Terminal Run

“Kelly, because of the communications security penetration, I want you to brief your captains personally, face-to-face. They don’t brief their crews until they’re safely submerged. And except for the NSA agents, there will be no E-mail from any crew member to shore. We’ll sail the old-fashioned way, in the dark. Now, about the forward deployed unit, the Leopard — you’re going to have to get word to the Leopard that she’s at war without using the battle network and without making her surface.”

“We’ve got some new technology allowing us to rendezvous with a submerged unit. I’ll get a few of the pad computers to her by the time she’s in the East China Sea.” McKee pushed his chair back. “Is that all, sir?”

“I wish it were, Kelly. I’m surprised you’re not thinking ahead. Since our command network is penetrated and compromised, we’rein deep trouble with the Snare. With her deployed in the Atlantic, she could target our East Coast subs as they scramble to the Indian Ocean.”

And that was the moment in McKee’s mind when the operation went from being a wartime deployment to a war. The Red

Chinese, formidable as they were, were an enemy he could accept. But having his own advanced weapons systems turning on him frightened him. His thoughts were interrupted by the Navy pilot standing in front of him.

“Admiral? We’re descending for a straight-in approach now. We should have you on the tarmac in fifteen minutes. Welcome to Hawaii, sir.”

“Thanks,” McKee said, craning his neck to see the lights of Honolulu out the window.

As he packed his pad computer into his briefcase, he wondered if the Piranha would be enough to stop the Snare. McKee choked off the thought. Catardi’s Piranha would prevail over the out-of-control robot sub. He had to — because if Snare sank Piranha and made it into the Indian Ocean, the war would be lost.

5

The weathered fishing boat tossed in the waves of the Yellow Sea northeast of Shanghai. The moon and stars were gone, an impenetrable overcast lingering over the area for the last two days. The trawler’s booms were extended, her fishing nets deployed. Two miles astern of the trawler, the TB-23 thin-wire wide-aperture towed array tasted the quadrillion noises of the sea and fed them to the Cyclops II sonar suite in the forward hold. The boat fished not for food but for a nuclear submarine. Its prey was the stealthiest and quietest manned undersea craft ever constructed. Finding it would be impossible without the processing power of the Cyclops system. While the submarine was quiet, it still contained pumps and turbines and motors and a propulsor, all machines that rotated, and when manmade machines rotated, they vibrated at a rhythmic frequency and emitted cyclic tones into their surroundings. These machines were mounted on four-dimensional sound mounts, their vibrations shielded from the universe and absorbed, at least most of the vibrations. Deep within the beast, steam and water pulsed and flowed like an animal’s blood in veins and arteries, each flow pulse putting another sound in the water. To the conventional sonar devices, the noise emitted by the target would go unnoticed, as if it were the noise of quiet rain in a tumultuous thunderstorm. It was true even of the TB-23 linear towed array, which heard only the vast frequency spectrum of the loud seas, passing each noise at each frequency up the signal wire to the main computer.

Deep within the consciousness of the Cyclops II, the noise from the sea was sifted, the sheer amount of data able to choke the computers of only two years before, those ancient machines able only to search in a narrow slice of ocean for the target. But Cyclops II could listen to the entire world and filter out the random ocean noise that didn’t have rhythmic pulses, leaving only the pure harmonic tonals from rotating machinery. From a hundred thousand yards away, the trawler’s computer isolated four tonals, locked them in, and identified them positively as a United States Virginia-class nuclear submarine. The technician at the Cyclops console called the fishing boat’s deck officer, who called the captain, who called the operations officer, who woke up the two divers and sent them to the aft hold.