Attack of the Seawolf

CHAPTER 6

The Gulfstream SS-9 swept-wing twelve-passenger jet touched down on the south runway, the rain on the asphalt forming a cloud behind the swift jet as it reversed its engine thrust, making its way to a halt on the diamond-cut pavement. At the midpoint of the 8,000-foot runway the jet turned off to a taxiway and headed for the hangar building, where the green Marine Corps SH-3 Sea King helicopter idled. The jet braked to a halt, its engines whining as they spun down. Almost immediately the forward port door opened, a stairway unfolded and Admiral Richard Donchez climbed out and jogged into the helicopter.

The deck canted forward as the aircraft lifted off and climbed from the wet asphalt, heading north toward the Pentagon’s helipad. Donchez turned to the other man in the chopper, Vice-Admiral Martin Steuber, who held his glance for a moment, then looked away out the rain-streaked window.

Donchez wasn’t happy to be pulled off the podium as he was in the middle of a speech at the launching of the SSN-22, the second of the controversial Seawolf-class submarines built by Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut. Donchez’s speech was calculated to condemn cancellation of the Seawolf program in favor of the inferior follow-on class of fast-attack submarines, the Centurion-class.

Steuber leaned over to Donchez.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but it seems something went wrong with the China operation. The SPEC-OP boat’s in trouble. That’s all I heard, but after we get the word in NMCC we’ve got a date at the White House to brief the President.”

Donchez looked hard at Steuber, suddenly mindful of what could go wrong with a nuclear submarine sent into China’s restricted territorial waters.

Admiral Richard Donchez would give the briefing, since he had been responsible for the China operation.

Steuber handed him the transparencies.

President Bill Dawson sat on the side of the large table against the curtained wall. He wore a golf shirt and khaki cotton pants, looking as if he had been pulled from a golf course. If Donchez had to guess his mood, it was one of impatience, but an impatience that was a prelude to anger. Secretary of Defense Napoleon Ferguson sat beside Dawson, looking uncomfortable in his rumpled gray pinstriped suit, his collar unbuttoned, his patterned tie at half-mast. Ferguson could be relied on to support military operations even when they went as badly as this one had. Ferguson was solid, Donchez thought. As if reading his mind, the SecDef gave him a nod. Donchez returned it, his face grim.

On Dawson’s right sat Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Eve Trachea, impeccable in a blue suit, her face serene, her eyes on Dawson, giving him the odd feeling of being sized up. He had predicted that Trachea would be ready to say I-told-you so when the operation’s failure was reported, but now he was not so sure. Eve Trachea was unpredictable.

On the other side of the table CIA Director Robert M. Kent sat with his deputy director and the deputies of the operations and analysis divisions. Kent looked like he had a migraine headache.

At the end of the table, the end opposite from Donchez, sat Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Brian Bevin, who had been promoted to Chairman when Dawson was inaugurated only months earlier. The general was a big man, athletic, tough-looking — a linebacker’s jaw, a broken nose, sunken eyes beneath a pronounced brow under tightly trimmed blond hair. Donchez’s only contact with Bevin had been at a Pentagon staff cocktail party four months ago, the last time he had been in D.C. He’d seemed an amiable sort, known to his staff as “Uncle Brian.” Bevin took pleasure in his nickname, it was said, but he did not seem his jolly smiling self now — his wide face impassive, tight. Donchez suspected the Chairman was not fond of evening meetings in which his military was in a position of reporting failure. For that, Donchez could hardly blame him.

Next to Bevin were President Dawson’s military aides, one from each service. Near Bevin, Martin Steuber had taken a seat, his eyes unreadable, staring through Donchez as if he weren’t there.

“Gentlemen,” Donchez began, “we’re here because of a problem with the China intelligence operation, with our SPEC-OP boat, the USS Tampa, in the Chinese Go Hai Bay. About two hours ago Tampa transmitted an emergency message that she’d been caught in the bay by units of the Chinese navy and was being taken captive after a battle in which she sank one Chinese surface vessel. The message also indicated that the captain was planning to initiate a ship selfdestruct if he was unable to repel a Chinese boarding party. That was the last transmission we had from her.”

Donchez paused, scanning the faces for reaction. No one moved. The contents of the messages had apparently already been known to most of them. Donchez turned on the overhead projector and parted the curtains.

“At 1645 our time, shortly after sunrise Beijing time, we had a KH-17 satellite pass over the Go Hai in the vicinity of Tianjin. That was before we got the distress call from the Tampa. But we did pick this up.”

Donchez dropped a transparency on the top of the projector and stepped away from the picture.

The scene was a black-and-white high-elevation view of the western bay, obviously a satellite photo from the faint appearance of the scan lines running diagonally across the picture. At the bottom of the picture three large surface warships and one small patrol craft were heading east. The wakes of the ships were white streaks across the blank darkness of the bay water. At the top of the picture two helicopters were taking off, heading in the same direction as the surface ships.

“The satellite shot showed the three destroyers you see here and one patrol boat heading on course zero eight five. In the direction of the estimated position of the Tampa at that time. As you can see from the wakes of the ships, they are moving out at maximum speed.”

Donchez let the image sink in for a moment before he pulled it off and went on to the next.

“The next satellite pass was not due for another ninety minutes, and it was not going to overfly the Tianjin area. We decided to re task the satellite, to use the KH-17’s onboard fuel reserves to maneuver the unit into a new orbit that would place her over the western shore of the Go Hai Bay. In the maneuver, almost all of the unit’s fuel was expended.” Donchez paused, taking in the glares of the men at the table. He had just admitted to ruining a half-billion-dollar surveillance satellite by using all the fuel that had been intended to last five years.

“But we did get this,” Donchez said, lifting the cover off the projector’s lens.

The photo on the screen showed the piers of New Harbor, Xingang, China.

One large finger of concrete, the seaward pier, extended horizontally across the picture.

Near the pier a strange assembly, looking like three ships lined up alongside each other, was maneuvering toward the pier. Donchez looked at the photo for a moment, feeling sick to his stomach. That photo had engraved itself in his mind. He pulled it off and replaced it with a blowup showing only the three ships together, the image becoming grainy from the magnification;

The shape between the destroyers was the cigar shape of the topside portion of a nuclear submarine, her paint blown off in patches to reveal bare metal, perhaps scars from the battle that had resulted in her capture.

“I regret to tell you that Tampa has been taken captive by the Communist Chinese. As you can see, there is a destroyer tied up on both Tampa’s port and starboard sides, and she’s being pushed in toward the pier.”

Donchez turned off the projector, not wanting to look at the image of one of his fleet’s finest submarines captured by the Chinese.

“That’s all I have,” Donchez concluded.

“I requested an overflight by an RF-117E, the reconnaissance aircraft that’s equivalent to the Stealth fighter.

So far we haven’t heard from the Air Force.”

He sat down on Kent’s side of the table, opposite Dawson, Trachea, Ferguson and Steuber.

“What about the Stealth?” Dawson asked, frowning at General Bevin.

“Did you do an overflight?”

Bevin nodded at Dawson, then pointed to the Air Force aide, a colonel who vanished from the room and came back with a sealed enveloped marked top secret that he handed to Bevin. Three glossy black and-white photographs that Bevin handed to the President.

Dawson frowned at them, then passed them around the table. It seemed to take forever for the shots to reach Donchez.

The photographs were high-altitude shots of the Xingang pier where the Tampa was held. The destroyers were still tied up to her port and starboard sides, but now the starboard destroyer was tied up to the pier. A frigate was tied up to the pier forward of the Tampa, another one aft. The three hatches were open on the deck of the submarine, all of them guarded by P.L.A soldiers or sailors with large weapons in their hands. The second photograph was a similar shot from a different perspective. The third photograph was an infrared shot of the pier and the ships.

Heat was shown in orange or white, cool spots in blue, cold in black. The middle of the Tampa was a large white spot. Orange lines and spots continued aft in splotches. The reactor and steam plants, Donchez thought. Her reactor was critical and the steam plant was hot. Maybe she could still get out of this … “Mr. President,” he began uneasily, “I’d like to propose a rescue mission. I have a tentative plan—”

“Well, Admiral,” Eve Trachea broke in, “I hate to say this, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems the ship’s selfdestruct didn’t exactly work out. If it had, there would be no need for a rescue, which will be much more hazardous than the original mission.”

Donchez bit his lip.

CIA Director Kent looked up from his notes.

“Mr. President, the Chinese have made no mention of this. No diplomatic protests, no demands. Nothing.”

“How do you read that?”

“The facts just aren’t in yet—”

“Bobby, just give me your best guess.”

“Well, maybe the Chinese P.L.A will try to use the submarine against the White Army, and so want to keep it quiet.”

“How could they make use of a sub against the White Armyi And don’t the Chinese already have nuclear subs?”

“Five of them, sir, the Han class. Roughly equivalent to the old Russian Victor’s. All useless in a fight with the White Army—”

“Sir,” Donchez interrupted, “the Tampa has ten Javelin conventional cruise missiles on board. Those missiles are accurate enough so that if one were to be launched at me from Wyoming it would be able to hit my end of the room rather than yours. That well might be something that could help the Chinese against the Whites, but I feel the real issue is that the Communist Chinese are holding Americans, and an American vessel, a top-of-the-line nuclear sub with the latest weapons and firecontrol. We have to get her and the crew out of this.”

“Well, Admiral, I agree, but how the hell are we going to do it, short of landing the Marines? I don’t want a damned war.”

Ferguson spoke up: “Mr. President, it’s clear that diplomatic channels can’t be used to free the ship. If we ask for the boat back it’s an admission we sent her in there to spy, and that just might be the move the Chinese are waiting for. They could claim we sent her there covertly to fire missiles on Beijing. They’d get international sympathy, maybe they’d even get the U.N. in there to fight the White Army.”

“Sir,” Eve Trachea said, her tone one of sweet reasonableness. “We were spying on the Chinese and got caught. We sank one of their navy’s ships trying to escape and they’ve captured and neutralized our sub. Now they will probably hold the ship as a bargaining tool to keep us from entering this conflict on the White Army side. Since we aren’t planning to do that anyway, we should be able to send an envoy to Beijing who can convince them to release the sub and its crew. We may need to admit what we were doing in their waters, however.”

Donchez fought down his anger.

“Sir, the submarine’s reactor is critical. The third photo shows it. Her crew is probably on board to run the reactor for power — maybe they can’t bring on shore power the voltage may be different. So, with the crew aboard, the reactor critical, what we need to do is put another submarine in there, sink the destroyers at the pier and Tampa sails out on her own steam.”

“Admiral,” Eve Trachea said, “how would you propose to get a submarine there now? The Chinese will be waiting for you. All you’ll have are two hostage subs. Or, if you do get in, your ship will kill a lot of their troops and probably sink the Tampa too. And then the rescue ship wouldn’t get out of the bay-Remember Carter’s failure in Iran, Desert One? A black eye for the Dawson Administration, contempt at home and hatred from the international community.”

“I like Donchez’s plan,” Defense Secretary Ferguson said.

“What’s your plan again. Eve? Apologize for the incident” Donchez spoke up before she could answer. This sort of wrangling was getting them nowhere. The main issue was losing out. He looked directly at President Dawson.

“What if I get the ship out in complete secrecy, sir?”

“If you could do it fast enough I’d consider it. What’s your plan?”

“Insert a submarine right next to the pier where Tampa’s held. It’ll be no problem getting her in. I’ll send the Seawolf, the quietest, most stealthy submarine there is. When she’s there we’ll insert a team of SEAL commandos to board and liberate Tampa. The sub will break away from the pier using her own power, which is more than enough to part those lines holding her, and out she goes, the Seawolf escorting her.”

“What about the fleet piers at Lushun,” Kent asked, “where the P.L.A has its Northern Fleet Headquarters, including antisubmarine surface ships and choppers? They’ll be waiting for your subs at the Lushun/Penglai Gap. You could lose both submarines.”

“Seawolf will get through,” Donchez said quietly, intensely. “She’s so quiet, our own surface ASW ships can’t detect her. She’ll get through and in the process create a diversion — perhaps even surface and resubmerge. The Chinese fleet goes after her, and meanwhile the Tampa goes right by. Net result — we get the submarines back, with all their intelligence, with no American loss of life and only a few Chinese. And the media, with luck, may never hear about it.”

“What if the SEALs fail. Admiral?” President Dawson asked.

“Then, sir, you authorize the fleet’s firepower to … give the Chinese something more to think about.”

“General Bevin?” Dawson looked hard at the general.

“I agree, sir. And suggest giving the Navy first crack.”

“Eve?” Dawson said to Trachea.

Her answer reflected her dual role as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State.

“I’ll go along, sir, but if the SEALs fail, the Seawolf must withdraw. And no shooting. I also suggest this affair should be a lesson for future adventures of this kind, Mr. President.”

Dawson noted her skating on both sides of the ice.

“Okay, Admiral Donchez,” he said, rising from the table, “get the Tampa out using the SEALs. Tell your sub commander to avoid shooting and explosions, if at all possible. I can’t tell you not to shoot if you absolutely have to, but minimize it. If the mission goes sour, and you can’t get the Tampa out of there, for God’s sake, get the Seawolf out of the bay.”

Donchez stood.

“I’ll keep you informed of our timing. My aide will bring over the Penetration Order request for the Seawolf in an hour.”

Admiral Donchez unwrapped a Havana and fished in his tropical white uniform trousers for his USS Piranha lighter. With three efficient puffs, the cigar’s tip glowed red, the smoke creating a cloud around the admiral. Captain Fred Rummel, Donchez’s aide, a heavyset officer in his fifties, coughed in the smoke.

Over their last decade together, since Rummel was a lieutenant commander and Donchez a rear admiral, the men had worked together, and Donchez had always smoked and Rummel had always coughed. It made the relationship comfortable, familiar, Donchez thought.

Donchez looked up at the electronic wall chart of the western Pacific, showing the blue dot in the Go Hai Bay labeled USS TAMPA SSN-774. The usual status indicator, either SUBMERGED OPERATIONS or SURFACED TRANSIT, was missing, there being no protocol for a status line when a submarine asset was held captive. The position of the dot was not just Top Secret, it was special compartmented information, and was shown only when Donchez and Rummel were in Flag Plot. At the moment, they were the only people in the room other than a crypto technician and a senior chief radioman. But the Tampa was not the blue dot they were looking at. It was a second blue dot that concerned them, a dot a hundred miles south of the island of Japan in an area of the Pacific marked YOKOSUKA OP AREA. The dot was labeled USS SEAWOLF SSN-21 SUBMERGED OPERATIONS (SEA TRIALS).

“Take a message to the Seawolf, Fred,” Donchez said, the cigar still clenched in his teeth.

“Classification Top Secret, personal for commanding officer. Priority immediate.”

“Who’s the captain, sir?”

“Duckett, Hank Duckett,” Donchez said. “You ready? Paragraph one: USS Seawolf to make port at Yokosuka Naval Station immediately. Paragraph two: commanding officer and executive officer will be flown to Washington, D.C.” by Navy transport for conference. Paragraph three: Purpose of trip is to testify before the Armed Services Committee about the value of the Seawolf submarine class. Be prepared to discuss ship capabilities in detail. Trip duration, approximately three weeks. Paragraph four: Admiral R. Donchez sends. That’s it.”

“Sir, before this goes out, may I ask what you’re doing? Isn’t Seawolf going to do the rescue mission?”

“She’s the one.”

“So … why are you recalling her skipper?”

“We’re giving Seawolf a new captain for this operation, someone who’s been in combat before, the best sub driver we’ve got.”

“Combat, sir? Our best? The only U.S. sub skipper in the last few decades to launch a torpedo in anger is Michael Pacino, and not only did he lose the Devilfish under the polar icecap, he left the Navy for medical reasons. And maybe personal reasons, too, if I remember. So who have you got in mind?”

“Right on the first time, Fred. We’re bringing Mikey Pacino out of retirement for this OP. He’s got the guts to do it, plus the brains and experience. The other captains, they’re okay, but like our friend Marty Steuber, they seem allergic to risk. We need someone who isn’t afraid to take chances. That’s the only reason he had Devilfish shot out from under him. And let’s not forget what happened to the other submarine in that incident — anyone other than Pacino would have come back dead or not at all.”

“So, how are you going to convince him to go back to sea?”

“I’ll personally order him. Get out a message to NAVPERS transferring Pacino back to active duty.”

“I don’t know. Admiral. We’re talking about the most sensitive mission in maybe forty years. Even if Pacino comes back, he’s a Piranha-class sailor — he won’t know the first thing about the Seawolf. And as a civilian, he’s under no obligation to go back to active duty to do this—”

“Leave all that to me,” Donchez said. “Just get those messages on the wire.”