Attack of the Seawolf

Chu sighed, realizing Tien was using the aircraft to protect the carrier, and thereby his own hide. But then, Chu thought, what benefit would come from exposing his own son to the murderous weapons of the rescue submarine, the one that could reach up into the sky and shoot down helicopters? Again he remembered a promise to the boy’s mother that he would never allow his own son to come to needless harm.

“Very well. Leader Tien. I will deploy the fleet as you have ordered.”

“No need, Fleet Commander. I have already given the orders, the fleet is already deployed.”

Chu stared at Tien, who only smiled pleasantly.

USS SEAWOLF

“Well, men, what’s it look like?” Pacino asked the four senior officers bent over the stateroom’s conference table.

Keebes stood up and pointed to the chart. Instead of being covered with grease-pencil marks it was crowded with pieces from a Monopoly game. Rows of red houses and green hotels were arranged in lines, and the tin battleship and dog and iron board pieces were put in places deemed significant.

“Sir, I took the liberty of raiding Captain Duckett’s game cabinet. He used to like Monopoly. Anyway, the dog game piece is us, you know, dog for Seawolf. The battleship is the Chinese aircraft carrier, the iron is the Tampa, since it has no weapons it’s dead iron. The hotels are major combatants, the Udaloys, the Luhus.

The houses are the other destroyers and frigates.

Thumbtacks are choppers, paper clips are VTOL jets, and the Han and Ming subs are dice. We ran out of stuff, so where we wanted to indicate mines we just spit on the table.”

Pacino smiled.

“Go on, XO.”

“Well, sir, we put a force of destroyers and frigates out here, in the approaches to the bay, sort of a mobile search-and-destroy outfit. Then we put a bunch of choppers out there to search in open water, some over the channels. We’re assuming the northern passage is the exit point, and we put sentry task forces at the entrance and exit, including the carrier at the exit. Just a token force here in the southern passage at Miaodao, couple PT boats, a few choppers. Jets patrolling here, rotating back to the carrier in sections to get refueled. It’s leakproof, sir. You’ll never get out of this.”

Keebes must have listened to his last sentence, because his light tone vanished.

Pacino examined the chart for a long time, nodding.

“That’s pretty much how I saw it,” he said.

“So how do we get out, Skipper? And what did we tell Tampa?” “You guys won’t believe this,” Pacino said, glancing at the intelligence message on the clipboard. He began pulling off hotels, game pieces, thumbtacks and paper clips.

“The main entrance to the northern passage at Bohai Haixia is wide open. Nothing there for twenty five miles. Then a small surface force patrolling at the throat of the channel. Two Udaloys, four Ludas, a few fast frigates. Then nothing all the way to the carrier, which is here, only five miles from international waters.

All the emphasis is on the southern channel at Miaodao. Two main surface task forces, including submarines, at the entrance and exit. The channel’s being mined here in the middle. PT boats orbiting on either side of the minefield.”

“What the hell?” Keebes said, looking at Pacino’s positions of the game pieces.

“Why would they guard the tiny channel to the south and leave the north damn near wide open?”

“Maybe they’re trying to sucker us north,” Morris said.

“Defense in depth. Lure us in deep, then flank around the west task force from the entrance to the southern channel here, closing in on us from the west, squeezing us from either side.”

“Goddamn,” Keebes said.

“Those guys are sneaky.

That beats hell out of the Chinese plan we had.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Pacino said.

“The task force to the south is too far away to come in and act like a cork in the bottle of the northern passage. Those guys are two hours away from the entrance to the northern channel. They may be filling the holes in the north coverage with aircraft but I don’t think so.”

“So what do you think they are doing?”

“I think they’re convinced we’re going to the southern channel, and are setting up to catch us there. The forces to the north are tokens, just to keep us from thinking we’ve got a clean shot going through the northern channel.”

“Why in hell would they think we’d try to escort Tampa out through that little channel on the south end?” Linden asked.

“That channel is so tight we’d all get hard-ons going through it.”

“They think we’ll go through the south channel because they know we know it’s too tight,” Pacino said.

“I can’t handle it,” Keebes said.

“So what do you want to do, then, sir?”

“We start here at the entrance to the northern channel.

We launch the Javelin cruise missiles. Each one will have the time delay set for a future launch, when we’re far into the channel. Then we launch half of the decoys, the Mark 38s designed to imitate the sounds of a 688-class sub. Most go east in the Bohai Haixia Strait, but we send a few south to the Miaodao Strait.