He could imagine the roar of the cavitation as the shafts and blades of the escorts thundered around, one ahead, one astern. He knew the active sonars would add to the din, and he knew also that such a racket would present serious problems to a marauding US SSN.
But he knew the Americans were forever improving their underwater weapons. They had long been able to program torpedoes to search and destroy any target more than forty feet below the surface. Such a weapon would plainly miss the surface escorts and hit the submarine below.
Zhang knew also that the Russians would have been towing decoys off the stern of all four escort vessels, designed to seduce away any incoming torpedo. But he had also heard of a further tactical development in the USA — one that allowed the torpedo guidance officer at the other end of the wire to force the underwater missile right on past the decoys, then allow it to search and lock on to a target beyond, all under strict control from the firing submarine.
This would even allow the torpedo, if necessary, to charge right through the “box,” and then turn to race back in for a second look, still searching for an underwater target using “active” to home in on its helpless prey. In Zhang’s view that had probably happened to Kilo 9. He was prepared to bow to advanced technology. What he could not bow to was the idiocy of running a thunderous sound barrier twenty-four hours a day, in the full knowledge that it would probably deny you the precious detection of an incoming “smart” missile.
What he could not bow to was the Russians’ truly numbing decision not to make clear to the Americans that if they opened fire on the Kilos they had an excellent chance of starting World War III by slamming a torpedo into a cruising Russian Typhoon.
In Zhang’s view, that was the key to this terrible situation. And he gazed upward through the little clusters of newly sprouting ginkgo nuts, which were such a delicacy in China, and he thought of the wide Baltic faces of the Russian Navy personnel with whom he dealt…and he heard in his mind the sonorous, triumphal military music of their vast gray neighbors to the west…sounds so utterly crass and discordant to the Chinese ear. And he wondered, quite seriously, precisely which he hated more — the dull, unsubtle, flatly predictable mind-set of the Russians, or the swaggering, high-tech outlaw sweetness of the United States Navy.
He strolled over to the great arbor, with its views across the two-hundred-yard-wide Huangpu River, and decided that while he found the Russians contemptible, he detested the Americans.
While his driver waited at the Fu Yu Street gate, Zhang walked along the wide boulevard of the Bund, which wound behind the seawall following the great right-hand bend in the river on its way to the Yangtze Delta. He stopped occasionally, listening to the sounds of China’s most prosperous and busiest seaport — its docks stretching thirty-five miles along Shanghai’s waterfront.
Zhang heard the lifelong familiar sound of horns and sirens blaring out over the water, and he watched the packed ferries vie for space with old flat-nosed steamers and freighters. All the while, ancient sailing junks tacked against the tide, ducking between huge coal barges as trading families tried to maneuver their sampans, hauling on the big single oar, the yuloh.
The professional head of China’s Navy shook his head at the gentle chaos of this quasi-commercial carnival taking place on the brown waters of the Huangpu. It was vibrant but not entirely typical, because Shanghai also represented the very heart of the Chinese Navy. Here, in the massive shipyards of Jiangnan, Hudong, and Huangpu, they built some of China’s finest warships — the four-thousand-ton Luhu Class guided-missile destroyers, the twenty-five Jianghu Class frigates, and the guided-missile Luda Class destroyers like the 3,670-ton Nanjing, which been home to Admiral Zhang for several years.
He could see her now if he closed his eyes — her stubby, sloping funnels, her sleek 433-foot-long hull, the state-of-the-art antisubmarine mortar launcher, positioned up on the bow, just for’ard of the main 130 mm. gun. Captain Zhang could handle that ship all right, old Number 131. Such days they had been. And he imagined the 120 mortar rockets he used to carry. He would have given his life for the opportunity to fire those mortars into the waters somewhere east of the Kuril Islands, where he knew an American nuclear submarine ran silently and deep, waiting for a new chance to hit the surviving Kilo.
He cast his mind back to the early morning of September 5, when the message had come in from Vladivostock, relayed from the Admiral Chabanenko off the Siberian headland of Ol’utorsky: “Short transient contact picked up on three sweeps radar, six miles off our port bow…possible US SSN.” And he recalled too the imprudent smugness of the Russian Captain: “No reason for additional defensive measures…sound barrier well in place…US powerless.”
Yeah, right. Admiral Zhang walked grimly back along the Bund and into the gardens, returning to the huge ginkgo tree, which to him seemed to embody the ancient soul of his land. He loved to stand in its shadow, and he did so whenever he came to Shanghai…just to stand there, beneath a tree that had already lived for four hundred years and would live for six hundred more — a tree whose natural heritage in his beloved country made the dinosaur look like an upstart.
The rain had stopped, and his anger was abating. He walked around the small lake to the Pavilion of the Nine Lions and strolled down the long east bank of the central lake, past the Tower of Elation, which did not reflect his mood. And he considered how he should deal with his masters. He could, he felt certain, buy some time if he could just obtain a private audience with the Paramount Ruler. Surely the old man would grant him that. Only one thing would change the tide in his favor — if sometime in the next two weeks Kilo number 10 would slide, unharmed, up to her berth in the port of Shanghai.
Wearily he walked back to the gates of the Gardens of Yu the Mandarin, and he stepped into the Navy staff car. Now he must prepare to face the inevitable inquisition. It would end, inevitably, with him, Zhang, and his senior Admirals trying to explain to civilians why a simple delivery of a few submarines, conducted in peacetime, in the waters of their friends and allies the Russians, was proving to be so catastrophically difficult.
Admiral Vitaly Rankov had been in the Kremlin for most of the night — ever since the signal had come in from the Pacific Fleet at 0200 that one of the two Kilos bound for China was lost off the northern Kuril Islands. He had tried to stay calm and had listened carefully to the reports of the Captains of the Russian escort ships, who noted that they could find no suspicion of foul play. But they would, wouldn’t they?
They reported that no one had any evidence of an attack. The Americans could not have detected the Kilos on sonar, and could not have seen them either. No one could have attacked the Kilos — unless an American submarine commanding officer had recklessly decided to blast a torpedo straight past the escort, somehow dodge the decoys, and swerve past the world’s biggest submarine and crash into the Kilo. No, Admiral Rankov did not really understand that either.
The giant ex-Russian Intelligence officer may not have been a submarine weapons expert or a scholar of Naval warfare like his Chinese counterpart, Admiral Zhang, but he knew the capabilities of the US weapons systems well enough.