The Art of War

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

In early January, Captain Joe Child was summoned to the Pentagon for a classified briefing. To Child’s surprise, the briefing wasn’t classified Secret, but Top Secret.

There were at least six admirals in attendance, and the CNO, Admiral Cart McKiernan. The interim DNI was there, along with Jake Grafton, the interim director of the CIA. They sat in the back of the conference room and didn’t say a word.

“Captain,” the CNO said, “your mission is to sink a ship, the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning.”

That ship was, Child was told, the former Soviet carrier Varyag. After the breakup of the old Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the Varyag, a ski-jump carrier of about fifty-nine thousand tons when fully loaded. But money was impossible for the Ukrainian navy to find, so she was stripped of engines and equipment, and the hulk was finally sold to a Chinese consortium from Macau that intended, they said, to turn her into a floating casino. That didn’t happen, but the PLAN got hold of her and decided to rebuild her as a carrier.

The briefer went into all of this at length, then got past the history lesson and discussed the PLAN’s first aircraft carrier. “She’s operational now, with an air wing and a capability that is superior to anything in the Philippine or Vietnamese navies.”

“You want me to sink her?” Child said incredulously.

“Yes.”

Joe Child turned to McKiernan, who was sitting off to one side. “Sir, may I ask why?”

“You know about the nuke we found at Norfolk” McKiernan said. “We are going to try to convince the Chinese navy that messing with us is a bad idea, and they’d better not do it again.”

Four days later Joe Child was in Pearl watching two high-speed stealth Sealions, being off-loaded from two air force C-5M Super Galaxies. A SEAL team had arrived a day earlier from Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego.

Sealions were experimental stealth commando boats and had never become operational. Each boat measured seventy-one feet long and required two sailors to operate it. Each was a semi-submersible, which meant that once loaded with SEALs and weapons, it could submerge until only the pilothouse, a stealth shape that dispersed radar waves trying to locate it, was above water, and carry its commandos and their weapons into a beach or other landing without the enemy being aware of its presence. Good for about forty knots in calm water and a bit less in an unsettled sea, Sealions were the armored personnel carriers of the naval commandos.

Captain Joe Child was in charge of the operation. The two Sealions were checked and, after necessary minor repairs were accomplished, taken out for night runs in Pearl Harbor. After more repairs and a minor modification to the internal lights, Joe Child pronounced himself satisfied, so the Sealions were loaded aboard USS Hornet, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship.

While this was going on, USS Utah, a Virginia-class attack sub, got under way. Roscoe Hanna, still the skipper, was delighted to get the chance to take the boat to sea one more time. The destination was the Yellow Sea, near the Qingdao naval base, home of the Chinese Northern Fleet.

Hanna consulted his charts and fretted over the problem. The Yellow Sea was shallow, and the naval base was at the end of the saltwater equivalent of a saucepan. Utah’s job was to make sure that there were no Chinese submarines near the area that might interfere with the SEALs’ mission.

Naval intelligence didn’t think the Chinese had either acoustic sensors at the mouth of the harbor or submarine nets. The Chinese did, however, have patrol boats equipped with sonar and searchlights, plus small depth bombs that were certainly adequate to kill submerged swimmers if they were detected or suspected, and all the usual machine guns and submachine guns.

“The problem,” Hanna explained to his officers, “is that the bottom is damned shallow way out into the Yellow Sea. The Chinese don’t think any fool would bring a submarine into water that shallow, and believe me, this fool wouldn’t if there were any other way.”

“Why don’t we just wait until the carrier sails, then torpedo her?” the XO asked.

“Orders. Washington wants demolition charges. SEALs will plant them. Washington wants them detonated under the keel, so the ship can’t be raised and repaired.”

“Sitting right at the pier?”

“Minimize the loss of life, yet break her back, sink her. That’s the mission.”

“Who did the Chinese piss off, Captain?”

“Just about everybody who is anybody.” Hanna didn’t know why Washington wanted the Chinese carrier sunk, but he suspected it had something to do with the recent debacle in Norfolk. No one had ever mentioned that a nuclear weapon had been found there, a fact that was highly classified and would never be confirmed by the United States government. But where there was that much smoke, one suspected there was at least a little fire of some kind.

“People way above our pay grade decided on this mission,” Roscoe Hanna told his officers, “so we’re going.” Orders are orders. Aye aye, sir.

While Utah ran across the western Pacific fifteen hundred feet below the surface at twenty-five knots, Hornet and her three escorts, all destroyers with guided missiles for protection from Chinese fighters, prepared to get under way.

Already in the East China Sea was an aircraft carrier, USS United States, with her battle group. Her aircraft were aloft day and night, around the clock. E-2s, satellites and shipboard radars were watching all the aerial traffic over that ocean, and the ships that sailed those waters. Every plane and ship was assigned a track number and watched. During the day, F/A-18 Hornets did flybys and photographed the ships, and occasionally intercepted aircraft that were thought to be Chinese military.

All this was out of the ordinary, and the admiral in charge of the battle group, Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington, worried that too much vigilance would make the Chinese suspect that something was in the wind. Still, with the recent aggressive moves by the PLAN against a P-8A Poseidon on patrol, and at Scarborough Shoals, maybe this was the expected U.S. reaction. He hoped so, anyway, and kept signing the operations plan.

The northern Pacific in January was a stormy ocean, with cold air, clouds, snow or rain, high sea states and low visibility. Many of the sailors on the ships in the small task force centered around Hornet became seasick. Captain Joe Child was one of them. He found the endless pitching, rolling and heaving of the amphibious assault ship impossible to endure inside, so he went to the flight deck and found a place behind a mobile crane where he could huddle out of the wind. The cold air and the openness seemed to help somewhat, but the howling wind and snow made even that refuge a miserable place. Finally he went to the doctor and got some pills. Threw them up. The third time he kept them down, and they seemed to help. The nausea stopped.

For the first time in four days, he felt like eating. In the wardroom he ran into the doctor, who asked, “How you doing, Captain?”

“Better, I think. The pills are working.”

“I thought I gave you suppositories.”

“Pills.”

The doctor nodded distractedly, as if trying to remember. “Okay. But I can’t remember whether I gave you placebos or the real stuff. You might just be getting used to the ride.”

“Thanks, quack.”

“We’re trying to do our part to keep medical costs down.”

Grafton called me in one day and asked if I wanted to go to Singapore. I told him I didn’t. He told me why he wanted me to go, so I said, “Sure.” As if I had a choice. The brass can send you anywhere on the planet by nodding their heads. Grafton was just being polite. I was just being me.

Singapore. I thought maybe I could stop in California on the way home and visit with Mom for a day or two. I stopped into Sarah’s office and popped the question.

“Wanna go to Singapore for a few days? Stop in California on our way back? Meet the family?”

She gave me the eye. “Really?”

“Yeah.” We had been dating a little bit, off and on, and sleeping together occasionally, but I was pretty much living with Willie at his place in the bowels of Washington. I was going to have to do something about that one of these days, but I thought Sarah and I should get our relationship figured out first. “Be a chance for us to get to know each other better,” I told her.

“This is so damned romantic I can’t resist,” she said, tossing her forearm across her forehead. “You’ve swept me off my feet. Okay, I’ll go.”

So the government sent me and we split the cost of Sarah’s airfare. There was an odd penny left over, which I paid so she wouldn’t think I was cheap.

We flew to LA, and from there all the way to Singapore. One thing was certain: Sarah and I knew each other a lot better when we staggered off that flying cattle car.

The hotel was everything I hoped for. A monstrous high-rise with a vast atrium, it was over-the-top opulent, perfect for well-heeled embezzlers seeking to get away from it all or Japanese businessmen on generous expense accounts. The rooms were actually two-room suites; the bed was king-sized. We were on the twenty-third floor, and the view out the window took in most of the downtown. If God ever gets out this way, he’ll probably stay in this hotel or one like it.

Two days after we arrived, on the morning that Sarah had a visit to the spa scheduled, I went to the city morgue and asked to view a body. I gave them the number of the cold tray. They led me into a meat locker with lots of drawers. They pulled out the drawer with the number that I had given them, and I took a look. Yep. Zoe Kerry. Someone had put a bullet into the side of her head. She didn’t look good but corpses rarely do.

Just to be on the safe side, I asked for an ink pad and a couple of sheets of paper. Inked up the tips of her fingers on the right hand, pressed them against both sheets. Thanked the attendant and left. Didn’t make a formal identification, didn’t ask what they were going to do with the body — none of that.

I took a taxi over to the American embassy and asked for a fellow whose name Jake Grafton had given me. At my request he gave me two envelopes. I put the fingerprints in them, addressed one to Jake Grafton and one to Harry Estep at the FBI. The envelopes would go into the diplomatic bag.

I strolled out of the embassy feeling rather bucked with life. Zoe Kerry had gone on to her reward. I speculated about who might have popped her. The Chinese were the most likely suspects, I thought. She had been in the game for the bucks and knew too much. Loose lips sink ships, or so they say.

After Sarah came out of the spa, we had a leisurely lunch and drank a bottle of wine at a window table in the four-star restaurant on the top floor of the hotel, then went downstairs to spend the afternoon naked in bed. I was just another civil servant on per diem. It’s good work if you can get it.

Just after dusk one miserable late January night in the Yellow Sea, the amphibious assault ship Hornet opened her rear doors and two Sealions carrying SEALs backed out of the well. They circled around a time or two, checking systems, then joined into a loose formation and headed west. The coxswains flooded tanks until the decks were below the waterline and only the small, stealthy pilothouses were above water. Above water occasionally, because swells washed over the small pilothouse windows from time to time, obliterating the coxswains’ view.

Down and aft, the SEALs in their wet suits tried not to puke. The motion of the semi-submersibles was rather severe. Some of them lost their cookies anyway.

Captain Joe Child was doing okay — no doubt because he took two of the doctor’s antinausea pills a half hour before embarking. He too was wearing a wet suit, just in case, but he was not going out unless he had to. He was the commander of this operation, with three encrypted satellite phones available to call just about anyone on the planet, including Admiral Toad Tarkington aboard USS United States, the admiral in charge of the Hornet task force and headquarters in Pearl and Washington. He knew there was a nuke sub prowling around out here someplace, USS Utah, but since she was submerged, he had no way to communicate directly with her. Before he left, however, he had read the latest report from SUBPAC, which said that Utah had found no Chinese submarines operating in the area.

The Chinese had been tracking Hornet’s little task force with aerial reconnaissance and radar, of course, but the official word, released in South Korea and the States, was that the task force was part of the American contingent in these waters to participate in an annual combined Republic of Korea/U.S. military exercise held at this time every year since the Korean armistice in 1953.

Captain Child and the five SEALs in his boat settled down for the four-hour ride to Qingdao.

The officer in charge of the second boat was Lieutenant Howie Peavy. His team’s task was to actually plant the demolition charges under the keel of Liaoning, as near the center of the ship as possible. He had four hundred pounds of explosives stored in the bottom of his Sealion, broken down into fifty-pound waterproof bags equipped with electromagnets to hold them in place. No doubt Liaoning’s hull was encrusted with barnacles, seaweed and rust, so a conventional magnet wouldn’t be able to get a grip. Without some way to attach the charges, the team would need a lot more explosives.

Just in case, Captain Child’s Sealion also carried four hundred pounds of demolition charges, which all concerned hoped would not be needed.

Riding just awash, with only the little cockpit above water some of the time, the Sealions pitched and corkscrewed through the sea. The smell of vomit filled the air.

Child stood behind the coxswain in his raised chair to see what he could see. The photonics mast was up to full extension; the picture from that was displayed on a multifunction display in front of the coxswain. There wasn’t much to see on the MFD or through the windows — it was really dark out there. Water from every swell washed over the bulletproof glass surrounding the coxswain. The coxswain had electronic help to stay separated from the other Sealion and a GPS to keep him on course. No radar, of course. If a ship or boat should loom out of the night, the ride would get very exciting very quickly.

Child checked his watch for the hundredth time and looked at the GPS presentation and once again took his seat. He tried to relax, to think about the mission and all the myriad of contingencies, which were things that could go wrong.

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. No good. The boat was writhing like a living beast. So he sat and rode it, just like the six men sitting behind him in the dark.

Waiting is the hard part. Seems like most of life is spent waiting.

What was it the admiral had said? “Your mission is to sink that aircraft carrier. The Chinese will know we did it, so do whatever you must to make that happen and get all your people out. You can’t leave anyone behind. We can’t give them a live man or a dead body to display to the press. That is of utmost importance.”

“SEALs don’t leave people behind,” Child answered brusquely.

Rear Admiral Hulette “Hurricane” Carter scrutinized his face and nodded. “Do what you have to do to accomplish your mission and bring your people back. Whatever it takes.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Good luck,” the admiral said, and shook his hand.

Whatever it takes. God, they were really pissed at the Chinese.

It was about ten in the evening, local time, when the coxswain blew the water from the tanks of Joe Child’s Sealion, lifting it from its semi-submerged condition and exposing the full length of the deck. The SEALs opened the hatches and came out on deck. They were wearing black wet suits with a balaclava, and goggles that magnified ambient light or saw in infrared.

In short order they inflated two rubber rafts, called Zodiacs, got them in the water, and began passing weapons to the man in the boat. One of the SEALs went into the water carrying a rope. He swam ten yards to the rocks of the breakwater, the mole, that formed the outer edge of the harbor, climbed up on it and began pulling a loaded Zodiac toward him.

Ten minutes after the Sealion arrived, the SEALs had a Browning .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod on the mole and ammo belts ready. A petty officer manned this gun and Child was his loader and backup. The other four spread out. One carried an M-3 Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, a “Goose,” that fired an 84 mm warhead — portable artillery — while his teammate carried a half-dozen warheads and a silenced submachine gun. The other two SEALs carried a .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifle with a starlight scope.

Their job was to keep any Chinese patrol boat that found the other Sealion occupied, if necessary, as a diversion.

Joe Child stood by the machine gun and used binoculars to examine the ships in the harbor, which were lit with night running lights, as usual. The carrier was quite prominent, easily the biggest ship in the harbor. She was about a kilometer away, moored against a long, well-lit quay filled with warehouses and cranes.

Other naval vessels were at other piers — three destroyers, some patrol craft, several supply ships.

Joe Child turned on his portable com device. The screen was backlit, as were the keys. He could type a message and the device would scramble it, then send it in a burst transmission to bounce off a satellite, or he could receive scrambled burst transmissions, which would be unscrambled and displayed in plain English on the screen. Finally, he could just use the device as a conventional handheld radio.

He typed in his message, a mere code word that told all recipients that his team was on station and all was going as planned. He hit the SEND button, which fired it into cyberspace.

Aboard USS Hornet, Admiral Hurricane Carter looked at the message on the big computer presentation in the Combat Information Center, and nodded. Aboard USS United States, Admiral Toad Tarkington did the same thing. Then both officers asked their aides for another cup of coffee.

Both ships were at Flight Quarters, which meant the flight decks were manned and flight crews were dressed and standing by in their respective ready rooms, ready to fly. Hornet had six AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters, sometimes called Zulu Cobras after their SuperCobra parent, armed and ready to launch.

Carter asked his operations officer, “How far are we from Qingdao?”

One hundred twenty nautical miles, he was told.

“Close to a hundred,” he said. With a full combat load, the Zulu Cobras would sweat every mile if they had to launch. Carter prayed that they wouldn’t be needed.

Aboard the large carrier, sixteen F/A-18 Hornets and two EA-18G Growlers were fueled, armed and ready for engine start. United States, call sign Battlestar, was just south of Cheju Island, northeast of Shanghai. Qingdao was within the combat radius of her air wing. Still, she had two tankers on deck, ready to launch if necessary.

Half a world away from the Yellow Sea, in Washington, it was midmorning. At Sal Molina’s request, Jake Grafton joined him in the White House Situation Room, which was, appropriately enough, in the basement of the executive mansion. Admiral McKiernan and the marine commandant were there, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The president was not in sight.

Jurgen Schulz, the national security adviser and erstwhile Harvard professor, was in a foul mood. He lit on Grafton like a starving mosquito. “You talked him into this,” he said accusingly, the “him” of course being the president.

“You gotta take your medication every morning,” Jake said. “Don’t forget those pills.” He turned his back on an enraged Schulz and wandered over to the coffeepot.

“Where’s the prez?” Grafton whispered to Molina.

“Fund-raising in California. Squeezing in a little golf.”

“Great.”

Peter Ciliberti, the coxswain of the Sealion that was supposed to deliver the demolition charges to Liaoning, informed Howie Peavy that there was a problem. “They got a net around this thing, sir. We can’t get any closer.”

Lieutenant Peavy looked at the picture from the photonics mast. “We’re still, what? A hundred yards away?”

“About that, I think.”

“Seen any patrol boats?”

“One. He went by the carrier as we were coming in and went on toward the dry dock off to the north.”

“Well, better lift her up so we can open the hatches and get the charges out. If you can put us alongside the net, we’ll hop over it.”

He and Ciliberti rotated the photonics mast in a 360-degree circle, looking at everything they could see in ambient light, then did it again in infrared. The carrier was tied up sideways to the quay, her bow to the south, Peavy’s left, and well lit up. In infrared she had all the usual hot spots, as did most of the ships at pierside, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, alarming.

Magnifying the image, Peavy could see two machine guns along the rail, one forward, one aft, each manned by one sailor. The guns seemed to be on swivel mounts, so they were probably of a fairly large caliber, the equivalent of a .50 caliber Browning machine gun. The problem was the gunners. He wondered how vigilant they were.

The carrier’s masthead and deck lights were behind the gunners, so they couldn’t see more than fifty or sixty yards from the ship, he thought. However, there were four lights on cables dangling from the catwalks, hanging down to about twenty feet above the water. Each cast a nice circle of light on the water. If a swimmer came up in one of those circles of light, and the gunner saw him, well …

They would have to stay submerged. Or take out the gunners.

“Take us up,” Peavy said to Ciliberti, and patted him on the shoulder. “And keep an eye out for that patrol boat.”

As the coxswain did his job, Peavy briefed his team: six men in black wet suits, wearing flippers over their dive boots, and LAR V Draeger rebreathers on their backs, so they would not release bubbles of exhaled gases into the water as conventional scuba gear did. The rebreathers used a pure oxygen system and filtered carbon dioxide from the exhaled air.

Up on deck Peavy took another look around. The night was dark as the inside of a coal mine, overcast, cold, with a stiff breeze blowing those swells lapping against the hull of the Sealion. The divers were going to have to work with headlamps to plant the charges. Peavy would need even more light to set the fuses and timer. Using lights was a risk, but as black as the water was under that ship, there was no way they could do the job by feel. The good news, Howie Peavy thought, was that the reduced visibility in the water, probably about two feet, and the spotlights hanging from the catwalks over the water would mean that no one on the surface would see the lights. He hoped.

He slipped into the water inside the net, made sure his rebreathing gear was working properly and reached up for the first fifty-pound demolition charge. It almost drove him to the bottom, but once it was in the water, it became much easier to handle. He turned, sighted on the middle of the carrier, checked his compass and began swimming toward it on the surface, towing the charge. Fifty yards from the carrier, he submerged.

Standing on the mole jutting from the land to form the entrance to the harbor, Captain Joe Child could see the harbor patrol boat making its rounds. He watched it through binoculars. The boat had running and masthead lights and some kind of deck light. He could see at least four men on the thing. One of them was using a large spotlight, playing it across the water randomly. If they found something, it should be obvious, he thought. So he watched.

After that Sealion ride he thought he would never want to sit again, but after ten minutes or so of scanning with the binoculars, he decided he did. He lowered himself to the damp concrete and braced his elbows on his knees, which steadied the binoculars somewhat.

“We have a subsurface contact, Captain,” the sonar operator, a first-class petty officer, said to Roscoe Hanna. “Sounds like an attack boat. Relative bearing three-three-zero degrees. Perhaps six thousand yards.”

Hanna looked at the computer plot. The contact was on the plot now, but the range was just an estimate, and would be until the contact could be tracked for a while through various bearings.

They were fifty miles east of the Qingdao naval base, running north at three knots. The other boat was heading southeast, in the general direction of the American task force. This close to the Chinese mainland, that was inevitable, perhaps.

“Are we alone?” Hanna asked everyone in the control room. The sonar operators were listening, and all agreed that the submarine at three-three-zero degrees relative was their only contact.

The sea was so shallow, sound bouncing around …

“It sounds like a Chinese attack boat, Captain. Nuclear.”

“Let’s get behind him,” the Utah skipper said. “We’ll let him cross our bows, then we’ll fall in behind him.” Hanna glanced at his watch. In two or three hours the Sealions would be coming out of Qingdao. “Let’s make sure this boat is the only Chinese sub out here, people,” Hanna said, “or we’re going to be the guys with egg on our faces.”

Hanna was assuming the crew of the Chinese boat hadn’t yet heard Utah. If they had, they wouldn’t mosey along as if they were alone for very long. He would soon know.

Swimming underwater towing demolition charges, moving them into position, activating the electromagnets that would hold them in place, all the time working under the vast black bulk of the aircraft carrier — it took tremendous physical exertion from every member of the team.

Peavy had to swim from the bow to the stern, watching his watch, then reverse himself and swim half that time to find the midpoint of the ship’s hull. All this took time, yet while he was doing it, other team members were assembling with explosive charges.

The water was as black as the grave under that huge ship. The turbidity of the water prevented any light from the dangling spotlights from reaching the keel. Howie Peavy and his team members used headlamps — they had to. It was absolutely critical that they got all the explosives as close together as possible, and right on the keel, the deepest part of the ship. Determining just where the keel was in that dark, opaque water was a difficult task. The roundness of the hull certainly didn’t help, because there was no way to determine exactly where the deepest part was.

Peavy and his team worked until they thought they had it. Every man got a vote, by gesture and light.

When the charges were all placed, Peavy and one other diver began rigging the fuses and timer.

It was the harbor patrol boat that caused the ruckus. Joe Child sat watching it, and was appalled to see that it was coming south working right along the antitorpedo net that had been rigged to protect Liaoning.

Of course, the coxswain of Peavy’s Sealion saw it coming. Ciliberti had a great view on his photonics display, and if he didn’t trust digital magic, he could turn in his seat and look north at the real thing coming his way. Ciliberti had already flooded his tanks and submerged the boat as far as it would go, which was down to the glass of the pilothouse, but the patrol boat was coming lazily on, perhaps at two or three knots, with the spotlight swinging back and forth, back and forth.

He had to do something, so he got his Sealion under way and turned ninety degrees to seaward, to clear the net. Perhaps he could allow the patrol boat to go by, then turn in behind him and join on the net again.

What Ciliberti couldn’t do was abandon the SEALs that were now under Liaoning. He keyed his portable com unit, which was in a bracket glued to the instrument panel.

“Gold One, this is Blue Two. I have a problem. I’m clearing the net, but this boat is coming down on me.”

“Roger,” Joe Child acknowledged. The patrol boat was only a hundred yards or so from the Sealion’s last position on the net. Child glanced at his watch. The divers had been in the water for over an hour. How much longer before they were ready to be recovered?

“How far?” Child asked the gunner on the Browning, who was holding a laser range finder up to his eye.

“Gonna be about eight hundred meters, sir,” the gunner said.

Child used his com unit. “Gold Four, give them a Goose round. Gold Six, use the Barrett on those machine gunners aboard the flattop if they fire a single shot.”

Mike clicks were his reply.

Fifteen seconds later, the M-3 spit out its round.

Watching through the binoculars, Joe Child saw the little shaped charge explode on the front left quarter of the patrol boat. The boat began slewing as if it were out of control. No one forward now on the gun. The spotlight wasn’t sweeping anymore. That had been an armor-piercing round, one that would kill a medium-sized tank. Child wondered what it had done to the hull of the boat.

Now it straightened out and accelerated. Child could see the bow rise onto the plane. The boat’s heading began to wander. The helmsman was probably wounded or dead.

“Hit ’em again,” he said on the radio.

This rocket missed. The boat continued on, closing the distance. Captain Child tapped the machine gunner on the shoulder. “Take ’em out.”

The machine gun began squirting short bursts. The gunner knew his stuff. Through his binoculars Child could see sparks where bullets were hitting the boat and pieces flying off. On the fifth burst the boat exploded. As the fireball rose into the night sky, illuminating the area around the boat, the wreckage drifted to a stop. The fire quickly went out as the boat sank. The harbor was dark again.

Except on the ships berthed against the piers and quay. Searchlights came on, klaxons wailed, Oriental voices could be heard talking over PA systems. The crews were being called to action stations.

Joe Child wondered how much more time Howie Peavy needed. He wondered how quickly the berthed ships could be gotten to sea. He wondered how many more patrol boats were sitting at a pier, ready to cast off. He wondered if he should alert the admirals in charge of the task forces.

He decided to alert them with a message on his com unit. Typing it would keep him busy doing something productive.

USS Utah slid in behind the Chinese hunter-killer sub at about four miles distance. If the Chinese boat was towing a sonar array, Roscoe Hanna didn’t want to hit it. Once safely behind the Chinaman, Hanna accelerated a bit to match his speed. A submarine’s stern was its dead zone, the sounds behind it hidden by the turning screws and disturbed water of its passing. The boat they were trailing would undoubtedly turn sooner or later to clear his stern, his “baffles,” but probably not for a while.

“Any other boats around?”

“No, sir.” None had been reported, but Hanna thought it never hurt to ask a direct question and make everyone look again.

Hanna checked the plot. The two subs seemed to be heading for the Hornet task group, which was only forty miles away. At ten knots, they would be there in four hours if they held this course. Of course, Hornet was moving, too. For whatever it was worth, they were already in Hornet’s vicinity.

“How are the sound conditions?” Hanna asked his sonar guru.

“Not good. Too shallow.”

The sound conditions would be equally bad for the Chinese boat, Hanna thought.

The clock on the bulkhead was ticking off the minutes. Captain Hanna sat on a stool where he could see the automated plot and waited.

As the SEALs got their demolition charges attached, they went back in pairs for the last ones, until all eight fifty-pound charges were attached under the keel. Then the two superfluous pairs of divers swam back to the Sealion, which had returned to the net after the passage of the harbor patrol boat.

It was very difficult working in the blackness under the ship, with only ten feet of water between the bottom and the keel, with visibility about a foot. Howie Peavy and his mate, Petty Officer Second Class Macon George, installed the fuses in each charge, attached the timer to the ship, and ensured the clock was working. Peavy was ready to set the timer when George grabbed his arm and motioned that his rebreather was going bad. Together the two men swam upward toward the surface.

They came up right against the hull of the ship. Lights dangling from the catwalk forty feet above lit the surface and dazzled the divers, whose eyes had not adjusted. Still, it was doubtful if anyone on the catwalk was looking straight down at the waterline.

“We can’t stay here,” Peavy told George. “You stay here, and I’ll go back and set the timer. Then we’ll share the mouthpiece and swim back together.”

A thumbs-up.

Peavy turned and flippered down … just in time to feel the whap of a bullet hitting the water near him. Very near.

He grabbed Macon George’s feet and dragged him under. George was using his hands to help get under the surface, so the two went down together.

Peavy took a deep breath, passed the mouthpiece to George, who put it in his mouth, spit the water out around the edge, exhaled, took a deep breath and passed it back.

The two men swam back down to the keel — and had to hunt for the damned charges. They had drifted too much toward the stern, Peavy realized, and turned George and swam back along the keel.

Taking turns breathing, they set the timer for thirty minutes. Then Peavy checked his compass, and they swam away underwater in the direction of the Sealion.

The cold water was getting to both men. They were very tired, lethargic.

They couldn’t quit. They swam on, holding hands, trading the mouthpiece, checking the compass every few strokes in that dark, cold, wet universe.

Although they didn’t know it, the Chinese sailors at the machine guns on the catwalks had opened fire on the surface of the water. They had no target, just sprayed bullets back and forth.

Petty Officer First Class Jack Brumlik was settled in with the Barrett sniper rifle on the mole. He was lying prone. He turned the rifle and aimed at the muzzle flashes. Touched off one of those .50 caliber rounds.

The muzzle flashes stopped. He waited for the starlight scope to adjust, saw the gunner looking wildly about and put the crosshairs on him. Squeezed ever so gently and felt the rifle smack him in the shoulder. When he recovered from the recoil and looked again, the man was not visible.

“The other one,” his spotter said. “Shoot him, too.”

Jack Brumlik aimed and touched off his weapon. A first-shot hit.

“Let’s move,” the spotter said urgently. “They’ll be shootin’ back.”

Brumlik scrambled up and grabbed the rifle, and they ran fifty yards along the mole, closer to the Sealion and the machine gun on a tripod.

When Howie Peavy and Macon George got to the net and surfaced, they found the Sealion was fifty feet or so to the north. Holding on to the net, they worked their way along it, then climbed it to the deck.

The hatch was open. Peavy shoved George in, then shouted down, “Count off.”

Five men answered. Peavy made six. Plus the coxswain. Peavy took off his rebreather and mask, dropped them through the hatch, then climbed down and dogged the hatch behind him.

“Let’s get the hell outta here,” he roared at the coxswain, and then counted heads again. Yep, he had everyone.

He went forward and climbed up beside the coxswain. “Message the ship. Give them the code. Mission complete, exiting the area.”

“Yes, sir.”

Peavy smacked the coxswain on the shoulder, then went aft to check on his men.

Aboard Hornet and United States, the admirals ordered the ready sorties to launch. The Sealions might need air cover on the trip back to Hornet.

Aboard the Sealion that was clearing Qingdao Bay, Howie Peavy looked at his watch. Seven minutes to go.

Meanwhile Captain Joe Child was supervising the reloading of the Zodiacs, then the transfer of the weapons to his ride, the Sealion with coxswain Peter Ciliberti at the helm.

It took a while. Child was about ready to go down the ladder and dog the hatch behind him when the charges under Liaoning went off with a thud. He could feel it through the water first, then the air. Not too loud.

He stood mesmerized, watching the carrier tied to the quay through his binoculars. Her lights were still lit. Some water had been squirted aloft, and he could see the cloud of it illuminated by the decklights. Then it dissipated.

Nothing happened. The lights stayed lit.

Child didn’t know what to expect. Obviously she wouldn’t go down like a torpedoed freighter in an old Victory at Sea movie. But shouldn’t she be doing something?

Maybe they got the charges in the wrong place. Maybe they didn’t use enough explosive. Maybe—

Then he realized the middle of the ship was lower, the bow and stern higher. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the middle settled and the bow and stern seemed to rise.

Liaoning was only going to do a little bit of that, Child realized, before the middle of the ship hit the bottom mud.

Her keel was broken. She was in two halves.

Child jabbed a fist aloft, went down the ladder and dogged the hatch, and shouted exultantly, “They did it! Broke her back! Let’s get the hell outta here, coxs’n.”

Child personally typed the success code into his com unit and hit the SEND button.

When he finished, he turned and saw that every man there was grinning widely.

Yessss!

Aboard Utah, the sonarman had the audio of his gear on the control room speaker, with the volume turned way down.

It was here that Roscoe Hanna and the control room crew heard a sonar ping from one of the destroyers around Hornet. One ping, pause, two pings, pause, two more. Then silence again.

The success signal. That meant the two Sealions were on their way back to Hornet.

Hanna glanced again at the plot. The Chinese attack boat was still four miles in front of them, still heading a little south of east toward the Hornet task group.

Hanna decided to wait until the Chinese boat heard the oncoming Sealions, which weren’t quiet. When the Chinese heard them, they would do something. Hanna didn’t know what, but the unknown sound coming from the direction of Qingdao might tempt the Chinese skipper to take his boat to periscope depth for a look around.

It would be at least an hour before the Sealions were close enough to hear. Roscoe Hanna took a head break.

It was midafternoon in Washington when Rear Admiral Hurricane Carter notified the Pentagon and White House of the success of the SEAL mission. In the White House Situation Room the civilian staffers and bigwigs made a happy noise, then wandered out. Finally only the permanent Situation Room staffers were left … and Admiral Cart McKiernan and Jake Grafton. They sat side by side in chairs at the back of the room.

Those two didn’t get excited when the news was announced. They wouldn’t get excited until the SEALs were back aboard Hornet. They wandered over to the coffeepot, helped themselves and inspected the stale doughnut and bagel selection.

McKiernan paused to whack Grafton on the arm with his fist. Grafton gave him a grin. Then each took a chunk of carbohydrates and a cup of sour coffee back to his seat and tried to get comfortable.

Utah heard the Sealions at least ten minutes before the Chinese attack submarine in front of her reacted by turning so her right flank was fully exposed to the noisemakers. Silently, slowing carefully, Utah entered a gentle turn so that her bow remained pointed at the Chinese sub, which was heading off to her right. The helmsman kept the turn in. The result was that the angle between their headings increased.

Roscoe Hanna knew precisely what he was going to do. The only thing he worried about was the timing. When? So he waited until the oncoming Sealions were about five miles away at two o’clock relative to him. They were going to cross in front of the Chinese boat, with the closest point of approach being three miles.

“Now,” Hanna said, and the sonarman flipped the switch to active pinging. Ping, the sound went out, and returned. The Chinese sub blossomed on the screen. Another ping. And another, regularly. The Chinese sub was pinned.

“Noisemakers,” Hanna ordered, and three acoustic bouys were launched from small tubes in the sail. They shot away from Utah, then slowed and began making wonderous amounts of noise, noise that would overwhelm the sensitive listening sensors of the Chinese sub, at least for a few moments.

The result of all this, Hanna hoped, was confusion. At the least, he thought the Chinese skipper would forget about the surface contacts he had detected and worry about the origin of all this noise. No doubt it was from another submarine, but where?

“Open outer doors on Tubes One and Two.”

The fact that Utah was going to shoot two torpedoes had been briefed and rehearsed. Now the sailors went right down the checklist. The torpedoes would travel a buttonhook path so that they approached the Chinese submarine from her beam.

“Fire One.”

Everyone in the control room felt the jolt of the big torpedo being ejected.

Ten seconds later, “Fire Two.”

The second torpedo went into the water.

Now Hanna ceased pinging and turned his boat to port to present its stern to the Chinese boat and open the distance.

Aboard the Chinese sub, confusion reigned. The active pinging of a subsurface sonar so near had come as a shock to the entire crew. Then the noisemakers.

They knew where the other sub was, or thought they did. But why all the noise?

While the skipper was trying to figure it out, the sonar operator called, “Torpedo running. Active homing. Approaching…”

The Chinese sub wasn’t even at action stations. The OOD in the control room smacked the collision alarm with his palm and the noise rang in every compartment in the boat.

The captain grabbed the headset from the sonarman. Put one pad against his ear. He could hear the distinctive gurgle of the approaching torpedo. He grabbed the volume knob and turned. The torpedo was close. Seconds from impact. He could hear the pinging of its seeker head.

“Surface,” he shouted. “Emergency surface.” He tossed the headset back to the sonarman, who flipped a switch to put the audio on the loudspeaker system.

Bedlam in the control room. Everyone shouting and reaching for knobs and buttons as the torpedo closed. The sound of the approaching torpedo was rising in pitch and volume as it sped toward the submarine. The pinging from the seeker came faster and faster as the range diminished.

Then … whump! A noise like the impact of a huge hammer. The torpedo struck the outside of the boat and didn’t explode! The noise from the seeker head and the pump-jet propulsion system fell silent.

But …

There was another torpedo in the water! Like the first, it roared in with its pinging head probing for the sub, whining louder and louder.

Whump!

Silence.

Two duds.

Or two practice torpedoes …

“Level off at this depth,” the captain roared. “Get the boat under control. And where is that Yankee sub?”

While the ocean floor was shallow here, Roscoe Hanna thought he could safely take Utah a little deeper, so he had the chief drop her down another hundred feet. Perhaps he would get a bit of help from a thermal layer, if there was one, or a discontinuity in salinity.

A minute passed, then two. “More speed,” Hanna told the chief of the boat. “Twenty knots.”

“Aye aye, sir. Twenty knots.”

The noisemakers had hidden the sound of the practice torpedoes, but he figured he got two hits at the end of running time. And gave the Chinese skipper the thrill of his life.

Hanna turned the boat so he was heading straight for the center of the Hornet task group.

Now the Chinese boat went active on its sonar. Ping.

It was turning toward Utah.

If the Chinese skipper fires a torpedo, this will be World War III. But he won’t, Hanna told himself. He’s been surprised, humiliated, lost a bucket of face, but he won’t pull the trigger. I hope.

“He’s accelerating, Captain,” sonar reported.

“Range?”

“About five miles, sir.”

“Give me a real hard starboard turn, Chief. I want to turn and point our nose right in front of him and go charging in like we’re going to ram.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Start pinging, sonar. I want to go close, but I don’t want to trade paint.”

“Yes, sir.”

The deck tilted as the chief had the helmsman bring Utah hard starboard. She came around like an airplane with her planes and rudder biting the water with a fierce grip. Then she straightened out.

“Faster, Chief. Another ten knots, I think.”

The Chinese boat was a bit to the left and perhaps fifty feet above them. The distances became stark as the two submarines rushed together, now at a combined speed of almost fifty knots, about sixty miles per hour.

“When we are one mile apart, we turn her, Chief, to port, go down his starboard side. We will fire more noisemakers as we pass.”

And that is what they did. They fired three more noisemakers as they were abeam the Chinese sub, then hit the turbulence she had left in her wake. The boat bucked and writhed. No doubt the Chinese sailors were also getting bounced around in Utah’s wake.

“Passive on the sonar,” Roscoe Hanna said. “Turn us to the south, Chief, and let’s get the hell out of here as fast as we can go.”

When the four Zulu Cobras from Hornet rendezvoused with the eastbound Sealions, two sections of F/A-18 Hornets were already overhead. The helicopters were under the overcast, flying at about one thousand feet. Their position lights twinkled in the vast darkness over the night sea.

Above the overcast, the fighters were probing the night with their radars while being illuminated by Chinese search radars. The pilots could hear the baritone tones as the radar beams swept over them. This information was data-linked to an E-2 Hawkeye in an orbit at thirty thousand feet over United States, and from there passed to the Combat Information Center and Flag Plot aboard the ship. From there it went by satellite to the White House Situation Room, where Cart McKiernan and Jake Grafton were watching.

Real-time text messages from Captain Joe Child and Lieutenant Howie Peavy scrolled across one of the large projection screens. The SEAL raid had been a success; all the men were coming out; they had egressed after sinking a harbor patrol boat and taking out several machine gunners aboard Liaoning.

“A nice job,” the CNO muttered. At the duty desk, one of the officers was on the telephone, no doubt briefing Sal Molina.

Grafton and the admiral watched as two bogeys climbed away from an airfield near the Qingdao naval base in real time, rendezvoused and headed out to sea, eastbound and climbing.

McKiernan looked at his watch. “The SEALs cracked that keel two and a half hours ago. Since then the PLAN has been trying to figure out what happened and what to do about it.”

These two had discussed all this, of course, before they went to see the president for approval of the SEAL raid. “The Chinese will be surprised, embarrassed and probably outraged,” Grafton argued, “yet they won’t shoot unless they are fired upon. No Chinese officer is going to take the responsibility for starting World War III.”

“You hope,” Jurgen Schulz glowered.

The secretary of state, Owen Lancaster, cleared his throat. He was a white-haired Brahmin who had been helping hold up the New England end of the establishment for at least fifty years. Although no one knew how he voted, if he did, he had been routinely appointed to key ambassadorships by thirty years’ worth of presidents. This president had elevated him to run the State Department, to the relief of a great many Americans who expected another party hack.

Lancaster was no fan of Jake Grafton, with whom he had crossed swords several times in the past. Still, he eyed McKiernan and Grafton carefully, then spoke to the president. “The Chinese need to be taught a lesson. That bomb in Norfolk was a gambit approved at the very top. We can’t let it pass. If we do, sooner or later we will be in a shooting war in the Far East or we will be run out of there with our tails between our legs. We must make our choice now. Tomorrow will be too late.”

The president deferred to Lancaster. “Do it,” he told Cart McKiernan.

So Grafton and McKiernan had gotten their permission. Now they sat in the back row of the White House Situation Room watching jets rush together over the Yellow Sea and hoped they had correctly predicted the Chinese reaction.

Yet neither man was really worried. Even if some Chinese pilot opened fire, he would quickly go into the sea, and cooler heads would prevail in Beijing. Political provocations are wonderful PR for the home folks, but when one encounters naked steel, it is time to reassess. Are you ready to fight?

The two American sections of Hornets, two fighters in each section, turned so that the Chinese formation went between them; then they turned hard to come in at an angle from each side, a classic rendezvous. But as the Chinese pilots knew, the Americans were in their rear quadrant pulling lead. If the Americans chose to shoot, they were perfectly set up for it.

The flight leader reported that the Chinese jets had their external lights on, as the American fighters did. Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington passed that comment on to Washington immediately, and both McKiernan and Grafton relaxed a bit when they heard it. The Chinese pilots had not been sent to shoot down an American plane or two. If they had, they would have never let the Americans get into a firing position.

McKiernan slapped Grafton on the shoulder again and dug a pack of chewing gum out of his pocket.

When the last of the helicopters and fighters were back aboard ship and Hornet had recovered her two Sealions, McKiernan and Grafton stood, stretched and strolled out of the Situation Room. They met Sal Molina coming in.

“We’re going over to the Willard for steaks and drinks,” Grafton told the president’s man. “You want to come along?”

He did. Late that night the Willard valet at the door hailed taxis to take all three men home.