“So would I, fuck it,” replied the NSA. “But I’m still not prepared to listen to reason.”
Joe Mulligan laughed. “Come on, old buddy. Fight the battle you’re in. We got clean away with it. Beautiful, right? What’ll we do now. Given that K-10 is still on the fucking loose.”
“Okay. I agree. You need not haul Boomer over the coals. But I do insist you make my thoughts clear to him. And I don’t want him promoted. You can’t have officers like that becoming Captains. He’s a fucking maniac.”
Admiral Mulligan grinned and said, “Yes, of course, Admiral. As much of a maniac as we were, in our youth. I wish to Christ we had a few more like him. But…down to business. Right here, we can’t do much. It’s no good hanging around and shadowing all the way to Shanghai. The Typhoon will now almost certainly stay as well.”
“Right. That bastard Rankov has been too clever for his own good. His stupid ships made too much noise. Boomer couldn’t get a classification, but the Typhoon turned out to be no deterrent, because they failed to make it obvious that the sonofabitch was there. But I’ll tell you one thing…it does show how determined they are to get the Kilos through to Shanghai.”
“As far as I’m concerned, the Kilo’s split,” replied Joe Mulligan. “That’s what I would have done. Which means that right now we haven’t got a chance of picking him up because the trail’s gone cold. He’s making a run for home. We’re not going to get him…and I think we may as well send Columbia to Pearl for maintenance. It’s only three thousand miles from where he is now. It’ll take him six days, and he can spend some time getting his ship into top shape. CINCPAC could use him to patrol with the new CVBG in the Arabian Sea in mid-October. But right now, I guess he and his crew could use a little R and R.”
“Okay, Joe. Let’s do that. We’ll just have to keep a weather eye out for K-10, as and when we can. Still, of the seven we went after, we got six, right? Not bad.”
The SUBLANT signal to Commander Dunning in Columbia was transmitted within the hour. Columbia sucked it off the satellite at 0900, local, the next day, September 11. It read: “Personal for Commander Dunning. Received your signal. Well done. Proceed to Pearl. Lack of POSIDENT: NSA assessment — D-A SOB…Mulligan.”
Three hours later, running deep now, due south down the Northern Pacific, Boomer read the signal ruefully. He had expected worse. They might even have relieved him of command. He had been instructed to get POSIDENT. But he was not the first front-line commanding officer to reflect upon how damned easy it is to sit in a Washington armchair, and how very much different things appear when you’re actually out there, trying to attack, trying to keep your ship safe, trying to do the business of your higher command.
How typical of the Navy, he thought, to accept cheerfully the demise of the Kilo, and to intimate guarded approval of the attack. And yet to leave a commanding officer in no doubt that he will be held to account, should they consider he exceeded his orders.
“That’s known, Admiral Mulligan, as having your cookies, and eating them,” he murmured. He wondered, quite seriously, whether he would ever gain the promotion to Captain that was so important to him. How, with an apparent enemy like the mighty Admiral Morgan watching his every move? He also wondered, reflectively, how long it actually was since anyone had been brave enough to call him a dumb-ass sonofabitch, even in code, even from the other side of the world.
14
The staff car drew up to the locked corner gate of the Garden of Yu the Mandarin, and the big man in the rear seat stepped out. Two officials in Mao Zedong overalls hurriedly unlocked the gate, and the powerful, uniformed military officer marched into the nearly deserted showpiece of Shanghai’s waterfront. It was 11 AM and the gardens would not open to the public until 2 PM but in China warlords have traditionally had an entirely different set of rules.
The steel-tipped black shoes of the lone figure clicked on the concrete path as he passed the Hall for Gathering Grace, in a light September drizzle, and continued through the hedgerows to the long lake, striding toward the Tower of Ten Thousand Flowers. But he slowed, as he walked to the towering ornamental ginkgo tree that dominates this end of the gardens. And there he sheltered beneath the large fanlike leaves of the last species of a tree that grew in Northern China two hundred million years ago.
He stood in solitary fury under the branches, breathing deeply, as if trying to control himself. He crashed his clenched right fist into the open palm of his left hand, and he hissed under his breath, “If I could, I would blow the Pentagon to pieces.” There were times when Admiral Zhang Yushu was Asia’s answer to Admiral Arnold Morgan. Right now he did not trust himself to fraternize with other human beings. Especially since he expected, imminently, a call from Admiral Vitaly Rankov, whom he now considered to be the biggest fool in all Russia.
The satellite message had explained there had been some sort of an accident off the southern end of the Kuril Island of Paramushir, and that one of the two Kilos had disappeared. At the time it had been running at a depth of two hundred feet in a protected two-mile square between the three Russian destroyers and the ASW frigate Nepristupny. It had also been accompanied by the twenty-one-thousand-ton Typhoon Class submarine, and had been surrounded by a sound barrier, which would make its detection impossible.
The Russians were mystified. Not one of the sonar rooms had detected the approach of a torpedo. And though three ships had reported a possible explosion in the immediate area of the two-mile-square box, none could be positive as to its cause. Suddenly the Kilo was not answering on the underwater telephone, and now, five hours later, the destroyers were combing the area, having summoned search-assistance from their base at Petropavlovsk. An oil slick and some wreckage had been found. At this stage, given the ironclad strength of the Russian escort, they suspected an accident, possibly a massive battery explosion inside the submarine.
Admiral Zhang had never read anything more complacent and dull-witted in his entire life. When the signal came in, the Admiral had asked himself just one question: would it have been obvious to a potential enemy that the Kilo was accompanied by a Russian Typhoon? The answer had been no. The Typhoon was in attendance to deter an enemy and had, in his view, failed. Even Rankov must now understand that it had failed because the Americans did not know it was there.
He had read the signal with incredulity, baffled at what he called the “boneheaded intractability of the Slav peasant mind.” Alone in his office he had been physically affected by the depth of his outrage. He felt claustrophobic, hemmed in — all he wanted to do was hurl something at the wall. Instead he had summoned the staff car and told the driver to arrange for the gates of the Yu Yuan to be opened for him.
Zhang loved lonely places. He would not have dreamed of spending time in the gardens when the teeming masses were in attendance, and he walked around the wide ginkgo tree, repeating over and over a jumble of cascading thoughts. “Their obsession with secrecy…their sheer mind-blowing dumbness…all they had to do was TELL the Americans the Typhoon was there, and this would never have happened — the Americans would never have dared to fire a torpedo had there been a chance of hitting a Russian submarine carrying inter-continental ballistics as the Typhoon certainly was because that’s what she’s for…and she was in Russian waters.”
Admiral Zhang Yushu was in no doubt. The men in the Pentagon had sunk the ninth Kilo, as they had blown apart Kilo 4 and Kilo 5…and as they had destroyed Kilo 6, and Kilo 7, and Kilo 8 in the canal. Zhang would not have bet a secondhand rickshaw on the arrival of Kilo 10 in the Port of Shanghai. He shook his head in exasperation and reflected in fury on the entire scene, which had taken place in that wide distant seaway south of Paramushir.