“I don’t think so. Not for an underwater passage,” replied Jicai. “I don’t much like the waterway. It’s quite busy. But what I really do not like are the northern approaches. The entire place is covered with damned oil fields.” He pointed at the charted area fifty miles east of the coast of Sumatra. “Look at this lot. You have the Cintra, Kitty, Nora, and Rama fields…then farther north the Yvonne, Farida, Zelda, and Tita. The whole place is a mass of oil rigs, production platforms, tanker moorings, tanker storage areas, platforms on pipelines…it goes on for miles…and it’s shallow. No one would choose to make a submerged voyage anywhere near there. In my opinion the Sunda Strait is a nonstarter.”
“How about the next one along…six hundred and fifty miles east, the narrows that separates Java and Bali?” Zhang was happy to defer to the Southern Commander in these investigations. Admiral Zu was a submariner and had served as the commanding officer of the five-thousand-ton nuclear boat Han 405, with its high-tech French intercept radar and modern Russian homing torpedoes. Commander Zu Jicai had made quite a name for himself in the mid-1990s when he was caught and tracked by a US Carrier Battle Group off the coast of North Korea.
Chinese Naval propaganda made much of his skillful handling of the submarine, and of the fact that Zu lived to fight another day after facing down the marauding American eagle. They made little of the fact that the Americans could easily have sunk Jicai at any time they wished, had they been so inclined.
Nonetheless, Admiral Zu Jicai was regarded as one of the best Chinese submariners…a status Arnold Morgan had uncharitably described as “like the world’s tallest midget.” But in an essentially nonmaritime nation, which China has been, at least militarily, for several hundred years, Zu Jicai knew more about submarines than almost anyone else in China.
“Don’t really like the Bali Narrows, sir,” he said. “It’s too shallow at its narrowest part…less than half a mile wide. And there’s only ninety feet of depth coming out on the southern side. That’s no real problem, but the narrows are too dangerous, too risky, especially with uranium on board. I’d never consider it.”
“Are we reaching the point where we must declare the whole exercise impossible as a subsurface transit? Coming through the Indonesian islands?” Admiral Zhang looked puzzled.
“No, sir. They could get through the Lombok Strait dived…right here…eighty miles east of the narrows. This stretch of water, it’s about twenty-five miles across between Eastern Bali and the island of Lombok. And the seaway splits into two good deep channels. It’s deep, at least six hundred feet all the way through…even this shallow part, just here at the southeastern exit point, shows four hundred feet on the chart.”
“It’s a long way east, Jicai,” said Zhang, peering at the chart. “They would have to take a different route from the short run down the South China Sea.”
“Yessir. They would. They’d have to head southeast as soon as they dived off Taiwan. Then they’d make a course east of the Philippines…through the Celebes Sea…right here. Then through the Makassar Strait, which is not only deep, it’s also a hundred and fifty miles wide. See these depths, sir? Six thousand feet…shelving up to two thousand feet…all the way down to the Lombok Strait it’s never less than fifteen hundred.
“I cannot be certain, of course, sir. But if I was asked to transport a dangerous cargo from Taiwan, underwater, in a highly classified operation, that is the route I would take — east of the Philippines and through the Lombok.”
“How far would that be, Jicai?”
“About a thousand miles from Taiwan to the southern point of the Philippines. Then a twelve-hundred-mile run down to the Strait. Look here, sir, the water’s four thousand feet deep just north of the gap. There’s no shoal water across the route, there’s no need to surface, and there’s shallow water for cover. It’s perfect for them.”
“Do we know when the next Hai Lung is due to clear Suao?”
“Yessir. Two days from now. July twenty-third.”
“That means she could be at the Strait in two weeks?”
“Correct, sir.”
“What do you think, Jicai? Two ACINT trawlers right here at the entrance to the Strait? Would that pick them up? We’d know its direction, and we’d be a lot wiser than we are now.”
“Two would do it. Three would be better. And then we would finally know if the Hai Lung was indeed three weeks away from its ultimate destination, sir, heading south.”
“Yes, Jicai. Yes we would. Perhaps three weeks away from some nuclear factory…which we must find.”
“The ACINTs are at twenty-four hours’ notice for sea, sir. We have three of them based well south at Hainandao. We have enough time to brief them before sailing, and we’ll have them on station well ahead of the Hai Lung.”
“We’ll do that right now, Jicai. We’ll go together. I’ll get your signal orders out later.”
The last weekend in July was a Cape Cod masterpiece. The warm, damp sea mists that had obscured the sun for so many days throughout the month had drifted away at last, and the gleaming bright light of midsummer lit up the waters of Nantucket Sound.
Not a cloud littered the pink evening sky as the sun went down behind the white steeple of the Church in Cotuit — at least it did if you happened to be drifting home across the bay on the evening tide, as Commander Boomer Dunning and his two daughters were doing at this moment.
His wife had a different view from the big family house, which faced southeast. She could see the surreal light of the setting sun along the sandy beach of Deadneck Island, which made it look floodlit.
From any direction Cotuit Bay was a beautiful sight on this warm summer evening. Secure in her earthly paradise Jo Dunning waved at her crew as thirteen-year-old Kathy ran the family skiff, Sneaker, expertly into the beach. Boomer jumped off the bow and dragged the boat up on the sand. Then they all pulled it a bit farther, and Kathy and her younger sister took down the big gaff-rigged sail. Of course it would have been more orthodox to put the boat on a mooring like most everyone else, but Boomer said he’d been running little sailboats up the beach all his life on calm summer evenings, and as the senior officer that was the way it was going to be.
For Jo, this Sunday evening and the barbecue they were about to light represented one of the rare bonuses she had received all summer. Boomer had arrived unexpectedly on Friday night and announced that he was not due back in New London until Monday morning. Her in-laws were away for three weeks in Maine, and the white clapboard house on the bay was theirs alone. Their real vacation here was not due to begin until August 5, when Boomer had a ten-day furlough, and right now Jo Dunning was at least as happy as she ever remembered being.
On the previous day, she and Kathy had won the weekly Cotuit skiffs race during the long, sunny afternoon, while Boomer and Jane had walked up the road to watch the village baseball team. The fabled Cotuit Kettleers had wiped out the Hyannis Mets 9–0 at Lowell Park.
As he cheered his men on, Boomer did not know that Frederick J. Goodwin, the Cape Cod Times feature writer, was sitting in the visitors’ area of the bleachers, glumly watching his team make four errors and walk seven Kettleer batters. It was an unfortunate omission, because the US Naval officer and the journalist had something in common, they being the only two people in the ballpark who had once journeyed to the island of Kerguelen. And each of them had a deep and personal involvement with that remote and terrible place.