by James Rosone
“Captain, Sonar. Torpedo in the water! Bearing one-five-three degrees and closing,” the sonar operator reported.
“Sonar, Captain. Range and speed of torpedo?” Chin asked.
“Captain, Sonar. Range five thousand, three hundred yards, speed fifty-five knots and accelerating.”
“Sonar, Captain. Very well. List all contacts as relative,” Chin replied.
“Captain, Sonar. List all contacts as relative, aye,” the sonar operator confirmed.
What the hell is Lee up to? Chin wondered. He’d tipped his hand too quickly. Surely he…damn it!
“Maneuvering, Captain. Right full rudder, all ahead flank.”
Chin instructed his communications officer to alert the destroyer and Arsenal ship that the attack had started. Each ship then turned right full rudder and increased to flank to match what he was doing. Chin wasn’t certain what Lee was up to, but he knew he needed distance from the submarine.
“Captain, Sonar. Torpedoes, torpedoes, torpedoes, bearing one-three-zero, one-three-five and one-four-two degrees off port bow, seven hundred and fifty yards, closing at forty-seven knots and accelerating!”
“Sonar, Captain. Very well.” Chin felt momentary panic, then reminded himself that the weapons closing on him were inert and that his ship was designed to take hits.
“Maneuvering, Captain. Turn into the torpedoes, match bearing and close distance,” Chin ordered.
Before the man could acknowledge the command, Chin cut him off and ordered his antitorpedo weapons to deploy. For good measure, he ordered them to fire double the munitions.
The weapons fired and splashed into the water within seconds. The computer reported that all but one of the incoming torpedoes had been acquired. The remaining torpedo had acquired his ship and impacted four seconds later with a thud that he felt even on the bridge.
Damage control reported to him that he needed to shut down his port shaft. If they had been hit by a live torpedo, it would have been destroyed. He cursed Lee under his breath. When he had increased his ship to flank speed, he’d had no idea the torpedo mines were programmed for wake homing. As he’d made his high-speed turn, the torpedo had followed his wake and struck.
What struck Chin as odd was that he knew doctrine said to strike from astern with wake homing programmed, not from a direct attack. This deviation from the standard doctrine had caught Chin off guard. It made him wonder if Lee would deviate from it further in his next attack.
We need to find Lee and sink them before they can carry out another strike on us…
*******
South China Sea
Changzheng 30
Captain Lee placed his commander’s tablet in its cradle and walked to the master plot. He enlarged the screen and saw the three remaining torpedoes heading toward Master 2. He received an indication that three of the four mine torpedoes had been intercepted by antitorpedo munitions from the Type 60. The fourth had acquired her wake and rendered her port screw inoperable. He needed to avoid her by staying out of her range. One ship off the board. Four remaining.
“Sonar, Captain. Distance to the first Type 55?” Captain Lee inquired.
“Captain, Sonar. First Type 55 is seventy-two hundred yards away, bearing three-one-eight degrees,” the sonar operator relayed.
“Sonar, Captain. Designate Type 55, Master 3. Report contact as relative,” Captain Lee ordered.
The sonarman was midsentence when he went quiet. Captain Lee looked up from the plot to see what had cut off the man’s report. He saw him place the second headphone on his other ear and cup them with both hands. As Lee looked intently at the man, he noticed the Conn had grown eerily silent.
“Captain, splashes in the water! ASW helos directly above us. Torpedo, torpedo, torpedo, actively homing, sir!”
“Weapons, fire tubes one and four at Master 3 along known bearing! Maneuvering ahead flank, forty-degree down angle on the planes! Release countermeasures and decoys!”
As the commands were executed, Lee didn’t need his stopwatch to know that time was up. The torpedoes had acquired his submarine and were on their terminal attack run. He looked at his XO as the man spoke.
“Sir, vent ballast?” As he spoke, he looked at the ceiling as the sonar pings of the torpedoes grew louder and increasingly frequent.
“No, the torpedoes are above us. We wouldn’t have room to…” Lee trailed off.
The Conn shuddered as three inert torpedoes thudded against the hull of his submarine. Even though these were smaller versions of the YU-9, the three impacts would have destroyed the submarine without question. As he gave the order to secure from battle stations, he looked forward to finding out how the ASW helos had acquired them.
Turning to look at the faces of his men, he knew they had performed well. His sonar operator removed his headset and looked at him pensively.
Loosening the collar on his shirt, Lee walked to the sonar station and asked the sailor what was wrong.
“Well, sir, I listened to our torpedoes as they tracked to Master 2 and 3. It’s just that—well, Captain, each target evaded one torpedo but was hit by the second,” the sonar operator explained.
Lee raised an eyebrow. Though they were technically dead, they had accomplished their mission. It was curious. Had he followed PLAN doctrine to the letter, he would have had to disengage after prosecuting the Type 60. The carrier would have gotten away, and he still would have been sunk. Even in death, they would have lost. Instead, they had managed to strike.
*******
Haidian District, Beijing
Five Days Later
Captain Lee followed the same procedure for entering the building as he had a month earlier. He expected to find the same officers assembled as before, but when he walked into the auditorium, it was just Fleet Admiral Wei Huang, head of the Chinese Navy, and his aide. He paused at the door, but Wei waved him forward. As he approached, Wei dismissed his aide.
“Captain, you performed quite well,” Wei said.
“Thank you, sir. But I must give the credit to my crew. They performed admirably.”
“Nonsense,” Wei said, waving his hands dismissively. “You followed your instincts and you nearly defeated three of the mightiest warships in our fleet.”
Lee remained quiet. Though Wei was correct, he’d still failed in his mission. Wei handed him an envelope.
“What is this, sir?”
“It is the results of the war game, and it is Jade Dragon’s prediction.”
Lee opened the envelope and read. He was pleased to learn that he was the only captain that had managed to score hits on three of the five ships. Captain Feng had been discovered on day three as he had tried to slowly maneuver in closer to the Arsenal ship. He had been flanked by the Type 60 and destroyers. They had all fired torpedoes at his sub and dropped torpedo mines along his avenues of retreat. Feng had simply had nowhere to run and had been destroyed.
Captain Su had been destroyed on the eighth day. He’d been trying to fire his torpedoes in the wake of the Arsenal ship and had been bracketed into a kill box by the ASW helos. He had managed to snap-shoot torpedoes, but they had been countered before he’d been sunk.
Next, Lee read the analysis from Jade Dragon.
The AI had anticipated the actions of the other three captains, nearly to the hour of the end of their exercise. When he got to the analysis of his action against the surface ships, he saw it was only one page. The last words gave him pause and he turned the page over to see if he had missed something. It simply read, “Outcome inconclusive.”
“Sir, what does this mean?”
Wei looked at him for a long moment, then smiled.
“It means, Captain Lee, you may very well be the key to our success in this coming war in the Pacific. It means you were able to outsmart the computer, which is saying something.”
Chapter Seventeen
Chengdu Virus
Acoustic Research Detachment
Bayview, Idaho
J
essica Parker looked at Dan. “We’ve met your demands. Now it’s time for you to tell us more about this virus—why would Jade Dragon create such a virus and unleash it within China and then spread it around the world?”
“It’s quite simple. It’s a machine. It doesn’t have the same emotional intelligence or morals that you and I may have. The program was given two problems and asked to solve them,” Dan replied.
“Really? What were the problems?” Jessica asked, her interest piqued.
“Climate change and population control,” Dan explained, his British accent sounding extra pompous in that moment. “You see, the two are intertwined. You can’t solve climate change without solving the growth in population. In China, we have 1.5 billion people. That’s twenty-one percent of the world’s population. In our case, we have limited land and resources to cultivate and feed our people. Worse, our population is aging fast in comparison to some of our peer nations like India or even the US. Just nine years ago, 9.5 percent of our population was above the age of sixty-five. Now, it hovers around 18 percent, and by 2050, it’s projected to be 27.5 percent. That’s just inside China. Jade Dragon looked at the broader problem of climate change and determined that the most effective way to solve the problem is to cull the herd of the sick and elderly, the ones who are no longer able to contribute to society or for whom the economic drain they impose on society outweighs what they are able to contribute.
“When we couple those issues with how to destabilize the West by imploding your economies, we come up with the reasoning behind Project Chengdu. The AI is solving a host of problems all at the same time. Namely, it’s going to crash your economies by forcing you to shut down like you did during the last COVID pandemic, then cull the herd of the sick, lame, and elderly, thus reducing the global population by 10 to 18 percent. It’s all very formulaic when you think about it.”
Jessica wasn’t sure if she wanted to throw up, punch Dan, or just scream at the ceiling. How these bastards could have created a machine so sinister was appalling; and that they would follow its advice no matter how immoral was beyond the pale.
Dan apparently saw the look of disgust on her face, and he tried to clarify, “You have to understand, Jessica. I was not involved in these decisions on how to use or implement JD. That was Dr. Xi, among many others. I was an engineer, a builder. When this program first started out, I truly thought I was joining something that was going to help solve some of the world’s toughest questions. I had no idea they were going to use JD in this fashion.”
“I’m sure that’s what the Nazi prison guards said about the trainloads of Jews and other undesirables when they showed up at the death camps.”
Dan didn’t say anything. He just sat there with a blank look on his face.
“How do we stop this virus?” she pressed.
“Acquire the vaccine and start mass-producing it. There’s plenty of it out there.”
“Really? So you concocted this superbug but made sure you had a vaccine in place to prevent it from getting too out of control?”
Dan canted his head to the side as if he were surprised by the question. “Xi and the others may be cold and calculating, but they are not idiots. If you want to treat them as sadistic morons, you do so at your own peril. The vaccine was distributed to China’s allied nations so they wouldn’t be hammered by it. The goal isn’t to destroy our friends—it’s to destroy the West and supplant them as the new world power.”
“So, Dan. How do we stop Jade Dragon?”
Smiling, Dan leaned forward. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that. Give me access to a computer and I can get you inside JD’s OS.”
“You have root access?”
“I built the damn thing; you better believe I built some backdoors into it,” Dan explained. “I don’t think even Xi knows about them. If you want to have a prayer of beating JD, then I need to see what they’re doing next. I need to gain entry into the program and see what kind of war games they’ve dreamed up. That will give us an insight into what is coming next.”
Chapter Seventeen
Kompromat
May 2024
Mariel, Cuba
What a beautiful day it is. The sun is shining, not a cloud in sight, thought José Santiago as he watched the waitress make her way over to his table. She placed a cup of coffee in front of him, along with a plate containing three thin slices of brazo de gitano, a mouthwatering cake roll with guava jelly filling. It was the perfect pairing.
When the waitress left, he took a couple bites of his breakfast before taking a sip of the fresh cup of joe. This was hands-down José’s favorite part of Cuba—the coffee, the cigars, and the pastries.
Looking out toward the water and across the bay, one could see the swarms of workers unloading one cargo vessel after another. It was an impressive facility, quickly and efficiently receiving cargo. Of course, none of it would be possible without the financial aid and port-building expertise the Chinese-owned firm COSCO brought to the table.
The Chinese, with their incredible engineering skills, had helped the Cubans dredge the bay to create more space to build the deepwater port. They’d also expanded the facility, adding three new port terminals. A new rail line had been constructed, allowing the offloaded shipping containers to be easily transferred to rail, where they could be shipped around the country.
This new facility, along with the oil terminal and the refinery, had transformed the Cuban economy. The government was becoming flush with cash. New infrastructure projects, buildings, and even cell towers were popping up everywhere.
In the last year, not only had Cuba become independent of foreign oil, they were now a net exporter of oil to China and other nearby countries. With so much global political pressure on Venezuela, the Chinese found Cuba to be an exceptional place to build a series of new oil refineries to handle the influx of crude being pumped from the Gulf.
Had the Chinese not gotten involved in drilling for oil along the Straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, José doubted America would be aware of half of what the Chinese were doing in Cuba. With the threat of terrorism and the continuing saga of the Moros regime, American attention and resources were not directed toward Cuba.
What struck José as odd was that, in February, Cuba had instituted a mandatory flu vaccination. Everyone had had to line up at their local clinic to get it. When José had gone to the clinic near his apartment, he’d noticed the vial the technician was using. It had a Chinese label on it. José had grown a bit concerned when he had seen it, but like everyone else, he had to get it.
A few weeks later, when this new virus from China had broken out across Europe and then the US. For two weeks, José had waited in fear for the symptoms to start, but they’d never come. Not only that, hardly anyone in the country was coming down with this new virus.
Then it dawned on José. Maybe this flu vaccine they had all been given was actually a vaccine against this new virus and that was why people in Cuba, Venezuela, Panama, and El Salvador weren’t being pummeled by it. José knew he needed to get his hands on a vial and have it shipped back to the US so it could be studied.
When he was halfway into his coffee and deep in his own thoughts, a beautiful woman walked out on the patio of the café, looking for someone. Then the five-foot-nine-inch-tall woman with beautiful hazel eyes, shoulder-length brownish hair and a figure to die for spotted José. Her eyes lit up and a smile spread across her face, her beautiful white teeth practically shining. She gracefully moved toward him as if she were effortlessly floating on a cloud of air. The flowing sundress moved around her body in the gentle breeze, showing just enough of her figure to cause every man in the place to stare as she glided past them.
“Good morning, Yamileth. How are you doing this beautiful day?” José said politely as he stood up, kissing her on both cheeks as he invited her to take a seat. The other men around him looked on jealously.
José loved that feeling he got when men stared at him longingly as he sat
with this beautiful woman. It happened every time they met.
Yami smiled as they briefly hugged and kissed. “I’m doing well, José. Thank you for inviting me out for breakfast this morning. I see you have already started,” she commented flirtatiously as she saw he had been nibbling on the pastry in front of him.
He blushed slightly. “How can a man stare at a piece of brazo de gitano and not eat some of it? Please, let me order you something.” José flagged down the waitress, who came over to their table, took Yami’s order and said she’d be back momentarily.
In a hushed tone, Yami leaned in and softly announced, “I made contact with our friend Esteban the other day.”
In an equally hushed tone, José prodded, “Were you able to obtain the kompromat?”
Yami tilted her head to the side. “Of course—as if that would be a problem.”
She then pulled out her phone and moved over near his seat. She pretended to take a selfie of the two of them and then placed the phone on the table as the waitress brought a cup of coffee and a fresh pastry for her.
While Yami added sugar to her coffee, José pretended to be checking something on his phone as he turned a stealth app on and then placed the phone on the table next to Yami’s. For the next few minutes, the two phones exchanged data discreetly while they continued to eat their pastries, drink their coffee and flirt with each other.
José took another sip of his coffee before remembering he had something to give her. He reached down into his satchel and pulled out a very worn paperback book titled Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier and placed it on the table near Yami.
“Oh, you brought the book for me,” Yami squealed with delight. She’d been wanting to read this book for some time, but it was a hard one to come by.
“I did. I’m sorry I forgot it last time. I remembered on my way out the door this morning to grab it. As you can see, it’s lovingly worn. I’ve read it a few times. I hate to say this, but page 301 is missing. I think I may have ripped it out a while ago, but I can’t remember what happened or why I did it,” José quipped apologetically.