Tiger's Claw: A Novel

THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

A SHORT TIME LATER

Although the crashed Z-9 helicopter masked the sounds coming from the Avenger heading away from it, it did not cover the sound from the Chinese Y-8 patrol plane coming in from the north. But it did conceal the sound of passive sonobuoys being dropped in its path . . .

. . . and the sound of a single depth charge, a BLU-89E Kepà debo, or Terrible Wave, being dropped several minutes later.

Resembling an oil barrel with stabilization fins on one end and a sonar dome on the other, the BLU-89E released from the bomb bay of the Y-8 patrol plane and disappeared into the South China Sea. Its sonar activated automatically in passive mode, and it began to steer itself to the damaged Taiwanese submarine as it descended through the ocean. As the submarine began to increase the distance between them—the depth charge was sinking straight down, while the submarine was sailing ahead—it activated its active sonar to get a more precise distance to its target.

“Con, Sonar, loud splash directly above us, could be a torpedo or depth charge,” the sonar operator aboard the Taiwanese submarine Avenger reported. “No propulsion sounds yet. Possible depth charge.”

“No one uses depth charges anymore,” Captain Yao Mei-Yueh said half aloud. He was afraid it might be another of the Chinese rocket-powered torpedoes. “All stop. Rig for ultraquiet,” he ordered. If it was, he didn’t have the steering capability or speed to try to outmaneuver it with countermeasures like the last time. Better to sit quietly and hope the torpedo didn’t detect him. He knew the torpedo dropped straight down into the sea, and if it didn’t detect any target it simply kept on descending until it buried itself in the sea bottom or self-destructed. “Anything, Sonar?” he asked quietly on intercom.

“Nothing, sir.”

Maybe they lucked out again, Yao thought. He decided to wait a few more minutes and then . . .

And then he heard it—the unmistakable pings of a powerful active sonar, very close. “Con, Sonar, active sonar, range two thousand yards, bearing—”

He never finished that report. The one-kiloton nuclear warhead in the BLU-89E detonated less than a mile behind the Avenger, and the red-hot undersea fireball completely engulfed the submarine. The fireball created a bubble of superheated steam that expanded at hundreds of miles an hour, creating a surge of seawater that cracked the submarine into pieces in an instant. When the weight of the seawater exceeded the pressure of the bubble, it collapsed into itself, creating a second surge of ocean water in the opposite direction. As the bubble compressed, it superheated the water once again, creating another rapidly expanding bubble of energy and another fast-moving wall of water, like a living, breathing tsunami.

The explosion was deep enough that all that was detected on the surface was a dome of water and steam less than fifty feet high, and as the steam from the bubble vented into the atmosphere the dome quickly dissipated. A few of the Chinese aircraft carrier Zheng He’s smaller escorts were rocked by the sudden reversing ocean surges, and a few watchstanders thought they noticed something that looked like a low cloud or fog bank on the horizon, but nothing more.

But the sudden appearance of the white-hot steam dome in the middle of the cooler South China Sea was detected by the American Space-Based Infrared System heat-sensing satellites, and another report was sent through the chain of command.