The Shark Mutiny Page 25

Big John steamed on, now making just 12 knots since Admiral Daylan Holt had cleared the flight wings to begin operations at 1500. And the deck once more came alive to the howl of the jets and the surge of the deck crews, as the fighter-bombers screamed into the bright skies above the deep Pacific Ocean.

  The course of the carrier now became erratic, certainly on the distant Chinese chart in Zhangjiang, because the JFK had to keep changing course to east-southeast, into the wind, for the landings and takeoffs. But her basic northern track up to the ops area remained steady.

  She crossed Admiral Zhang’s outer line of approach at 1900. And the busy flying evening wore on in the great waterborne fortress of Big John. The Admiral’s ops room was receiving no reports of foreign warships anywhere in the area. Nothing from either of the two nuclear submarines riding shotgun out there off his port and starboard bows. Not a thing from the S-3B Viking ASW aircraft ranging out in front, dropping sonobuoys into the water, seeking any foreign submarine that might be lurking in these deep waters.

  Behind this fast, powerful, deep-field ASW screen the rest of CV-67’s Battle Group, two destroyers and five frigates, moved safely through seas that had been “swept” by possibly the world’s sharpest ears.

  At the current low speed, with a lot of course adjustments, Big John and her men were about eight hours short of their op area. Though Lt. Commander Guangjin did not need them to be in it, just heading up that way. And at 2200 he activated, via the satellites, the Chinese decoy station B-5.

  Floating in the water, identifiable only by its ultrathin aerial wire, B-5 was just about invisible at 50 feet. It made one short, sharp transmission from approximately 100 miles northwest of the carrier, and three of the sonobuoys dropped by the Viking picked it up instantly at range 15 miles and under.

  Lieutenant (jg) Brain Wright had the signals on the aircraft screen instantly, and he assessed a rough position of a patrolling submarine at 21.20N 122.21E. The engine lines fed into the Viking’s onboard computer and moments later Brain Wright was contemplating the presence of a possible Russian-built Kilo-Class diesel-electric, in the water 100 miles from Big John. He guessed the submarine had just made a “dynamic start” of her engines, probably to charge her batteries. Everyone connected, in any way, with a big carrier is wary of a diesel-electric underwater boat because of its stealth at lows speed.

  And Lt. Wright punched in his signal to the Admiral’s ops room “…Dynamic start possible kilo Class position 21.20N 122.21E. Transient contact…attempting to localize.”

  The Viking, heading north, banked back hard to the east in search of the “intruder,” sweeping the sea with radar, looking for submarine that did not exist. It was just a brilliantly invented transmitter with a slim aerial wire jutting three feet out of the water, almost invisible by day, totally invisible by night. It was being activated at will by Lt. Commander Guangjin Chen 600 miles away in Zhanjiang: activated to transmit the uniquely chilling engine lines of the Kilo-Class Type 636.

  Admiral Daylan Holt received the signal from comms at 2220 and instantly ordered a course change.

  “Come right as soon as you can to Zero-three-Zero…cancel all flying.”

  The JFK quickly retrieved two more fighter aircraft and then slewed slowly around in the water, settling thirty degrees east of north. It took the ship a full 15 minutes to make those maneuvers, and five minutes later, the Viking picked up a new transmission from one of the sonobuoys.

  Again it was transient. To the sonar operator thundering though the dark skies above the Pacific it looked like a dynamic stop. He could see just a little curl at the base of the tiny bright “paint” near the bottom of his screen. It looked no nearer than the first contact, and he recorded it in essentially the same spot, suggesting in his signal to the flag that it was almost certainly the same contact they had located 20 minutes previously.

  And there the minor drama seemed to end. Nothing more was heard from anyone. Flying continued unabated, Big John continued her zigzagging course for the landings and takeoffs and another 45 miles of water slipped beneath her keel.

  But out over that pitch-black water, at 0145 in the morning, another Viking picked up another transient contact off two sonobuoys. And again they judged it to be a Kilo, but no one was certain whether or not it was the same one, because its position was roughly 50 miles northeast of the last one. Which meant it must have been making over 10 knots: unlikely because the American sonar would have picked it up.

  For the second time that night a big U.S. Navy Viking banked around again to the east and again never caught a glimmer of anything. At least, not for a half hour, when a different buoy picked up what appeared to be a dynamic start. Neither of the two U.S. submarines, both deploying towed arrays, picked up anything. And the signal from the Viking to the flag was similar to the others…“Transient contact. Kilo-Class 636. Possibly same as Datum One. Rough position 21.53N 122.45E. Attempting to localize. Prosecuting.”

  Guangjin Chen’s C-4 was proving as elusive as B-5. And now both of these devilish decoys, being instructed from the satellites, remained silent. And the entire U.S. Navy could have set off in pursuit and they would have found precisely nothing.

  Nonetheless Admiral Holt was obliged to move his carrier farther east from his northern course, because a Kilo is simply too dangerous a ship to risk going close to, and anyway, easy to sidestep.

  And once more the ocean world beyond Taiwan’s east coast went more or less silent. Big John steamed on approximately toward her ops area, but her present course would carry her right past the triangle, past the point to the east, unless she could turn in. But that seemed very doubtful at present, since there appeared to be at least one and possibly two Chinese submarines somewhere off her port beam, patrolling where Big John wanted to be. And the U.S. submarines were picking up nothing on the towed arrays.

  Then, at 0545, the patrolling Viking tracker picked up the signal again, and this time it was appreciably closer to the carrier. In fact, it was still C-4 transmitting but the JFK was only 75 miles from the decoy now, instead of 100.

  Admiral Holt did not like it. And he edged east again away from his op area. He simply could not go in there, if there should be one or more Chinese Kilos awaiting him. Particularly since everyone in the Navy now knew the SEALs had just banged out a $10 billion Sino investment down in the Strait of Hormuz.

  The Admiral pressed on North for another 30 miles, and at 0804 on Monday morning, May 21, Guangjin Chen hit the computer buttons to activate C-3. A new field of U.S. sonobuoys picked up the transmission immediately, and the patrolling Viking’s signal to the flag caused major consternation. They assessed that this was an entirely different Kilo, and it was waiting bang in the center of CV-67’s op area.

  Admiral Holt had the distinct feeling he was being pushed around by the Chinese Navy, and he was beginning to sense a feeling of rising frustration. Right now he had only one option, to make a swing right around the northeast end of the triangle and try to move in sometime in the next few days when the Kilos had tired of this game of cat and mouse. Nonetheless he could not take any risks, and he ordered a course change to the northeast, with his submarines moving out to his west, and the Viking pilots scanning the ocean with ever more vigilance.

  For a long time there was nothing, and then just before midday the Viking picked up a new contact, and again it was a Kilo. It could have been the same one they heard at 0804, but it may very well have been a different one. The Chinese only own four Kilos, and privately Admiral Holt thought there were probably two of them out there. However, at 1200 (local), that was not quite the point. What mattered was that the Viking operator put the transmission only 56 miles off Big John’s port beam, and that was not good. Worse yet, it was continued, but not localized, by either of the SSNs.

  In Admiral Holt’s opinion, this was becoming quite serious. There was, it seemed, at least one Chinese Kilo possibly as close as 50 miles from the carrier, and it seemed to be extremely elusive. Which was a shudde
ring thought for a U.S. admiral accustomed to controlling the ocean, on, above and below the surface for 200 miles in any direction wherever he roamed.

  No admiral commanding a carrier battle group wants to go anywhere within 300 miles of a foreign, unfriendly, land-based air force, and he certainly wants no part of a marauding submarine. The Chinese ploy to have two Kilos on permanent patrol in the Taiwan Strait is based on the simple assumption that no U.S. admiral would steer a carrier down the Taiwan Strait if this were so. Neither would he.

  And now, the steel-haired Daylan Holt, a Texan from Mesquite on the western edge of Dallas, was face-to-face with a brand-new kind of hardball international politics out on the northern edge of his own ops area. Of course he could sink the Kilo if he could catch it below the surface…IF he could find it.

  But at that point, no one could find it, or even them, if there were two, despite having flooded the probability areas with radar, ESM and active and passive sonar from his submarines, aircraft and towed-array frigates. And it was beginning to look as though the JFK would have to continue northeast into the deep water at the southern end of the lonely Sakishima Islands, where Japan finally peters out into the Pacific. This is a very remote corner of the ocean, 300 miles southwest of the American base at Okinawa. The Sakishimas stand 120 miles west of Taiwan, 60 miles from the op area of Big John. Admiral Holt had an uneasy feeling he was being herded away from his objective by the demonic, near-silent Chinese submarines.

  And the Chinese not only tracked the Americans all the way, at 1400 they activated E-1, some 80 miles north of the carrier, undetected by the outriding nuclear submarine. The Viking picked it up and signaled the flag. Admiral Holt briefly changed course, and as he did so, Guangjin activated D-2. Just a transient, seven-second transmission, which had the effect of pushing the carrier toward the waters south of the tiny island chain, to Ishigaki, where the water was deep, and which, by a grand design hatched in distant Zhanjiang, lay neatly in two outer squares of Lt. Commander Guangjin’s grid.

  Admiral Holt was forced to turn north again, and he reasoned that the Kilo force, however many, was now to his left and right, but falling astern. If they wanted to get at his carrier, they’d have to transit northwest through the massive ASW barrier he’d set up. The decoy Kilo-buoys were indeed on either side of him, but the wily Zhang had stationed two real Kilos just 30 miles ahead of the CVBG. And he’d done it seven days ago.

  And now they were almost stationary, transmitting nothing, preparing to launch a copybook attack on the U.S. carrier, identical to that of Commander Ben Adnam when he destroyed the Nimitz-Class carrier USS Thomas Jefferson in the Arabian Sea five years previously.

  They had chased and pursued nothing. They had just waited, silently, for the prime moment to fire, when Lt. Commander Guangjin’s ingenious invention had done its work. Unlike Ben Adnam they had not needed to assess the wind and the carrier’s time of approach. The very occasional transmissions from the floating electronic buoys had “herded” Big John into the appointed place like so many sheepdogs.

  The Chinese submarines were in there, in 600 feet of water, the Kilo-Class hulls 366 and 367, jet-black 3,000-ton diesel-electrics built in Russia’s Admiralty Yard at Saint Petersburg. They were each armed with 18 TEST 71/96 wire-guided passive-active torpedoes, homing at 40 knots to 15 kilometers. But the Chinese COs would fire their two torpedoes, with their 205kg nonnuclear warheads, from a lot closer than that.

  But Admiral Zhang was not out to create world havoc and mass destruction. He just sought, quietly, to cripple the great U.S. warship, despite all the difficulties that would involve.

  And at 2100 that Monday evening, his underwater commanders drew a bead on Big John.

  Same time (0800 local, Monday).

  The White House.

  Everything about the goddamned Chinese baffled Arnold Morgan. He had no idea why they would have wanted to infuriate the entire Western world, not to mention much of the Eastern world, by assisting the goddamned towelheads in mining the Strait of Hormuz.

  Maybe just for money. Maybe they really thought they could make a huge financial killing by selling their oil from Khazakhstan at the massive world prices that would follow the blockade of the Gulf of Iran.

  Maybe. But maybe not. It made some sense to the President’s National Security Adviser. But not enough. Well, the USA had slammed back hard, as China must have known they might. And no one had complained to anyone. Certainly the USA knew there was no point remonstrating with the Chinese over the minefield, because they would say nothing. Equally the Chinese had said nothing to anyone about the destruction of the oil refinery.

  Admiral Morgan knew he was not going to receive any answers to anything. Which was why he had summarily requested the presence of the Chinese ambassador to Washington, the urbane Ling Guofeng. Arnold might not be getting any answers, but he was about to deliver one or two truths.

  Kathy O’Brien politely ushered the ambassador into the main office at 0815. The two men knew each other, of course, but it was always a cool relationship. The Admiral had passed one or two withering broadsides across the bow of the Chinese ship of state in the past few years, and Ling Guofeng had frequently been obliged to keep his head well down.

  In another life, they might actually have been friends. Both of them knew more about the world than was good for anyone. And both of them knew implicitly where their loyalties were. Arnold Morgan, a natural aggressor, was constantly issuing warnings, making threats and, occasionally, carrying them out. The veteran Ambassador Ling, in his role as China’s chief appeaser in Washington, was thus obliged to absorb a substantial amount of grief from the Admiral. But the diplomat from Shanghai knew how to roll with the punches.

  “Good morning, Admiral,” he said, bowing. “What a very kind invitation. It’s been too long.”

  Arnold Morgan raised his eyes heavenward…Too long! Never mind the blown-up tankers, never mind the minefield, the world oil crisis, Japan almost going bankrupt because of it. Never mind that the blasted refinery’s still spouting flames one hundred feet into the air…. Will someone ever save me from this Oriental bullshit?…“Too long,” he says. Jesus Christ.

  “Ambassador, the pleasure is, as always, mine,” replied the Admiral. “Please sit down. I have ordered a pot of Lapsang Suchong, your favorite China tea, I believe—at least your favorite in this country.”

  “Now that is very kind of you, and I hope it will smooth our way during our discussions.”

  And Arnold slyly congratulated himself on Kathy’s call to Ling’s secretary on Friday afternoon to establish the subtleties of the ambassador’s tastes. He had no recollection that Kathy had made the call without even asking him.

  Anyway, the tea was delivered and poured by a polite and attentive waiter, and Arnold Morgan stepped up to the plate.

  “Ambassador, there is much that cannot be said at this discussion—much, possibly, that never will be said. I have asked you here because I believe that you and I understand each other.”

  “I think and hope that we do,” replied Ling in his impeccable English accent.

  “Well, let me begin by saying that we are very well aware of China’s complicity in the placing of the minefield in the Strait of Hormuz.”

  “Oh, really?” replied Ling. “I have not been so informed.”

  “And I guess, if I wanted to, I could inform you myself of the origin of the mines, the date they left Moscow, the times of the refueling stops for the Andropov freighter that delivered them, and the date the PLAN assisted the Iranians in laying the fields.”

  Ambassador Ling said nothing, betrayed nothing, not a flicker of understanding—the precise way all great ambassadors are supposed to operate under this kind of pressure in a foreign capital.

  “But there is no need for me to do so, since we both understand the…er…rather heated game we are playing. But I would like to mention the fire that is still raging in the strait at the Chinese refinery. That, ambassador, represents the
collective wrath of the entire industrial world. So I would warn you about the danger of writing it off as an accident and blithely rebuilding it.”

  “Am I hearing an admission that the United States of America actually attacked and destroyed the ten-billion-dollar Chinese refinery in the strait?”

  “No more than I am hearing an admission that China purchased hundreds of sea mines at vast expense from Moscow, and then tried to shut down the principal power supply of every oil-consuming country in the world. Damn nearly all of them, that is.”

  Ambassador Ling said nothing.

  And Admiral Morgan continued: “And so, my good friend, Guofeng, I would like to conclude with this piece of advice for you and your government. In our opinion, and in the opinion of all our allies, you have committed a crime of vast proportions in the Strait of Hormuz. And it is a crime that must not be repeated. It is therefore my rather sad duty to advise you”—and here his voice rose to its familiar growling quality—“to stay the fuck out of the Middle East oil routes.”

  “And if we should insist on our right to trade in any international waters?”

  “You would find no objection from us, because your ships are welcome to visit us at any time. But if you continue to put Chinese warships anywhere near the north reaches of the Arabian Sea, inside the Strait of Hormuz or indeed in the Gulf of Iran, we shall have no hesitation if it comes to sinking them. Your nation has committed a terrible crime, for reasons best known to your masters in Beijing. But the rest of the world will not permit you the leeway to repeat that crime. Ling, old buddy, your Navy is on its way right back to the South China Sea.”

  “I shall indeed report your views to my government. But do I have your permission to inform them that the United States willfully destroyed the Chinese refinery?”

  “No, Ambassador. You do not. You may tell them that the elimination of the refinery was in your opinion an act of retribution against your government for crimes committed by China in the strait. You may also say that the U.S. government was not unsupportive of the action against the Chinese oil. But as to who perpetrated the destruction, that may never be known. But if I had to guess, I’d say you should look to some of those Arabs who are currently unable to sell their oil because it’s all trapped in the gulf.”