Kilo Class (54 page)

“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.

T
HE 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 though three ships had reported a possible explosion in the immediate area of the two-mile-square box, none could be positive as to its cause. Suddenly the Kilo was not answering on the underwater telephone, and now, five hours later, the destroyers were combing the area, having summoned search-assistance from their base at Petropavlovsk. An oil slick and some wreckage had been found. At this stage, given the ironclad strength of the Russian escort, they suspected an accident, possibly a massive battery explosion inside the submarine.

Admiral Zhang had never read anything more complacent and dull-witted in his entire life. When the signal came in, the Admiral had asked himself just one question: would it have been obvious to a potential enemy that the Kilo was accompanied by a Russian Typhoon? The answer had been no. The Typhoon was in attendance to deter an enemy and had, in his view, failed. Even Rankov must now understand that it had failed because the Americans did not know it was there.

He had read the signal with incredulity, baffled at what he called the “boneheaded intractability of the Slav peasant mind.” Alone in his office he had been physically affected by the depth of his outrage. He felt claustrophobic, hemmed in — all he wanted to do was hurl something at the wall. Instead he had summoned the staff car and told the driver to arrange for the gates of the Yu Yuan to be opened for him.

Zhang loved lonely places. He would not have dreamed of spending time in the gardens when the teeming masses were in attendance, and he walked around the wide ginkgo tree, repeating over and over a jumble of cascading thoughts. “Their obsession with secrecy… their sheer mind-blowing dumbness… all they had to do was
TELL
the Americans the Typhoon was there, and this would never have happened — the Americans would never have dared to fire a torpedo had there been a chance of hitting a Russian submarine carrying inter-continental ballistics as the Typhoon certainly was because that’s what she’s for…
and
she was in Russian waters.”

Admiral Zhang Yushu was in no doubt. The men in the Pentagon had sunk the ninth Kilo, as they had blown apart Kilo 4 and Kilo 5… and as they had destroyed Kilo 6, and Kilo 7, and Kilo 8 in the canal. Zhang would not have bet a secondhand rickshaw on the arrival of Kilo 10 in the Port of Shanghai. He shook his head in exasperation and reflected in fury on the entire scene, which had taken place in that wide distant seaway south of Paramushir.

He could imagine the roar of the cavitation as the shafts and blades of the escorts thundered around, one ahead, one astern. He knew the active sonars would add to the din, and he knew also that such a racket
would
present serious problems to a marauding US SSN.

But he knew the Americans were forever improving their underwater weapons. They had long been able to program torpedoes to search and destroy any target more than forty feet below the surface. Such a weapon would plainly miss the surface escorts and hit the submarine below.

Zhang knew also that the Russians would have been towing decoys off the stern of all four escort vessels, designed to seduce away
any
incoming torpedo. But he had also heard of a further tactical development in the USA — one that allowed the torpedo guidance officer at the other end of the wire to force the underwater missile right on past the decoys, then allow it to search and lock on to a target beyond, all under strict control from the firing submarine.

This would even allow the torpedo, if necessary, to charge right through the “box,” and then turn to race back in for a second look, still searching for an underwater target using “active” to home in on its helpless prey. In Zhang’s view that had probably happened to Kilo 9. He was prepared to bow to advanced technology. What he could not bow to was the idiocy of running a thunderous sound barrier twenty-four hours a day, in the full knowledge that it would probably deny you the precious detection of an incoming “smart” missile.

What he could not bow to was the Russians’ truly numbing decision not to make clear to the Americans that if they opened fire on the Kilos they had an excellent chance of starting World War III by slamming a torpedo into a cruising Russian Typhoon.

In Zhang’s view,
that
was the key to this terrible situation. And he gazed upward through the little clusters of newly sprouting ginkgo nuts, which were such a delicacy in China, and he thought of the wide Baltic faces of the Russian Navy personnel with whom he dealt… and he heard in his mind the sonorous, triumphal military music of their vast gray neighbors to the west… sounds so utterly crass and discordant to the Chinese ear. And he wondered, quite seriously, precisely which he hated more — the dull, unsubtle, flatly predictable mind-set of the Russians, or the swaggering, high-tech outlaw sweetness of the United States Navy.

He strolled over to the great arbor, with its views across the two-hundred-yard-wide Huangpu River, and decided that while he found the Russians contemptible, he detested the Americans.

While his driver waited at the Fu Yu Street gate, Zhang walked along the wide boulevard of the Bund, which wound behind the seawall following the great right-hand bend in the river on its way to the Yangtze Delta. He stopped occasionally, listening to the sounds of China’s most prosperous and busiest seaport — its docks stretching thirty-five miles along Shanghai’s waterfront.

Zhang heard the lifelong familiar sound of horns and sirens blaring out over the water, and he watched the packed ferries vie for space with old flat-nosed steamers and freighters. All the while, ancient sailing junks tacked against the tide, ducking between huge coal barges as trading families tried to maneuver their sampans, hauling on the big single oar, the
yuloh
.