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

south, making twelve knots. We have an eleven-hertz line on the TB-29. That equates to a Chinese Yuan-class submarine. Ambiguous bearings are three-one-zero, designate Sierra Four-Five, and zero-five-zero, designate Sierra Four-Six.”

The TB-29A was a mile-long line of highly sensitive hydrophones that were being towed along behind the George Mason. Since it was a single long line of phones, any sonar contact showed as being somewhere in a three-dimensional conical “bearing” around the array. The conical “bearing” was formed by the time delays in the beamformer. What this effectively meant was that any new sonar contact arrived as two contacts—now designated as Sierra Forty-Five and Sierra Forty-Six—on either side of the array and at equal, ambiguous angles. The only way to determine which of the two was the real one was to maneuver the sub to a new course and regain it. The side where the contact reappeared from the same direction was the true bearing line.

Edwards nodded, chewing his lower lip. He could see everything Wilson was telling him on the passive narrow-band display. “Okay, what are you planning to do?” he asked.

“Skipper, I’m thinking that if I come left to a course of something like one-two-zero, I can resolve ambiguity and still stay close to the navigator’s track. If we’re wrong, if it’s not a Chinese boat, we could still get to the surfacing point, maybe an hour late.”

Edwards shook his head. He stepped back to the ECDIS table. “First off, let’s look at priorities. Finding and tracking a Yuan has a higher priority than a liberty call. The boss would not be happy if we were drinking San Miguel in Olongapo while the Chinese had a sub on the loose out in the South China Sea.”

Lieutenant Wilson nodded as Edwards went on. “Now, look at the geography of this. If our new best friend was on bearing zero-five-zero, he is either really close to us or he is snuggled up to the Philippine coast and we went blowing right past him last night.” He pointed at the chart display. “But, if he is really out at three-one-zero, he would probably be in the deep water somewhere to the west of Scarborough Shoal. Higher probability is that he is out that way. Let’s come around to two-seven-zero to resolve ambiguity.”

Jackson Biddle, his hair still wet from the shower, joined the group huddled around the ECDIS.

“So, we caught a fish, did we?” the XO asked as he looked carefully at the sonar displays. After flipping through several screens, he scratched his chin. “You know something, Skipper? The signature looks an awful lot like that Yuan we played with in the Arabian Sea a couple of years ago. What was that boat’s name? The Wushiwu, wasn’t it? One trigger-happy bastard.”

Edwards nodded. “Sure looks like it, XO. Not one either of us is likely to forget. How about you draft a message to Subgroup Seven that we have contact while I supervise getting up to periscope depth. Better tell the boss that we have a friend out here. And we can grab the latest intel while we’re up. Maybe there’ll be a clue about this guy there.”

Edwards turned to Bill Wilson and ordered, “Mr. Wilson, clear baffles to the right and come to periscope depth for comms. Come up on course two-seven-zero.”

“Pilot, right full rudder, steady course two-seven-zero,” Lt. Wilson ordered. “Make your depth one-five-zero feet.”

The big boat swung around smoothly and came shallow, all the while searching for any close sonar contacts that could be a hazard.

Ten minutes later, the George Mason was back down at depth. Subgroup Seven, operating out of a nondescript building in Yokosuka, Japan, was now aware that the George Mason was playing footsie with a suspected Chinese submarine and probably would not make her port visit to Subic. The intel crowd would certainly be scurrying around, trying to find where the Chinese boat had come from and, more importantly, deduce where he was going. The operations team would be working out the complicated dance to make sure that the George Mason had enough water assigned to her so that she could maneuver without worrying about running into any friendly submarines. Literally.

In the crowded waters of the South China Sea, especially given how many of the littoral nations now operated diesel electric submarines lately, this had become a very real and complicated problem.

Underwater blind man’s bluff with a ten-thousand-ton submarine would not be a fun game to play.

Ψ

Joe Glass had spent most of his long flight reading through a great stack of thick, boring reports that his chief of staff had dumped into the empty seat between them. Glass was beginning to understand that the old expression was absolutely true. The Navy really did sail on a sea of paperwork. It never seemed to end. At least the five-hour Omni International charter flight from Honolulu to American Samoa had provided a great opportunity to catch up.

The cabin steward’s warning that they were descending into Pago Pago International Airport caught Commodore Glass in mid-red-pencil mode, editing new instructions for conducting a monitor watch. Hardly compelling reading. He shifted his interest to look out the window.

Pago Pago Harbor, encircled by small villages, came into view. Glass spotted the Lewis B. Puller anchored out in the middle of the harbor. The Military Sealift Command expeditionary mobile base ship—better known as the Chesty Puller after her famous Marine namesake—would be his new home for the near-term. He could also make out the black form of one of his submarines nestled up alongside the much larger ship. That would be the Cheyenne, newly arrived in port for a brief mid-deployment maintenance period.

Glass glanced around the cabin. The planeload of submarine sailors, shipyard workers, and technical experts would soon be busy, helping transform the sleepy harbor at Pago Pago into a bustling submarine maintenance and repair facility. Marrying up the expertise that his team represented with the pre-positioned equipment on the Chesty Puller would allow them to fix just about anything