Seawolf Class

19

At forty knots, Seawolf cruised east across the stretch of shallow ocean between Hong Kong and Taiwan in less than eight hours. The Penghu Islands — until recently known by their Portuguese name of the Pescadores, or Fishermen's Islands — were a scattering of low, flat islands and atolls stretched across the Formosa Strait about halfway between the mainland and the southern tip of Taiwan. They were of little importance to anyone save the local tourism industry and as a median strip in the strait, dividing it into the broader west channel along the mainland coast and the narrower but deeper east channel next to Taiwan.

Garrett had been seeking the deeper water of the eastern passage. The average depth offshore from Hong Kong was fifty meters or less; west of the Penghu Islands, the bottom averaged twenty meters and shoaled to as little as ten meters — far too shallow for the Seawolf to remain submerged.

Which meant those waters were too shallow for Chinese subs as well, and they would be looking for the same, deep waters. The undersea valley between the Penghu Islands and Taiwan would be prime hunting grounds for PLA Navy Kilos.

The sun was high when Seawolf came to periscope depth. Garrett walked the scope, confirming that the horizon was empty. A recent line of storms had passed through on their way into Asia, and the broken clouds caught the golden morning colors and scattered them across the sky.

The sky was filled with radio waves as well as color. As soon as Seawolf's radio mast broke the surface, the radio shack began recording multiple repeated calls. Most urgent was a series of coded messages giving Sea-wolf a forward controller contact, code named Crystal Ball. When contact was established via UHF, Crystal Ball turned out to be a Navy E-2C Hawkeye off the Stennis, serving as a forward battle controller and as coordinator for the Stennis's far-flung air squadrons.

Garrett was not surprised when he heard the voice at the other end of the line as he pressed a radio handset to his ear. "Commander Gordon! What the hell are you doing out here?"

"Trying to get what is laughingly called 'the big picture' by the Beltway insiders," Gordon replied. His voice sounded worn and very tired, and Garrett guessed the Naval Intelligence officer had been awake for a long, long time.

Well, Gordon had been a submariner once, and he knew what port-and-starboard watches were like.

"And what does the big picture look like so far?"

"Like shit. The PLA is out to prove that they rule the Strait of Formosa, and is threatening everyone else with death and destruction if they try venturing through. Four hours ago they closed the strait to all shipping, military and civilian, and set out to prove it by sinking a Filipino freighter and a Japanese oil tanker."

"Missile attacks?"

"Negative. Submarines. We think the Kilos have just started earning their keep. Which is what you're going to do. Confirmation just came down the line. You have temporary command of Seawolf."

The words scarcely sounded real. Even a temporary command was more than he'd been expecting. There were, he imagined, plenty of people back in the World who'd have preferred to see another skipper flown out to the Seawolf, but this was war, and every moment counted.

"Thank you, Commander. So… it sounds like the Seawolf is going to go sub hunting."

"Affirmative… but you have another mission first."

"That being?"

"A platoon of U.S. Navy SEALs — sixteen men — plus ten Taiwanese commandos are stranded on the mainland near Xiamen. J-SOCOM is organizing an extraction with Mark-5s, but we want Seawolf to move in and offer support. The Mark-5s may not be able to penetrate the coastal defenses."

"That is damned shallow water in there," Garrett said. "Seawolf may have to walk in."

"You can fly in if you have to, but get those people out of there."

"What's the rush? I thought you'd want SEAL teams on the ground right now."

"These boys went in just ahead of the current unpleasantness and were basically overlooked when State began playing kissy-face with Beijing. Their Taiwanese opposite numbers walked into a firefight, our boys bailed them out… and they're coming out now with wounded and low ammo."

"We'll get them, Commander."

"Good. I know you will. Retrieving those SEALs is your primary mission. Your secondary mission — which you will pursue so long as it does not interfere with your primary mission — is to find every goddamn Kilo you can run to ground and blow it out of the water. We suspect at least one Kilo is in the AO near Kin-men. She took part in the sinking of the Jarrett last night and is believed to be positioning herself to interdict traffic in the Xiamen area. We want that bastard sunk."

"Aye aye, sir. Any other good news?"

"Only this: You have two carrier battle groups coming into the theater within the next twenty-four hours — the Stennis and the Kitty Hawk. Kitty Hawk will be taking up station off the northern tip of Taiwan. Stennis will be stationed off the south tip. Neither carrier can be allowed to enter the battle zone until we are certain the submarine threat has been eliminated or greatly reduced. The CBGs have their own ASW assets, of course, but they will not be able to cope with ten Kilos. We want you to cause some attrition on the enemy forces before the big boys arrive on the scene."

"Roger that." Hell. Every Chinese submarine along the coast would be eager to score an American carrier. Once they knew those CBGs were on the scene, the underwater stretches of the Formosa Strait were going to look like rush hour.

"You'll have some help from other U.S. submarine forces in the area. The Jefferson City and the Salt Lake City will be arriving ahead of the Stennis CBG. They should be in your AO within the next eight hours. The Cheyenne is en route from the Indian Ocean and should be in your area late tomorrow. Ah… and your old friend, the Pittsburgh, will be attached to the Kitty Hawk group. Try not to run into her with the Seawolf."

"Fuck you, sir," he replied in a deadpan voice. "Fuck you very much." He saw the radioman, who was jacked into the conversation, struggling to control his expression and wondered how long it would take for the story to spread throughout the boat.

"This is where we find out if all the money we spent on the Seawolf was worth it," Gordon said. "Good luck, Tom."

"Thank you, sir. We'll do our best."

"I know you will, Tom. Congratulations on your confirmation."

"Thank you." He didn't let himself think about the possibility of temporary becoming permanent. There were too many variables, too much in the way of politics involved. They wouldn't let him keep the Seawolf once this fracas was over, but another command, perhaps? Another L.A. boat?

This was at least a golden opportunity to get his career back on track. The promotion boards might select him for O-5 yet.

That was a worry for the future, though. Right now, it sounded like Seawolf was the only submarine asset in the Strait of Formosa, and that was damned thin odds. Ten to one? Worse, when you counted the Chinese Akula loose out there, the former Nevolin, and infinitely worse when you remembered that even before their recent Russian shopping spree, the PLA Navy had boasted a submarine fleet of ninety-one old Romeo-class diesel boats, fifteen even more ancient Whiskeys, plus eight or ten of their more modern Han- and Ming-class nukes. Whiskey and Romeo attack boats might be antiques by today's standards, but in a defensive role, dashing out from coastal hides to strike at shipping or passing American naval forces or lying in silent ambush among the tangled labyrinths of coastal islands from Hainan to Luda, they were still deadly. The People's Republic was not yet able to project her submarine force across oceans as easily as the United States, but her submarine forces made her a dangerous regional player and the obvious mistress of her corner of the world ocean should the United States decide to pull back from the western Pacific.

Not an option. Quite aside from any vital interests the United States possessed in the region, Garrett had strong personal reasons not to want to see the Chinese dragon swallow this quarter of the planet.

Kazuko would be back in Tokyo by now. He was glad she was out of the fire zone.

"Mr. Simms," he said as he left the radio shack and reentered the control room. "Plot us a new course."

"Aye aye, sir," the navigator said, looking up from his chart table. "Where to?"

"Into harm's way, Mr. Simms. Into harm's way…. "

They called him Sinbad.

Hai-tziun shan-tzo Hsing Ling Ma — the rank was the equivalent of a Russian kapitan pervogo ranga or an American naval captain — was something of a celebrity within the ranks of the PLA Navy. He was an ethnic Hui, for one thing, a Chinese Muslim of Eurasian descent, from the province of Yunnan, near China's border with Burma, Laos, and Vietnam. Such high rank rarely came to non-Mandarin officers, and only exceptional performance through the course of an exceptional career could have brought him to the post he now held — commander of the Akula-class nuclear attack submarine Changcheng, the Great Wall.

His nickname actually was the Chinese equivalent of Sinbad — Ma Sanbao, a figure unknown to the West but something of a historical icon to people in southern China, Burma, and other parts of southeast Asia. The original Ma Sanbao had been born in 1371 and, like Hsing, was also a Hui from Yunnan. "Ma" was the Chinese equivalent of "Mohammad," and Sanbao's original name had been Ma Ho.

As a child Ho had been castrated by Chinese troops chasing Mongols out of the southern provinces — a curious custom they'd evolved to pacify the male locals, whether Mongol or not — and made an orderly in the Chinese army. Perhaps because of the hormone imbalance, he had grown to great height — probably not the eight feet legend attributed to him, but a giant, certainly, among his own people. By the time he was twenty-five, he'd won influence as chief of all of the emperor's thousands of eunuchs, made powerful friends within the imperial court, and been given the name "Cheng."

In 1405, three years after the ascent of a new emperor to the nascent Ming throne, he was made an admiral. Eighty-some years later, an obscure Genoese navigator in the service of Spain was given the grandiose title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea," but that admiral had only three ships in his command; Cheng Ho's fleet numbered 317 vessels, many of them far larger and more seaworthy than Colombo's caravels.

The Ming Empire was undeniably the world naval power of its day. They possessed enormous fleets, with magnificent ships far larger and more modern than anything yet developed in the primitive backwaters of Europe, vessels with three decks and towering masts capable of ocean voyages of thousands of miles. Between 1405 and 1433, Admiral Cheng Ho set forth on seven separate voyages — the original "Seven Voyages of Sinbad" — which took him to Ceylon and the Persian Gulf, to Arabia, to Egypt, and perhaps as far as the southern tip of Africa.

There were even rumors that the Ming fleets discovered new lands far to the east as well; certainly, they reached the southern shores of Africa from the east fifty years before Vasco da Gama did the same from the west and were within a historical footnote of discovering Europe. Had they done so, world history undeniably would have been vastly different, and the whole long, sad, and bloody chronicle of European colonization of Asia, of opium wars and puppet governments, of western hegemony, the Boxer Rebellion, and centuries of shame and national loss of face would never have happened.

For one brief, gleaming moment of history China had unknowingly held within her grasp the key to world domination. The ascent of a new emperor to the Ming throne in 1433, however, ended all possibility of that. Turning inward, suspicious of foreigners and foreign-barbarian ideas, the Ming Dynasty had ceased its explorations, disbanded its fleets, and even passed laws against building ships of more than one deck. The magnificent fleet that might have circumnavigated a world rotted on the beach, and Cheng Ho vanished, his name erased from the records by jealous, vengeful, or fearful enemies.

China could have discovered the West rather than the other way around, and how might that have changed the course of world history? Hsing Ma had used that argument frequently while campaigning for a stronger, deep-water navy for the PRC and especially for a stronger submarine force, one that could project Chinese power as far afield as Europe or the American West Coast. That, undoubtedly, at least as much as his religion and ethnic heritage, was why he'd received the nickname of Ma Sanbao.

Perhaps as a reward for his diligence in promoting the PLA Navy — or perhaps simply because he was a strong political supporter of Admiral Li Guofeng— Hsing had received the coveted command of the Changcheng and orders to take her into action against the Americans. The U.S. Seventh Fleet had intervened in Chinese affairs in the Strait of Formosa more than once since 1949. This time, it was vowed, the balance of naval power would be in the hands of the Middle Kingdom. Key to winning that power, however, was the destruction of the new American submarine Seawolf. Then other American submarines would have to move into the strait… and movement meant noise, and an advantage in any undersea game of xiang qi.

Seawolf, unfortunately, had eluded the Tai Feng at Hong Kong, where trapping and capturing her would have been easy, and recovery efforts simpler if the attempt had ended with the American's destruction. Now the enemy vessel was loose in the Taiwan Haixia — the Formosa Strait — and trapping her would be difficult. Fortunately, Hsing thought, he held several key advantages.

First of all, until the American carrier fleets arrived, the Seawolf would be largely alone, save for ASW assets flying off of Taiwan. With the Changcheng as the flagship of a wolfpack of Chinese submarines, supported by PLA ASW aircraft and vessels operating off the mainland, it should be fairly simple to cast a net that would snag the American vessel. Too, the operational area between Taiwan and the mainland was excruciatingly shallow — a disadvantage for Hsing's submarines, but a greater disadvantage for the American. There would be no thermal convection layers beneath which a submarine could hide from sonar, no deep trenches in which to lose pursuers.

And best of all, the American submarine's movements could be anticipated, even predicted with some precision. The Seawolf would almost certainly be hunting for the Hutiao, the Kilo-class diesel boat that had torpedoed the USS Jarrett yesterday. With the Tiger Leaping as bait, hard up against the Fujian coast, the Seawolf would be as vulnerable as a tortoise on its back.

Hsing planned his campaign like a carefully plotted game of xiang qi, the ancient Chinese version of chess that, like its western counterpart, used lesser pieces— pawns, guns, carts, horses, ministers, and officers — to trap and pin the opponent's leader, the red suai or the black jiang, a situation called jiang shi. He had already signaled three other Kilo-class subs to join his pack… and sent orders to the captain of the Tiger Leaping to remain in the vicinity of Kinmen.

And now, with almost leisurely deliberation, Hsing began to draw tight the net….

They'd reached their insertion point that morning, taking the risk of traveling by day in order to put yet more distance between themselves and any pursuit. The storm had moved on, but the ground was soaking wet, slowing travel to a slippery, uncertain-footed scramble through mud and dripping vegetation. All of them, SEALs and commandos both, were chilled and miserable despite the wet suits beneath their camouflage. The cold and the damp reminded Morton forcibly of the less pleasant aspects of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training — BUD/S — and of Hell Week in particular, when SEAL recruits were kept soaking wet and running on the thin edge of exhaustion, lucky to pull down forty hours of sleep total in an entire week.

The training was that grueling so that the SEALs knew they could survive such conditions, knew they would survive and continue to hurt the enemy. Knowing he would survive, however, was not the same as enjoying that survival. Just a little farther, he told himself. Just another few kilometers…

Morton crouched in the underbrush at the edge of the forest, studying the narrow channel between the mainland and Kinmen through his binoculars. They would not be going back that way. Half a dozen PLA patrol boats were crisscrossing the narrow channel, and it looked like heavier craft were bombarding the Kinmen defenses. The invasion of Taiwan had begun, apparently, and it had begun, as had long been expected, with landings on tiny, isolated Kinmen or at least with a heavy naval bombardment. Morton could see what looked like a Luda-class destroyer out there, plus several smaller vessels, probably Jianghu missile frigates. A pall of black smoke hung above Kinmen, and he could hear the thump and rumble of big guns across the water.

Their Draeger rebreathers and swim gear were where they'd left them, buried and hidden at the edge of the woods above the beach. They would not be able to make the crossing by daylight, however, not with those patrols out there. And the four wounded Taiwanese wouldn't be able to swim underwater in any case. They would need to wait for darkness… once more.

Morton accepted six volunteers for the perimeter watch and told the rest of the men to get some sleep. Shivering, he decided he would not sleep himself just yet. Instead, he worked with Knowles to set up the LST-5, pointing the antenna at the southern sky.

They were going to need help on this one, and lots of it.

The captain, Queensly decided, was being cautious. He liked that.

They'd crossed the Strait of Formosa at midday, but they'd taken their time, running at twenty knots and taking the 150-mile journey in seven hours. They could easily have halved the length of time necessary for the crossing, but the skipper had a paranoid streak about him, and he took it slow so the sonar team could actually have a chance to hear something.

At the end of the run, Garrett cut the speed even more, idling along the coast at five knots, trailing the TB-23 towed array astern and giving the boys in the sonar shack a really good listen. At speeds over twelve to fifteen knots, the efficiency of the boat's passive sonar arrays was reduced considerably. At speeds of over twenty knots, it was almost impossible to hear anything at all, because of the rush of water over the acoustical pickups.

In any case, even Seawolf made noise when she cruised along at better than twenty knots, and the skipper was being careful about any noise at all. The crew was padding around barefoot or in their socks, and the word had quietly been passed: Silent routine means silent, or the skipper'll see you walk home, see?

Queensly wasn't concerned with noise on the boat… not with the whispered conversations or the mounting tension. He was doing what he liked to say the Navy paid him to do, which was to see with his ears.

Everyone has their own modality, the means by which they best pull in information from the world around them. For most, that modality was sight, with hearing second and kinesthesia — the sensing of body position and movement — a distant third. Ken Queensly, however, had been born with a defect in both eyes that left him nearly blind, able to make out shapes and shadows. So far as the state of Ohio was concerned, he'd been legally blind. He'd gone to special schools, gone through special training, and for a time had even had a seeing-eye dog. Simply living in a world of gray and formless shapes had given him an almost magical way with hearing. It wasn't that his ears were that much sharper than those of sighted people; he'd simply been able to draw a lot more information from the sounds he heard than could most.

When he was fourteen a new laser surgery technique had given him sight. It wasn't perfect — he would always wear glasses — but the shapes now had solidity and meaning. He could see.

And yet Queensly's primary modality remained his hearing, perhaps because his brain had simply been rewired that way. When he joined the Navy at eighteen, a standard test of his hearing had shown he could recognize faint mechanical noises behind a susurration of natural noise, could pick up on acoustical patterns others missed, could distinguish easily between sounds that seemed identical to others. In short, he was a born sonar technician, and in due time, after attending C-school at New London, that was what he'd become.

Perhaps the strangest part of the story of which Queensly was aware was that there were plenty of sonar techs in the Navy who were as good or even better than he was, yet had never been blind. Some people, it seemed, had simply been born with supernatural hearing, and the Navy recruit testing was designed to identify those people so that they could be properly trained.

Queensly was using every bit of his expertise now, both natural and trained, as he sat in his chair at the sonar console, head encased in earphones, eyes closed, reaching out with his mind…out…out… listening.

He could hear the whisper of Seawolf moving through the water and easily discounted that. He could hear a forest of clicks and snaps in the distance… shrimp, or other biologicals. He could sense the bottom, a kind of dead feeling, flat and muddy and very shallow beneath the Seawolf's keel. Far off, there was a rumble of sound, many vessels, he thought, and the pounding of what might have been gunfire transmitted through the water.

And closer… just a few miles off… a steady beat of sound, a kind of chugging noise…

He opened his eyes and studied the waterfall on the console screen in front of him, reaching out after a moment to flick selector switches that narrowed in on the low frequency end of the signal. There… a faint, faint straight line against the background hash. But he'd heard it first.

"Chief? New contact. I've got a diesel boat snorkeling."

Each of the four sonar stations was manned. Queensly was listening to broadband signals from the towed array, while Rog Grossman handled the broadband input from Seawolf's spherical bow array, Tommy Juarez watched the high-frequency input from the port and starboard hull sensors, and Chief Toynbee ran the spectrum analyzer and served as watch supervisor. The sonar officer, Lieutenant j.g. Neimeyer, stood in the doorway, apparently doing his best to stay out of the way.

Toynbee called up the signal on his screen. "Got it. Conn, Sonar," he added, speaking softly over the intercom circuit.

"Go ahead, Sonar."

"Designating new target, Sierra One-eight-three, Skipper. Bearing two-nine-five."

"Do you have a range yet?"

Queenie looked at Toynbee, who nodded. He touched the intercom button on his console. "Sir? Range uncertain, but I think he's close in to shore. I'm getting a bit of back-echo that's kind of…muffled."

He couldn't explain what he heard or how he knew what he knew, but in his mind's eye he could sense that diesel engine chugging along with the muffling presence of the shore just beyond.

"Got it, Queenie. Thanks." There was a pause. "Outstanding job."

"Thank you, sir."

He felt a small warm thrill at that. Queensly was in danger of falling in love with the captain. At least, that's what Toynbee and the others laughingly said. It didn't make sense that a submarine skipper should be able to walk on water, but Garrett inspired that kind of loyalty. Jesus! The man had come down to that filthy, stinking jail himself and charmed them right out from under the noses of those Hong Kong cops….

Right now, he would follow Captain Garrett anywhere, and he would certainly give the skipper his very best. He continued trying to pierce the dark waters about the Seawolf. There was something… something….

Seawolf possessed the most advanced, most sensitive underwater listening equipment in the world, gear so sensitive the sonar crew liked to joke about what they heard on surface ships or other submarines — snatches of conversation, scenes of passionate sex aboard a cruise ship… or the fall of thirty-seven cents — three dimes, a nickel, and two pennies — on the deck of the ship's store aboard a Los Angeles-class sub passing miles away. Toynbee swore he'd once been able to tell the chief snipe on board the DDG Arleigh Burke exactly what was wrong with a pressure coupler on his number three LM-2500-30 gas turbine simply by the sound it transmitted through the water as the Burke passed the Seawolf off the California coast.

Seawolf's sonar suite was the brand new BSY-2(V), affectionately known as "Busy-Two." Computer enhancements and electronic filters allowed the sonar techs to strain each individual thread of sound from the background, clean it up, strengthen it, stretch it for analysis. Nicks, dents, and out-of-balance shafts gave each turning screw a slightly different quality of sound that could be used to identify one ship from another, as individual as fingerprints even on sister vessels. A library of recorded sounds let Seawolf's sonar crew match up the sound prints of thousands of ships from countries around the world.

And yet, despite all of the technical gimmicks, all of the bells and whistles, the most delicate, sensitive, and vital listening device on board any American submarine was the Mark I Mod 0 ears of the sonar tech, and the brain between them. Electronics were wonderful… but the human brain was capable of feats that seemed nothing short of sheerest magic.

What Queensly was picking up now, pulling it away from the background hash and the slow chug of the diesel engine snorkeling up ahead, was less a distinct sound than a feel, almost an absence of sound, a dead zone in the water. Sonar techs sometimes joked among themselves about hearing holes in the water, but there was, sometimes, something about the quality of background noise that seemed to change in a particular direction, suggesting that there was something there in a manner that felt more like extrasensory perception than mere hearing.

Seawolf's TB-23 towed passive array was particularly sensitive to sounds to either side of the boat, though Queensly could hear that snorkeling submarine which was just a little off the port bow now.

"Chief?"

"Yeah?"

"I think I have something to port. Off the port beam." He looked up at his screen, adjusted the frequency input. Nothing there that he could identify by eye. And yet…

"I don't see a thing, Queenie."

"It's there, Chief." He was certain of it. "It's big, and it's moving. And… it's quiet."

"You sure?"

"Absolutely."

"Sonar, Conn."

"Go ahead, Sonar."

"Uh, sir…Queenie has a possible new sierra… bearing…Queenie?"

"Bearing one-nine-zero. Extreme range."

"Bearing one-nine-zero, extreme range. Designate Sierra One-eight-four."

"You got a make on it yet?"

"Negative, sir. It's real stealthy, whatever it is."

"Okay, Chief. Stay on it."

"Will do, sir."

"Tell Queenie he's got a free shore leave if he can hear them talking over there and tell me what they're saying."

Toynbee chuckled and tossed Queensly a wink. "You got it, Captain."

The warm feeling grew stronger.

And as the minutes passed, so too did the nonsounds of the hole in the water to port. Something, Queensly thought, was stalking them.

The hunter was on the point of becoming the hunted.