What frequency tonal? How loud? Did low frequencies show up first? Where should the processors be set? Wide bands or narrow? The sonarmen knew they were putting their necks on a chopping block and so did Patton, but he had to show them confidence, because that was all they had at this point — just the captain’s instincts and his guts.
“Listen, goddammit,” Patton finally said, his nostrils flared, his black eyes flashing. “I’m going in and I’m going in shooting. You guys find me a fucking target, I don’t care how hard it is. You got that?”
O’Conner nodded, looking as if he’d just been asked to drive a car at one hundred mph at midnight with no headlights.
As Patton returned to the control room he wondered how he was going to explain all this to fleet command. He’d missed the intruder submarines, he wouldn’t hear them when he returned to attack them, and his sonarmen wanted to just go home. When this mission was over, he would probably lose his ship, his command pin, his shoulder boards, and probably his dolphins, because losing a convoy he was charged with protecting was not the way to promotion. Of course, that assumed he walked away from this operation instead of becoming fish food at the bottom of the East China Sea.
Vale was staring at him. “What?” Patton said, irritated.
“What’s going on. Captain?”
“I’ll tell the men,” Patton said. “Attention in the fire-control team.” A dozen whispered conversations — all of them business — halted. “Starting a few minutes ago, we heard multiple explosions from the bearings of the convoy. We’ve turned around and are heading back to the convoy’s position at flank speed. Meanwhile sonar reports a blueout across all eastern bearings, with explosions continuing. The convoy is probably under attack. What we don’t know is whether the attack is coming from an intruder submarine or submarines or whether it was an air attack. My intention is to make maximum speed toward the convoy, and when we’re closer, slow down, rig for ultraquiet, and commence a slow-speed sonar search for any possible submarines. Carry on.”
“Conn, Sonar, aye,” came through Patton’s headset.
So now, here I am, Patton thought, flanking it into a war zone like a fool, with no idea who the enemy is or what he sounds like. I might as well just wear a sign that says, “Shoot me.”
There was a big difference between sleeping on an airplane and trying to sleep on an airplane.
Pacino was alternately too hot and too cold, trying to get comfortable in a seat that reclined all the way back.
At the moment he was sweating, his head throbbing, sleep eluding him despite the bone-tired ache in his limbs and back. He tried to force himself down deeper, to let go of the world. Still half awake, he saw a stream of lucid visions, one of them the SSNX painted red, the hull being lowered into a sea of blood.
A sound came to him from a long way away. He could hear snatches of a voice, a television, tuned to SNN, Paully having forgotten to turn it off. “In other financial news today, the European Union stock market lost over twenty points on fears that the renewed hostilities in White China— We interrupt the World Financial Report for breaking news from the East China Sea-Operation Sealift has apparently met with disaster. Reporting from the Pentagon is our war correspondent—”
Pacino sat up abruptly, reaching for Paully White’s shoulder.
“Paully, wake up, quick.”
Both men watched, eyes wide with incredulity. The report was only half done when the pilot called back on the intercom: “Admiral, we’re getting a secure voice radio call from Air Force One. The president wants to talk to you.”
Admiral Chu Hua-Feng had reclined the command-console seat. His headset had grown uncomfortable, so he had pulled it off. His eyes shut, he was breathing deeply, listening to the electronic hum of the computer and display systems. A high-pitched, distant whine sounded from the inertial-navigation rotating element, a small titanium sphere that spun at over 10,000 rpm. Below the whine purred the deep bass of cool air blowing in through the control-room ducts.
The seat of the console was relaxing to the extreme, and Chu was beginning to believe he would be able to spend days in this seat if he had to. In a pocket below the cushion was an endurance package, with several candy bars, two bottles of water, and a waste bag. On discovering, it, the navigator had been jubilant, talking about stocking his bag with tea, magazines, cookies. His assistant, the operations officer, had joked that if he had one of those decadent Western blow-up dolls, he could stay in the seat for months. Chu had glared at his officers and told them to knock off the joking, but privately he had chuckled over it.
He was lying there, reclined far back, nearly flat, when he thought he heard a buzz in the earpiece hanging around his neck.
“Admiral, new contact, we have a seven-bladed screw.”
Xhiu Liu, the navigator at the sensor console, had snagged something. Chu sat the seat up and pulled on the headset simultaneously.
“Designate contact ST-3,” Xhiu said, his voice back in focus as Chu strapped on his earpiece. “Submerged warship, American 688-class improved, bearing two six four. Contact is extremely distant but is making way rapidly. Admiral, we have a broadband trace on him from his equipment, maybe some kind of pump. In addition, we’ve got an intermittent rattle.”
“Very good. Next tube, Chen?” Chu asked Chen Zhu, the operations officer, standing at the weapons-control console.
“Number eight, sir.”
“Warm up weapons eight and nine. Rood both tubes. Wait on the bowcap doors; let’s keep them shut for now. Program eight as the ultraquiet unit and nine as the impulse unit.” The weapon in tube eight would be set up to swim out quietly at slow speed, while tube nine would be reserved for trouble. In that case a solid rocket motor would blow the weapon out into the sea, the torpedo preset for a highspeed transit.
Chen acknowledged, but Chu was already on his next stream of nearly instinctive orders. “Ship Control, right five effective degrees rudder, throttle up to thirty clicks, steady course north.”
“Five degrees, thirty clicks north, aye, Admiral.”
“Navigator, set up to get a leg on target ST-3. Three minutes north, then three minutes south. Something tells me he’s way out there.”
“Sir.”
Chu waited, watching data as valuable as gold roll onto the displays. He was feeling fully alert, the way an athlete feels at the start of the second half of a game.
The ship’s pulse was there in front of him, and after the first thirty torpedoes had been fired, he was getting used to the rhythm of the ship. He was almost comfortable with the odd blind-console stupid-Second Captain Japanese design. It was working out so well that he could believe that this was how he would design a submarine.
And yet, had the system really had its shakedown cruise? Certainly they had taken the ship through combat.
He had fired thirty torpedoes and made thirty confirmed hits, and twenty-seven ships with tens of thousands of men had gone to the bottom or vaporized in plasma explosions from his targeting and tactical skill, but then, that was the nature of a submarine — an assassin that was invisible, its stealth its main weapon. But how would it perform against another submarine?
Hadn’t the Japanese scheduled the Rising Sun sea trials as a submarine-versus-submarine exercise? Was there some weakness in the vessels that would make them do poorly against another sub, even ones as unsophisticated as a 688-class? The only answer to that question would come with the first undersea challenge, and by all appearances that was happening right now.