Virginia Class

14

"Captain? A general flash just came in over the SAT-COM. You might want to punch it up."

"Right." Garrett pressed the message-waiting icon on his touchscreen, and read it with a dawning, pit-of-the-stomach horror.

…all of which was a cover-your-ass set of orders if Garrett had ever seen one.

Fifty-five years after Pearl Harbor, the whys and wherefores of American military preparedness in December of 1941 were still hot topics at Annapolis and other U.S. military schools. Of special interest was the fact that numerous warnings had been sent to the Hawaiian Islands shortly before the Japanese attack, but those warnings were either so vague or so badly worded that no solid preparation was possible. In fact, a warning about the hazards of sabotage by Japanese civilians living in Hawaii at the time resulted in Army aircraft being parked closely together in order to better guard them… which, of course, made them perfect targets for the Japanese naval air assault of December 7.

Unfortunately, the lesson learned from the incident appeared to be that warning orders such as this one were best used to shunt responsibility to the Other Guy. Hey! I did my duty and sent out a warning! It wasn't my fault! The order conveyed almost zero useful information in a military sense.

The news of Flight 1125's destruction, though, had an intensely personal meaning for Garrett.

Kazuko had been on that flight… at least that was the number her roommate had given him when he'd called her from Yokosuka. Kazuko! Had she been on that plane?

The terrible fear growing in the pit of his stomach told him that it was true, that she'd been on that flight. A part of his mind wanted to cling to hope; perhaps she'd been ill or delayed in Bangkok or Singapore, and missed her flight.

But the cold and rational part of himself could only see the fact that Kazuko was almost fanatical in the pursuit of her duties. Once she'd refused to take sick leave and worked a Tokyo-to-Calcutta flight with a 101-degree temperature — a violation of company rules, incidentally, but a fair indication of how stubborn she could be. And determined.

Yes, she'd been on that flight, and now she was dead. Kazuko! …

The fact that she'd told him she was leaving him meant nothing now. They would have gotten back together, he was certain of that. They would have worked something out. Hell, Garrett wasn't going to stay in the Navy forever. He had no interest in seeking flag rank, and doubted he would achieve it in any case. He didn't have the political connections. He could have retired in another few years, retired and lived anywhere in the world that suited him. And Kazuko wouldn't have stayed with JAL forever, either. They'd talked, once, about the two of them retiring one day and meeting halfway — literally — in Hawaii.

A long time later, he lay in his quarters, the door locked to keep the bustle and routine of the submarine at bay. The XO had the chair, and here there was time to lie down on his bunk, time and quiet to think.

Not, Garrett thought, that thinking was a particularly good thing to do just now.

A military man lived by plans. Op orders, sailing orders, duty rosters, plan-of-the-day, all were means by which the military life could be organized and channeled, so that individuals — from the 153 men on board the Virginia to the hundreds of thousands of officers and enlisted personnel Navy-wide — all could pull together, working as one.

What Garrett was now acutely aware of was the need for a plan for his own life. Every time he started to get things squared away for himself, it seemed, someone would come along and kick him in the balls. Each time he thought he knew where he was going, it turned out he wasn't going that way at all.

Damn it, life ought to be more than reacting to what other people did. Ever since Claire had left him, he'd struggled with the idea of taking control of his own life.

He was the captain — the man in control — of the most modern attack submarine in all the arsenals of the world. Why couldn't he control his own life?

He recognized that pang of self-pity as the onset of a depressive episode, placed his hands over his face, and groaned.

He'd been dealing with moderate clinical depression for several years. Hell, depression was an occupational hazard for submariners. You had to be borderline crazy in the first place to voluntarily lock yourself away from the sun and stars in a steel sewer pipe deep beneath the surface of the ocean. Too-close quarters, too tightly regimented a life, too few outlets for normal relaxation or play, these things demanded men who could handle a lot of stress. All too often, though, stress turned to anger, and anger was turned inward, suppressed, buried, because there was no way on board a Navy submarine to release that anger when it first flared hot.

And anger suppressed in that fashion swiftly metamorphosed into a cancerous, soul-devouring depression.

The Navy handled the problem in a typically Navy way. Men with severe depression could not hold command, of course, and all command personnel were subject to periodic psych evaluations. Enlisted men were expected to report unhealthy behavior in their shipmates. Classes and awareness seminars were mandated for personnel on shoreside rotation. Garrett had never seen any figures, but he'd heard that the submariner service accounted for more doses of Prozac and other antidepressants than any other department in the Navy.

The antidepressants weren't helping now. At least, he sure didn't feel like they were. He felt as though he could barely move.

He was angry — at himself and at the service. He'd totally blown it with Claire; she'd left him because he was never home, never there when she needed him, and he'd not been able to balance his career in the Navy with the demands of a life at home.

And he'd blown it with Kazuko. He'd hoped to be able to get her to change her mind, to convince her that he could change, that he would change, that this time he would find a way to strike that improbable balance between husband and submarine commander.

But now, Kazuko was dead and he would never have the chance to tell her what he thought, what he wanted, what he'd dreamed for both of them. She'd died thinking he didn't care, thinking that he loved the Navy more than her.

Maybe she'd even died hating him. It was so easy to imagine that.

Damn, I'm an idiot….

There was no way to release the anger he felt at himself. All he could do was hold it, control it… and feel it shifting to a self-loathing depression that pinned him there to his bunk.

He felt, too, as though he were balanced between two paths. Slip one way, and he would drop into an abyss of self-pity, surrendering everything he'd built in his career so far — his command, his reputation, the trust of those both below and above him in the hierarchy of rank. Go the other way, and he would suck it all up, deal with it, suppress it, and continue to function as he always had.

The first choice was so enchantingly easy. Hell, he could call up Jorgensen on the private internal comm channel right this moment and formally relinquish command. Hell, do it now, before Doc Colbert had to do it for him!

He reached for the microphone in its cradle on the bulkhead next to his bunk.

And stopped.

No…

The other choice was a lot harder. But he also knew from experience that the blackness and self-doubt were temporary. He could command an attack submarine.

He could, he would command himself.

The Shuhadaa was racing along on the surface at twenty knots, running parallel to the northwest coast of Borneo, which lay some five hundred kilometers over the horizon to the southeast. Ul Haq was taking advantage of a heavy cloud cover that had rolled in over the area at sunset. Weather reports were calling for a storm over the entire Spratly region, and he wanted to use the cover clouds and rain would provide — protection from the all-seeing eyes of American spy satellites. Already, the wind had freshened and the sea had begun picking up. The wind was blowing out of the northeast now at twenty knots, and the waves were beginning to join one another in long, rolling swells capped by white horses and scatterings of spray.

Ul Haq stood alone on the sail's weather bridge, wrapped in a plastic hooded poncho, feeling the wind blast against the exposed skin of his face. Salt spray stung out of the darkness. Shuhadaa was plowing directly into the teeth of the wind, which made for rough sailing. The narrow hull of the submarine pitched and yawed and rolled with each passing swell, with waves surging across the forward deck and exploding around the narrow, upthrust barrier of the sail.

He'd considered submerging; even with a full gale blowing on the surface, at fifty meters the sea would be as calm as the inside of a fishbowl. But ul Haq had decided to stay on the surface as long as he possibly could. He wanted to give Shuhadaa's batteries a chance to recharge to full, which was only possible when she was running on her diesel engine. The submarine could run her diesel while submerged, drawing in air and venting the poisonous exhaust gases through her snorkel, but running on the snorkel was a compromise that would not help the situation. At snorkel depth, Shuhadaa would still be subject to the pitching embrace of rough seas, her airway would intermittently be blocked by breaking waves, and no snorkel system was 100 percent effective. The stink of diesel fuel and exhaust fumes would fill the boat, compounding the misery of seasickness and sharply reducing the efficiency of the crew.

Better to run on the surface, with the diesel fully venting topside and fresh air freely available through the boat's deck intakes. Later, the storm might become so rough that he would have to submerge, and when that happened, he wanted a full battery charge to give him a minimum of ten to twelve hours at depth. In the meantime, the fresh air blowing from the bulkhead vents below helped combat the seasickness, and cleaned out the mingled stinks of diesel fuel and vomit — a little, anyway. No man lasted long as a submariner if he didn't have a very strong stomach. "Captain? Captain!"

He looked down at the open sail hatch in the deck beneath his feet. The face of Lieutenant Saad al-Muhabi peered up at him through the circle of the hatch combing.

Ul Haq squatted on his haunches, sheltering his ears from the roar of spray and wind so that he could hear.

"What is it?"

"The prisoners again, sir. They say they're dying, that their sickness is worse."

"They will have to make do."

Al-Muhabi looked worried. "Captain, with respect…"

"What?"

"Sir, there's talk among the crew. They say you're torturing the Americans. The cabin they're locked in… sir, it's a hellhole. It is an affront to Allah, the merciful."

"And what do they suggest that we do, Lieutenant?" he replied. "Throw them overboard?"

"Sir, that might be the kindest thing we could do."

He shook his head. "Our orders are to bring them to Zaki. The leader, DuPont, may have value for the movement."

"If there were only DuPont, there would be no problem, sir. But keeping so many locked in that compartment… Captain, we could at least put the women overboard. They are only women, after all, and their treatment is inflaming the other prisoners, and some of the crew as well."

Al-Muhabi, ul Haq remembered, was Saudi, with the conservative Saudi's belief that women were of less worth than men. As a Pakistani Muslim, ul Haq had a somewhat more liberal view. Women might not be as intelligent or as powerful as men, he believed, but they were still people, not things, not property.

"All have value in Allah's eyes, the men and the women both," ul Haq replied. "The Prophet himself, blessings on his name, declared that women deserve just treatment. It is our duty to keep all of our guests safe."

He thought for a moment. Between the diarrhea and the vomiting, the senior petty officer's quarters must indeed be a hellhole by now.

"Detail extra men to keep watch on the prisoners," he said. "See that they have access to the sanitary facilities every hour, and permit them to shower if they wish. Have someone who speaks English tell them that they will be allowed up on deck for air as soon as this storm is past. That might give them something to look forward to."

"Yes, sir."

"Maintain a guard of two men at the door."

"I do not believe our 'guests,' as you call them, are going anywhere, Captain."

"No. The guards are there to keep out members of the crew who may wish to take advantage of the women… or of the men, for that matter. And two guards allows one to watch the other."

"It almost sounds as though you trust the Americans more than you trust your own crew. Sir."

"I know my crew, Lieutenant. They are men, with men's weaknesses. And they will see the helplessness of our guests as an invitation to take advantage of them. I will not have that."

"Yes, sir."

"In any case, they will not be on board for much longer. We will be rendezvousing with Zaki on our way back to Small Dragon Island."

The other nodded. "That, of course, is the best solution, sir. There is no room for prisoners on board a submarine."

"I agree. Please check with the navigator on watch and get me an expected time of arrival at Waypoint Alif." That was the agreed-upon location, some two hundred kilometers south of Spratly Island, where they would rendezvous with Zaki's yacht.

"Yes, sir." Al-Muhabi ducked back into the hatchway, vanishing down the ladder.

Ul Haq stood up again, drawing a deep breath, savoring the sting of spray on his face.

He was eager to make that rendezvous. He'd talked personally to Zaki over the radio the night before, discussing with him the problem of the prisoners. One or two prisoners could be cared for easily enough, and might indeed have served the purpose of providing a human shield against enemy retaliation, but only if that enemy knew they were on board.

But communicating that fact to the world, enabling them to use the prisoners as an onboard deterrent to attack, was problematical in the first place. And in the second, it was clear that the presence of those prisoners — especially the women — was affecting the morale and the performance of his crew. He needed to get them off the submarine as quickly as he could.

At worst, he would take them back to Small Dragon

Island. Shuhadaa Muqaddaseen needed to refuel and replenish her provisions. But the fact that Zaki was supposed to be near Point Alif for the next several days would let him offload them that much sooner.

"Captain?"

Al-Muhabi was back. There was an intercom speaker on the sail's weather bridge, of course, but it could be difficult to hear in this kind of wind. He squatted down again, the better to hear the man. "Yes?"

"The navigator says — if we can maintain twenty knots — fifteen hours."

He nodded. "Excellent." By one o'clock tomorrow afternoon, the prisoners would be someone else's problem… thanks be to a merciful Allah.

"Captain?"

"Yeah."

"Weps wants permission to take the weapons systems off-line."

Garrett looked up, meeting Jorgensen's gaze. The direct eye contact was almost more than he could stand, and he looked back down at the touchscreen on his board. "Why?"

"He's swapping out some of the 3Cs in the firing circuits. Remember?"

Garrett looked up again. He'd heard the worry in Jorgensen's voice. Had he done something or forgotten something to trigger the XO's concern?

This time it was Jorgensen who first broke the uncomfortable eye contact, checking something on the clipboard in his hand. "The swap-out's on the sched, sir. You approved it."

"Yes, XO. I remember." He sighed. "Sorry, Pete. Woolgathering. My mind was somewhere else."

"Not a problem, sir."

"He's sure the swap-out won't leave us toothless for more than twenty-four hours?"

"That's what he says, sir. Although there's always the unexpected."

"That is God's own fucking truth."

Jorgensen started at that, and Garrett realized how tightly wound the man was right now. Garrett rarely, if ever, used profanity, and his sailor's talk must have caught the exec off guard. Or had it been the intensity with which he'd said it?

It didn't matter. He was going to have to watch himself more closely, keep a tighter rein on the emotions galloping through his brain. It wouldn't do to let his officers or the crew know just how shaken he was.

"The People's Republic is still right off the starboard beam, XO," he said. "And we still don't know what their intentions are, what they're up to. I'm a bit nervous about entering the South China Sea without torps or Tomahawks."

"Same here, Captain. But we agreed that it made more sense to take both systems off-line at the same time, so that we have both when we reach the Spratlys."

"I know. Pass the word to the sonar boys, would you? I want an extra sharp set of ears out in these waters." Jorgensen didn't answer, and Garrett pressed him. "What?"

"Sir, we're traveling at forty knots. Sonar can't hear shit at that speed."

"It is my intention, XO, for us to come to dead slow every… make it every two hours, so that sonar can have a good listen around and we can clear our baffles."

Jorgensen visibly relaxed. "Ah. Aye aye, sir."

Garrett had covered his slip. The truth was, just for an instant, he had forgotten that sonar couldn't hear a damned thing when they were moving at full-ahead.

His hastily improvised coverup actually made sense, though. If a Chinese sub did spot them and try to follow them south, a periodic clearing of the baffles — a maneuver in which Virginia would make a full circle in order to give sonar a chance to "see" the sonar-dead space astern of the boat — should pick it up. And by slowing to take sonar readings every couple of hours, they could create a kind of rough sketch of the water traffic around them, enough to alert them if major surface traffic was closing on their position.

But the fact of the matter, Garrett reminded himself, was that he had slipped up, and that was something no captain could afford. Damn! he thought with a white, savage fury. What's happening to me?

"Have Weps and his boys get on it, XO," he said.

"Aye aye, Captain."

Maybe I was right. Maybe I should step down now, Garrett thought. Relinquish command. Jorgensen's good. He'd get the job done.

His momentary lapse had shaken him. Everyone makes mistakes, forgets something, gets momentarily confused, has a brain fart, as he'd heard it so eloquently described… but when the commander of a submarine had a brain fart, people could die. He had no business remaining in command if he could not keep his mind and his heart focused on the task at hand.

There was, at the same time, a deep and very human part of Garrett that refused to give up the chance to strike back, directly, at whoever it was that was blowing up ships and aircraft in the South China Sea. Whoever it was who had killed Kazuko.

There was one thing, Garrett had discovered long ago, that could relieve the depression when he feared it might be getting out of hand. Not a cure, by any means, but a worthwhile distraction.

Work. He would concentrate on the command of the Virginia, and forget about Kazuko.

At least for now.

"There, sir. There it is again."

Captain Jian pressed the headphone tight against his right ear, eyes closed as he listened. It had been a few years since he'd stood a sonar watch, but the old skills never completely deserted you. He ignored the sonar screen with its cascade of green light and slanted lines, each line representing the movement of a different contact out there in the abyss around them. No, to hear, to really hear a faint and distant contact, was to shut out the visual, to turn one's mind inward, and to reach out with an entirely different sense altogether.

He could hear the soft rushing rumble of the ocean itself, the click and squeak and clatter of its denizens. And there… just at the threshold of hearing, the faintest hint of a pulsing hiss.

"What is your estimate?" he asked the sonar officer.

"This contact is not in our data banks, Comrade Captain. However, it sounds to me much like one of the American Seawolf submarines … but moving at extremely high speed."

"You would not hear it at all if it was not moving at high speed," Jian said. "They say a hole in the water is noisy by comparison." He listened a moment more. "I'm surprised we picked up this much. What do you think the range might be?"

The sonar officer shook his head. "Sir, we were extremely lucky to catch this. It is almost certainly a convergence zone contact."

"I see. So… fifty kilometers… or one hundred… or one hundred fifty."

"Or possibly two hundred. Yes, sir."

"Very well. Stay on the contact."

"Yes, sir. We have designated the target as Ch'ien Nine-five."

Jian left the sonar room and made his way to the main navigational table at the rear of the control room. Elsewhere, Yinbi de Gongji's crew sat or stood at their stations, attentive to their duties and all too obviously trying to ignore the presence of the submarine's captain close by. He said nothing. If nervousness made them even more attentive, so much the better.

Yinbi was currently cruising northwest at a depth of three hundred meters, her position currently at approximately 16° North, 117° East, 160 kilometers north of the tiny island of Huangyan Dao, and 300 kilometers west of the Philippine island of Luzon. She was trailing her towed array, which gave her an uncannily sensitive ear on the ocean to port and to starboard. And she'd picked up that whisper of sound on her starboard side.

Convergence zones were a freakish effect of depth and pressure on sound waves. A submarine captain couldn't count on them, because often the conditions to create them simply didn't exist.

Here, though, they did. Yinbi was crossing the abyssal plain known as the South China Sea Basin, a tongue-shaped depression in the ocean floor between Vietnam and the northern half of the Philippine Islands with depths as great as 4,500 meters. Huangyan Dao interrupted the basin at its eastern end. To the north and to the south, like the two halves of a fish's tail, a deep trench embraced the island of Luzon just off its west coast; the northern part of the trench served as a kind of highway extending from the shallow waters of the Luzon Strait between Luzon and Taiwan, and the main part of the basin.

The point was the basin's depth. Below a couple of thousand meters, the ocean's pressure was so great that it actually served to deflect sound waves, bending them back toward the surface. In a convergence effect, the sound from, say, a fast-moving submarine would hit the high-pressure water and bend up, then hit the surface and deflect down, to be bent up again by the water pressure. The sound waves were focused at specific, clear-cut intervals — usually every fifty kilometers or so — which meant that Yinbi could detect the other submarine when it was fifty kilometers distant, or at any multiple of fifty kilometers out to a range of four or five times that distance. Once the target moved a little closer, Yinbi would lose it. But, if they were lucky, they might pick it up when it entered the next convergence zone, fifty kilometers closer. Jian suspected that the topography of the sea floor — that long, slightly curving trench running toward the north and northeast — was serving as a deep sound channel, creating the convergence-zone effect and also giving him a good idea of the other vessel's exact course.

It was Jian's intent to close with that target, and find out what it was.

Was Ch'ien Nine-five an American Seawolf? Very possible. Very possible, indeed. Chinese Naval Intelligence had already informed him that elements of the American Seventh Fleet were en route through the Luzon Strait, no doubt to provide an intervention force, if necessary, in the Spratly Islands. American attack submarines, like the Seawolf, would most likely precede that force.

And one of those attack submarines would be the target for this entire operation — that and one of the American supercarriers.

Tempting targets indeed, but targets that required extraordinary skill and luck to stalk and kill.

Jian knew he had the skill.

All he needed was a small bit of luck… and that sonar contact just might be the luck he was looking for.