The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  “This is one for the books,” the XO said one evening at the wardroom table. “Maybe she’s going to the States. The captain and his crew might be defecting, like Red October. Maybe she’ll surface outside the Narrows and nuke into New York harbor.”

  “France, I think,” the chief engineer opined. “Maybe they are going to France for a refit or upgrade. Visit the Riviera, ogle the women, perhaps buy a French sonar.”

  “Why not a pool?” suggested the navigator. “Everyone picks a place and we each put in a twenty, then whoever gets the closest to this guy’s final destination wins the pot.”

  The officers liked that idea and mulled their choices for a day. The destination was defined as the farthest point from Hainan Island that the Chinese sub reached before it retraced its course. “I’ll take a circumnavigation,” the junior officer aboard said the following evening when he dropped his twenty on the table. “I think we’re following a Chinese Magellan.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion twenty bucks’ worth.”

  With the pool set, the off-duty officers went back to the wardroom Acey-Deucy tournament.

  Captain Hanna began fretting the fact he was completely out of communication with SUBPAC. Utah could not transmit messages when submerged. It could, however, receive very low frequency radio signals, which literally came through the saltwater. When summoned, he would have to report. He decided to let his superiors know what he was doing without waiting for a summons. He prepared a long report, told SUBPAC where he was, what he was following, the condition of his boat, and his intentions. He had it encrypted and ready for a covert burst transmission, then slowed and let the Chinese sub extend the range. Poking up his stealthy comm mast would create only a little noise, but better to be safe than sorry. When the distance was about fifteen nautical miles, he rose to periscope depth, sent off his message and picked up incoming traffic, then quickly went deeper and accelerated.

  The Great Leap Down was ahead of him, somewhere, yet she was, he hoped, still on course twofive-zero. He didn’t want to close on her too quickly, so he set a speed just two knots above the boat he was shadowing. Getting back into sonar range took two tense hours. Finally his quarry reappeared as squiggles on a computer screen. The computer recognized the signature; the assigned symbol appeared. Got her again!

  And so it went, day after day, averaging about 330 nautical miles every twenty-four hours. Around the Cape of Good Hope and northward into the Atlantic. Occasionally they heard commercial vessels passing on various headings, and now and then storms roiled the ocean, putting more sound into the water from the surface. The ocean was not quiet. It was a continuous concert of biological sound: shrimp, fish, porpoises, whale calls and farts. Amidst all this there was the steady sound of the Chinese sub boring along, slowing, listening, turning, speeding up, rising or descending.

  “Man, I feel like we’re following Captain Nemo in Nautilus,” the chief of the boat remarked one boring day, a comment that drew laughter.

  The fact that the Great Leap rarely raised her comm antenna and never her periscope left Hanna with something to think about. A secret mission?

  Despite the mystery, Hanna was enjoying himself immensely. He had been in subs his entire career, working for the opportunity to command his own. Now that he had that command, he was savoring every single day of it, for it would be all over too quickly. He visited every space in the boat every day, inspected, asked questions, praised, cajoled, encouraged, looked every one of his officers and sailors straight in the eyes. With the tight spaces, submarines were intimate places. There was no place to escape even if you wanted to. Roscoe Hanna loved the whole experience.

  Finally, one day off the Amazon, the Great Leap slowed to three knots and began a giant square-search pattern. The slow speed allowed her sonars to listen with maximum efficiency. Utah kept well away from her.

  On the surface, ships came and went occasionally. Single and double-screw freighters and tankers.

  On the night of the third day at this low speed, the Great Leap turned into the center of the search pattern. A double-screw small vessel was approaching from the northwest. The Utah sonarman on duty recorded her sound signature and assigned her a symbol.

  The Great Leap came up to periscope depth. She remained there for twenty minutes, then began blowing her tanks. The sound was unmistakable. Captain Hanna had the sound put on the control room loudspeaker, so everyone could hear it. There was no danger the Chinese boat would hear the noise that was now radiating from Utah since she was making so much herself.

  The small vessel rendezvoused, then killed her engines. The buzz of a small outboard engine came from that location. After a while sounds of small explosions, then the sinking sounds.

  Utah heard the prop of the Great Leap begin to turn and her ballast tanks flooding. A mile away from the sinking site, at a depth of two hundred feet, she turned to a heading of south and began accelerating.

  A day later it seemed likely she was heading back for the Cape of Good Hope, to round Africa and reenter the Indian Ocean.

  While the officers squabbled over the money in the destination pool—the junior officer was holding out for a right turn around Cape Horn and a transit of the Pacific, a circumnavigation—Captain Hanna composed a report to SUBPAC, with a copy to SUBLANT since he was now in SUBLANT’s ocean. The next day, after the Great Leap had slowed and cleared her baffles, then accelerated away, he rose to periscope depth and sent the encrypted report, recorded the messages waiting for him on the satellite, then set off again to follow the Shang-class attack boat … as it turned out, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and northward to Hainan.

  In the wardroom of the Utah a victor was named in the Acey-Deucy tournament, the Great Leap destination pool was awarded to the lucky winner, who had given the matter some thought and picked the Azores as his entry because it was close to Europe and a lot of other places, and another Acey-Deucy tournament was begun.

  *

  Utah’s report of the Atlantic rendezvous and the subsequent sinking of the small surface vessel raised eyebrows at submarine headquarters in the Pentagon and in the Office of Naval Intelligence. This secret rendezvous was obviously for a purpose, but what was it? The National Reconnaissance Office was tasked to find satellite imagery that might be of help. When ONI finally received the sound signature of the rendezvousing yacht, the computer records from the acoustic arrays lying on the ocean beds and harbor entrances of the American East Coast were studied carefully. A candidate emerged. Ocean Holiday. She had cleared Norfolk in late March bound for Barbados. She never arrived there. Routine inquiries of port authorities around the Atlantic basin were negative. Cuba and Venezuela didn’t bother to answer the telex messages. Still, even if Ocean Holiday had visited those countries, she had left them and rendezvoused with the Shang-class Chinese attack boat just south of the equator, in midocean. And sank there.

  A covert operation? Was a Chinese spy taken aboard secretly in the United States? Presumably her Chinese crewmen and South African captain, the two Ukrainian women, the old Russian couple and anyone else aboard had transferred to the submarine and had been taken back to China.

  Why? No one knew.

  The information was shared with the CIA. Perhaps it would eventually become part of a larger picture.

  There the matter rested. The Americans had done all they could, so for them, now, the matter became another unexplained happening in a world full of them.

  *

  As it happened, a Chinese mole in the National Reconnaissance Office noted the request for data searches of satellite images for Ocean Holiday. He had no idea why the request was made, nor was it unusual. It was simply one of many. He included it in his weekly report to his handler, who serviced him through a drop in a Chinese restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, whose owner had no idea his premises were being used to pass messages back and forth to spies. It was used simply because the handler, supposedly
a Chinese American, liked the food and the restaurant was a plausible place for him to visit regularly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Politics is the womb in which war develops.

  —Carl von Clausewitz

  In late July the report from the spy in the American National Reconnaissance Office landed on the desk of Admiral Wu the senior officer in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN. In China, the navy was not a separate armed service but, like the air force and rocket forces, merely a branch of the army, though with its own officers, ratings and uniforms.

  The report was quite simple: The Americans had searched their satellite archives for images of Ocean Holiday. Without more, the report raised a host of questions, none of which could be answered, including the most important one: Why?

  Admiral Wu well knew the mission of Ocean Holiday, knew of the voyage of Hull 2 of the Type 093 class to a secret rendezvous, knew of the return of Lieutenant Commander Zhang and his crew to China, knew of his report of the successful completion of his mission.

  The one conclusion that could be reached was that the Americans knew something. Something had made them suspicious. What?

  Certainly not the fact that Ocean Holiday never arrived in Barbados. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Without a worried ship owner or insurance company or anxious relatives complaining and asking questions, a search of satellite imagery was unusual, to say the least.

  Or was there an inquiring relative of the ship’s captain, the mate, the Ukrainian women or the Russian couple? He sent for Lieutenant Commander Zhang, who had approved and vetted those people; the commander of the submarine forces, Rear Admiral Sua; and the skipper of Hull 2, Type 093 class, Captain Zeng.

  Three days later the three officers stood in his office. He bade them be seated and passed around the intelligence report. And he asked, “What made the Americans order a search of satellite records of this ship? Why did they do this?”

  When no one had an answer, or even a guess, Admiral Wu questioned Zhang closely. He had, he said, chosen the captain, mate and passengers partly because they had no family ties. It was possible they had lied to him, but unlikely, he thought.

  Wu led Zhang though the mission, which was documented in his report, day by day after the yacht reached American waters. The question-and-answer session took an hour. Zhang was frank with the admiral—all had gone as planned. There wasn’t a single incident he could point to that would arouse the slightest suspicions.

  Seemingly satisfied, Wu began on Captain Zeng. “Were any ships or submarines in the rendezvous area?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Were you intercepted and trailed by an American submarine?”

  “No, sir.”

  Wu raised his eyebrows. “You mean, not to your knowledge.”

  “No, sir,” Zeng said stoutly. “I took every precaution. My boat was not followed. We never came up to periscope depth and used the scope or the radio during the entire voyage, which was made submerged except for the rendezvous at the prearranged place and time. Our sonar functioned as it should. We had our best sonarmen in the submarine force on board for the voyage. No, sir. We were not followed.”

  “Rear Admiral Sua, have any of your boats ever been followed while at sea?”

  “The conventional diesel-electric boats have, sir. But none of our nuclear-powered boats have, to the best of my knowledge.” Wisely, the sub admiral used the caveat. He continued, “We even surfaced a boat in the middle of an American carrier task force conducting flight operations, to their consternation. The incident was reported worldwide. The Americans were completely surprised, shocked and embarrassed by our capabilities. They lost much face.”

  The question-and-answer session went on for another twenty minutes, then the officers were sent to an outer office. Admiral Wu wanted some time alone to mull his choices.

  He got out of his chair, went to a window and lit a cigarette.

  That Sua had mentioned the Americans losing face was interesting. Sua couldn’t prove a negative, of course, but the fact that the Americans were grossly embarrassed had impressed him, convinced him that what he wanted to believe was indeed true. Never would he have willingly suffered such a humiliation. So he offered it as proof, which, of course, it was not.

  Wu well knew the ingrained inability of Orientals to admit mistakes or embarrass their superiors, to lose face. Some of them would defer to erroneous decisions made by their superiors even if it cost them their lives. This cultural attitude was so ingrained that huge mistakes in the Chinese military acquisition process cost untold billions of yuan and long delays. Wu had fought this cultural foible his entire career, trying to get ships, submarines, missiles, aircraft and, finally, China’s sole aircraft carrier designed, built and operational. At times he thought the shipyards, engineers and naval officers would rather build it wrong and pretend it worked than admit a mistake.

  Zeng’s and Sua’s careers were in submarines. Nuke subs were the future. If they were already vulnerable to American submarines … well, in a shooting war they wouldn’t last long.

  Zhang—he had been entrusted with a great mission. Would he admit a mistake or an unforeseen glitch? Probably not.

  Ultimately, Admiral Wu decided, how the Americans got interested in Ocean Holiday didn’t matter. Today. What mattered was whether they knew her mission.

  The Beijing politicians wanted the fish in the Yellow, East and South China Seas, and the Gulf of Tonkin and, someday, the Philippine Sea. The latest surveys suggested that huge oil and natural gas deposits could be there. Using stolen American technology, the locked-up petroleum could perhaps be captured in huge, economical quantities. In the years ahead an assured source of petroleum at a reasonable cost would be vital to fuel China’s growing industries. Imports cost great wads of foreign currency and were subject to the vagaries of Middle Eastern politics, which in turn were driven by religious feuds and racial dreams. China’s politicians also wanted to take over Taiwan, a goal that was popular with the Chinese masses. The politicians used the media to stoke the fire, to feed Chinese nationalism and justify military expenditures; and indeed, they would get Taiwan sooner or later. But first, the Yellow and China Seas. To intimidate the other nations around this basin, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, China needed a navy that looked impressive. Not a navy that could win World War III, but a navy that could cow the neighbors. And the United States, whose navy ruled this ocean.

  As Wu analyzed the problem, it really didn’t matter if U.S. submarines had a technological edge on Chinese submarines. What mattered was that Chinese ships and submarines were better than those of any of China’s neighbors who might be inclined to fight for their rights. The Americans—well, they had sold their souls for cheap Chinese goods for Walmart. American corporations were investing billions in China. The Americans would not go to war over Vietnam’s or the Philippines’ rights in the China Sea. Probably. The trick was to raise that probability to a certainty, and the way to do that was to weaken the United States Navy, to do it in such a way that it could never be proven who was responsible. Japan made that mistake when they attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941; the Americans knew precisely who was responsible and vowed revenge, which they took in full measure.

  The admiral finished his cigarette and lit another. He stood at the window with unseeing eyes, thinking back.

  “You have the floor, Admiral,” the Paramount Leader had said. The Central Military Commission met behind locked doors in an underground conference room deep inside the August 1st Building in Beijing. The Paramount Leader was also chairman of the CMC, general secretary of the Communist Party of China and president of the People’s Republic of China. He was a technocrat, one of the new generation, ten years younger than the admiral, and a politician to the core. A champion of the military, he gave them the money they needed to build weapons for the twenty-first century. Consequently the military were among the chairman’s most ardent supporters. But support was a two-way street: The military n
eeded the party, and the party needed the military to enforce its will upon the people. Neither could exist without the other.

  Admiral Wu recalled that he had pushed his chair back and stood. Every eye in the room was on him. He had made a bold proposal ten days before. That day was the time for decision. Yes or no.

  The admiral was the senior officer in the People’s Liberation Army Navy. He knew that the Central Military Commission had already met and discussed this matter. That this item was on today’s agenda meant they hadn’t yet said no.

  “Comrades, we have before us a historic opportunity, one presented to us by the vagaries of American budget politics and the excellence of our cyber-espionage program. There are risks, which I will discuss, and yet great rewards if this thing can actually be accomplished.

  “As you know, the United States heavily influences events and politics in the western Pacific and the countries around its rim, including China. Especially China. America cannot be ignored or disregarded because of the power and might of the United States Navy. That navy keeps the puppets on their throne on Taiwan. That navy prevents China from claiming the oil it needs from the seabeds of the China Sea. Lower-cost domestic oil would stimulate our economy, slow the drain of foreign exchange. Our future rests on our economy. We must control the China Sea. The American navy lowers our influence with all our neighbors, except, of course, the one we wish we did not have, the People’s Republic of Korea.”

  Admiral Wu’s small audience of seven men—four politicians and three other uniformed officers, the senior officers of the military—chuckled, which relaxed the admiral, who was at heart a gambler. He was willing to bet China’s future on this one weird chance that fate had sent their way. He had to convince them.

  “Comrades, it will take two generations for the Chinese navy to match the United States Navy ship for ship, plane for plane. It matters not how powerful our army, how mighty our air force. Upon the sea and under it, the United States Navy rules. We have been given an opportunity to change the odds. To level the playing field for at least twenty years.”