So the Albany was quiet. Damned quiet. And she was on the hunt.
In the sonar room, Chief of the Boat Ernie Pooler leaned over STS3 Rivera’s shoulder to have a look at contact Sierra Two-Three. Between merchant ships, fishing boats, pleasure craft, and all of the U.S. warships rushing in to join the blockade, the BQQ-10 broadband display was a tangled mess of surface contacts. Enough easy targets to warm the heart of any bubblehead.
But the main target of interest was isolated on a narrowband display for the Albany’s towed array.
Sierra Two-Three appeared on the green waterfall style display as a series of parallel lines, with lower frequencies toward the left side of the screen and higher frequencies toward the right. The relative brightness of each frequency was an indication of signal strength. Some of the contact’s frequency lines were clearly visible, while others were so faint and intermittent as to be barely detectable.
Currently, Sierra Two-Three was classified as POSS-SUB high, indicating that the contact was probably (but not definitely) a submarine. As the sonar team continued to collect and analyze acoustic clues, the contact’s classification might be downgraded to NON-SUB or upgraded to PROB-SUB.
To hedge against the second of those two possibilities, the Albany had Mark-48 ADCAP torpedoes loaded and prepped in tubes one and four. The attack center was manned, and the targeting team was busily refining its fire control solution on the off-chance that the encounter devolved into a shootout.
U.S. submarines did this as a matter of routine, treating unknown (and sometimes known) sonar contacts as potential enemies — going through the full sequence of steps and procedures leading up to a torpedo or missile launch — stopping just short of hitting the button. This hair-trigger level of readiness kept the crews in continual training for combat, and gave U.S. subs the ability to react within seconds to changes in the threat situation.
If Sierra Two-Three turned out to be a non-submarine, the Mark-48s would remain in their tubes and the contact would be relegated to low-priority status: tracked for purposes of situational awareness, but otherwise ignored. If — on the other hand—Sierra Two-Three proved to be a submarine, the Albany was already prepared for action.
The thing was, there shouldn’t be any other submarines here. Master Chief Pooler had read the threat board, the OPTASK ASW SUPP, and the most recent update from Blue Force Tracker. There weren’t any friendly subs in the area, and there was no intel whatsoever about non-U.S. submarines anywhere near the Caribbean.
On top of that, the power plant noise from this contact had some frequency patterns in common with the old Chinese Han class fast attack boats. The Hans has been the first (and rather crude) generation of nuclear submarines to come out of Asia. Tactically limited and noisy as hell, most of them had been pulled out of service more than ten years ago.
Sierra Two-Three probably wasn’t a Han class sub, but it appeared to have some similar engineering characteristics. That was strange. Almost as strange as the fact that the damned thing was here at all.
Master Chief Pooler straightened up and massaged his lower back. He’d wander out to the attack center and see how the target motion analysis was coming along.
He was just turning to leave when STS3 Rivera sat bolt upright. “What the fuck? Did the processors just crash or something? Narrowband just went snake-shit!”
Pooler and the Sonar Supervisor both stepped forward to look at the narrowband display. The top of the screen, where new information appeared, was suddenly bright with broad and fuzzy tonal lines, clustered mostly in the higher frequency range. A blast of sound so intense that it almost resembled acoustic jamming.
The disturbance was visible on the broadband display too, a swath of green that cut across the screen at an improbably shallow angle, so brilliant that it eclipsed the cavitation signatures of the noisy surface contacts.
The bearing of Sierra Two-Three had suddenly begun changing at a ridiculous rate. The contact was moving fast. Impossibly fast.
After a minute or so, Master Chief Pooler left the sonar team to their own devices and went out to stand next to the CO in the attack center. As he’d expected, the fire control team was scrambling to stay on top of the contact’s ludicrously fast motion.
The bizarre run of Sierra Two-Three lasted just under four minutes. Then the contact vanished from broadband and narrowband, leaving no trace of its massively loud signal, or even the weaker acoustic signature that resembled a Han class reactor plant. When the contact (whatever it was) throttled back to a quieter mode of operation, it was evidently out of detection range.
Based on TMA, the contact’s estimated range at the start of the run had been in the neighborhood of 16,000 yards. If the estimate was even close to accurate, Sierra Two-Three had moved something like twenty nautical miles in less than four minutes. The contact’s speed through the water had to be up around three-hundred knots.
That was crazy. It was impossible. But it had happened.
CHAPTER 14
All but five of the 2,000 seats were empty. With the lights out, the windowless main meeting hall of the North Korean government was a 4,300 square meter cavern of echoing darkness. A lone ceiling lamp cast a circle of illumination on the platform at the front of the room.
This was not an official meeting of the Supreme People’s Assembly, or even the much smaller National Defense Commission. A gathering of either group would have been pointless. Most members of the fatherland’s governing party were figureheads, whose only purpose was to rubber-stamp the proclamations of the Supreme Leader.
The five men seated within the cone of light were not part of that mock administration. They were not puppet delegates or token legislators. Between them, the five composed the entire body of the haengdong wiwonhoe, a term which could be translated loosely as action committee.
They sat at the head table, with Supreme Leader Kim Yong-nam in his usual chair at the center position of honor. To his right were General Pan Sok-ju (Minister of State Security), and Cho Song-taek (Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Workers’ Party of Korea). On the Supreme Leader’s left were Sun Jin-sung (Chairman of Central Committee Bureau 121, the cyber warfare branch of the North Korean government), and Gyo Pyong-il (Chairman of the infamous Central Committee Bureau 39, which managed state-sanctioned illicit activities, including the counterfeiting of foreign currencies, illegal arms dealing, drug production and distribution, and trafficking in humans).
Collectively, these men controlled the military, the economy, the media and communications infrastructure, and even the criminal underworld of their country. Four of them deferred only to Kim Yong-nam, while Kim himself deferred to no one at all.
With more than twenty smaller conference chambers to choose from, the Mansudae Assembly Hall had plenty of rooms more suited in size and layout to the action committee, but — at Kim Yong-nam’s insistence — the committee always met in the main hall.