Again, the back of that gray flight helmet gave a shake.
“No. Not really. The thing is, babe, that I know you. I don’t think you really want somebody blowing sunshine in your ear just now. We can’t control what kind of judgment call the powers that be are going to make about this situation. That’s out of our hands. But last night, when you committed us to that recon run, you did it for what you believed were all the right reasons. Right?”
Amanda let her eyes drift back out to the sunrise. “By the time, I thought so.”
“Knowing what you do now, pluses and minuses, personal-and world-wise, would you do anything different?”
She was pleased to find that the answer came easily.
“No.”
“Well, there you go.”
Admiral Tallman’s fist slammed onto his desktop like a bomb.
“Commander Garrett,” he said in a deadly monotone, “this Task Force is now on full war alert. We are at battle stations. Seventy-five miles to the west of here, my combat air patrol is eyeball-to-eyeball with a full squadron of Q-5 attack bombers all armed for maritime strike. I, for one, would like to know how the hell all this came about.”
The tension in the Admiral’s cabin was thick enough to be physically tangible. Amanda held a parade-rest posture in front of Tallman’s desk while his chief of staff paced restlessly.
Beyond the bulkheads, the thunder of air operations raged on at an increased tempo.
“All of the essentials were in my after-action report, sir,” Amanda replied levelly. “We were executing a reconnaissance pass of the Yangtze estuary and the Shanghai military district, investigating a theory developed by my intelligence officer. She believed that the Communists have been deliberately maintaining a reduced operational level within the Shanghai military district to divert attention away from some high-security project, or activity, they had under way there.”
Commander Walker cut in. “I read the report you passed on to our theater intelligence section. We could find no concrete indication of any kind of special project. As far as I can tell, Captain, all you were operating on was a whole lot of nothing.”
“Sometimes that is all you have to start with, Commander,” Amanda replied quietly. “At any rate, during the course of that pass, we experienced a failure in our thermographic vision systems. Exactly what, we don’t yet know. The systems checked out four-oh both before and after the event.
“As a result, we were involved in a collision with a Red Chinese torpedo boat — one of a squadron that was apparently deployed on picket duty ahead of the estuary mine barrier. We were forced to disengage under fire and to suppress both the mainland coastal batteries and pursuing fast-attack craft with Standard HARMS. Following disengagement, we resumed full stealth protocols and cleared the area.”
“I’ll say this for you, Captain Garrett,” Nolan Walker said bitterly. “When you blow it, you blow it big. The Reds are already stating over diplomatic channels that it was a United States naval vessel that violated their coastal waters. They claim to have concrete evidence. I don’t suppose you have any idea what that might be?”
“The life raft we dropped to the survivors of the torpedo boat we rammed.”
“Oh, Christ!” Walker exploded. “What in the hell possessed you to do that!”
Amanda snapped her head around to stare down the Chief of Staff. “Because there were men in the water, Commander!”
“That’s enough!” Tallman cut in. “Okay, I guess that covers what happened. Now, let’s see if it was worth it. Admiral Macintyre has informed me that you’ve got some material that I should have a look at.”
“Yes, sir. Shortly before the collision we detected what sounded like a convoy assembling up the Yangtze on our passive sonar. At the suggestion of my intel, Lieutenant Rendino we executed a single high-definition surface sweep of the area with our SPY 2A Aegis radar.” Amanda lifted her briefcase to the corner of the desk, popping the latches. “As you know, sir, the SPY-2A has a skin track silhouette capacity at closer ranges. That is, we have enough definition on the return to actually get an identifiable outline of the target.”
She removed a folded strip of hard copy from the briefcase.
Opening the first section, she spread it across the desk top before Tallman. Walker moved in and peered over the Admiral’s shoulder, intrigued in spite of himself.
“This is a graphics printout of the skin-track,” Amanda continued. “computer enhanced for maximum clarity.”
Running down the edge of the paper was a single ink jetted line, the representation of the river’s surface At two points the line jiggled upward, producing a sketchy, but recognizable, outline of a small vessel.
“The lead craft we think, is one of the Shanghai pilot launches. The second is definitely a Lienyun-class coastal minesweeper. Now, here it really gets interesting. “
Amanda unfolded another series of sheets. Revealed were two neat rectangles extending above the river line, the larger ahead of the smaller. There was no need for commentary. Tallman and Walker both instantly recognized the sail and the upper vertical stabilizer of a nuclear submarine.
“There are three of them, sir,” Amanda said. “By measuring the hull length between the sail and fin, we were able to determine that the two leaders are Han class attack submarines. The trailer is a Block 2 Xia fleet ballistic-missile boat.”
Much as she had done when she had been confronted with this revelation, the two male naval officers became very still and very quiet. Mentally, they were running the same equation. One Block 2 Xia equaled sixteen Ju Lang 2 sea launched intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Sixteen Ju Lang 2 IRBMs, in turn, equaled thirty two megatons of thermonuclear firepower.
“All of our intelligence indicates that the Reds have not sortied a nuke for over a year,” Walker said quietly. “They laid up their fleet because they lacked the resources to keep them operational. Is there any chance that these could be hulks under tow?”
Amanda shook her head. No. She removed a CD from the briefcase and placed it on the desk. “This is the track we recovered from our passive sonar. Analysis indicates that all three boats were maneuvering independently under reactor power.”
She moved back and paced a step or two. “Intel says that several Chinese nuclear submarines were laid up in Shanghai. The Communists must have made an extraordinary effort to put these three back in commission. They waited until there was a hole in our satellite coverage, then they sortied the boomer. The attack subs are probably acting as escorts, and the torpedo boat that I rammed must have been part of a security screen covering the departure.”
“I wonder if your busting in on their party might have scared them back into their hole?”
Amanda shook her head “I’d doubt it, sir. The Communists know that if word gets out that they have an operational boomer, the Nationalists will go for it with everything they have. I think they earned through with the sortie. I think this wolfpack is at sea right now.”
Admiral Tallman scowled and studied the hard-copy stop as if all the secrets of the universe were encrypted upon it.
“Nolan,” he said finally, “get on the horn to the Flag bridge. Have them bring us around and get the Task Group headed north. Then talk to Air Ops and have them initiate a maximum-effort ASW search pattern covering an area well, starting with everything within a hundred-and-fifty-mile radius of the mouth of the Yangtze River.
“I’ve got a hunch that the Reds are going to be a little bit cranky about any sub hunting that may be tried up that way, so have the air boss tie on some fighter cover for the Vikings. Set up the Bombcats, a Hummer, some tankers, whatever’s needed.”