“So now we brief the President that we haven’t got a single idea what’s going on in goddamned China.”
Kent stood, handing back the briefing folders to Jaspers.
He pulled on his suit jacket from a hanger near the door and walked into the anteroom, Jaspers trailing.
“Your car’s waiting,” the receptionist said to Kent, who nodded, continuing out the door, Deputy Director Jaspers still following.
“Sir, just a thought,” Jaspers said, “the commander of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, Admiral Richard Donchez, is in Washington visiting the Pentagon. I can have him at the briefing at the White House by the time you get there.”
Kent looked at his deputy from under the ridge formed by his bushy gray eyebrows.
“The Navy? What are you getting at, Steve?”
“Sir,” Jaspers said, “I think maybe it’s time we sent a submarine into the Go Hai Bay to listen to Beijing.”
Kent shook his head.
“That’d be like sailing a sub up to Chesapeake Bay to the Potomac River to eavesdrop on Washington. Too dangerous.”
“But that’s all we have left.”
After a moment Kent stepped into the limo, shut the door, and lowered the window. Jaspers crouched over to listen to Kent’s decision.
“You’re right.” Kent said.
“Get Admiral Donchez to the briefing.”
CHAPTER 1
The sun climbed above the horizon, its glare shimmering over the calm water of the western Pacific. The water was a tranquil deep blue, mirroring the sky above. No land was visible; there were no ships. Only the vast stretches of ocean stretching from horizon to horizon. Beneath the calm surface the underside of the waves appeared silvery, reflecting some of the light back deep. The water was so clear that the surface could be seen down to a hundred feet. Below that, there was diffuse light enough to see fifty feet in any direction, but the underside of the gentle waves above could no longer be made out.
At a depth of two hundred and ten feet, the temperature of the water suddenly changed from the lukewarm water of the Pacific in spring to the frigid cold of the sea below, the deep water unaffected by sun or waves. At three hundred feet the light was barely enough to equal that of a flickering candle. Deeper, at four hundred feet, all light from the surface was blocked and the sea was darker than a coal mine. At five hundred feet, the water temperature was a fraction of a degree above freezing, the sun above no longer a factor. At a thousand feet, the weight of the water above caused the pressure to be thirty times atmospheric pressure, enough to crush all but the most primitive life forms. Here the water was undisturbed by currents, fish, sound or light. It was a world more dead, more hostile than the surface of the moon.
The nuclear submarine cruising at this depth was invisible, no light to show the three-hundred-sixty-foot length of her hull, the thirty-three-foot diameter cylindrical black pipe narrowing to a cone at the rear and to a bullet-nose at the bow. No light showed the conning tower presiding over the cylinder of the hull. The conning tower, the “sail,” was a fin of black steel that afforded visibility for navigating the vessel on the surface and housed the periscopes and antennae — her vital sensors that could scan the world on the surface from the protection of the deep.
Inside the cylindrical pressure hull of the ship, beneath the sail, the forward compartment’s upper deck was subdivided into rooms, most of which were full of watch standers doing the routine duty of driving the huge nuclear ship deep below the surface. In the control room, the Officer of the Deck stared at the firecontrol screens and the sonar repeater monitor, bored now that no surface or submerged contacts were being tracked. Forward of the control room, the sonar room was quiet, filled with consoles and screens and enlisted sonar men one with headsets scanning the passive towed array narrow-frequency display. The radio room and ESM room were empty, both of them unused unless the ship was at periscope depth.
One deck below, in the middle level, the crews’ mess was half-filled with enlisted men eating traditional bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, their eyes heavy from six hours of watch standing through the middle of the night, the mid watch In the neighboring galley cooks were finishing the last servings of breakfast, cleaning up and preparing for a lunch of “sliders,” hamburgers so greasy they were known to slide down the throat. On the starboard side of the middle level, officers’ country was quiet. The staterooms were empty. The officers’ wardroom, which doubled as a conference room, office, movie screening room and dining room, was crowded with men, some officers, some senior enlisted chiefs and petty officers. Most were dressed in blue cotton coveralls, their silver or gold submariner’s dolphin pins above their left breast pockets, all of them wearing sneakers or crepe-soled shoes for ship silence.
The seat at the head of the table was empty. The man in the seat just to the right of the end seat counted heads, stood up and lifted a phone by the starboard bulkhead communication ship status console.
“Captain, Engineer here,” he said into the phone.
“We’re ready.”
One deck above, in the captain’s stateroom adjacent to the control room, Commander Sean Murphy smiled as he acknowledged and hung up the phone. Murphy was forty, of medium height with the muscular build he had had at the Naval Academy. Since then, of all his classmates, he had probably changed the least. He had yet to lose a single hair to baldness, although gray seemed to be appearing with regularity in his wavy blond hair. He had fought off the weight gain of middle age and was still able to fit into the dress-white uniform he had worn to his graduation eighteen years before. His only wrinkles were the laugh lines around his dark blue eyes, accentuated by hours of squinting out of a type-20 periscope. Murphy was almost always cheerful, his smile softening the planes of an otherwise harsh-looking face. His leadership style had always featured encouragement and reward, rarely threat or admonishment, and it had taken him up the Navy’s ladder quickly, giving him command of the second newest submarine in the entire fleet, the last Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine built before Electric Boat retooled for the new but already canceled Seawolf-class ships.
Here at sea. Murphy was in his element, in the role that he had trained for for nearly three decades-command at sea. Although he could not walk onto the bridge, smell the sea air and scan the horizon with binoculars and see dolphins and seagulls, like his surface-warfare classmates, the smells and sounds of the submarine deep under the Pacific were compensation enough for him. His only regret was that one year hence he would have to turn the boat over to her next skipper and give up the sea for an endless series of desk jobs. The thought filled him with a momentary sadness, and again he found a foreign thought entering his head, to resign his commission and leave the Navy, but then he would be trading a desk job at squadron for a desk job in civilian industry. What was the difference?
He made an effort to put the matter out of his mind, picking up the drill briefing sheets and scanning them before affixing his signature on the bottom. As he considered the schedule for the day — nuclear reactor emergency drills in the morning, tactical drills in the afternoon, perhaps some approach-and-attack runs against surface ships with some simulated torpedo shots — he found his mood improving. Another day of play deep beneath the Pacific with this brand new billion-dollar toy.
Murphy closed the spiral notebook he had been writing in before the call from the wardroom. The notebook was a long letter to his wife Katrina, whom he hadn’t seen in ten weeks since Tampa deployed to WESTPAC; in the next six weeks the book would be filled with his daily notes to her, the only way he knew to ease the ache of being away from her and nine year-old Sean Junior and two-year-old Emily. Murphy tucked the photo of Sean and Emily into the notebook and put it in a cubbyhole on the aft wall of his ten by-ten stateroom, grabbed a red baseball cap from a hook near the door and walked out to the passageway, down the ladder, and into officers’ country and the crowded wardroom.