Terminal Run

22

Captain Lien Hua walked into the command post and found Zhou at the command console doodling on a paper tablet.

“Dou’s starting the reactor,” he said. “The battery is back on-line.” The lights in the overhead flickered and held, the uneven wavering light of the casualty lanterns banished by the brightness. “And we need to submerge. Station underway watch section two and prepare to vertical dive.”

Zhou Ping grinned. “Yes, Captain, section two and prepare to vertical dive.”

Fifteen minutes later the Nung Yahtsu was steaming submerged on her own power, on course north to intercept Battlegroup Two, but no longer in a hurry. Captain Lien ordered a transit speed of eight knots, the optimal for covering ground while engaging a maximum-scan sonar search. This time the Americans would not have the advantage of searching slow and quiet while Nung Yahtsu was forced to burn through the seas at full speed. This time, Nung Yahtsu would sneak up on the Americans.

By the end of the morning watch the ship had arrived at the sinking location of the American submarine. Captain Lien ordered an excursion to periscope depth, and while they examined the surface for flotsam — evidence of a kill they could report to the Admiralty — they transmitted their after-action report to Admiral Chu and received their messages. Lien was scanning the message traffic, which was minimal since the Admiralty assumed they’d been lost. Lien decided to linger at periscope depth to see if the Admiralty would give them emergency orders once their after-action report was digested, and it became clear that Nung Yahtsu had returned from the dead. It was then the American helicopter was sighted. Lien ordered the periscope dipped, only allowing it to be exposed for ten seconds every minute.

In the second minute of observing the U.S. Navy chopper, his face pressed close to the warm optics module of the periscope, Lien noticed that the chopper was not searching for them with a dipping sonar, but had focused its attention on the sea. Two divers jumped out, and a man-basket was being lowered to the sea.

“Dead slow ahead course zero four zero,” Lien ordered from the periscope. “Raising scope.” When he saw what was going on, he became furious.

“Arm the antiair missile battery,” he commanded. “Target number one, U.S. helicopter rescuing survivors of our submarine attack.”

“AAM battery armed,” Zhou Ping reported. “Periscope station has control.”

“Target bearing and altitude, mark!” Lien observed, the periscope still up after the time he should have lowered it. “Missile one — fire!”

There was no sound as the Victory II antiair missile lifted off from the sail in a bubble of steam from the gas generator and broke the surface. The missile’s solid rocket fuel ignited and it flew straight upward to a thousand-meter height and made a graceful Mach 1.1 loop downward, its infrared heat seeker seeing the helicopter’s twin jet exhausts. The missile sailed into the port engine and exploded. The hundred pounds of high explosive was not sufficient on its own to blow up the chopper, only to damage it severely, the fireball blowing off a rotor and sending the chopper spinning out of control. The explosion in the tailpipe of the number two turbine sent turbine blades scattering through the airframe, severing two fuel lines, and the still-burning fireball set off the fuel and then the fuel tanks, and the Sea Serpent IV helicopter detonated with the power of a ton of TNT, blowing rotor blades, aluminum structural pieces, control panels, and human flesh over the surface of the sea. The shock wave from it slammed the eardrums of Lieutenant Commander Donna Phillips in life raft number one. A five-foot piece of helicopter rotor whooshed over her head, the debris flying fast enough to have cut her in half, another piece of shrapnel puncturing the flank of the life raft.

Phillips’s expression fell. Life had just become much more complicated.

“Vertical surface,” Lien commanded Zhou. Zhou gave the order to the ship-control officer, and the ship came to a stop in the waters of the East China Sea, her hovering system controlling her depth. The ship-control officer dialed in a negative depth rate, and the ship rose vertically from fifty meters to the surface. Once on the surface, the ship-control officer raised the snorkel and started the main compressor, blowing air into the ballast tanks. Within two minutes, it was safe to man the fin cockpit.

“Ship is vertical surfaced, sir,” Zhou Ping reported.

“Man the fin watch,” Lien ordered.

When Lien climbed the vertical access tunnel to the fin cockpit, Zhou was stationed as surfaced deck officer. He handed Lien a set of binoculars.

“Look, sir. They must be survivors of the submarine that fired on us and the battle group

Lien’s face grew hard as he looked into the binoculars. “Bring us closer, Leader Zhou, at dead slow.”

Zhou raised the cockpit communicator microphone to his mouth and ordered, “Dead slow ahead, steer course three four zero.”

The ship moved slowly toward the life rafts until they were a half ship length away. Lien glared angrily down on the survivors.

“All stop,” Zhou commanded into the microphone, then glancing at Captain Lien. “What now, sir?”

Lien didn’t answer. He stood there, frozen, as if unable to make a decision.

Zhou’s face was a mask of anger. “Sir, we must hurry to Battlegroup Two, as she may come under attack without our help.”

Lien still stood there, frozen in indecision.

Zhou picked up a microphone and called the command post watch. “Get the key to the small arms locker from the captain’s stateroom. It is in the safe. The combination is the commissioning day of this ship.” It was a date everyone on board was required to memorize. “Bring up five AK-80s and fifteen clips of ammunition.”

“Zhou,” Lien said uncertainly, “what are you doing?”

Zhou glared at his captain. “We can’t take them prisoner, sir. I won’t have Americans on our ship, not these devils who sank the battle group we were ordered to protect. They could revolt and try to take us over. I will finish the job that the Tsunami torpedo began.”

Lien narrowed his eyes at his first officer. His intention was a violation of international law and of the unwritten code of the sea. Lien had read about Nazi Germany’s U-boats doing this, and had condemned the action. He never thought the man he regarded as his protege would do such a thing, even to hateful Americans.

“Sir, you must act,” Zhou said. “If you do not give the order to shoot them, I will relieve you of command under the Regulations of the PLA Navy for Commanders Afloat, Section Twenty-three.”

Lien sighed, but said nothing, just stood there, staring at the Americans. Two enlisted men climbed into the fin, bringing the rifles. Zhou turned to one of them. “Fighter Ling, place the captain under arrest. I have been forced to assume command of the Nung Yahtsu.”

The enlisted sailor stared at Zhou, but seeing the captain standing like a statue, he nodded and gently pulled Lien’s wrists behind his back and tied them with plastic cable ties. He began to nudge Lien toward the tunnel opening, but realized he would have to ask the first officer to move out of the way. He hesitated, then motioned to the senior officer. “Keep him here until we dive,” Zhou said, his attention fixed on the sea below.

Zhou picked up one of the rifles and glared at the American survivors.

Captain George Dixon blinked as he sat up, leaning heavily against Commander Donna Phillips.

“What is it? Are we rescued?”

“Sir, I’m afraid it’s the Julang-class. Either he didn’t sink or the Chinese have more than one.”

“Oh, shit,” Dixon said, groaning. “We have a pistol from the survival kit?”

“A couple of twenty-twos, sir. Good for fending off a small shark, but not much use holding off a Chinese submarine.”

“Oh, God,” Dixon said. “My mother didn’t raise me to be a prisoner of war. Not under those guys.”

“We’ll get through this, Skipper. My grandfather was a POW in Vietnam, and he said it was not as bad as everyone thought,” Phillips said, lying to Dixon. Her grandfather had been shot down over Hanoi and imprisoned, but the truth of his imprisonment was far worse than any of the stories. Phillips tried to breathe deeply, fighting off her feelings of desperate fear, and knowing that if she could give Captain Dixon courage, seeing his war face would give her the strength to go on.

“Okay, XO. We’ll get through this.” He reached into his breast pocket below his dolphin emblem and pulled out the gold coin his wife had given him. He blinked rapidly, then put the coin back in his pocket. Phillips waited for him to show a sign of encouragement, but his eyes closed, at first as if he were stressed, but then Phillips realized that he had lost consciousness.

Lieutenant Brett Oliver, the NSA-assigned officer who’d joined the ship in mid operation began trembling in fear. “XO,” he said, his voice shaking, “I can’t be a prisoner of war. Not with what I know. I’m an NSA agent. If they interrogate me, they’ll break me. They’ll know about the battle network, and the entire war could be compromised.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Phillips said in a hard voice, but seeing his point. She tried to think, but there seemed to be no solution.

“Give me a twenty-two,” he said.

“What do you intend to do, Mr. Oliver?”

“Give me the gun, XO.” His look stopped being frightened for a moment, a hard resolve in his eyes. Reluctantly she handed it to him.

“Don’t use it unless you have to.” she said.

“Goodbye, Donna.” he said. “Good luck.” He slipped backward off the raft and stroked away from the Julang submarine’s approach. Phillips watched him swim, his head barely visible over the crests of the waves. When she could no longer see him, the sound of a single gunshot echoed over the water.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, putting her head in her hands.

When she looked up, the Julang had heaved to, close aboard. Phillips looked at it in wonder. Until now it had been an impersonal diamond shape on a firecontrol display, or a dimly remembered grainy intelligence photograph, and now here it was. It seemed so big in reality, the sail towering over them, the hull wider than their Leopard’s. On the bridge she could make out a half-dozen men, and something else. Either they all had broomsticks, or weapons.

She watched the men on the bridge as they pointed the automatic rifles at the life rafts from a distance of thirty yards. She realized that they were not threatening with the rifles to take the Leopard survivors hostage, but intending to shoot to kill. The scream was torn from her lips without conscious thought.

“Crew! All hands! In the water, now!” She bodily tossed Captain Dixon off the raft and into the sea, grabbed the man next to her, and threw herself backward into the water as the first shots rang out over the waves.

Zhou Ping raised the AK-80, the rifle heavy in his grip, the precise long-range scope installed before the weapon was brought to the fin. In the scope he could see the closest life raft, with a woman sitting next to a man slumped against the yellow inflated wall of the raft. The man had gold insignia on his chest, perhaps a high-ranking senior officer. Zhou clicked off the safety, ready to fire, when a gunshot rang in his ears.

“What was that,” he asked, taking his face from the scope.

“They’re shooting at us, Mr. First,” Fighter Ling said. “Shoot them!”

Zhou put his eye back to the scope, but the people in the rafts were jumping off into the sea. He located the senior officer he’d been aiming at before, put the man’s chest in his crosshairs, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle jumped slightly, coughing as it fired a single round.

“Select the rifle to full automatic, sir!” Ling shouted.

“Damn thing,” Zhou said, finding the switch that took the rifle out of semiauto, then re-sighting on the survivors in the water. He squeezed the trigger and sprayed the rafts and the men in the water with bullets until the clip was empty.

The other rifles began firing as he down loaded the clip and put in a fresh one, then emptied that clip, the bullets flying over the sea at the Americans.

“Look around, number two scope,” Captain Andrew Deahl ordered from the conn of the USS Essex, the Virginia-class SSN dispatched by Admiral McKee to find the Julang-class before it could form up with Battlegroup Two. Deahl stood behind the command console with the Type 23 helmet on, the room rigged for black despite the daylight hour, so that he could better see the seascape in the periscope view. The crew, stationed at battle stations since sonar had detected the Julang at long range, waited silently for the next order. When the Julang, designated Target One, had vertical surfaced, Deahl had ordered tubes one and two check fired, the attack aborted, to see what was happening.

“Depth seven zero, speed zero, Captain.”

“Up scope.” Deahl hit the joystick strapped to his wiry thigh and the photonic mast came out of the sail. Deahl’s view showed the underside of the waves, the computer’s superimposed bearings selected to the bearing of the Julang. When the scope broke through the waves, Deahl reported, “Scope’s breaking, scope’s clear! I have Target One surfaced. Observation, Target One! Bearing three zero five, bearing mark. Range, three divisions in low power, masthead height set at three zero feet, range five hundred yards, angle on the bow starboard one two zero! Attention in the firecontrol party — we are suspending torpedo attack until we can determine Target One’s actions. Carry on.”

“Bastard’s probably just broken down, Skipper,” the XO said in his Baton Rouge accent.

“Sonar, Captain,” Deahl said into his boom microphone, “do you show loss of propulsion on Target One?”

“Captain, Sonar, no. His engines are idle, but he is still steaming.”

“So much for that theory, XO,” Deahl said. Andrew Deahl, a thirty-eight-year-old underweight marathon runner, was new to command, having taken over the Essex a mere two months ago from a captain beloved by the crew, and so far command had been nothing like he’d imagined. The transition from being second-in-command to captain was a wide gulf to cross, and there were moments when he suffered severe self-doubts. The orders to the war in the East China Sea had complicated things, but at least Deahl had learned to lean on his executive officer, though it was hard for a New Yorker like Deahl to trust the smooth Southerner that XO Harlan Simoneaux was.

“Captain,” the XO said in a voice that seemed too loud, “the men in the sail have rifles. They’re shooting at something!”

“What the hell?” Deahl mumbled.

“Oh, shit, Captain. This is where Leopard went down! They’re survivors!”

“Snapshot tube one, Target One!” Deahl shouted. “Disable anti-self-homing, disable anti circular run, immediate enable, surface impact mode, high-speed active search, direct contact mode!”

The outer door to tube one was already open. The Mark 58 Alert/Acute had been powered up for the last thirty minutes, and the solution to the target was locked in, the weapon only waiting for word to shoot. It took a second for the weapons officer to respond to the radical settings required to get a Mark 58 to detonate on such a close target, the safety interlocks required to be removed to allow the weapon to work.

“Set!” the XO finally said.

“Stand by,” the weapons officer called, his console ready to fire.

“Shoot on generated bearing!”

“Fire!” the weapons officer called, and the deck trembled and Deahl’s ears slammed from the torpedo launch.

“Sir, tube one fired electrically,” the weapons officer said.

“Conn, Sonar, own ship’s unit, normal launch.”

The words were barely out of the sonar supervisor’s mouth before the view out the Type 23 went white, then blinked out. Deahl blinked, but the interior of the helmet was dark. Something had happened to the Type 23 mast, he thought. It was then that the sound of the explosion came roaring into the hull, and the ship trembled violently as if struck by a huge sledgehammer.

“Conn, Sonar, explosion from bearing to Target One.”

“Well, obviously,” Simoneaux said sarcastically.

“Raising number one scope,” Captain Deahl said, selecting his thigh controller to the starboard periscope. The second Type 23 rose out of the sail and penetrated the waves, and when it did, all Deahl saw was a large orange and black mushroom cloud and debris falling from the heavens in large metal chunks, the flotsam field growing with each second.

“Target One is gone,” Deahl said with a flat voice. He just realized he may have made a grave error, because if there had been floating survivors within two hundred feet of the hull of the Julang, they were survivors no more.

“Officer of the Deck, vertical surface the ship!”

“Captain, bodies in the water, thirty degrees off the port bow!”

Commander Deahl guided the Essex to the position the OOD had pointed out and ordered all stop.

“Get the divers in the water,” Deahl commanded.

Over the next two hours they combed the waters of the Julang sinking site, harvesting thirty-five bodies, a dozen of them dead, the remainder unconscious. Among the living were five Chinese, two of them officers if Deahl had interpreted the insignia on their uniforms correctly. The dead were wrapped in trash bags and brought to the frozen stores room. The living were brought to the crew’s mess, Deahl ordering the tables unbolted from the deck to create more space for them, the crew’s mattresses spread out on the floor. The medic, a senior chief petty officer on his last sea tour, attended to the wounded. Captain Deahl watched from a corner of the room until the medic came up to him, the older man wiping sweat off his forehead.

“What’s the word. Chief?”

“They’re all lucky, sir. About a million cuts and lacerations and broken bones between them, and a few gunshot wounds. The Leopard XO, Phillips, is in good shape except for a bullet through the upper arm. Captain Dixon took two rounds in the shoulder and one in the chest, and he had internal bleeding, but he’s stable.”

“A round in the chest and he’s still alive?” Deahl asked.

“He had a souvenir in his chest pocket, something heavy and made of gold — a locket or a watch or something. It’s a dented lump curled around a mushroomed AK-80 round now, but it saved his life. That bullet would have gone straight through his heart.”

“Lucky guy,” Deahl muttered. “What about the Chinese?”

“They’ll fare the best, Skipper. They were on the Julang sail, so the explosion threw them clear. I think one of them is the captain.”

“Bring me to him.”

The senior chief led Deahl to the Chinese commanding officer. It was strange, Deahl thought. With his eyes shut, a blanket over him, and an IV needle in his arm, the Red officer looked as innocent as a sleeping child. Hardly the devil that Deahl had imagined. It was just war, Deahl told himself. If not for the war, this guy probably had a house and a wife and kids, an annoyed squadron commander, a ship that needed maintenance, a crew that needed leadership, and all the other headaches of life. In a way, Deahl realized he had more in common with the Chinese officer than he did with a typical civilian back home.

“Thanks, Senior,” Deahl said. “Inform me when any of them regain consciousness.”

Deahl walked down to the control room and addressed the officer of the deck.

“Keep steaming north until we find Battlegroup Two,” he said. “And be damned careful of any more Chinese submarines.”