Terminal Run

11

The USS John Paul Jones labored through twenty-foot seas and forty-five-knot winds, the gales rising to fifty-five knots. Although she was larger than the Sears tower laid on its side, displacing over a hundred twenty thousand tons as one of the largest aircraft carriers built in the history of the world, she could barely be seen five hundred yards away with her running lights dark.

The carrier battle group lumbered slowly west-southwest in the Philippine Sea, a day’s sailing time from the Celebes Sea south of the Philippine Islands, which was another day from the Strait of Malacca and the entrance to the Indian Ocean. The ships of the force were far over the horizon from each other, outside of radar range — which was useless to them anyway, because the operation order required all surface search radars to be shut down to avoid the detection of the oncoming battle group through electronic means. Unfortunately, that also applied to air-search radars, leaving the battle group vulnerable to air attack, although the new high-resolution radar and thermal-imaging surveillance satellites would supposedly alert them to an incoming attack aircraft, assuming the Internet Email connection functioned and they could authenticate the message fast enough. The storm was a godsend, as it made flight operations impossible, not just for the John Paul Jones, but for the adversary as well.

High over the John Paul Jones’s flight deck the superstructure of the island presided. The highest full-width island deck was the bridge, with angled windows looking down on the wide expanse of the deck and the surrounding seas. Set into the windows were large Plexiglas wheels spinning at six hundred RPM, casting off the water of the almost horizontal rain to allow the officers to see outside, but even the view through the wheels was nearly opaque. The atmosphere surrounding John Paul Jones was more water than air in the driving rain.

The bridge deck’s central feature was the ship control console, with the helm station with its wheel and the throttle console and communications station. Forward of it on either side were the radar stations, all of them dark. The carrier was in the center of the far-flung loose formation, the antisubmarine destroyers and frigates running far out in an ASW sector fifty to a hundred nautical miles ahead of the rest of the battle group Somewhere out there were five Aegis II missile cruisers, their holds stuffed to the gills with Equalizer Mark IV supersonic heavy cruise missiles. Also steaming with them were the multipurpose destroyers, the DD-21s, their clean decks making them look like the old Civil War ironclads, but their belowdecks choked with batteries of missiles and torpedoes. To a bystander, the John Paul Jones carrier battle group would seem invincible, the most massive assembly of naval firepower since the War of the East China Sea, with over two million tons of warships plowing the hostile seas. But to the battle fleet’s commander, Vice Admiral Egon “The Viking” Ericcson, the fleet was woefully inadequate. The Achilles’ heel of the flotilla was its vulnerability to hostile submarines.

Far over the horizon to the west, the nuclear submarine Leopard had come to periscope depth and had sent a brief situation report, a “sit-rep,” copied to Admiral Ericcson’s task force. Admiral Ericcson was awakened during the night to read the message from Leopard.

“I wasn’t asleep, goddammit,” he said in his gravelly voice to the messenger of the watch.

The admiral sat up in his rack and pulled a new Partagas cigar out of his humidor and lit it in the dimness of the stateroom, illuminated only by his desk lamp. He handed the pad computer back to the messenger of the watch and snarled at him to take the news to the ship’s captain and the battle group operations officer. Too wound up to return to sleep, Ericcson rose to his six-and-a-half-foot height and pulled on his khaki uniform. On his left breast pocket were eight rows of ribbons, topped by the gold wings of a fighter pilot. Below the ribbons Ericcson wore his surface warfare pin, and below that his fleet command gold emblem, a downward angling dagger framed by tidal waves. He ran his hand through his closely cropped full head of platinum-blond hair, the fierce frowning expression interrupted briefly for a yawn. Ericcson coughed, swearing to himself for the tenth time this trip that he would quit his constant cigar smoking. He was rarely seen at sea without one in his fist, insisting on chewing them unlit in places where smoking was prohibited. The bridge of the aircraft carrier was such a place, the advanced electronics of the phased array radar systems too delicate to be bombarded with cigar smoke. The Viking had accused the electronics of being sissies, and insisted on smoking anyway.

He took three cigars to the bridge, where he decided to spend the rest of the night, reclining in the fleet commander’s chair and smoking. He spent one in three nights in the chair, the nicotine and the weight of fleet command making him an insomniac. The deck inclined upward precipitously as the ship rode an incoming wave, then rolled sickeningly down the crest to slam into the trough, all the while rolling far to port, then back to starboard, the ship corkscrewing through the mountainous waves. Ericcson lit the first cigar, stoking it up to a mellow cloud in front of him, listening to the music of the spray on the windshield and the howl of the wind in the rigging, the low tones of conversations on the bridge and the whine of the high-speed gyros. The Viking puffed on the Partagas, his eyes half shut, feeling the roller-coaster motion of the deck, a deep contentment filling his soul, his battle fleet under his combat boots, sailing into harm’s way on a ship christened John Paul Jones, the greatest American naval officer in history.

Ericcson smoked the cigar and let his mind return for the dozenth time to Patton’s underground bunker briefing.

“We’re late and I’ve got orders for you both. Vie, you first, since we need to get you on the plane to Pearl before you’re missed. For the next six days, get ammunition loaded and put out rumors that there are a number of exercises coming, quick scramble-to-sea-type things. This is the hard part, because you have to have your ships ready to go without anyone thinking they’re being readied for an extended emergency deployment. Shut down any heavy maintenance your repair organization’s doing. Button up all the ships, and give the repair boys some excuse — a readiness inspection or an audit of their records and procedures. Then next Saturday night you’re to have one of your customary big all-hands parties. Invite all your fleet’s commanding officers and their executive officers, their wives and girlfriends, husbands and boyfriends. Make damned sure everyone comes, get it catered, open bar, but get a slow waiter. Early in the evening get all the captains and XOs together in the basement, put on some music, give them each two of these handheld computers, a main unit and a spare. Brief them on the Red-Indian flap. Don’t release anything on the loss of security of the network — you can tell them we’re doing an exercise to see what happens if we use it for disinformation purposes, as a security exercise. Then, as another exercise, scramble the whole fleet to sea. Slowly. A few ships at a time. Go to sea by ship type, destroyers, then frigates, then cruisers, rather than as a coordinated battle group. No one is to know the whole fleet is pulling out, it has to be a complete surprise to the men. You’ve got two weeks. In fourteen days I want the Nav ForcePac Fleet steaming at maximum revs for the Indian Ocean, fully loaded out with war shots and provisions for a long haul, but I don’t want any satellites to suspect, no pier side prostitutes reporting anything, no wives or husbands squawking, no word at all. It’s just another day playing in the Pacific, and we need to see if our toys will work. That’s all. We’ll be back next Tuesday, honey, so pick up a few steaks and plan to put the kids to bed early. Get the picture?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Vie, your ships will not be sailing in formation. You’ll all be far over the horizon from each other, so any spy satellites just see one of you at a time. Meantime I will be mobilizing the mothballed fleet under robotic control, using NSA’s electronics instead of the command network, and the decoy ships will be sailing all points of the compass, so to anyone in orbit it will look like an exercise. You will be doing a zigzag on the way, so a photograph won’t show you always headed the same direction.”

“An eye-in-the-sky will see the preponderance of ships heading for the Indian Ocean, sir, on their base course.”

“We can’t help that. At the end of the day you still command surface ships. They’ll never be as stealthy as McKee’s boats, but the ocean is a very big place. And that’s all I have for you, Vie. Get back to Pearl Harbor. There’s a jumbo jet waiting for you topside. Takeoff before the sun rises, and get back to the golf course before the Reds or the Indians know you’ve been gone.”

Ericcson had risen from his seat, the briefing obviously over.

“Good hunting, my friend,” Patton said. “You’ll have the mixed blessing of a target-rich environment.”

“One last thing for you, sir,” Ericcson said. “Don’t bother about the demotion. With a mission this heavy, I might as well have the title as well as the headaches.”

The cigar was down to a soggy nub. Ericcson lit a second, his thoughts returning to the present. He squinted at his watch, frowning deeper as he realized he couldn’t see the face. He looked around the dim lights of the bridge, making sure no one was watching him, then sneaked out a pair of frameless reading glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on to see the Rolex face reading 11:50 pm local time, which was 1750 GMT or 1250 pm on the U.S. East Coast. He quickly put the reading glasses away and called the officer of the deck over.

“Get the ops boss and the captain to flag plot in ten minutes,” he said quietly.

“Aye aye, sir.”

Ten minutes later, the Partagas was half smoked, and Ericcson left the bridge out the hatch to the ladder way below past air operations to flag plot, a full-island-width space filled with displays and land maps and ocean charts, the central table a map of the entire Indian Ocean in relief. Over on the port side the Gulf of Aden emptied into the Arabian Sea from the Red Sea north to the Suez Canal. A fleet marker showed the Royal Navy Fleet making its way in the eastern Med toward the Suez Canal. In the early hours of daylight Eastern Europe Time the fleet would make its approach to the canal. Their entrance into the Arabian Sea would happen fifty hours later at a speed of advance of thirty-five knots, but he gave them another eight for the speed restriction at the mouth of the canal. That put the Brits in-theater in sixty-two hours.

The Viking walked a pair of dividers across the surface of the map, measuring the distance from their position to the Strait of Malacca before he noticed Captains Casper Hendricks and Dennis Pulaski standing behind him. Hendricks was a Harvard grad, an ugly officer with a long thin nose, eyes much too close together presiding over thin lips and a weak chin. He was tall, thin, and awkward, with one of the deepest mean streaks Ericcson had ever seen in the fleet, but the man was sharp and incisive when it came to grasping a tactical situation, which led to bitter arguments over tactics. The admiral loved to mix it up with the ship’s captain, but the raised voices obviously bothered Hendricks. Ericcson had wanted to stop in a liberty port and get the man drunk and laid to see if it would loosen him up, but there had been no time during the flank run from Pearl. Captain Pulaski, the battle group operations officer and Ericcson’s acting chief of staff, was Hendricks’s opposite. Pulaski was short and solid, his thick arms and legs carrying a barrel chest with a hairless bucket for a head, his pockmarked features blunted by four years of brigade boxing at the Academy, his fists appearing capable of driving nails without a hammer. He spoke with a thick Chicago accent, every syllable sounding tough and intimidating. His thuggish appearance fronted for a tactical intelligence as honed as Hendricks’s or Ericcson’s. In contrast to the ship’s captain, Pulaski loved the tactical flaps with The Viking, sometimes breaking into language even more colorful than Ericcson’s. At their last tactical session, Pulaski had erupted, crossing the line by roaring, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Viking — my second-grade daughter can deploy a fleet better than that.” Flag plot had gone completely silent, Hendricks’s face had gone white, and Ericcson had drawn himself up to his full height, a murderous look coming to his face before he roared in laughter and clapped Pulaski on the shoulder. Hendricks looked like he eagerly awaited the day when both officers would leave his ship far behind them.

“Morning, gentlemen,” Ericcson said. “Pour yourselves some coffee and get your asses over here and look at the chart. We have serious problems.”

“Same problems we had last night, Admiral,” Pulaski said, filling his coffee cup and rubbing his eyes, the ops boss looking rumpled, wrinkled, and tired.

“Exactly, sir,” Hendricks said in his cultured accent.

“Except that today I’ve had an idea. One of those inspired middle-of-the-night ideas that can get you fired. Look at it like this, men.” The Viking jabbed a finger at the fleet marker at their position in the Philippine Sea. “This is us.” Then he pointed a finger at the marker outside the Suez Canal. “The Royal Navy.” At the far end of the chart, the East China Sea ended and the South China Sea began near the island of Taiwan. The admiral placed a red marker in the South China Sea between Taiwan and the Philippines. “Red Chinese Northern Fleet Battlegroup One, making way at thirty-five knots.”

Ericcson put his chin in his hands, thinking. “Listen, the Royal Navy Fleet is going to be here too soon. Allowing the Brits in-theater is a loser. We need to attack them the minute they exit the Gulf of Aden, or maybe as soon as they leave the Red Sea and enter the Gulf of Aden, here at the choke point.”

“That would take a miracle, sir,” Hendricks said. “The East Coast submarines are inbound, but at least six days out. Besides which, we don’t have direct operational control of them. They still report to McKee.”

“Not the point,” The Viking said. “Look at the chart. What do you see?”

Pulaski pointed at the Suez Canal. “If we hold the Royal Navy Fleet at the Suez for six days, we can set up an ambush for them when they come out of the Gulf.”

“Exactly,” The Viking said, stoking a new cigar. “We’ll block the Suez.”

“But, sir, how would you propose to block the canal? We can’t just drop a big bomb on it.” Hendricks looked like he’d just bit into a lemon.

“I need some real-time overhead intelligence of what’s transiting the Suez Canal. And hurry.”

Nung Yahtsu moved through the dark and the cold at a keel depth of three hundred meters on a course of one nine zero degrees true.

In the belly of the ship, in the command post beneath the fin on the ship’s upper level, several officers and men stood watch in the dimness of the room’s red lights, the glowing navigation plot, and ship control console instrument displays. The room’s silence was broken only by the bass thrum of the air handlers moving air into the room, accompanied by the music of the whining firecontrol computer consoles set into the port side of the room. The center of the room was taken up by an elevated platform surrounded by smooth stainless steel handrails, called the command deck, where the commander’s console and command chair were mounted astern of the twin periscopes. Astern of the command deck, two navigation tables were arranged, one of them in an area of darkness. Its electronic flat panel display was set up to communicate with the firecontrol computer, showing a small area of the sea around them. The second navigation plotting table was illuminated by a dim red lamp. The display looked down on the surface of the earth from high above, showing the East China Sea at the southern approaches to the Strait of Formosa. In the center of the plot a glowing red dot marked their position. Behind them, to the north by twenty nautical miles, a green dot depicted the fleet formation of Battlegroup One as it made its way south on the long voyage to the Indian Ocean on this mission of revenge.

Leaning over the navigation plotting table was the tall, lean form of Lien Hua, the commanding officer of Nung Yahtsu. Lien studied the chart display, deep in thought. He walked his dividers along the track line going through the dot of the ship’s position, calculating the distance and the time until they entered the South China Sea, and from there around the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the Strait of Malacca, the entrance corridor to the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal southeast of the Hindu Republic of India. The point at the northern run of the Strait of Malacca was marked with a broken curving line, the curve denoting the point that the Chinese plasma tipped heavy cruise missiles would finally be in range of their Indian targets. The battle group could not get there fast enough for Lien Hua.

He glanced up at the chronometer bolted to the bulkhead above the cables leading to the ship-control console, the brass instrument a gift he had given to the ship. The chronometer had been taken from a British sailing vessel during the Opium War of 1839 as the barbarian calendar reckoned time. Lien’s ancestor Lien Bao, the great-grandfather of Lien’s great grandfather had been killed by a British Royal Navy lieutenant in that three-year struggle that had resulted in England taking Hong Kong. Not long after, the British dogs stole Burma from the breast of China, the Russians took Manchuria — in violation of China’s first treaty with a European power — and the French ripped Indochina from the dynasty’s empire, feeding on Chinese territory like a hyena eating a corpse.

He turned his mind away from world politics for a moment to think about his wife and their twin girls. Po, his wife, was petite, and the doctors never suspected she would have twins. Twins were problematic in China, where the rule was that a citizen may only have one child, and it was typical that twins would be separated. But without Lien saying a word to him, his superior, Admiral Chu HuaFeng, had intervened with the PLA General Staff, which had had a word with the civil authorities, and Lien and Po had been allowed to keep both girls. The news that they could keep both babies came at the same time that the Julang-class final design was rolled out, and Chu placed Lien in command of the first unit of the Julang-class. It was as if the heavens had smiled upon him. It was then he had found his faith in the Life Force of the Universe, and felt the current of destiny that he had ridden until this moment, the curve of life that would carry him to execute China’s revenge upon the naval forces of the West, his hatred of China’s enemies and his love for China mixing inside him like two serpents entwined.

He checked the chronometer again. It neared midnight, Beijing time. He pulled a phone to his ear and dialed up the first officer’s stateroom. The sleepy voice of Zhou Ping answered.

“Station the command duty officer,” Lien Hua ordered. “I am retiring for the evening. Wake me at two bells of the second watch.”

“Yes, sir. Any night orders for me, Captain?”

“Only the standard ones for this mission, Mr. First. Detect the enemy and pierce him until he dies in howling pain.”

Admiral Kelly McKee walked slowly down the pier, deep in conversation with his chief of staff, Karen Petri. Despite their previous caution about being watched, today McKee had arrived in his staff truck with the flags on the fenders. The people watching them already knew something was going on, since every submarine except Hammerhead had already departed the piers of Norfolk, leaving the base looking lonely and deserted.

McKee instructed the driver to drop them at the security fence rather than at the berth of the USS Hammerhead. McKee wanted to see the ship from a distance first, and watch her grow in his view. If he were honest with himself, he would admit to loving the collection of high-yield steel, uranium fuel assemblies, and electronics that formed the first ship of the Virginia-class. He would never forget the first moment he saw her, the day he had rechristened her Hammerhead in honor of the World War II submarine his great grandfather had sailed and his father’s Cold War Piranha-class ship. A photo in McKee’s study at home showed all four generations of McKees on the deck of a fishing boat, four-year-old Kelly proudly holding open the jaws of a hammerhead shark they’d caught, the smiling faces of his ancestors behind him. When Patton had asked McKee to take the submarine to sea — when she wasn’t even completed yet — his only condition was that they change her name, and Admiral Patton had reluctantly agreed.

And now here she was, a ship of his command, but the days of being a submarine captain now behind him. He felt an ache in his soul daily that his command at sea was over. The only possible comparison was that of being a former moon astronaut, the experience of walking on another world a defining experience, and when it was over, that sense of identity seemed to fly away, and being a senior flag officer at his young age of forty-three held none of the thrill of SSN command. When it came time to pick a submarine to be his command platform for the upcoming war, he had been torn. Common sense would tell him to take one of the less effective ships, so that the war zone would not be deprived of a first-string sub, and the skipper could avail himself of the admiral’s experience to improve. But fixing a deficient ship was not the mission, and in truth there was no dog of the fleet — all the ships were front line fighting SSNs, no one candidate suggesting herself to be the one ridden into the op area. So McKee had picked the ship that still appeared every night in his dreams, the ship of his past.

As he got closer to her, her breathtaking sleek lines made him ache, just as the face of a beloved exgirlfriend would. He stopped fifty yards aft of her and stared, the currents of the past made real to him. He tried to shake the emotions, forcing himself to see the ship as a machine. There was her simple slab-sided rudder protruding from the black water of the slip. Further forward her hull sloped gently out of the water, where the aft escape trunk hatch was latched open, an electrician watching as the shore power cable gantry slowly retracted into the pier like a rocket’s fuel boom rotating back to the tower just before liftoff. Forward of the aft escape trunk the hull was a perfect cylinder, the top curving surface of her glossy and black, her skin the same as a shark’s to lower skin friction and absorb sonar pings. A hundred feet further forward the tall sail rose starkly from the hull, the conning tower a simple fin, vertical at the forward and aft ends, but in cross-section, teardrop shaped. Three masts rose out of the top of the sail, each one with a mottled gray-and-black-painted fairing. McKee could see the stainless-steel rails of the flying bridge above the cockpit with its Plexiglas windshield. Forward of the sail he could see the forward access hatch opened, and there the bullet nose sloped down into the water. There was no doubt, he thought, she was a beauty.

“Admiral?” a booming voice asked from far away. McKee tried to bring himself back to the moment, and saw the husky athletic form of Commander Kiethan Judison standing in front of him, at attention, his hand to his garrison cap in a rigid salute. Judison’s trademarks had been his struggle with his weight, his too-loud voice, and his mop of hair, but it seemed he had won the battle of his waistline, his hair was short, and only the foghorn voice remained. McKee came to attention and returned the salute, then broke into a wide grin at his former navigator, who was now in command of the ship.

“Kiethan,” McKee said. “Great to see you, and my apologies in advance for cramping your style with a flag rider. You know I hated that when I was CO.”

“I know, Admiral,” the captain of the Hammerhead said, “but this is different — this time it’s you. And now the baddest submarine in the fleet just got badder. Welcome aboard, sir. And good to see you again, ma’am,” Judison said to his former executive officer. Karen Petri smiled at him and returned his salute. “Would you like a tour?”

“I’d love a tour, Commander,” McKee said, grimacing at his watch, “but we need to go. I’ll walk through with you after we pull the plug.”

Judison grinned. “Well, let’s go then.”

After the deck sentry announced their arrival, Judison shouted up at the bridge, “Off’sa’deck, lose the gangway!”

The gangway silently rose off the deck and retracted into a pier structure, only the singled-up lines keeping Hammerhead fast to the pier. The three officers lowered themselves down the forward access trunk ladder, the sensations of the ship making McKee smile. The harsh electric smell, the bright fluorescent lights, the growl of the ventilation system, and the whine of the inertial navigation binnacle made it seem like coming home. Judison led them to the V.I.P stateroom, where their bags were already loaded on the train-compartment-style bunks.

“I’ll let you two get settled and meet you on the bridge,” Judison said, shutting the door behind him.

Karen Petri looked up at McKee, noticing him looking at her, and she smiled shyly. “Not much privacy here, is there, Kelly?”

“Does it bother you?” he asked.

“No. It’s cozy. I just thought maybe it was making you nervous.”

McKee laughed. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad to be here,” she said quietly.

A knock rapped at the door, and she rapidly turned away from him to rummage in her bag.

“Yes?” McKee said.

“Sir, the captain sends his respects and invites you to come to the bridge. The ship is getting underway.”

“After you. Captain Petri,” McKee said, He smiled as he climbed to the top of the bridge access tunnel and on top of the sail to the flying bridge. He had a good feeling about this run. He clipped off the end of the Cohiba with an engraved cutter given him by the old Devilfish crew and lit it with a Hammerhead lighter, the cigar firing up to a mellow glow. He handed cigars to Captain Judison and the two junior officers down in the cockpit, and puffed the stogie, feeling happy for the first time in months as the land faded away behind them and the buoys of Thimble Shoal Channel passed by on either side of the ship.

When they cleared the Port Norfolk traffic separation scheme and turned to the southeast, he went below with Judison and Petri. After he changed into his submarine coveralls-the sleeve patches showing the emblem of SSNX-1, the Devilfish — he joined Judison in the wardroom to look at the charts of the op area, and to collect his radio traffic from the ships of the squadron that had already submerged and were flanking their way to the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, where they would sail into the Indian Ocean. After a voyage of a week and a half, they would be in-theater, the first mission to get in close to the Royal Navy battle groups and submarines, the second the sinking of anything still afloat after the eastern Indian Ocean submarines and Admiral Ericcson’s surface fleet fought it out with the Reds.

He poured himself a cup of strong coffee and leaned over the chart display with Judison and Petri, the deck shaking with the power of the flank bell, the ship rolling and pitching in the waves of the Atlantic. McKee smiled, back in his element.

A hundred and fifty nautical miles north-northeast of the Nung Yahtsu, the United States Navy fast-attack nuclear submarine Leopard sped deep beneath the waves at an engine order of all-ahead flank. The needle of the reactor power meter remained steady on the dash, marking one hundred percent power.

The propulsor thrashed in the sea at 240 RPM. The steaming engine room howled with the power of the main engines and the two ship service turbine generators powering the gigantic reactor recirculation pumps. At this speed the ship flew through the water like a bullet at just over fifty knots, almost fast enough to outrun a conventional torpedo. The decks of the vessel shuddered violently at the flank bell as she sped southward to intercept the Chinese battle group.

In the first moments of the maximum-speed run, books had been shaken off bookshelves, cups vibrated out of pantry cupboards, and anything on a table not strapped down would walk its way to the edge. It was not the gentle bumpiness of a backcountry dirt road in grandfather’s pickup, but more like the old-fashioned muscle toning machines with the strap that jiggled the body frantically. The power of the screw at flank would set the teeth buzzing. The psychologists had assumed that the vibration would lead to crew fatigue, but exactly the opposite was true. The shaking hull reminded every crewmember aboard that the ship was headed for something vital, that she was speeding on to her destiny.

Captain Dixon walked into the control room and looked at the chart. “What time are you slowing?”

“Top of the hour, sir,” Lieutenant Kingman said. Kingman was the damage control assistant, one of the chief engineer’s right-hand men.

Leopard had been sailing a southern course parallel to the Chinese battle group track, but fifty miles east, outside of their detection range, but at the very point that their own sonar systems had to strain to hear the loud convoy. The ship had been called to periscope depth to receive an E-mail intelligence update and to send a situation report, and the time shallow at six knots had allowed the convoy to disappear far over the horizon, and had called for a flank run to catch up. Fortunately, they had made their last trip to periscope depth until time-on-target. Since the flank pursuit began, every ninety minutes the Leopard slowed to ten knots and maneuvered back and forth in a target motion analysis wiggle to allow their passive sonar system and the battle control computer to recalculate the battle group position and course. Once the battle group movement was determined, Leopard would speed back up to flank. She would keep up this sprint-and-drift tactic until she was fifty nautical miles ahead of the fleet, when Dixon’s orders had them turning to intercept the track of the battle group and coming to periscope depth as the Chinese ships sailed directly toward them. By the time the huge surface ships were about to run over Leopard, Dixon’s torpedoes would begin connecting.

“Torpedo room ready?”

“It’s like being at the Academy the night before final exams before Christmas, Captain. Everyone’s tense and nervous and excited and happy at the same time.”

“Keep up the max parallel scan for Chinese attack submarines, OOD. Intel has the battle group steaming with the Julang-class, and we don’t know what she sounds like.”

“Yes sir. We’ve got the transient processors straining, and we’researching the probable tonal frequencies, but so far all we’ve heard are the surface ships.”

“The battle group is the haystack. Find the needle.”

“We’re working it, Cap’n, but the flank run isn’t helping. Our signal-to-noise ratio blows with us blasting through the ocean.”

“We’ll continue on the parallel course to the battle group until we’re a hundred miles further south of them. Then turn to intercept their track at a right angle. We’ll close the track at flank so it will only take an hour, then we’ll slow to four knots and orbit at the hold position. When we get to the battle group track, they’ll still be sixty-five nautical miles north, a two-hour trip for them to overrun our position. In that two hours we’ll be rigged for ultra quiet and pacing back and forth across the battle group incoming vector. Odds are, an antisubmarine escort sub will be twenty or thirty miles ahead, but he’ll come clanking in at his flank speed. We’ll catch him first.”

“Will we fire on him if we see him?”

“No. We’ll let him go by, but we’ll keep tabs on him. If we shoot him and miss, he’ll alert the convoy and they’ll disperse, and they’ll get away. As soon as we release weapons against the Chinese battle group we’ll put the remainder into the Julang-class SSN. Then we can put our feet up on the table and smoke cigars.”

“It’s an excellent plan, Captain,” Kingman said. “Damned glad I thought of it.”

“Recompute the intercept time and get the navigator up here to examine the new courses. The XO will brief the crew in the mess decks. We’ll man battle stations at zero three hundred.”

Captain Dennis Pulaski stood up from the console he’d been leaning over. The overhead satellite image appeared on the two-meter-tall bulkhead display screen, the resolution startlingly detailed on the high-definition display.

Admiral Ericcson slowly unwrapped a fresh cigar as he scanned the screen.

“Good weather shot,” he said slowly. “Suez Canal is busy today.”

“Busy every day, sir,” Pulaski said. “Twenty tankers in the queue waiting to enter the canal from the Med side. Another fifty at anchor waiting their turn. The Red Sea side is lighter, but not by much. And the canal itself is filled nose-to-tail with tankers big and small. The Red Sea channels are choked with hundreds of vessels.”

“Any cruise ships?”

“Nothing showing up here, sir.”

“Chore number one, Dennis, is to find out where the nearest passenger vessels are.”

“I’m on it, Admiral.”

“What about the British? Where are they on the Suez approach?”

Pulaski leaned over the console and adjusted the display.

The vantage point of the view climbed as northern Africa and the Mediterranean came into the picture and the Suez shrank. Pulaski made an arrow appear on the display.

“The better part of the Royal Navy carrier battle groups are transiting here, north of the Libyan Gulf of Sidra, west of Crete, Admiral. But we don’t have anything on the positions of their submarines. There’s a chance they were sent on ahead.”

“What’s the British speed of advance?”

“Thirty-eight knots, sir.”

“Not bad. Nothing like what we’re doing, though.”

“Oilers and tender ships are keeping the group’s speed down.”

Ericcson lit the cigar and stood deep in thought. “Calculate the transit time for a time-on-target cruise missile attack on the ships in the Suez Canal, the approaches to the canal from the Med and the Red Sea channels, assuming we put down ten ships here, fifteen here, and twenty here,” Ericcson said, using the Partagas as a pointer.

“Large bore Equalizers?”

Ericcson nodded.

“How close a tolerance on detonation time, Admiral?”

“Five minutes.”

Pulaski shook his head. “Missiles would be flying all night, sir. We’re right at the edge of the range circle. It’s coming out at six and a half hours time-of-flight from launch number one. By the time they get there, their targets are far over the horizon.”

“We won’t target them until late. Their last fifteen minutes inbound.”

“That’s a lot of telemetry, sir. There’s forty-five missiles inbound. If the weather degrades and we don’t have a clear overhead shot, or if the satellites are out of position, or there’s a problem receiving your signal, we could risk the whole missile battery.”

“We could give them a backup targeting zone and then confirm their individual targets close-in. They would fly for where we want explosions and if they don’t hear from us, they can seek out tankers or ships where we want detonations, and if they do hear from us, they get a target in the last minutes of flight.”

Pulaski smiled. “Perfect. The Suez becomes blocked by tanker wrecks, the Brits are bottled up in the Med, and you’ve just bought us two or three weeks to attack the Red Chinese.”

Captain Hendricks picked that moment to enter flag plot with a coffeepot and a plate of bagels and pastries. “What are you two conspiring about now,” he asked.

“The admiral has a plan to block the Royal Navy from the Indian Ocean.”

Hendricks listened for a few minutes, his face becoming white. “Oh no, no sir, you can’t do this. That’s civilian shipping, in international waters, for God’s sake. You can’t just toss missiles at the Suez Canal, dear God, what are you thinking, sir? We’ll be barbecued in the world press. The U.S. will be seen as a nation of war criminals, pirates, aggressors—”

“How will they know it’s us?”

“Oh, please, Admiral. Forty-five heavy supersonic cruise missiles streaking over every piece of territory between here and the Suez Canal? Who else would have the means to do that? And the motive? Not to mention the twenty thousand souls in our task forces who’d know we launched nearly fifty missiles a few hours before massive explosions in the Suez. Come on, sir. The world will know, and we don’t have the authority to do this, and even the President wouldn’t do this.”

“Think of the alternative, Captain. The Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean. These missiles will need to be targeted on British ships if we don’t plug up the canal. The Brits are bringing in-theater some of the nastiest nuclear weapons ever created. You want to let them in?”

“I’m not saying that, sir. I’m just — you could be about to kill a thousand civilians on these tankers. Or what if there’s a cruise ship in the mix? You want that to be your legacy? You attacked a cruise ship? After what happened to us last summer, you can still consider this?”

“So, Casper,” Ericcson said, puffing his cigar, “are you saying we need to get permission to do this? Maybe you’re right.”

“Permission?” Hendricks sputtered. “Sir, we can’t do this at all!”

“You’re right, you’re right, Patton will need to weigh in on this, maybe even bring in the President. Still, I’d think they’d want to have it done while having someone to blame. Dennis, put together a quick briefing draft for Admiral Patton, just a few sentences. Make it a “UNODIR,” so it reads unless otherwise directed we will launch missiles in twenty minutes. Then, if we don’t hear from Patton, we go ahead, and I’ll be accountable for anything that screws up. They can put me in prison after we sink the Chinese. If we do hear from Patton, and he says to hold off, but his message seems to lack a certain urgency, we’ll know he wants this done and wants us to disregard his countermanding order. We’ll claim we didn’t get his order in time. If Patton comes roaring back with a flash message saying stand down from your attack and repeats it three times, I’ll back off. How’s that?”

“Overkill, sir,” Pulaski said. “Just launch the damned missiles. You drag Patton into this, of course he’ll say no. You think the Pentagon wants responsibility for a hundred or a thousand civilian casualties? Plus, we’ll have to pay for the damage and repair the canal.”

Ericcson laughed out loud. “You’re worried about a lawsuit? Listen, draft the message, but just give Patton ten minutes to reply. Meanwhile, let’s take the task force to battle stations and prepare to launch the missile salvo.”

“Admiral Patton? A flash transmission came in on the bypass E-mail circuit marked personal for CNO, sir.” The Navy lieutenant commander handed Patton a tablet computer, and the admiral put down his pen and pushed his reading glasses to the bridge of his nose as he read.

He studied the message, then wandered to the sepia-colored globe in the corner of the Chief of Naval Operations suite and tapped at the Suez Canal, frowning in concentration.

“Draft a reply, with immediate priority,” he said.

“Ready, sir,” the aide said.

“Make it read, “Strongly concur with your plan. Good luck. Admiral Patton sends.” Got that?”

“Yes sir.”

Patton sat back in the chair, a slight smile appearing on his face.

The first Equalizer IV heavy supersonic cruise missiles streaked off the deck of the John Paul Jones at just after three in the morning and climbed to the west. With a missile taking off every minute, it took less than an hour to launch them all.

Five hours later, Admiral Ericcson was called out of his rack to flag plot as the missiles received their targeting instructions. A half hour later the units began to seek their targets in the Suez.

“Turn on SNN London,” Ericcson said to Pulaski. “Let’s see how long it takes for the news to hit the airwaves.”

By the fourth explosion, Satellite News Network London interrupted a business report with a breaking story about violent supertanker explosions in the Suez Canal.

“Any bets they get a camera there to catch the last missile impact live?”

Two minutes after Ericcson spoke, the tanker on the screen was hit from directly above by a descending missile. The explosion rocked the camera. An orange eruption of flames rose from the middle of the ship, and as it grew into a fierce mushroom cloud, the form of the supertanker could be seen in the smoke, clearly broken in half, the bow protruding pathetically vertical while the aft section rolled to expose the huge screw and rudder.

“Holy Christ,” Pulaski muttered.

Ericcson nodded somberly. “Poor bastards.”

A moment of silence passed, until finally Ericcson tossed his cigar away and said, “I wonder what the British admiral is thinking right now.”

The pilot put the supersonic Whirlwind fighter in the approach glide slope, rowing his throttles to full power, back to half throttle, then back to a hundred percent. The deck of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier Ark Royal grew closer in the windscreen, on a perfect calm sunny day in the Mediterranean. The pilot took one last scan of the instrument panel — the landing gear was extended, flaps were at thirty degrees, the arresting hook was deployed, fuel was at thirty percent, engine oil pressure was nominal — and after a tenth of a second had his eyes back on the carrier deck. He jogged the wings level, dipped the nose, pushed the throttles to maximum, and stopped breathing. One second to impact, then a half second, until the twenty-ton jet’s rear gear thumped hard on the steel deck of the carrier. The jet was still at full throttle in case the arresting hook missed the cables and he had to fly back off the carrier deck. The wait for the deceleration of the hook seemed to take a full minute, but suddenly the pilot was thrown against his five-point harness as the hook bit into the arresting cable and the heavy jet came to a full stop. The pilot cut power, retracted the flaps, and opened the canopy, then followed the deck officer’s direction to taxi off the landing area. The wheels were chocked, and the signal came to kill the engines.

The pilot climbed out, feeling both exhilarated and disappointed to be back on the carrier deck. He pulled off his helmet, a full head of salt-and-pepper hair falling over his forehead. The squadron commander ran toward him from the island — that couldn’t be good news.

“Admiral,” the squadron boss called.

The pilot pushed a sweaty lock of hair out of his face and looked at the squadron commander. “What’s the trouble, Commander?”

“Sir, bad news from the Admiralty in London. The Americans have launched an attack on the Suez Canal. There are fully forty hulks blocking the channels, sir.”

Lord Admiral Calvert Baines IV, Royal Navy, Commander British Indian Ocean Expeditionary Forces, bit his lower lip hard, enough to make his mouth bleed, trying to avoid cursing.

“Show me the data,” he said calmly, his sweaty flight suit suddenly making him feel chilled.

“We’ll either have to wait at the mouth of the canal or turn back and go around Africa, sir. We’ve just lost three weeks, maybe longer.”

Baines sighed, handing his flight helmet to the squadron boss. “Let’s get all the facts, then talk to the Admiralty. But first, let me visit the men’s room.”

The admiral ducked into the head, and when he made sure he was alone, he spit blood into a paper towel, then clamped it to his mouth so no one would hear him cursing into it.

Goddamned Americans, he thought.