Macklin looked around the room, wondering if anyone else was as confused as he was.
“Mr. President,” Macklin finally said, “I would prefer that we work together toward maintaining peace in the region. I do not want to embarrass you or your generals by publicly sharing the information I have. That would merely serve to inflame the situation.”
After a long pause, Jiechi said, “President Macklin, I cannot be clearer on this matter: our planes were attacked in our airspace and acted in self-defense. If you don’t understand that aspect of international law, I suggest you take a short drive to Georgetown University and educate yourself.”
What the hell does that mean? Macklin thought, shaking his head. He didn’t understand the resistance to working together to resolve the matter. He understood the Chinese didn’t like to lose face, but this was fantasy.
“Mr. President,” Macklin replied. “If I must, I will release the proof that I have to the news media and the UN. It will be very embarrassing for your government.”
“President Macklin, I stand by the account my generals have given me. However, we will… review the matter with our pilot and provide the United States with our own proof. I also strongly suggest you pull your aircraft carrier from the region to ensure there are no future… misunderstandings.”
“I appreciate your willingness to provide us with ‘proof.’ I’m sure you understand that our carrier group will remain in international waters in support of the Taiwan Relations Act and for the safety of our allies in the region. Good day.”
“Good day, Mr. President.”
Macklin punched the off button on the phone. The translator and technician quickly cleared the room.
“Well, that was a real W-T-F phone call. He can’t have any proof, can he?”
Prost answered, “No, sir. My guess is that he’s sitting there with others during the call, so he couldn’t possibly take your side. He did say one thing I want to look into.”
“What’s that?”
“The references to Oxford and Georgetown. I would bet that was very intentional. I can’t help but wonder what he meant by that.”
“By all means, look into it then.”
As Prost, Austin, and Adair left the room, the president tilted his head back and closed his eyes, hoping like hell for no more incidents.
— 24 —
It took all of her concentration to get the MH-60F Seahawk off the very windy flight deck, even for an experienced pilot like Lieutenant Commander Kathy Lombardo from Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 4 (HSC-4) of the “Black Knights.”
She twisted the throttle at the end of the collective in her left hand and slowly raised it. Her feet worked the rudder pedals and her right fingertips the cyclic between her thighs, commanding the helicopter onto a steady hover.
Mixing art, science, and skill at a level incomprehensible to fixed-wing operators, Kathy regulated the power delivered by the twin GE T700 turboshafts to propel this naturally unstable twenty-one-thousand-pound beast gently into the skies above the carrier strike group. Hauling a full load of three MK 54 torpedoes and equipped with active dipping sonar used to detect submarines, it represented the best America could offer in the anti-submarine warfare (ASW) department to protect the large carrier.
“Very smooth,” commented her copilot, Lieutenant Danny Mendez, in charge of communications and weapons.
“Just another day in the neighborhood,” she replied with a shrug.
Entering a holding pattern at 1,500 feet provided Kathy with a great view of Vinson and its escorts operating halfway between Quanzhou on China’s mainland and Changhua on the Taiwanese side, remaining well clear of the northern end of the strait. Her mission this clear but turbulent afternoon was to search and destroy a rogue submarine that the intelligence briefing in the Black Knights ready room had indicated might be roaming the waters off Taipei, at the northern tip of the island.
The same bastard that attacked Stennis five days ago.
But Kathy and her copilot weren’t alone in this massive search. Following a long racetrack pattern at 4,500 feet along the coastal waters of Taiwan, a Boeing P-8A Poseidon ASW aircraft scanned the strait with its APY-10 multi-mission surface search radar.
Kathy glanced at her screen and spotted the returns from the Eightballers’ jet from Naval Air Facility Atsugi, Japan, performing a much wider search than her Seahawk. The militarized version of the 737–800 carried the same MK 54 torpedoes as her helo but also hauled mines and AGM-84 Harpoon missiles.
“Where are you, little bastard?” Mendez commented over the intercom.
Her eyes returned to the white-capped sea as she searched through her visor for any sign of the elusive submarine lurking in the turbulent water below.
C’mon. Show yourself!
Capt. Yuri Sergeyev had ordered all stop after clearing the northern end of Taiwan twenty-four hours earlier. Now the submarine drifted at a depth of 120 feet, as close as he felt comfortable drifting in the strait’s average depth of 180 feet, but deep enough to avoid detection by the overhead surveillance he knew would have been deployed by the Americans.
Letting the China Coastal Current flowing southward in the western part of the strait propel him to a steady seven knots, the former Soviet Navy captain used rudders to steer the Type 212A ever closer to the carrier force. Moving through the water completely undetected, Sergeyev ignored the unsmiling crew members at their battle stations, especially Anatoli Zhdanov, who had approached him earlier that day in his cabin.
“Captain,” Zhdanov had said. “You know I would never contradict you in front of the men, but everyone knows the risk if the crew of the freighter was detained and interrogated. Captain Orlov knows the details of our mission.”
His second in command had been right, of course. Orlov, or even Aleksandr Radishchev, the crew member left behind aboard Nuovoh Arana, could reveal the submarine’s new target if the freighter was unable to avoid American vessels.
“We may be blundering into a trap, sir.”
“If it looks like a trap, Anatoli,” he had told him, “we will head for the eastern side of the strait and let the currents takes us north, to the Sea of Japan.”
Sergeyev frowned, thinking back on the conversation. He stroked his beard and pondered their odds, his gaze shifting between their speed, bearing, and depth, and the sonar station manned by Leonod Popov. The thing about traps, of course, was that you typically didn’t realize it was a trap until you were… well, trapped.
Sergeyev looked over the shoulder of the bald-headed sonarman, who wore headphones and had his eyes closed as he monitored the traffic on the strait. The screen in front of the sonar station showed data on each ship being tracked. For the past thirty minutes, Popov had provided updates on the range and bearing to their final target.
“Sonar, Conn,” Sergeyev said. “Range and bearing.”
“Seven thousand feet,” Popov quietly reported. “Bearing zero-seven-four, Cap’n.”
Sergeyev held his stopwatch, rolling it back and forth between two fingers. “Fire one,” he said, and punched the timer.
Kathy Lombardo got an emergency call from the Boeing P-8 that a torpedo had just gone active and was tracking Vinson.
While Mendez made radio calls to the ASW assets protecting the Vinson strike group, including a frigate hauling depth charges, she rushed the Seahawk to the coordinates where the torpedo was first detected.