Virginia Class

11

"Steady as she goes," Garrett said over his headset.

"Steady as she goes, aye aye" came the response.

Virginia was on the surface once more, cruising slowly through the placid waters of the Uraga Strait. The headland of Sunosaki was well astern now, and the submarine had rounded Cape Kannon, picking her way with careful deliberation through a swarm of shipping and boats of every size, shape, and description. Directly ahead rose the bristling forest of masts, antennae, and U.S. naval buildings that was Fleet Activities, Yokosuka. A pilot boat led the way through the crowded shipping lanes.

Yokosuka lay on the Mura Peninsula, astride the entrance to Tokyo-wan—Tokyo Bay itself — and was right on the main drag leading to the ports of Yokohama, Kawasaki, Chiba, and Tokyo itself. Hundreds of ships were visible from Virginia's sail in all directions, from pleasure boats and fishing smacks up to a monstrous supertanker lumbering north a mile to starboard of the American sub.

Jorgensen stood beside him on the sail's bridge. "You know, sir, the crew think it's a bitch that they're not getting liberty."

"They can think anything they like, XO. But our orders don't cut us any slack. We're out of here tomorrow, zero-six hundred."

"Aye aye, Captain." He didn't look pleased.

"You know, XO… it's your job to be a bastard." Technically, the executive officer of a ship handled the routine responsibilities concerning the crew, all internal matters, leaving the captain free to think strategically and concern himself with more global matters. The way that usually played out, however, had the exec playing the villain, the guy who handed out the unpleasant news and details, the officer the men could freely hate.

"Yeah, I know. But I don't have to like it."

"No, you don't."

With a final blast from its whistle, the pilot boat sheered off. Pier Two was ahead and to port, a hundred yards off.

"Maneuvering, Captain. Come left three-zero degrees. Bring engines to dead slow."

"Maneuvering, aye aye. Come left three-zero degrees. Engines to dead slow."

"Line handling parties, man your stations."

Virginia entered Yokosuka's harbor as men clad in dungarees and the blue coveralls known as poopie suits filed up out of the hatches and formed up at bow and stern. Garrett judged the approach carefully, watching for just the right moment.

"Maneuvering, Sail. Engine astern, one half."

"Sail, Maneuvering. Engine astern, one half." He felt the throb of the engines change pitch and timbre, felt the slight jolt as Virginia's forward speed was negated. The sub still possessed considerable momentum, however, and continued to drift forward, slowing now with each passing second.

"Helm, do you have the dock?"

"Captain, Helm. We have the dock in sight."

"Very well, then. Let's see what video gaming can do."

He heard Lieutenant Lanesky's dry laugh. "Will do, Skipper."

On other submarines, Garrett or another officer would have talked the submarine into dock, calling for left or right rudder. On Virginia, however, the helmsman and helm officer could watch the approach on the TV feed from the Photonics mast. The helmsman would be steering the boat in with his joystick — hence Garrett's crack about video games. There were those who argued that a generation of American kids raised on such games would transform the face of war. Virginia was one small proof of that argument.

It took considerable self-control for Garrett not to feed the helm instructions. He needed to show the crew his trust in their abilities.

At the same time, it wouldn't do at all for Virginia to take out that dock just off the port bow.

In silence he watched his command sidle up to the dock, watched the line handlers toss their lines across to sailors waiting ashore, and wondered if he would ever get used to this new kind of war.

Captain ul Haq dropped the arms of the periscope and leaned into them, walking the scope in approved fashion through three complete circles as Shuhadaa approached periscope depth. He could see the water growing light, then becoming a froth of white spray. As the periscope cleared the surface, he continued walking the scope, checking the entire horizon. Submarines had been lost when they surfaced inadvertently directly beneath — or in the path of — an oncoming surface ship.

There was only a single ship visible, and she was at least three miles off. "Allah be praised," he said with soft but heartfelt sincerity.

"What is it?" Noor Khalili asked.

"Our prey."

Four times in the past five days, Shuhadaa had stalked a target, and four times the target had eluded them. The last time, two days ago, they'd picked up a very large surface contact — almost certainly a super-tanker — but the vessel had proven to be too far away to make visual contact. Evidently, sound waves played interesting tricks on the sub's sonar displays in these shallow waters. Convergence zones could make a target seem to be thirty kilometers away, when in fact it was hundreds.

A Kilo-class boat could only manage about twenty knots, running all-out on the surface using her diesels, which was dangerously noisy. Creeping along submerged on batteries alone, she could only manage twelve knots. Almost anything could outrun that. As with predators in the wild, the submarine needed to exercise supreme patience… and to expect that too often chance would favor the prey.

Now, though, ul Haq watched the target moving slowly along the horizon, an almost perfect setup.

The vessel's lines were unmistakable, impossibly high and sharply square, with a very low, two-story bridge structure forward, a single stack aft. As if to confirm the initial identification, the name NISSAN was spelled out in titanic characters along the vessel's side.

According to intelligence reports passed on from Zaki, she was the Innoshima Maru, a bulk car carrier sailing under Panamanian registry — gross weight of 51,858 tons, deadweight tonnage of 28,070 tons, length overall 185 meters, draught 11.7 meters. Her Hitachi/BMW single-shaft diesel propelled her at a steady 19.5 knots. On board, loaded onto fourteen full cargo decks from keel to main deck, were 3,100 automobiles and 500 trucks, en route from Yokohama to Europoort/Rotterdam.

She was, in fact, a submariner's dream target.

She was also a prime terrorist's target — epitome of Western capitalist consumerism. Ul Haq's orders from Maktum in fact were to give special attention to hunting and killing such highly visible symbols of the West — cargo carriers piled high with consumer goods, cruise ships loaded with wealthy tourists… and the oil tankers that represented the lifeblood of America, Europe, and the West.

"Target bearing… mark!" he snapped.

"Target bearing two-five-seven," Lieutenant Mahmud Jamal replied, reading the figure off the circle marker on the opposite side of the periscope casing.

"Range, 5,500 meters. Sonar, designate contact as Target One-five. Fire control, ready tubes two and three and prepare to fire."

"Captain, tubes two and three are loaded and ready to fire."

"Set running depth at fifteen meters." That was deep, but the Russian-built torpedoes were designed to explode beneath the target ship's keel, breaking her back. And, according to the warbook, that car carrier had a draught of almost twelve meters.

"Running depth set to fifteen meters, Captain!"

"Open outer doors."

"Outer doors open."

"Match sonar bearing on tube two and… shoot!"

A loud hiss sounded through the submarine, accompanied by a shudder in the deck. "Tube two fired electrically!"

"Match sonar bearing on tube three and… shoot!"

A second hiss. "Tube three fired electrically. Both torpedoes running straight and normal, Allah be praised!"

Ul Haq suppressed a wry grin at that last. As a ship captain, he frowned on invoking Allah aloud during ship operations, especially during combat. It could get in the way of orders and understanding. And that fervent Allah-be-praised carried just the faintest hint of surprise… as though Lieutenant Jamal hadn't expected the torpedoes to work at all. That could be bad for discipline.

But Jamal's excitement, with the excitement of the moment, was contagious. After five days of stalking, the tiger was pouncing at last!

"Down scope!" He slapped the periscope handles up and stepped back as the gleaming cylinder slid down into its well in the deck at his feet. The ocean had appeared clear and there was no reason for that carrier to be escorted, but a submariner did not casually ignore his training. "Running time to target?"

"Three minutes, forty seconds, Captain." Ul Haq checked the clock on the bulkhead, noting the position of the sweep second hand, and began counting off to himself.

A minute passed… then another… and another. The tension in the control room grew, a palpable presence as crushing as the weight of the ocean outside. Those torpedoes were acoustically homing, with sound receivers that picked up the target's propeller noise and steered them in unerringly. But even the best technology was known to fail.

And then, transmitted through the water, came the far-off thud of an explosion.

The men in the control room erupted into cheers and shrill-chorused cries of "Allah akbar!"

"Silence!" Ul Haq shouted, and the tumult quieted. Martyrs and angels! He'd missed hearing a second explosion, if there'd been one. "Sonar, conn! What do you hear?"

"Conn, sonar! Two definite underwater explosions. And… and breaking noises! We got her, Captain!"

And now it was time for ul Haq to mutter a quietly voiced Allah be praised….

"Up periscope!" he ordered, stepping up to the scope mount once more. Snapping down the handles, he leaned against the eyepiece, walking the periscope back onto the heading of the target.

Pandemonium….

The Innoshima Maru, despite her deep draught, towered high out of the water and, with a full cargo, tended to be uncomfortably top-heavy. One of the torpedoes appeared to have detonated directly beneath her stern-quarter roll-on/roll-off door, crumpling the vessel's stern; the other must have exploded almost directly beneath her center keel, for the carrier had buckled partly amidships, as though punched from below by a titanic, upthrust fist. She was far down by the stern already as the hungry sea poured in through a gaping hole torn across her transom. Those car carriers, ul Haq knew, did not have transverse watertight bulkheads — an omission designed to save weight and to provide more maneuvering room when loading the cargo onto fourteen separate decks. The water pouring in astern and amidships would rapidly flood all the way forward. Already, the Innoshima Maru was taking on a pronounced list to port, its upper deck angling toward the distant submarine.

He thought he could make out members of the carrier's crew, tiny black specks moving along the deck. They would be terrified, he knew, struggling to lower boats, or else giving in to panic and flinging themselves into the sea. There would be no escape, though. The car carrier possessed a huge volume, and the water flooding those compartments and deck spaces would suck down everything in and on the water for hundreds of meters around.

Worse, thousands of gallons of marine diesel fuel were spilling from ruptured tanks now, and the fuel had caught fire. The surface blaze looked tiny alongside the huge vessel, but the clouds of greasy black smoke roiled into the blue of the tropical noon sky. The blaze was spreading quickly, providing the men trapped on board with their choice of deaths — by fire or by sea.

Ul Haq could now hear a strange, ongoing noise echoing through Shuhadaa Muqaddaseerts steel hull, a kind of clanging, clashing sound, part drumbeat, part crash. It took him a moment to figure out what that noise was… hundreds and hundreds of cars and trucks, torn from their fastenings as the deck tilted sharply beneath them, slamming ten, twenty, fifty at a time into the port-side bulkheads. The crashing sound was accompanied by another sound that submariners knew well — those who'd been in combat, at any rate… a shrill, piercing squeal, almost like a woman's scream.

It was the death cry of a ship, the sound made by twisting, tearing steel.

As he watched, the Innoshima Maru shuddered, rolled suddenly, and literally fell full on her port side in a colossal cascade of white spray. The shriek of tearing metal grew suddenly sharper and louder, and then with a wrench, stern separated from bow, the rear half submerging rapidly, the bow rolling and settling a bit, still afloat, but going down fast. For a time, the blunt prow of the Innoshima Maru remained jutting above water like a red-and-black-painted island, almost engulfed by black smoke.

Ten minutes later, it was all over. With a final rattle of steel and cargo spilling into the depths, a final rumble of water flooding internal compartments, the last of 52,000 tons of ship and cargo vanished beneath the waves.

Shuhadaa Muqaddaseen had scored her first major seagoing kill.

"Thank you for coming ashore, Commander," Captain Theodore Summers said. "I know you're damned busy."

"It did catch me by surprise, Captain," Garrett replied. "My orders are quite explicit about wrapping things up here and moving on to our next waypoint with all possible speed."

Garrett was standing in Summers's office, clad in his dress white uniform, as protocol demanded.

"Quite right," Summers said. He was a heavyset man with a mustache, close-cropped hair the color of steel, and the brusque manner of a corporate CEO. Captain Summers was in fact the senior Naval Intelligence officer at Yokosuka, and a member of Admiral Montgomery's personal staff. Montgomery was the CO of Fleet Activities, and an order from his intelligence officer was as good as an order from the Man himself. "But I thought you would want to see these…."

He handed Garrett a string-tied messenger envelope, marked top secret and eyes only. Garrett read the security classification warning box, then looked up at Summers, questioning.

"You have the proper clearances, Commander. I arranged it."

Garrett undid the fastening and pulled out two 8x10 black-and-white photographs. Both appeared to have been shot from the air at an oblique angle. Both showed the surface of the ocean in almost crystalline detail and clarity. One showed a large cargo or container ship of some kind, partly sunk and engulfed in the stain of oil and black smoke. The other was more difficult to identify. It looked like a building — was that a heliport on one end? — or possibly a large ship of some sort, twisted, broken, and aflame.

Identifiers at the corners showed that the photos both had been taken by KH-12 reconnaissance satellites. According to the time and date stamps, one — the strange-looking structure — had been taken five days ago. The other had been taken… my God! Less than three hours ago. That was astonishingly fast work for this sort of intelligence dissemination down the ladder from NPIC and the CIA. Someone at the very top must think that it was very important that Garrett see these.

"That," Summers said, pointing to the first photo, "is… was, I should say, the Vietnamese oil exploration base on Amboyna Cay, in the Spratly Island Group. I gather Washington flashed you about that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. And this one was taken this afternoon about 175 miles west of Amboyna Cay, halfway between the Spratlys and the southern tip of Vietnam. It's a Japanese commercial car carrier. Panamanian flag, but it had the name 'Nissan' spelled out in giant letters down both sides, so there's no possibility that her attackers didn't know who she was. That ship was sunk deliberately and without warning. Now, look at this."

He pulled a standard marine navigational chart from its storage tube and unrolled it on his desk. The chart showed the South China Sea, from the Philippines in the east to Malaysia in the west, from the northern shore of Borneo in the south to southern China in the north. Six Xs marked the chart, each neatly labeled. Five lay clustered among the central

Spratly Islands, and another was located well out of the archipelago and off to the west, almost due south of the bulging belly of Vietnam.

"These two," Summers said, "the Vietnamese exploration rig and the Innoshima Maru, that Japanese cargo ship, are apparently just the last two of a number of sinkings in this region. Reports are still filtering through, and we may not have all of them yet. These first three… here, here, and here, represent the last reported positions of one Vietnamese and two Filipino fishing trawlers. The first went missing sometime last Saturday, 27 May."

"Somebody thinks those sinkings were connected with Amboyna Cay?" Garrett asked, one eyebrow giving a skeptical lift. "I imagine fishing boats go missing in those waters all the time."

Summers nodded. "The South China Sea is one of the most dangerous areas for boats and small craft in the world. You wouldn't think it in this day and age, but piracy is not a thing of the past."

"Yes, sir." Garrett had read reports of whole fleets of pirate vessels — mostly fishing boats and trawlers disguised to look like harmless working craft — operating out of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Their victims tended to be fishing boats and trawlers, small commercial craft, and the like; sometimes, though, when political shifts sent hordes of refugees fleeing their native countries in overcrowded rafts and boats, the pirates indulged in bloody orgies of robbery, rape, and murder. "But…" Garrett held up the photographs. "You don't think these were the work of pirates, do you? A major base and a Nissan carrier are pretty big targets. Besides, what's the payoff?"

"Correct. Pirates go after weak and defenseless targets… and they're only going to do it if they get something out of it. Amboyna Cay and the Innoshima Maru are part of something else, something bigger. Someone may be trying to disguise them as piracy. Or … maybe the pirates have some new players on their team."

Garrett studied the photos a moment longer. "What kind of weapons are we looking at here?"

"What's your guess?"

"Torpedoes. The car carrier looks like her back was broken. That suggests an explosion under her keel. Since when do pirates in the South China Sea use torpedoes?"

"That is why the Pentagon is assuming Chinese involvement. We know they have attack subs in the region. We also know they want the Vietnamese out of the Spratly Islands. Amboyna Cay could be a first move on their part in that direction."

"But then… why sink the Maru?"

"That is what the Pentagon doesn't know. There are no particularly bad tensions between Beijing and Tokyo right now. In fact, there's a Far Eastern trade conference going on in Singapore right now, and Japan and the PRC are actually working together pretty well, for a change. Beijing is supporting the Japanese Trade Ministry's call for a new East Asian trade consortium, against objections by the United States and the Europeans. So what's the motive?"

"I see you've also got the Sea Breeze marked," Garrett said.

"Right. Same area. It's possible it was a pirate attack, though according to Global Oil, DuPont had security people on board. They should have been enough to deal with garden-variety pirates."

"Yeah. But someone is loosing torpedoes down there. That could mean a surface warship… "

"Or it could mean an attack submarine," Summers said, nodding. "Exactly. And that means not your run-of-the-mill pirate outrage."

Garrett set the photographs on Summers's desk. "So… where does that leave the Virginia, sir?"

"It leaves her continuing to the Spratly Islands as ordered, with a SEAL team on board. Washington will continue to update you and feed you a list of possible targets — both ashore and afloat. We want you to do a lot of covert looking and listening — a sneak-and-peek mission. We need to have hard intel if we're going to make even a half-assed guess at what's really going on. You follow?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Washington is especially interested in this." He handed Garrett a second envelope, this one containing a single photograph. It showed the stern quarter of a sleek, elegant vessel, obviously a pleasure craft. The name on the transom was in Arabic and English. The English letters spelled al qahir.

"What's this?"

"A yacht officially belonging to a Dhahran national named Feisel. But the Agency feels a character named Zaki Abar might just be on board her right now."

"Abar?" The name was familiar… an al Qaeda operative? He tried to remember the lineup of the current most-wanted list.

"Al Qaeda. One of their nastier and brighter masterminds. They think he was behind the bombing of that airliner in Greece in January, and maybe the bomb in the Tokyo nightclub that killed five sailors last year.

"We've been tracking Al Qahir by satellite. Apparently whoever is on board is transmitting low-wattage signals to somebody in the area, and the Agency thinks it's a submarine."

"Whose submarine?"

"Good question. Smart money backs the Chinese…"

"But I can't imagine the Chinese wanting to be seen associated with al Qaeda."

"Exactly. There's also the matter of that Japanese car carrier. What motive would the Chinese have for sinking her?"

Garrett shrugged. "Bringing instability to the area, maybe? Or providing an excuse to send their navy in to 'restore order?' "

"A possibility," Summers agreed. "A definite possibility."

"An attack boat couldn't operate in a vacuum, Captain. They would need a base — a place to take on supplies. I assume we're talking about a diesel boat here. That means they need fuel."

"Correct. We need to know who's deploying that submarine, and why. To that end, your orders are being amended. While you're patrolling the Spratly Islands, you will do all you can to assist the SEAL team embarked with you to investigate Chinese facilities in the region, and to locate and shadow Chinese submarines that may be operating in the area. You will also be expected to shadow the Al Qahir."

"That should be interesting. I take it we're going after this Abar person then?"

"Negative. Langley wants to gather intelligence. I gather they're hoping to get enough rope together to hang the bastard. No, Virginia will be involved in signals intercepts and tracking the Al Qahir's movements. You will not reveal Virginia's presence."

"Yes, sir."

"But you'll also be hunting for that submarine out there, if it exists. We want to know who's torpedoing

Vietnamese bases. If it's a rogue sub, we want to know how it's carrying out operations, who's supporting it. If it's Chinese, we want to know that, too. But when you find out, you will report the fact but not take action, not until and unless CINCPAC or the Joint Chiefs give you the word. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir. Perfectly."

Shit. Virginia would be walking a political tightrope, that much was all too clear. If the Chinese weren't behind the sinkings, Garrett would need to find out who was without stepping on Chinese toes. Whether the mystery sub belonged to China or to somebody else, the Chinese were certain to be watching the Spratly area closely. There would be a Chinese sub in the area, probably more than one. It would be all too easy to sink the wrong boat, and trigger a shooting war between China and the United States.

Hell, a wrong guess on Garrett's part and the Virginia could end up being responsible for starting World War III. Not a career-positive move for anyone, least of all Virginia's skipper.