Kilo Class (1998)

by Patrick Robinson

  Admiral Vitaly Rankov had been in the Kremlin for most of the night—ever since the signal had come in from the Pacific Fleet at 0200 that one of the two Kilos bound for China was lost off the northern Kuril Islands. He had tried to stay calm and had listened carefully to the reports of the Captains of the Russian escort ships, who noted that they could find no suspicion of foul play. But they would, wouldn’t they?

  They reported that no one had any evidence of an attack. The Americans could not have detected the Kilos on sonar, and could not have seen them either. No one could have attacked the Kilos—unless an American submarine commanding officer had recklessly decided to blast a torpedo straight past the escort, somehow dodge the decoys, and swerve past the world’s biggest submarine and crash into the Kilo. No, Admiral Rankov did not really understand that either.

  The giant ex-Russian Intelligence officer may not have been a submarine weapons expert or a scholar of Naval warfare like his Chinese counterpart, Admiral Zhang, but he knew the capabilities of the US weapons systems well enough.

  Nevertheless, despite the lack of evidence, he KNEW whose hand was behind this. It was the same hand that had somehow smashed three submarines, two Tolkach barges, and a sizable length of the Belomorski Canal in one diabolical strike three months ago. It was the hand of Admiral Arnold Morgan.

  Right now he would have loved to call the White House and remonstrate with Morgan, threaten him with everything, reprisals, the Court of Human Rights, the United Nations, humiliation in front of the world community. But he just could not face the inevitable degradation of a conversation with the stiletto-sharp Morgan, the awful, criminal-smooth tones of the Texan: “Hey, Vitaly…you gotta get your security beefed up…stuff happens.”

  No. He just could not bear it. Instead he must placate the Chinese. And above all he must do everything in his power to ensure the last Kilo would arrive in Shanghai. Despite all of the wicked efforts of the fugitive from justice who rejoiced in the title of the US President’s National Security Adviser.

  Columbia was 150 miles clear of the datum, moving swiftly south-southeast in twelve thousand feet of water toward the Midway Islands. Boomer had been driving men and machinery hard for over a month now, and he was happy to be heading to the American submarine base at Pearl Harbor. He and his crew would get some much needed R and R, and Columbia would receive overdue routine maintenance. They would shut down the reactor, replace supplies, load on stores, and check working parts. But they’d do it all alongside, because Columbia would not require a bottom scrape. The freezing waters in the Arctic do not support the warm-water crustaceans and weeds that always take root on the hull when the submarine is in warmer seas.

  Columbia made a peaceful seven-day voyage down the Pacific, passing to the north of Midway, and staying north of the Hawaiian Ridge. Boomer left the island of Kauai to starboard and then swung down the Kauai Channel past Barbers Point and along the rocky southern coast of Honolulu. They steamed into Pearl Harbor on September 17, exactly one week after dispatching K-9 to its six-hundred-foot grave off Paramushir.

  The crew of the Black Ops submarine was glad to stand in the bright sunlight of the island. They would remain here for four weeks while Columbia was restored and given her minor overhaul. Officers would catch up on paperwork; many of the crew would assist the Pearl Harbor engineers, and others would supervise the loading and logging of supplies. They would be permitted ample shore leave to visit the island and Honolulu’s legendary nightspots.

  Boomer telephoned Jo in Connecticut when he arrived, despite the appalling hour of the morning on the East Coast of the United States, and broke the equally appalling news that Columbia might be required to accompany the new Carrier Battle Group on a three-week patrol in the Arabian Sea in early December. However this was by no means definite. Jo received the news of another Christmas shot to pieces with equanimity. She was just so relieved that her husband was safe.

  He told her he was at Pearl Harbor for a while, and Jo ventured to ask him how the hell he got there. “I thought you were somewhere in the Atlantic, not the Pacific,” she said.

  “Sorry, sweetness, can’t tell you that,” he replied breezily. “Remember always, our business is classified”—he deepened his voice and added—“my name’s Dunning…Cale Dunning…double O six and three-quarters.”

  171630SEPT. 34N 142E. A hundred and fifty miles off the east coast of Japan, in thirty thousand feet of water, the Kilo Class submarine, Russian-built but now under Chinese command, was making nine knots three hundred feet below the surface, running south on its battery.

  Captain Kan Yu-fang, formerly commanding officer of China’s eight-thousand-ton nuclear Xia-Class (Type 093) submarine, was now expert at operating the Russian diesel-electric submarine that meant so much to his C in C. The most senior officer in the Chinese Navy still serving on operational submarines, Captain Kan had built a distinguished record in the notoriously difficult Xia, which had experienced countless problems with its CSS-NX-4s, the huge nuclear-warhead missiles.

  Admiral Zhang regarded Kan Yu-fang as the ideal commander for the new Kilo and this most dangerous voyage. A native of Shanghai, the Captain was a disciplinarian of the old school. When K-9 had vanished off Paramushir, he had told the Russian officers still on board that he was going to clear the datum, dismiss the escort, and move silently at five knots toward Shanghai, submerged. He instructed the Russian Lieutenant Commander on board to inform the Escort Group Commander what he was doing, and from there on Captain Kan ignored all other ships and signals, ordered a general decrease in speed for a day, and just crept away.

  Thereafter they would make all speed to Shanghai. In a western phrase, Captain Kan had decided to go for it.

  He had no time for unnecessary heroics. And he had no wish to seek out and engage a possible US nuclear boat. Because he knew there was but one achievement for which he would be rewarded by the C in C—the safe delivery of the tenth Kilo to Shanghai.

  He was now well on his way, seven days farther south from Paramushir, and running free. For the first time in a long while he could take responsibility for his own actions. And he was going to deliver. He liked the new ship, which handled well. And he especially liked its overall feel of steadfast reliability. Captain Kan expected to dock in Shanghai on the afternoon of September 23. When he snorkeled east of the central Kurils on that first night, he accessed the satellite and informed the C in C of his intentions. Two hours later he went deep again and pressed south, with his torpedo tubes loaded, toward his beloved home city, in his beloved China. Captain Kan was a very dangerous man.

  Quite how dangerous was unknown to the Pentagon. But the fifty-two-year-old Kan had been handpicked for his command by Admiral Zhang himself, not merely because he was the most seasoned of China’s front-line submarine commanders but also because of his background and his political “pedigree.” Kan Yu-fang was a former Red Guard, one of Mao Zedong’s teenaged fanatics, back in the mid-1960s, when the Chairman had willfully and deliberately unleashed a bloody insurrection upon the Chinese populace.

  Kan was then, and was now still, a zealot in the cause of a greater China. In 1966, at fifteen, he had led the “First Brigade of the First Army Division” of Shanghai’s infamous “Number Twenty-Eight School.” This was a fearsome group of twenty young Red Guards who made national news when they tortured three of their own teachers, blinding two and causing two others to jump to their deaths from a sixth-floor window. Kan Yu-fang led what amounted to an armed street gang. He changed his name to “Kan, the Personal Guard to Chairman Mao,” he carried a gun and a stock whip, and he made nightly rampages through his poor local streets in the cause of the Cultural Revolution. He searched for those he judged were “enemies of the people,” or in Mao’s phrase, “capitalist-roaders”—which broadly meant anyone who was successful.

  During the twelve months in which Mao gave power over adults to the most violent elements of Chinese youth, Kan was responsible for torturing so many teachers and i
ntellectuals that he took over an entire theater in central Shanghai where he and his colleagues routinely beat scholars, intellectuals, and professors to within an inch of their lives. The suicide rate in his district approached alarming levels because Kan always made spouses and children watch the shocking torture of the other parent. It was said that his greatest joy was enforcing the “jet-plane position” on women, which required him to twist their arms right back, up to their shoulder blades, until they dislocated. It sometimes became necessary for his men to kick protesting husbands to death.

  Kan made no allowances for women. He was, in a more modern phrase, gender blind, and he had never married.

  When the vicious and hated regime of the teenage Red Guards came to a close, young Kan made a smooth and efficient change to the Rebel Red Guards, endlessly broadcasting in the streets, shouting Mao’s thoughts—“The savage tumult of one class overthrowing another.”

  By the end of the 1960s his brutality had come to the notice of one of the cruelest women in the entire history of China, the former actress Jiang Qing, who had became Mao’s wife. She made Kan one of the youngest leaders in her rampaging cabal as it roamed through the country destroying schools, universities, and libraries, burning books, smashing windows, and enforcing a reign of pure terror on the academic communities of China’s great cities.

  Madame Mao employed the young Kan for four years, at the end of which she personally granted him his wish to join the People’s Liberation Army-Navy. And as a kid born a block from the Shanghai waterfront, he made the most of his chances, quickly attaining officer rank. He was a tall, distant man, dark, smooth, and friendless, but he was an efficient commander of a surface ship. Never popular, he was involved only once in a scandalous incident when he was suspected of cutting the throat of a Shanghai prostitute. It was however never proven.

  When Kan made the transfer to submarines his stature improved rapidly. He became a fearless underwater commander, reputed to be the best Weapons Officer in the entire Navy. A few senior commanders, however, knew of his terrible past, and most of his colleagues preferred to give him a wide berth.

  Admiral Zhang had known all along that the bloodstained hands of this strange and emotionless killer were the precise hands he wanted at the helm of K-9 or K-10. Zhang knew instinctively that if the US Navy was hunting down the Chinese submarines, it was being done by a Black Ops nuclear boat. He also knew that the American commanding officer on such a mission would be a merciless opponent.

  Whoever the American was, he would have a good match in Captain Kan, who would shoot to kill at the slightest provocation. And these were orders Admiral Zhang had no compunction about issuing. Not in this instance. And the new satellite message to K-10, as it headed for Shanghai, bore out his views to the letter.

  231730SEPT. In the Shanghai Naval Base. Admiral Zhang Yushu threw his arms around Captain Kan with delight as the commanding officer of K-10 stepped ashore from the submarine, which had journeyed the Siberian route from northern Russia. He instructed his staff to ensure that the Russian liaison team that had accompanied the Chinese Captain halfway around the world be treated with honor. He then invited the six Russians to dine with him and the senior Chinese officers that evening.

  Before dinner he would personally debrief Captain Kan. But in the ensuing hour he learned little that he did not already know.

  No, the submarines had never been aware of a pursuing US nuclear boat. Yes, the underwater sound barrier, which they had believed would keep them safe, did in fact block out everything. No, they had no hard evidence of an attack. If the ninth Kilo had been hit by a torpedo it had to have been brilliantly delivered. Yes, they had been almost a mile away at the time. Yes, their sonar room had reported an explosion at that time, but it was just impossible to conclude what had caused it, with all the tremendous noise they were surrounded by. As indeed they had been since the Bering Strait.

  Admiral Zhang finally asked the one question that would plague him for all of his days: “Do you think it would have been better to make the Americans aware of the presence of the Typhoon running south between the two Kilos?”

  “Yessir. Yes, I do. As a matter of fact I assumed they were aware. You have surprised me greatly…I cannot believe no one knew the Typhoon was in attendance.”

  On October 1, Admiral Zhang dispatched the new Kilo to Canton, a 1,200-mile journey south from Shanghai that would take six days, under the command of Captain Kan, now with an all-Chinese crew.

  On October 7, at the new submarine docks on the Pearl River, the Kilo was formally handed over to Vice Admiral Zu Jicai, the Commander of the Southern Fleet. Admiral Zhang believed that the submarine’s business was better conducted from Canton, because he might soon send it much farther south, to find out precisely where the Taiwanese were conducting their nuclear experiments. The actual recapture of the Island of Taiwan would have to wait until he had negotiated a new deal for more Kilos from the Russians.

  At 1030 on October 14, a Field Officer in the Chinese Intelligence Service reported to General Fang Wei that Professor Liao Lee of Taiwan National University had suddenly vanished. He had failed to show up after the Double Tenth National Day vacation. Students mystified. Faculty silent.

  General Fang hit the secure phone line to Admiral Zhang’s office in nearby Naval Headquarters, Beijing. He reported the conversation with the Field Officer and requested any information about the departure of Hai Lung 793.

  Admiral Zhang suggested the General come to his office instantly. One hour later they had ascertained that the Dutch-built submarine had already left two days previously, on October 12. Both men were now certain that the renowned nuclear physicist was on board. They were equally certain that something important had happened at the mysterious nuclear laboratory, wherever it was in the cold south.

  But Zhang thought he knew where, and he sent an immediate signal to Admiral Zu Jicai in Canton: “Order recently arrived Kilo to the southern Indian Ocean island of Kerguelen within 24 hours. Distance 8,500. Refueling south of Lombok Strait. Briefing follows.”

  Twelve hours later, at 1100 local—it was still October 14 at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia—the Far East Chief Frank Reidel fielded a coded satellite message from Taipei. It had plainly originated from their priceless dock foreman in the submarine base at Suao…Carl Chimei.

  It stated that he was almost certain he had recognized a civilian passenger boarding Hai Lung 793 at first light on October 12, two days previously. He had recently read an article in a Taiwan National University brochure that carried two photographs of the man. Carl Chimei would swear the passenger was Taiwan’s most eminent nuclear physicist, Professor Liao Lee.

  Frank Reidel cast protocol to the winds and opened up the ultra-secure line to the White House straight through to Admiral Arnold Morgan.

  “Morgan…speak.”

  “Frank Reidel here, sir.”

  “Hi, Frank, what’s hot?”

  “Our man in Taipei is certain he saw the most important nuclear scientist in Taiwan board one of the Hai Lung submarines, hull 793, at first light on October 12. It left almost immediately, no one knows where.”

  “Hey, Frank. That’s good information. Real good. Keep it tight.” At which point he just slammed down the phone.

  “Rude prick,” said the CIA man, grinning. But added to himself, “Some kind of an operator that ignorant sonofabitch…and the worst part is…I almost like him.”

  Admiral Morgan told his secretary to get Charlie right outside the door and then to call Admiral Mulligan and tell him to “sit still, till I get there.”

  In the Pentagon an hour later, it took only a few minutes for the two Admirals to agree it was about time they took a serious look at the activities of the Taiwanese on “that goddamned island.” “Jesus Christ,” said Arnold Morgan. “Those crazy pricks might be into germ warfare or something…they’re so damned neurotic about the mainland Chinese.”

  “More likely nuclear, especially with this hotshot
professor on his way there in a goddamned submarine,” growled the CNO.

  At 1237 Admiral Mulligan put a secure signal on the satellite to Columbia in Pearl Harbor: “Personal for Commander Dunning: proceed with dispatch to Kerguelen. Conduct thorough search of the island for duration two weeks.

  “Aim: Locate clandestine Taiwanese operations. Remain undetected, repeat, undetected. COMSUBPAC informed of your continued operations under SUBLANT OPCON. Suspect either germ warfare factory, or nuclear weapon fabrication in place. And/or potential government hideout in event of Chinese occupation.

  “Taiwan Hai Lung submarine hull 793 cleared Suao October 12. ETA Kerguelen November 18/19, most probably on resupply task to Taiwanese facility. Your job is to find WHERE. Nothing else. ROE self-defense only—negative preemptive self-defense.