Undetected

by Dee Henderson

  “Let’s hope they get the Seawolf out of there.”

  Bishop nodded. The front line of this skirmish was coming right at the Seawolf. China was mounting an aggressive search to find its missing boat.

  “The captain has the deck,” he announced, taking authority back from the XO. He moved with Kingman over to the navigation table. “We know China’s military is running on high alert. They’ve lost two diesel submarines in the past to accidents. It’s possible, given the circumstances, they had a catastrophic failure aboard the boat. A torpedo accident, an engine overheated and got away from them. But knowing the Seawolf had been fired upon, China is going to proceed under the assumption it was hostile fire.”

  Bishop looked at the topology to their southwest. “The coordinates put the last known location of the Chinese submarine here”—he tapped the map—“south of the seamounts in the East China Sea. That’s a tough area to search. Sonar has to be able to look down into the terrain to see what’s in the canyons and valleys. It’s going to take days to search a reasonable-sized area. China will be probing there, but they’ll be wondering who else is below them that might have fired on their sub.”

  Bishop shifted his attention to the waters around the Nevada. “As tense as this is likely to get, I think we’re okay with our current patrol box.” He thought about it and made a decision. “XO, ask the chief of the boat to join me. I’m going to put senior enlisted and senior officers on the missile deck for the duration. Then walk the boat, pass on the news as we know it, check in with the department chiefs. Make sure sailors know this is not going to be a quick step down in alert. Reinforce the order to get some sleep when off watch.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kingman headed out of command-and-control and deeper into the boat.

  Every navy in the world dealt with the possibility of a submarine going down. There were rescue plans and protocols to deal with all possible accidents at sea, including agreements between nations to help each other. But if this loss of a sub was the result of hostile fire . . . Nothing in the EAM suggested the Seawolf had reported hearing an explosion or a torpedo, but it was likely the fast-attack was still at depth for its own safety, preventing them from sending a message back to Command.

  Bishop ran a hand across the back of his neck. What they needed right now was time for the Seawolf to report in with whatever it had picked up. They needed that solar flare photo to tell them where that Chinese submarine was. Bishop just hoped the situation didn’t escalate further before they had the means to get answers. Solving this was going to take the coordination of a lot of people doing their jobs, some wise leadership in various militaries counseling patience, and waiting rather than taking action. But he didn’t trust that to happen tonight.

  26

  How long till we have a photo?” Daniel asked.

  Gina didn’t bother to look again at the clock. She’d been glancing at it every five minutes. “Six hours and forty minutes.” It had been a hot solar flare, and she anticipated having enough reflections to generate a detailed photo shortly after the energy burst hit the earth. But that moment was still hours away. In the meantime, she was trying to figure out another way around the problem. “There’s been no sign of debris?”

  “No,” Daniel replied, scanning the boards again, reading the latest updates. “No sign of an oil slick, floating salvage, or discolored water.”

  An ocean map lined with search grids showed just where China was deploying its assets, both air and sea. The U.S. rescue group was dispatching boats from Hawaii to offer their assistance once the submarine was located. Somebody just had to find it. Gina was doing her best to ignore the news headlines and the flurry of exchanges and accusations flying back and forth between China, Japan, and South Korea. Only one thing would bring clarity to this situation, and that was the location of the missing sub.

  “Daniel, what causes a sub to disappear?” It wasn’t the first time she had asked the question, but it was a useful exercise. Daniel settled into the guest chair to think it through with her again.

  “A catastrophic accident aboard the boat, it ends up on the seabed floor. It gets shot at, the hull breaches, it ends up on the seabed floor. It goes deep beyond the reach of low-frequency radio waves, doesn’t hear attempts to contact it, doesn’t come up to report in—most boats go to those depths only when the boat has structurally cracked, is taking on water, and has lost ballast tanks.”

  Gina nodded at the grim list. “Anything that might cause a sub to disappear that would not be a catastrophic problem?”

  “It could be deliberately ignoring attempts to find it. It could be sitting on the ocean floor on the continental shelf—around 400 feet—basically saying ‘find me if you can.’ Or it could have deliberately sailed at speed out of the area, trying to stay beyond where others would think to look for it, be ignoring radio traffic from its own navy, for reasons we can only guess at.”

  “Which would make this part of a plan to create conditions for a war, so we’ll skip those possibilities too. What else?”

  Daniel thought about it, finally shook his head. “China uses a 30-minute ‘we’re alive’ transponder fail-safe, Gina. Someone aboard the boat has to literally turn a key every half hour and reset the timer to keep that equipment from going off. If no one resets the timer within 30 minutes, the transponder turns on and begins to send a ping. It’s macabre, but China wants to know where its boat is so it can retrieve a hundred-million-dollar submarine, even if the crew aboard is asphyxiated from smoke and dies during a fire.

  “If the crew’s alive and are turning the key, and they aren’t deliberately trying to hide, then maybe—” Daniel paused, struggled to come up with a realistic option—“maybe it’s a case where they can’t send a message out even though they want to. A fire could do it, but a fire would have sent the sub to the surface to vent smoke, and they would have been seen by now, if nothing else by a satellite scanning the area.”

  Daniel leaned back in the chair, ran both hands through his hair. “I don’t know, Gina. The more you think about it, this is a destroyed sub, either by accident or hostile act. We’re submariners, we stay silent in the ocean, but that’s different from not being in contact with our own National Command. They were noticed as missing because they failed to report in when expected to do so. They’re in trouble. It’s the only thing that fits.”

  She looked at the ocean map. “The sub might not be where China thinks it is. A lot of assumptions have been made to determine where to search.”

  “That’s very possible,” Daniel agreed.

  Gina set aside her notebook, considered the activity going on in the TCC, trying to find a distraction so she could let her mind run for a few minutes on tangents, see if an idea might jell. She turned toward Daniel. “What if it was a collision, two subs hitting each other? A South Korean sub tried to follow the Chinese sub too closely, and the submarines collided? That last photo showed 38 submarines in these waters, running around at speed, while at the same time trying to listen so they wouldn’t hit something.”

  “South Korea, Japan, both insist all their submarines are accounted for, that they didn’t fire on this Chinese sub or otherwise engage it.”

  “Would they admit it if they were responsible?” Gina asked.

  “After this amount of time, we’d know if they were searching for a damaged submarine of their own or had a damaged sub coming into port. They couldn’t hide that level of activity.”

  Gina thought about that, reluctantly nodded. “Okay, I buy that.”

  She looked out at the TCC ocean map, saw it shift to the topology overlay where the Seawolf remained on station. “What if the sub ran into something, but something that wasn’t another sub?”

  Daniel shot her a look. “You’re thinking of the USS San Francisco?”

  Gina nodded. “That collision with a seamount turned the front of the boat into a smashed can, took out everything in the sonar dome and radio room. What’s to say the Chinese sub didn’t try to mi
mic what the Seawolf is doing, go lurk among the seamounts, only to run into one of them? China doesn’t have as accurate of topology maps as we do. I should know, the U.S. classified the accuracy of my work to keep it out of the public domain, and it’s doubtful China has had time to steal that data and get it deployed on their boats. It would have been difficult for China to tightly map that area from its own survey ships without causing an international incident.” She looked again at the screen.

  “A Chinese sub,” she thought aloud, “trying to get into the disputed area and show China’s presence, heads into that group of seamounts thinking she can do what the Seawolf is doing. It doesn’t take much to get a 300-foot boat that can’t do tight turns into a jam and hit something. We’ve had boomers hit a buoy on the Hood Canal, and that’s with the boat on the surface, guys watching with binoculars, and clear visibility. Submarines are not graceful when they’re around objects, and those seamounts are towering hundreds of feet from the seabed floor. China may have a sub that hit one of them in the disputed area. Now that I think about it, I’m getting incredibly nervous about what Jeff is doing. A ten-second mistake, begin a turn late or with a bit too much speed, and the U.S. is also searching for the Seawolf on the ocean floor.”

  Daniel leaned forward in his chair. “Your theory is plausible. It’s even likely. I buy the premise China’s sub hit something, and if you’re right about what happened, that search grid China is running should eventually find the boat. They’re working toward that area around the Seawolf. It might take days, though. It will be difficult to find the boat on sonar if it’s gone down in one of the canyons. To see it, the search vessel would have to be directly above it.”

  “We need to shorten the time it’s going to take. We don’t have days. If the sub ran into something, like a seamount, that makes this an accident. A tragedy, but an accident. They didn’t have good enough topology maps.” She thought about that for a moment, then turned around and spun the dial on her office safe. “Can you get me an outside phone line? Outside of the Navy?”

  “Maybe. Lockdowns in the TCC are tricky. Who do you need to call?”

  “I need to talk with Kevin Taggert.”

  “Taggert. Former boyfriend Taggert? You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Daniel got to his feet. “Give me a minute.”

  Gina hung up the phone, still typing.

  “What are you bringing across?” Daniel asked.

  “Data from the Jason satellite for the last few days. And that visual data set on the second terminal is the current magnetic map of the earth.”

  Daniel studied the rotating orange and red ball. “It looks likes a deformed, half-dehydrated orange.”

  She smiled briefly. “It does. Everyone thinks the earth is this perfect ball of dirt with a hot molten rock core, when it’s really a magnetized bunch of hot rocks flowing around under pressure. How much iron is in the ground, how deep the ocean is at a particular point, all affects the magnetic map of the earth.”

  She brought up the topology map for the Taiwan-to-Japan section of the Pacific on the third screen. She’d created these high-resolution maps, but their details still caught her breath with their beauty. They were a combination of the earth’s magnetic field data with the Jason survey data.

  “What are you thinking?” Daniel asked.

  “If the missing submarine hit something, and hit it hard, it wasn’t just the sub that got damaged. It would put a crater in a seamount, cause an underwater avalanche, and somewhere there should be a footprint of the collision. I’m going to build the seabed topology map as it existed last week and as it exists today. And hope we find a collision site and an answer.”

  “Interesting. How long will this take?”

  The data mirror locked in. “Data is across. Alert Captain Strong I’m dispersing into the computer cluster a large-scale data problem, and I’m about to absorb a lot of computing power. I’m recreating the seabed maps for the East China Sea before and after this sub disappeared. I’ll have those two photos in a couple of hours if this doesn’t hiccup on me.”

  Daniel was out of the room before her sentence was finished.

  “Admiral Hardman . . . we have an answer.” Gina got the words out around a throat that was tightening, her speech starting to lock up, slightly out of breath after having run from the printer room with the photo of what they’d spotted on the screen.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Daniel stepped in to help her, spreading the large photos out on the nearest desk. “Something ran into seamount M6SN8 and hit it with such force it cracked off the spire and put a new cavity in the east side of the mountain. These are the before and after photos a week apart. This wasn’t a geological, naturally occurring event. Something slammed into it. Sir, you need to ask the Chinese if their navigational maps show a seamount at this location. They probably didn’t know it was there. We’ve had a repeat of the USS San Francisco, sir. Their sub hit it with speed, not realizing it was there.”

  “Where’s the boat?”

  “That’s the good news, sir. We don’t see the sub on the seabed floor in this area. We should see at least part of the hull in these photos if the impact led to its immediate implosion. So we assume for now the sub is still afloat. Afloat but badly damaged. From the collision impact, I’m guessing she’s got very little of her front dome left, sir—sonar and radio are probably gone. And she’s got ballast-tank problems, as the sub hasn’t been able to surface for a satellite to spot her. The sub’s probably trying to make it back home, but who knows if the crew can figure out which way is west right now. They may be traveling the wrong direction. If the impact site is right here, and she’s been traveling at half speed at best, the sub is somewhere in this circle. The boat isn’t going to be quiet, sir. We just need to get ears into the right area to hear it.”

  “China is searching in the wrong area,” Hardman said, studying the two photos.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hardman turned to Captain Strong. “Send tasking orders to the Seawolf. Put it at this collision site and start a spiral search outward. It’s the nearest boat we’ve got in the area.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gina felt relief, both that their discovery was being accepted as a workable theory, and that the Seawolf was being ordered out of her current position. “Sir,” she began tentatively, “I know the topology map accuracy is classified. But if you send the Chinese the before and after seamount photos, maybe it gets them to calm down and see this as a possible accident while the search is under way.”

  “If we can’t find the sub within the next several hours, we’ll consider it. They know we can do a topology map of the ocean floor from space, but we’d rather not give away just how good these maps are.” Hardman checked the time. “Where are we at for the solar flare photo?”

  Daniel consulted the timer on his watch. “Two hours ten minutes, sir.”

  “That photo is going to be our best answer to this crisis. Let’s hope the boat is afloat and the next photo can show us where it is.”

  The images were barely smudges, it was so early in the data collection. The algorithms showed a dot or two where a submarine might be. Gina had the stretch of ocean from Taiwan to South Korea spread across the three screens, zooming in to check out the smudges.

  “Look at all those possible subs. I’m at 64,” Daniel offered, leaning close to the nearest monitor as he finished his count. “There’s hardly anybody left in port.”

  Gina watched a dot on the photo disappear. “Another half hour and the ones which aren’t submarines will be scrubbed out. But at this point, all real subs should now be showing, so we can start overlaying what the TCC knows against this. We’ll eliminate those we can identify.”

  Daniel pointed to the middle screen. “From the previous data we know these four subs are Japanese, these two are South Korean.”

  Gina dropped a blue circle around them.

  “I think we can eliminate any points th
at China had a surface boat pass over during its search.” She dropped yellow circles around them. “That takes most of these out of the equation. What else can we eliminate?”

  Daniel pointed. “Anything to the east of this island can’t be our missing sub, as the distance from the collision site is too great.”

  She dropped gray circles around them, then had an idea. “Daniel, see if you can get someone in the TCC to give us a real-time radio-wave- transmission map. We don’t care what the content is, just that there’s radio traffic originating from a location. Our sub isn’t sending traffic, so any smudge sending out radio traffic is one we can eliminate.”

  “Great idea. Let me see what the guys can get us.” Once more Daniel pushed back his chair and headed into the TCC proper.

  The photo resolution was improving, turning smudges into more defined forms. Gina rolled her shoulders and neck to fight the tightness from her sitting so long. A third had been identified from TCC data, radio traffic had eliminated another third, and the distance from the possible collision site ruled out several more. The Seawolf was now named and circled in black.

  She set blinking red boxes around four images.

  Daniel turned to look at her. “You think?”

  Gina nodded. “Get Hardman.”

  “This has to be the sub, sir,” Daniel told Rear Admiral Hardman, pointing at the screen. “The other candidates imply a speed of travel from the collision site that, while theoretically possible, isn’t practical for a damaged boat.” Others were crowded into Gina Bishop’s office to look at the marked-up photo.

  “Captain Strong?”

  “I concur, sir. If that’s the missing China sub, she’s quite a distance east of the collision site, and heading into the middle of the Pacific—meaning she’s lost. But their premise of a collision fits the topology data. The sub’s been found, sir.”

  Hardman nodded. “Flash orders to the Seawolf of a sub in distress, with these coordinates. Confirm and render assistance.”