Payback

Gomez separated out the Possible Hostile trace line and amplified it on the screen. “That’s its sound print.”

The RS having to stop and listen to the HAN added to the tension surrounding the general’s dilemma as to whether or not he should proceed. The delay caused by his having to stop and sort out the possible hostile’s intent meant that the Payback team’s evac time from Kosong would be perilously close to dawn. Dawn was ideal for attack, a time of indistinct shapes not yet fully delineated by the sun, but it was not a time for withdrawal, with the enemy able to see movement with or without benefit of night-vision goggles.

The TTT — Time to Target — readout was twenty-eight minutes.

“He’s closing,” Gomez advised Freeman. “Ten thousand yards.”

“Five miles plus,” intoned the general. Too damn close. He turned to Eddie Mervyn. “Pilot. Tubes ready?”

“Tubes ready, sir.”

“Status?”

“One and two tubes forward warshot loaded. Number three astern warshot loaded. Number four astern decoy loaded.”

“We’re between a rock and a hard place, boyo,” Choir told Aussie. “Old man fires a live fish, we could be at war with China.”

“Yeah,” said Aussie. “And if he doesn’t, we could be flatter’n a fucking pancake.”

Eddie Mervyn’s gaze shifted from the anomalous “print” squiggle to the four transparent safety covers over the torpedoes’ Fire selector buttons.

“Nine thousand yards!” reported Gomez.

Time to Target was twenty-five minutes. Everyone was tense, save Choir, who, so grateful he was no longer suffering the torture of unrelieved seasickness, calmly accepted the fact that they could not expect any assistance, any help whatsoever, from the battle group. He and his seven comrades were not officially here. The only thing that bothered him was whether the Chinese sub, clearly venturing well beyond the North China Sea, had been tipped off about them and was doing the NKA a favor, or whether the HAN’s captain, as sub captains of all waters were wont to do, was merely on a “fishing” expedition. In any event, the important question was, Had the HAN locked on to the RS’s engine pulse or a noise short from any other part of the RS?

“Eight thousand yards.”

Would the general, Choir wondered, elect to evade or to fire if the HAN got too much closer? He knew that Freeman’s natural disposition was to follow the dictate of L’audace! L’audace! Toujours l’audace! But in a sub, once you opened the tubes, an enemy sub immediately would know your intention, would counterattack, and the mission would be compromised. Yet not to fire was to let the HAN, over five times bigger, get too close with its six big Russian-type 533mm explosive HE torpedoes, which would be suicidal for the RS.

Time to Target read twenty-three minutes.

“Range?” Freeman asked Mervyn.

“Three thousand yards and closing.”

Thirty seconds later, at precisely fourteen miles from target, Freeman ordered Eddie Mervyn to down-gear the RS’s electric underwater motor and take her slowly toward the bottom of the littoral’s continental slope, the general emphasizing “toward.” To allow the RS, now known officially as the RS-XP, extra-powered, to actually touch the mud-sea interface would risk having the sixteen-ton craft sink into the gelatinous green ooze, burying the prop in the accumulated sediment of eons and the detritus of massive slides triggered by shifts in the tectonic plates around the Pacific’s rim of fire. Plus, should the craft become bogged down, the strain on the MUSCLE battery system and shaft as the RS tried to extricate itself from the mud would not only emit sound, but the bubbles of putrid-smelling hydrogen sulfide would race to the surface, exploding in a telltale profusion of iridescence. Bubbles might not be seen by the HAN unless it was right over the RS, but they soon would be visible if the HAN kept on its present course, and heard if the ChiCom Navy’s hydrophone mikes were halfway decently maintained. Any noise “shorts,” such as the whines of a straining electrical motor, would most definitely pinpoint the Payback team’s position.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Aboard the McCain, over eighty miles to the east, an EWO, electronics warfare officer, in the blue-tiled Signals Exploitation Space looked around at XO John Cuso, whose black skin and graying hair were usually in marked contrast but were now bathed in the subdued blue light emitted from the SES’s flat screens. “Sir, I’ve got a ChiCom trip S PL radio loop between a ChiCom sub, eighty-four miles west of us, and Qingdao.”

A triple S, ship-to-shore-to-ship, communication loop between a Chinese Communist vessel, merchantman or warship, in the Sea of Japan and its Chinese or North Korean port wasn’t unusual. A Chinese sub had as much right as the American McCain to be passing through the Sea of Japan. What was unusual, however, was that the communication between the HAN sub and the Chinese naval base at Qingdao was in PL, plain language, uncoded Mandarin. And neither the ChiCom submarine, nor Qingdao, HQ of China’s North Sea Fleet, had used a “burst,” a superquick nanosecond, transmission but rather regular snail-mail low frequency. Using a low-frequency transmission, John Cuso and everyone else knew, had cost more than one submarine captain a court-martial for having given an enemy’s surface warship or submarine time to triangulate — zero in on your position — a violation of any submariner’s first commandment: “Thou shalt not be heard.”

The only reason that might be cited for using plain language would be if your vessel, sub or surface craft, was on fire and quick assistance was an imperative. Cuso recalled the Cold War Soviet Kilo-class sub that had burned and sunk rather than risk giving out the location of its battle group by sending an SOS to its fleet HQ.

“You think the RS would have picked up the HAN sub’s transmission to Qingdao?” asked Crowley.

“If the HAN had its pop-up antenna deployed,” said Cuso. “That’s the million-dollar question, Captain.”

The older man, diminutive though he was, had the worry-creased face that, as he sat in his admiral’s high “Mikado chair” in the SES, somehow made him appear taller, infinitely wise. “If that HAN’s on fire, we should be hearing noise shorts.”

The EWO nodded. Old Growly was right — you could hear a fire from hundreds of miles away but only if conditions were favorable, and they weren’t. The storm now barreling down into the Sea of Japan, or East Sea, from the Sakhalin Island chain north of Japan and past Vladivostok to the east was churning up the sea’s surface like some massive Mississippi paddleboat with a jet assist.

“But you could hear the son of a bitch’s radio message to Qingdao?” Crowley asked the blue-hued EWO.

“Yes, sir, we heard him — and Qingdao responding — because the big Chinese sub was transmitting from the surface.”

“The surface?” said Crowley, glaring down from his Mikado chair at Cuso as if it were Cuso who had committed the indecency of a sub skipper radioing from the surface. Then the import of the intercept between Qingdao and the nuclear-armed HAN sub struck John Cuso, cutting through the fatigue of overseeing McCain’s launch of his country’s ultrasecret Advanced Littoral Warfare Craft, or so he thought. “That HAN wanted us to hear its chatter with Qingdao!”

Crowley said nothing, but was scratching his crotch, the itch a habitual manifestation of uncertainty in the old warrior. A ChiCom nuclear sub squawking from the surface and in plain language rather than code was something so — so blatantly nontraditional that he found himself regarding it as a personal affront by one fellow sea captain to another. It reeked of change, at the very least of spontaneity, which battle-group commanders did not like. There was enough uncertainty in the world already, enough aboard his boat of six thousand souls who could make McCain work only if they operated as a team, by the book, by unchanging, reliable routine, not by some cowboy like Freeman or this Chinese joker whose sub, indicated by a red X on the SES’s big blue screen, was, the data block said, 3.68 miles north of where the electronics warfare