Kilo Class (39 page)

“If one of those Hai Lungs passes anywhere near, we’ll pick him up. I’m going to suggest we move one down to Indonesia very soon and station it at the southern end of the Sunda Strait, where we’ll be patrolling, and ready.

“We’ll know when it’s due because we’ll let the trawler know the moment the outward-bound Hai Lung clears Suao. Since the distance is about two thousand two hundred miles, they ought to arrive eleven days later. We will of course be there very early…”

“What if he doesn’t show up?”

“Then we check the Malacca Strait… then the Bali Strait… and if he doesn’t show up there either… well… he’s not coming… and then we have to turn our attentions to the more difficult north. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Tell me, Zhang,” interrupted the Paramount Ruler again. “Where
could
they be going?”

“Sir, I am as ever honored that you should value my judgment… but in this case I am afraid I may be wasting everyone’s time by speculating… I do have my chart book here… and I have marked out possibilities… I am more than happy to give everyone the benefit of my studies… but I have of course nothing certain…”

“I would like to hear these places, Zhang,” said the Ruler.

“Well, the Taiwanese could be going to the islands of Amsterdam, or St. Paul, which are four thousand miles southwest of the Sunda Strait. And I suppose they might just make the Îles Crozet, which are eighteen hundred miles farther. However there are three places that fit better into our estimated five-week time frame — Heard Island, and two hundred and thirty miles to the northwest, Kerguelen, which is really a large archipelago of both large and small islands. The three desolate McDonald Islands lie twenty-three miles west-southwest of Heard. So far as I know, all of them are completely inhospitable and without power of any kind, except for the French weather station on Kerguelen. The weather on each of them is shocking. They are ice and snow-bound for most, if not all, of the year.

“If the Taiwanese are in the south, working on some nuclear program, they must be in one of those places. I must say, sir, I am nearly at a loss to suggest a way in which we might find them. They are without doubt the most remote places on the earth. Very nearly inaccessible, no airstrips. And really bad weather and sea conditions. You would need a nuclear-powered warship, with a helicopter… and that would be noticed within a week of arrival.”

“Or perhaps a submarine,” said the Ruler.

“Yessir. A submarine would be helpful,” replied Admiral Zhang. But he did not look too convinced.

“I am somewhat at a loss,” said Admiral Lee Yung. “How could the Taiwanese
possibly
have set up some kind of a laboratory in a place such as those you have mentioned, where there is no power and no buildings?”

Admiral Zhang answered. “The power is not a huge problem, sir. You could use a nuclear submarine… its reactor could power a small town… no problem with a couple of very large generators.”

“But the Taiwanese do not have a nuclear submarine,” interjected the Ruler.

“No, sir, they do not. At least not one that we know about, or one that has ever been to Taiwan… however there was much speculation a few years ago that they had bought one from France… somewhat inexpensively… it was an old twenty-five-hundred-ton Rubis Class nuclear boat. I believe it was in 1999. But the story became a mystery… it was never delivered, and there was much conjecture that it had been lost on the journey. We never even had confirmation that it had left the main French Atlantic base at Brest.”

“Perhaps it went straight to Heard Island and began its work as a power station,” said the Paramount Ruler.

“Perhaps, indeed, sir,” replied Admiral Zhang. “But if it were not to be detected, it would have to remain underwater for long periods, and to provide power for any facility ashore, it would also have to be moored underwater. Who could ever see it then?”

“Are any of these places on the shipping routes?”

“No, sir. Certainly not Kerguelen, nor Heard, nor McDonald. None of them are even on air routes. They are basically just slabs of granite jutting up from undersea ridges. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone operating anything from there. In my view, the sooner we are able to get a trawler into the Sunda Strait, the better it will be. Then we can acquire some facts.”

“I agree with you, Zhang. And unless anyone here has some serious objection to this course of action, I would like you and Admiral Zu to develop your plan and submit it for our approval as soon as possible.”

The General Secretary of the Communist Party, whose office entitled him to chair the Military Affairs Commission, nodded his assent, and everyone else took their cue from this most powerful paymaster to the Navy. There was no dissenting voice, and Admiral Zhang Yushu confirmed he would take charge of the mission forthwith.

“I would also like to say, sir, that this makes the delivery of the final two Kilos even more pressing.”

“I wondered if that might be the case,” said the Ruler, smiling again. “Tell me why.”

“Because, sir, if we find what we think we may find, behind some remote rock in the Southern Ocean… I imagine we will consider the possibility of an attack… and I would prefer to do so with our very best submarine… a brand-new Kilo would be perfect.”

“If we find what we think we may,” said the Ruler, “there is not the merest possibility of an attack. My orders will be absolute. I want any Taiwanese nuclear laboratory, or factory, or any such facility,
destroyed
. I hope I make myself clear… Now perhaps we should have some tea.”

“Yessir,” said Admiral Zhang, standing formally to attention.

The pressure on the CIA from the office of the President’s National Security Adviser had been intense for several days now. Scarcely an hour passed without some new instruction, demand, or memorandum landing on the desk of the profoundly harassed chief of the Far Eastern Desk, Frank Reidel. “Admiral Morgan wants this… Admiral Morgan wants that… Admiral Morgan says, ‘Get into the White House right now’… Admiral Morgan wants to know what the hell’s going on… Admiral Morgan says if he is not told what those ‘fucking Hai Lungs’ are up to within one day, heads are gonna roll.” “Jesus Christ,” said Reidel.

In turn he had turned the heat up on all of his Far Eastern field officers, especially those in Taiwan, who were permitted by the friendly government to operate almost at will, making their inquiries, on behalf of the United States, freely, almost like journalists, which indeed a couple of them were.

There was, however, one place on the island where
no one
was permitted to operate, and that was the Eastern Command submarine base out along the Sutung Chung Road, which runs seaward out of Suao, a coastal town thirty-three miles southeast of Taipei, in Ilan County.

This road comes to a shuddering halt three hundred yards from the post office. A big military-style gate, set into hundreds of yards of wire fencing, is manned twenty-four hours a day by armed police. No one is permitted past the gates without documentation. Dock workers who forget or mislay their pass are not admitted.

Frank Reidel’s Taipei chief had two men in the Eastern Command base who undertook enormous risks for very little information. Carl Chimei, the forty-four-year-old foreman on the submarine loading dock, was one of them. A deeply embittered man, he hated China and everything to do with it, including Taiwan. He had done so ever since his schoolteacher-parents had been murdered by Mao’s Red Guards on the mainland thirty years previously. He himself had escaped the insurrection and made it to Taiwan when he was just eighteen years old.

He was probably the easiest recruit Reidel’s men had ever encountered. He lived for the day when he would be flown to the USA; his wife and two children were leaving early next year, if not sooner.

But on this night, June 28, crouched in the shadow of the stacked crates on the jetty, Carl Chimei was in mortal danger. He had not returned home with his comrades, and his exit pass had not been stamped. Tomorrow, or even later tonight, he would attempt to talk himself out of that. Perhaps no one would notice — he had worked in the dockyard for twenty years. But now he was petrified. Every fifteen minutes, two armed Navy sentries walked within ten feet of his hiding place, thirty feet away from the Hai Lung. If one of them saw him, he would be shot dead, no questions asked. Only the thought of life in the United States, and the promised payment of $250,000 for risking his life on more than one occasion, kept him steady. In his hard right hand he carried a two-foot-long crowbar. But the crate he wanted to pry open was stacked twenty feet up, and he would have to work ferociously fast, with only the distant dock lights to guide him.

He had the pattern of the sentries’ patrol clear in his mind. They walked past the orderly pile of crates, and then hesitated at the light above the gangway to the Hai Lung, which was moored alongside. Twice they had called out something to the guard on the casing of the submarine. They had then proceeded down the jetty and it took precisely fifteen minutes for them to return, from the other direction. Carl had already decided to scale the crates while they checked the shore bridge to the Hai Lung.

And now he could hear the steady beat of their footsteps as he flattened himself behind the wall of crates. He closed his eyes and willed his thumping heart to be silent as the footsteps grew louder, and then began to recede.

Carl counted to ten, hooked the crowbar through his belt, and pulled himself up onto the rim of the first crate, three feet above the ground. The crates were unevenly stacked, and the climb was not difficult for a man as fit as Carl. But there were six more crates to scale, and one mistake might prove fatal. He dug his fingers over the rim of the wood as he cleared the next two, and hung on nine feet above his starting point, his soft work shoes jammed into the cracks between the cases. It took him three minutes to reach the top of the stack, and when he got there he could just see the red-painted letters he sought:
HAI LUNG
793. He expertly jammed the crowbar between the lid and the wall of the crate, and heaved with short strokes to prevent the nails from squeaking as they came out. But the lid would not move.

Carl’s fingers raced over the surface of the crate. And he cursed the two steel bands that bound it tight. He reached for the cutters deep in his trouser pocket, adjusted them for size, and severed the first band. Then he cut the second and was appalled at the noise they made as they fell away with a twanging, sprung, metallic protest. He thought it would never die away.

But now the six-foot lid of the case moved against the heave of the crowbar, and Carl wrenched it upward and back, leaving it open. Seven minutes had passed, and he ripped at the waterproof wrapping inside the case. Then he switched on his tiny flashlight. He felt around and touched something soft and furry. For a moment he thought he had grabbed a dead panda. But the light told him differently. He was looking at fur-lined clothes, and at the bottom were boots and hats. Carl knew what he had come for — and he knew that wherever those submarines were going was very cold indeed.

He heaved the top of the crate back into position, and pushed the nails back into place with the flat end of his crowbar. The trouble was again the steel bands. He could cut them and get rid of the pieces, but if he left the bands dangling, and ran for it, his break-in would be obvious in the morning.

He had three minutes before the sentries were due back, and he decided to stay and cut up the steel bands, and hope that neither of the guards would look aloft as they passed.

Carl’s luck held. The sentries came and went, and he was able to pull out the bands, one by one, and then fold and carry them to the ground, like fully extended steel measuring tapes.

He cut them into small pieces and then dumped the jangling pieces into a bin. Tomorrow, with any luck, he would himself supervise the loading of the Hai Lung. For now, he just had to get away. And at 2300, that was not going to be easy.

Carl, however, was a senior worker at the yard and had lived right in the town of Suao for many years. If he had a halfway decent reason for being on duty so late, he would almost certainly get away with it.

And so, he pulled on his jacket, picked up a clip-board full of notes, and crate numbers, and marched straight down the jetty toward the Sutung Chung Gate, eight hundred yards distant. As he approached the guardhouse, the duty officer stepped out to meet him. “Hey, Carl,… what are you doing here at this time of night?”

“Ah, someone had misplaced one of those crates we’re loading tomorrow. At least the documents said it was misplaced. Took me five and a half hours to find it… in the wrong damned pile. I was so angry I’ve walked up here with all the stuff…”

He handed it to the guard and said, “Stick this in your office for me, will you? I’ll collect it in the morning… if my wife hasn’t killed me. We were going out to dinner.”

The guard laughed. “Okay, Carl. I’ll be gone by the time you get back. Tell the duty officer your worksheets are in my desk drawer. Here, let me stamp you out.”

The two men chatted for a few minutes more, and then the foreman walked off down the dark Sutung Chung Road toward the town, quietly humming the national anthem of the United States to himself.

Frank Reidel had no idea what the fuss was about. But Admiral Morgan had been specific. “If you get any word from Suao, let me know right away.” It had taken Carl Chimei and his CIA contact almost a day to get his message out, but they did so, from a safe house in Taipei, via Pearl Harbor, to Langley. It read simply: “Opened the box. Fur coats, hats, and boots. Cold vacation for the Dutchman.”

The message had arrived at 1800 on June 29. Reidel opened up the secure line to the White House and read the thirteen-word message to Admiral Morgan. “Beautiful, Frank,” said the NSA as he slammed down the phone and punched the air triumphantly.

“That does it for me,” he said to himself. “The Taiwanese are fucking around in Kerguelen. The distance is right. The time is right. The message from the
Cuttyhunk
was right, except that the Japanese were Taiwanese. And my boys saw the periscope of a Dutch-built Hai Lung submarine, right there in Choiseul Bay. There are two questions: what the hell are they doing down there? And, do I give a rat’s ass? The answer to the first is, I don’t know what they are doing. To the second, I answer, yes, I very much give a rat’s ass.”