Kilo Class

of the altar, another boy and I placed our hands upon our breasts, and prayed: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…I have sinned, I have sinned, I have greatly sinned.”

“You mean Boomer’s admitting he overstepped the mark?”

“He sure is. And that’s the mark of a fine officer. A man big enough for his rank. And not threatened by the admission of a mistake.”

“NOT THREATENED? I’LL FUCKING THREATEN HIM. THAT BOY’S NOTHING SHORT OF A DUMBASS SONOFABITCH. WHAT IF HE’D HIT THE FUCKING TYPHOON?…Good morning, Mr. President, we just had a bit of bad luck in the Pacific. One of our best submarine commanders blew up and sank a big Russian nuclear submarine in Russian waters by mistake. The nuclear cloud from its twenty inter-continental ballistic missiles is in the process of wiping out most of the Orient…ain’t that a gas?”

Joe Mulligan chuckled at the brutal irony of Arnold Morgan’s words. “Steady, Arnie. In an operation like this, there’s a ton of risk, every step of the way. Why don’t we just think ourselves lucky? Boomer has removed one of the goddamned Kilos on a thirty-three percent chance of starting World War III. And he seems to have gotten away with it. That makes him a very lucky commander. But you need luck in the game we’ve asked him to play.”

“Christ, I know that. But our signals to Columbia never stopped stressing the fact that he MUST HAVE POSIDENT. Therefore his actions were in direct contravention of his orders. He not only did not have POSIDENT, he had no fucking IDENT whatsoever…POS…NEAR-POS, OR FUCK-ALL POS.”

Admiral Mulligan blew coffee down his nose, trying to stop laughing at the infuriated NSA. “Come on, Arnie, if we send off a blast to Columbia, which others may see, humiliating their commanding officer, we will do nothing except hurt the morale of his ship.

“Just remember what Commander Dunning has done. He’s actually sunk three of those Kilos. He’s made a trans-polar run under the North Pole, and he’s still operational. Undetected.”

“Don’t gimme his fucking life story, for Christ’s sake, Joe. I’m not talking about what he’s done. Any good nuclear submarine officer could have done the same. Right here, I’m talking about what he could have done. Like started a goddamned world war. Nothing serious. Because he is, apparently, unable to obey a simple order. Like GET POSIDENT. Nothing earth shattering. Just routine sense. He’s a dumbass sonofabitch.”

“What would you have said if his signal had claimed he did have POSIDENT on the Kilos?”

Admiral Morgan grappled for words, but for once in his life found none.

“Commander Dunning could have said that. And we would have been none the wiser. And if, as you are now implying, we give him a severe reprimand, he might also remind us that we kept telling him the Typhoon was gone. Oh, I know we can look at the small print and say we did not quite say that. But we did, and we advised him so several times. Let’s face it… none of us knew the Typhoon was still there. Never even suspected it. In my view the Commander behaved in an exemplary way, and to tell the truth, I’d probably have done the same.”

“So would I, fuck it,” replied the NSA. “But I’m still not prepared to listen to reason.”

Joe Mulligan laughed. “Come on, old buddy. Fight the battle you’re in. We got clean away with it. Beautiful, right? What’ll we do now. Given that K-10 is still on the fucking loose.”

“Okay. I agree. You need not haul Boomer over the coals. But I do insist you make my thoughts clear to him. And I don’t want him promoted. You can’t have officers like that becoming Captains. He’s a fucking maniac.”

Admiral Mulligan grinned and said, “Yes, of course, Admiral. As much of a maniac as we were, in our youth. I wish to Christ we had a few more like him. But…down to business. Right here, we can’t do much. It’s no good hanging around and shadowing all the way to Shanghai. The Typhoon will now almost certainly stay as well.”

“Right. That bastard Rankov has been too clever for his own good. His stupid ships made too much noise. Boomer couldn’t get a classification, but the Typhoon turned out to be no deterrent, because they failed to make it obvious that the sonofabitch was there. But I’ll tell you one thing…it does show how determined they are to get the Kilos through to Shanghai.”

“As far as I’m concerned, the Kilo’s split,” replied Joe Mulligan. “That’s what I would have done. Which means that right now we haven’t got a chance of picking him up because the trail’s gone cold. He’s making a run for home. We’re not going to get him…and I think we may as well send Columbia to Pearl for maintenance. It’s only three thousand miles from where he is now. It’ll take him six days, and he can spend some time getting his ship into top shape. CINCPAC could use him to patrol with the new CVBG in the Arabian Sea in mid-October. But right now, I guess he and his crew could use a little R and R.”

“Okay, Joe. Let’s do that. We’ll just have to keep a weather eye out for K-10, as and when we can. Still, of the seven we went after, we got six, right? Not bad.”

The SUBLANT signal to Commander Dunning in Columbia was transmitted within the hour. Columbia sucked it off the satellite at 0900, local, the next day, September 11. It read: “Personal for Commander Dunning. Received your signal. Well done. Proceed to Pearl. Lack of POSIDENT: NSA assessment — D-A SOB…Mulligan.”

Three hours later, running deep now, due south down the Northern Pacific, Boomer read the signal ruefully. He had expected worse. They might even have relieved him of command. He had been instructed to get POSIDENT. But he was not the first front-line commanding officer to reflect upon how damned easy it is to sit in a Washington armchair, and how very much different things appear when you’re actually out there, trying to attack, trying to keep your ship safe, trying to do the business of your higher command.

How typical of the Navy, he thought, to accept cheerfully the demise of the Kilo, and to intimate guarded approval of the attack. And yet to leave a commanding officer in no doubt that he will be held to account, should they consider he exceeded his orders.

“That’s known, Admiral Mulligan, as having your cookies, and eating them,” he murmured. He wondered, quite seriously, whether he would ever gain the promotion to Captain that was so important to him. How, with an apparent enemy like the mighty Admiral Morgan watching his every move? He also wondered, reflectively, how long it actually was since anyone had been brave enough to call him a dumb-ass sonofabitch, even in code, even from the other side of the world.

14

The staff car drew up to the locked corner gate of the Garden of Yu the Mandarin, and the big man in the rear seat stepped out. Two officials in Mao Zedong overalls hurriedly unlocked the gate, and the powerful, uniformed military officer marched into the nearly deserted showpiece of Shanghai’s waterfront. It was 11 AM and the gardens would not open to the public until 2 PM but in China warlords have traditionally had an entirely different set of rules.

The steel-tipped black shoes of the lone figure clicked on the concrete path as he passed the Hall for Gathering Grace, in a light September drizzle, and continued through the hedgerows to the long lake, striding toward the Tower of Ten Thousand Flowers. But he slowed, as he walked to the towering ornamental ginkgo tree that dominates this end of the gardens. And there he sheltered beneath the large fanlike leaves of the last species of a tree that grew in Northern China two hundred million years ago.

He stood in solitary fury under the branches, breathing deeply, as if trying to control himself. He crashed his clenched right fist into the open palm of his left hand, and he hissed under his breath, “If I could, I would blow the Pentagon to pieces.” There were times when Admiral Zhang Yushu was Asia’s answer to Admiral Arnold Morgan. Right now he did not trust himself to fraternize with other human beings. Especially since he expected, imminently, a call from Admiral Vitaly Rankov, whom he now considered to be the biggest fool in all Russia.

The satellite message had explained there had been some sort of an accident off the southern end of the Kuril Island of Paramushir, and that one of the two Kilos had disappeared. At the time it had been running at a depth of two hundred feet in a protected two-mile square between the three Russian destroyers and the ASW frigate Nepristupny. It had also been accompanied by the twenty-one-thousand-ton Typhoon Class submarine, and had been surrounded by a sound barrier, which would make its detection impossible.

The Russians were mystified. Not one of the sonar rooms had detected the approach of a torpedo. And