Kilo Class (42 page)

When the meeting broke for lunch at 1300, tea was brought in, served in the most beautifully painted china, which looked a lot like Royal Doulton but was, unsurprisingly, made in Taiwan.

The President went to the window with his Foreign Minister, Chien-Pei Liu. The two men were thoughtful as they stared east, beyond the spectacular gardens that surround the wondrous architecture of the Chiang Kaishek Memorial.

There was so much to protect here in this scenic, mountainous island, where the glorious rivers flow with money and the great oceans wash billions of American dollars into the economy each year. “Here in Taiwan we are on the verge of creating the world’s first genuine Shangri-la,” the President said. “We have opportunities that no nation has ever enjoyed. Only one nation stands in our way. I pray we will be in time to frighten them off, for good.”

He did not, of course, know that China was keenly aware of precisely what he was up to — although Beijing did not know
where
. Neither did he realize that America knew precisely
where
he was up to something, although they did not know
what
.

A
WARM, SUBTROPICAL RAIN SWEPT ACROSS the narrow two-mile-long causeway leading to China’s island seaport of Xiamen. Hunched against the stiff, offshore sou’wester, all alone, strode the unmistakable figure of Admiral Zhang Yushu. He was bareheaded, wearing dark blue foul-weather gear, and was without his customary horn-rimmed spectacles. It was 0700, and the overcast sky and rain stretched all the way to the eastern seaward horizon, beyond which lay the rebel island of Taiwan.

Occasionally a passing worker on a bicycle would nod to him in greeting as he pedaled past. Zhang was a familiar sight around Xiamen, particularly in the summer months, when he and his wife and family tried to spend time in their big villa on Gulangyu Island, known as the Isle of the Thundering Waves, which lies right at the front of the town, across the Lujiang Channel.

Admiral Zhang had been born right in these waters, on his father’s elderly freighter, and for as long as he could remember, he had loved the long walk along this rocky causeway from the mainland. Then, as now, the lazy, gaff-rigged junks in the distance made their way ponderously across the mouth of the Nine Dragon River.

When his father died, the ship was sold, and the young Naval officer had invested the proceeds in a broken-down property on the nicest side of Gulangyu, overlooking the rugged coastline of the Strait, close to the southern beach. Over the years he had improved the property, which was set amid abundant trees and flowers, building a beautiful house with a curved red roof. Now, should he ever sell, he would become a relatively rich man. His wife, Lan, whom he had met at the university, was also a native of Xiamen, and their dream was to retire here, deep in South China’s green and mountainous Fujian Province, home to both of their families for a thousand years.

Zhang was grateful that the Navy had maintained a Naval base on the edge of Xiamen, a base equipped to deal with submarines, and where he had established a summer office. Each morning a Naval launch arrived at the Gulangyu dock to ferry the C in C to his office at the Xiamen base. For the remainder of the year, the Admiral and his family lived in Beijing.

In the early hours of this morning, July 21, he had made the eight-mile journey down to the causeway by ferry and car, specifically to walk its length and back. It was a place where he could think, where the fresh ocean breezes cleared his mind, and where he could remain undisturbed for hours. The Admiral walked like a marching army, illusively fast.

Zhang’s task was of such a highly secretive nature he had elected to spend two hours at his villa with the South Sea Fleet Commander, Admiral Zu Jicai, and to draft a plan to nail down the precise destination of the vanishing Taiwanese Hai Lungs. It was obvious to him that the government across the Strait was in the process of creating its own nuclear deterrent. The question he had to answer, for his great mentor and supporter, the Paramount Ruler, was
where
? And to do that he had to find a way to track Taiwan’s two clandestine submarines.

He walked more determinedly than ever, ignoring the sheeting rain. He splashed along the road in his seaboots, his face reflecting the thunder that rolled up the coast from the southwest. The key to the journey of the Hai Lungs, he decided, lay in the endless archipelago of islands that form Indonesia. The submarines plainly made their entire journey dived and must have found a way to travel out into the Indian Ocean, past Malaya, Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and Bali without being driven to the surface by shallow waters.

He had already studied and written off the possibility that they had traveled the Malacca Strait. It was too shallow in parts, too busy, and too difficult to avoid being detected when running through the myriad of shoals and islands that straddle the waterway to the southeast of the great port of Singapore. Last night, when he had arrived from Beijing, he had spent an hour in his office considering the less obvious Sunda Strait, the thirteen-mile-wide channel that divides the northwestern headland of Java from the southeast coast of Sumatra.

The Strait was just deep enough, 180 feet in the channel, but there were several shallow areas. It was also a busy ferry route and was used for submarine exercises by the Indonesian Navy. “If I were a Taiwanese submarine CO, on a secret mission, I would probably not go through there,” he had decided. “I would find another gap.” But the Admiral had been too tired to proceed further and decided to go home and sleep. He would walk the causeway and then approach the problem anew in the morning, with his friend Jicai. He had not counted on the driving rain, but he would not let that stop him.

And now he plowed forward, head down, arms pumping, relishing the exercise while plotting the destruction of some distant Taiwanese nuclear weapons factory, which was a mystery right now, but not for long. Not if he had his way.

He had almost reached the island end of the causeway, and he could see four men sitting in the lee of the side wall, beneath a large umbrella, playing cards, a bottle of whiskey between them. “Gambling,” he muttered disapprovingly. “What a weak-minded pursuit, relying on chance. That’s no way to run anything.” But at least tradition was on the side of the little scene by the wall. The Chinese did, after all, invent umbrellas and playing cards and whiskey. And they were not too bad at walls either.

Admiral Zhang was a traditionalist, one of those obdurate Chinese thinkers who believed implicitly that his country represented the bedrock of civilization. It was the cradle of scholarship and had been since the dawn of Chinese inventions — from the world’s first printed book, the
Diamond Sutra
in the ninth century, to the first printing press in the eleventh, the first seismograph, the first steel, the first suspension bridge, the first ship’s rudder, and of course the first paper money. Admiral Zhang believed that China was the great gateway to modern civilization. It pained him to see his beloved nation treated poorly by the West, regarded as a Third World country, incapable of being entrusted with its own military matters. “We will see about that,” he thought. “If we can just get our own Kilo submarine fleet into operational order, and then get Taiwan under control.”

Admiral Zhang, the former Captain of a guided missile destroyer, ruefully reflected on the fact that most of his time these days involved subsurface vessels. Indeed his two raging hot priorities these past weeks had involved
only
subsurface vessels — the disappearing Hai Lungs, with their potentially lethal nuclear cargo, and the disappearing Kilos, with their definitely lethal US enemy.

“Bastards,” said Admiral Zhang under his breath as he mentally dumped the military high commands of both Taiwan and Washington into the precise same garrison of deceit, villainy, and dishonor.

He drove across the little island and took the ferry on to Gulangyu. The rain had eased, and the sun was coming through, warming the lush, verdant grounds of the oceanfront properties. Jicai was already there by the time he arrived home and was having tea and pastries with Lan and the children. The South Sea Fleet Commander apologized for being more than an hour early, but he had been dropped off by helicopter from the base at Canton.

The two men retired immediately to Zhang’s private study on the west side of the house, where maps of the Indonesian islands had been laid out.

“What d’you think of the Sunda Strait?” asked the C in C.

“I don’t think so. Not for an underwater passage,” replied Jicai. “I don’t much like the waterway. It’s quite busy. But what I really do not like are the northern approaches. The entire place is covered with damned oil fields.” He pointed at the charted area fifty miles east of the coast of Sumatra. “Look at this lot. You have the Cintra, Kitty, Nora, and Rama fields… then farther north the Yvonne, Farida, Zelda, and Tita. The whole place is a mass of oil rigs, production platforms, tanker moorings, tanker storage areas, platforms on pipelines… it goes on for miles… and it’s shallow. No one would choose to make a submerged voyage anywhere near there. In my opinion the Sunda Strait is a nonstarter.”

“How about the next one along… six hundred and fifty miles east, the narrows that separates Java and Bali?” Zhang was happy to defer to the Southern Commander in these investigations. Admiral Zu was a submariner and had served as the commanding officer of the five-thousand-ton nuclear boat
Han 405
, with its high-tech French intercept radar and modern Russian homing torpedoes. Commander Zu Jicai had made quite a name for himself in the mid-1990s when he was caught and tracked by a US Carrier Battle Group off the coast of North Korea.

Chinese Naval propaganda made much of his skillful handling of the submarine, and of the fact that Zu lived to fight another day after facing down the marauding American eagle. They made little of the fact that the Americans could easily have sunk Jicai at any time they wished, had they been so inclined.

Nonetheless, Admiral Zu Jicai was regarded as one of the best Chinese submariners… a status Arnold Morgan had uncharitably described as “like the world’s tallest midget.” But in an essentially nonmaritime nation, which China has been, at least militarily, for several hundred years, Zu Jicai knew more about submarines than almost anyone else in China.

“Don’t really like the Bali Narrows, sir,” he said. “It’s too shallow at its narrowest part… less than half a mile wide. And there’s only ninety feet of depth coming out on the southern side. That’s no real problem, but the narrows are too dangerous, too risky, especially with uranium on board. I’d never consider it.”

“Are we reaching the point where we must declare the whole exercise impossible as a subsurface transit? Coming through the Indonesian islands?” Admiral Zhang looked puzzled.

“No, sir. They could get through the Lombok Strait dived… right here… eighty miles east of the narrows. This stretch of water, it’s about twenty-five miles across between Eastern Bali and the island of Lombok. And the seaway splits into two good deep channels. It’s deep, at least six hundred feet all the way through… even this shallow part, just here at the southeastern exit point, shows four hundred feet on the chart.”

“It’s a long way east, Jicai,” said Zhang, peering at the chart. “They would have to take a different route from the short run down the South China Sea.”

“Yessir. They would. They’d have to head southeast as soon as they dived off Taiwan. Then they’d make a course east of the Philippines… through the Celebes Sea… right here. Then through the Makassar Strait, which is not only deep, it’s also a hundred and fifty miles wide. See these depths, sir? Six thousand feet… shelving up to two thousand feet… all the way down to the Lombok Strait it’s never less than fifteen hundred.

“I cannot be certain, of course, sir. But if I was asked to transport a dangerous cargo from Taiwan, underwater, in a highly classified operation, that is the route I would take — east of the Philippines and through the Lombok.”

“How far would that be, Jicai?”

“About a thousand miles from Taiwan to the southern point of the Philippines. Then a twelve-hundred-mile run down to the Strait. Look here, sir, the water’s four thousand feet deep just north of the gap. There’s no shoal water across the route, there’s no need to surface,
and
there’s shallow water for cover. It’s perfect for them.”

“Do we know when the next Hai Lung is due to clear Suao?”

“Yessir. Two days from now. July twenty-third.”

THE TWO CHOKE POINTS
. The puzzle for Admiral Zhang — would a stealthy submarine use the quicker but shallower Sunda Strait? Or would it run deep, 730 miles to the east, through the wide Lombok Strait
?

“That means she could be at the Strait in two weeks?”

“Correct, sir.”

“What do you think, Jicai? Two ACINT trawlers right here at the entrance to the Strait? Would that pick them up? We’d know its direction, and we’d be a lot wiser than we are now.”