U.S.S. Seawolf

Mountains sweeping southward, down to the sea.

“SHE DIVES, SIR!..THE XIA’S GOING DEEP…MAINTAINS HER SPEED AND BEARING…RANGE ONE MILE…”

“Let’s drop a little farther behind now…we can follow her easily at two miles,” said the captain. “Just wanna be on the safe side, and we don’t need to be so close. Make your speed fifteen for six minutes…then return to twenty-five…so long as the Chinaman maintains…watch her, Kyle.”

And now the two submarines moved in tandem. At the 22-degree line of latitude the Xia made a course change to the southwest, running fast down the coast of the mainland province of Guangdong, about 65 miles offshore in water 10,000 feet deep.

In Judd Crocker’s view she was headed for an unknown ops area where she would conduct her sea trials. By 1830 they were 300 miles shy of the Canton Roads, forbidden waters for centuries to all but Chinese shipping. This rule, of course, excluded the British, who arrived regularly, assuming as ever their general ownership of the entire world, and ultimately not giving a bilge rat’s ass whether they were invited or not.

Pearson estimated they would be right off Canton (Guangzhou in modern Chinese) by first light on July 1. Meanwhile, in company with Xia III, they charged through the night on a head of steam generated by Thompson’s sweet-running pressurized water reactor (PWR).

The other major head of steam in Chinese waters that evening was generated by a fuming Admiral Zhang, who glowered across at the lazy, gaff-rigged junks while he made the short ferry journey home to Gulangyu. No wreckage had been found, no one had reported any kind of a hit or oil slick, and his captains had been driven to the conclusion that no American nuclear boat was tracking the new Xia at this time. Each of the surface warships had kept up the barrage around the new Chinese submarine for a total of two hours, and had blown upward of 200 depth charges and the same number of ASW mortars. Result: a big fat nothing.

Zhang did not believe them. At least, he did not believe their conclusion. But he did believe they had tried and missed. Which was a personal blow to him, because in his heart he had truly hoped one of those depth charges would have blown a big hole in the hull of USS Seawolf. The fact that they had not done so merely meant they had not fired one close enough. It did not mean Seawolf was not there. It meant that she was devilishly hard to find, and that she was being driven by a master, with a brilliantly competent crew.

0900. Friday, June 30.

Office of the National Security Adviser to the President.

At one minute past the hour Admiral Morgan let fly, ignoring as ever the state-of-the-art White House telephone system.

“COFFEE!” he bellowed.

At one minute and eight seconds past the hour, his door opened briskly and Kathy O’Brien walked in.

“Good. Nice and quick. The way I like it. Bit more practice and you’ll be just fine.”

The admiral did not look up.

“I am afraid that even I, even at my most devoted, cannot produce coffee the way you like it in under ten seconds.”

“Right,” he said, still not looking up. “Three buckshot and stir, s’il vous plait…”

The admiral had taken to the use of occasional French phrases ever since their perfect weekend in Paris in April. Kathy hoped that one more visit would persuade him that the t in plait was in fact silent.

“Oh, Great One,” she said, “whose mind operates only on matters so huge the rest of us mortals can’t quite get it…I bring messages from the military.”

And she scuffed his papers all over the place and told him that she loved him, even though she had only just got to work, whereas he had been at his desk since 0600.

“Where’s my coffee?” he wondered, grinning, faking absentmindedness.

“Christ, you’re impossible,” she confirmed. “Listen, do you want me to get Admiral Mulligan on the phone or do you not? His assistant called two minutes ago and asked you to get back to him secure.”

“Of course, and hurry, will you? Goddamned women fussing about coffee when the country’s far eastern fleet may be on the brink of destruction.”

“It’s you who stands on the brink of destruction,” retorted Kathy as she marched out of the door. “Because I may of course kill you one day.”

“Now what the hell have I done?” the admiral asked the portrait of General Patton. “And where’s the goddamned CNO if it’s that urgent?”

The pastel green telephone tinkled lightly, grotesquely out of character with its master. “Faggot phone. Faggot ring. I’d rather listen to a goddamned battleship’s klaxon.” He picked it up.

“Hey, Joe. What’s hot?”

And then Arnold Morgan went very quiet as the Navy’s top man in the Pentagon outlined the recent uproar in the Taiwan Strait.

“Taipei came in right away when it started, sometime before lunch today. They reported a small Chinese battle fleet about twenty miles off their southwestern naval base at Kaohsiung, hurling hardware every which way.

“The Taiwanese have a pretty big air base down there at P’ingtung and they sent up a couple of those Grumman S2E turbo trackers…worked the place over from twenty-five thousand feet, reported a lot of action, ordnance flying around, mortars and depth charges. They reported no missiles over their land, and they were not fired on.

“The only thing that surprised them was a big ICBM submarine, heading southeast, probably out of Xiamen, on the surface, flying the pennant of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy. They didn’t report any other submarine in the area, either on or below the surface. Which I thought was surprising, because the Taiwanese have turned those Grummans into real specialist ASW aircraft — new sensors, new APS 504 search radar, sonobuoys, Mark 24 torpedoes, depth charges, depth bombs, the lot. If there was another big sub in the Chinese ops area, they’da surely found it. Hell, we’ve sold ’em all our latest stuff. They have, legally, nearly as much as the Chinese stole…”

“And your conclusion, CNO?”

“I don’t know where our man is.”

“Well, they plainly haven’t hit him, or half the world would know by now.”

“Right. According to Taipei, the bombardment was over by fourteen-thirty.”

“So I guess he’s still there, lurking.”

“Well, he could hardly have followed them into the Taiwan Strait, Arnie. Not without a big risk. Too shallow. Maybe he hung around to the south, then picked up the Xia on her way to her ops area. I presume she’s conducting sea trials.”

“And our people believe she’s going to be based at the Southern Fleet headquarters at Zhanjiang, Joe…so she’s plainly on her way south, probably right off that base.”

“I guess we oughtta be grateful we’re undetected. Anyway, I’m just checking in. Thought you’d wanna be kept up to speed.”

“I’m grateful, Joe. By the way, you know my conclusion? The Chinese believe we’re out there watching. And if they get half a chance, I think they may actually hit our ship. And then say how goddamned sorry they were, but we really should have told them if we wanted to go creeping around their coastline.”

“Wouldn’t that be just like them? Devious Orientals.”

“Chinese pricks. ’Bye, Joe.”

Admiral Mulligan was oblivious to the compliment. The National Security Adviser never said good-bye to anyone except the CNO. He was too busy, too preoccupied to bother with that. Even the President was occasionally left holding a dead phone while his military adviser charged forward with zero thought for the niceties of high office.

“He just don’t pay no one no never mind,” was the verdict of Arnold’s permanently cowed chauffeur, Charlie. “Ain’t got time, man…ain’t got no-o-o-o time.”