“That’s the shape of it, Captain,” Lieutenant Beltrain concluded.
“The second Han is history. He saved us the price of a torpedo by busting himself up trying to evade that SDF boat. Two down. One to go.”
Amanda nodded slowly. She and her tactical officers were clustered around the chart table in the Combat Information Center, listening as Dix brought them up to speed on the events that had transpired to the north.
“Yeah,” Christine Rendino commented. “He must have been trying to break out into the Pacific through the deepwater channel just south of Yaku Shima. He must have figured that we wouldn’t be looking quite so hard for him that close to the Japanese home islands. Ballsy move, but it didn’t pan out.”
Christine looked up and noted the expression on her captain’s face.
“You don’t look exactly super-pleased about this. Boss Ma’am. Were you looking forward to collecting a matched set?”
“No … No. There’s just something odd here.”
“What’s that, Captain?” Arkady asked, his frown coming to match Amanda’s.
“Look.” Amanda picked up one of the chart table’s data wands and touched a point on the graphics display. “Here is where we acquired our Han yesterday afternoon … ” She drew a light line across the chart, the numbers of a digital distance hack blurring beside the wand tip as she measured the range. “Here is where the second Han went down. That’s a distance of over three hundred miles. The assumption has always been that both Hans and the Xia were operating together as a single unit. A wolf pack with the attack boats covering the boomer.
“Now, if that was the case, could the surviving Han and, presumably, the Xia have crossed this three hundred miles in the sixteen-odd hours between the two sinkings?”
Ken Hiro shrugged. “Three hundred miles? That shouldn’t have been a problem for a nuke.”
“No, sir,” Arkady said. “I see what the skipper is getting at. Crossing that range wouldn’t be any problem for a nuke if it was just cruising. But not if he was running at good quiet. He’d have to creep along at dead slow and he’d have had to zigzag to stay under the best thermoclines. He also would have had to swing wide to get around that SDF Task Force that was operating to the north of us. A Han couldn’t have crossed between those two points within that time frame and not have escaped detection.”
“Exactly.” Amanda nodded. “Dix, has the hunt boss indicated any contact with the Xia up near Yaku Shima?”
“Not so far. Search assets are being retasked to increase coverage in the area.”
Amanda nodded again. “I’m willing to wager that they’re not going to find anything. Since the start of this operation, we’ve been assuming that the Red subs have been acting together as a unit. Well, that’s wrong. They dispersed after clearing Shanghai. They’re acting independently.”
Amanda lightly bit her lower lip in thought. “I wonder,” she said after a moment, “what else we might be wrong about.”