Warshot (The Hunter Killer Series Book 6) by Don Keith (dark books to read TXT) 📕

earthquakes and potential tsunamis—was doing its optional job. NOPF’s high-speed computers churned away on the mass of acoustic data, separating the extraneous noise from the contacts of interest, and then applying advanced algorithms to identify the submarines and figure out what they were up to.

Fifteen minutes after the first alert warning, a message flashed on Rear Admiral Jon Ward’s classified computer. An hour later the first of a rotation of P-8 ASW aircraft was wheels up from Anderson Air Force Base on the island of Guam in the Marianas.

The USNS Impeccable, with her twin TL-29 towed arrays streaming over a mile behind the ship, was conducting a routine patrol in the East China Sea, just north of Okinawa. The ship spun around and headed south, but it would take a while before it could be of help. At its ponderous speed of four knots, it would be five days before the ship would be in a position to do any good in this search.

Ψ

The USS Boise cruised at periscope depth three miles off the coast of Prattle Island, on the western edge of the Paracel Archipelago, the cluster of reefs and islets at the northern end of the South China Sea. Being almost equidistant between Vietnam and China, the islands were claimed by both countries, but China currently possessed them. And they had wasted no time getting several of them heavily fortified.

That included Prattle Island. Though little more than a pile of sand and coral, Prattle now boasted a deep-water protected harbor and an airfield capable of handling heavy bombers. This was all protected with batteries of surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, besides the menacing natural reefs that encircled almost all the island.

The Boise had spent the better part of a week cruising back and forth, steaming as close as they could safely and covertly, gathering all the electronic and communications signals that they could vacuum out of the ether. Being close but hidden allowed the submarine to gather intelligence when the other side had no suspicions that they were being monitored. And the submarine could stay on station for a very long time.

The downside was that it was excruciatingly boring work. As the navigator so eloquently described it, “So far all we’ve done is watch seagulls fornicate.”

“Conn, Radio, request captain come to radio.”

The sudden voice of the 21MC announcement disturbed the quiet in the control room. Commander Chet Allison ducked out the back door of the compartment, dodged around the ring-laser gyro binnacles, and stepped into the radio room.

The radioman of the watch was already extending to him a paper printout as he stepped inside the small room. The skipper scanned the document, then promptly spun on his heel and headed to the control room.

After a quick glance at the electronic navigation chart display, he ordered, “Officer of the Deck, come to course three-two-zero. Make your depth one-five-zero feet. Come to ahead standard. When we get to deep water, come to six hundred feet and a full bell.”

Turning to the chief of the watch, the skipper continued, “Send the messenger to find the XO and the navigator. Looks like a couple of CHICOM nukes are out of the barn. We are being vectored to find them.”

8

The little wolf pack of Chinese PLAN submarines —or lang qun, as Yon Hun Glo had dubbed them—steered a precise course of one-three-zero for exactly two hundred kilometers. Yon Hun Glo’s planners at naval headquarters back in Beijing had calculated that a two-hundred-kilometer diversion was the distance necessary to distract the Americans in that direction. At a signal from the Wushiwu, the lang qun swung around to a course of zero-seven-zero. That headed them toward the Luzon Strait, eleven hundred kilometers off their bows.

The admiral calculated that it would take the better part of six days steaming at their current ten-kilometer-per-hour speed. The slow pace was frustrating, especially to a man accustomed to going where he needed to be at all good speed. But the admiral knew that if they tried to go any faster, they would have to use their batteries to supplement their air-independent propulsion systems. The AIP simply did not have the capacity to push the boats at any more than a patrol speed. And, of course, using their batteries meant that the boats would have to snorkel frequently. Every time they ran their diesels, they were just inviting the Americans to come find them. Stealth was far more important than speed, typically, and especially on this particular mission. It was essential that they arrive in Tonga before the Americans had any idea that the Chinese Navy—and more importantly, four of their submarines—was swimming about anywhere in the South Pacific. Or noticed they were taking extraordinary steps to remain undetected.

Admiral Yon Hun Glo glanced up from the chart he was studying to see Captain Liu and Political Officer Yu walk into the control room, almost as if in lock-step marching formation. The two men seemed to always be together, shadows of each other. So far, he had never seen one without the other. He could only be thankful that he had left command of a submarine before a political officer had been assigned to his boat, there at his elbow to always consider the Communist Party aspect of any action the boat’s captain might desire to undertake. Nowadays, almost every ship in the PLAN had such a political officer.

Just then, he felt the boat angle upward and watched as the Wushiwu proceeded up to periscope depth. He frowned, then glanced over questioningly to where Captain Liu stood.

The officer answered the admiral’s unasked question. “It is time to copy communications. The operations order specifies copying communications every eight hours.”

The admiral glanced at his watch. Indeed, it had been precisely eight hours since they dove beneath the surface after departing Yulin. He sensed that this pair of officers were apparatchiks, blindly devoted to the Communist Party and totally incapable of independent thought. He was not surprised but reminded himself that he