“Man, I feel like we’re following Captain Nemo in Nautilus,” the chief of the boat remarked one boring day, a comment that drew laughter.
The fact that the Great Leap rarely raised her comm antenna and never her periscope left Hanna with something to think about. A secret mission?
Despite the mystery, Hanna was enjoying himself immensely. He had been in subs his entire career, working for the opportunity to command his own. Now that he had that command, he was savoring every single day of it, for it would be all over too quickly. He visited every space in the boat every day, inspected, asked questions, praised, cajoled, encouraged, looked every one of his officers and sailors straight in the eyes. With the tight spaces, submarines were intimate places. There was no place to escape even if you wanted to. Roscoe Hanna loved the whole experience.
Finally, one day off the Amazon, the Great Leap slowed to three knots and began a giant square-search pattern. The slow speed allowed her sonars to listen with maximum efficiency. Utah kept well away from her.
On the surface, ships came and went occasionally. Single and double-screw freighters and tankers.
On the night of the third day at this low speed, the Great Leap turned into the center of the search pattern. A double-screw small vessel was approaching from the northwest. The Utah sonarman on duty recorded her sound signature and assigned her a symbol.
The Great Leap came up to periscope depth. She remained there for twenty minutes, then began blowing her tanks. The sound was unmistakable. Captain Hanna had the sound put on the control room loudspeaker, so everyone could hear it. There was no danger the Chinese boat would hear the noise that was now radiating from Utah since she was making so much herself.
The small vessel rendezvoused, then killed her engines. The buzz of a small outboard engine came from that location. After a while sounds of small explosions, then the sinking sounds.
Utah heard the prop of the Great Leap begin to turn and her ballast tanks flooding. A mile away from the sinking site, at a depth of two hundred feet, she turned to a heading of south and began accelerating.
A day later it seemed likely she was heading back for the Cape of Good Hope, to round Africa and reenter the Indian Ocean.
While the officers squabbled over the money in the destination pool — the junior officer was holding out for a right turn around Cape Horn and a transit of the Pacific, a circumnavigation — Captain Hanna composed a report to SUBPAC, with a copy to SUBLANT since he was now in SUBLANT’s ocean. The next day, after the Great Leap had slowed and cleared her baffles, then accelerated away, he rose to periscope depth and sent the encrypted report, recorded the messages waiting for him on the satellite, then set off again to follow the Shang-class attack boat … as it turned out, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and northward to Hainan.
In the wardroom of the Utah a victor was named in the Acey-Deucy tournament, the Great Leap destination pool was awarded to the lucky winner, who had given the matter some thought and picked the Azores as his entry because it was close to Europe and a lot of other places, and another Acey-Deucy tournament was begun.
Utah’s report of the Atlantic rendezvous and the subsequent sinking of the small surface vessel raised eyebrows at submarine headquarters in the Pentagon and in the Office of Naval Intelligence. This secret rendezvous was obviously for a purpose, but what was it? The National Reconnaissance Office was tasked to find satellite imagery that might be of help. When ONI finally received the sound signature of the rendezvousing yacht, the computer records from the acoustic arrays lying on the ocean beds and harbor entrances of the American East Coast were studied carefully. A candidate emerged. Ocean Holiday. She had cleared Norfolk in late March bound for Barbados. She never arrived there. Routine inquiries of port authorities around the Atlantic basin were negative. Cuba and Venezuela didn’t bother to answer the telex messages. Still, even if Ocean Holiday had visited those countries, she had left them and rendezvoused with the Shang-class Chinese attack boat just south of the equator, in midocean. And sank there.
A covert operation? Was a Chinese spy taken aboard secretly in the United States? Presumably her Chinese crewmen and South African captain, the two Ukrainian women, the old Russian couple and anyone else aboard had transferred to the submarine and had been taken back to China.
Why? No one knew.
The information was shared with the CIA. Perhaps it would eventually become part of a larger picture.
There the matter rested. The Americans had done all they could, so for them, now, the matter became another unexplained happening in a world full of them.
As it happened, a Chinese mole in the National Reconnaissance Office noted the request for data searches of satellite images for Ocean Holiday. He had no idea why the request was made, nor was it unusual. It was simply one of many. He included it in his weekly report to his handler, who serviced him through a drop in a Chinese restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, whose owner had no idea his premises were being used to pass messages back and forth to spies. It was used simply because the handler, supposedly a Chinese American, liked the food and the restaurant was a plausible place for him to visit regularly.
CHAPTER THREE
Politics is the womb in which war develops.
In late July the report from the spy in the American National Reconnaissance Office landed on the desk of Admiral Wu the senior officer in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN. In China, the navy was not a separate armed service but, like the air force and rocket forces, merely a branch of the army, though with its own officers, ratings and uniforms.
The report was quite simple: The Americans had searched their satellite archives for images of Ocean Holiday. Without more, the report raised a host of questions, none of which could be answered, including the most important one: Why?
Admiral Wu well knew the mission of Ocean Holiday, knew of the voyage of Hull 2 of the Type 093 class to a secret rendezvous, knew of the return of Lieutenant Commander Zhang and his crew to China, knew of his report of the successful completion of his mission.
The one conclusion that could be reached was that the Americans knew something. Something had made them suspicious. What?
Certainly not the fact that Ocean Holiday never arrived in Barbados. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Without a worried ship owner or insurance company or anxious relatives complaining and asking questions, a search of satellite imagery was unusual, to say the least.
Or was there an inquiring relative of the ship’s captain, the mate, the Ukrainian women or the Russian couple? He sent for Lieutenant Commander Zhang, who had approved and vetted those people; the commander of the submarine forces, Rear Admiral Sua; and the skipper of Hull 2, Type 093 class, Captain Zeng.