Terminal Run

The last of the cigarettes ran out an hour ago. Lieutenant Commander Zhou Ping sat back in the command chair and allowed himself the luxury of a yawn. The captain had extended his wakeup call by two hours, which meant Zhou would be here for two hours longer than his body was used to, the very thought making him feel tired. There was absolutely nothing he could do for the next four and a half hours but sit here at the command console in the command post, waiting for a submerged contact. That would be wonderful, he thought, fantasizing about detecting an American submarine and alerting the captain. The ship would set wartime readiness conditions, the command post would fill up, and the captain would obtain a passive range on the contact, then shoot a salvo of Dong Feng torpedoes, or perhaps the new Tsunami nuclear-tipped weapon. Both types of torpedoes were supercavitating, with solid rocket fuel that would make them sail through the water at nearly two hundred knots, but a Tsunami could pack a punch so severe that it did not even need to get close. Of course, launching one was something of a suicide maneuver, since in all likelihood the one-megaton blast of the warhead could damage the shooting ship. The Admiralty obviously believed shooting a Tsunami was suicide, because each ship had been loaded with only one Tsunami. Why waste torpedo room space with more than one if shooting one meant the firing ship would sink? But Zhou was not convinced. The Tsunami would head toward the aim-point at two hundred knots, with a maximum range of fifty miles, so its time-of-flight could be as long as fifteen minutes, and in fifteen minutes the Nung Yahtsu could travel twelve miles in the opposite direction, for a total of sixty-two miles, and that distance from a submerged megaton detonation should prove more than enough for ship survival. Zhou had long since decided that the Tsunami suicide issue was unfounded.

Of course, releasing a nuclear weapon could normally only be ordered by Beijing with a nuclear release code. The party leadership tended to get rather annoyed at unauthorized nuclear warfare, but if the captain of a submarine decided it was launch or die, he would have Beijing’s blessing. Zhou called up the weapon control panel, and saw that tubes one through five were loaded with Dong Feng torpedoes, with a Tsunami in tube six, as Captain Lien Hua had insisted. He was midway through selecting the on-line technical manual for the Tsunami when his world seemed to crack in half with a dozen terrible things happening at once.

“Command Post, Sonar, we have multiple explosions to the north, in the baffles. Request you turn the ship immediately to the north!”

“Helm, right full rudder, steady course north, half ahead!” As the helmsman put the rudder over and acknowledged Zhou’s order, Zhou called the captain on a speaker intercom. “Captain to the command post, Captain to the command post!”

The deck tilted violently over as their high rate of speed put the ship into a snap roll, the torque of the propulsor and the drag of the fin putting the ship in a slight roll that became worse with time.

“What’s going on?” Captain Lien Hua shouted as he entered the command post.

“Sonar, report!” Zhou screamed to the overhead speaker.

“Command Post, Sonar, I say again, we have multiple explosions to the north, now out of the baffles. We also have distant sonar traces of weapons in the water.”

“Dammit to the bottom of hell, Mr. First,” Lien said. “The American SSN has attacked the task force. You were correct to turn the ship. That trace, the one we thought was biologies—”

“Wasn’t biologies at all, Captain.”

“Draw a circle from the position of the phantom noise trace we had. Designate it Target Number One, and give it an assumed speed of twenty knots. Show me where the target could be now.”

Zhou manipulated his firecontrol console, the range circle generating over the geographic plot. It was a damned large area, he thought.

“It’s too big to cover, sir. We’ll have to do a gallop-and walk search.”

“Command Post, Sonar, more explosions from the north. We no longer hold sonar contact on weapons in the water.”

“I have the deck, Mr. First,” Lien said. “Get to sonar and make sure we’redoing a maximum sensor scan for the American SSN. I’ll see if I can plot the weapon tracks backward in time to see where they originated, and maybe I can collapse this probability circle.”

“Yes, sir,” Zhou said as he hurried to the sonar space.

“American bastard,” Lien said, biting his lip. For the next few minutes he wondered if he should make an excursion to mast broach depth to warn the Admiralty and Battlegroup Two of the submarine attack, but decided they would know on their own soon enough. The highest priority was to find the American submarine and sink it.

“Sonar, Captain,” he called into one of the intercom microphones. “Have you scanned to the north for Target Number One?”