“See the waterfall? Those vertical streaks falling down the screen are noises, each noise a contact, and their horizontal positions on the display are their true bearings from us. The vertical position is time, the new at the top, the old at the bottom, the new replacing the old. The old falls off the screen, giving it the name waterfall. How many vertical streaks do you see?”
Bart counted: “Twelve. No, thirteen with this dark trace at one hundred degrees.”
“The one zero zero trace is the surface force directly ahead. The other twelve traces are twelve Tampas.”
“Say what?”
“Every one of those noises is a 688-class submarine. At least so it will appear to the Chinese. Those are Mark 38 decoys. They are torpedo-sized, with large fuel tanks and a computer brain that steers them on a programmed course. In the nose cone of the unit is a sonar transducer that emits noises sounding exactly like this submarine. To the surface ships, it will look like there are thirteen subs coming.”
“So?” Bart said. “So they shoot a dozen more depth-charge things than normal, and kill us a few seconds later. Is this the great plan you and Lennox have been hatching?”
“Only part of it.”
Vaughn pressed a sequence of touch keys on the lower face of the monitor panel, dividing the waterfall display into two waterfalls.
“The upper screen shows the last thirty minutes of history instead of just the last thirty seconds. The dark traces are the Mark 38 decoys. Look here at these lighter traces, the ones that sloped flat about fifteen minutes ago.” Eleven new traces were visible, each vertical at the bottom, sloping flat in the middle and vertical again at the top of the display.
“Those are torpedoes. They came out of our baffles and passed us here, where the traces are horizontal, then drove on ahead of us. They are now catching up to the decoys. In another twenty minutes or so the first wave of decoys will swim into the task force zone. The Chinese will detect them — I hope — and get confused, since there are apparently several submarines. Then the volley of torpedoes will reach them, and after that, we and those closer decoys will reach the task force. By that time the Chinese should be sinking.”
“Won’t you be shooting at the surface ships?”
“Can’t. None of the torpedoes are working. We thought we had some healthy units but they all failed their self-checks. Two tubes work, but without an intact torpedo there’s no chance. We’ve got vertical launch tubes for cruise missiles, but without the firecontrol computer they’re just useless scrap metal.”
“So what happens after the Seawolf runs out of torpedoes? Will we be out of hot water?”
Vaughn pushed the function keys on the sonar monitor, returning the original waterfall display, and turned to Bartholomay.
“Who the hell knows? Look, Bart, either we get out of the bay or we don’t.”
“I just don’t like being along for the ride. On an OP at least I have a finger on the trigger. Here, all I can do is wait inside this sewer pipe for you to drive us out.”
Lube Oil Vaughn looked at the SEAL, his face a mask of confidence, his stomach a nest of butterflies, his hands in his pockets to prevent anyone seeing them shake. He was one of only — two officers who could get the ship out, and if he didn’t look steady it would be that much harder to keep the men’s trust.
But the truth was, Vaughn was just as much a passenger as Black Bart.
At 1845 Kurt Lennox came into the control room, his black-rimmed, bloodshot eyes giving away the fact that he had been unable to sleep for days. Each minute stretched into hours, each hour a month. Lennox, Vaughn and Bartholomay stood over the chart table as if gathered around a campfire on a cold night.
“How much longer to international waters?” Lennox asked.
Vaughn walked his dividers across the chart, measured the distance, then grabbed a time-motion slide rule and spun the inner circle twice.
“About ninety minutes,” he said, “assuming we speed up to full when we hit the task force at the channel midpoint.”
“Goddamned long time,” Bart said.
“It’s a big goddamned channel,” Vaughn said, looking at the chronometer, wishing they had just one lousy torpedo.
Weapons Department Leader Chen Yun held up the binoculars and looked out the bridge windows at the water to the west. The wind blew the rain against the windshield, the sound like a sandblast rig from the shipyard. Outside the windows, the bay water was black, the sky turning dark brown as the light faded.
The water of the bay was choppy, the whitecaps phosphorescent in the dim light. The ship was on course north, two kilometers astern of a Jianghu frigate, which was two kilometers astern of another frigate.
Chen walked to the surface search radar display and put his face down to the hooded display, the rubber of the hood cold on his forehead. The circular scope was green, the rotating beam lighting up the land around them. The point of Lushun was sharp and clear to the north. The hump of Penglai was more distant, its shoreline fuzzy in the rain. Close to the center of the circle, a group of islands lit up and slowly faded with each rotation of the radar beam. Chen adjusted a range-display knob, setting the radius of the display circle to eight kilometers. The points of land vanished, the scope taken up with twelve dots arranged in an oblong rectangle, the center of the display on the east elongated edge of the rectangle. The dots were the twelve other ships of the task force, all steaming one behind another along an eleven-kilometer by two kilometer racetrack, pacing back and forth over the deep channel through the Bohai Haixia.
Chen didn’t like it. A Udaloy-class destroyer was not meant to march back and forth in formation as if on a parade ground; it was built to prowl the open seas in search of submarines, and when they were detected, to kill them. The ship should have been steaming independently, in a forward deployment, searching over open water for the submarines. To bottle them up here at a choke-point was stupid. Certainly that was fine for the frigates, but to put a sub-hunting Udaloy here made no sense. Even if they detected the subs now, the Udaloy would have a tough time getting to them in the restricted waters of the channel.
The water to the west, from the direction of enemy approach, was a free-fire zone for their SS-N-14 Silex missiles. That at least had been done right. The most lethal weapon in the task force was the SS-N-14, a rocket-launched depth charge. Usually one per customer would be enough to kill any sub. But if they needed to launch torpedoes down a west bearing line, they could not do it from the eastern branch of the pace pattern because they could acquire on the ships of their task force to the west, the ones pacing south.
And they were prohibited from shooting in the east direction because the aircraft carrier Shaoguan was patrolling the end of the channel to the east, and it would not do to hit the carrier with a volley of Type 53 torpedoes.
It made no sense, confining a deadly Udaloy to this battle tactic, but then, who was he to say? Chen was still in his late twenties, barely out of the Second Surface Vessel Academy at Canton. He could not hope to match the tactical minds of the fleet commanders and task force commanders or of Ship Commander Yang Pei Ping, the Jinan’s captain. They must have agreed to this force deployment. Still, the tactics course at the academy had always insisted that fast ASW destroyers like the Udaloy operate in open water, leaving choke-point entrapments to lesser ships like the Jianghu frigates. And what about the fleet deployments to the south? The fleet commander had stationed most of the fleet at the entrance and exit of the southern passage, the Miaodao Strait, expecting the subs to try to leave through the narrow channel.