“Sonar, do you have anything yet?”
“Still no contact in all forward arcs.”
Damn all certain setups and all fools who believed in them.
“We can’t wait any longer. Hayao, reverse course, hard about one hundred eighty degrees. All engines ahead two thirds.”
“We’re going after the Han?”
“It’s either that or lose him. Weapons Officer, flood all tubes and stand by to open outer doors. This will be a firing sequence.”
“Hai!”
The deck tilted beneath their feet as the Harado swung around to pursue her enemy.
“Open outer doors and set wire guidance for units one and two. Match sonar bearings on the target and give me a firing solution.”
“Speed setting, Captain-san.”
“Set for high speed. I want a fast kill on this.”
“Control room, this is sonar. Changes in blade count and plant noise. The target is increasing speed.”
“Weapons Officer, where’s that firing solution!”
“Control room. Target is going to full power. We are now getting prop warble. The target is turning!”
“He knows we’re here,” Kakizaki whispered in disbelief. “Somehow the bastard knows we’re here!”
“We have a firing solution,” the weapons officer announced from his station. “Outer doors open. All units ready to fire.”
Too late. Ichijo stared bleakly down into the chart tank.
He’d waited too long. He’d let the Chinese attack boat get too close to Aichi Shima Island. Now it was turning eastward, directly into the craggy seamount. Even running at their seventy-knot sprint speed, their torpedoes could not cross the ten-mile gap between the two submarines before the Han pulled up an dover the narrow ridge like a hedgehopping airplane.
With a solid wall of rock between it and the Harado’s sensors, the Communist vessel could either continue its dash away to safety or it could reverse back over the seamount at the point of its own choosing.
Ichijo knew that in a sneak-and-stealth duel, his diesel electric boat could more than hold its own. But in an open-water dogfight, using active sonar, the speed and maneuverability bestowed by the Han’s nuclear-fired turbines would give it the decisive edge.
“Hayao, launch the communications buoy. At least we can get off a sighting report.”
“At once, Captain-san,” Kakizaki replied quietly.
Within the tank, the Han’s trace was closing with the Aichi Shima Island’s outline, holding its course and depth and accelerating past twenty knots. Beyond his self-incriminating bitterness, Ichijo felt a sudden puzzlement.
“Sonar control, has the target gone active?”
“Negative, sir. Still passive. The target is not pinging.”
The Chinese skipper was riding on nerves of steel to run in on a seamount like that. The Reds used a reverse engineered copy of a French inertial-guidance system that did not have an extremely accurate baseline. Without active sonar, he must have been steering blind.
“How is that bastard navigating?” Kakizaki exclaimed, turning from the communications panel.
“I have no idea, Hayao,” Ichijo replied, watching the Man’s plot start to merge with the seamount’s outline.
“He’s going to have to execute an emergency blow to clear that ridge.”
“If he is going to clear it.”
Ichijo again keyed his headset. “Sonar control. Put your audio input over the control-room speakers.”
The control room filled with filtered sound, the thudding rush of a fast-turning propeller. All hands lifted their faces in reflex to listen. The sound continued steadily for a few moments more and then terminated with the deep-toned slamming boom of steel meeting stone.
The sound of the impact drew out, echoing and reverberating into a continuous, bubbling roar of escaping air and buckling metal. The Captain and crew of the Harado exchanged bewildered looks as their former enemy began its death slide down the face of the seamount.
39
“That’s the shape of it, Captain,” Lieutenant Beltrain concluded.
“The second Han is history. He saved us the price of a torpedo by busting himself up trying to evade that SDF boat. Two down. One to go.”
Amanda nodded slowly. She and her tactical officers were clustered around the chart table in the Combat Information Center, listening as Dix brought them up to speed on the events that had transpired to the north.
“Yeah,” Christine Rendino commented. “He must have been trying to break out into the Pacific through the deepwater channel just south of Yaku Shima. He must have figured that we wouldn’t be looking quite so hard for him that close to the Japanese home islands. Ballsy move, but it didn’t pan out.”
Christine looked up and noted the expression on her captain’s face.
“You don’t look exactly super-pleased about this. Boss Ma’am. Were you looking forward to collecting a matched set?”
“No … No. There’s just something odd here.”
“What’s that, Captain?” Arkady asked, his frown coming to match Amanda’s.
“Look.” Amanda picked up one of the chart table’s data wands and touched a point on the graphics display. “Here is where we acquired our Han yesterday afternoon … ” She drew a light line across the chart, the numbers of a digital distance hack blurring beside the wand tip as she measured the range. “Here is where the second Han went down. That’s a distance of over three hundred miles. The assumption has always been that both Hans and the Xia were operating together as a single unit. A wolf pack with the attack boats covering the boomer.
“Now, if that was the case, could the surviving Han and, presumably, the Xia have crossed this three hundred miles in the sixteen-odd hours between the two sinkings?”
Ken Hiro shrugged. “Three hundred miles? That shouldn’t have been a problem for a nuke.”
“No, sir,” Arkady said. “I see what the skipper is getting at. Crossing that range wouldn’t be any problem for a nuke if it was just cruising. But not if he was running at good quiet. He’d have to creep along at dead slow and he’d have had to zigzag to stay under the best thermoclines. He also would have had to swing wide to get around that SDF Task Force that was operating to the north of us. A Han couldn’t have crossed between those two points within that time frame and not have escaped detection.”
“Exactly.” Amanda nodded. “Dix, has the hunt boss indicated any contact with the Xia up near Yaku Shima?”
“Not so far. Search assets are being retasked to increase coverage in the area.”
Amanda nodded again. “I’m willing to wager that they’re not going to find anything. Since the start of this operation, we’ve been assuming that the Red subs have been acting together as a unit. Well, that’s wrong. They dispersed after clearing Shanghai. They’re acting independently.”
Amanda lightly bit her lower lip in thought. “I wonder,” she said after a moment, “what else we might be wrong about.”
40
… Ship closed up to war cruising mode. ASW sweep operations continuing. Search zone expanded at 1200. No contacts. No comments.
Garrett, Commanding.
41
The wardroom was empty except for Christine Rendino and a discordant blast of noise. There were heavy metallic overtones to it, a creaking and groaning of tortured steel like a protracted avalanche in a wrecking yard. Intermixed was a continuous bubbling roar and a series of irregular thudding explosions like distant artillery fire. Although she couldn’t identify the sound mixture immediately, there was something about it that made Amanda shudder. The discordance was issuing from the wardroom stereo system; Chris was sitting cross-legged on the carpeted deck, directly at the focus of the speakers. Totally intent, she gave no notice that she had visitors.