McGarvey turned and walked out of the Oval Office.
“You sonofabitch,” Lindsay shouted after him. “You sonofabitch!”
TWENTY-THREE
“Conn, sonar. Sierra seventeen is turning inboard to port,” Seaman Fischer reported excitedly.
“Does he have positive contact on us yet?” Harding demanded.
“I don’t think so, Skipper. The current is probably messing up his sonar, but he suspects something. And if he keeps it up he’s going to find us.”
The problem was they lay on the bottom in three hundred feet of water at the southwestern extremity of the Eastern Channel below Tsushima Island. They weren’t deep enough to enjoy the protection of a thermocline, and they didn’t have much maneuvering room. The only things going for them were the fierce current in the channel, ten foot seas on the surface and the fact that when Seawolf was rigged for ultrasilent operations she was extremely quiet. In addition, it was thirty minutes past midnight. Despite radar and collision avoidance systems, operations like this in which so many ships were in close proximity to each other — sonar had identified eleven surface targets — the darkness of night made everything all the more dangerous. Accidents could and often did happen.
On the surface their most immediate threat was from the MSDF destroyer Myoko, which had been running a grid pattern search for the past two hours, the legs of which kept getting smaller and smaller. Seawolf was being effectively boxed in. And when Myoko found them it would be an uneven fight that Seawolf couldn’t possibly win. Despite her awesome nuclear capability, she simply could not prevail against eleven-to-one odds, not counting the threat from however many ASW Orion aircraft that were circling overhead and however many MSDF submarines that were lurking about.
Paradise handed the captain a cup of coffee. “We need another ten hours and the George Washington will be here.”
“We’re probably not going to get that much time.” The ELF message they had received ten hours ago was sketchy. But Admiral Hamilton had warned them about the trouble they were heading into and promised a pair of Hornets on scene within thirty minutes and the entire fleet in twenty hours.
“Then the jets are going to have to hold them off.” Paradise gave Harding a worried look. “We’re not going to fire again, are we?”
Harding shook his head. “The moment we did, they would come after us with everything.”
Paradise looked relieved. “We can make a case for shooting at Natsushio. All we did was disable her. She’s up there on the surface now, her skipper mad as hell. But I think he had every intention of shooting first. And not merely to cripple us.”
“I agree,” Harding said. “But the Myoko won’t have to start it. Once they find us, they’ll send one of their choppers out to wherever their submarines are hiding, drop a dipping buoy and give them our position. If we’re fired on and we either move or retaliate, then the surface ships can make a case for declaring us hostile, possibly a Chinese submarine, and they’ll come after us and win.”
“I see,” Paradise said after a moment. “But we’re not just going to wait here until it happens.”
“We might have to, Rod. But we’re not beat yet.” Harding picked up the growler phone and called sonar.
“Sonar, aye.”
“Mel, I want you to feed us the position of every surface ship within fifty thousand yards. I’ll need constant updates as fast as you can get to me.”
“Ah, yes, sir,” Fischer said. “Skipper, it might help if I knew what you wanted. Help me come up with the right numbers, in the right sequence.”
“We’re going to start a TMA on every ship up there. I want continuous shooting solutions on each of them. Simultaneously.” Harding let that sink in. “Can you handle that?”
“Yes, sir. But it’s going to get a little busy back here. How long do you want to keep it up?”
“Maybe as long as ten hours. But probably a lot less than that.”
Fischer hesitated only a moment. “You’ve got it, Skipper,” he said.
There were lights all around him. Captain Tomita, standing on the bridge, studied the lights of the ocean-going tug connected to his boat by a three-hundred-meter steel tether. His orders were to return to Maizuru at all possible speed for repairs, but for the first time in his naval career Tomita was not obeying a direct order. He wanted to stay here to witness the destruction of the American submarine that had bested him. He’d ordered the tug to maintain steerage way in the three-meter seas, nothing more.
Thinking about the incident that had sent his boat limping to the surface made him tighten his grip on the binoculars so hard that the knuckles on his fingers turned white.
“Bridge, communications.”
Tomita lowered his binoculars and answered the growler phone. “This is the captain.”
“Kan-cho, I have the captain of the Myoko for you.”
“Very well.” Tomita raised his binoculars with one hand and searched for and found the 2+2 Kongo class destroyer about two miles off his starboard bow. “Kurosawa-san, how is the search going? Have you found him yet?”
Shintaro Kurosawa, captain of the Myoko, sounded rushed. “We may have picked up something with the sidescan sonar on our last pass. We’re doubling back now for another set of sweeps.”
“He’s there, listening to us.”
“How can you be certain?”
“I know this captain,” Tomita said. “He’s a cowboy, waiting for the fleet to arrive.”
At that moment one of the two F/A-18 Hornet fighter/interceptors screamed low overhead from the north, the tremendous roar drowning out all sound. Tomita lowered his binoculars and raised a fist to the sky in a perfectly futile gesture.
“ … shoot them out of the sky,” Kurosawa was saying.
“It would be a mistake to destroy them.”
“That’s what I said. But we have other resources. If we find him, Tomita-san. If he’s down there.”
“He’s there. I’d stake my life on it.”
“You should start for base.”
“Not yet.”
“I understand,” Kurosawa said. “But now let me get back to my work. If we can pinpoint his exact position perhaps we can flush him out of hiding.”
“Better to kill him without warning, lest he fire on us again. The fact is, he’s probably a Chinese submarine. Perhaps even North Korean. We don’t know for sure who he is, simply that he fired on my boat.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Kurosawa said.
“Good hunting,” Tomita replied.
Flying an operation so low and slow in restricted visibility, the ASW aircraft’s two radar operators were the most important crew members aboard. The pilot, Lieutenant Hitoshi Kuroda, a slight line of sweat on his narrow upper lip, was flying by the numbers. He had to trust his radar people because the slightest mistake could send them crashing into one of the other two Orions out here on patrol or the two American jet fighters. In fact, he was surprised that an accident hadn’t already happened with so many ships and aircraft so concentrated in so small an area.
“Captain, ELINT. Ready to deploy on your mark.”
“Stand by,” the pilot said.
Their search pattern was being coordinated by the Combat Information Center aboard the Myoko.
“Home plate, this is aircraft eleven. We’re ready to make our turn now and deploy on your mark.”