Attack of the Seawolf

CHAPTER 3

Tampa cruised slowly north at 1.5 knots at a keel depth of sixty-eight feet, the top of her sail ten feet below the surface of the dark water of the Bohai Wan.

The ship was rigged for ultra quiet All off-watch personnel were confined to their bunks. One of the turbine generators and one of the main engines aft was shut down to minimize radiated noise. Reactor main circulation pumps were in slow speed. Ventilation fans were turned to low speed. All lights were rigged for red to remind the watch standers of the need for silence. The PA. circuit speakers were disabled so that a transmission on them would not be heard outside the hull. Watchstanders in each compartment wore headsets and boom microphones to take the place of the PA. circuits. The control room was rigged for black, all lights extinguished except for the backlit gage-faces and the dim green light from the firecontrol console screens. A heavy dark curtain was drawn around the periscope stand to screen out the low level of light from the rest of the room. The precautions were designed to protect the night vision of the Captain and Officer of the Deck.

Commander Sean Murphy was pressed up against the hot surface of the deck-to-overhead length of the number-two periscope optic-module. His right eye was tight against the wet rubber of the eyepiece, now drenched with sweat and skin oil. He gripped the periscope with a grasp as familiar as a motocross racer’s on his motorcycle’s handlebars.

The view through the scope revealed the floodlit piers of New Harbor, Xingang, a mere four thousand yards away. The nearest pier was occupied by two rusty tankers and an old freighter. The pier further to the north was not so well lit but the backwash of the first pier’s lights showed a half-dozen warships of the P.L.A navy tied up, looking deserted and forlorn. Two were Luda-class guided-missile destroyers; the third was a Russian-designed Udaloy antisubmarine destroyer.

Further aft were several Huchuan and P-4 fast torpedo patrol craft. Properly manned and alerted, the surface vessels could pose a threat, but it looked like the P.L.A navy might have abandoned their ships to lend troops to fight off the land attack of the White Army. That suited Murphy just fine.

The piers of Xingang slowly passed by as the ship proceeded north, dead slow, keeping up just enough flow over the bow planes and stern planes to provide sufficient depth-control to keep the sail from broaching. Should the sail become exposed, standing orders called for the captain to assume he had been seen and quickly withdraw at maximum speed while attempting to remain undetected. The first commandment of the Silent Service — remain undetected.

The number-two periscope, the type-20, was more than a collection of lenses and mirrors. Viewed from the surface, the periscope would look like a telephone pole with an oval window in it. The top of the pole had two large spheres on it, one atop the other, called “elephant balls” for obvious reasons. The elephant balls were highly sophisticated radio receivers able to receive UHF, VHP and HF radio signals and to perform rough direction-finding to the source of a radio transmission. Below the elephant balls was a highly sensitive UHF antenna designed for receiving communications from the COMMSAT communications satellite in orbit above the western Pacific as well as from the NAV SAT geopositioning navigation satellite that enabled them to get a fix to within yards of their actual position. The oval window contained television optics, low-light infrared capability and the laser-range finder, a system designed to beam a narrow laser beam at a surface target to determine the range. For decades before the laser-range finder, submariners had prided themselves on being able to call a vessel’s range by using the division marks on the crosshairs and knowing the masthead heights of various ships. Not only was the laser device considered unneeded, it was unpopular because preliminary reports by U.S. Navy research ships showed that properly equipped warships could detect the laser beam. Being detected robbed a submarine of her one natural advantage — stealth. On the Tampa, and on most other fast-attack submarines, the laser range-finder was disabled, its fuses removed and its breakers locked open to prevent an inadvertent transmission. The whole package of the type-20 scope was shrouded in radar absorptive material, RAM, to lessen the chance of radar detecting them. That left two ways to detect a submarine’s periscope — by sighting the periscope’s vertical wing-shaped fairing that rose to the level of the water, or by an orthogonal-polarized radar that so far as the United States knew was beyond the reach of the Chinese.

Aft of control in the cramped radio and ESM rooms four Chinese-speaking NSA cryptologists listened through headsets to communications from the Chinese mainland surrounding the ship. Wide-band tape recorders captured every word from the dozens of frequencies being scanned and intercepted. Their computers alerted the spooks to the reception of any of the hundreds of key words programmed in, such as missile or nuclear or attack. In the hour since Tampa had arrived on station at Point Hotel, the harvest of communications intelligence had been rich.

A fifth spook collected quick summaries from the other four, writing his situation report that would be transmitted within two hours, assuming no urgent communications were intercepted.

On the surface, the telephone pole of the ship’s number-two periscope protruded four feet above the calm water of the Go Hai, moving north at almost a yard per second, a small foamy wake trailing behind it. It was barely visible in the overcast blackness of the night. No one on shore saw it. No one in a patrol boat or fishing vessel noticed it.

But at 0430 local time, the orthogonal-polarized radar waves began washing over the exposed length of periscope.

Fighter Sai Fu-Ting sat at the console of the orthogonal-polarization radar set in the crude block building in the Dashentang compound housing the P.L.A radar-surveillance corps. Sai was a senior enlisted technician in the P.L.A’s radar corps, but in the theoretically rank less military structure of the P.L.A he was called “fighter,” like any other enlisted man. His uniform also did not indicate his seniority, his olive drab Mao suit jacket buttoned to the top, the red tabs on his collars the only insignia other than the red star on his liberty cap. Sai Fu-Ting was one of the best radar technicians in the platoon. He had taken over the watch on the radar console at 0400 after a night of tossing and turning. With the White Army closing in on Beijing, the radar outpost could be overrun in a matter of weeks. An electronics technician, Sai wondered how he would be in a real fight. Hand-to-hand combat was not something he looked forward to, nor was looking down the barrel of a Kuomintang rifle.

He tried to concentrate now on the screen of the DynaCorp International AN SPY-45 console, the top of-line equipment acquired through an intermediary in the Middle East. At the time of its purchase two years before, the leaders in Beijing had been worried about an invasion of Beijing from the sea, but now that the main worry was a land assault from the White Army, Sai wondered what use the SPY-45 would be.

His orders were to scan the Go Hai Bay for ships, patrol craft, divers or evidence of a shipborne amphibious assault by White Army forces. Unlikely, he thought, but those were the orders, and he watched the radar screen and sipped his tea, trying to shake the heaviness from his eyes … The blip on the screen two miles offshore from Dagu flashed as it was first registered by the SPY-45 system. A small contact, no bigger than a piece of driftwood. Sai logged it in and called for more tea.

The blip could be nothing more than a piece of garbage or a drifting fishing boat, perhaps even a loose dinghy.

Twenty minutes later Sai frowned at the small contact.

It had not disappeared like a chunk of garbage or driftwood. It seemed to be moving northward at a slow steady pace, only a few clicks, walking speed. But it had regularity. When the blip continued on north, Sai decided it was just some sort of detritus drifting in the current.

At 0500 exactly, at a position two kilometers east of Qingtuozi, the blip reversed itself and began moving to the south.

No piece of driftwood or castaway dinghy could do that if it were merely drifting in the current. And a fishing boat would not be trolling so close to shore. It might be some kind of White Army spy boat or a raft of White Army divers. Sai called the officer in charge of the platoon. Leader Peng Chung, who no doubt would have something to say about the mysterious contact. Perhaps they needed to get a patrol boat out on the bay to identify the contact.

At 0510 Leader Peng squinted at the blip on the SPY-45 screen. The contact was continuing south at its creeping slow speed. For the next ten minutes Peng monitored the contact and its motion, then reached over Sai to the console and adjusted a knob, changing the scale of the projection so that the contact’s detection was at the bottom and its furthest north penetration was at the top.

The computer-generated curve drawn through the contact’s previous positions was a straight line north, a curving turn some fifty meters in diameter, then a straight line to the south.

Peng stood up abruptly and reached for a phone.

While he waited, he caught sight of Sai’s inquiring look.

“It’s a submarine,” Peng said quietly.

The phone to the control-room periscope stand buzzed. Murphy grabbed it.

“Captain.”

“Radio, sir. The SITREP is ready to send. Request the Bigmouth antenna.”

“Captain, aye, wait.” Murphy tapped the shoulder of the officer on the periscope. Lieutenant Commander Greg Tarkowski.

“Let me look.”

The world outside was getting lighter with dawn only fifteen minutes away. The situation report needed to get out before the sun rose or the antenna exposure during daylight could risk detection. Murphy did a quick circle in low power, seeing the world at a distance, then engaged high power with the right periscope grip. The shore, only a few thousand yards away, jumped suddenly close, as if he were standing, wading in the water. Not a soul was visible in the shabby buildings crowded together along the shoreline.

Murphy turned the scope over to Tarkowski.

“Radio, Captain,” Murphy said, tilting his head toward the overhead where the Conn Open Mike microphone was nestled among the valves and pipes and cables.

“Prepare to transmit.” Murphy looked at Tarkowski pressed up against the scope.

“Raise the Bigmouth and transmit the SITREP.”

Tarkowski acknowledged. Twenty-five feet above them, from the aft part of the sail, the Bigmouth antenna raised steadily upward, the top of the mast breaking the surface. The pole continued rising out of the sail, rising steadily higher until it towered ten feet above the top of the periscope, fat as well as tall, over a foot in diameter.

The transmission began, a ten-second burst to the satellite overhead, the text of the message a summary of all the Chinese communications received since the Tampa had arrived onstation. As the Bigmouth antenna was lowered back into the sail. Murphy felt at once relieved and apprehensive. Relieved because the SITREP was out and the antenna was down. Apprehensive because the sun was rising, exposing the ship to a greater chance of detection, and because the transmission might have given them away to an alert surveillance crew ashore. But for the next four weeks, or until called back by the Pentagon, this SPEC-OP would continue, and Tampa would remain at risk, spying on the Chinese.

Commander Yen Chi-tzu maneuvered the heavy airplane to the end of the runway and coaxed the old turbines to full power, his eye on the number-three engine tachometer and oil-pressure indicator. That engine would fall off the airplane someday, he was convinced, if the maintenance technicians continued to neglect it. Still, other than some vibrations, it came uncomplainingly up to twenty-four thousand RPM.

The big four-engined jet, an ancient British-built Nimrod antisubmarine patrol craft, lifted off the runway and headed south toward the point the Dashentang radar station had detected a suspicious contact. It was undoubtedly a false contact, Yen thought, but he didn’t mind. Better to be flying than cooped up in the ready building, trying to sleep, waiting for word about the encroaching White Army.

It did not take long to maneuver the plane over the water east of Beitang and cruise over the supposed path of the radar contact. The sun was rising as Yen approached the point in the bay where the spy boat or submarine was suspected. Yen, as he was trained, flew east of the intercept point so that he would be up sun of the contact. As he approached the intercept point, still a mile away, he thought he saw something.

He flew toward it, keeping it down-sun, and now as the plane closed the contact he blinked hard, not quite believing.

It was a periscope. No doubt. Yen keyed the radio button on the control yoke and called the contact report back to Dashentang, then flew back around, alerting the crew to prepare the load he was about to drop into the sea.

“Conn, Sonar,” Murphy’s earphone crackled, “we’re getting aircraft engines, close contact.”

“Air search!” Murphy called to Officer of the Deck Tarkowski. Tarkowski flipped his left wrist down, scanning his view upward, rotating the scope rapidly.

“Goddamn,” Tarkowski said.

“Mark on top! Looks like a P-3. Dipping scope.”

Tarkowski snapped up the grips and rotated the hydraulic control ring, and the periscope dropped into the well, coming down slowly, slowly.

“Conn, Sonar, the aircraft is still close, high-bearing rate. It’s circling us.”

“Get us out of here, course east,” Murphy ordered.

“Ten knots.”

“Helm, all ahead two thirds,” Tarkowski called to the helmsman at the control panel.

“Left fifteen degrees rudder, steady course east.”

“Station the section tracking team, OOD, and restart the port turbine generator. Start up the port main engine and shift propulsion to both mains.”

“Aye, sir, station the section tracking team and restart the port engine room The OOD reached for a phone and began barking into it.

“Conn, Sonar,” Murphy’s headset intoned, “splashes in the water up our port side. Sonobuoys, sir … confirmed. Sonobuoys, bearing zero four zero.”

The aircraft was dropping buoys into the water, each one a listening device with a portable radio, listening for them to drive by and nailing their position.

Prelude to a possible torpedo attack. Murphy thought.

The standard way of dealing with a sonobuoy volley was to get away from it and change course and speed, to zig, so that the aircraft above couldn’t predict his next position. He figured if the next round of buoys found nothing the aircraft would have lost them.

“I have the conn,” Murphy said.

“All ahead standard.

OOD, plot the splash, mark range fifteen hundred yards.”

“Sonar, Conn, we have another volley of sonobuoys, this time to starboard. He’s trying to box us in.”

The eerie sound of sonar pulses came through the hull, louder than the background noises of the ventilation fans and the gyro. Sean Murphy’s stomach filled with bile as an ugly thought filled his head.

We’re caught.