Asian Front

trawlers.

The three investigating destroyers were three miles apart, seventy-one miles out, southwest of Long Beach on Vancouver Island on the main egress, or navy exit, “track” for U.S. and Canadian warships coming out of the Pacific Northwest. Suddenly there was a feral roar, enormous mushrooms of foaming water, both Knox-class destroyers ripped apart, sinking within minutes. The only reason some survivors, thirty-seven in all were plucked up from the oil- and debris-scummed water was that the Canadian destroyer was slower and running three miles astern of the Americans when the pressure-activated mines blew, gashing the destroyers open, the modern ships’ thin armor plate a concession in the constant tug-of-war between more equipment and speed. Five hundred and seventy men and twenty-six women aboard the U.S. ships perished.

Tragic as it was, the loss of the destroyers to the U.S. Navy was hardly something in itself to undo the strategy of the chief naval officer in Washington. But the damage was far worse than at first supposed, for the entire egress channels for the northwest were now an unknown factor, meaning that each cargo vessel, submarine, or U.S. warship setting out to sea off the Pacific Northwest had to make a one-thousand-mile southern “detour” loop to avoid the suspect area, thus effectively bottling up and/or delaying large sections of COMPAC’s West Coast fleet.

The sinkings became a crisis because of the cluster of questions pressing the CNO. Why didn’t the U.S. Navy know about the mines? How could a submarine, recalling the Southern Star’s sighting, mine such a huge area, if it was huge and not merely local? Just as alarming, how could an enemy submarine get so close in undetected? If enemy submarines could do this with impunity, “within a stone’s throw of our coastline,” the New York Times had asked, what were the implications for the desperately needed resupply of Freeman’s Second Army?

The CNO’s spokesperson gave a terse “No comment at this time” to the scrum of reporters dogging her and the CNO as the admiral prepared to enplane the helicopter in Washington to report directly to the president at Mount Weather.

As he was whisked across the line into Virginia, CNO Admiral Horton was now giving much more credence to the Southern Star’s initial report, and ordered COMPAC–Commander Pacific — to have his chief of naval intelligence send someone immediately out to the Southern Star to interview her captain and crew before she limped back to dock and before airborne “experts” were rushed out by the TV networks and La Roche’s tabloids.

This proved impossible. There was no difficulty locating the Southern Star, despite the failure of the navy and the factory ships’ four trawlers to make radio contact in surges of static afflicting the northwestern states. The problem was that the ship wasn’t where she was supposed to be, the southern-flowing Californian current taking the disabled vessel to a point sixty miles off the Olympic Peninsula, the swells lethargically moving the big ship to and fro like a wallowing whale who had lost all sense of direction.

When Lieutenant Eleanor Brady, a vivacious redhead who COMPAC’s intelligence officer craftily gauged would elicit much more response than her male counterparts, was lowered by harness onto the Southern Star’s aft helicopter deck, there was no one to greet her. Southern Star was far from a ghost ship, however; the bodies of the two hundred men who had crewed her were painfully visible — strewn all over the ship in the galley, walkways, others having been shot down in midmeal, others murdered in their bunks, the officers on watch and the lookouts found sprawled amid the debris of shattered glass on the bridge, the ship’s telegraph still set for “Full Ahead,” though the engines, while still warm, were dead. The commandos, who, Eleanor Brady supposed, had obviously taken over the ship, had moved with grotesque swiftness and thoroughness. In the cavernous engine room, over twenty men, many more than usually would be on shift, had sought frantic refuge and now lay dead.

To say Lieutenant Brady’s discovery shocked her would be an understatement. When other naval intelligence officers arrived aboard the ship from Bangor, they found her ashen-faced. The ammunition used was quickly ascertained to be depleted-uranium-tipped 7.62mm of the kind used by Spets.

At first the theory was that Spets aboard some other merchantman had somehow taken over one of the four trawlers and, once aboard the Southern Star, had been the ones to radio in the sighting of a submarine — in order to lure the Americans into the mine field, thus inciting a massive panic attack amid the navy brass and precipitating an equally massive lack of confidence in the navy throughout the country. Pressure mines, the CNO informed the president, would not have shown up on the sub-chasing Orion’s magnetic anomaly detector, as the mines were often manufactured of nonmagnetic plastic composite.

The supposition that the Spets had sent out the message to lure the Allied ships made sense, but then questions were asked about where they had come from in the first place. Satellite pictures showed no other surface vessel within a hundred miles of the Southern Star. Had there been a sub as the Southern Star first reported? A sub carrying Spets commandos?

All the theories fell apart, however, when the four trawlers were found between a 110- and 130-mile radius from the Southern Star’s last position. Furthermore, none of the four trawlers had seen any other vessels — the other common agreement among the four skippers being that they had been unable to contact Southern Star after midnight.

With the certainty of ice turning blood cold, the truth began to sink in, and the director of naval intelligence, along with the CNO, knew he would have to inform the president without delay.

The DNI, his gold rings catching the velvety firelight in the deceptively calm atmosphere of the president’s Mount Weather lounge, gave the president the bad news that contrary to first suspicions, the Spets had certainly not come from a submarine. The undersea sound-detection network was working fine — both U.S. and Canadian ships out of Bangor and Esquimalt respectively having run PROSIGs — prop signature recognition tests — in the hours following the Southern Star incident. And to show that everything had been working properly, it was pointed out that the shore SOSUS stations had plotted the Canadian and U.S. warships’ exact positions and given detailed computer visual recognition of the ships and their armaments within twenty seconds of first noise pickup.

A sub would likewise have been picked up by SOSUS with the same ease. Even if a sub had been hiding near a hot spot, using the sound of thermal vents to mask it, once the sub made any move to attack or release mines, SOSUS would have picked it up.

“If there were no subs in the area,” the president asked, “then where the hell did the Spets come from?”

“Mr. President,” the DNI replied, “they were already there.” He paused. “Aboard the Southern Star. Sleepers. Southern Star laid the mines. It’s difficult for the layman,” the DNI began, stopped short by a warning glance from the CNO.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the DNI corrected himself. “I mean for nonnavy personnel to realize, but a ship that size, fifteen thousand tons, while not a big vessel in navy terms, is plenty big enough to hide a couple of automobiles without anyone noticing — if the parts are brought aboard piece by piece. Pressure mines would be a cinch. ChiCom agents among the crew could have been stashing them aboard for months, even years, waiting to be dumped in the event of war. So far,” the DNI continued, “we’ve listed thirty crewmen not accounted for. All Chinese names. Out of San Francisco. But in all honesty we’d have to search the vessel for days to be absolutely certain. There are so many nooks and crannies a body might have been dumped in.”

“They would have killed the crew — before dumping the mines,” Mayne proffered.

“That’s what it looks like, Mr. President. What puzzled us for a while is how they got away, but we think we have the answer for that one now. The factory ship’s helicopter is gone, so it’s pretty clear they escaped to shore, flying low, taking advantage of wave clutter to avoid our radar.”

“But could thirty men — I mean against two hundred?”

“Mr. President, it would have taken only ten commandos from the Guo An Bu — Chinese Intelligence — or anywhere else against unarmed men. They used grenades as well.”

For Mayne this was the last straw. The attack on Hillsboro’s cesium clock, the sabotage against the huge electric grid, the water poisoning in New York and other cities — and now his entire West Coast sealift — shipping having to be rerouted, losing days, possibly weeks, in reaching Freeman. He and his cabinet decided he had no alternative but to extend and widen the Emergency Powers Act: curfews and empowering the police to arrest on there suspicion, and suspension of Mirandizing suspects. He turned to Trainor, whose gaze during the crisis seemed morbidly attracted to the flickering of the fireplace.