“Impeachment?”
“Haven’t you been listening to the news? They want my neck for the loss of an entire army. Can’t say I blame them.” Pacino thought he heard a slight sniffle. “Three hundred seventy-five thousand troops lost. Every one of them has a family, that’s millions of votes, and if you believe the news, I’ve lost eighteen points in the last twenty-four hours. I figure I’ve got about two weeks before I’m Jaisal Warner, private citizen. That’s four days to get the backup force to the East China Sea, and a week to win a ground war. What do you think, Admiral?”
Think you’d better take a good look at the balance in your blind trust, Pacino thought.
“Sounds like we’re in the huddle, with the quarterback saying, ‘Same play, on one.’ The backup force could get attacked just like the first RDF. I think we stand a good chance of getting our butts kicked.”
“Do you think they will sink us before we get to the East China Sea?”
Pacino thought, the circuit silent for a moment.
“Hello?” Warner said.
Well, would they? He thought. What would he do, fresh from the killing of an entire convoy?
“Madam President, before I answer, I want to think this through. Can I have an hour?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“We’ll be landing soon,” Pacino said. “Can you video into my quarters?” That would be perfect, he thought. He’d be able to see her face and, even better, he could get Paully’s opinion, even call up Number Four, Jack Daniels, and see if he had any hard intelligence about the men who had managed to steal a submarine force.
Red subs, Mikey. You’re up against the Reds.
So be it, he thought. Red Rising Sun submarines, the most advanced in the world.
“We’ll video you in, what, half an hour?”
“Perfect, ma’am.”
Warner and O’Shaughnessy clicked off without warning.
Pacino walked back to the cabin, deep in thought.
Paully White was there, concentrating on the widescreen.
“What’d she say?”
“You probably know more than I do,” Pacino said, sinking into the seat next to Paully.
“Warner has another rapid deployment force,” White whined. “Now there’s suddenly time to get a Hawaiian convoy to the East China Sea. Where was that plan yesterday?”
“Paully, never mind. I need you, now. We’ve got a war to plan.”
“I’m ready. What’s on the list?”
“Get Number Four Daniels on the horn. Ask what he has on the Rising Sun, and see if you can get him on the case to track down Admiral Tanaka. We’re going to need him. Then we’ll need to put Bruce Phillips from the Piranha on a video conference.”
“Bruce will be well on the way to the East China Sea by now.”
“That’s okay. But before you do anything else, we need to get Santa Fe and Annapolis the hell out of the zone.”
“But aren’t they going in to see if they can find—”
“I don’t care, Paully. They can’t win against a half dozen Rising Suns who know they’re coming. Tell them to get the hell out of the op area right now. When we go in, we’ll go in coordinated — Pegasus patrol planes, Blackboards, Seahawks, the 688’s, Bruce’s Piranha, the works. And we’ll sanitize that damned zone but good.”
“ELF call signs, emergency periscope depth?”
“Yeah, and tell them to withdraw at emergency flank. And don’t give me any backtalk about ruining reactors, Paully.”
“Hell, no. Admiral. I’d tell them emergency flank even if you were quiet about it. Those boys are standing into danger.”
“Hop to it, Paully. Bring’em out.”
“Conn, Radio, we’ve got the first letter of our ELF call sign.”
ELF, Patton thought in frustration, extremely low-frequency radio waves, transmitted out of Lualualei Naval Radio Station off Maili, Oahu. Transmitting the ELF radio waves required tremendous power. An entire nuclear plant big enough to light up Baltimore had been built on-site at Lualualei just to power the massive antennae.
The radio waves, unlike the higher frequencies, were able to penetrate the upper layers of the ocean and the earth’s crust. Unfortunately, the data rate was so slow, it would take ten minutes just to receive two alphabetical letters. Admiral Pacino had ordered that subs change their call signs to a single alphanumeric encrypted character, with a second letter thrown in as a confirmation, because he didn’t want to wait ten minutes to drag a submarine to periscope depth in an emergency.
Patton had not been thrilled with the new system. The office of submarine captain was one of the last existing dictatorships in the world. At sea he was accountable almost to no one, receiving radio messages rarely, transmitting almost never. But with an ELF call sign, the brass could call him to periscope depth at any time of the day or night. It might take them twenty minutes to get the radio computer’s attention, but at that point they were required to come up and see what the Navy Com-Star satellite had to say.
An emergency ELF call could mean a declaration of war, retasking, new rules of engagement, new orders, anything. Though Patton was sorely tempted to wait until the second or even third ELF call, buying himself time to try to detect an enemy submarine, he knew he had to come up. For all he knew, the convoy had been hit by an air attack instead of a sub assault, and there was a new mission waiting for him on the Comstar’s broadcast.
“OOD, clear baffles and take her up,” he ordered.
Five minutes later, he watched the television screen in the overhead. In the periscope view that Lieutenant Dietz was rotating in the hot-optics module, there was nothing there but sea and sky and a stark, ruler-straight horizon. There were no seagulls, no clouds, no aircraft, and no convoy ships.
And there was Patton, hanging out at periscope depth like a sitting duck. An insistent nagging feeling entered him — he needed to continue the search, and quickly.
“We have him slowing from seventy-seven clicks to ten, Admiral.”
“Very good, Nav.”
Chu waited, staring at his panels and yawning.
“Well, sir? Aren’t you going to shoot him?”
Could it be that they had been detected? Chu was torn — he wanted desperately to know if they could hear his ship, and if so, at what range. That would be a priceless piece of information. Yet the mission was too important to risk his vessel during the very first encounter with the Americans. It would eviscerate his command structure — since he did not have a real replacement— and it would discourage his force.
If he sank the 688, it would be over for the American effort. They would know they were defeated then, wouldn’t they? They would back away from Red China and let the Whites fell, and his plan — and it was Mai Sheng’s plan also, he admitted to himself, her idea to get the Rising Suns — would succeed. He could return home, marry Mai, perhaps have children, and rebuild the PLA Navy once its coastline was again part of the one unified China. He needed to get on the SNN World Report that he had not only sunk the American surface force but had killed their escort submarines too.
Unbidden, the dream of his father returned to him.
You must hurry, young warrior, for they are coming, and they are strong. That had to be the meaning of the dream, he thought. He had to strike hard and fast, and deter the West from coming in for a rematch.
Because one thing was certain — he could continue to win only if his tubes were full of weapons. He was down thirty weapons, only eighteen left, and he didn’t know how the other subs had fared; they could be even lower.
The far east cork force, the Volcano and the Tsunami, should be fully loaded out, he knew, but the Lightning Bolt and the Thundercloud could be out of torpedoes, for all he knew. And if the West came back with another deployment of ships and equipment, he would sink only a fraction of them, and eventually he would be defeated.