"Captain, please contact the CIC."
Wordlessly, Chief Thomson removed his headset and passed it to her.
"Captain here. What's up?"
"This is Dix Beltrain, Captain. I just thought you might want to know.
We just got the word from the hunt boss on the Enterprise. We just killed another one."
35 MILES WEST SOUTHWEST OF YAKU SHIMA ISLAND NORTHERN RYUKYU ISLAND
GROUP
0427 HOURS ZONE TIME; AUGUST 19, 2006
Captain Hikaru Ichijo was out of his cabin bunk and heading for the control room even before the intercom could summon him. His ears had popped as the main induction valve had slammed shut, awakening him. Now the diesels had grumbled down into silence and the decks of his ship, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces submarine Harado, were angling steeply as she broke off her snorkeling run and dove for the wet dark.
"Report, First Officer," he snapped, ducking through the hatchway.
His executive officer, Lieutenant Hayao Kakizaki, looked forward from his position at the periscope standard. ' ' sonar contact, Captain-.van.
Submarine target, bearing zero five zero degrees off the starboard bow.
Estimated range twenty-five thousand meters. Plot has been initiated."
"Status of the boat?"
"Upon verification of the contact, I ordered the battery charge secured and reverted to electric propulsion. Snorkel and communications masts have been retracted and, as per your posted orders, we have commenced an immediate descent to one hundred meters." Rather breathlessly, the junior officer completed his report.
Ichijo gave an approving nod. "Very good, Hayao. Now get her leveled out and let's see who we have out there."
This was what the Harado was here for. She was one of half a dozen SDF
submarines strung out in a picket line along the Ryukyus, seeking to contain any breakout attempt by the Chinese into the North Pacific. It appeared now as if the deployment had been a wise precaution.
The submarine commander took a step and a half across the cramped confines of the control room to the main chart tank. Lifting a command headset from the rack around its perimeter, he settled the phones over his ears and then looked down into the three-dimensional holographic projection beneath the tank's glass surface.
Off to the east of the SDF sub, sketched in luminous blue hasure lines, was the Aichi Shima seamount. A stillborn island of the Ryukyu chain, it was a great steep-sided ridge of basalt, reaching upward from the ocean floor two thousand feet below to within two hundred of the surface. Off to the west was the green track of a fishing trawler going about its lawful occasions. Almost due south was the plot of the bogey, a glowing yellow dot-V trailing a course line and flanked by a Kanji data blurb:
"Course, 010 degrees true. Speed, 12 knots. Depth, 80 meters.
As Ichijo watched, the plot changed from warning yellow to hostile red.
"Sonar Control, this is the Captain. Do you have an identification on the plotted target?"
"Affirmative, Captain-san. Blade count and plant noise indicates a single-screw vessel using nuclear propulsion.
Matchup with audio signatures library indicates a high probability that the target is a PRC Han-class attack submarine."
"We've got him, Hayao. Sound general quarters, silent mode."
A soft, but urgent, electronic tone sounded within the confines of the Yuushio-class submarine and the overhead lights pulsed in synchronization, sending her crew hurrying to their stations.
"Torpedo room. Tube status?"
"Standard load-out in all tubes, Captain-saw. GRX-3 dual role torpedoes in one, two, and three. A decoy pod in number four."
"Very good. Power room."
"Hail"
"What is our battery state?"
"We have not completed recharge. Seventy-three percent available on all banks."
"It will have to do."
First Officer Kakizaki joined him at the chart tank.
"The ship is closed up at general quarters, Captain-.van, and we are leveled off at one hundred meters. We are steering one eight zero. Speed six knots."
Ichijo nodded and continued to stare down into the display like a monk meditating at a pond. The Chinese Han and his own slower-moving vessel were running on almost diametrically opposed courses that should shortly have them passing abeam of each other at a fairly close range.
Given the Han's rate of speed, its passive sonar had probably failed to detect the Harado, even though she had been snorkeling on her diesels.
With this tactical situation, it would be a fairly simple thing to drop into the Han's baffles, the kill slot directly behind the Chinese sub.
However, Captain Ichijo had larger game in mind.
"Sonar control, is there any indication of a second target?"
"Negative, Captain-saw. Only the initial contact ... Wait a moment ...
Blade count and plant noise levels are dropping.
... The target is slowing, sir."
Ichijo nodded to himself. The Han was conducting a classic "sprint and drift," entering the area at high speed and then decelerating to listen for potential threats.
Too late, my friend. Now that Harado had switched over to battery power, she was as silent as a shadow on the sea floor.
"Hayao, I'll wager you that this fellow is clearing the way for that missile submarine."
The younger officer nodded his agreement. "That would seem logical to me, sir." He tapped the southern edge of the display screen. "He's probably loitering around out here somewhere, waiting for the attack boat to sterilize this sector.
Then he'll spring in."
"Precisely. And if we will hold this course and speed, he'll probably come right to us."
Ichijo's grandfather had been at Nagasaki and had died a long, lingering death as a result. The Japanese sub commander found the prospect of killing a boatload of nuclear weapons most satisfying.
"Should we launch a communications buoy with a sighting report?"
Kakizaki asked.
Ichijo frowned. It was a reasonable notion, but a buoy launch could produce enough transitory sound to give away their presence.
' ' yet, but program a buoy and have it standing by in the launch tube."
"At once, Captain-san."
The two undersea craft ghosted by each other at a meager mile-and-a-half range, the only difference in their passage being that the Han's older-gen machinery produced just barely enough noise to be tracked by the Harado's sensors.
The Japanese boat was now fully rigged for silent running.
When it was necessary to speak, her crewmen whispered.
When speaking was not necessary, they kept silent. All non vital systems had been secured, and even the air-conditioning plant had been powered down to bare-minimum life support.
The sub's internal temperature began to climb rapidly as the waste heat radiating from bodies and equipment was trapped within the well-insulated hull. Shutting down the blowers also deprived the crew of that sensation of free air movement, so critical in maintaining the illusion of open space. The lurking specter of claustrophobia that haunts every submarine began to make its presence known.
"Sonar control. Any indication of a new contact?"
"Negative, Captain-ran."
Ichijo and Kakizaki met each other's eyes in a silent officer's conference. "The missile boat could be waiting for an all-clear signal from the Han," the First Officer suggested finally.
"At the ranges we're dealing with, that would mean going active with their main sonar. I doubt they'd want to attract that much attention.
I'd say they were working some kind of staged relay system. They're taking their time about things, though."
"Our last bathythermograph drop indicates a mild thermocline at about one hundred and twenty-five meters. Maybe he's gone deep and is ducting underneath us?"
"Possibly. Let's find out. Take us down another fifty meters."
Minutes crawled by, accumulatin
g into a fair portion of an hour. As Captain Ichijo looked on with growing tension and concern, his once sound tactical situation began to come apart. Even given the creeping speed of the two boats, the range between them was growing.
The angle-off was increasing as well and soon the Han would be slipping out of the arc of Harado's lateral arrays and disappearing into her own baffles. The Chinese attack sub was also drawing closer to the potential shelter of the Aichi Shima seamount, and still there was no sign of the missile boat.
"Sonar, do you have anything yet?"
"Still no contact in all forward arcs."
Damn all certain setups and all fools who believed in them.
"We can't wait any longer. Hayao, reverse course, hard about one hundred eighty degrees. All engines ahead two thirds."
"We're going after the Han?"
"It's either that or lose him. Weapons Officer, flood all tubes and stand by to open outer doors. This will be a firing sequence."
"Hai!"
The deck tilted beneath their feet as the Harado swung around to pursue her enemy.
"Open outer doors and set wire guidance for units one and two. Match sonar bearings on the target and give me a firing solution."
"Speed setting, Captain-san."
"Set for high speed. I want a fast kill on this."
"Control room, this is sonar. Changes in blade count and plant noise.
The target is increasing speed."
"Weapons Officer, where's that firing solution!"
"Control room. Target is going to full power. We are now getting prop warble. The target is turning!"
"He knows we're here," Kakizaki whispered in disbelief.
"Somehow the bastard knows we're here!"
"We have a firing solution," the weapons officer announced from his station. "Outer doors open. All units ready to fire."
Too late. Ichijo stared bleakly down into the chart tank.
He'd waited too long. He'd let the Chinese attack boat get too close to Aichi Shima Island. Now it was turning eastward, directly into the craggy seamount. Even running at their seventy-knot sprint speed, their torpedoes could not cross the ten-mile gap between the two submarines before the Han pulled up an dover the narrow ridge like a hedgehopping airplane.
With a solid wall of rock between it and the Harado's sensors, the Communist vessel could either continue its dash away to safety or it could reverse back over the seamount at the point of its own choosing.
Ichijo knew that in a sneak-and-stealth duel, his diesel electric boat could more than hold its own. But in an open- water dogfight, using active sonar, the speed and maneuverability bestowed by the Han's nuclear-fired turbines would give it the decisive edge.
"Hayao, launch the communications buoy. At least we can get off a sighting report."
"At once, Captain-.san," Kakizaki replied quietly.
Within the tank, the Han's trace was closing with the Aichi Shima Island's outline, holding its course and depth and accelerating past twenty knots. Beyond his self-incriminating bitterness, Ichijo felt a sudden puzzlement.
"Sonar control, has the target gone active?"
"Negative, sir. Still passive. The target is not pinging."
The Chinese skipper was riding on nerves of steel to run in on a seamount like that. The Reds used a reverse engineered copy of a French inertial-guidance system that did not have an extremely accurate baseline. Without active sonar, he must have been steering blind.
"How is that bastard navigating?" Kakizaki exclaimed, turning from the communications panel.
"I have no idea, Hayao," Ichijo replied, watching the Man's plot start to merge with the seamount's outline.
"He's going to have to execute an emergency blow to clear that ridge."
"If he is going to clear it."
Ichijo again keyed his headset. "Sonar control. Put your audio input over the control-room speakers."
The control room filled with filtered sound, the thudding rush of a fast-turning propeller. All hands lifted their faces in reflex to listen. The sound continued steadily for a few moments more and then terminated with the deep-toned slamming boom of steel meeting stone.
The sound of the impact drew out, echoing and reverberating into a continuous, bubbling roar of escaping air and buckling metal. The Captain and crew of the Harado exchanged bewildered looks as their former enemy began its death slide down the face of the seamount.
EAST CHINA SEA 0715 HOURS ZONE TIME; AUGUST 19, 2006
"That's the shape of it, Captain," Lieutenant Beltrain concluded.
"The second Han is history. He saved us the price of a torpedo by busting himself up trying to evade that SDF boat. Two down. One to go."
Amanda nodded slowly. She and her tactical officers were clustered around the chart table in the Combat Information Center, listening as Dix brought them up to speed on the events that had transpired to the north.
"Yeah," Christine Rendino commented. "He must have been trying to break out into the Pacific through the deepwater channel just south of Yaku Shima. He must have figured that we wouldn't be looking quite so hard for him that close to the Japanese home islands. Ballsy move, but it didn't pan out."
Christine looked up and noted the expression on her captain's face.
"You don't look exactly super-pleased about this. Boss Ma'am. Were you looking forward to collecting a matched set?"
"No ... No. There's just something odd here." "What's that, Captain?"
Arkady asked, his frown coming to match Amanda's.
"Look." Amanda picked up one of the chart table's data wands and touched a point on the graphics display. "Here is where we acquired our Han yesterday afternoon ... " She drew a light line across the chart, the numbers of a digital distance hack blurring beside the wand tip as she measured the range. "Here is where the second Han went down. That's a distance of over three hundred miles. The assumption has always been that both Hans and the Xia were operating together as a single unit. A wolf pack with the attack boats covering the boomer.
"Now, if that was the case, could the surviving Han and, presumably, the Xia have crossed this three hundred miles in the sixteen-odd hours between the two sinkings?"
Ken Hiro shrugged. "Three hundred miles? That shouldn't have been a problem for a nuke." "No, sir," Arkady said. "I see what the skipper is getting at. Crossing that range wouldn't be any problem for a nuke if it was just cruising. But not if he was running at good quiet. He'd have to creep along at dead slow and he'd have had to zigzag to stay under the best thermoclines. He also would have had to swing wide to get around that SDF Task Force that was operating to the north of us. A Han couldn't have crossed between those two points within that time frame and not have escaped detection."
"Exactly." Amanda nodded. "Dix, has the hunt boss indicated any contact with the Xia up near Yaku Shima?" "Not so far. Search assets are being retasked to increase coverage in the area."
Amanda nodded again. "I'm willing to wager that they're not going to find anything. Since the start of this operation, we've been assuming that the Red subs have been acting together as a unit. Well, that's wrong. They dispersed after clearing Shanghai. They're acting independently."
Amanda lightly bit her lower lip in thought. "I wonder," she said after a moment, "what else we might be wrong about."
EAST CHINA SEA 1800 HOURS ZONE TIME; AUGUST 19, 2006
... Ship closed up to war cruising mode. ASW sweep operations continuing. Search zone expanded at 1200. No contacts. No comments.
Garrett, Commanding EAST CHINA SEA
1440 HOURS ZONE TIME; AUGUST 20, 2006
The wardroom was empty except for Christine Rendino and a discordant blast of noise. There were heavy metallic overtones to it, a creaking and groaning of tortured steel like a protracted avalanche in a wrecking yard. Intermixed was a continuous bubbling roar and a series of irregular thudding explosions like distant artillery fire. Although she couldn't identify the sound mixture immediately, there was something abou
t it that made Amanda shudder. The discordance was issuing from the wardroom stereo system; Chris was sitting cross-legged on the carpeted deck, directly at the focus of the speakers. Totally intent, she gave no notice that she had visitors.
Arkady, who was accompanying Amanda, came up behind the blond Intel.
"Heavy-metal revival?" he inquired with a raised voice.
"Close, but no free game," Christine replied. Leaning forward, she switched off the player. "This," she said, tapping the first disc slot,
"was made aboard the Duke down in Sonar Alley. It's the death dive of the Han-class attack boat we killed, as recorded off the sonobuoy net."
Amanda nodded to herself. No wonder she had shuddered.
"Now, this," Christine continued, her finger moving across to the player's second disc slot, "is a download from the Fleet Intelligence net. It's a copy of a recording made aboard the Japanese SDF sub that monitored the sinking of the second Han. Pull up a couple of chairs, guys. I'd like you to hear them both."
The first recording ran approximately five minutes, from the final sinking of the sub to the distant crash of the hulk pile-driving into the marl of the sea floor a mile below.
"Okay, here's the sinking of the second Han. You'll pick up some extra background noise here because the wreck is sliding down the face of an undersea cliff. That's not what you're listening for."
Another few minutes of steely clamor.
"Okay, what was the difference?"
Amanda and Arkady exchanged glances. "Okay, ," Arkady said finally, "I plead abject ignorance. What are we supposed to be hearing?"
"It's what you aren't hearing. Let me play a section of this first disc once again."
She reset the player and again the cacophony issued from the speakers: the creaking and wailing of buckling steel, the bubbling roar, and, again, that ragged series of echoing booms.
"Those detonations," Amanda said suddenly. "There weren't any on the second recording."
"Bingo!"
"What arc they?"
"Those are watertight compartments imploding as the sub sinks below crush depth." Amanda sup another shudder and silently cursed the fact that she had an imagination. When she had been attached to the David W.
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