U.S.S. Seawolf (7 page)

2100. Monday, June 19
.
USS
Seawolf
.

Judd Crocker was frowning. And when he frowned, he resembled the Pirate King. His looks were classic Black Irish, the dark Mediterranean coloring of the Spaniard, descended, as he was, from one of the hundreds of Spanish sailors who washed up on Ireland’s shores after the defeated Armada ran into a storm in 1588. You would not, however, have mistaken him for a matador. More likely the bull.

He was an enormously powerful man. In Newport, you’d take him for a winch-grinder on a major racing yacht, in Canada you’d wonder why he wasn’t wearing a checkered shirt and swinging a double-bladed ax, and outside Madison Square Garden or Shea Stadium, someone would have offered him a contract.

Judd was a major presence in a submarine. He seemed all business, but he was quick with his lopsided smile, and quicker with a droll, often teasing remark. Some might think him sardonic, but that would be an exaggera
tion. It was just that he was extremely thoughtful, and tended to be a couple of jumps ahead of the opposition.

Right now, bent frowning over a big white, blue and yellow chart of the northern half of the Yellow Sea, he was trying to stay a couple of jumps ahead of the Chinese. But it was not proving easy. Sitting alone in his cabin, poring over the ocean depths of a distant sea in which he had never sailed, he was exercising his mind fully.

And the air in the little room was filled with mumbled phrases like, “Damn, can’t go in there…too shallow…that’s not a sea, it’s a frigging mud flat…beats the hell out of me why they’d even want submarine bases up there…Christ, there’s nowhere within five hundred miles of the shipyards where you could even dive without hitting the bottom…beats the hell out of me…no one even knows whether he’ll run down the eastern shore or the western shore…least of all me.”

The subject was China’s new Xia-class submarine, the Type 094, 6,500-ton, superimproved version of old Number 406, the Great White Elephant of the Chinese fleet, so named because she was essentially slow and tired (20 knots flat-out, running downhill); carried largely useless missiles that mostly failed to work; was as noisy as a freight train; and spent much of her life in dry dock. The 406 made the Americans and the Brits laugh at the mere thought of her, the joke being that she was
so
noisy it wasn’t worth her while going underwater anyway.

But that was before Mr. Lee and his cohorts stole all the new technology, from California and New Mexico, before President Clinton held out the red carpet for China to learn anything she damn pleased, to the obvious fury of the Joint Chiefs, not to mention a whole generation of U.S. Navy admirals.

Now, according to the Chinese, the new
Xia
was designed to be fast and silent, her ICBMs would work, and they would have a significantly longer range than the old ones. She also carried the very latest sonar.
Would the U.S. really trade Taiwan for Los Angeles
?

More important, so far as Judd was concerned, the new
Xia
was ready to begin her trials. The American satellites had been watching her for months, nearing completion up in the remote Huludao Yards, way up the Yellow Sea on the desolate eastern shore of Liaodong Bay. The
Xia
was the reason
Seawolf
had made the journey to Pearl Harbor in the first place. And last Saturday afternoon through its probing lens, the satellite had spotted the telltale infrared “paint,” the sign of heat inside the submarine. The Chinese had begun to take
Xia
’s reactor critical, which explained the Americans’ hurry, leaving in the middle of the night.

So far only Captain Crocker was privy to all of the information, and every 12 hours he was ordering
Seawolf
to periscope depth, to suck a fast message off the satellite, telling him whether the
Xia
was still testing her systems moored alongside in Huludao or whether she was at last heading south, into deep waters.

Right now, with Judd Crocker and his team 1,300 miles out from Pearl, the
Xia
was still at her jetty, and Judd fervently hoped she would stay there until he had covered 3,000 more miles to reach the eastern waters of the Yellow Sea, where he hoped to pick her up as she steamed south, probably on the surface. The rest was going to be truly hazardous.

The CO planned to brief his senior officers as to the precise nature of the mission. But first he was trying to familiarize himself with the vast but somewhat shallow waters of China’s submarine production area. The only available charts were Japanese, and their underwater surveys were, Judd thought, pretty unreliable. But the northern waters of the Yellow Sea have been for centuries almost bereft of foreign shipping, except by invitation of mainland China.

Because it is essentially a cul-de-sac, there is literally no reason to go there. Running north from Shanghai, the Yellow Sea quickly becomes 300 miles wide, but after less than 200 miles it becomes bounded by South Korea
to the east. Three hundred northerly miles later it runs into a choke point, only 60 miles wide, at the entrance to a massive bay stretching almost 300 miles northeast-southwest. There is no escape from the bay except back through the choke point.

Way up to the north of that bay, on the borders of the old province of Manchuria, lies the great shipyard of Huludao, on the north side of a jutting peninsula, bounded by a gigantic sea wall. It is here that China builds her attack submarines. All five of the 4,500-ton Han-class (Type 091) guided-missile boats were constructed in Huludao. It was here that the original
Xia
itself was built.

But Liaodong Bay is not much deeper than 100 feet anywhere, bounded as it is by great salt flats, so when an SSN leaves here it must not only run to the choke point on the surface, it must proceed south on the surface for another 400 miles before reaching
any
deep water whatsoever. The northern Yellow Sea is a strange place to build underwater warships. The weather in winter is shocking, the border of the snowswept plains of Inner Mongolia being only 100 miles away. Huludao possesses only one advantage, that of privacy, indeed, secrecy.

Curiously, another of the major Chinese shipyards is also located up in those northern waters—the one at Dalian (Dawan), on the northern peninsula of the choke point, where they build most of the great workhorses of the Chinese Navy, the Luda-class destroyers.

Judd stared at the chart, trying to put himself in the Chinese captain’s mind:
What would I do if I were in a brand-new ICBM submarine, and was almost certainly being watched by an American nuclear boat somewhere
?

Well, the Yellow Sea’s deeper to the east along the Korean shore, so I’d come to the choke point and keep running southwest for maybe four hundred miles. I’d stay on the surface until I was down here…where am I? Thirty-four degrees north…then I’d run north of the island of Cheng Do…then I’d make a beeline for the
deep water…over by these islands west of Nagasaki…then I’d dive, real quick as a matter of fact…that’s what he’ll do, I think. That’s where I’ll be waiting for him
.

Judd Crocker called a conference of his key personnel in the control room: Lt. Commander Clark; Lt. Commander Rothstein; the navigator, Lt. Shawn Pearson; the sonar officer, Lt. Kyle Frank; the marine engineering officer, Lt. Commander Rich Thompson; the chief of the boat, Master PO Brad Stockton; and the officer of the deck, Lt. Andy Warren.

“Gentlemen,” said the CO as he closed the door, “I have asked you to come in for a briefing on the nature of our mission. In short, we are going to China, to the eastern waters of the Yellow Sea, where we are trying to pick up their brand-new ICBM submarine, the new
Xia
, track it south, and then ascertain its precise measurements from keel to upper casing.”

“How exactly do we do that, sir?” asked Rothstein. “They probably won’t invite us over with a tape measure.”

“Cy, we have to get under its keel, directly under, and then use an upward sonar to get a complete picture of the underwater shape and depth of the submarine, from surface to keel. Then we range her from surface to casing and that way we have a dead accurate measurement of her precise height.”

“Yes, I see. But what exactly do you mean directly under its keel—you mean a couple of hundred feet below?”

“Cy, I actually mean a hell of a lot closer than that.”

“Can you tell us why we’re doing this, sir?”

“Yes, Brad, I guess so. Inside that submarine will be the very latest intercontinental ballistic missiles, the one they’ll throw at L.A. should they ever decide on such a course of action. For obvious reasons, we
must
know the precise range of that missile, how far it will go and whether they really could hit our West Coast from the far
side of the Pacific Ocean. Basic intelligence, really. We’re on a top-classified spying mission, and
we must not get caught
.”

“Presumably, sir, we’re discussing the technology they stole from the USA in the final years of the nineties?”

“And a bit before that, Cy. Anyway, you all know the theory. We can’t measure the missile, but if we measure the submarine that carries it, we’ll know its height. Which I’m guessing will be around forty-five to fifty feet. There’s probably around nine feet of engine in there, and maybe four feet of warhead. The rest’s fuel, and our guys can ascertain within about a hundred yards how far that baby will fly.”

“How about the diameter, sir?”

“They have that. Picked up the hatch measurements from the satellite photographs.”

“Sir, I’ve known you for a lot of years,” said Brad Stockton. “And I can tell you’re holding back the bad news…”

They all laughed, and the CO continued, “There’s so much of that I’m not sure where to start!

“First of all we have to find the submarine, but we’ll have plenty of assistance from the overheads so long as she’s on the surface. Second, they’ll guess the Americans are watching, so they’ll be pretty vigilant watching for us. Third, Fort Meade is afraid they have stolen our most up-to-date ASW system, which will allow them to spot us underwater from space, from their own satellite. Which would make us pretty easy prey if the water’s not deep and they send ship after ship to look for us.”

“Jesus Christ. Do we know if they have this stuff operational?”

“No. We only know that they have it. We’re not sure whether they know how to use it. Anyway, if we stay in deep water, we’re fairly safe. They have nothing that will catch us, nothing remotely fast enough.”

“And sir, if we had to, could we blow ’em out of the water?”

“Andy, that would be frowned upon. If they hit us, they’d probably get away with it—a marauding American nuclear boat creeping through Chinese waters, et cetera. But if we hit them, I’m afraid it would be regarded as an act of war, since we really have no reason to be there, four thousand miles from our home base.”

“You mean you’d just let them destroy us?”

“No, Andy, if it came down to a straight us or them, well, there could be only one answer to that.”

“Not us. Right, sir?”

“Not us. That’s correct, Andy. But officially, we’re not allowed to do that. Our orders are to stay undetected.”

“But that, as we all know, may be easier said than done,” said Cy Rothstein quietly.

“Correct. But we have to try. And we have to get our mindset straight. We are in a devastatingly powerful attack submarine. We could probably take out half the Chinese fleet if it came right down to it. But that’s not our job. We will be thanked profoundly at home only if we come back quietly with information, photographic evidence of what the hell the goddamned Chinese are up to…and how much of our stuff they have stolen and utilized.”

“Is that our only mission, sir?”

“Not quite. The Chinese have recently commissioned their third and newest Luhai-class destroyer, a big six-thousand-ton gas-turbine ship with an endurance of fourteen thousand miles, and guided missiles they can project to seventy miles. The Pentagon thinks the damn thing may have a ballistic trajectory ASW weapon. It’s called a CY-1. They want us to locate the destroyer and take a look. But we’ll need to be careful. CNO thinks it might be fitted with China’s first decent towed-array, developed from the stuff they stole from us.”

“Guess we better be careful,” said Lt. Pearson. “Especially if they got the ole CY-1 into action.”

230700JUN06
.
North of the Ryukyu Islands
.
29.10N 129.30E
.
Speed 30. Depth 300. Course 305
.

Seawolf
ran swiftly underwater into the approaches to the East China Sea on Friday morning, five days after leaving Pearl. The journey through the great Pacific wilderness had been uneventful. They never even heard another ship. Nine times during the journey
Seawolf
’s periscope came jutting out of the water, but the one-second signal from the satellite was always the same: The new
Xia
was still
moored securely alongside in Huludao, her reactor still running.