The Art of War: A Novel (49 page)

Carter asked his operations officer, “How far are we from Qingdao?”

One hundred twenty nautical miles, he was told.

“Close to a hundred,” he said. With a full combat load, the Zulu Cobras would sweat every mile if they had to launch. Carter prayed that they wouldn’t be needed.

Aboard the large carrier, sixteen F/A-18 Hornets and two EA-18G Growlers were fueled, armed and ready for engine start.
United States,
call sign Battlestar, was just south of Cheju Island, northeast of Shanghai. Qingdao was within the combat radius of her air wing. Still, she had two tankers on deck, ready to launch if necessary.

*   *   *

Half a world away from the Yellow Sea, in Washington, it was midmorning. At Sal Molina’s request, Jake Grafton joined him in the White House Situation Room, which was, appropriately enough, in the basement of the executive mansion. Admiral McKiernan and the marine commandant were there, as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The president was not in sight.

Jurgen Schulz, the national security adviser and erstwhile Harvard professor, was in a foul mood. He lit on Grafton like a starving mosquito. “
You
talked him into this,” he said accusingly, the “him” of course being the president.

“You gotta take your medication every morning,” Jake said. “Don’t forget those pills.” He turned his back on an enraged Schulz and wandered over to the coffeepot.

“Where’s the prez?” Grafton whispered to Molina.

“Fund-raising in California. Squeezing in a little golf.”

“Great.”

*   *   *

Peter Ciliberti, the coxswain of the Sealion that was supposed to deliver the demolition charges to
Liaoning,
informed Howie Peavy that there was a problem. “They got a net around this thing, sir. We can’t get any closer.”

Lieutenant Peavy looked at the picture from the photonics mast. “We’re still, what? A hundred yards away?”

“About that, I think.”

“Seen any patrol boats?”

“One. He went by the carrier as we were coming in and went on toward the dry dock off to the north.”

“Well, better lift her up so we can open the hatches and get the charges out. If you can put us alongside the net, we’ll hop over it.”

He and Ciliberti rotated the photonics mast in a 360-degree circle, looking at everything they could see in ambient light, then did it again in infrared. The carrier was tied up sideways to the quay, her bow to the south, Peavy’s left, and well lit up. In infrared she had all the usual hot spots, as did most of the ships at pierside, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, alarming.

Magnifying the image, Peavy could see two machine guns along the rail, one forward, one aft, each manned by one sailor. The guns seemed to be on swivel mounts, so they were probably of a fairly large caliber, the equivalent of a .50 caliber Browning machine gun. The problem was the gunners. He wondered how vigilant they were.

The carrier’s masthead and deck lights were behind the gunners, so they couldn’t see more than fifty or sixty yards from the ship, he thought. However, there were four lights on cables dangling from the catwalks, hanging down to about twenty feet above the water. Each cast a nice circle of light on the water. If a swimmer came up in one of those circles of light, and the gunner saw him, well …

They would have to stay submerged. Or take out the gunners.

“Take us up,” Peavy said to Ciliberti, and patted him on the shoulder. “And keep an eye out for that patrol boat.”

As the coxswain did his job, Peavy briefed his team: six men in black wet suits, wearing flippers over their dive boots, and LAR V Draeger rebreathers on their backs, so they would not release bubbles of exhaled gases into the water as conventional scuba gear did. The rebreathers used a pure oxygen system and filtered carbon dioxide from the exhaled air.

Up on deck Peavy took another look around. The night was dark as the inside of a coal mine, overcast, cold, with a stiff breeze blowing those swells lapping against the hull of the Sealion. The divers were going to have to work with headlamps to plant the charges. Peavy would need even more light to set the fuses and timer. Using lights was a risk, but as black as the water was under that ship, there was no way they could do the job by feel. The good news, Howie Peavy thought, was that the reduced visibility in the water, probably about two feet, and the spotlights hanging from the catwalks over the water would mean that no one on the surface would see the lights. He hoped.

He slipped into the water inside the net, made sure his rebreathing gear was working properly and reached up for the first fifty-pound demolition charge. It almost drove him to the bottom, but once it was in the water, it became much easier to handle. He turned, sighted on the middle of the carrier, checked his compass and began swimming toward it on the surface, towing the charge. Fifty yards from the carrier, he submerged.

*   *   *

Standing on the mole jutting from the land to form the entrance to the harbor, Captain Joe Child could see the harbor patrol boat making its rounds. He watched it through binoculars. The boat had running and masthead lights and some kind of deck light. He could see at least four men on the thing. One of them was using a large spotlight, playing it across the water randomly. If they found something, it should be obvious, he thought. So he watched.

After that Sealion ride he thought he would never want to sit again, but after ten minutes or so of scanning with the binoculars, he decided he did. He lowered himself to the damp concrete and braced his elbows on his knees, which steadied the binoculars somewhat.

*   *   *

“We have a subsurface contact, Captain,” the sonar operator, a first-class petty officer, said to Roscoe Hanna. “Sounds like an attack boat. Relative bearing three-three-zero degrees. Perhaps six thousand yards.”

Hanna looked at the computer plot. The contact was on the plot now, but the range was just an estimate, and would be until the contact could be tracked for a while through various bearings.

They were fifty miles east of the Qingdao naval base, running north at three knots. The other boat was heading southeast, in the general direction of the American task force. This close to the Chinese mainland, that was inevitable, perhaps.

“Are we alone?” Hanna asked everyone in the control room. The sonar operators were listening, and all agreed that the submarine at three-three-zero degrees relative was their only contact.

The sea was so shallow, sound bouncing around …

“It sounds like a Chinese attack boat, Captain. Nuclear.”

“Let’s get behind him,” the
Utah
skipper said. “We’ll let him cross our bows, then we’ll fall in behind him.” Hanna glanced at his watch. In two or three hours the Sealions would be coming out of Qingdao. “Let’s make sure this boat is the only Chinese sub out here, people,” Hanna said, “or we’re going to be the guys with egg on our faces.”

Hanna was assuming the crew of the Chinese boat hadn’t yet heard
Utah.
If they had, they wouldn’t mosey along as if they were alone for very long. He would soon know.

*   *   *

Swimming underwater towing demolition charges, moving them into position, activating the electromagnets that would hold them in place, all the time working under the vast black bulk of the aircraft carrier—it took tremendous physical exertion from every member of the team.

Peavy had to swim from the bow to the stern, watching his watch, then reverse himself and swim half that time to find the midpoint of the ship’s hull. All this took time, yet while he was doing it, other team members were assembling with explosive charges.

The water was as black as the grave under that huge ship. The turbidity of the water prevented any light from the dangling spotlights from reaching the keel. Howie Peavy and his team members used headlamps—they had to. It was absolutely critical that they got all the explosives as close together as possible, and right on the keel, the deepest part of the ship. Determining just where the keel was in that dark, opaque water was a difficult task. The roundness of the hull certainly didn’t help, because there was no way to determine exactly where the deepest part was.

Peavy and his team worked until they thought they had it. Every man got a vote, by gesture and light.

When the charges were all placed, Peavy and one other diver began rigging the fuses and timer.

*   *   *

It was the harbor patrol boat that caused the ruckus. Joe Child sat watching it, and was appalled to see that it was coming south working right along the antitorpedo net that had been rigged to protect
Liaoning.

Of course, the coxswain of Peavy’s Sealion saw it coming. Ciliberti had a great view on his photonics display, and if he didn’t trust digital magic, he could turn in his seat and look north at the real thing coming his way. Ciliberti had already flooded his tanks and submerged the boat as far as it would go, which was down to the glass of the pilothouse, but the patrol boat was coming lazily on, perhaps at two or three knots, with the spotlight swinging back and forth, back and forth.

He had to do something, so he got his Sealion under way and turned ninety degrees to seaward, to clear the net. Perhaps he could allow the patrol boat to go by, then turn in behind him and join on the net again.

What Ciliberti couldn’t do was abandon the SEALs that were now under
Liaoning.
He keyed his portable com unit, which was in a bracket glued to the instrument panel.

“Gold One, this is Blue Two. I have a problem. I’m clearing the net, but this boat is coming down on me.”

“Roger,” Joe Child acknowledged. The patrol boat was only a hundred yards or so from the Sealion’s last position on the net. Child glanced at his watch. The divers had been in the water for over an hour. How much longer before they were ready to be recovered?

“How far?” Child asked the gunner on the Browning, who was holding a laser range finder up to his eye.

“Gonna be about eight hundred meters, sir,” the gunner said.

Child used his com unit. “Gold Four, give them a Goose round. Gold Six, use the Barrett on those machine gunners aboard the flattop if they fire a single shot.”

Mike clicks were his reply.

Fifteen seconds later, the M-3 spit out its round.

Watching through the binoculars, Joe Child saw the little shaped charge explode on the front left quarter of the patrol boat. The boat began slewing as if it were out of control. No one forward now on the gun. The spotlight wasn’t sweeping anymore. That had been an armor-piercing round, one that would kill a medium-sized tank. Child wondered what it had done to the hull of the boat.

Now it straightened out and accelerated. Child could see the bow rise onto the plane. The boat’s heading began to wander. The helmsman was probably wounded or dead.

“Hit ’em again,” he said on the radio.

This rocket missed. The boat continued on, closing the distance. Captain Child tapped the machine gunner on the shoulder. “Take ’em out.”

The machine gun began squirting short bursts. The gunner knew his stuff. Through his binoculars Child could see sparks where bullets were hitting the boat and pieces flying off. On the fifth burst the boat exploded. As the fireball rose into the night sky, illuminating the area around the boat, the wreckage drifted to a stop. The fire quickly went out as the boat sank. The harbor was dark again.

Except on the ships berthed against the piers and quay. Searchlights came on, klaxons wailed, Oriental voices could be heard talking over PA systems. The crews were being called to action stations.

Joe Child wondered how much more time Howie Peavy needed. He wondered how quickly the berthed ships could be gotten to sea. He wondered how many more patrol boats were sitting at a pier, ready to cast off. He wondered if he should alert the admirals in charge of the task forces.

He decided to alert them with a message on his com unit. Typing it would keep him busy doing something productive.

*   *   *

USS
Utah
slid in behind the Chinese hunter-killer sub at about four miles distance. If the Chinese boat was towing a sonar array, Roscoe Hanna didn’t want to hit it. Once safely behind the Chinaman, Hanna accelerated a bit to match his speed. A submarine’s stern was its dead zone, the sounds behind it hidden by the turning screws and disturbed water of its passing. The boat they were trailing would undoubtedly turn sooner or later to clear his stern, his “baffles,” but probably not for a while.

“Any other boats around?”

“No, sir.” None had been reported, but Hanna thought it never hurt to ask a direct question and make everyone look again.

Hanna checked the plot. The two subs seemed to be heading for the
Hornet
task group, which was only forty miles away. At ten knots, they would be there in four hours if they held this course. Of course,
Hornet
was moving, too. For whatever it was worth, they were already in
Hornet
’s vicinity.

“How are the sound conditions?” Hanna asked his sonar guru.

“Not good. Too shallow.”

The sound conditions would be equally bad for the Chinese boat, Hanna thought.

The clock on the bulkhead was ticking off the minutes. Captain Hanna sat on a stool where he could see the automated plot and waited.

*   *   *

As the SEALs got their demolition charges attached, they went back in pairs for the last ones, until all eight fifty-pound charges were attached under the keel. Then the two superfluous pairs of divers swam back to the Sealion, which had returned to the net after the passage of the harbor patrol boat.

It was very difficult working in the blackness under the ship, with only ten feet of water between the bottom and the keel, with visibility about a foot. Howie Peavy and his mate, Petty Officer Second Class Macon George, installed the fuses in each charge, attached the timer to the ship, and ensured the clock was working. Peavy was ready to set the timer when George grabbed his arm and motioned that his rebreather was going bad. Together the two men swam upward toward the surface.