Viking said, stoking a new cigar. “We’ll block the Suez.”

  “But, sir, how would you propose to block the canal? We can’t just drop a big bomb on it.” Hendricks looked like he’d just bit into a lemon.

  “I need some real-time overhead intelligence of what’s transiting the Suez Canal. And hurry.”

  Nung Yahtsu moved through the dark and the cold at a keel depth of three hundred meters on a course of one nine zero degrees true.

  In the belly of the ship, in the command post beneath the fin on the ship’s upper level, several officers and men stood watch in the dimness of the room’s red lights, the glowing navigation plot, and ship control console instrument displays. The room’s silence was broken only by the bass thrum of the air handlers moving air into the room, accompanied by the music of the whining firecontrol computer consoles set into the port side of the room. The center of the room was taken up by an elevated platform surrounded by smooth stainless steel handrails, called the command deck, where the commander’s console and command chair were mounted astern

  of the twin periscopes. Astern of the command deck, two navigation tables were arranged, one of them in an area of darkness. Its electronic flat panel display was set up to communicate with the firecontrol computer, showing a small area of the sea around them. The second navigation plotting table was illuminated by a dim red lamp. The display looked down on the surface of the earth from high above, showing the East China Sea at the southern approaches to the Strait of Formosa. In the center of the plot a glowing red dot marked their position. Behind them, to the north by twenty nautical miles, a green dot depicted the fleet formation of Battlegroup One as it made its way south on the long voyage to the Indian Ocean on this mission of revenge.

  Leaning over the navigation plotting table was the tall, lean form of Lien Hua, the commanding officer of Nung Yahtsu. Lien studied the chart display, deep in thought. He walked his dividers along the track line going through the dot of the ship’s position, calculating the distance and the time until they entered the South China Sea, and from there around the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the Strait of Malacca, the entrance corridor to the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal southeast of the Hindu Republic of India. The point at the northern run of the Strait of Malacca was marked with a broken curving line, the curve denoting the point that the Chinese plasma tipped heavy cruise missiles would finally be in range of their Indian targets. The battle group could not get there fast enough for Lien Hua.

  He glanced up at the chronometer bolted to the bulkhead above the cables leading to the ship-control console, the brass instrument a gift he had given to the ship. The chronometer had been taken from a British sailing vessel during the Opium War of 1839 as the barbarian calendar reckoned time. Lien’s ancestor Lien Bao, the great-grandfather of Lien’s great grandfather had been killed by a British Royal Navy lieutenant in that three-year struggle that had resulted in England taking Hong Kong. Not long after, the British dogs stole Burma from the breast of China, the Russians took

  Manchuria—in violation of China’s first treaty with a European power—and the French ripped Indochina from the dynasty’s empire, feeding on Chinese territory like a hyena eating a corpse.

  He turned his mind away from world politics for a moment to think about his wife and their twin girls. Po, his wife, was petite, and the doctors never suspected she would have twins. Twins were problematic in China, where the rule was that a citizen may only have one child, and it was typical that twins would be separated. But without Lien saying a word to him, his superior, Admiral Chu HuaFeng, had intervened with the PLA General Staff, which had had a word with the civil authorities, and Lien and Po had been allowed to keep both girls. The news that they could keep both babies came at the same time that the Julang-class final design was rolled out, and Chu placed Lien in command of the first unit of the Julang-class. It was as if the heavens had smiled upon him. It was then he had found his faith in the Life Force of the Universe, and felt the current of destiny that he had ridden until this moment, the curve of life that would carry him to execute China’s revenge upon the naval forces of the West, his hatred of China’s enemies and his love for China mixing inside him like two serpents entwined.

  He checked the chronometer again. It neared midnight, Beijing time. He pulled a phone to his ear and dialed up the first officer’s stateroom. The sleepy voice of Zhou Ping answered.

  “Station the command duty officer,” Lien Hua ordered. “I am retiring for the evening. Wake me at two bells of the second watch.”

  “Yes, sir. Any night orders for me, Captain?”

  “Only the standard ones for this mission, Mr. First. Detect the enemy and pierce him until he dies in howling pain.”

  Admiral Kelly McKee walked slowly down the pier, deep in conversation with his chief of staff, Karen Petri. Despite their previous caution about being watched, today McKee had arrived in his staff truck with the flags on the fenders. The


  people watching them already knew something was going on, since every submarine except Hammerhead had already departed the piers of Norfolk, leaving the base looking lonely and deserted.

  McKee instructed the driver to drop them at the security fence rather than at the berth of the USS Hammerhead. McKee wanted to see the ship from a distance first, and watch her grow in his view. If he were honest with himself, he would admit to loving the collection of high-yield steel, uranium fuel assemblies, and electronics that formed the first ship of the Virginia-class. He would never forget the first moment he saw her, the day he had rechristened her Hammerhead in honor of the World War II submarine his great grandfather had sailed and his father’s Cold War Piranha-class ship. A photo in McKee’s study at home showed all four generations of McKees on the deck of a fishing boat, four-year-old Kelly proudly holding open the jaws of a hammerhead shark they’d caught, the smiling faces of his ancestors behind him. When Patton had asked McKee to take the submarine to sea—when she wasn’t even completed yet—his only condition was that they change her name, and Admiral Patton had reluctantly agreed.

  And now here she was, a ship of his command, but the days of being a submarine captain now behind him. He felt an ache in his soul daily that his command at sea was over. The only possible comparison was that of being a former moon astronaut, the experience of walking on another world a defining experience, and when it was over, that sense of identity seemed to fly away, and being a senior flag officer at his young age of forty-three held none of the thrill of SSN command. When it came time to pick a submarine to be his command platform for the upcoming war, he had been torn. Common sense would tell him to take one of the less effective ships, so that the war zone would not be deprived of a first-string sub, and the skipper could avail himself of the admiral’s experience to improve. But fixing a deficient ship was not the mission, and in truth there was no dog of the