Warshot (The Hunter Killer Series Book 6)

by Don Keith

  “Mr. Walters, get Oscar back aboard,” Edwards directed. “Now that we’ve saved the guy’s life, we need to get moving toward Papa Hotel. The commodore’s waiting for us over there and he’s a busy man.”

  Edwards moved down into the cockpit and, in a voice that only Ensign Walters could hear, said, “Nicely done for your first one. Now, the key is to just pretend like you had complete control and knew exactly what was happening all the time.” The skipper smiled. “My watchword is ‘it’s always better to be lucky than good.’”

  With that bit of advice, Edwards disappeared down the ladder.

  2

  The gray ship sailed serenely through a spectacular early-morning twilight. A gentle breeze played across the vessel’s bridge, bringing a faint earthy smell that mingled with the familiar tang of saltwater. Only her large battle ensign, snapping briskly in the breeze, belied the tranquility of the scene.

  The USS Tarbox, the Navy’s newest fast frigate—so new that her paint still smelled fresh—cut smoothly through the gentle swell. The bow wave curved up almost to where her hull number, 72, was painted on her bow. Her SPY-6(V)3 radar searched out to find every contact for hundreds of miles around the warship, but Commander Malcom Fritz, Tarbox’s skipper, was much more concerned about one particular return. That one marked the bit of land just appearing on the horizon off his ship’s port bow. He could barely make out the low-lying island from his perch on the port bridge wing.

  Only a few months ago, North Danger Reef had been a conglomeration of coral and rock, just barely emerging from the warm waters of the South China Sea. Marking a point at the northernmost end of the Spratly Islands, the reef had earned its name honestly, sending many an unsuspecting ship to its doom. These days, though, North Danger Reef appeared on the electronic charts under a new name. Dong Doa Island was the newest bit of Chinese-government-claimed sovereignty in these waters. Even if some of the islands hereabouts had barely enough dry “territory” to erect a flagpole and flag.

  The Tarbox’s orders were to challenge that sovereignty claim. She was to steam boldly past the newly claimed real estate, conducting what were termed FONOPS—or Freedom of Navigation Operations—figuratively thumbing their noses at the Chinese government’s assertion of ownership.

  But something else had changed besides the island’s name. A new airfield and missile launchers now fit on what had become a man-made spit of sand barely large enough to hold the improvements. China made no attempt to hide their purpose. They were meant to reinforce China’s claim that all of the South China Sea was within her territorial waters. And beyond that, the Middle Kingdom could and would deny any nation the right to traverse that water. Violently if need be.

  Dong Doa Island was merely the newest in a chain of airfields and anchorages that the People’s Liberation Army Navy had constructed, ranging from the Spratlys in the south through the Parcels, and right on up to Hainan, the island province that marked China’s southernmost point. Lately, the PLAN had been making noises about extending their claims all the way to the Riau Archipelago. That would effectively close off the southern entrance to the South China Sea while the Chinese continued to rattle their swords about claims to the Dongsha Islands at the northern end, chillingly near Taiwan. PLAN warships had been spotted frequently circling both areas from a menacingly close distance. The Indonesians did not say very much about incursions into the Riaus, but the Taiwanese complained loudly to anyone who would listen every time the PLAN sailed too close to Dongsha.

  The heightened tensions were only one of the reasons Commander Fritz was concerned about these FONOPS. The other was because his crew was every bit as new and untested as his ship. They had completed their work-up training and left Pearl Harbor only two weeks prior. A quick couple of days in Guam had relieved the tedium of a long ocean transit, but the crew was distracted, anticipating arriving in Singapore. It would be Tarbox’s first ever foreign liberty port. The tales that the couple of old salts aboard had been sharing about the delights to be found in the tropical city had everyone anxious to speed across the intervening distance. And that was exactly what they had been doing until just before sunrise.

  That was when some desk jockey back in the Pentagon noticed that North Danger Reef was barely off the ship’s track. Maybe they should make a quick detour, knock, and say “Hi” to their Chinese friends in the area.

  Commander Fritz barely had enough time to break out Seventh Fleet’s FONOPS instructions, scan them, and hold a hurried discussion with his XO and ops officer. None of them had any experience with FONOPS, but thankfully, it looked simple enough. All they had to do was veer slightly off their original course, steam through the disputed waters with their flag flying, then resume the trek toward shore leave. Should they be challenged, they were to respond that they were peacefully exercising their right to pass through these waters under international law. And then, of course, they would have to write a report detailing their transit of the disputed area and everything that transpired. All sounded simple and easy. Besides, how many other ships had conducted FONOPS without serious incident?

  “Captain.” The officer of the deck stuck his head out to the pilothouse. “We are being challenged on the bridge-to-bridge circuit, channel sixteen.”

  Fritz frowned as he stepped inside the pilothouse so that he could hear the radio speaker.

  “American warship, this is Dong Doa Control. You have entered restricted waters. You will secure all electronic emissions and leave Chinese waters immediately.” The voice was harsh and seemed to brook no discussion.

  Fritz snorted as he grabbed the microphone. “This is the USS Tarbox. Please be advised that we are engaged in freedom of navigation of these waters as is our right under international law. We do not recognize Chinese claims that these are territorial waters.”

  “Tarbox, I repeat, you will immediately secure all electronic emissions and change course to leave our waters or you will be engaged.” Immediately after the voice stopped, static burst from the speaker.

  “Captain, Combat,” the tactical action officer reported over the tactical circuit. “We are being jammed on all frequencies. All radars are down. I think we detected an aircraft launch just before we lost the SPY-6. The X-band precision tracking radar locked on for just a second.”

  “Locked onto what?” Fritz asked. The X-band was an anti-air fire control radar programmed to automatically lock onto threat profile airborne targets. It had detected something that fit a threat profile. If the system was in automatic mode, anti-air missiles would already be outbound. But this was peace time. The Chinese may fly something close by, but it was all for show.

  Right on cue, a Shenyang J-16 strike fighter came in low and fast. Fritz shook his head. Obviously, these guys had ratcheted up their show of force a notch or two.

  But then, the first burst of fire from the aircraft’s GSh-30-1 thirty-millimeter cannon tore through the frigate’s bridge and shredded the comms masts. A YJ-12 anti-ship missile impacted, penetrating deep into Tarbox’s interior before detonating in the vessel’s CIC just seconds after the fighter roared directly overhead.

  In fifteen seconds, the proud warship was reduced to a burning, defenseless hulk.

  A salvage tug was already steaming out of Dong Doa’s tiny harbor, headed directly toward the burning ship. It would take just over an hour to rescue the survivors, extinguish the fires, and put what was left of the Tarbox under tow, headed back to the tiny outpost in the South China Sea.

  Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, people were already trying to figure out why the Navy’s newest warship and her crew had seemingly vanished from the face of the earth.

  Ψ

  The MQ-4 Triton orbited at sixty thousand feet, far too high to be seen by the frequent Tokyo-to-Singapore airline flights passing twenty thousand feet below the gray-and-white unmanned spy plane. From this high perch, Triton flight PE Six-Zero sent a steady stream of data back to its “pilot” and sensor operator, senso, who were sitting in a c
inderblock building at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Florida. PE Six-Zero’s pilot, Lieutenant Cindy “Stick” Sidirourgos, had not actually seen her bird up close in more than six months. Her squadron, VUP-19, was homeported at NAS JAX, only a couple of blocks from the main runways. Their six Tritons, however, flew out of Anderson Air Force Base, high on a bluff in the northeast corner of Guam, over eight thousand miles away in the Mariana Islands.

  Most of the considerable data that Six-Zero sent back from its package of state-of the-art sensors held little interest to Cindy Sidirourgos. She was only considering the information from the drone that she needed to know to be able to fly the bird. All that appeared on the four large flat-panels that fronted her “cockpit.” The rest of the bits and bytes went to the senso and then were shunted off to the numerous organizations and three-letter government agencies that really cared about what was going on in the contentious waters of the far western Pacific.

  The flight up from Guam had taken almost three hours. Then, as ordered, Sidirourgos put her bird into a long elliptical search orbit. After a few quick button pushes, confident the craft was obeying her commands, she stood to stretch. The bird—she secretly and affectionately called it “Polly”—would now fly itself for a while. She shivered in the blast of cold air conditioning designed to keep the electronics cool, ignoring the humans and their comfort, then threw her leather flight jacket over the green flight coveralls she routinely wore when she was “flying a mission.” Sidirourgos then stepped across the hall to the tiny pantry for a cup of coffee and a donut.

  Flying these ocean surveillance missions was hard, boring work, collecting valuable data, and she was responsible for the well-being of a very expensive hunk of machinery. Four hours in the cockpit, then four hours off, followed by four more hours flying, all to complete the twelve-hour watch. Four days on, then four days off.

  Sidirourgos selected a plain glazed donut, not one of the jelly-filled ones she preferred. Just one more day to go, and then it was beach time. Four days of fun in the sun with her boyfriend on the sugary sands of Seagrove Beach, one of the Florida Panhandle’s best. She could hardly wait. But she had been watching her figure lately, better to fit into her new bikini.

  Just then, the red light hanging outside the cockpit door flashed and the buzzer blasted. Something was happening to her bird. Sidirourgos quickly put down her coffee cup—no open liquids allowed in the cockpit, a cup of coffee spilled in the wrong place would be a bad day for a lot of people—and stuffed the rest of the donut in her mouth as she hurried back.

  The chat link with Seventh Fleet was flashing red as she plopped down in her seat, still chewing.

  “Mission PE-60, Seventh Fleet Ops,” the text on the screen read. “Emergency re-target your mission. Establish patrol area vicinity one-two-dot-five north, one-one-four-dot-eight east. Conduct all-sensor search. Target of interest USS Tarbox. Last contact eight hours, vicinity Spratly Islands. Highest priority. Report contact with Tarbox Op Immediate.”

  She frowned, shook her head, and quickly re-read the message. In her six years in the Navy, Cindy Sidirourgos had never seen a communication like this one. Quickly acknowledging the text, she grabbed the joystick and swung the big bird around to its new course. Then she pushed the throttles to the firewall. After punching the ordered coordinates into the nav system, she learned that she had an hour’s flying time before she began this new and seemingly urgent mission.

  Time to finish that coffee and maybe indulge in a second donut. No way it could show up on her thighs or hips in just one day, right?

  Ψ

  As the unmanned MQ-4 spy plane reached the northern end of its new search area, the senso, AWP-1 Flint Allerman, set up the systems for an all-sensor search of the cluttered ocean area far below. To the east and south was a vast area of rock, shoals, and tiny islands. Thousands of fishing boats littered his sensor screens. Just to the west were the main shipping channels through the South China Sea, perhaps the most heavily trafficked sea lane on the planet. Locating a lone frigate in all this clutter was not going to be easy.

  Then, as Allerman watched intently, the image on the screen abruptly turned to fuzz. And there was nothing being reported by any of the bird’s sensors. Even the optical and IR circuits were suddenly out. Something very powerful and very close was actively jamming his bird, something the senso had never seen before. Not even during his extensive training.

  Allerman was just keying his mike to call Sidirourgos when her voice blared over his speaker.

  “Senso? Pilot. I’ve lost contact with our bird. What are you seeing?”

  Ψ

  Eight thousand miles away from where the two stared at their suddenly blank screens, the shattered remains of “Polly,” PE Six-Zero, fluttered down, eventually plunging into the sea far below. Meanwhile, the pilot of the Shenyang J-16 fighter was busy on his radio, proudly reporting that his mission had been successfully completed and that he was now returning to base on the speck of land once called North Danger Reef.

  Ψ

  TJ Dillon braced himself against a stout sea breeze as he stood outside Eluanbi Lighthouse, at the far southern end of Taiwan, overlooking the South China Sea to his right, the Philippine Sea to his left, and a narrow, rocky beach almost a thousand feet below. Down there was a flurry of activity. A couple of bright yellow dozers were pushing piles of sand around. Barges and tenders were making regular shuttle runs between the spit of land and a bright red ship that rode at anchor half a mile offshore.

  Dillon did not need his powerful binoculars to read the six-foot-tall white letters along the ship’s high side, spelling out “GLOBAL MARINE.” He could also easily read the ship’s name, CS Sovereign, in smaller black letters toward her stern. Dillon’s employers had hired the British cable company, an affiliate of British Telecom, to do some critical cable laying. In the process, they used a fictitious but legally valid corporation to execute the contract and deliver the deposit for the job. In truth, British Telecom had not deemed it necessary to investigate the transaction very deeply once the check cleared. Besides, they had done business with this particular “company” before, and all had gone well. So, there was nothing that could tie back this job to Dillon’s actual employer. One of those three-letter US government agencies.

  As Dillon watched—now through his binoculars—a heavy black line draped over the ship’s stern and disappeared below the waves. A pair of tugs laboriously pulled a large barge loaded with heavy equipment toward the beach in a straight line from the cable-laying ship. A heavy crane hung out over the barge’s broad stern with cables and power lines disappearing from it into the water. The last few thousand yards to the beach were where a submarine fiber-optic cable was most vulnerable. Anchors, fishing trawls, just about anything somebody dragged along the shallow bottom could snag on and break them. For this reason, the barge was guiding a remotely operated trencher as it buried the cable on the bottom and right up to the water’s edge under ten feet of sand, stone, and bottom muck.

  As Dillon watched the process play out far below, his encrypted cell phone buzzed.

  “TJ, how’s it going?” Dillon immediately recognized the voice of Rear Admiral Jon Ward. Now this was a most unexpected call. “Looks like we are getting good data from the north string as well as the ones on the east coast. The data extraction seems to be working quite well.”

  Ward was cryptically referring to the technology hidden in the sensors now tapping off raw hydrophone data at the shore terminal and re-routing it back to the US for intense analysis. And the technology was doing its job while not allowing the Taiwanese engineers any opportunity to detect hacking on their seismic monitoring system. They were listening for the first rumblings of earthquakes and resulting tsunamis. But thanks to fiber-optics and the wonders of the internet, the spooks back in Norfolk were studying the same data, looking instead for Chinese submarines.

  “Jon, guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you are read in on this particular little operation,�
�� Dillon answered. “After all, you’re now the Navy’s top spook.”

  Jon Ward was a former submariner who had been kicked upstairs. Way upstairs. He now ran Naval Intelligence from his office at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., after the retirement of its longtime head, Tom Donnegan.

  “Yeah, and after all the times we’ve worked together, your boss was happy to help us with this little plan,” Ward responded with a chuckle. It still amazed Ward how often other agencies, purportedly defending the country against the same foes, could not seem to be able to cooperate. “But look, since you are really over there vacationing on my nickel, I figure you have another day or so in Eluanbi to wrap things up, so why don’t you enjoy a couple of days in Taipei? You gotta have dinner at Din Tai Fung on Xinyi Road. Michelin Star and the xiaolongbao are out of this world. Easy walk from the Grand Hyatt.”

  “Admiral, thank you for the suggestion,” Dillon replied. “You know my previous visits to the area were considerably more stressful. And the best meals we had were MREs. Far as I know, Michelin hasn’t rated those things.”

  Dillon was a retired Navy SEAL, called back into service doing covert and dangerous duty on behalf of the aforementioned three-letter government agency.

  “Delicious, I know. But at the time, you were probably glad to get them, right?”

  “Always. They were meals and they were ready to eat. Thanks, Admiral, and I’ll let you know if I see anything out of whack over here.”

  “Likewise, TJ. Be careful, though. You never know. You just never know.”

  Ψ

  Jonathan Ward sat back in his big office chair. He was still getting acclimated to being a flag officer, having an office in the Pentagon, a desk half the size of an aircraft carrier, a chair with electronic adjustments for height, tilt, and back resistance. Nothing like these digs in all those submarines he had ridden for most of his military career. And he had already developed even more respect for what Tom Donnegan, his predecessor and godfather, had been forced to contend with. Papa Tom was retired now, obsessing over his orchids and watching his beloved submarines going into and out of Pearl Harbor from his lanai, high up on Aiea Heights in Pearl City, Hawaii. And that meant Jon Ward now had the unenviable task of wading through yet another stack of reports that somebody somewhere who outranked him believed needed reading.