The Art of War: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  “Thanks, quack.”

  “We’re trying to do our part to keep medical costs down.”

  *

  Grafton called me in one day and asked if I wanted to go to Singapore. I told him I didn’t. He told me why he wanted me to go, so I said, “Sure.” As if I had a choice. The brass can send you anywhere on the planet by nodding their heads. Grafton was just being polite. I was just being me.

  Singapore. I thought maybe I could stop in California on the way home and visit with Mom for a day or two. I stopped into Sarah’s office and popped the question.

  “Wanna go to Singapore for a few days? Stop in California on our way back? Meet the family?”

  She gave me the eye. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” We had been dating a little bit, off and on, and sleeping together occasionally, but I was pretty much living with Willie at his place in the bowels of Washington. I was going to have to do something about that one of these days, but I thought Sarah and I should get our relationship figured out first. “Be a chance for us to get to know each other better,” I told her.

  “This is so damned romantic I can’t resist,” she said, tossing her forearm across her forehead. “You’ve swept me off my feet. Okay, I’ll go.”

  So the government sent me and we split the cost of Sarah’s airfare. There was an odd penny left over, which I paid so she wouldn’t think I was cheap.

  We flew to LA, and from there all the way to Singapore. One thing was certain: Sarah and I knew each other a lot better when we staggered off that flying cattle car.

  The hotel was everything I hoped for. A monstrous high-rise with a vast atrium, it was over-the-top opulent, perfect for well-heeled embezzlers seeking to get away from it all or Japanese businessmen on generous expense accounts. The rooms were actually two-room suites; the bed was king-sized. We were on the twenty-third floor, and the view out the window took in most of the downtown. If God ever gets out this way, he’ll probably stay in this hotel or one like it.

  Two days after we arrived, on the morning that Sarah had a visit to the spa scheduled, I went to the city morgue and asked to view a body. I gave them the number of the cold tray. They led me into a meat locker with lots of drawers. They pulled out the drawer with the number that I had given them, and I took a look. Yep. Zoe Kerry. Someone had put a bullet into the side of her head. She didn’t look good but corpses rarely do.

  Just to be on the safe side, I asked for an ink pad and a couple of sheets of paper. Inked up the tips of her fingers on the right hand, pressed them against both sheets. Thanked the attendant and left. Didn’t make a formal identification, didn’t ask what they were going to do with the body—none of that.

  I took a taxi over to the American embassy and asked for a fellow whose name Jake Grafton had given me. At my request he gave me two envelopes. I put the fingerprints in them, addressed one to Jake Grafton and one to Harry Estep at the FBI. The envelopes would go into the diplomatic bag.

  I strolled out of the embassy feeling rather bucked with life. Zoe Kerry had gone on to her reward. I speculated about who might have popped her. The Chinese were the most likely suspects, I thought. She had been in the game for the bucks and knew too much. Loose lips sink ships, or so they say.

  After Sarah came out of the spa, we had a leisurely lunch and drank a bottle of wine at a window table in the four-star restaurant on the top floor of the hotel, then went downstairs to spend the afternoon naked in bed. I was just another civil servant on per diem. It’s good work if you can get it.

  *

  Just after dusk one miserable late January night in the Yellow Sea, the amphibious assault ship Hornet opened her rear doors and two Sealions carrying SEALs backed out of the well. They circled around a time or two, checking systems, then joined into a loose formation and headed west. The coxswains flooded tanks until the decks were below the waterline and only the small, stealthy pilothouses were above water. Above water occasionally, because swells washed over the small pilothouse windows from time to time, obliterating the coxswains’ view.

  Down and aft, the SEALs in their wet suits tried not to puke. The motion of the semi-submersibles was rather severe. Some of them lost their cookies anyway.

  Captain Joe Child was doing okay—no doubt because he took two of the doctor’s antinausea pills a half hour before embarking. He too was wearing a wet suit, just in case, but he was not going out unless he had to. He was the commander of this operation, with three encrypted satellite phones available to call just about anyone on the planet, including Admiral Toad Tarkington aboard USS United States, the admiral in charge of the Hornet task force and headquarters in Pearl and Washington. He knew there was a nuke sub prowling around out here someplace, USS Utah, but since she was submerged, he had no way to communicate directly with her. Before he left, however, he had read the latest report from SUBPAC, which said that Utah had found no Chinese submarines operating in the area.

  The Chinese had been tracking Hornet’s little task force with aerial reconnaissance and radar, of course, but the official word, released in South Korea and the States, was that the task force was part of the American contingent in these waters to participate in an annual combined Republic of Korea/U.S. military exercise held at this time every year since the Korean armistice in 1953.

  Captain Child and the five SEALs in his boat settled down for the four-hour ride to Qingdao.

  The officer in charge of the second boat was Lieutenant Howie Peavy. His team’s task was to actually plant the demolition charges under the keel of Liaoning, as near the center of the ship as possible. He had four hundred pounds of explosives stored in the bottom of his Sealion, broken down into fifty-pound waterproof bags equipped with electromagnets to hold them in place. No doubt Liaoning’s hull was encrusted with barnacles, seaweed and rust, so a conventional magnet wouldn’t be able to get a grip. Without some way to attach the charges, the team would need a lot more explosives.

  Just in case, Captain Child’s Sealion also carried four hundred pounds of demolition charges, which all concerned hoped would not be needed.

  Riding just awash, with only the little cockpit above water some of the time, the Sealions pitched and corkscrewed through the sea. The smell of vomit filled the air.

  Child stood behind the coxswain in his raised chair to see what he could see. The photonics mast was up to full extension; the picture from that was displayed on a multifunction display in front of the coxswain. There wasn’t much to see on the MFD or through the windows—it was really dark out there. Water from every swell washed over the bulletproof glass surrounding the coxswain. The coxswain had electronic help to stay separated from the other Sealion and a GPS to keep him on course. No radar, of course. If a ship or boat should loom out of the night, the ride would get very exciting very quickly.

  Child checked his watch for the hundredth time and looked at the GPS presentation and once again took his seat. He tried to relax, to think about the mission and all the myriad of contingencies, which were things that could go wrong.

  He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. No good. The boat was writhing like a living beast. So he sat and rode it, just like the six men sitting behind him in the dark.

  Waiting is the hard part. Seems like most of life is spent waiting.

  What was it the admiral had said? “Your mission is to sink that aircraft carrier. The Chinese will know we did it, so do whatever you must to make that happen and get all your people out. You can’t leave anyone behind. We can’t give them a live man or a dead body to display to the press. That is of utmost importance.”

  “SEALs don’t leave people behind,” Child answered brusquely.

  Rear Admiral Hulette “Hurricane” Carter scrutinized his face and nodded. “Do what you have to do to accomplish your mission and bring your people back. Whatever it takes.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Good luck,” the admiral said, and shook his hand.

  Whatever it takes. God, they were really pis
sed at the Chinese.

  *

  It was about ten in the evening, local time, when the coxswain blew the water from the tanks of Joe Child’s Sealion, lifting it from its semi-submerged condition and exposing the full length of the deck. The SEALs opened the hatches and came out on deck. They were wearing black wet suits with a balaclava, and goggles that magnified ambient light or saw in infrared.

  In short order they inflated two rubber rafts, called Zodiacs, got them in the water, and began passing weapons to the man in the boat. One of the SEALs went into the water carrying a rope. He swam ten yards to the rocks of the breakwater, the mole, that formed the outer edge of the harbor, climbed up on it and began pulling a loaded Zodiac toward him.

  Ten minutes after the Sealion arrived, the SEALs had a Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod on the mole and ammo belts ready. A petty officer manned this gun and Child was his loader and backup. The other four spread out. One carried an M-3 Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, a “Goose,” that fired an 84 mm warhead—portable artillery—while his teammate carried a half-dozen warheads and a silenced submachine gun. The other two SEALs carried a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle with a starlight scope.

  Their job was to keep any Chinese patrol boat that found the other Sealion occupied, if necessary, as a diversion.

  Joe Child stood by the machine gun and used binoculars to examine the ships in the harbor, which were lit with night running lights, as usual. The carrier was quite prominent, easily the biggest ship in the harbor. She was about a kilometer away, moored against a long, well-lit quay filled with warehouses and cranes.

  Other naval vessels were at other piers—three destroyers, some patrol craft, several supply ships.

  Joe Child turned on his portable com device. The screen was backlit, as were the keys. He could type a message and the device would scramble it, then send it in a burst transmission to bounce off a satellite, or he could receive scrambled burst transmissions, which would be unscrambled and displayed in plain English on the screen. Finally, he could just use the device as a conventional handheld radio.

  He typed in his message, a mere code word that told all recipients that his team was on station and all was going as planned. He hit the SEND button, which fired it into cyberspace.

  Aboard USS Hornet, Admiral Hurricane Carter looked at the message on the big computer presentation in the Combat Information Center, and nodded. Aboard USS United States, Admiral Toad Tarkington did the same thing. Then both officers asked their aides for another cup of coffee.

  Both ships were at Flight Quarters, which meant the flight decks were manned and flight crews were dressed and standing by in their respective ready rooms, ready to fly. Hornet had six AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters, sometimes called Zulu Cobras after their SuperCobra parent, armed and ready to launch.

  Carter asked his operations officer, “How far are we from Qingdao?”

  One hundred twenty nautical miles, he was told.

  “Close to a hundred,” he said. With a full combat load, the Zulu Cobras would sweat every mile if they had to launch. Carter prayed that they wouldn’t be needed.

  Aboard the large carrier, sixteen F/A-18 Hornets and two EA-18G Growlers were fueled, armed and ready for engine start. United States, call sign Battlestar, was just south of Cheju Island, northeast of Shanghai. Qingdao was within the combat radius of her air wing. Still, she had two tankers on deck, ready to launch if necessary.

  *

  Half a world away from the Yellow Sea, in Washington, it was midmorning. At Sal Molina’s request, Jake Grafton joined him in the White House Situation Room, which was, appropriately enough, in the basement of the executive mansion. Admiral McKiernan and the marine commandant were there, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The president was not in sight.

  Jurgen Schulz, the national security adviser and erstwhile Harvard professor, was in a foul mood. He lit on Grafton like a starving mosquito. “You talked him into this,” he said accusingly, the “him” of course being the president.

  “You gotta take your medication every morning,” Jake said. “Don’t forget those pills.” He turned his back on an enraged Schulz and wandered over to the coffeepot.

  “Where’s the prez?” Grafton whispered to Molina.

  “Fund-raising in California. Squeezing in a little golf.”

  “Great.”

  *

  Peter Ciliberti, the coxswain of the Sealion that was supposed to deliver the demolition charges to Liaoning, informed Howie Peavy that there was a problem. “They got a net around this thing, sir. We can’t get any closer.”

  Lieutenant Peavy looked at the picture from the photonics mast. “We’re still, what? A hundred yards away?”

  “About that, I think.”

  “Seen any patrol boats?”

  “One. He went by the carrier as we were coming in and went on toward the dry dock off to the north.”

  “Well, better lift her up so we can open the hatches and get the charges out. If you can put us alongside the net, we’ll hop over it.”

  He and Ciliberti rotated the photonics mast in a 360-degree circle, looking at everything they could see in ambient light, then did it again in infrared. The carrier was tied up sideways to the quay, her bow to the south, Peavy’s left, and well lit up. In infrared she had all the usual hot spots, as did most of the ships at pierside, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, alarming.

  Magnifying the image, Peavy could see two machine guns along the rail, one forward, one aft, each manned by one sailor. The guns seemed to be on swivel mounts, so they were probably of a fairly large caliber, the equivalent of a .50 caliber Browning machine gun. The problem was the gunners. He wondered how vigilant they were.

  The carrier’s masthead and deck lights were behind the gunners, so they couldn’t see more than fifty or sixty yards from the ship, he thought. However, there were four lights on cables dangling from the catwalks, hanging down to about twenty feet above the water. Each cast a nice circle of light on the water. If a swimmer came up in one of those circles of light, and the gunner saw him, well …

  They would have to stay submerged. Or take out the gunners.

  “Take us up,” Peavy said to Ciliberti, and patted him on the shoulder. “And keep an eye out for that patrol boat.”

  As the coxswain did his job, Peavy briefed his team: six men in black wet suits, wearing flippers over their dive boots, and LAR V Draeger rebreathers on their backs, so they would not release bubbles of exhaled gases into the water as conventional scuba gear did. The rebreathers used a pure oxygen system and filtered carbon dioxide from the exhaled air.

  Up on deck Peavy took another look around. The night was dark as the inside of a coal mine, overcast, cold, with a stiff breeze blowing those swells lapping against the hull of the Sealion. The divers were going to have to work with headlamps to plant the charges. Peavy would need even more light to set the fuses and timer. Using lights was a risk, but as black as the water was under that ship, there was no way they could do the job by feel. The good news, Howie Peavy thought, was that the reduced visibility in the water, probably about two feet, and the spotlights hanging from the catwalks over the water would mean that no one on the surface would see the lights. He hoped.

  He slipped into the water inside the net, made sure his rebreathing gear was working properly and reached up for the first fifty-pound demolition charge. It almost drove him to the bottom, but once it was in the water, it became much easier to handle. He turned, sighted on the middle of the carrier, checked his compass and began swimming toward it on the surface, towing the charge. Fifty yards from the carrier, he submerged.

  *

  Standing on the mole jutting from the land to form the entrance to the harbor, Captain Joe Child could see the harbor patrol boat making its rounds. He watched it through binoculars. The boat had running and masthead lights and some kind of deck light. He could see at least four men on the thing. One of them was using a large spotlight
, playing it across the water randomly. If they found something, it should be obvious, he thought. So he watched.

  After that Sealion ride he thought he would never want to sit again, but after ten minutes or so of scanning with the binoculars, he decided he did. He lowered himself to the damp concrete and braced his elbows on his knees, which steadied the binoculars somewhat.

  *

  “We have a subsurface contact, Captain,” the sonar operator, a first-class petty officer, said to Roscoe Hanna. “Sounds like an attack boat. Relative bearing three-three-zero degrees. Perhaps six thousand yards.”

  Hanna looked at the computer plot. The contact was on the plot now, but the range was just an estimate, and would be until the contact could be tracked for a while through various bearings.

  They were fifty miles east of the Qingdao naval base, running north at three knots. The other boat was heading southeast, in the general direction of the American task force. This close to the Chinese mainland, that was inevitable, perhaps.

  “Are we alone?” Hanna asked everyone in the control room. The sonar operators were listening, and all agreed that the submarine at three-three-zero degrees relative was their only contact.

  The sea was so shallow, sound bouncing around …

  “It sounds like a Chinese attack boat, Captain. Nuclear.”

  “Let’s get behind him,” the Utah skipper said. “We’ll let him cross our bows, then we’ll fall in behind him.” Hanna glanced at his watch. In two or three hours the Sealions would be coming out of Qingdao. “Let’s make sure this boat is the only Chinese sub out here, people,” Hanna said, “or we’re going to be the guys with egg on our faces.”

  Hanna was assuming the crew of the Chinese boat hadn’t yet heard Utah. If they had, they wouldn’t mosey along as if they were alone for very long. He would soon know.

  *

  Swimming underwater towing demolition charges, moving them into position, activating the electromagnets that would hold them in place, all the time working under the vast black bulk of the aircraft carrier—it took tremendous physical exertion from every member of the team.