Seawolf Class

9

"You mean the entire ROC has only four submarines?" Jack Morton was only now receiving a personal briefing on the readiness state of Taiwan's parafrogman program from Commander Tse. "I would have thought that would be your strongest force!"

Tse shrugged and manage to look apologetic. "It is a political thing," he explained. "In China — I mean, in Nationalist China — all things are political to one degree or another."

Morton looked at the two aging submarines moored to the Kaohsiung Naval Facility docks. "But those two are relics!"

"Indeed. U.S. Guppy II class submarines. The one on the left is the Hai Shih… formerly the USS Cutlass, SS-478. She was launched in 1944 and in service by March 1945. The other is her sister, the Hai Pao, originally the USS Tusk, SS-794. She has been in service since 1946. Both vessels were transferred to the Republic of China in 1973 for antisubmarine warfare training… with their torpedo tubes welded shut, I might add.

"We have only two other submersibles in our navy. Both are modified Dutch Zwaardvis-class vessels." Tse stumbled over the alien name and made a face. "They are Hai Lung and Hai Hu — the Sea Dragon and the Sea Tiger. They were ordered by Taiwan in 1980, over Mainland China's strong protests. Sea Dragon was not delivered to us until 1986 and then only as deck cargo on a heavy-lift freighter.

"There were orders for two additional submarines of the class," Tse continued, "plus options for a fifth and a sixth. All were cancelled by the Dutch after heavy political pressure was brought to bear on them by Beijing. Does this tell you anything?"

"Beijing doesn't want you to have submarines," Morton said, nodding.

"We are at war, Commander," Tse said with matter-of-fact bluntness. "We have been at war with the Communists since the beginning of our civil war in 1927. Taiwan has stood alone against the Communist monsters since we were forced to withdraw here in 1949."

Morton raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing. Taiwan had not exactly been alone throughout the long years of the Cold War, and the U.S. Navy still served as buffer and guarantee for the holdout island's freedom. And… he'd done some reading up on the history of the Chinese Civil War, which, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, had ended in 1949. It had begun in 1927 with the Shanghai Massacre — when Chiang Kai-shek turned on his erstwhile Communist allies in a surprise attack, capturing and executing five or six thousand of them on the spot. The blood feud between Nationalist and Communist in this war-sick country was old, bitter, and exceedingly deep, and neither side held the moral high ground any longer— indeed, if either had ever held it.

A pox on both your houses was what he wanted to say, but his orders were to cooperate with his Taiwanese hosts and assist them in the upcoming op. The question was how that op was going to be deployed. The best idea for such a mission would have involved insertion by a submarine outfitted for commando-type operations close inshore.

But that wasn't going to be possible with this submarine fleet. operation Dragon Slayer had been assigned to SEAL Team Three during the flurry of excitement over Beijing's sudden, restless churnings in the western Pacific. The missiles fired at Taiwan had so far been of two calibers — Long March ballistic missiles fired from a test center west of Beijing, and a new, uprated version of the venerable Silkworm surface-to-surface missile, fired from a group of mobile launchers clustered near the coast opposite Taiwan at a village called Tong'an.

The Long March sites were deep within China's borders and well out of reach of anything but a U.S. air strike or an extremely large and complex covert operation. The mobile launchers, however, offered mission planners in Washington an almost irresistible temptation — a high-profile target within easy striking distance by a small team of Special Forces operators. Hitting those launchers would send a clear political message to Beijing: stop the bombardment of Taiwan or face a much larger, much more devastating response.

Satellite reconnaissance had pinpointed the mobile launcher site. of course, the fact that those launchers were mobile made them an ephemeral target; Operation Dragon Slayer had to be what was known as a hasty strike, an attack put together from scratch with almost no preparation time at all. That was why the decision had been made to join elements of SEAL Team Three with their parafrogman counterparts in Taiwan.

The SEALs trained endlessly for just this sort of operation. The Taiwanese commandos had actual operational experience on the mainland. It should be possible for the two to work together to slip into the PRC, sabotage the launchers, and get out again before the PLA even knew they were there.

The getting in, however, was the tough part. Right now, the Strait of Formosa was heavily patrolled and swept by search and weapons radar. Infiltrating a large commando strike force into Mainland China was not going to be easy.

And as for getting them out again afterward…

"Okay," Morton said, "I give up. How do you put operators ashore on the mainland, then, if you can't use submersibles?"

"Small boats, most often," Tse replied. "Sometimes we use HAHO or HALO parachute drops from aircraft. And sometimes we go in aboard larger ships which call at major ports, like Hong Kong or Shanghai. Our men slip over the side as the freighter moves into Communist waters."

"I see." None of those methods was going to work well for this op. HAHO assaults — High-Altitude/ High-Opening parachute drops that allowed the infiltrators to maneuver steerable chutes for twenty miles or more — and HALO assaults — High-Altitude/Low Opening drops that required the infiltrators to free-fall to within a thousand feet or less of the ground before opening their chutes — required exceptional levels of training to keep the operations team together. Making that kind of insertion without practicing with the Nationalist forces first was guaranteed to scatter them all across the mainland in hopeless and ineffectual confusion.

Besides, the PRC was going to be real touchy about aircraft entering their airspace right now, and it might be difficult to get within twenty miles of the objective.

By boat? Possible… but, again, the Mainland Chinese were going to be nervous about everything from freighters to traditional fishing junks to high-speed cigarette boats. The waters of the Formosa Strait had to be one of the most heavily radar-blanketed regions in the world right now. A sparrow wouldn't make it through that hundred-mile stretch of water without a challenge.

They would need to try another approach.

"So how else can we get over there?" he asked Tse. "It sounds to me like every avenue is blocked."

"Not quite all," Tse replied.

"You're not thinking of packaging us up and mailing us to the mainland, are you?"

Tse looked puzzled, then brightened as he realized Morton was making a joke. "Ah! No. We will use helocast."

Morton's eyes widened. Helocast — having frogmen jump out of helicopters as they skimmed the wave tops — would work within a mile or so of an enemy coast, but they would have to get within swimming range. SEALs were good, as were their Nationalist counterparts, but even they couldn't carry out an op ashore after a twenty-mile submerged swim to get through Chinese territorial waters.

"If we can't get an aircraft or a boat close enough to the mainland to do any good," he said, "what makes you think the Communists will let us come right up to their coastline in helicopters?"

"Simple, Commander Morton," Tse said with a smile. "We will be operating out of our territory, at Kinmen."

Garrett stood just inside the doorway leading to the Seawolf's control room. Chief Toynbee stood next to him, watching three other sonar techs sitting at the boards, ears encased in headsets. On the screens before them cascades of light—"waterfalls," in sonar parlance — made the sounds filling the surrounding water visible.

"We've been picking up good solid contacts all day," Toynbee said. "It's finding the needles in the proverbial haystacks that's problematical. This is one of the busiest international shipping channels on the planet, after all."

"Conn, Sonar. New contact, designated Sierra Five-four," ST3 Queensly reported. "Bearing zero-seven-one, estimated range ten thousand."

"See?" Toynbee said. "That's fifty-three separate individual sonar contacts since this cruise began."

"I'd have thought most of that international shipping would have cleared out to the Formosa Strait by now," Garrett said. "With Chinese missiles flying overhead, this can't be the healthiest piece of aquatic real estate in the world."

"Sierra Five-four tentatively identified as another trawler," ST2 Juarez said. "I've got drag sounds from the nets. He's making revs for twelve knots."

"Most of them have cleared out, as of two days ago," Toynbee told Morton. "What's left are local junks, fishing trawlers, coastal traffic, most of 'em under a thousand tons. Their livelihood is the sea — this sea. They're sure as hell not going to pack up and leave just because Beijing and Taipei are shooting at each other again."

"The real trick is finding the Kilos in all that clutter," ST1 Roger Grossman said, leaning back in his seat and looking up at the two khaki-clad men in the doorway. "Junks and trawlers are noisy. Against that kind of background, Kilos are damned near invisible."

"Wait a sec!" Queensly said, leaning forward and pressing his headset tightly against his ears. "I've got something, guys."

For a moment all three techs strained against their equipment, trying to drag order out of chaos. "I just hear the trawler, Sierra Five-four," Grossman said with a frustrated shake of his head.

"No," Queensly insisted. "Behind the trawler. Listen hard… "

"Let me hear," Garrett said.

Toynbee jacked in an extra set of headphones and handed them to Garrett. He set them over his ears and listened.

He could hear the gentle, background whoosh of moving water… the noisy hammering of an ancient diesel engine. That would be the trawler. He could also make out a kind of muffled clattering, hissing noise, the sound of a heavy seine net moving through the water.

And just beneath and behind those covering sounds…

"He's right," Garrett said. "He's snorkeling."

"I'm calling it," Queensly said excitedly. "Conn, Sonar! New contact, designated Sierra Five-five. Bearing zero-seven-three, estimated range twelve thousand, speed twelve knots. Probable diesel submarine running submerged on snorkel."

"Sonar, Conn!" Lawless's voice snapped back over the intercom. "Verify that last!"

As Queensly repeated his call, Garrett focused on the soft, almost smothered sounds all but lost in the sea ahead. Diesel engines needed air — and lots of it — to run. Running them while submerged swiftly poisoned a submarine's air supply with carbon monoxide. The alternative was to run the sub on its batteries when it was submerged, surfacing periodically when the batteries ran low in order to recharge them off the diesels.

Surfacing, however, was the next best thing to a death sentence for any submarine in this modern era of ASW — antisubmarine warfare. German submariners had solved the problem, at least partially: hook the diesels to a rigid hose — the "snorkel" — and run it to the surface just abaft of the periscope array. The sub could then cruise along at periscope depth with only its snorkel above water, recharging its batteries while remaining hidden.

Snorkels did not render a submarine invisible, however, nor did they keep it silent. Diesel motors were noisy all by themselves, and snorkels used rather noisy pumps to draw in fresh air from the surface and to expel exhaust fumes. They also made noise dragging through the interface between air and water, and the snorkel could be spotted by day by sharp-eyed surface observers, and any time by radar.

From the sound of things, this sub was trying to mask the sounds made by its own engine and the wake of its snorkel by snuggling in close to an even noisier fishing trawler. It was a good strategy, but not a fool-proof one. Garrett could just barely hear the thud-thud-thud of a diesel engine, and the duller thump of air pumps, all but masked by the louder pounding of the surface ship.

The Seawolf was running south through the Strait of Formosa, midway, roughly, between Taiwan and the coast of Mainland China. She had arrived on-station that morning after an all-night passage south from Yokosuka. She was submerged, moving at a depth of three hundred feet, while her various sonar arrays strained useful data from the welter of noise around her. Contact Sierra Five-five was about six to seven miles to the east-north-east, in the direction of the Taiwan coast.

Garrett handed the headset back. "Good listening, Queenie," he told the third-class sonar tech. "That's a tough one to differentiate."

"Th-Thank you, sir!" He blinked owlishly behind his glasses. "Thanks a lot!"

"Stay on the bastard," Toynbee added. "I don't want him to so much as stealth-fart without our hearing the bubbles."

In the control room, Lawless was giving orders to come to periscope depth. The command was relayed back from Lieutenant Tollini, "Make my depth, periscope depth, aye aye, sir." He then spoke quietly to the sailor on duty at the dive planes station; the sailor pulled back gently on the aircraft-style control yoke, and the deck tilted slightly beneath their feet. Seawolf was moving up out of the darkness, gradually approaching the light of day far above.

Lawless looked across the control room as Garrett walked toward the chart tables behind the periscope housings. "I'll want to radio this one in to Mother Hen," he said. "They can decide whether that trawler is a PLA decoy or an innocent fisherman being used by that Kilo."

"I'd put my money on the former, sir," Garrett said. "That trawler has his nets down, but he's going at a hell of a clip for fishing. He must be doing twelve knots, maybe a little better."

"Agreed," Lawless said. "But it's not our job to sort 'em out. That's a job for the Taiwan Navy."

Garrett could see that Lawless was playing this very strictly by the book. Submarine officers were by nature conservative, unwilling to take risks with the lives of their men and the safety of their boats on the line. But they also tended to temper that conservative nature with a daring commensurate with their skill, the daring that in World War II had let Gunter Prien slip the U-47 into the heavily guarded British base at Scapa Flow to torpedo the British battleship Royal Oak… or a host of American sub skippers to penetrate Tokyo Bay itself. In the Cold War, U.S. submarine skippers had repeatedly taken their commands deep inside Soviet territorial waters to spy on their arch rival… and to glean bits of intelligence firsthand that might have proven invaluable if war had ever broken out between East and West.

Garrett had no doubts about Lawless's skill as a submarine skipper, but so far he hadn't shown the initiative, the sheer guts, that Garrett associated with good attack boat drivers. He was acting more like a boomer skip-per — the captain of a ballistic missile submarine, which was supposed to stay hidden, out of sight and off the enemy's sonar displays, with survival as the watchword.

His assessment, of course, wasn't entirely fair. Garrett knew that Seawolf's mission required stealth, patience, and a hunter's cunning… which included the ability to observe without being observed, to watch without being seen.

He couldn't help watching Lawless command the Seawolf without wondering what he would do in the same situation. In this case, he thought his best option would have been to approach the new contacts — especially the surface contact, Sierra Five-four — and take them under direct observation through Seawolf's Mark 18 scope. Were the crewmen aboard that trawler fishermen, or would he see uniforms? Weapons? A hightech radio mast that had no business being mounted on board a civilian fishing junk? The visual inspection by a good, old-fashioned Mark I Mod 0 human eyeball could provide invaluable additional data that went a long way toward expanding the wealth of purely electronic data gathered by the Seawolf's sensor suites.

And yet, Lawless was right. By simply identifying the trawler as a possible PLA screening vessel, he'd given the local navy something to go on. It was Taipei's responsibility now to stop and board that ship, or let it continue on its way.

He felt the deck leveling beneath his feet. "Leveling off now at five-eight feet," the diving officer announced. "Periscope depth."

"Very well," Lawless said, stepping to the periscope platform. "Up scope."

The periscope slid up in its housing, and Lawless rode the handles as they opened, walking the scope in a complete circle as he scanned the surface overhead. "We're clear," he said. "Radio Shack! Let's raise Mother Hen."

"Radio Shack, aye!"

Mother Hen was the code name for the submarine command facility on Taiwan, which was linked electronically and via satellite both with elements of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and with Pearl Harbor. They would relay Seawolf's sneak-and-peek discoveries to the appropriate channels.

"Conn, E-2 sensor suite. We're being painted. Can't tell if they've fingered us yet, but we're getting a lot of military-grade radar out there."

"Roger that. Keep monitoring."

"Conn, Radio Shack. We're patched through to Mother Hen."

"Very well." Lawless began rattling off the specs of the two latest sonar contacts, giving ranges, bearings, and probable identification, and recommending an overflight by local ASW assets.

"Are we going to track that Kilo, sir?" Garrett asked.

"If your intelligence is accurate, Mr. Garrett, there are nine other Kilos out here and possibly an Akula as well. We can't waste time following one lone PLA boat. We'll wait for the ASW people to pick them up and continue with our assigned patrol. By the book, Mr. Garrett, by the book."

By the book. Garrett had about decided that if he heard the captain's pet phrase one more time, he was going to Section 8 right out of the service — that mythological medical classification that said you were too nuts to be in the military. He shook his head ruefully at the thought. He'd had his chance to get out with some remaining measure of dignity three years ago and turned it down cold. It was way too late to think about that now.

"Captain, Radio Shack" came over the 1MC. "This is the captain. Go ahead."

"Sir, we have incoming SATCOM radio traffic. It's headed 'Titan Spear,' 'Top Secret,' and 'Urgent.' "

"On my way."

Lawless left the control room. Leaving the OOD in charge, Garrett returned to the Sonar Shack to listen to the subtle thud and rumble of the presumed Chinese diesel sub. A Titan Spear message meant something from Washington and from pretty high up on the chain of command. Garrett wondered, though, why the message had been sent by UHF transmission, especially if it was Top Secret.

Staying in touch with the Navy's fleet of submarines, especially when they were submerged, had long been a tough technical problem. There were a variety of communications modes: VLF, LF, HF, UHF, ELF, and even blue-green OSCAR laser pulses fired from geostationary communications satellites.

Extremely Low Frequency transmissions could penetrate the upper levels of the ocean and be received by a submarine at depths of a hundred meters or more. Because the wavelength of an ELF signal was so long— about four thousand kilometers — the transmission rate was painfully slow. It could take hours to send just a few characters, and the method was usually reserved for "bell-ringer" messages, an alert to come to shallow depths and receive a longer message by VLF or other means.

Other modes of communication required the sub to trail a long antenna in its wake or to use a buoy that drew the antenna up to within a few meters of the surface. Very Low Frequency transmissions were routinely received this way, and most communications with submerged submarines on a deployment were handled through this mode. Low-frequency, high-frequency, and ultrahigh frequency transmissions could only be picked up by the sub when its radio mast was extended above the surface, from periscope depth. Optical Submarine Communications by Aerospace Relay— OSCAR — was still experimental, expensive, and limited in scope, but the Seawolf was equipped to receive blue-green laser messages and could do so without trailing long receiving antennae or buoys.

Standard communications procedures had messages for deployed submarines — attack boats on ASW duty in particular — stored for burst transmissions from orbiting communications satellites at specified times of the day. The sub skipper needed only to bring his boat to receiving depth and trail the antenna at a specified time to pick up his mail. Garrett looked at his watch. Seawolf's next scheduled CVLF receiving time was set for 1720, another three hours. Having the Titan Spear message transmitted by satellite rather than waiting for the VLF window seemed a hit-or-miss way of doing things. Either the message was of very low priority or someone back in the World didn't know what the hell they were doing.

And that hardly bode well for the cruise.

However, until the skipper decided to share the contents of the message with the other officers of the boat, it wasn't his worry. Garrett continued listening to the snorkeling noises of the Kilo, pulling them from the heavier pounding of the surface traffic, burning them into his brain until he was sure he could recognize their distinctive feel at another time.

"Mr. Simms, Mr. Garrett. This is the captain. Report to my office, on the double."

Toynbee looked at Garrett, then rolled his eyes. "No rest for the wicked, sir?"

"True enough, Chief."

"Now what did he do?" Grossman asked just before Garrett was out of earshot.

Garrett couldn't help a lightly malicious chuckle at that. Apparently the crew had noticed how hard Lawless was riding him. It suggested that they both liked and respected him, which was important. A boat's XO needed a close rapport with the crew.

The fact that the captain had called for both him and Seawolf's Nav officer suggested that they were about to learn the contents of that UHF message. Garrett had expected Lawless to sit on it for as long as he could, if only to show that he had the power to do so. Much of Lawless's behavior, Garrett thought, seemed centered on his need to prove to all concerned that he was in command.

Then another thought occurred to him: What if that UHF message had been transmitted as it had just in case Seawolf was on or near the surface? That might mean considerable urgency in the matter.

And the only thing Garrett could think of that might be that urgent was the possibility that the United States was now at war with the People's Republic of China. Washington would want to warn its most valuable submarine asset in this part of the world as soon as possible, without waiting for the 1720 VLF transmission window.

A war with China… and the Seawolf was already in the middle of it.

Captain George Lawless looked again at the printout flimsy in his hands, fresh from the radio shack and decoding. "I still don't know what to make of this, COB," he said.

Master Chief Dougherty had been in the control room when Lawless had emerged from the radio shack, and he was summoned to the office with a curt wave of the hand. They were just waiting for—

Three sharp raps on the door announced their arrival. "Enter."

Garrett and Simms came in. "You wanted to see us, Skipper?" Simms said.

"Sit," Lawless said, nodding at a pair of empty chairs squeezed into the claustrophobic space. "Read."

He handed Garrett the message flimsy and watched with mild amusement the play of emotions over the man's face: worry… puzzlement… surprise… consternation…

Garrett handed the message to Simms and said, "I don't understand this, Captain. It's insane!"

"Neither the hell do I," Lawless replied. "Neither the hell do I!"

"It doesn't strike me as an especially sound decision tactically," Simms said.

"I was expecting a message to the effect that we were at war," Garrett added. He almost sounded disappointed. "What does it mean?"

"Damfino," Lawless replied, taking the flimsy back from Simms. "But we will follow orders. By the book, gentlemen, by the book!"

He looked at the flimsy again, reading the decoded message.

There was more, a lot more, but most of it was little more than bureaucratic garble about the need to impress China with America's essentially peaceful posture in the West Pacific. It was signed by none less than Paul Duggin, Undersecretary of State.

But Garrett was right. The whole thing was categorically insane.

But the USS Seawolf was going to follow orders.

By the book.