by Don Keith
“May I ask you a question?” he queried. She gave the slightest of nods and closed her eyes. “There are...what?...a billion-and-a-half people in China. Why are so few of them like you? Why has there not been a revolution?”
She leaned forward, resting her arms on the table, and looked TJ Dillon squarely in the eyes. It appeared she had been waiting a long while for someone to finally ask her this question. And waiting just as impatiently to answer it.
“There are plenty more like me, but they do not dare. They have a roof, four walls, at least enough food to survive, and some kind of job. And they have their children, or as many as the government allows. They have been convinced since childhood that the country is ungovernable any other way, that there would only be chaos if the collective—the people—do not submit to the will of all. The alternative is to be governed by rich capitalists who prey on the people to build wealth and grab power. As they are told that it is in the USA, of course. Plus, if they do not submit to the will of the masses, their children will be taken away, their homes stolen, their jobs eliminated. All those bad things will happen for the good of all the people and, by the way, Mother China.”
Zhou slumped down, as if the speech had claimed all her strength. Then she cocked her head, regained eye contact, and went on, quietly.
“When I was a little girl, the first song I learned was 'I Compare the Communist Party to My Mother.’” She quietly sang in Mandarin a few lines of what sounded like a sweet, peaceful lullaby. Dillon, fluent in the language, understood every word.
“Jesus. How old were you?”
“Four. Four years old. We stood at our desks every day in school...like your kindergarten in the West...and recited, ‘Father is dear, Mother is dear, but none compare to the dearest Party.’ From the earliest age, we constantly heard that the Party would take care of us, that we had all we needed and could be happy, and all we had to do was remain loyal to the Party.”
She slumped down once more, leaning back on the bench seat, as if the words had worn her out.
“So, what changed you? Why did you turn on your own country? That had to be difficult...”
“I was lucky. I had skills they needed. Mathematics, digital communications, computer technology. I got to go to school in the US. Cal Tech. That was when I learned the real story. Logic convinced me that what I had been told all my life was wrong. Why was it necessary to lie so much if the Party really was the best hope for China? Did you know more than one hundred million people were murdered by the Party during the decades of Chinese communism? One hundred million good, honest, hard-working people who believed there was no better choice of government. I vowed I would make it my life’s work to do what I could do to bring positive chaos to my country and the people there who would prosper if free. Chaos. The good chaos of democracy and a free society.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Dillon responded when she finally stopped. The former SEAL suddenly tensed, his hand inches from the gun inside his suit coat. “So, who do you like in the World Cup?”
Zhou was savvy enough to not react at all, not to Dillon’s tension, not to the sudden change of subject. A young man was quickly approaching them from the rear entrance of the restaurant.
“At ease. One of my guys,” she said. “Hey, thanks for letting me blow off steam.”
“Glad to listen.”
“You have the data on the thumb drive for Ward. We’ll have more details on what all the new activity out there is about shortly, who exactly is involved, and we’ll know what to do. I hope. Looks to me, though, that all the factions are lining up and ready to make a move like right now. That, as you know as well as anybody, means somebody’s going to get hurt in the melee.”
The young man had stopped a respectful distance away, over near the soda dispenser with its scores of competing flavors of pop.
“Chan has your stuff,” she told Dillon. “I assume you can upload the data on the drive. Just like checking your Gmail account, right?”
“I got it. Thank you again for saving my ass tonight. Maybe we can create some chaos. First the bad kind. Then the good kind, like what you’ve been trying to bring about,” Dillon said, with all the sincerity he could muster.
“I don’t think we have a choice, TJ. The whole planet is depending on us.”
9
Lt. Bill Wilson stepped over to the Electronic Chart Display and Information System console (ECDIS) to check the George Mason’s position. As the mid-watch officer of the deck, his job was to make sure everything was ready to surface at first light. They would be just outside the twelve-mile limit off the entrance to Subic Bay, on the western coast of the Philippine island of Luzon.
He could feel his watch-section’s eager anticipation, more than ready to pull into the most storied liberty port in all of Asia. Subic Bay and Olongapo City might have lost some of their allure from the heyday of when they housed the largest US military installation in the world, when the massive US Naval base graced those shores. All of that was gone now. But the stories of liberty in Subic Bay continued to reverberate around the fleet. And since the location still served as a replenishment port for US vessels, submarine sailors had the opportunity to blow off steam there after being submerged for months at a time.
“Sonar Supervisor,” Wilson ordered, “take station to stow the TB-29 towed array.”
ST1 Josh Hannon, standing watch as sonar supervisor, stood behind the narrowband operator. Frowning, he held up his hand. “Officer of the Deck, give me a couple of seconds. We’re analyzing a new contact.”
“Okay, but we need to have the array stowed in time to surface at first light,” Wilson responded, rolling his eyes. What now? “Skipper ain’t gonna like it if we hold up a perfectly good liberty port because sonar was busy analyzing snapping shrimp.”
Hannon looked up. He was still frowning.
“Mr. Wilson, I suspect you had better call the skipper. I’m thinking our Subic liberty may be delayed for just a little bit.”
“What are you rambling on about?”
“Well, those snapping shrimp just got classified as a submerged submarine. The eleven-hertz lines equate to a Chinese Yuan-class,” Hannon reported. “Recommend you call the skipper and station the section tracking party while we get a leg on this guy. Sooner we find out what it is, sooner we can be wettin’ our whistles on Magsaysay Boulevard.”
Two minutes later, Brian Edwards walked into the control room, still wiping sleep out of his eyes but carrying his coffee mug. The section tracking party was just starting to gather information, working to identify this unexpected guest.
“What do you have, Mr. Wilson?” Edwards busily scanned the command display as the young OOD related what he knew for certain.
“Captain, on course south, making twelve knots. We have an eleven-hertz line on the TB-29. That equates to a Chinese Yuan-class submarine. Ambiguous bearings are three-one-zero, designate Sierra Four-Five, and zero-five-zero, designate Sierra Four-Six.”
The TB-29A was a mile-long line of highly sensitive hydrophones that were being towed along behind the George Mason. Since it was a single long line of phones, any sonar contact showed as being somewhere in a three-dimensional conical “bearing” around the array. The conical “bearing” was formed by the time delays in the beamformer. What this effectively meant was that any new sonar contact arrived as two contacts—now designated as Sierra Forty-Five and Sierra Forty-Six—on either side of the array and at equal, ambiguous angles. The only way to determine which of the two was the real one was to maneuver the sub to a new course and regain it. The side where the contact reappeared from the same direction was the true bearing line.
Edwards nodded, chewing his lower lip. He could see everything Wilson was telling him on the passive narrow-band display. “Okay, what are you planning to do?” he asked.
“Skipper, I’m thinking that if I come left to a course of something like one-two-zero, I can resolve ambiguity and still stay close to the navigator’s track. If we’re wrong, if it�
��s not a Chinese boat, we could still get to the surfacing point, maybe an hour late.”
Edwards shook his head. He stepped back to the ECDIS table. “First off, let’s look at priorities. Finding and tracking a Yuan has a higher priority than a liberty call. The boss would not be happy if we were drinking San Miguel in Olongapo while the Chinese had a sub on the loose out in the South China Sea.”
Lieutenant Wilson nodded as Edwards went on. “Now, look at the geography of this. If our new best friend was on bearing zero-five-zero, he is either really close to us or he is snuggled up to the Philippine coast and we went blowing right past him last night.” He pointed at the chart display. “But, if he is really out at three-one-zero, he would probably be in the deep water somewhere to the west of Scarborough Shoal. Higher probability is that he is out that way. Let’s come around to two-seven-zero to resolve ambiguity.”
Jackson Biddle, his hair still wet from the shower, joined the group huddled around the ECDIS.
“So, we caught a fish, did we?” the XO asked as he looked carefully at the sonar displays. After flipping through several screens, he scratched his chin. “You know something, Skipper? The signature looks an awful lot like that Yuan we played with in the Arabian Sea a couple of years ago. What was that boat’s name? The Wushiwu, wasn’t it? One trigger-happy bastard.”
Edwards nodded. “Sure looks like it, XO. Not one either of us is likely to forget. How about you draft a message to Subgroup Seven that we have contact while I supervise getting up to periscope depth. Better tell the boss that we have a friend out here. And we can grab the latest intel while we’re up. Maybe there’ll be a clue about this guy there.”
Edwards turned to Bill Wilson and ordered, “Mr. Wilson, clear baffles to the right and come to periscope depth for comms. Come up on course two-seven-zero.”
“Pilot, right full rudder, steady course two-seven-zero,” Lt. Wilson ordered. “Make your depth one-five-zero feet.”
The big boat swung around smoothly and came shallow, all the while searching for any close sonar contacts that could be a hazard.
Ten minutes later, the George Mason was back down at depth. Subgroup Seven, operating out of a nondescript building in Yokosuka, Japan, was now aware that the George Mason was playing footsie with a suspected Chinese submarine and probably would not make her port visit to Subic. The intel crowd would certainly be scurrying around, trying to find where the Chinese boat had come from and, more importantly, deduce where he was going. The operations team would be working out the complicated dance to make sure that the George Mason had enough water assigned to her so that she could maneuver without worrying about running into any friendly submarines. Literally.
In the crowded waters of the South China Sea, especially given how many of the littoral nations now operated diesel electric submarines lately, this had become a very real and complicated problem.
Underwater blind man’s bluff with a ten-thousand-ton submarine would not be a fun game to play.
Ψ
Joe Glass had spent most of his long flight reading through a great stack of thick, boring reports that his chief of staff had dumped into the empty seat between them. Glass was beginning to understand that the old expression was absolutely true. The Navy really did sail on a sea of paperwork. It never seemed to end. At least the five-hour Omni International charter flight from Honolulu to American Samoa had provided a great opportunity to catch up.
The cabin steward’s warning that they were descending into Pago Pago International Airport caught Commodore Glass in mid-red-pencil mode, editing new instructions for conducting a monitor watch. Hardly compelling reading. He shifted his interest to look out the window.
Pago Pago Harbor, encircled by small villages, came into view. Glass spotted the Lewis B. Puller anchored out in the middle of the harbor. The Military Sealift Command expeditionary mobile base ship—better known as the Chesty Puller after her famous Marine namesake—would be his new home for the near-term. He could also make out the black form of one of his submarines nestled up alongside the much larger ship. That would be the Cheyenne, newly arrived in port for a brief mid-deployment maintenance period.
Glass glanced around the cabin. The planeload of submarine sailors, shipyard workers, and technical experts would soon be busy, helping transform the sleepy harbor at Pago Pago into a bustling submarine maintenance and repair facility. Marrying up the expertise that his team represented with the pre-positioned equipment on the Chesty Puller would allow them to fix just about anything on a submarine short of something requiring a drydock. This saved almost two weeks of steaming each way for any boat operating in Southeast Asian waters.
The big 767 slapped down on Pago Pago’s main runway and taxied over to an out-of-the-way corner of the apron. Glass could see a pair of C-17 Globemaster airplanes being unloaded directly to a pair of CH-53K heavy-lift helicopters. He smiled. That was certainly one of the benefits of using the Chesty Puller. She came with her own heliport.
“Proper preparation prevents poor performance,” Glass muttered under his breath as he slid from his seat and pulled his sea bag from the overhead rack.
“Sir?” a sailor in the aisle in front of him asked.
“Oh, nothing. Just something a former skipper of mine used to tell us.”
Ψ
Vice Deputy to the Minister of National Defense Soo Be Xian sat at his desk and watched the large monitor hanging on the far wall of his office. In split-screen on the other end of the video conference were Colonel General Xiang, Commanding General of Southern Theatre of Operation, and his Chief of Staff, Major General Shun. General Shun had just spent the last fifteen minutes explaining the tactical positioning of the three brigades from Fourteenth Army in the heavily forested highlands overlooking Lao Cai on the Red River in the far southernmost reaches of China. His elaborate maps and animation clearly showed how the mounted infantry units and armor brigades could be driving into Vietnam within an hour of receiving such operational orders.
Shun shifted the map to the east, down to where the border was depicting a decided bend into Vietnam to form the Muc Nam Quan border crossing. The bulge on the map, barely two miles wide and roughly four miles long, moved the border from the ancient Ming Dynasty Friendship Pass further into what had once been eight square miles of Vietnamese territory. This seemingly minor result of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War still rankled Vietnamese pride, even after all these years.
“We have moved the One-Twenty-Third Infantry Division to the Daxiang Reservoir area,” Shun was explaining, waving his laser pointer to an area on the map only a few miles north of the disputed border crossing. “The Fifteenth Armored Brigade and the One-Twenty-First Motorized Infantry Brigade are both encamped in the hills just east of Youyizhen.” He waved the pointer to an area a little further south.
Soo Be Xian nodded, understanding. The two generals had done exactly what he had ordered. However, the Vietnamese reaction so far had been much more measured than he had expected. They had only moved a few more companies of border guards north. Even the Coast Guard attack on the fishing fleet had only resulted in a minor diplomatic clamor and a Vietnamese request for still more arms from the US. He apparently needed more provocation if he was going to goad them into some action that he could turn right around and claim as a preemptive attack by the Vietnamese. A reaction in response to their unprovoked assault on the Middle Kingdom’s sovereignty.
“General Xiang, I want you to move a battalion of main battle tanks right up on the border at the Muc Nam Quan border crossing. I want them so close to the border that if a mosquito flies out of the gun barrel, it will be in Vietnam. Am I clear?”
General Shun smiled. He, too, was disappointed their activities so far had not resulted in the opportunity for his forces to demonstrate their might in defense of China.
“Honored Vice Deputy, the Twenty-Second Tank Battalion is a Rapid Reaction Unit. It is equipped with the latest Type 99B main battle tanks. They can be lined up at the border c
rossing in two hours.”
The screen showed an animated video sequence of a dozen tanks charging ominously down the Nan You Gao Su Road toward the border crossing.
Clearly impressed, Soo Be Xian smiled.
“Excellent! Make it happen now. And I have something a little more lethal that I want you to put in motion. From that Special Operations Brigade that you have in Guangzhou, I want you to move the best platoon of covert operators down to Fangcheng. From there, make arrangements for the team to do a covert insertion across the border into Vietnam. There is a Texhong facility just outside Quang Dien that must be destroyed. The extraction can be noisy. In fact, very noisy would be better for our purposes.”
General Shun nodded grimly. An attack on the well-known yarn company’s factory at the industrial park was required. It was not his role to question why. But the slight grin that crept onto his face assured that he was pleased to do his commander’s bidding.
“Honored Vice Deputy, I have the best covert operations team in the PLA. And, for once, they will not be nearly so covert.”
10
Yon Hun Glo watched carefully as the quartermaster plotted the latest GPS position on the submarine’s electronic chart. When he was completely satisfied that the sailor had accurately plotted Wushiwu’s position, the admiral ignored all the technology available to him and used his thumb and index finger to walk off the distance to the Mindoro Strait. He really wanted to make the transit through the narrow strait between the islands of Busuanga and Mindoro under the cover of darkness. That way there would be much less chance of being detected in that narrow and heavily traveled stretch of water.
Yon Hun Glo did the familiar time/distance/speed calculation in his head. They needed to make four hundred and seventy kilometers. At their current twelve-knot speed, they would arrive in the straits in the middle of the afternoon. Not acceptable.