“I wouldn’t quite say that, Captain,” Tallman interjected. “We’ve accounted for both of the Hans.”
“Yes, sir. We have. We were able to get fixes on both of the Red attack boats in pretty short order. But we haven’t been able to even get a sniff of the larger and — theoretically — more vulnerable boomer. The reason for it is simple. It’s not out here. It never has been.”
“Oh, for Christ sakes!” Walker exploded. “Need we remind you, Captain, that you were the one who originally claimed to have seen the damn thing sortie!”
“Stand easy, Commander!” Tallman’s voice was stern. “Go ahead, Captain. Where do you think she is?”
Amanda called up a coastal chart on the horizontal flatscreen built into the surface of the briefing table. “We saw her sortie from Shanghai, all right, but she never headed out into the open ocean.”
Her finger came down on a point on the chart. “She’s right here, lying on the bottom of the Yangtze estuary.”
Walker didn’t say a word. Admiral Tallman had reined him in with a single sideways glance. “Let’s see your evidence, Captain,” he said quietly.
“I don’t have anything physical yet, sir, just a chain of logic. However, my intelligence officer is working the problem and should have the proofs shortly.”
The Seventh Fleet C.O. nodded again. “Okay, then let’s hear your logics.”
Amanda paused for a moment to organize her thoughts, then began. “All along, we have been making a critical error in our projection of the Red Chinese intent. We have been assuming that we both think the same way.”
“How do you mean, Captain?” Tallman prompted.
“What has been our primary assumption about the Red intent?”
“That they’ve been trying to break out into the open Pacific.”
“Exactly, because that’s what one of our subs would try to do. But we’re not the Chinese. We’re a blue-water navy. When we think operations, we think open ocean. The Chinese don’t! They’re a brown-water navy. They think coastal. All of their history, doctrine, and orientation trends that way. They would no more think of sending a major fleet unit out into the open ocean than we would of sending a carrier task force up the Mississippi River.”
“Those attack boats sure seemed to be trying.”
“They were decoys, Admiral. They were sacrificed to draw our attention away from the Shanghai area. The same basic tactic they’ve been using all along during this operation.”
“That’s some kind of sacrifice, Commander,” Tallman mused. “Those Hans were probably the most powerful units left in the Red fleet.”
“They’re playing for maximum stakes here, sir. All the chips are on the table. When we interrogated the survivor off the boat we killed, he as much as said that he knew that he was on a suicide mission.
“Then there was the puzzle of what happened to the other Han.” Amanda stepped back from the table and paced a couple of steps in her agitation. “We’re fairly certain now that its loss off of Yaku Shima was an operational accident. But how could a handpicked submarine crew make the elementary error of running into the side of a seamount? The answer is simple.
“They didn’t know it was there! They didn’t have a decent set of up-to-date submarine charts for those waters, because they were outside of the Red Chinese Navy’s usual zone of operations.”
Amanda returned to the table and leaned in over it. “That boomer is the PRC’s last roll of the dice. They would not risk it out in open water where we could get at it. It has to still be in Shanghai.”
“Where?” Walker demanded. “God knows that our recon has scoured every inch of that area ever since those subs sortied, and we haven’t seen a sign of anything that resembles a fleet ballistic-missile boat.”
“As I said, it’s on the bottom of the Yangtze. The charts indicate that there are several holes deep enough for a Xia to lie submerged in. That’s a heavily polluted tidal estuary out there. A sub would be totally invisible.”
“But we’d still spot the thermal plume coming off of its reactor.”
“If it were on line,” Amanda replied levelly. “But he’s sitting on the bottom in the shallows. He doesn’t need an operational reactor. He can just stick a snorkel up every couple of days to refresh his air and recharge his batteries using his auxiliary diesel.”
Tallman frowned. “You’re making a large degree of sense, Captain, but I’m going to need some concrete evidence on this.”
“You’ve got it, sir.”
A new voice sounded in the briefing center. Christine stood waiting in the doorway. Amanda motioned her forward.
“Admiral Tallman, this is my intelligence officer, Lieutenant Rendino. Hopefully, she’s been able to find what we need.”
“I have, Captain. Once we knew what we were looking for, it wasn’t too hard to spot.”
Christine looked over at Tallman. “With your permission, sir. Your intels have some imaging ready to pipe up here.”
“Carry on, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir.” Christine claimed the briefing room’s control pad from the center of the table. “I think you’ll find this interesting.”
Tallman gave an acknowledging nod, and Christine began her report.
“I’m sure Captain Garrett has explained our theory about where the Red boomer has been laying low. Now, the mouth of the Yangtze River is a very heavily silted and polluted tidal estuary. Lots of thermal gradients, highly opaque water quality — it’s a great place to hide something if you’re worried about satellite or aircraft recon. Accordingly, we had to look for peripheral indications of the sub’s presence.”
Using the control pad, Christine called up an admiralty chart of the Shanghai approaches. “We started with the potential hiding places. Number one is this big deep hole just east of the point where the Huangpu River empties into the main estuary.”
Using the integral track ball pointer, Christine indicated the area. “Even at low tide, you’ve got twenty-two meters of water out there, just about enough to keep a bottomed-out Xia concealed.
“When we checked the event annex for that area, we found something interesting. A little over a month ago, three heavy antiaircraft batteries were resited to cover this stretch of the river. Two here on the mainland near Waigaoqiao and one out here on Zhongyang Sha Island. In addition, a number of light antiair gun and missile mounts were emplaced out on the end of these two long quays here at Waigaoqiao.”
Christine looked around the space. “Now, Waigaoqiao is a fishing-village suburb of Shanghai. Supposedly, nothing more impressive than the local trawler fleet ever ties up at those quays. I put it to you that the Reds have deployed a heck of a lot of heavy firepower into that area just to defend their squid supply.”
“What else do you have, Chris?” Amanda asked quietly.
“A smoking gun, or at least a reasonable facsimile.”
“Let’s see it.”
Christine began to call up a series of images on the briefing center’s bulkhead screens. “Here’s how it works. Before we cross-decked over from the Duke, I contacted Fleet Intel here on the Enterprise to see what they might have on Waigaoqiao.
“Come to find out, a high-definition photography file was available. The thing is, until now it had not undergone a full photo analysis. Nobody had ever had a reason to really take a good long look at the area. Once we did, we began to turn up all sorts of interesting stuff.”
She directed attention to the first screen. “First, over on the westernmost of the quays, nothing much seems to be going on. Business as usual. The only military presence noted were the gun crews and some armed People’s Police. However, over on the eastern quay, these guys are all over the place.”