The Art of War: A Novel (3 page)

“We are working on the engine,” Lawrence replied.

“Do you need a shipfitter? Or a tug?”

“In an hour we will know. Can you give us one more hour?”

“One more.” The harbor boat began to move, the wake boiled, and it accelerated away. The man with the loud-hailer saluted the women.

Lawrence translated for Zhang, then stood on the bridge wing a moment, looking at the water, his hands braced on the rail. The water was dark and dirty and undoubtedly cold. After a moment he pushed himself away from the rail with an effort and came back inside the bridge.

A crewman came up the ladder to the bridge and reported to Zhang in Chinese. “It’s under the yacht. The divers are getting new tanks, then will attach it to the hooks.”

“The condition of the package?”

“It appears to be in perfect shape, sir.”

Zhang merely nodded.

The crewman left.

It.
A nuclear warhead. Transported to America in a waterproof container below the waterline of the freighter. Ten megatons.

“I want to get off this yacht,” Lawrence said loudly in Chinese as Zhang puffed contentedly. Unnaturally loud. He had made his decision and had decided to announce it.

Zhang eyed the man. “That wasn’t our agreement.”

“I’ve gotten you here. I’ve been paid enough for that, and I am not going to the police. I just don’t want to go back to China.”

“I may need you again. This vessel must have two licensed officers.”

“Now listen,” the mate said, wiping a bit of drool off his chin. “I am in this as deeply as you are, and I don’t want to go to prison. You can put me ashore when you start down the bay and we’ll just forget—”

That was as far as he got. Zhang took one step toward him, leaped and kicked. His right foot caught Lawrence under the chin and the mate’s head snapped backward. His body went with the kick. It skidded on the deck and lay absolutely still, the head at an unnatural angle. Zhang stepped closer for a look. The man’s neck was obviously broken, his eyes frozen.

Zhang left him there. The second hand on the bulkhead clock went around and around. Zhang smoked another cigarette.

Twenty minutes after Lawrence died the crewman was back. He glanced at Lawrence’s body, then saluted Zhang. “It’s secure under the vessel. The divers and sled are aboard, the door to the sea is closed, and we are pumping the compartment.”

“Very well. Send two men up here to get Lawrence’s body. He fell down a ladder and broke his neck. Put him in his bunk and lock the stateroom door.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Get those women on deck below. Make preparations to get under way. We will back down on the stern anchor, raise it, hose it off and stow it, then move forward and pick up the bow anchor. You know the drill. When you have Lawrence tucked away, wake the captain and send him to the bridge.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

After the sailor had left, a wave of relief swept over Zhang. Ignoring the body on the deck, he seated himself in the captain’s chair.

They were halfway there. Halfway. Now to plant the bomb.

He reached for the book of charts they had used to navigate up Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and flipped through it. He quickly found the one he wanted.

Norfolk, Virginia. The biggest naval base on the planet.

Zhang lit another cigarette and studied the chart, as he had dozens of times in the past month. There were, of course, no marks on the paper. Still, he knew every depth, every distance. His finger traced a course.

There. Right there! That was where he and his men would plant the bomb.

*   *   *

Seven days later
Ocean Holiday
passed the Cape Henry light on its way out of Chesapeake Bay and entered the Atlantic. Lieutenant Commander Zhang steered a course to the southeast. A few degrees north of the equator, three hundred miles from the mouth of the Amazon River, on a dark night with no surface traffic on the radar, Zhang rendezvoused with a Chinese nuclear-powered, Shang-class attack submarine. Swells were moderate.

Both the yacht and sub could be seen by satellites, of course—even through the light cloud layer, by infared sensors—but the chance of a satellite being overhead at just this moment was small, since the crew knew the orbits and schedules of most of them. The night and clouds shielded the vessels from anyone peering through an airliner’s window, which was the best that could be achieved.

Captain Vanderhosen, the Ukrainian prostitutes and the Russian couple were dead by then and, like Lawrence, consigned to the sea in weighted sacks that Zhang had brought on this voyage for just this purpose. Demolition charges were set as near the keel of the yacht as possible and put on a timer, and every hatch on the vessel was latched open. The life rings around the top decks were removed. Four of the Chinese rode the ship’s boat over to the sub. One man brought it back for another load of people. Zhang Ping went with the final boatload of crewmen.

He was standing on the sub’s small bridge when the demolition charges detonated and the yacht began settling. He stood watching for the four minutes it took for the yacht to slip beneath the waves on its journey to the sea floor eighteen hundred feet below.

When the mast went under and there was nothing on the dark water to be seen by searchlight except a few pieces of flotsam and a spreading slick of diesel fuel that would soon be dissipated by swells, Zhang went below. Sailors from the sub chopped holes in the bottom of the ship’s boat and the flotation tanks that were built in under the seats. Then they cast it adrift and watched as it too settled into the sea.

Sixty-five minutes after the sub surfaced, it submerged.

CHAPTER
TWO

Whoever rules the waves rules the world.

—Alfred Thayer Mahan

Six miles away and two hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, the officers and sonar technicians of USS
Utah
listened to the dead-in-the water surfaced Chinese submarine and the gurgling noise of the sinking yacht. They knew exactly what made the noises. And they wondered what was going on.

Utah
had picked up the Type 093 Shang-class sub as it exited the Chinese sub base at Sanya, Hainan, four weeks ago, and listened to her submerge. The American sub had fallen in trail about six miles behind her quarry and had no trouble maintaining that position. The Chinese sub was quiet, but that was a relative term. At 110 decibels, she was much noisier than
Utah,
which was a Virginia-class attack boat with all the latest technology.
Utah
was so quiet she resembled a black hole in the ocean and was undetectable by Chinese sonar beyond the range of a mile at this speed. She never once got that close.

The American skipper was named Roscoe Hanna, and he was an old hand at following Russian and Chinese boomers, as well as conventionally powered Chinese Kilo- and Whiskey-class boats. This was the first time since he’d assumed command of
Utah
that he’d had the luck to latch on to a nuclear-powered boat. The Chinese diesel-electric subs were noisy on the surface and easy to follow because they couldn’t go very deep and they had to surface, usually at night, to recharge their batteries. The difficulty level rose geometrically, however, when two or more of them operated together. Chinese nukes, on the other hand, spent more time in port than they did at sea, probably because their reactors were unreliable and the boats needed copious maintenance.

“What’s the name of this boat?” someone asked. Research in the ship’s computers couldn’t come up with a name, merely a hull number in the class.

“It’s a Chinese military secret,” the chief of the boat decided.

“The
Great Leap Down,
” the XO quipped, so that is what she became to the American crew sneaking along behind her.

Hanna and his officers had been ecstatic four weeks ago in the South China Sea when they realized they had a nuke on the hook. Then the ecstasy faded and mystification set in. The Chinese sub didn’t stooge around the South China Sea or the Gulf of Tonkin, or head for the Taiwan or Luzon Strait. She submerged, worked up to eighteen knots and headed south.

Occasionally, at odd times, the Chinese captain would slow down and make ninety-degree turns to ensure no submarine was behind him, its noise masked by his propeller, and he would maintain that slow speed for a while to listen, “clearing his baffles.” While he did that,
Utah,
in trail, also listened. The Americans wanted to ensure that their boat wasn’t being trailed in turn by a Chinese or Russian sub. No, except for the Chinese attack sub and
Utah,
the depths were empty.

After a half hour or so, the Chinese sub resumed cruising speed. A half hour to listen, then go. The routine must have been on the Plan of the Day. On a similarly predictable schedule, the
Great Leap
routinely slowly rose from the depths and descended again, no doubt checking the temperature and salinity of the water at various levels, and once poking up her comm antenna for a moment, probably just to receive message traffic from home.

Captain Hanna and his officers remained alert. Russian subs occasionally used a maneuver known as a “Crazy Ivan” to try to detect trailing U.S. submarines. The Russian sub would make a 270-degree turn and come back up its own wake, trying to force any trailing sub to maneuver quickly to avoid a collision, which would make noise and alert the Russians to the trailing boat.

Yet the Chinese maneuvered only to clear their baffles. The
Great Leap Down
held course to the south. Rounding the swell of Vietnam, the course became a bit more westward.

The noise the Chinese boat made appeared as squiggles, or spikes, on computer presentations. The sonarmen designated the unique noise source with a symbol, then recorded and archived it. A movement of the noise source left or right meant the contact was turning; up or down, ascending or descending; getting quieter or noisier, slowing or speeding up. Following it required care and concentration, made easier by the fact that every maneuver the Chinese sub made changed the frequency of the sound. Taking on or discharging water to change her buoyancy, speeding up or slowing the prop, moving the rudder—all of that was displayed instantly on the sonar computer screens in
Utah
’s control room.

“My guess is she’s headed for the Strait of Malacca,” the navigator said to Captain Hanna, who was standing beside him studying the chart.

“Into the Indian Ocean?”

“Well, maybe.”

Hanna seemed to recall that at least once before a Chinese boomer or attack boat had passed through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean. Normally they stayed in the western Pacific to intimidate their neighbors and strengthen Chinese demands for complete control of the China Sea. Yet this one was on a mission, going somewhere. As the navigator had predicted, it went past Singapore and northwest right through the strait between the Malay Peninsula and the island of Sumatra.

“Maybe she’s going to India to show off Chinese technology,” the captain mused.

Yet out of the strait, the
Great Leap Down
turned southwest, around the northern tip of Sumatra and through the Great Channel between Sumatra and the Nicobar Islands, into the Indian Ocean. Then it set a course for the Cape of Good Hope.
Utah
followed right along.

“This is one for the books,” the XO said one evening at the wardroom table. “Maybe she’s going to the States. The captain and his crew might be defecting, like
Red October.
Maybe she’ll surface outside the Narrows and nuke into New York harbor.”

“France, I think,” the chief engineer opined. “Maybe they are going to France for a refit or upgrade. Visit the Riviera, ogle the women, perhaps buy a French sonar.”

“Why not a pool?” suggested the navigator. “Everyone picks a place and we each put in a twenty, then whoever gets the closest to this guy’s final destination wins the pot.”

The officers liked that idea and mulled their choices for a day. The destination was defined as the farthest point from Hainan Island that the Chinese sub reached before it retraced its course. “I’ll take a circumnavigation,” the junior officer aboard said the following evening when he dropped his twenty on the table. “I think we’re following a Chinese Magellan.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion twenty bucks’ worth.”

With the pool set, the off-duty officers went back to the wardroom Acey-Deucy tournament.

Captain Hanna began fretting the fact he was completely out of communication with SUBPAC.
Utah
could not transmit messages when submerged. It could, however, receive very low frequency radio signals, which literally came through the saltwater. When summoned, he would have to report. He decided to let his superiors know what he was doing without waiting for a summons. He prepared a long report, told SUBPAC where he was, what he was following, the condition of his boat, and his intentions. He had it encrypted and ready for a covert burst transmission, then slowed and let the Chinese sub extend the range. Poking up his stealthy comm mast would create only a little noise, but better to be safe than sorry. When the distance was about fifteen nautical miles, he rose to periscope depth, sent off his message and picked up incoming traffic, then quickly went deeper and accelerated.

The
Great Leap Down
was ahead of him, somewhere, yet she was, he hoped, still on course two-five-zero. He didn’t want to close on her too quickly, so he set a speed just two knots above the boat he was shadowing. Getting back into sonar range took two tense hours. Finally his quarry reappeared as squiggles on a computer screen. The computer recognized the signature; the assigned symbol appeared. Got her again!

And so it went, day after day, averaging about 330 nautical miles every twenty-four hours. Around the Cape of Good Hope and northward into the Atlantic. Occasionally they heard commercial vessels passing on various headings, and now and then storms roiled the ocean, putting more sound into the water from the surface. The ocean was not quiet. It was a continuous concert of biological sound: shrimp, fish, porpoises, whale calls and farts. Amidst all this there was the steady sound of the Chinese sub boring along, slowing, listening, turning, speeding up, rising or descending.