The Art of War: A Novel (4 page)

“Man, I feel like we’re following Captain Nemo in
Nautilus,
” the chief of the boat remarked one boring day, a comment that drew laughter.

The fact that the
Great Leap
rarely raised her comm antenna and never her periscope left Hanna with something to think about. A secret mission?

Despite the mystery, Hanna was enjoying himself immensely. He had been in subs his entire career, working for the opportunity to command his own. Now that he had that command, he was savoring every single day of it, for it would be all over too quickly. He visited every space in the boat every day, inspected, asked questions, praised, cajoled, encouraged, looked every one of his officers and sailors straight in the eyes. With the tight spaces, submarines were intimate places. There was no place to escape even if you wanted to. Roscoe Hanna loved the whole experience.

Finally, one day off the Amazon, the
Great Leap
slowed to three knots and began a giant square-search pattern. The slow speed allowed her sonars to listen with maximum efficiency.
Utah
kept well away from her.

On the surface, ships came and went occasionally. Single and double-screw freighters and tankers.

On the night of the third day at this low speed, the
Great Leap
turned into the center of the search pattern. A double-screw small vessel was approaching from the northwest. The
Utah
sonarman on duty recorded her sound signature and assigned her a symbol.

The
Great Leap
came up to periscope depth. She remained there for twenty minutes, then began blowing her tanks. The sound was unmistakable. Captain Hanna had the sound put on the control room loudspeaker, so everyone could hear it. There was no danger the Chinese boat would hear the noise that was now radiating from
Utah
since she was making so much herself.

The small vessel rendezvoused, then killed her engines. The buzz of a small outboard engine came from that location. After a while sounds of small explosions, then the sinking sounds.

Utah
heard the prop of the
Great Leap
begin to turn and her ballast tanks flooding. A mile away from the sinking site, at a depth of two hundred feet, she turned to a heading of south and began accelerating.

A day later it seemed likely she was heading back for the Cape of Good Hope, to round Africa and reenter the Indian Ocean.

While the officers squabbled over the money in the destination pool—the junior officer was holding out for a right turn around Cape Horn and a transit of the Pacific, a circumnavigation—Captain Hanna composed a report to SUBPAC, with a copy to SUBLANT since he was now in SUBLANT’s ocean. The next day, after the
Great Leap
had slowed and cleared her baffles, then accelerated away, he rose to periscope depth and sent the encrypted report, recorded the messages waiting for him on the satellite, then set off again to follow the Shang-class attack boat … as it turned out, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and northward to Hainan.

In the wardroom of the
Utah
a victor was named in the Acey-Deucy tournament, the
Great Leap
destination pool was awarded to the lucky winner, who had given the matter some thought and picked the Azores as his entry because it was close to Europe and a lot of other places, and another Acey-Deucy tournament was begun.

*   *   *

Utah
’s report of the Atlantic rendezvous and the subsequent sinking of the small surface vessel raised eyebrows at submarine headquarters in the Pentagon and in the Office of Naval Intelligence. This secret rendezvous was obviously for a purpose, but what was it? The National Reconnaissance Office was tasked to find satellite imagery that might be of help. When ONI finally received the sound signature of the rendezvousing yacht, the computer records from the acoustic arrays lying on the ocean beds and harbor entrances of the American East Coast were studied carefully. A candidate emerged.
Ocean Holiday.
She had cleared Norfolk in late March bound for Barbados. She never arrived there. Routine inquiries of port authorities around the Atlantic basin were negative. Cuba and Venezuela didn’t bother to answer the telex messages. Still, even if
Ocean Holiday
had visited those countries, she had left them and rendezvoused with the Shang-class Chinese attack boat just south of the equator, in midocean. And sank there.

A covert operation? Was a Chinese spy taken aboard secretly in the United States? Presumably her Chinese crewmen and South African captain, the two Ukrainian women, the old Russian couple and anyone else aboard had transferred to the submarine and had been taken back to China.

Why? No one knew.

The information was shared with the CIA. Perhaps it would eventually become part of a larger picture.

There the matter rested. The Americans had done all they could, so for them, now, the matter became another unexplained happening in a world full of them.

*   *   *

As it happened, a Chinese mole in the National Reconnaissance Office noted the request for data searches of satellite images for
Ocean Holiday.
He had no idea why the request was made, nor was it unusual. It was simply one of many. He included it in his weekly report to his handler, who serviced him through a drop in a Chinese restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, whose owner had no idea his premises were being used to pass messages back and forth to spies. It was used simply because the handler, supposedly a Chinese American, liked the food and the restaurant was a plausible place for him to visit regularly.

CHAPTER
THREE

Politics is the womb in which war develops.

—Carl von Clausewitz

In late July the report from the spy in the American National Reconnaissance Office landed on the desk of Admiral Wu the senior officer in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN. In China, the navy was not a separate armed service but, like the air force and rocket forces, merely a branch of the army, though with its own officers, ratings and uniforms.

The report was quite simple: The Americans had searched their satellite archives for images of
Ocean Holiday.
Without more, the report raised a host of questions, none of which could be answered, including the most important one: Why?

Admiral Wu well knew the mission of
Ocean Holiday,
knew of the voyage of Hull 2 of the Type 093 class to a secret rendezvous, knew of the return of Lieutenant Commander Zhang and his crew to China, knew of his report of the successful completion of his mission.

The one conclusion that could be reached was that the Americans knew something. Something had made them suspicious. What?

Certainly not the fact that
Ocean Holiday
never arrived in Barbados. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Without a worried ship owner or insurance company or anxious relatives complaining and asking questions, a search of satellite imagery was unusual, to say the least.

Or was there an inquiring relative of the ship’s captain, the mate, the Ukrainian women or the Russian couple? He sent for Lieutenant Commander Zhang, who had approved and vetted those people; the commander of the submarine forces, Rear Admiral Sua; and the skipper of Hull 2, Type 093 class, Captain Zeng.

Three days later the three officers stood in his office. He bade them be seated and passed around the intelligence report. And he asked, “What made the Americans order a search of satellite records of this ship? Why did they do this?”

When no one had an answer, or even a guess, Admiral Wu questioned Zhang closely. He had, he said, chosen the captain, mate and passengers partly because they had no family ties. It was possible they had lied to him, but unlikely, he thought.

Wu led Zhang though the mission, which was documented in his report, day by day after the yacht reached American waters. The question-and-answer session took an hour. Zhang was frank with the admiral—all had gone as planned. There wasn’t a single incident he could point to that would arouse the slightest suspicions.

Seemingly satisfied, Wu began on Captain Zeng. “Were any ships or submarines in the rendezvous area?”

“No, sir.”

“Were you intercepted and trailed by an American submarine?”

“No, sir.”

Wu raised his eyebrows. “You mean, not to your knowledge.”

“No, sir,” Zeng said stoutly. “I took every precaution. My boat was not followed. We never came up to periscope depth and used the scope or the radio during the entire voyage, which was made submerged except for the rendezvous at the prearranged place and time. Our sonar functioned as it should. We had our best sonarmen in the submarine force on board for the voyage. No, sir. We were not followed.”

“Rear Admiral Sua, have any of your boats ever been followed while at sea?”

“The conventional diesel-electric boats have, sir. But none of our nuclear-powered boats have, to the best of my knowledge.” Wisely, the sub admiral used the caveat. He continued, “We even surfaced a boat in the middle of an American carrier task force conducting flight operations, to their consternation. The incident was reported worldwide. The Americans were completely surprised, shocked and embarrassed by our capabilities. They lost much face.”

The question-and-answer session went on for another twenty minutes, then the officers were sent to an outer office. Admiral Wu wanted some time alone to mull his choices.

He got out of his chair, went to a window and lit a cigarette.

That Sua had mentioned the Americans losing face was interesting. Sua couldn’t prove a negative, of course, but the fact that the Americans were grossly embarrassed had impressed him, convinced him that what he wanted to believe was indeed true. Never would he have willingly suffered such a humiliation. So he offered it as proof, which, of course, it was not.

Wu well knew the ingrained inability of Orientals to admit mistakes or embarrass their superiors, to lose face. Some of them would defer to erroneous decisions made by their superiors even if it cost them their lives. This cultural attitude was so ingrained that huge mistakes in the Chinese military acquisition process cost untold billions of yuan and long delays. Wu had fought this cultural foible his entire career, trying to get ships, submarines, missiles, aircraft and, finally, China’s sole aircraft carrier designed, built and operational. At times he thought the shipyards, engineers and naval officers would rather build it wrong and pretend it worked than admit a mistake.

Zeng’s and Sua’s careers were in submarines. Nuke subs were the future. If they were already vulnerable to American submarines … well, in a shooting war they wouldn’t last long.

Zhang—he had been entrusted with a great mission. Would he admit a mistake or an unforeseen glitch? Probably not.

Ultimately, Admiral Wu decided, how the Americans got interested in
Ocean Holiday
didn’t matter. Today. What mattered was whether they knew her mission.

The Beijing politicians wanted the fish in the Yellow, East and South China Seas, and the Gulf of Tonkin and, someday, the Philippine Sea. The latest surveys suggested that huge oil and natural gas deposits could be there. Using stolen American technology, the locked-up petroleum could perhaps be captured in huge, economical quantities. In the years ahead an assured source of petroleum at a reasonable cost would be vital to fuel China’s growing industries. Imports cost great wads of foreign currency and were subject to the vagaries of Middle Eastern politics, which in turn were driven by religious feuds and racial dreams. China’s politicians also wanted to take over Taiwan, a goal that was popular with the Chinese masses. The politicians used the media to stoke the fire, to feed Chinese nationalism and justify military expenditures; and indeed, they would get Taiwan sooner or later. But first, the Yellow and China Seas. To intimidate the other nations around this basin, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam, China needed a navy that looked impressive. Not a navy that could win World War III, but a navy that could cow the neighbors. And the United States, whose navy ruled this ocean.

As Wu analyzed the problem, it really didn’t matter if U.S. submarines had a technological edge on Chinese submarines. What mattered was that Chinese ships and submarines were better than those of any of China’s neighbors who might be inclined to fight for their rights. The Americans—well, they had sold their souls for cheap Chinese goods for Walmart. American corporations were investing billions in China. The Americans would not go to war over Vietnam’s or the Philippines’ rights in the China Sea. Probably. The trick was to raise that probability to a certainty, and the way to do that was to weaken the United States Navy, to do it in such a way that it could never be proven who was responsible. Japan made that mistake when they attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941; the Americans knew precisely who was responsible and vowed revenge, which they took in full measure.

The admiral finished his cigarette and lit another. He stood at the window with unseeing eyes, thinking back.

“You have the floor, Admiral,” the Paramount Leader had said. The Central Military Commission met behind locked doors in an underground conference room deep inside the August 1st Building in Beijing. The Paramount Leader was also chairman of the CMC, general secretary of the Communist Party of China and president of the People’s Republic of China. He was a technocrat, one of the new generation, ten years younger than the admiral, and a politician to the core. A champion of the military, he gave them the money they needed to build weapons for the twenty-first century. Consequently the military were among the chairman’s most ardent supporters. But support was a two-way street: The military needed the party, and the party needed the military to enforce its will upon the people. Neither could exist without the other.

Admiral Wu recalled that he had pushed his chair back and stood. Every eye in the room was on him. He had made a bold proposal ten days before. That day was the time for decision. Yes or no.