Undetected (43 page)

Bishop turned to his second-in-command. “Kingman, you're now off duty. I need you to get some sleep. You'll have the deck after me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bishop picked up the phone. “Weapons, tell your two deputies to find their bunks.”

“Yes, sir.”

Time wore heavy on the
Nevada
when patrolling with missiles ready to fire.

“Lieutenant Olson. A question for you,” Bishop said.

“Yes, sir.”

“What does a Trident D-5 missile weigh?”

“One hundred thirty thousand pounds, sir.”

“How do we keep the
Nevada
level once a missile fires?”

“Missile-compensation tanks, sir. They fill with seawater to compensate for the lost weight.”

“Good answer.”

The force of the launch would push the boat down, but then the boat would abruptly bounce up one hundred thirty thousand pounds lighter. Seawater filling the empty tube would help with that weight differential, but they would still be thousands of pounds lighter in the immediate moments after launch.

The XO entered the command-and-control center. Bishop thought he might have slept a few hours of the six he'd been off duty. “The world hasn't changed,” Bishop said by way of an update, and handed to the XO a thick stack of informa
tional messages to read. Strategic Command had been using the time to backfill in everything that had occurred with the
Seawolf
and China's fleet, making sure all its commanders were fully informed. Buried in the general section on communication issues was the reference to a solar flare occurring and intermittent static expected on the comm radio bands. It was a nicely slid-in reference for those who knew what else it meant. Bishop glanced at the time in the note and then his watch; 42 hours from now there would be a photo, and he could think of nothing he would like more to see.

The reference to the solar flare also told him his wife was likely in the TCC right now. The
Seawolf
had been shot at with a torpedo, North Korea was firing loaded missiles, and he was getting launch preparation orders. His hope that Gina would have a calm 90 days was now a distant memory. He hoped Gina wasn't dealing with this alone, that Daniel was still ashore and able to help, but he knew there might have been a rushed deployment ordered when the trouble started that put the
Nebraska
to sea. He couldn't let himself think about what this might be doing to Gina . . . or how she would handle the next deployment when it came.

“I'm current, sir,” Kingman said, reaching the end of the updates.

Bishop nodded as he accepted them back. “XO, would you like the deck?”

“Yes, sir.” Kingman checked with every officer in command-and-control, picked up the phone and called engineering, then checked with sonar. “I am ready to relieve you, sir.”

Bishop knew the pressure he was putting on his XO's shoulders with this decision, but he thought Kingman was ready for it. “Every 15 minutes, call sonar and ask for a full sweep,
the radio room to ask about all new radio traffic of any priority, check with navigation for our position in the patrol box, ask engineering for a review of all pressure readings. Make sure the boat isn't going to ram into a seamount or otherwise miss a routine concern. Normal submarine operational warnings can get missed when one threat becomes the crew's entire focus.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bishop moved from the captain's chair. “The XO now has the deck,” he broadcast to the boat. He turned to Kingman. “I'm going to sleep for four hours. Err on the side of waking me with news or changes in the waters around the
Nevada
.”

“Will do, Captain.”

The phone woke him, and he was alert in an instant. “Bishop here.”

“EAM traffic, sir, captain's eyes only.”

“Very well.” He pushed his feet into tennis shoes and ran a hand through his hair, headed out of his stateroom. Sailors made room for him in the passageway and on the ladder. Bishop could feel their tension as the crew members watched him climb up to the command-and-control center. He scanned the room as he walked through, nodded his approval to the XO at what he saw, then made his way to the radio room.

Bishop accepted the printout, moved into the small operations control room, and picked up the orange binder on the bunk. He flipped pages to the four-letter code leading the message text block and traced down the page to
Nevada
's decryption key. He entered it and his captain's code into the system. The printer came to life. Bishop tore off the first page
and read while the rest printed. He closed his eyes, breathed a prayer, and went to the command-and-control center to rejoin his XO when he had the full message.

“Bad news?” Kingman asked.

“China is missing a sub,” Bishop said quietly.

Kingman winced. Bishop handed him the full message. It didn't say someone had fired at the Chinese submarine and hit it, but the Chinese surface-fleet movements showed the assumption they had made.

“Who do you guess made the error? South Korea? Japan?” Kingman asked.

“At this point it's not going to matter.”

Kingman reread the message. “Do you think it's really been lost at sea? Or is it playing possum on purpose to give China another reason to escalate?”

“You can tell from the wording that Strategic Command is wondering the same thing,” Bishop replied.

“Let's hope they get the
Seawolf
out of there.”

Bishop nodded. The front line of this skirmish was coming right at the
Seawolf
. China was mounting an aggressive search to find its missing boat.

“The captain has the deck,” he announced, taking authority back from the XO. He moved with Kingman over to the navigation table. “We know China's military is running on high alert. They've lost two diesel submarines in the past to accidents. It's possible, given the circumstances, they had a catastrophic failure aboard the boat. A torpedo accident, an engine overheated and got away from them. But knowing the
Seawolf
had been fired upon, China is going to proceed under the assumption it was hostile fire.”

Bishop looked at the topology to their southwest. “The
coordinates put the last known location of the Chinese submarine here”—he tapped the map—“south of the seamounts in the East China Sea. That's a tough area to search. Sonar has to be able to look down into the terrain to see what's in the canyons and valleys. It's going to take days to search a reasonable-sized area. China will be probing there, but they'll be wondering who else is below them that might have fired on their sub.”

Bishop shifted his attention to the waters around the
Nevada
. “As tense as this is likely to get, I think we're okay with our current patrol box.” He thought about it and made a decision. “XO, ask the chief of the boat to join me. I'm going to put senior enlisted and senior officers on the missile deck for the duration. Then walk the boat, pass on the news as we know it, check in with the department chiefs. Make sure sailors know this is not going to be a quick step down in alert. Reinforce the order to get some sleep when off watch.”

“Yes, sir.” Kingman headed out of command-and-control and deeper into the boat.

Every navy in the world dealt with the possibility of a submarine going down. There were rescue plans and protocols to deal with all possible accidents at sea, including agreements between nations to help each other. But if this loss of a sub was the result of hostile fire . . . Nothing in the EAM suggested the
Seawolf
had reported hearing an explosion or a torpedo, but it was likely the fast-attack was still at depth for its own safety, preventing them from sending a message back to Command.

Bishop ran a hand across the back of his neck. What they needed right now was time for the
Seawolf
to report in with whatever it had picked up. They needed that solar flare photo
to tell them where that Chinese submarine was. Bishop just hoped the situation didn't escalate further before they had the means to get answers. Solving this was going to take the coordination of a lot of people doing their jobs, some wise leadership in various militaries counseling patience, and waiting rather than taking action. But he didn't trust that to happen tonight.

H
ow long till we have a photo?” Daniel asked.

Gina didn't bother to look again at the clock. She'd been glancing at it every five minutes. “Six hours and forty minutes.” It had been a hot solar flare, and she anticipated having enough reflections to generate a detailed photo shortly after the energy burst hit the earth. But that moment was still hours away. In the meantime, she was trying to figure out another way around the problem. “There's been no sign of debris?”

“No,” Daniel replied, scanning the boards again, reading the latest updates. “No sign of an oil slick, floating salvage, or discolored water.”

An ocean map lined with search grids showed just where China was deploying its assets, both air and sea. The U.S. rescue group was dispatching boats from Hawaii to offer their assistance once the submarine was located. Somebody just had to find it. Gina was doing her best to ignore the news headlines and the flurry of exchanges and accusations flying back and forth between China, Japan, and South Korea. Only one thing would bring clarity to this situation, and that was the location of the missing sub.

“Daniel, what causes a sub to disappear?” It wasn't the first time she had asked the question, but it was a useful exercise. Daniel settled into the guest chair to think it through with her again.

“A catastrophic accident aboard the boat, it ends up on the seabed floor. It gets shot at, the hull breaches, it ends up on the seabed floor. It goes deep beyond the reach of low-frequency radio waves, doesn't hear attempts to contact it, doesn't come up to report in—most boats go to those depths only when the boat has structurally cracked, is taking on water, and has lost ballast tanks.”

Gina nodded at the grim list. “Anything that might cause a sub to disappear that would
not
be a catastrophic problem?”

“It could be deliberately ignoring attempts to find it. It could be sitting on the ocean floor on the continental shelf—around 400 feet—basically saying ‘find me if you can.' Or it could have deliberately sailed at speed out of the area, trying to stay beyond where others would think to look for it, be ignoring radio traffic from its own navy, for reasons we can only guess at.”

“Which would make this part of a plan to create conditions for a war, so we'll skip those possibilities too. What else?”

Daniel thought about it, finally shook his head. “China uses a 30-minute ‘we're alive' transponder fail-safe, Gina. Someone aboard the boat has to literally turn a key every half hour and reset the timer to keep that equipment from going off. If no one resets the timer within 30 minutes, the transponder turns on and begins to send a ping. It's macabre, but China wants to know where its boat is so it can retrieve a hundred-million-dollar submarine, even if the crew aboard is asphyxiated from smoke and dies during a fire.

“If the crew's alive and are turning the key, and they aren't
deliberately trying to hide, then maybe—” Daniel paused, struggled to come up with a realistic option—“maybe it's a case where they can't send a message out even though they want to. A fire could do it, but a fire would have sent the sub to the surface to vent smoke, and they would have been seen by now, if nothing else by a satellite scanning the area.”

Daniel leaned back in the chair, ran both hands through his hair. “I don't know, Gina. The more you think about it, this is a destroyed sub, either by accident or hostile act. We're submariners, we stay silent in the ocean, but that's different from not being in contact with our own National Command. They were noticed as missing because they failed to report in when expected to do so. They're in trouble. It's the only thing that fits.”

She looked at the ocean map. “The sub might not be where China thinks it is. A lot of assumptions have been made to determine where to search.”

“That's very possible,” Daniel agreed.

Gina set aside her notebook, considered the activity going on in the TCC, trying to find a distraction so she could let her mind run for a few minutes on tangents, see if an idea might jell. She turned toward Daniel. “What if it was a collision, two subs hitting each other? A South Korean sub tried to follow the Chinese sub too closely, and the submarines collided? That last photo showed 38 submarines in these waters, running around at speed, while at the same time trying to listen so they wouldn't hit something.”

“South Korea, Japan, both insist all their submarines are accounted for, that they didn't fire on this Chinese sub or otherwise engage it.”

“Would they admit it if they were responsible?” Gina asked.

“After this amount of time, we'd know if they were searching for a damaged submarine of their own or had a damaged sub coming into port. They couldn't hide that level of activity.”

Gina thought about that, reluctantly nodded. “Okay, I buy that.”

She looked out at the TCC ocean map, saw it shift to the topology overlay where the
Seawolf
remained on station. “What if the sub ran into something, but something that wasn't another sub?”

Daniel shot her a look. “You're thinking of the USS
San Francisco
?”

Gina nodded. “That collision with a seamount turned the front of the boat into a smashed can, took out everything in the sonar dome and radio room. What's to say the Chinese sub didn't try to mimic what the
Seawolf
is doing, go lurk among the seamounts, only to run into one of them? China doesn't have as accurate of topology maps as we do. I should know, the U.S. classified the accuracy of my work to keep it out of the public domain, and it's doubtful China has had time to steal that data and get it deployed on their boats. It would have been difficult for China to tightly map that area from its own survey ships without causing an international incident.” She looked again at the screen.

“A Chinese sub,” she thought aloud, “trying to get into the disputed area and show China's presence, heads into that group of seamounts thinking she can do what the
Seawolf
is doing. It doesn't take much to get a 300-foot boat that can't do tight turns into a jam and hit something. We've had boomers hit a buoy on the Hood Canal, and that's with the boat on the surface, guys watching with binoculars, and clear visibility. Submarines are not graceful when they're around
objects, and those seamounts are towering hundreds of feet from the seabed floor. China may have a sub that hit one of them in the disputed area. Now that I think about it, I'm getting incredibly nervous about what Jeff is doing. A ten-second mistake, begin a turn late or with a bit too much speed, and the U.S. is also searching for the
Seawolf
on the ocean floor.”

Daniel leaned forward in his chair. “Your theory is plausible. It's even likely. I buy the premise China's sub hit something, and if you're right about what happened, that search grid China is running should eventually find the boat. They're working toward that area around the
Seawolf
. It might take days, though. It will be difficult to find the boat on sonar if it's gone down in one of the canyons. To see it, the search vessel would have to be directly above it.”

“We need to shorten the time it's going to take. We don't have days. If the sub ran into something, like a seamount, that makes this an accident. A tragedy, but an accident. They didn't have good enough topology maps.” She thought about that for a moment, then turned around and spun the dial on her office safe. “Can you get me an outside phone line? Outside of the Navy?”

“Maybe. Lockdowns in the TCC are tricky. Who do you need to call?”

“I need to talk with Kevin Taggert.”

“Taggert. Former boyfriend Taggert? You're sure?”

“Yes.”

Daniel got to his feet. “Give me a minute.”

Gina hung up the phone, still typing.

“What are you bringing across?” Daniel asked.

“Data from the Jason satellite for the last few days. And that visual data set on the second terminal is the current magnetic map of the earth.”

Daniel studied the rotating orange and red ball. “It looks likes a deformed, half-dehydrated orange.”

She smiled briefly. “It does. Everyone thinks the earth is this perfect ball of dirt with a hot molten rock core, when it's really a magnetized bunch of hot rocks flowing around under pressure. How much iron is in the ground, how deep the ocean is at a particular point, all affects the magnetic map of the earth.”

She brought up the topology map for the Taiwan-to-Japan section of the Pacific on the third screen. She'd created these high-resolution maps, but their details still caught her breath with their beauty. They were a combination of the earth's magnetic field data with the Jason survey data.

“What are you thinking?” Daniel asked.

“If the missing submarine hit something, and hit it hard, it wasn't just the sub that got damaged. It would put a crater in a seamount, cause an underwater avalanche, and somewhere there should be a footprint of the collision. I'm going to build the seabed topology map as it existed last week and as it exists today. And hope we find a collision site and an answer.”

“Interesting. How long will this take?”

The data mirror locked in. “Data is across. Alert Captain Strong I'm dispersing into the computer cluster a large-scale data problem, and I'm about to absorb a lot of computing power. I'm recreating the seabed maps for the East China Sea before and after this sub disappeared. I'll have those two photos in a couple of hours if this doesn't hiccup on me.”

Daniel was out of the room before her sentence was finished.

“Admiral Hardman . . . we have an answer.” Gina got the words out around a throat that was tightening, her speech starting to lock up, slightly out of breath after having run from the printer room with the photo of what they'd spotted on the screen.

“What am I looking at?”

Daniel stepped in to help her, spreading the large photos out on the nearest desk. “Something ran into seamount M6SN8 and hit it with such force it cracked off the spire and put a new cavity in the east side of the mountain. These are the before and after photos a week apart. This wasn't a geological, naturally occurring event. Something slammed into it. Sir, you need to ask the Chinese if their navigational maps show a seamount at this location. They probably didn't know it was there. We've had a repeat of the USS
San Francisco
, sir. Their sub hit it with speed, not realizing it was there.”

“Where's the boat?”

“That's the good news, sir. We don't see the sub on the seabed floor in this area. We should see at least part of the hull in these photos if the impact led to its immediate implosion. So we assume for now the sub is still afloat. Afloat but badly damaged. From the collision impact, I'm guessing she's got very little of her front dome left, sir—sonar and radio are probably gone. And she's got ballast-tank problems, as the sub hasn't been able to surface for a satellite to spot her. The sub's probably trying to make it back home, but who knows if the crew can figure out which way is west right now. They
may be traveling the wrong direction. If the impact site is right here, and she's been traveling at half speed at best, the sub is somewhere in this circle. The boat isn't going to be quiet, sir. We just need to get ears into the right area to hear it.”

“China is searching in the wrong area,” Hardman said, studying the two photos.

“Yes, sir.”

Hardman turned to Captain Strong. “Send tasking orders to the
Seawolf
. Put it at this collision site and start a spiral search outward. It's the nearest boat we've got in the area.”

“Yes, sir.”

Gina felt relief, both that their discovery was being accepted as a workable theory, and that the
Seawolf
was being ordered out of her current position. “Sir,” she began tentatively, “I know the topology map accuracy is classified. But if you send the Chinese the before and after seamount photos, maybe it gets them to calm down and see this as a possible accident while the search is under way.”