The Art of War

CHAPTER TWO

Six miles away and two hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, the officers and sonar technicians of USS Utah listened to the dead-in-the water surfaced Chinese submarine and the gurgling noise of the sinking yacht. They knew exactly what made the noises. And they wondered what was going on.

Utah had picked up the Type 093 Shang-class sub as it exited the Chinese sub base at Sanya, Hainan, four weeks ago, and listened to her submerge. The American sub had fallen in trail about six miles behind her quarry and had no trouble maintaining that position. The Chinese sub was quiet, but that was a relative term. At 110 decibels, she was much noisier than Utah, which was a Virginia-class attack boat with all the latest technology. Utah was so quiet she resembled a black hole in the ocean and was undetectable by Chinese sonar beyond the range of a mile at this speed. She never once got that close.

The American skipper was named Roscoe Hanna, and he was an old hand at following Russian and Chinese boomers, as well as conventionally powered Chinese Kilo- and Whiskey-class boats. This was the first time since he’d assumed command of Utah that he’d had the luck to latch on to a nuclear-powered boat. The Chinese diesel-electric subs were noisy on the surface and easy to follow because they couldn’t go very deep and they had to surface, usually at night, to recharge their batteries. The difficulty level rose geometrically, however, when two or more of them operated together. Chinese nukes, on the other hand, spent more time in port than they did at sea, probably because their reactors were unreliable and the boats needed copious maintenance.

“What’s the name of this boat?” someone asked. Research in the ship’s computers couldn’t come up with a name, merely a hull number in the class.

“It’s a Chinese military secret,” the chief of the boat decided.

“The Great Leap Down,” the XO quipped, so that is what she became to the American crew sneaking along behind her.

Hanna and his officers had been ecstatic four weeks ago in the South China Sea when they realized they had a nuke on the hook. Then the ecstasy faded and mystification set in. The Chinese sub didn’t stooge around the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin, or head for the Taiwan or Luzon Strait. She submerged, worked up to eighteen knots and headed south.

Occasionally, at odd times, the Chinese captain would slow down and make ninety-degree turns to ensure no submarine was behind him, its noise masked by his propeller, and he would maintain that slow speed for a while to listen, “clearing his baffles.” While he did that, Utah, in trail, also listened. The Americans wanted to ensure that their boat wasn’t being trailed in turn by a Chinese or Russian sub. No, except for the Chinese attack sub and Utah, the depths were empty.

After a half hour or so, the Chinese sub resumed cruising speed. A half hour to listen, then go. The routine must have been on the Plan of the Day. On a similarly predictable schedule, the Great Leap routinely slowly rose from the depths and descended again, no doubt checking the temperature and salinity of the water at various levels, and once poking up her comm antenna for a moment, probably just to receive message traffic from home.

Captain Hanna and his officers remained alert. Russian subs occasionally used a maneuver known as a “Crazy Ivan” to try to detect trailing U.S. submarines. The Russian sub would make a 270-degree turn and come back up its own wake, trying to force any trailing sub to maneuver quickly to avoid a collision, which would make noise and alert the Russians to the trailing boat.

Yet the Chinese maneuvered only to clear their baffles. The Great Leap Down held course to the south. Rounding the swell of Vietnam, the course became a bit more westward.

The noise the Chinese boat made appeared as squiggles, or spikes, on computer presentations. The sonarmen designated the unique noise source with a symbol, then recorded and archived it. A movement of the noise source left or right meant the contact was turning; up or down, ascending or descending; getting quieter or noisier, slowing or speeding up. Following it required care and concentration, made easier by the fact that every maneuver the Chinese sub made changed the frequency of the sound. Taking on or discharging water to change her buoyancy, speeding up or slowing the prop, moving the rudder — all of that was displayed instantly on the sonar computer screens in Utah’s control room.

“My guess is she’s headed for the Strait of Malacca,” the navigator said to Captain Hanna, who was standing beside him studying the chart.

“Into the Indian Ocean?”

“Well, maybe.”

Hanna seemed to recall that at least once before a Chinese boomer or attack boat had passed through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean. Normally they stayed in the western Pacific to intimidate their neighbors and strengthen Chinese demands for complete control of the China Sea. Yet this one was on a mission, going somewhere. As the navigator had predicted, it went past Singapore and northwest right through the strait between the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra.

“Maybe she’s going to India to show off Chinese technology,” the captain mused.

Yet out of the strait, the Great Leap Down turned southwest, around the northern tip of Sumatra and through the Great Channel between Sumatra and the Nicobar Islands, into the Indian Ocean. Then it set a course for the Cape of Good Hope. Utah followed right along.

“This is one for the books,” the XO said one evening at the wardroom table. “Maybe she’s going to the States. The captain and his crew might be defecting, like Red October. Maybe she’ll surface outside the Narrows and nuke into New York harbor.”

“France, I think,” the chief engineer opined. “Maybe they are going to France for a refit or upgrade. Visit the Riviera, ogle the women, perhaps buy a French sonar.”

“Why not a pool?” suggested the navigator. “Everyone picks a place and we each put in a twenty, then whoever gets the closest to this guy’s final destination wins the pot.”

The officers liked that idea and mulled their choices for a day. The destination was defined as the farthest point from Hainan Island that the Chinese sub reached before it retraced its course. “I’ll take a circumnavigation,” the junior officer aboard said the following evening when he dropped his twenty on the table. “I think we’re following a Chinese Magellan.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion twenty bucks’ worth.”

With the pool set, the off-duty officers went back to the wardroom Acey-Deucy tournament.

Captain Hanna began fretting the fact he was completely out of communication with SUBPAC. Utah could not transmit messages when submerged. It could, however, receive very low frequency radio signals, which literally came through the saltwater. When summoned, he would have to report. He decided to let his superiors know what he was doing without waiting for a summons. He prepared a long report, told SUBPAC where he was, what he was following, the condition of his boat, and his intentions. He had it encrypted and ready for a covert burst transmission, then slowed and let the Chinese sub extend the range. Poking up his stealthy comm mast would create only a little noise, but better to be safe than sorry. When the distance was about fifteen nautical miles, he rose to periscope depth, sent off his message and picked up incoming traffic, then quickly went deeper and accelerated.

The Great Leap Down was ahead of him, somewhere, yet she was, he hoped, still on course two-five-zero. He didn’t want to close on her too quickly, so he set a speed just two knots above the boat he was shadowing. Getting back into sonar range took two tense hours. Finally his quarry reappeared as squiggles on a computer screen. The computer recognized the signature; the assigned symbol appeared. Got her again!

And so it went, day after day, averaging about 330 nautical miles every twenty-four hours. Around the Cape of Good Hope and northward into the Atlantic. Occasionally they heard commercial vessels passing on various headings, and now and then storms roiled the ocean, putting more sound into the water from the surface. The ocean was not quiet. It was a continuous concert of biological sound: shrimp, fish, porpoises, whale calls and farts. Amidst all this there was the steady sound of the Chinese sub boring along, slowing, listening, turning, speeding up, rising or descending.

“Man, I feel like we’re following Captain Nemo in Nautilus,” the chief of the boat remarked one boring day, a comment that drew laughter.

The fact that the Great Leap rarely raised her comm antenna and never her periscope left Hanna with something to think about. A secret mission?

Despite the mystery, Hanna was enjoying himself immensely. He had been in subs his entire career, working for the opportunity to command his own. Now that he had that command, he was savoring every single day of it, for it would be all over too quickly. He visited every space in the boat every day, inspected, asked questions, praised, cajoled, encouraged, looked every one of his officers and sailors straight in the eyes. With the tight spaces, submarines were intimate places. There was no place to escape even if you wanted to. Roscoe Hanna loved the whole experience.

Finally, one day off the Amazon, the Great Leap slowed to three knots and began a giant square-search pattern. The slow speed allowed her sonars to listen with maximum efficiency. Utah kept well away from her.

On the surface, ships came and went occasionally. Single and double-screw freighters and tankers.

On the night of the third day at this low speed, the Great Leap turned into the center of the search pattern. A double-screw small vessel was approaching from the northwest. The Utah sonarman on duty recorded her sound signature and assigned her a symbol.

The Great Leap came up to periscope depth. She remained there for twenty minutes, then began blowing her tanks. The sound was unmistakable. Captain Hanna had the sound put on the control room loudspeaker, so everyone could hear it. There was no danger the Chinese boat would hear the noise that was now radiating from Utah since she was making so much herself.

The small vessel rendezvoused, then killed her engines. The buzz of a small outboard engine came from that location. After a while sounds of small explosions, then the sinking sounds.

Utah heard the prop of the Great Leap begin to turn and her ballast tanks flooding. A mile away from the sinking site, at a depth of two hundred feet, she turned to a heading of south and began accelerating.

A day later it seemed likely she was heading back for the Cape of Good Hope, to round Africa and reenter the Indian Ocean.

While the officers squabbled over the money in the destination pool — the junior officer was holding out for a right turn around Cape Horn and a transit of the Pacific, a circumnavigation — Captain Hanna composed a report to SUBPAC, with a copy to SUBLANT since he was now in SUBLANT’s ocean. The next day, after the Great Leap had slowed and cleared her baffles, then accelerated away, he rose to periscope depth and sent the encrypted report, recorded the messages waiting for him on the satellite, then set off again to follow the Shang-class attack boat … as it turned out, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and northward to Hainan.

In the wardroom of the Utah a victor was named in the Acey-Deucy tournament, the Great Leap destination pool was awarded to the lucky winner, who had given the matter some thought and picked the Azores as his entry because it was close to Europe and a lot of other places, and another Acey-Deucy tournament was begun.

Utah’s report of the Atlantic rendezvous and the subsequent sinking of the small surface vessel raised eyebrows at submarine headquarters in the Pentagon and in the Office of Naval Intelligence. This secret rendezvous was obviously for a purpose, but what was it? The National Reconnaissance Office was tasked to find satellite imagery that might be of help. When ONI finally received the sound signature of the rendezvousing yacht, the computer records from the acoustic arrays lying on the ocean beds and harbor entrances of the American East Coast were studied carefully. A candidate emerged. Ocean Holiday. She had cleared Norfolk in late March bound for Barbados. She never arrived there. Routine inquiries of port authorities around the Atlantic basin were negative. Cuba and Venezuela didn’t bother to answer the telex messages. Still, even if Ocean Holiday had visited those countries, she had left them and rendezvoused with the Shang-class Chinese attack boat just south of the equator, in midocean. And sank there.

A covert operation? Was a Chinese spy taken aboard secretly in the United States? Presumably her Chinese crewmen and South African captain, the two Ukrainian women, the old Russian couple and anyone else aboard had transferred to the submarine and had been taken back to China.

Why? No one knew.

The information was shared with the CIA. Perhaps it would eventually become part of a larger picture.

There the matter rested. The Americans had done all they could, so for them, now, the matter became another unexplained happening in a world full of them.

As it happened, a Chinese mole in the National Reconnaissance Office noted the request for data searches of satellite images for Ocean Holiday. He had no idea why the request was made, nor was it unusual. It was simply one of many. He included it in his weekly report to his handler, who serviced him through a drop in a Chinese restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, whose owner had no idea his premises were being used to pass messages back and forth to spies. It was used simply because the handler, supposedly a Chinese American, liked the food and the restaurant was a plausible place for him to visit regularly.