Free Kilo Class by Patrick Robinson

this?”
    “Too fucking late is how we found out. You wouldn’t believe this, Joe, but I had not vacated my chair at Fort Meade for more than an hour and a half when some brain-dead asshole gets a hold of a report from the satellite that suggests a Kilo Class submarine is on the move, on a freighter, from St. Petersburg. They alert the Defense Secretary, and the office of the Secretary of State and presumably someone here or hereabouts.”
    “Not me,” said Admiral Mulligan.
    “Anyway they have a very high level conference and decide the Kilo is probably going to the Middle East or Indonesia, especially as they seemed to think the freighter carrying it might be Dutch. Decided there was not much we could do about it anyway, and let the matter rest.
    “
Do you guys know what they shoulda done? They shoulda said ‘CHINA’ — and gone out and sunk the motherfucker. That’s what they shoulda done
.”
    “Yeah. Good idea, Arnie,” said Admiral Mulligan. “That is what they shoulda done.”
    “Delivery of these bastards is a goddamned absolute. The Chinese either get ’em, or they don’t get ’em, right?” The Admiral was not pleased.
    “Without telling you the whole story,” he continued, “we then had to track the damned thing right across the Indian Ocean. We watched her enter the Malacca Strait, which as you know is a darned long bit of water — divides the entire thousand-mile-long coast of Sumatra from the Malaysian Peninsular. It’s really the gateway to the east, and we have a kinda sentry right in there. You don’t need to know exactly who, or how, but we have friends… well, employees anyway… guys who specialize in this type of stuff.”
    “Couldn’t be anything to do with the requirement for pilotage past Singapore, could it?” asked Admiral Mulligan, an eyebrow slightly raised.
    “In this case, the least said, Joe… Anyway, once she gets through there, and steers northeast, she’s into the waters of the South China Sea. It’s fifteen hundred miles, around four and a half days for a big freighter making fifteen knots, and she’s right off the first Chinese Naval Base. That’s Haikou, on their southern island of Hainan. We’re guessing that’s the freighter’s first stop, and it’s too damn late for us to do anything about it. We can’t just take the fucker out, not in front of the whole goddamned world, right on China’s front doorstep. I told Fort Meade this morning they should expect some kind of a Chinese escort from the Southern Fleet to come out and meet her, and then accompany her right into Haikou. Devious Chinese bastards.”
    “Glad to see you’re mellowing some, Arnold,” observed the CNO with a grin.
    “I cannot see one thing to
be
mellow about,” said Admiral Morgan. “Neither can I see how the hell this one got through the net. But I’m going to find out and there’s gonna be big fallout in my old department by next week. Christ! This’ll be China’s third Kilo. It better be their goddamned
last
.”
    Joe Mulligan shifted in his chair. “You know, Arnold,” he said, “I just wonder whether you’re not getting overexcited about these Kilos. I mean, are they really so important? It’s a medium-size, kinda slow, kinda basic ex-Soviet design with a limited endurance. If I knew where they were, I could probably wipe out three of ’em in as many minutes.”
    “CNO,” said Admiral Morgan formally, “
you
could probably wipe out ten of them,
if
you knew precisely where they were. But remember, they are diesel-electrics, not nuclears, and at under five knots they are silent. And we expect them to be working close to their base, in what are extremely difficult, shallow waters, where our antisubmarine capability is least.”
    “Well, Boomer here had a successful run-in with one of ’em, didn’t he?”
    The Captain of
Columbia
looked up. “Only once with a Kilo, and I’d have to say that boat was dead quiet at less than seven knots. We only picked him up