Attack of the Seawolf

We were hoping one of our penetration agents could tell us if there was any truth to the report that a Communist weapons depot had been sabotaged. That would have shown us whether the White Army is targeting any residual nuclear capability of the Communists.

That’s the long answer, sir. The short answer is, again, we really don’t know.”

“What about the Kuomintang? Any nukes there?”

“The NKMT has publicly forsworn any use, first or retaliatory, of any kind of nuclear weapon, sir. This may be more than a play for world opinion — they expect to gain the support of the people in the countryside, and that promise will earn them the loyalty of both the peasants and the urbanites. Besides, nuking territory they hope to occupy makes no sense. But I can’t confirm any of this.”

“So what about all our KH-17 spy satellites, Bobby?

Half a billion dollars a copy. What do they show?”

“Mr. President, we’ve used the KH-17s to the limit of their abilities, and all they’ve revealed are battlefields and ruins where the People’s Liberation Army, the Communist troops, have clashed with the White Army. The images don’t show who won. They don’t show troop strength. They give us enough data to be able to show you this,” Kent said,

pointing to the slide showing NKMT occupation of roughly half of China, “but they can’t read the minds of the leaders of both sides.”

“What about the NSA outposts in Korea? Aren’t they intercepting radio transmissions?” The President was referring to the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping stations on the west coast of South Korea, Donchez knew. He himself had visited one of the complexes the year before; it was impressive, but Korea was too far away from China to receive the critical communications.

“Sir, not to go into the physics of radio transmissions, but if you’ll bear with me … most tactical transmissions are made on UHF. It’s for short-range secure communications, because it’s line-of-sight just like light waves. The radio waves go in straight lines. If you’re trying to listen over the horizon you don’t get it.”

“But the satellites would,” President Dawson said.

“Yes sir, but only for the few minutes the spacecraft is over the territory, which means we can’t intercept Chinese communications without using the military.”

“What about flying reconnaissance planes outside of China’s borders?” Dawson asked.

Kent seemed ready for the question.

“The P.L.A air alert radars would detect the planes and they’d deduce the reason for them. The result would be only that they’d get careful about their communications security. We’d gain nothing.”

“What about the recon Stealth fighters?”

“We only have one outfitted for eavesdropping and it has been having mechanical problems. We can get it up but we can’t keep it up, and that risks losing it over Communist territory. That leaves us the Navy.”

Donchez sat up straight in his chair, suddenly realizing why he had been asked to attend a top secret National Security Council meeting. What Kent wants is a submarine, he thought. A nuclear sub could hide in the Go Hai Bay just outside Beijing and intercept UHF radio transmissions from anywhere on the northeastern mainland while sitting there invisible underwater.

“Admiral Donchez can explain this next slide, Mr. President.” Kent looked at Donchez, who rose and walked to the front of the room. Kent clicked the slide to a close-up view of the northern Yellow Sea and the Korea Bay, the sea between the peninsula of Korea and mainland China. At the northern end of the Yellow Sea a finger of land pointing south and one pointing north enclosed the Go Hai Bay. The Go Hai was a triangle of water three hundred miles tall and two hundred miles wide at its base to the south.

At the western point of the triangle’s base was the port of Tianjin, which was a mere seventy miles from Beijing. Donchez looked at the slide, the geography familiar to him from the hours of briefings he had given.

“Mr. President, I believe the director is proposing putting a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine in the territorial waters of Communist China about right here, a few miles off Tianjin. A patrolling sub here is ideally positioned to perform multi frequency surveillance — eavesdropping, in a word — on Beijing, which from the sea side is less than a hundred miles to the northwest. From this point our submarine will be able to intercept UHF, VHF, HF and other frequencies of radio transmissions from the Red Chinese as well as the White Army. It will know as soon as there is an imminent attack. It will know if Beijing is going to fold. All in real time.”

Dawson looked at Donchez.

“Real time? Don’t you need to decode the transmissions?”

“We use spooks, sir. NSA intelligence specialists.

They ride the sub and translate the Chinese transmissions.

Decoding may or may not be required. Most of the time they transmit UHF battle com ms in the clear without any encryption. The spooks just pick it up and write it all down.”

“But how does the sub do that without surfacing?”