Much farther to the east, in the Pacific Ocean, were the subs that would act as the bottle cork. The Earthquake, Volcano, and Tsunami. Chu’s Arctic Storm was positioned directly in the path of the approaching American Rapid Deployment Force convoy. If the landing was to be Shanghai, as he was hoping, the convoy would drive right toward him. However, if Tsingtao was their course, it would bring them within two kilometers of the Lightning Bolt, and his Arctic Storm would be south of their track by about twelve kilometers. Similarly, if Hong Kong was their destination, the Thundercloud would be close and he would be off track by twelve kilometers.
Either way, his three subs would still manage to bottle up the incoming fleet. He hoped central White China was the target, so he could shoot down their throats.
Sinking three aircraft carriers of the massive Webb class would be glorious.
With his computer link to the radio gear, Chu had ordered the other subs to their coordinates using an ingenious encryption system — music. He had broadcast old, scratchy American and English rock’n’ roll songs, each one referred to in a code book. The Rolling Stones was the address for the Thundercloud, the Beatles selected for the Volcano, and so on, with individual songs keyed to different preplanned codebook positions. All the while he’d brought no suspicion upon himself from the listening American fleet. And that was for his initial positions.
If he needed to maneuver the fleet as the Americans approached, he would use VHF bridge-to-bridge radios, having his Korean-speaking first officer come up on the radio as if he were a fishing boat captain speaking to other fishermen, telling them to get out of the way of the convoy, which would risk collision, scare the fish, and possibly dump them in their huge wake waves.
Chu’s trawlers currently filled the East China Sea.
“Admiral,” Chen Zhu, the operations officer at the weapons console said, “is it time?”
“Yes,” Chu said, his eye on the chart, then on his watch. If he acted too soon, he’d have to turn off the torpedo gyros to keep them from overheating, but if he warmed up the weapons too late, he’d lose vital seconds in the attack sequence. He decided to take the risk.
“Open all twenty-four outer doors. Apply power to all torpedoes.”
Chen spoke into his boom mike to the Second Captain, which then reported back to Chu: “All doors coming open, sir, all torpedoes indicate power applied. All gyros are coming up to full revolutions now.”
“Very good.”
A tense moment of silence filled the room, only the electronic hum of the consoles and the deep bass roar of the air handlers audible. Then Lieutenant Commander Xhiu Liu, the navigator who stood watch as the sensor-console operator, reported: “Admiral, I have a strong detect on a muffled seven-bladed screw showing up on low-frequency analysis, with high broadband noise from multiple pumps, with high flow noise and several flow-induced resonances. Sir, it’s a 6881-class submerged warship, making way at high speed, headed directly toward us!”
Captain John Patton leaned over the port chart table aft of the periscope stand and frowned.
The deck trembled with the power of the main propulsion turbines. At flank speed, the screw turbulence caused the trembling to be transmitted to the huge thrust bearing and to the main motor, from there to the motor foundation to the hull. A couple more hours of shaking like this and the crew would experience severe fatigue.
Doing a sonar sweep at forty-one knots was like searching for a contact lens on a superhighway at eighty miles per. Every instinct he had screamed at him to slow down and clear the ship’s baffles.
Except that Admiral Henri’s op order prohibited him even from coming to periscope depth, since that would dramatically slow him down. And the restriction on periscope-depth maneuvers meant that he was driving blind, having no idea what was going on topside. Patton walked his dividers across the big chart display, the electronic points measured to twenty nautical miles. They were now officially in the East China Sea. If USUBCOM’s odd message had any validity at all, anyone waiting for them would be here, inside the protection of the Ryukyu Island chain. Why? Because everyone with a satellite television set knew where the American task force was. No one knew where it would go, but it had to make the turn at the southern island of Japan, south of Yakushima Island, and head on in. This would be the place to find anyone set up for an ambush.
He had to slow. But he also had to “sweep the sea” for the safety of the task force.
“Fuck this,” Patton said out loud, raising the eyebrow of tall, skinny Lieutenant Karl Horburg, the young officer of the deck standing on the conn, “Oftsa’deck, slow to ten knots and turn off reactor recirc pumps. Notify Sonar that we’re doing a baffle-clear maneuver. I want a good hard search at ten knots until I say to speed up again.”
Horburg held up the standing order message from the fleet commander, not saying a word.
“Yeah, I know,” Patton said, grimacing. “Baffle clear, OOD! Let’s go!”
Horburg in turn barked to his subordinate. “Helm, all ahead one-third, turns for ten knots, maneuvering stop all reactor recirc pumps! Sonar, Conn, slowing to ten knots, baffle clear!”
“One-third, Helm, aye, turns for ten, downshift recirc pumps to stop, maneuvering answers, one-third, turns for ten. Recirc pumps will be downshifted as reactor power permits.”
“Very well. Helm.” Horburg plucked a microphone from the overhead, the mike suspended by a coiled cord.
“Sonar, Conn, supervisor to control.”
“Conn, Sonar, aye,” a voice from the overhead speaker announced.
The helmsman called over his shoulder from his aircraft-style console, “Maneuvering reports all reactor circulation pumps at stop, all pumps coasting down, reactor in natural circulation.”
“Very well. Helm,” Horburg called.
Senior Chief Byron Demeers appeared behind Horburg on the conn, a bemused expression on his face.
“You notice the speed indicator?” Patton said, nodding to the ship-control panel.
“Yeah! This is great,” Demeers said, a rare smile cracking his features. The chief paused to take a swig of his omnipresent Coke bottle. “A real sonar search. How many minutes are you giving me when we steady on course? And where you turning first?”
“Take two minutes heading north, then two south,” Patton said in his don’t-argue-with-me voice.
“Come on. Skipper, give me three minutes each leg,” Demeers said. “Who knows? It could be the difference between finding someone and getting a medal or finding a torpedo in our hull and getting a posthumous medal.”
“Screw you. Senior Chief. Three minutes. No more. Now, get back in your hole and find me a bad guy.”
Patton’s voice sounded irritated, but Horburg smiled, knowing the captain always sounded like that when he was amused.
The Annapolis coasted slowly down from forty-one knots to ten. She turned to the north, her BSY-4 sonar system straining to pick up a submerged contact. The nose-cone sonar spherical array, the wide-aperture hull array, and the thin-wire towed narrowband array were all tuned to the slightest noise of the ocean. These in turn fed the onboard supercomputer, the processors displaying, filtering, and analyzing the massive data gathered by the arrays, searching for the manmade noise— the needle in the haystack of nature’s acoustical background.
For 180 seconds, Byron Demeers added his own ears to the search, listening to each narrowband tonal bearing.
One was a group of clicking shrimp, the other a lonely whale, one a trawler in the distance, a fourth a fishing boat even farther away. The screen glowed brightly to the east, where one hundred ten ships of the convoy were bearing down on them at thirty-five knots.