The Silex missile lifted out of the quad launcher of the destroyer Zunyi and accelerated away from the sleek warship, its tailfins moving slightly in response to the onboard processor’s commands. The missile reached apogee and arced back down toward the dark sea, the inertial navigation system aiming the missile for the position of the submarine, not its position at launch but the position it was calculated to be at time of impact. After forty seconds of rocket-powered flight, the rocket motor cut out, exhausted, the explosive bolts in the ring separating the motor from the depth charge below, jettisoning the inert rocket-motor canister.
The warhead flew on, the surface ahead approaching at Mach 0.95.
The impact of the water jarred the missile’s warhead.
The accelerometer tied into the arming circuit felt the negative four g’s of deceleration and completed the circuit to the depth-charge arming-circuit.
The depth indicator felt the pressure increase of the water as the unit sank, the pressure rising as it fell to ten meters, twenty, thirty … At a depth of forty-five meters the depth-indicator output matched the limits set by the processor’s set point and the detonation circuit software logic interlock was satisfied. The detonator went off, exploding the depth-charge warhead in an underwater fireball. The shock wave of the explosion traveled outward, seeking the hull of a submarine.
Which it did not take long to find.
The White House basement’s situation room was walled with painted cinder block, full of Formica-topped tables and cheap carpet. An entire wall on the west side was lined with communication and crypto gear. The east wall was filled with television screens, some of them selected to cable feeds from Langley, CIA Headquarters; Ford Meade, home of NSA; or the Pentagon. But two were selected to CNN, since the open media often got stories as quickly as CIA, DIA or NSA. The north wall of the room was reserved for charts and maps, in this case the Go Hai Bay. The south wall had a table filled with stale sandwiches and donuts and another one with a large coffee urn on it. Coffee cups filled the waste cans and cigarette butts were piled high in the ash trays. A door in the east wall led to the situation room’s conference area, lined with curtains, where the President would meet with the National Security Council. The press or the White House photographer often captured the NSC in situation-room meetings, the conference table neat, the curtains pressed and clean. But this morning, the table was strewn with top-secret briefing papers and the curtains were drawn.
Secretary of Defense Napoleon Ferguson stood in the conference area, chewing on a tasteless donut and washing it down with cold coffee, waiting for President Dawson and Secretary of State/ National Security Advisor Eve Trachea to arrive. He had been in the situation room all night. He had hoped he could catch Dawson’s ear when Trachea wasn’t around, but that seemed more and more difficult in recent months. Trachea was apparently becoming Dawson’s favored advisor, and Ferguson had begun to wonder why the hell he continued in the job. He had begun to feel Trachea’s guiding philosophy was to disagree with anything he wanted, which tempted him to argue for what he did not want and count on Eve to disagree. But now Dawson relied so heavily on Eve Trachea’s guidance that often Department of Defense personnel weren’t invited to meetings. NSC meetings had grown less frequent, as had Cabinet meetings.
When Dawson and Trachea arrived, Ferguson checked his watch, then sat down. He only took a few moments updating them on the situation in the Go Hai Bay, ending with his request to allow the Reagan’s air wing to overfly the bay and escort the subs out.
Dawson seemed inclined to go along, but then Trachea spoke up:
“Mr. President, this course of action would be an all-out attack against the Chinese fleet. Our agreement with your admiral was to use the Seawolf to get out the spy sub. Now there’s pressure to escalate. Why does that sound so familiar. Secretary Ferguson? “Just give us a few troops now,” you say, and later it’s ‘we need to support the troops we already have.” We cannot commit to a killing air war …”
Ferguson looked from Trachea to Dawson, who clearly was unhappy with his choice.
“She’s right, Napoleon. I only authorized the use of force for the Seawolf. The country can’t go to war over this …”
Ferguson pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, spread it on the desk and smoothed it out before handing it to Dawson. Dawson began to read, with Trachea, who sat next to him, reading along with him. The paper was the message transmitted from the Tampa describing the torture the men had undergone when the Chinese had taken the ship. Dawson’s face went pale at first, then changed to the flush of anger.
“These are the people we’re dealing with,” Ferguson said.
“Is it possible this is exaggerated, Napoleon?” Dawson asked, the certainty on his face from a moment before seeming to evaporate.
Ferguson tried to control himself. Somehow he needed to find something to shock this well-meaning but misguided president into unleashing the aircraft.
But what …
“Chief of the Watch, prepare to emergency blow all main ballast tanks,” Pacino ordered, his eye on the chronometer.
“What are you doing?” Morris asked.
“Sonar, Captain, report the splash of the SS-N-14 as soon as you have it.”
“Captain, Sonar, aye.”
“We’re going to surface,” Pacino finally told Morris.
Morris began to protest when the overhead speaker blared out the report from sonar:
“SPLASH FROM THE MISSILE DIRECTLY ASTERN!”
“Emergency blow fore and aft!” Pacino shouted.
“Take her up, ten degree up bubble! All stop!”
The emergency blow system levers were thrown upward to the BLOW position, forcing ultra-high-pressure bottled air into the ballast tanks of the Seawolf, blowing them dry of sea water. At her already shallow depth, it took only a moment to blow the tanks dry, and the sudden increase in buoyancy forced the ship toward the surface, her nose rocketing upward.
A split second before Seawolfs sonar dome broached the sea, the depth charge from the Silex missile exploded directly astern of the ship.
Aircraft Commander Chu HuaFeng watched as the Silex missile impacted the water, the splash still phosphorescent in the bay. He flew around in a circular pattern, waiting for orders to finish off the submarine, waiting for the Silex missile’s depth charge to explode.
He watched the spot of foam for signs that the depth charge had succeeded. In a way he hoped it would fail and give him the chance to put the submarine on the bottom. He glanced at his fuel gages, saw how little fuel he had left. As he looked back down to the bay he saw a black shape coming out of the dark water. For a moment he could not believe his eyes. Half a kilometer east of the depth-charge detonation, the American submarine had surfaced, either surrendering or damaged beyond the ability to stay submerged, he decided. As the water of the depth charge explosion rained back down into the bay and its spot of foam calmed, Chu flew his Yak toward the submarine, which now bobbed in the water, no longer underway, as if it had lost its engines.
The deck jumped with the explosion. The bank of fluorescent lights in the overhead flickered and went out. The firecontrol displays and sonar repeater monitor winked out, then the lights came back on, illuminating the room in a red glow.
“Weps, get your firecontrol back and hurry,” Pacino said.
“Conn, Sonar, loss of sonar. We’re reinitializing.”
“Get it back up. Chief,” Pacino ordered. Two firecontrol technicians scrambled to the outboard side of the attack center consoles and began typing into a console hidden from the conn platform. The screens of the firecontrol system came back for a moment, then winked out.