U.S.S. Seawolf

of chicken. Chuck Freeburg had Simpson blocking the Chinese captain’s escape route on her starboard quarter, while Kaufman came straight at her bow on the same side.

Right in front, off Xiangtan’s port bow, angled in on course zero-seven-five, would be the massive bulk of the Vella Gulf, which would prevent her swerving away and still somehow holding her easterly course. Which would leave Xiangtan just one option: a hard left turn, forcing her right away. Captain Freeburg had Reuben James in prime position making four knots right on the American cruiser’s starboard quarter, ready to run in and force the Chinese destroyer around in a half-circle.

All of the above were slick, operable, time-honored Navy tactics in such circumstances. But all of it was entirely dependent on the Chinese captain’s willingness to obey the rules.

Thirty years previous, Great Britain’s Royal Navy found itself in a total “bugger’s muddle” when trying to force Iceland to allow British trawlers in their fishing grounds. To Iceland, this was economic life or death. Their patrol craft, completely outgunned by RN frigates, used their hulls instead of guns, smashing into Royal Navy warships, simply refusing to alter course.

In the end, the Navy had to turn away, to avoid serious damage to expensive warships a long way from home. It proved what every Navy CO knows; if you want to win a fight at sea, you’d better be prepared to sink your opponent, otherwise you have a very sporting chance of losing.

It was a little after 1900 when Captain Freeburg’s particular game of chicken began. All four of the American ships were in position, and Kaufman made its run-in, driving forward from a quarter-mile out, straight into the precise same square of water where Xiangtan was headed, from her starboard side.

On the bridge of the destroyer Colonel Lee assessed the situation: “Are they going to ram us? We’re badly boxed in.…I can’t turn to starboard because of the second American ship.…The port side is my only chance…but if I turn, they will force me right around.…I can’t drive through the cruiser…and the fourth American ship will have me under the same starboard rule…what now? They’re going to turn me right around.”

Colonel Lee made his decision. There was, he knew, a get-out clause that applied to the “burdened” ship, in this case, Kaufman: If collision is inevitable, you must alter course.

The get-out clause meant, of course, that the entire rule did not work, not if a particular CO decided he was not going to be ridden off. And Colonel Lee, who this day had been on the wrong end of a tongue-lashing from the C-in-C himself, was a lot more afraid of Zhang, who plainly did not care if he and all his crew perished, than he ever was of the USS Kaufman.

He said quietly, “Maintain your course and speed.”

Which put Commander Carl Sharpe in a difficult spot, as he drove his frigate straight toward Colonel Lee’s much bigger destroyer.

“They’re not going, sir!”

“He’s holding course…”

“Jesus, we’ll slam right into him…sir…sir, we have to bear off…and it’s gotta be to starboard…”

“HARD RIGHT TO ZERO-NINE-ZERO!”

On Xiangtan’s bridge they could only watch as the knife-edged bow of the American frigate came arrowing in toward their hull…and then fractionally began to turn away. They all watched through the bridge windows as Kaufman slewed right around from a southerly course to an easterly, fetching up right alongside the Xiangtan with a grinding of steel as the two hulls slammed into each other, and then locked.

Sailors on deck looked right into each other’s eyes, two sets of men, all trying to do the same job as best they could. Two sets of men from either side of the planet Earth. Two sets of men from different worlds.

On Kaufman’s bridge, Commander Sharpe could scarcely believe what had happened. The Chinese CO had simply held course, nerve and helm. And now Xiangtan was pulling away again, passing Vella Gulf and moving right on toward the submarine she so obviously still sought.

Captain Freeburg ordered the cruiser hard to port, flank speed, his 86,000-horsepower gas turbine engines driving her back level with the Chinese destroyer, into a position out off her starboard beam. The other American frigates also closed in, more or less ignoring Shantou.

There was, however, one shining fact emerging here: Nothing was going to stop the Xiangtan, short of sinking her. And Captain Freeburg was not about to allow her to break free without demonstrating once more that the U.S. Navy meant business. And he ordered his big five-inch forward-mounted gun into action.

“TWO SHOTS ACROSS HER BOW…NOW.”

The Mk 45 shells, programmed for much greater distances, exploded out of the barrel aimed loosely at the airspace in front of Xiangtan. They whistled across her bow, 40 feet above the foredeck. For a split second Captain Freeburg thought the Chinese would return fire, and he said quickly to his XO, “If she shoots, sink her.”

But Colonel Lee had no intention of deviating from his allotted task, which was to sink the submarine. “To the ends of the earth.” The words of Admiral Zhang refused to leave his mind, and he ignored the obvious warning shots and pressed on forward into the waters where he knew the damaged Greenville must still be lurking beneath the surface. The sonar might be inoperable, but the underwater telephone was decisive, and the Chinese knew what they were hearing.

Captain Freeburg immediately accessed the Flag and spoke directly to Admiral Barry. “Right now, sir, we have a stalemate out here. We tried to ride her off, in fact Kaufman crashed right into Xiangtan, just a sideswipe, a lotta metal grinding, but only minor damage. But that Chinese ship refused to be intimidated. She never altered course by one inch, just kept going forward on her easterly bearing, right through the middle of all four of us.

“I put two warning shots across her bows, which she most certainly saw, but offered no response, just kept on her course, easterly, possibly picking up Greenville on the UWT. Sir, I am forced to conclude that this destroyer is either under the command of an absolute fanatic, or her CO is under orders from an absolute fanatic. Either way, I don’t like it. In my view, sir, you should let me sink the sonofabitch before he sinks one of us. It would only be tit-for-tat, since she’s already put a shell into Greenville.”

Admiral Barry was inclined to agree with all of that, because he did not want this obsessive Chinese destroyer to suddenly open fire and cause serious damage to one of the Battle Group ships, which she plainly could. But he considered that he was not yet empowered to start sinking heavy-duty Chinese warships, and he told Captain Freeburg to form a threatening “escort” around the two Chinese intruders while he contacted CINCPAC.

At this point they were beginning to run out of ideas. CINCPAC opened a line up to Admiral Mulligan, who did not want to be a party to a real big-ship shooting war against China, and his orders were still not to sink either destroyer or frigate unless they opened fire first, now in international waters.

The solution, when it came, was relatively simple, dependent only on Greenville’s ability to continue submerged at speed: just keep heading home right across the Pacific. “The two Chinese ships cannot refuel,” said Joe Mulligan. “And sooner rather than later, one of ’em is going to run out of gas. We can keep going all the way to San Diego if we so wish.”

Admiral Barry quickly grasped the sense of that, and announced that he would steam the carrier another 600 miles east, by which time at least one of the Chinese ships would have to be considering turning around. The range of the frigate was only 2,700 miles at 18 knots, and she’d been traveling a lot faster than that for several hours.

At this moment, in the gathering darkness, they were almost 200 miles offshore, and the two Chinese ships had already made a fast 120 miles before that. The range of Shantou at high speed was probably much nearer 1,800, maybe less, which meant 900 miles out and 900 back. And with 320 already under her belt, she could not have more than 1,480 miles in her fuel tanks.

And so Admiral Barry ordered the entire Battle Group to continue heading east for another 30 hours at 20 knots, 600 miles, every one of which would drain the Chinese frigate’s fuel supply. The admiral had shrewdly kept