“I’m sorry,” she whispered sadly, “but you just can’t stay here tonight.”
“I know, babe, but I don’t have to go quite yet.”
“No, not quite yet.”
The shrill warbling of the interphone exploded in the cabin like a bomb. With the combination of a strangled curse and a startled yelp, they disentangled from each other. After several seconds of frantic floundering, Amanda managed to get up onto her knees and reach the handset at the head of her bunk.
“Yes?” she snarled with more intensity then she intended.
“Uh, Captain? This is Lieutenant Beltrain down in CIC. We just got the latest sweep updates in from Task Flag. You did want to be informed, didn’t you?”
“Oh, sure, Dix. Of course. Go ahead.”
“All ASW sweeps in all sectors are still negative. No solid tracks reported, no possibles being worked. All Allied Pacific Rim forces report the same. U.S. and Allied national intelligence assets report no new situational updates. Blank slate, ma’am.”
“Any new instructions from Task Flag?”
“Keep current sweep patterns until oh six hundred tomorrow morning. Then stand by to deploy to expanded search zones.”
“Very good. Carry on, and keep me posted.”
Amanda returned the phone to its cradle with great deliberation.
“I really hope that was important?” Arkady asked.
“Not so you’d notice. Just more of the same. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. That damn Chinese boomer must have been abducted by aliens.”
Amanda dropped back down onto the mattress beside Arkady. Stretching out on her stomach, she snuggled close.
They’d stolen as much time as they could from the twin taskmasters of reality and duty. Dix’s phone call had shattered their mood like a brick through a plate-glass window.
Still, they were satiated for the moment, and the warm darkness was a good place to talk.
“If you were a Chinese sub on the run, where would you go?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said, rolling over beside her. “If I were that Red skipper, 1 would have burned a hole in the water after leaving Shanghai. I’d have run straight east till I was clear of Formosa and then straight south across the Philippine Sea. I’d trust to blind luck and speed to keep me ahead of the search curve until I reached the coast of New Guinea.
“You’ve got a good combination of deepwater close inshore through there, which makes for a sloppy sound environment. There’ll be plenty of surf and current noise, and maybe some geologic transients.”
“Hmm.” She nodded, her hair brushing silkily against his shoulder. “Where from there?”
“I’d work east through the Bismarck Archipelago and then out along the curve of the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides chain. From that point, I could break out into the West Pacific basin. You’ve got a whole lot of empty sea miles out there to get lost in.”
“No,” Amanda shook her head, “that doesn’t work. Let’s say you do make it out into the central Pacific. Chinese naval vessels aren’t set up for long-range deployment. It’s not part of their doctrine. You’d be running out of food. Your power plant would be breaking down. Your crew would be going stir crazy, and there you’d be, a veritable dagger poised at the throat of Tahiti.”
“Okay, babe. Then where do you think he is?”
“You were losing sight of the fact that this guy isn’t just out here to hide. His job is to target Taiwan and the rebel zones in southern China. He’s limited in his running room by the range of his missiles.”
“Which is?”
“For the Ju Lang-2 IRBM, it’s about two thousand miles. That would give you a firing arc that would extend from about Vladivostok to the north, to the Marianas to the east, to Singapore to the south. Now, given that some of his potential targets are pretty far inland from the Chinese coast, I’d tighten that up some. Say. Pusan, to Parece Vela, to Saigon. I’ll bet he’s still inside that arc somewhere, right now.”
“The East and South China Seas and the western Philippine Sea,” Arkady mused. “I hope that you aren’t betting your pretty skin on that, my lady, because you’d lose. We’ve searched those bodies of water just about every way conceivable, short of pouring them through a strainer one bucketful at a time. He just isn’t there.”
“He’s got to be!” Amanda coopted the lone pillow and tucked it under her chin in a carefully wadded ball. “No other place makes sense.”
“Hell, that Chinese submarine would sound like … well, like a Chinese submarine. He’d be a sitting duck. If he was anywhere inside that arc you’re projecting, we would have heard him by now and we would have killed him, just like we did the two attack boats.”
Amanda shook her head again. “We only killed one of the attack boats, Arkady. The other one either committed suicide or died from a terminal overdose of ineptitude. That’s all part of this, too, somehow.”
Angrily, she rolled over onto her back again. “This scenario is like one of those damn visual pattern puzzles. I get the feeling that if I just look at this a little bit differently, everything will come clear.”
“Maybe so, babe. But still that boomer had to have gone somewhere.”
“Obviously … “
Amanda’s voice trailed off, and Arkady felt her muscles tense. Abruptly, she sat up in the darkness.
“No,” she whispered. “No, it didn’t.”
48
Retainer Zero One blazed low over the night-darkened waves. It was a repeat of their previous crisis flight to Task Force 7.1, except that this journey had been instigated at Amanda Garrett’s insistence. Likewise, this time the Sea Comanche carried a third passenger.
“This would be a lot more fun if one or the other of us were male,” Christine Rendino grumped. She was wedged in beside Amanda in the rear cockpit, lacking the room for even a deep breath.
Amanda was in no mood for levity. “Will you be able to spot what we need, Lieutenant?”
The Intel sobered swiftly. “I can’t make any guarantees, Boss Ma’am. I have a pretty good idea of what we should be looking for, and I think that Fleet Intelligence should have the assets we need to get the job done. Beyond that, I can’t make any promises. You might want to give me a little more time to develop this before you beard the brass in their den.”
“We may not have a little time to spare. Arkady, how long to Task Flag?”
“I’ve got everything wide open but the glove compartment,” the aviator replied from the front cockpit. “We should be down on the flattop in another twenty minutes.”
“This is damn unusual procedure, Captain,” Admiral Tallman said.
Admiral Tallman and his chief of staff had been waiting for them in the briefing room on the carrier flag deck. Vince Arkady accompanied Amanda, standing behind her at parade rest, awaiting her call forward. She would need his input presently. Christine was already involved down in the carrier intelligence section, making serious medicine with her Fleet level counterparts. Hopefully, she also would be available when the time for her input came.
“I know, sir,” Amanda replied. “This is out of the ordinary. However, I believe the situation warrants it. I think I know where the Xia is.”
“What?” Commander Walker came half out of his chair. “You’ve had a contact that you haven’t reported?”
Amanda shook her head emphatically. “No, Commander, that’s just the problem. We haven’t. No one has. For the past six days, we’ve been scouring the East China Sea with the most sophisticated ASW assets available in the inventory and we haven’t produced a single solid contact.”