She picked up her phone, punched a number, and started talking as soon as the call was picked up on the other end. “Roger, this is Irene. How long will it take to get Tom Gwinn or Kelly Spencer into Tibet with a full crew?”
There was a half second pause before Senior Producer Roger Calloway spoke. “Are you serious?”
“Damned right I’m serious,” Irene said. “We’re going to need one of the headliners on the ground in Tibet fast.”
She looked at the slaughter playing out on her computer screen. “Hang on to your ass, Roger. I’m about to drop a stick of dynamite in your lap.”
CHAPTER 29
The Sonar Supervisor’s voice came over the net, “Conn — Sonar. Sierra One Five bears zero-three-niner. Contact shows slow right bearing drift.”
Captain Patke touched his Officer of the Deck on the shoulder. “Let’s come a couple of degrees to starboard, and keep as close to the center of his baffles as we can.”
The OOD nodded. “Aye-aye, sir.” He began issuing quiet orders to the helmsman.
Sierra One Five was the current sonar tracking designator for a Chinese Shang class nuclear attack submarine. USS California had been trailing the Chinese sub for nearly twenty-hours, and now they were about to follow it past the perimeter ships of the Indian aircraft carrier strike group.
Patke and his crew had performed a similar operation five days earlier, when they had slipped past the defensive ring of ships surrounding the Chinese aircraft carrier, near the southern end of the Bay of Bengal. Then, they had received orders to break off their surveillance, to locate and trail this Chinese attack submarine. And here they were at the northern end of the bay, following the sub as it tried the exact same maneuver against the Indians.
There was a good chance they would succeed, too. The Chinese sub skipper was skillful and cautious, and his boat was reasonably quiet. As quiet as Chinese submarines ever got, at any rate.
Captain Patke glanced at the master dive clock. It was coming up on 1830 hours. Above the surface, the world would be experiencing that strange period of illumination known as nautical twilight, when the sun was below the horizon, but its rays continued to light up the sky. The surface of the sea would be too dark to make out visual details, and the still illuminated sky would be too bright to allow the human eye to properly acclimate to the darkness.
This was the time of day when aircrews and shipboard lookouts would have the hardest time spotting the silhouette of a submerged submarine, or the feather of an exposed periscope.
Patke nodded. The Chinese sub commander was doing it right. If the noise of his boat’s reactor plant didn’t give away his position, he would make it past the defensive ring of Indian destroyers and frigates, and into the heart of the aircraft carrier’s screen.
A half-hour later, it was clear that the skipper of Sierra One Five had succeeded in his objective. His boat was well inside the screen of the Indian aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant. Patke’s own boat, the California was still trailing silently behind, using the screw noise and reactor plant noise from the Chinese sub as a mask against detection.
Contact Sierra One Five, the Shang, was one of China’s second-generation subs, and its acoustic signatures were significantly reduced from the older Han class boats. But there was a world of difference between less noisy, and silent. Despite the skill of her commander, Sierra One Five might be just a smidge too noisy to escape detection by the sonar operators in the Indian battle group. And given the close trailing-distance, that would probably mean detection of the California as well.
Patke pulled off his wire rimmed glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose before returning his glasses to their usual perch. Following close on the ass of a potentially hostile submarine was risky on the best of days. Doodling around inside the defensive perimeter of another navy’s aircraft carrier brought an entirely different order of risk. Now, the California was suddenly doing both at once. If anything went wrong at all, it would take about three seconds for this entire situation to go straight down the frigging toilet.
Patke took at last look at the tactical plot, and then strolled over to the accordion door that led to Sonar Control. He leaned against the door jam, and stared into the dim interior of the sonar compartment. The boat’s leading Sonar Technician, Chief Petty Officer Lanier Philips, was the Sonar Supervisor on duty.
Captain Patke caught the eye of the sonar man. “How’s it looking, chief?”
The sonar chief looked up, his African American features intense with concentration. He shifted his headset far enough to the side to expose his right ear, and used his left palm to press the remaining earphone tighter against his other ear. “We’ve got a solid track on this guy, captain. You know that weird little low frequency flutter that the Han class boats make in their second-stage heat exchangers? Looks like the Shang class has a similar design. The dB level is a lot lower on these boats, but the tonal is still there.”
The chief turned back to the array of sonar screens. “If you keep us in his baffles, sir, we can track this guy until the fat lady sings.”
Captain Patke nodded. “How about our Indian friends up above? Are their sonars good enough to sniff this guy out?”
The Sonar Chief frowned at the screen, and answered over his shoulder. “Hard to say for sure, skipper, but I doubt it. The primary tonal we’re tracking is not all that loud. We detected it, but we’re sticking to this contact’s butt like a barnacle. Also the contact is running below the layer, and so are we. We’re in the same water with him, which makes it easier for us to track him.”
The layer (also referred to as the sonic layer) was a barrier to sound energy caused by the transition from virtually constant water temperature near the surface of the ocean, to the thermocline, a zone of rapidly decreasing water temperature that extended down to about two thousand feet. This abrupt shift in temperature could reflect much of a submarine’s acoustic signal away from the hull-mounted sonar sensors of surface warships. This did not make submarines acoustically invisible to ships on the surface, but it created a tactical edge that all good sub commanders knew how to exploit.
Patke nodded again. If Chief Philips was right, contact Sierra One Five’s presence might go unnoticed by the Indian Navy ships above.
Patke was about to walk away when the Sonar Chief spoke again.
“That’s weird…”
Patke turned back. “What have you got, Chief?”
Chief Philips tilted his head to the side, and stared at one of the sonar waterfall displays. “Got a transient… It sounds like…”
The sonar man straightened up suddenly and keyed his headset’s microphone. “Conn — Sonar. Sierra One Five is flooding his tubes! I say again, contact is flooding his tubes!”
“Holy shit!” someone in the control room said. “He’s gonna shoot!”
Patke sprinted the half dozen steps back to the OOD platform. The unidentified author of that comment was correct. Sierra One Five was getting ready to launch weapons.