“I’d be happy to. Skipper. Just one problem. We don’t know what the hell they sound like.”
The old search paradox had returned, Patton thought. They couldn’t very well search for a sub unless they knew its “sound signature,” the pure tones that it emitted from its rotating machinery. It was usually discovered only by shadowing a new submarine, lead ship of the class, with a U.S. sub, recording the sounds heard as it submerged the first time out of the shipyard. But absent that acoustic intelligence, it would be difficult at best to find an intruder submarine. Perhaps only the transient noises would give it away.
“So, here we are, steaming ahead of the convoy, going max out at forty-one knots, half deaf because of our own speed, half blind because we have no idea what we’re searching for, with cryptic messages that there might be an advanced-technology Japanese sub or mirror image out here, and we’re supposed to keep the whole East China Sea clean with all that?”
“That’s it. Skipper. That’s why you get that command pay.”
“Yeah, all forty bucks a week,” Patton said. “You got an old Destiny III search plan?”
“Sure. It’s covered with dust, but yeah, I could find it for you.”
“Do me a favor. Load it in. It’s as realistic as a Rubis or a Han.”
“No problem, coming right up. Anything else? Fries with your Destiny III? A Coke?”
“Just an open seaway. That’s all I want. Last thing I need is to have the convoy attacked on my watch.”
“We lost the Lincoln together, sir. I’m not all that interested in losing a second task force.” Uncharacteristically, Demeers’ voice was dead serious.
Irritated, John Patton returned to the control room, frowning and thinking.
Even after almost two weeks, the command console took some getting used to. Admiral Chu Hua-Feng thought, busy scanning the screens.
For two weeks Chu had put the crew on a crash course to learn the ship. The training sessions had taken hours, with the Second Captain both driving the ship while simulating combat-screen readouts for the control-room watchstanders. The Second Captain had proved one of the keys to the operation’s success — up till now. The Second Captain ran everything aboard, including the galley ovens, and fortunately they had managed to convince it that they were the legitimate crew members. Had that gone wrong, the mission would have been scrubbed.
After the Second Captain had listened to and obeyed Chu’s first order, he’d put up an antenna, and using the computers they’d hauled aboard from the submersible just before cutting it loose, Chu had communicated with each of the other Rising Sun submarines. He’d been pleasantly surprised to find that not one of his unit commanders had had trouble taking over their vessels. In fact, of the six, only Arctic Storm had given the invading Chinese a struggle. The other five crews had walked aboard, fired a few shots, and calmly taken over. That he alone had had to fight his way aboard seemed odd, an inconsistency. Perhaps it had something to do with this vessel, this very ship, he’d thought, wondering for the merest moment if the machine could have a soul, but he’d shaken off the superstition immediately and gone on to the next of the endless number of tasks required to train the crew and the flotilla.
At times over the last days he had thought the task impossible, the men not understanding, fatigue setting in, the stress and the lack of fresh air and sufficient sleep and customary food beginning to make his men lose their edge. But finally, after one of his acidic speeches, the mood had changed, and like a soccer team roaring onto the field after being shouted at by the coach at halftime, the ship had begun to function, and the team solidified. The last exercises had been dramatically different, the ship the winner of each. After a day of crew rest, they were here, positioned at the Nazeyakushima Gap, waiting for the fleet of Americans.
The Satellite News Network had proved amazingly useful, broadcasting the positions and intentions of the Americans, leaving out only their eventual landing site.
It was such pinpoint intelligence that Chu had wondered if it was disinformation, but the confirming Chinese satellite photos of the incoming flotilla had shown the ships’ positions exactly where the news reports claimed.
So far the plans for the attack had been going well, with the briefing of the crews being done in parallel with Chu training his own ship’s men on the assault. A debate had raged about how the attack should be conducted, and Chu’s plan had been called into question by his own men, chief among them the engineering officer, Lieutenant Li Xinmin, who insisted that the American 688 submarines be attacked prior to the surface force, while Chu planned to simply allow the 688s to drive blindly by.
When the debate rose to a crescendo, Chu retreated to his stateroom and programmed a simulation, playing it that evening to the men in the messroom. In the first simulation scenario, Chu programmed them shooting first at the 688 subs. In response to word that the submarine screen had sunk, the ships of the incoming American fleet broke up and retreated, making torpedo targeting nearly impossible, with only ten percent of the ships sinking. In Chu’s second scenario, with the surface ships coming under attack, the entire force was demolished, without exception. Chu had thought that would end the debate, but then the men had begun to worry about the effect of the 688s and their revenge, with a wave of land-based patrol aircraft screaming in to sink the Rising Suns.
That was not Chu’s private worry. Each ship had 24 weapon tubes; each tube had two weapons, a loaded weapon and a magazine weapon. That was 48 torpedoes per ship, a total of 288 large-bore antiship weapons.
With one torpedo expended per target, his forces had 288 chances to sink surface vessels. With one fleet of 170 ships, the 288 torpedoes should hold out, provided they didn’t have duplicate targets. The only question in Chu’s mind was what would happen when the second force from the American side came, as they eventually would.
Surface ships hunting them unsuccessfully would soon yield to submarines. The first might be more 6881’s, the antiques. But in time others would come, more capable units. They would begin to hunt down his force, and his ships had only so many weapons. The key had to be a rapid demoralizing strike, something so devastating that they wouldn’t come back for more. Whether he could achieve that, no one knew.
With that thought Chu decided to turn to the task at hand and stop thinking about eventualities. He was a dark soul, as he’d known for years, and men like him did not drink in the champagne of victory, they waited for the pain of failure. And so, in Chu’s mind, the time for debate had ended. He resumed the mantle of the commander and made the orders that had brought them here, where his force was set up to kill the invading surface fleet Chu reclined in his control couch’ at the intricate command console, looking over its marvels. The displays could be configured in any of a thousand modes. The screens could read out computer machine language, sonar curves, sonar raw data, weapons presets, camera video displays, virtually anything. He’d read through some of the manuals, even had some of the Japanese captain’s notes translated to English, and by now he was becoming confident. The ship would function, and he would lead it and the men to victory.
He looked at the center screen, the god’s-eye view of the sea, showing his Arctic Storm in the center. There were no sonar contacts, but he had instructed the Second Captain to show for him the approximate position of the other Rising Sun submarines. Twenty kilometers to the northeast was the Lightning Bolt, twenty kilometers to the southeast the Thundercloud, the three subs forming a triangle, but which was actually a bottle, with Chu’s ship the bottom of the bottle, the other two the sides.