by Jeff Edwards
Usually, the shutter was either completely open or completely closed. But whoever had used it last hadn’t pulled it all the way down, leaving a gap of four or five inches at the bottom of the serving window. The voices of the two young mess attendants were coming through the opening.
“Yeah,” the first mess attendant said. “But the Indians and the Chinese are shooting at each other, right? We’re just going down there for like, diplomacy reasons, or something. We’re not really going to fight.”
“I don’t know,” said the second mess attendant. “Those crazy bastards are launching missiles all over the place. We could end up in the middle of a shit storm, no matter what the big plan is supposed to be.”
Silva felt a momentary urge to clear her throat, or make some sudden noise that would let the two young Sailors know that their soon-to-be-captain was in the wardroom. Not that she needed their help to get a cup of coffee. She was quite happy to pour for herself. But it seemed rude to eavesdrop on their conversation.
Still… It was never easy for a commanding officer—or a prospective commanding officer—to find out what the Sailors on the deck plate were truly thinking. Over time, a CO could develop a rapport with the crew that would bridge that communication gap, at least in part. But Silva was new to the Towers. She hadn’t yet had time to get a good feel for the men and women who would be her officers, much less the enlisted crew.
She would be assuming command soon, but she was a complete stranger to these people. And they were strangers to her. For the moment, any qualms she felt about listening in on a private conversation were outweighed by her desire to know what the junior Sailors were saying amongst themselves.
She picked up the nearest coffee cup, moving carefully to avoid making a noise. The mess attendants were still talking.
“You got that right,” the first mess attendant said. “This ship has a way of being at the center of the fucking crosshairs when the bombs and the bullets start flying.”
The second mess attendant snorted. “Dude, have you seen the pictures? Guys in my division have pics of the damage from that last shoot out, up in the Russian ice pack. The forward gun was totally blown away. Completely fucking gone. Nothing left but a crater in the deck.”
“I heard about that,” the other sailor said. “But I haven’t seen any pics.”
Silva had seen pictures of the damage from the last deployment, and pictures of the damage from the deployment before that. These kids might be a bit too free with the profanity, but they were right about one thing; the Towers did have a way of winding up in the thick of the fighting.
She lifted the coffee pot from its warmer, and poured herself a cup. The liquid was dark, and the odor was acrid. An old Sailor would call this good Navy java, but Silva didn’t care for coffee that had been on the burner too long. She could live with it though, and she didn’t want to interrupt her impromptu intelligence-gathering session to ask for a fresh pot.
She eyed the dark liquid dubiously, before deciding to double her usual dose of creamer to take the worst of the edge off of the carbon taste.
“I don’t know whether to be excited, or scared shitless,” the first attendant said.
The second attendant laughed. “I’m going for both.”
The first mess attendant didn’t join in the laugh. “I’m sure glad Captain Bowie is still the skipper. If this crap with the Chinese had happened two weeks from now, we’d be stuck with the new CO.”
“What have you got against Commander Silva?” the second attendant asked. “She seems okay to me.”
“I don’t have anything against her,” the first attendant said quietly. “I’m sure she’s fine, and I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. But if we’re going into battle, I’d rather have Captain Bowie in command.”
“I know what you mean,” the other Sailor said. “But we don’t get to make that choice. In a couple of weeks, she’s going to be the skipper. We’ve just got to hope she’s up to the job.”
“Yeah, but what if she isn’t up to it? Has she ever been in a real combat situation before? What if she doesn’t have what it takes when the shooting starts?”
The second mess attendant snorted again. “You need to stop worrying about that shit, and start worrying about these dishes. We’ve got to start getting ready for evening chow.”
Commander Silva set her cup down on the table. She didn’t feel like coffee anymore. She walked out of the wardroom, the untasted contents of her cup swirling gently as the door swung shut behind her.
CHAPTER 15
MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE COMPOUND
AUGUST 1ST BUILDING
BEIJING, CHINA
MONDAY; 24 NOVEMBER
9:11 PM
TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’
Vice Premier Lu Shi sat at his desk, leafing slowly through the stack of photographs for the tenth or eleventh time. The photos varied in size, age, and quality. A few had been composed by professional photographers, and some were recent high-resolution digital images, printed on glossy card stock. Most were ordinary snapshots, taken at various times over a period of nearly three decades. There were even a half dozen Polaroids, alternately fading from exposure to sunlight, or merging into supersaturation by color emulsions that had continued to incrementally intensify with the passage of years.
Lu Shi had scavenged the pictures from every family photo album he’d been able to lay hands on. The collection depicted indoor scenes, outdoor scenes, close-ups, wide shots, group poses, and solo portraits. The images shared a single common element. Every one contained Lu Shi’s son, Lu Jianguo.
Here was Lu Jianguo at age six or seven, playing a pickup game of soccer with a gaggle of other boys on the grass in Chaoyang park. And here was plump baby Jianguo, swaddled in orange silk for the traditional red egg and ginger ceremony at which he had received his name. Fourteen year-old Lu Jianguo, wearing the red scarf of the Young Pioneers, marching in ranks with his comrades in Tiananmen Square. A snapshot of the boy at about age eight, sleeping stretched out on the back seat of a limousine, with his head resting on his father’s knee. A formal portrait of Lu Jianguo in a severely-tailored gray suit. He must have been about twenty-five in that shot. It had probably been taken shortly after he’d become a junior secretary in the Ministry of Public Security.
The phone on Lu Shi’s desk rang, but his brain registered the sound only vaguely. He continued to leaf through the stack of photographs, searching for something that he could neither name, nor fully imagine. Some indefinable sliver of information or fragment of insight that could make sense out of the senselessness that had seized control of his life.
How could Lu Jianguo—this beautiful boy, this bright young intellect, this brilliant communist—be gone? How was such a thing even possible? The very idea was wrong. Hideously wrong. Monstrously wrong.
At some point Lu Shi’s eyes ceased to register the photos as they passed through his fingers. The motions of his hands became mechanical repetition.
In the late nineteen-seventies, when Lu Shi had himself been a rising young star in the Communist Party, he had fought hard to bring China’s one-child policy into being. It hadn’t been a popular law in those days, and it wasn’t much more popular now. But it had been a necessary measure.
By 1976, China’s population had multiplied to nearly a billion, and the rate of growth had still been increasing. If the trend had been allowed to continue, the People’s Republic would ultimately have devolved into famine, and economic collapse.
The decision to limit each family to a single child had not been made lightly, and it had not been easy to enforce. As with any restrictive regulation, there were exemptions which could be exploited by the privileged elite. Several senior party members had taken full advantage of the loopholes. Lu Shi had not been one of them. The one-child policy was important to China’s future. Lu Shi could not very well espouse the benefits of the policy, while violating it himself.
So, he had obeyed the law which he had helped
to create. He had fathered only one child. Now, that child was gone, and the future was gone with him.
CHAPTER 16
USS CALIFORNIA (SSN-781)
NORTHERN INDIAN OCEAN
TUESDAY; 25 NOVEMBER
1522 hours (3:22 PM)
TIME ZONE +6 ‘FOXTROT’
Captain James Patke scanned the tactical display on his command console, carefully studying the wide ring of icons that represented the frigates and destroyers encircling the Chinese aircraft carrier. Like most submarine commanders, Patke had an almost Zen-like level of patience when he was on the hunt, and the current mission was putting that patience to the test.
China was a latecomer to carrier warfare, but their defensive screening tactics were turning out to be surprisingly effective. It had taken Patke and his crew nearly two days of unhurried probing to find a weak spot in the aircraft carrier’s defensive perimeter. There had been opportunities to slip in more quickly, but Patke was determined to be even more cautious than usual.
The Chinese and Indian navies were both pretty damned trigger happy right now. If you made the mistake of spooking either one of them, you were likely to get your ass shot off.
Patke looked up from the display and glanced toward his Officer of the Deck. “Take us to periscope depth.”
The USS California was a Virginia class attack submarine, so she didn’t technically have a periscope. In place of the traditional Type 18 scopes used by other classes of U.S. attack subs, the Virginia class boats were each equipped with a pair of AN/BVS-1 photonics masts. The new fiber optic system was both technically and tactically superior to its predecessors, but no self-respecting submarine officer ever wanted to utter the phrase ‘photonic mast depth.’ As a result, much of the old periscope-related terminology remained in use, even though the periscope itself was no longer around.
The OOD nodded. “Sir, periscope depth, aye!” He turned toward the Diving Officer. “Make your depth one hundred twenty feet.”
The Diving Officer acknowledged the command and immediately relayed his own order to the Planesman. “Five degree up bubble. Make your new depth one-two-zero feet.”
The Planesman pulled back slowly on the control yoke, keeping his eyes glued to the plane angle indicator. “Sir, my bubble is up five degrees, coming to one-two-zero feet.”
The submarine began its slow and cautious ascent.
The OOD keyed the mike on his headset. “Sonar—Conn, coming shallow in preparation for going to periscope depth. Report all contacts.”
Captain Patke observed the smooth operation of his control room crew at work. This was a good team—confident, but not cocky. If any of them were nervous about penetrating the defensive screen of a foreign carrier strike group, it didn’t show.
Patke was actually a tad nervous, himself. This was not a simulation. If something went wrong here, things could turn ugly.
He wasn’t particularly concerned about the destroyers and frigates. He took pride in the superb acoustic silencing technology of his boat. The California was quiet enough to get fairly close to most surface ship sonars without being detected.
The Chief of the Boat, who held the traditional bubblehead’s opinion that all surface ships are targets, liked to claim that the California could sneak in close enough to piss on the hull numbers of any surface vessel in the world. Patke wasn’t ready to go quite that far, but the COB’s boast wasn’t completely off base.
But the PLA Navy’s antisubmarine warfare helicopters were no joke, and somewhere out there, a Type-93 attack sub was operating in support of the carrier group. Patke’s sonar team had maintained an intermittent track on the Chinese submarine for the last two days. At the moment, it was stationed on the far side of the carrier’s defensive envelope. If the California were detected, the Type-93 would come after her, and the sub would be a hell of a lot harder to shake off than the surface escorts.
* * *
The California reached periscope depth about fifteen minutes later, after a brief pause at 120 feet to check for shapes and shadows: the silhouettes caused by ships floating on the surface.
The sensor head of the California’s photonic mast rose slowly through the surface of the water. The narrow dome-shaped housing contained a color video camera, a high-resolution black and white camera, and a thermal imaging camera for infrared target detection and evaluation. All three cameras scanned continually as the sensor head rotated through a full 360 degree sweep.
The digital video feed from each camera was relayed down to the control room of the California in real-time, via high bandwidth fiber optic cables at the core of the photonic mast.
Seated at his command console, Patke jogged the pistol-grip joystick until the cameras spun around to cover the aircraft carrier. He thumbed a button to trigger the video recorders, and zoomed in for a tighter view.
The big Chinese warship had a strange history, and not much was known about her current configuration or capabilities. Built by the Soviet Union during the last years of the Cold War, she had been intended as the newest vessel of the Admiral Kuznetsov class. But the ship had been unfinished when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, and she had eventually been sold at auction to a Hong Kong-based travel agency, who supposedly intended to convert the ship into a floating hotel and gambling parlor.
The floating casino plan had never materialized, and the unfinished ex-Soviet carrier had somehow ended up in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The PLA Navy had re-christened the ship Liaoning, in honor of Liaoning Province in northeast China.
Captain Patke nodded to himself as he watched the crisp digital video feed on his command console. This was the closest look that anyone had managed of the Liaoning since the ship had gone into operation. The intel weenies were going to have a field day when they got their paws on these video recordings. They would scrutinize every frame of video, from every available angle—examining antenna placements, weapons fixtures, and even the routing of topside cables and pipes—searching for any and all clues to the ship’s capabilities or limitations.
The operational parameters of the original Russian design were well known. But the Chinese had made extensive modifications, and no one—with the possible exception of the PLA Navy—had a firm understanding of how those changes would impact the combat potential of the ship.
So Patke was nearly as busy as the video recorders, soaking up and evaluating every detail he could lay eyes on. They were facing the port side of the aircraft carrier, from about twenty degrees aft of the port beam. From this angle, Patke noted the squashed pepperbox silhouette of an FL-3000N missile launcher, and the vaguely robotic form of a Type 730 Close-In Weapon System. Judging from the placement of both systems, it was a fairly safe bet that each of them had a mirror-image counterpart on the opposite side of the ship.
Patke tilted the joystick forward, zooming in tighter, and beginning a slow pan down the length of the Chinese warship. “Alright, you sneaky bastards,” he said. “Let’s see what kind of surprises you’ve got up your sleeve.”
CHAPTER 17
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From:
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 4:31 PM
To:
Subject: Missing You
My Dearest Beth,
Just another happy day aboard the mighty USS Midway. At least I think this is the Midway. I’ve taken so many wrong turns that I might be on a different ship by now. Six weeks, and I still can’t find my way around this beast. I have to scatter a trail of breadcrumbs every time I leave my stateroom, or I’ll never make it back to my bunk.
Aside from the ever-present danger of getting lost on the way to the briefing room, things are going pretty well. The guys in my squadron are great. I catch the usual ration of bullshit for being a nugget, but I won’t always be the new kid on the block. What happens down here doesn’t matter all that much anyway. What really counts is what happens in the sky, and nobody can l
ay a hand on me up there.
Remember Chucky Barnes who reported to the squadron at the same time I did? He’s earned himself a new callsign, and he’s not real happy about it. He used to be Barnstormer, which isn’t too bad, if you ask me. But a couple of days ago, he lost his cookies all over the 0-5 level catwalk. Now everybody in the squadron is calling him ‘Upchuck,’ and it looks like it’s going to stick. (No pun intended.)
My lead, the infamous Poker, has been threatening to change my callsign to ‘Monkey Man,’ which is apparently the most creative thing that his limited imagination can do with the name Monkman. He’s been around so long that his first wingman was Wilbur Wright, so you can’t really expect much. But for now, I’m still Rob the ‘Monk’ Monkman, and I like that just fine. That’s me, baby – the Shaolin monk of the skies, kicking butt with my badass aerial Kung Fu.
Okay, enough of that hero-of-the-skies crap. So far, my aerial Kung Fu has been limited to simulators and unarmed practice engagements against other U.S. Navy flyboys. I look pretty damned good in training, but I’ve never flown against an actual threat. If I ever go up against the real deal, I’ll be happy if they don’t change my callsign to ‘Monkey Butt,’ or something equally flattering.
Speaking of the real deal, we’ll be entering our Op Area just in time for Thanksgiving. We’re only supposed to be doing the observe-protect-stabilize thing, but I’m still kind of nervous. The Chinese and Indian navies have traded shots several times now, and both sides are pretty jumpy. I just hope they remember that we’re not the enemy. I’d hate to get my butt shot off while I’m trying to get my turkey dinner on.
Just kidding, baby. I’m sure everything is going to be fine. We’ve got a full carrier strike group, with all the bells and whistles. We’re not here to fight, and nobody is going to be stupid enough to start any trouble with us.
I sure would love to be home tomorrow, helping you get the turkey ready for the oven. We really are going to have to try that one of these days. We can’t keep doing Thanksgiving at your Mom’s house forever. Or maybe we can… Her sweet potato pie is still the best I’ve ever tasted, and that bean casserole thing she does is amazing.
