“Helm Officer, dead slow ahead, make turns for five knots.”
“Dead slow ahead, turns for five knots acknowledged, Leader Zhou.”
A bell rang at the helmsman’s console, the engine order telegraph. The ship would slow to five knots, and he, the tactical systems watch officer, the sonar officer of the watch, and the Second Captain computer system would scan the sea to search for the Westerners, despite the intelligence that indicated that the Americans were far over the horizon and the British were coming from the other side of the hemisphere.
“Sir, engine room answers dead slow ahead, making turns for five knots,” the helm officer reported.
Zhou nodded. “Very good.” He reached for the microphone at the command console. “Sonar Officer of the Watch, five knots, conduct a complete sonar search and report all contacts.”
“Sonar Officer, well received, conducting search.”
Zhou selected his left screen to the broadband display, the central screen to the narrowband frequency buckets, even though five minutes was not enough to integrate narrowband on one sector, they might get lucky. On the right panel he displayed the transient analyzer, a computer module that listened to the short-duration noises in the sea, and trained to recognize the sound of a slammed hatch or dropped wrench or the stomp of boots, and able to discriminate between those sounds and the click of shrimp or the blowhole venting of a whale.
After thirty seconds slow Zhou knew the sea was empty. There was nothing on broadband. The narrowband search would only hold meaning after it had percolated for the full five minutes, but the key was the transient display, which was empty. Zhou ground out his cigarette and pulled out another. While he lit it, the transient display blinked, an odd, full throated noise out there that suddenly died away.
“Deck Officer, Sonar,” the speaker rasped.
“Deck Officer,” Zhou said to his microphone.
“Sir, distant transient received, bearing one seven three, to the south just to the left of our track. Transient is unrecognized by the system.”
“Deck Officer, well received,” Zhou said, donning a headset and ordering his console to replay the transient. It was not much more than a whooshing sound that died quickly.
“Deck Officer, Sonar, no correlation on that bearing to broadband contact or narrowband bucket. Transient probable designation is biologies.”
“Deck, well received,” Zhou said, puffing the cigarette, his eyes on the transient screen. It was almost a disappointment, Zhou thought. A whale venting at the surface, most likely, and
the sonar gear wasn’t calibrated for that species. “Sonar, Deck Officer, is there any chance this could be mechanical?”
“A whoosh like that, sir? We don’t have bubble sounds and there is no sign of metal-to-metal contact in the frequency analyzer. Also no pulsing sounds, so this is not a pump.”
“Any other activity at that bearing?”
“Nothing, sir. The sea is empty. I am calling it biologies.”
Zhou nodded to himself. “Keep the trace in the memory, and record latitude and longitude and time.”
“Sonar, well received.”
Zhou glanced at the intercom phone to the captain’s stateroom. By Lien’s standing orders, an unknown transient had to be reported. He considered the option of advising the captain when he woke, but decided against it. Zhou hoisted the phone to his ear and buzzed the captain. It took several minutes for Lien Hua to answer, and when he did, his words were slurred and faint.
“Captain, Deck Officer, reporting an unidentified transient.” Zhou Ping made a concise report, leaving out nothing.
“What is your recommendation?” Captain Lien asked sleepily. “Catalog the noise and continue, sir,” Zhou replied.
“Very good. Make it so,” Lien yawned. “And change my wake-up call to eight bells of the morning watch.”
“Well received, Captain.” Zhou hung up and yawned.
The chronometer’s needle passed the five-minute mark. It was time to speed back up, or else they would be overrun by the convoy, and if sonar reception was bad with them twenty miles astern, he couldn’t imagine the racket they would make ten miles closer.
“Helm Officer, ahead full speed.”
The ship sped back up to fifty percent power, surging back to her thirty-eight-knot transit speed, on the way to the Strait of Formosa. Zhou pulled out the cigarette pack and lit his last one for the night, yawning again and rubbing his eyes, waiting for the watch to end so he could get a few hours of sleep.
The Alert/ Acute designation for the Mark 58 torpedo stood for Extreme Long Range Torpedo/ Ultra Quiet Torpedo, the acronym initially ELRT/UQT, but as early as the initial design stages, the DynaCorp defense contractor’s personnel had nicknamed it Alert/ Acute and the name had stuck, even formalized in the technical manual. The Alert/ Acute units launched from the tubes of the submarine Leopard had all detected their surface ship targets within minutes of each other, then sped up to attack velocity, a roaring fifty-nine knots.
The surface force was never warned of the attack. The ships of the task force—including the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier Kaoling, two Beijing-class battle cruisers three heavy cruise missile destroyers, four antisubmarine destroyers, five antiair destroyers, four fast frigates, and several oilers and support ships—steamed southward. The fleet commander and his staff and the commanding officers of the convoy were all asleep, the clocks all showing a few minutes past three in the morning.
Mark 58 Alert/ Acute unit one’s sonar never needed to go active. The massive hull of the Kuznetsov-class aircraft carrier had been detected tens of miles ago, beckoning the torpedo in every foot of the journey. The hull was so massive and so gigantic that the sonar signal grew and grew until the world contained only the torpedo itself and the target. Soon the proximity hull detectors went off-scale, and the torpedo hit the ship. The direct-contact circuits bloomed into electronic activity, the processor routing the signal to the detonation circuits of the plasma warhead.
The warhead ignited in plasma incandescence at the forward starboard quarter of the aircraft carrier, the plasma blast vaporizing everything in its vicinity to a distance of fifty feet, carving a spherical hole in the hull where there was no longer steel or plastic or paint or jet fuel or bunks or personnel. In the ‘milliseconds after the vaporization, the plasma bottle collapsed and the blast was allowed to blow upward and outward, disintegrating every molecule of the forward third of the ship,
and burning much of the rest. The shock wave that penetrated the ocean surface smashed the island like the fist of a god.
In the flag plot level of the Kaoling, the leading member of the fleet’s tactical duty officers, Commander Cheng Chi, had been glancing through the window at the flight deck below when the solid deck beneath his feet suddenly and violently rose up in a tenth of a second and threw him to the bulkhead, as if he had been standing on a huge spatula. The bulkhead became a wall of flashing stars, each of them containing an infinite amount of pain in a thousand varieties, the pain of his skull crushing, of his bones breaking, of his flesh gashing open, of his organs smashing, of his arteries severing. The dimming world, viewed through the blood flowing down his forehead, erupted in acrid black smoke as the bulkhead hurled his disfigured and broken body back to the deck. The navigation plot tumbled on top of him, shattering glass over him. The bare 220-volt electrical cables mercifully electrocuted him in the last second before power was lost, and his last thought was relief that the pain was certain to end. His consciousness ceased like a light suddenly shut off.
What remained of the aircraft carrier Kaoling was driven by the momentum of the city-sized vessel plowing through the sea at thirty-five knots and forced underwater. The aft deck disappeared into the violent foamy sea, the aft half of the ship misshapen and crushed as it departed the surface and sank in the deep water quickly, vanishing below the two-hundred-foot layer depth where the light from the surface ended, and proceeded deeper in the dark cold sea until seve
ral minutes later it smashed into the rocks of the bottom, eleven thousand feet beneath the still-foaming waves.
The other ships of the Kaoling’s task force were not as lucky. Most of those vessels were blown to pieces smaller than trucks, the scattered pieces of the ships sinking rapidly. Three minutes after the explosion of the carrier Kaoling, eighteen other major surface combatants no longer existed in any recognizable fashion, and the Red Chinese Battlegroup One was
gutted. All that remained were a radio relay ship, four large fleet oilers, and six support ships containing food and spare parts for the fleet. The commanding officer of the radio relay vessel Dong Laou, a hundred-meter ugly monstrosity of radio antennae, was a lieutenant commander named Bao Xiung. Bao stood on the deck of the starboard bridge wing and watched the fires burning on the surface where the fleet had once sailed.
He dropped his binoculars and let them hang on the leather cord around his neck as he turned to his deck officer.
“You wanted a fight, Leader Meng,” he said dryly. “Now you have one. And what would your recommendation be for me, since all that appears to be left of the task force are a few support vessels?”
Young Lieutenant Meng Lo swallowed hard, then lowered his own binoculars slowly. “Sir, there must be an entire fleet of enemy submarines out there to have caused this damage. We have no choice. We must withdraw to the north and form up with Battlegroup Two. And radio the Admiralty to tell them about the disaster.”
Bao nodded, feeling guilty that he had been sarcastic to the idealistic youth. “Turn to the north, Leader Meng, and radio the support vessels that we have taken tactical command of the remnant of Battlegroup One, and order the others to continue north on a zigzag pattern. Perhaps zigzag pattern bear would be appropriate.”
“Yes, sir,” Meng stuttered, his face noticeably pale even in the dimness of the bridge lights and the light of the fires of the graves of their comrades. “It will be so, sir.”
Meng hurried into the bridge, leaving Bao behind, shaking his head sadly as the Dong Laou turned to the north to run from the vicious Americans.
Damn them to the seventh layer of hell, Bao thought. Damn them forever.
The last of the cigarettes ran out an hour ago. Lieutenant Commander Zhou Ping sat back in the command chair and allowed
himself the luxury of a yawn. The captain had extended his wakeup call by two hours, which meant Zhou would be here for two hours longer than his body was used to, the very thought making him feel tired. There was absolutely nothing he could do for the next four and a half hours but sit here at the command console in the command post, waiting for a submerged contact. That would be wonderful, he thought, fantasizing about detecting an American submarine and alerting the captain. The ship would set wartime readiness conditions, the command post would fill up, and the captain would obtain a passive range on the contact, then shoot a salvo of Dong Feng torpedoes, or perhaps the new Tsunami nuclear-tipped weapon. Both types of torpedoes were supercavitating, with solid rocket fuel that would make them sail through the water at nearly two hundred knots, but a Tsunami could pack a punch so severe that it did not even need to get close. Of course, launching one was something of a suicide maneuver, since in all likelihood the one-megaton blast of the warhead could damage the shooting ship. The Admiralty obviously believed shooting a Tsunami was suicide, because each ship had been loaded with only one Tsunami. Why waste torpedo room space with more than one if shooting one meant the firing ship would sink? But Zhou was not convinced. The Tsunami would head toward the aim-point at two hundred knots, with a maximum range of fifty miles, so its time-of-flight could be as long as fifteen minutes, and in fifteen minutes the Nung Yahtsu could travel twelve miles in the opposite direction, for a total of sixty-two miles, and that distance from a submerged megaton detonation should prove more than enough for ship survival. Zhou had long since decided that the Tsunami suicide issue was unfounded.
Of course, releasing a nuclear weapon could normally only be ordered by Beijing with a nuclear release code. The party leadership tended to get rather annoyed at unauthorized nuclear warfare, but if the captain of a submarine decided it was launch or die, he would have Beijing’s blessing. Zhou called up the weapon control panel, and saw that tubes one through
five were loaded with Dong Feng torpedoes, with a Tsunami in tube six, as Captain Lien Hua had insisted. He was midway through selecting the on-line technical manual for the Tsunami when his world seemed to crack in half with a dozen terrible things happening at once.
“Command Post, Sonar, we have multiple explosions to the north, in the baffles. Request you turn the ship immediately to the north!”
“Helm, right full rudder, steady course north, half ahead!” As the helmsman put the rudder over and acknowledged Zhou’s order, Zhou called the captain on a speaker intercom. “Captain to the command post, Captain to the command post!”
The deck tilted violently over as their high rate of speed put the ship into a snap roll, the torque of the propulsor and the drag of the fin putting the ship in a slight roll that became worse with time.
“What’s going on?” Captain Lien Hua shouted as he entered the command post.
“Sonar, report!” Zhou screamed to the overhead speaker.
“Command Post, Sonar, I say again, we have multiple explosions to the north, now out of the baffles. We also have distant sonar traces of weapons in the water.”
“Dammit to the bottom of hell, Mr. First,” Lien said. “The American SSN has attacked the task force. You were correct to turn the ship. That trace, the one we thought was biologies—”
“Wasn’t biologies at all, Captain.”
“Draw a circle from the position of the phantom noise trace we had. Designate it Target Number One, and give it an assumed speed of twenty knots. Show me where the target could be now.”
Zhou manipulated his firecontrol console, the range circle generating over the geographic plot. It was a damned large area, he thought.
“It’s too big to cover, sir. We’ll have to do a gallop-and walk search.”
“Command Post, Sonar, more explosions from the north. We no longer hold sonar contact on weapons in the water.”
“I have the deck, Mr. First,” Lien said. “Get to sonar and make sure we’redoing a maximum sensor scan for the American SSN. I’ll see if I can plot the weapon tracks backward in time to see where they originated, and maybe I can collapse this probability circle.”
“Yes, sir,” Zhou said as he hurried to the sonar space.
“American bastard,” Lien said, biting his lip. For the next few minutes he wondered if he should make an excursion to mast broach depth to warn the Admiralty and Battlegroup Two of the submarine attack, but decided they would know on their own soon enough. The highest priority was to find the American submarine and sink it.
“Sonar, Captain,” he called into one of the intercom microphones. “Have you scanned to the north for Target Number One?”
“Command Post, Sonar, yes. Recommend you commence a twenty-five-knot gallop to the north-northwest to attempt to close the probable locus of Target Number One.”
“Captain, aye,” Lien said. “Helm, all ahead full speed, turns for twenty-five knots.”
Zhou Ping returned. “Sonar has the picture, Captain. We’re on the gallop now. When will you slow down?”
“Twenty minutes,” Lien said. “We’ll spend fifteen minutes at eight knots, then speed up again. The American has to be to the north, probably in pursuit of the second task force.”
“If he is, sir, then he’s sped up to his maximum speed, hasn’t he?”
“Perhaps. But if it were me, I would linger to get a damage assessment, and to torpedo any lingering hulls.”
“If anything is left, it won’t be a high value target. Just a few oilers or supply ships.”
“If he departed the area, we may never catch him, but we can’t proceed north at maximum speed, because at some point he’ll clear his baffles, hear us coming in with
our noisy pumps on, and he’ll have an easy down-the-throat shot. We have to preserve stealth, even in this miserable situation.”
“Yes, sir. But if we get him, I want to pull the torpedo trigger with my own hands, and spill his blood personally.”
“I can see why, Mr. First, but why do you hate the Americans any more than the rest of the officers?”
“Because this miserable failure happened on my watch, Captain. I want vengeance and I want my honor back.”
“Then you shall pull the torpedo trigger, Mr. First. Whether that returns you, your honor, I will leave that to you.”
15.
Kelly McKee was shaken awake in the night, his curtain pulled aside by the messenger of the watch. He blinked in the light of the messenger’s red-hooded flashlight, sitting up on one elbow submariner style, since sitting upright would only result in a bang to the head on the low overhead of the coffin like rack enclosure. He felt the rack shaking, then realized it was the entire ship that was trembling. Judison must have increased speed to flank, up from the full bell, which was a violation of McKee’s orders to the fleet to proceed at high speed, but quietly, at the maximum revolutions possible in natural reactor circulation mode. He didn’t want his submarines clanking across the ocean, alerting the Snare or the British or even an Atlantic-penetrating Red Chinese submarine.
“What is it?”
“Admiral, the captain sends his respects at the hour of twenty hundred Zulu, and requests your presence on the conn, sir. There is top-secret message traffic and an update to the tactical situation, sir.”
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