The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  The underwater container had been attached to the freighter, which regularly made round trips between Shanghai and Baltimore, in a Chinese shipyard, and the bomb inserted. The container could ride along as part of the hull without the knowledge of any of the crew, who might talk, and hopefully would remain undetected by port authorities anywhere the ship called. Of course, the bomb could be triggered in any port, but this operation required deniability. The freighter would be long gone when the bomb detonated, months later, and would never have entered Hampton Roads. The yacht would take the weapon from the freighter and deliver it.

  The Chinese had thought about putting the bomb aboard the yacht in China, but concluded that if for any reason the yacht were searched and the bomb and Chinese scuba divers were found, Chinese culpability would be undeniable. So the freighter brought the bomb to America, and it would be aboard the yacht for the absolute minimum time.

  While he was waiting, Zhang Ping went to the kitchen and got a bowl of rice with pieces of fish in it, some chopsticks and a glass of hot tea. He ate there in the kitchen, drank the tea and poured himself another. When it was gone thirty minutes had passed. He climbed the ladders to the bridge.

  The South African, Vanderhosen, was nervous. He was walking the bridge, listening to the radio traffic, glancing now and then at the freighter.

  “If we are caught here, we will spend a long time in prison,” he said.

  Zhang didn’t think that comment worth a reply. Vanderhosen thought the Chinese were drug smugglers, an ancient, honorable, profitable profession, although criminal. If he had known about the warhead, he would have been petrified.

  Zhang paid little attention to the man, who didn’t have long to live. Vanderhosen, the first mate, the Russian couple and the two Ukrainian whores who decorated the upper decks in Mediterranean ports would be shot and buried at sea as soon as they were out of American waters. Then the Chinese crew would merely be delivering a yacht to a Greek buyer, with papers to prove it.

  Vanderhosen wasn’t frightened—he wouldn’t have slept in the captain’s chair if he felt the cold fingers of mortal terror—just tense, now that the sun was up. He knew the sled was out.

  “It goes well,” Zhang said, to mollify the man.

  “Umph.”

  “A few more hours…”

  Zhang saw the harbor patrol boat first. It was heading this way. The radio squawked to life. They were calling the yacht.

  Vanderhosen stepped to the mike and acknowledged.

  “You need to move your vessel to its assigned anchorage. You can’t stay there on the edge of the channel.”

  “We have had a problem in the engine room,” Vanderhosen replied matter-of-factly. “It will take several hours to set right.”

  “Do you need assistance?”

  “No. Our engineer is working on it.”

  The patrol boat swept on past. “Keep us advised. Move to your anchorage as soon as possible.”

  “Wilco, mate.”

  Vanderhosen hung the microphone in its bracket, then translated the English for Zhang, who was was watching the patrol boat motor away.

  When Zhang turned to face him, Vanderhosen said, “This is a nice little operation you’ve got here, mate. Maybe I could get some sort of permanent job with you people.”

  “Perhaps,” Zhang said. He grinned. The South African liked to see smiles and relaxed when he did.

  Zhang glanced again at his watch. The divers had been gone an hour.

  “Have the girls come up on deck and exercise,” he told the captain. “Tell them to wear tights.” Vanderhosen picked up the ship’s phone and dialed their stateroom.

  That should mollify the harbor patrol, Zhang thought. To maintain discipline, he had forbidden the women’s company to the crew. Vanderhosen and the first mate, however, had been making nocturnal visits to their compartment. He thought Zhang didn’t know about it.

  The Chinese naval officer permitted himself a tight, private smile, and lit another cigarette.

  *

  The fog cleared away, but the rain continued to drizzle. The half-open bridge door swung back and forth, back and forth, as the wind, now a gentle breeze, swept the bridge of cigarette smoke.

  The first mate replaced the captain on the bridge. His name was Lawrence. He had obviously been drinking heavily and was nursing a hangover. And he was nervous. He eyed Zhang, the water and the freighter.

  Lawrence had been involved with a Chinese gang in Hong Kong smuggling opium when the authorities caught on to his activities. He still thought he was involved with drug smuggling, but this time in an operation controlled by a high official in the Chinese government. After all, corruption was ubiquitous in the Orient, and he was promised a large sum of money, some of which had already been paid, so why not? He still had his mate’s ticket, so he looked good to port authorities the world over.

  The harbor was busy now, with boats coming and going, an occasional ship moving into or out of the pier area, cranes off-loading containers, the radio squawking at odd intervals, police boats patrolling. On the freighter the crew was moving about occasionally. A wisp of smoke came from her stacks.

  That freighter could be called to move at any time. That was the rub. Commander Zhang stood and watched everything, ignoring Lawrence, and waited. He was good at waiting. The captain and mate thought the man had no nerves. He did, but he had learned many years ago to keep his emotions tightly controlled. His one outlet was cigarettes.

  Out on the wing of the bridge he could see the women exercising on the fantail. They were wearing Lycra that showed off their legs and butts, and tight sweaters. They would have been cold if they hadn’t been working out. Zhang smoked his weed to the filter, flipped it into the harbor, and when back inside lit another. Lawrence was trying to drink coffee. His hands shook so badly that he slopped some onto the deck.

  The second hour came and went. The minute hand on Zhang’s watch crawled so slowly he had to force himself not to look at it. However, every now and then his gaze did sweep across the ship’s clock on the bulkhead.

  Two hours should have been enough. The divers must be having a problem. There was no way to communicate with them, so he had to hope that they could solve it. If they couldn’t, they would be back for more air in their tanks and he would get a report then. How much air did they have? At a shallow depth, but working hard?

  Here came the harbor boat. A man stood on the fantail with a loud-hailer.

  “We have a problem in the engine room,” Zhang told Lawrence. “Another hour, at least, then we’ll move the yacht.”

  The boat came right alongside and slowed to a stop with a burst of reverse thrust on the engines. It wallowed there as its wake rebounded off the hull of the yacht. Every man aboard, all four, were watching the women. Finally one of them called to Lawrence on the bridge wing. “Ocean Holiday, you must move to your assigned anchorage. This yacht cannot remain in the channel.”

  “We are working on the engine,” Lawrence replied.

  “Do you need a shipfitter? Or a tug?”

  “In an hour we will know. Can you give us one more hour?”

  “One more.” The harbor boat began to move, the wake boiled, and it accelerated away. The man with the loud-hailer saluted the women.

  Lawrence translated for Zhang, then stood on the bridge wing a moment, looking at the water, his hands braced on the rail. The water was dark and dirty and undoubtedly cold. After a moment he pushed himself away from the rail with an effort and came back inside the bridge.

  A crewman came up the ladder to the bridge and reported to Zhang in Chinese. “It’s under the yacht. The divers are getting new tanks, then will attach it to the hooks.”

  “The condition of the package?”

  “It appears to be in perfect shape, sir.”

  Zhang merely nodded.

  The crewman left.

  It. A nuclear warhead. Transported to America in a waterproof container below the waterline of the freighter. Ten megatons
.

  “I want to get off this yacht,” Lawrence said loudly in Chinese as Zhang puffed contentedly. Unnaturally loud. He had made his decision and had decided to announce it.

  Zhang eyed the man. “That wasn’t our agreement.”

  “I’ve gotten you here. I’ve been paid enough for that, and I am not going to the police. I just don’t want to go back to China.”

  “I may need you again. This vessel must have two licensed officers.”

  “Now listen,” the mate said, wiping a bit of drool off his chin. “I am in this as deeply as you are, and I don’t want to go to prison. You can put me ashore when you start down the bay and we’ll just forget—”

  That was as far as he got. Zhang took one step toward him, leaped and kicked. His right foot caught Lawrence under the chin and the mate’s head snapped backward. His body went with the kick. It skidded on the deck and lay absolutely still, the head at an unnatural angle. Zhang stepped closer for a look. The man’s neck was obviously broken, his eyes frozen.

  Zhang left him there. The second hand on the bulkhead clock went around and around. Zhang smoked another cigarette.

  Twenty minutes after Lawrence died the crewman was back. He glanced at Lawrence’s body, then saluted Zhang. “It’s secure under the vessel. The divers and sled are aboard, the door to the sea is closed, and we are pumping the compartment.”

  “Very well. Send two men up here to get Lawrence’s body. He fell down a ladder and broke his neck. Put him in his bunk and lock the stateroom door.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Get those women on deck below. Make preparations to get under way. We will back down on the stern anchor, raise it, hose it off and stow it, then move forward and pick up the bow anchor. You know the drill. When you have Lawrence tucked away, wake the captain and send him to the bridge.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  After the sailor had left, a wave of relief swept over Zhang. Ignoring the body on the deck, he seated himself in the captain’s chair.

  They were halfway there. Halfway. Now to plant the bomb.

  He reached for the book of charts they had used to navigate up Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and flipped through it. He quickly found the one he wanted.

  Norfolk, Virginia. The biggest naval base on the planet.

  Zhang lit another cigarette and studied the chart, as he had dozens of times in the past month. There were, of course, no marks on the paper. Still, he knew every depth, every distance. His finger traced a course.

  There. Right there! That was where he and his men would plant the bomb.

  *

  Seven days later Ocean Holiday passed the Cape Henry light on its way out of Chesapeake Bay and entered the Atlantic. Lieutenant Commander Zhang steered a course to the southeast. A few degrees north of the equator, three hundred miles from the mouth of the Amazon River, on a dark night with no surface traffic on the radar, Zhang rendezvoused with a Chinese nuclear-powered, Shang-class attack submarine. Swells were moderate.

  Both the yacht and sub could be seen by satellites, of course—even through the light cloud layer, by infared sensors—but the chance of a satellite being overhead at just this moment was small, since the crew knew the orbits and schedules of most of them. The night and clouds shielded the vessels from anyone peering through an airliner’s window, which was the best that could be achieved.

  Captain Vanderhosen, the Ukrainian prostitutes and the Russian couple were dead by then and, like Lawrence, consigned to the sea in weighted sacks that Zhang had brought on this voyage for just this purpose. Demolition charges were set as near the keel of the yacht as possible and put on a timer, and every hatch on the vessel was latched open. The life rings around the top decks were removed. Four of the Chinese rode the ship’s boat over to the sub. One man brought it back for another load of people. Zhang Ping went with the final boatload of crewmen.

  He was standing on the sub’s small bridge when the demolition charges detonated and the yacht began settling. He stood watching for the four minutes it took for the yacht to slip beneath the waves on its journey to the sea floor eighteen hundred feet below.

  When the mast went under and there was nothing on the dark water to be seen by searchlight except a few pieces of flotsam and a spreading slick of diesel fuel that would soon be dissipated by swells, Zhang went below. Sailors from the sub chopped holes in the bottom of the ship’s boat and the flotation tanks that were built in under the seats. Then they cast it adrift and watched as it too settled into the sea.

  Sixty-five minutes after the sub surfaced, it submerged.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Whoever rules the waves rules the world.

  —Alfred Thayer Mahan

  Six miles away and two hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, the officers and sonar technicians of USS Utah listened to the dead-in-the water surfaced Chinese submarine and the gurgling noise of the sinking yacht. They knew exactly what made the noises. And they wondered what was going on.

  Utah had picked up the Type 093 Shang-class sub as it exited the Chinese sub base at Sanya, Hainan, four weeks ago, and listened to her submerge. The American sub had fallen in trail about six miles behind her quarry and had no trouble maintaining that position. The Chinese sub was quiet, but that was a relative term. At 110 decibels, she was much noisier than Utah, which was a Virginia-class attack boat with all the latest technology. Utah was so quiet she resembled a black hole in the ocean and was undetectable by Chinese sonar beyond the range of a mile at this speed. She never once got that close.

  The American skipper was named Roscoe Hanna, and he was an old hand at following Russian and Chinese boomers, as well as conventionally powered Chinese Kilo-and Whiskey-class boats. This was the first time since he’d assumed command of Utah that he’d had the luck to latch on to a nuclear-powered boat. The Chinese diesel-electric subs were noisy on the surface and easy to follow because they couldn’t go very deep and they had to surface, usually at night, to recharge their batteries. The difficulty level rose geometrically, however, when two or more of them operated together. Chinese nukes, on the other hand, spent more time in port than they did at sea, probably because their reactors were unreliable and the boats needed copious maintenance.

  “What’s the name of this boat?” someone asked. Research in the ship’s computers couldn’t come up with a name, merely a hull number in the class.

  “It’s a Chinese military secret,” the chief of the boat decided.

  “The Great Leap Down,” the XO quipped, so that is what she became to the American crew sneaking along behind her.

  Hanna and his officers had been ecstatic four weeks ago in the South China Sea when they realized they had a nuke on the hook. Then the ecstasy faded and mystification set in. The Chinese sub didn’t stooge around the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin, or head for the Taiwan or Luzon Strait. She submerged, worked up to eighteen knots and headed south.

  Occasionally, at odd times, the Chinese captain would slow down and make ninety-degree turns to ensure no submarine was behind him, its noise masked by his propeller, and he would maintain that slow speed for a while to listen, “clearing his baffles.” While he did that, Utah, in trail, also listened. The Americans wanted to ensure that their boat wasn’t being trailed in turn by a Chinese or Russian sub. No, except for the Chinese attack sub and Utah, the depths were empty.

  After a half hour or so, the Chinese sub resumed cruising speed. A half hour to listen, then go. The routine must have been on the Plan of the Day. On a similarly predictable schedule, the Great Leap routinely slowly rose from the depths and descended again, no doubt checking the temperature and salinity of the water at various levels, and once poking up her comm antenna for a moment, probably just to receive message traffic from home.

  Captain Hanna and his officers remained alert. Russian subs occasionally used a maneuver known as a “Crazy Ivan” to try to detect trailing U.S. submarines. The Russian sub would make a 270-degree turn and come back up
its own wake, trying to force any trailing sub to maneuver quickly to avoid a collision, which would make noise and alert the Russians to the trailing boat.

  Yet the Chinese maneuvered only to clear their baffles. The Great Leap Down held course to the south. Rounding the swell of Vietnam, the course became a bit more westward.

  The noise the Chinese boat made appeared as squiggles, or spikes, on computer presentations. The sonarmen designated the unique noise source with a symbol, then recorded and archived it. A movement of the noise source left or right meant the contact was turning; up or down, ascending or descending; getting quieter or noisier, slowing or speeding up. Following it required care and concentration, made easier by the fact that every maneuver the Chinese sub made changed the frequency of the sound. Taking on or discharging water to change her buoyancy, speeding up or slowing the prop, moving the rudder—all of that was displayed instantly on the sonar computer screens in Utah’s control room.

  “My guess is she’s headed for the Strait of Malacca,” the navigator said to Captain Hanna, who was standing beside him studying the chart.

  “Into the Indian Ocean?”

  “Well, maybe.”

  Hanna seemed to recall that at least once before a Chinese boomer or attack boat had passed through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean. Normally they stayed in the western Pacific to intimidate their neighbors and strengthen Chinese demands for complete control of the China Sea. Yet this one was on a mission, going somewhere. As the navigator had predicted, it went past Singapore and northwest right through the strait between the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra.

  “Maybe she’s going to India to show off Chinese technology,” the captain mused.

  Yet out of the strait, the Great Leap Down turned southwest, around the northern tip of Sumatra and through the Great Channel between Sumatra and the Nicobar Islands, into the Indian Ocean. Then it set a course for the Cape of Good Hope. Utah followed right along.