Free U.S.S. Seawolf by Patrick Robinson Page B

were just testing tube functioning, or maybe something more complicated, maybe even some kind of a tactical trial. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen a full-functioning explosive trial. Certainly not with a TRV downrange.
    “Also, there’s no sign of a target. And if there were, there would be a lot of ships out here monitoring the whole event. My conclusion, therefore, was it was a non-warhead trial…but meanwhile I’m going a bit further off-track. I want to creep around behind that Kilo, hang around for a bit, ready for a second firing if there’s gonna be one. I’d like to get a full recording of the noise of the tubes being prepared and the firing sequence.
    “And Linus, old buddy, have faith, willya?”
    270100JUN06 .
32.10N 128.OOE .
Speed 9. Depth 150 .
Bearing three-six-zero .
    Judd Crocker was trying to catch three or four hours’ sleep in his sparse, but private, cabin when someone knocked sharply on the door three times and then came straight in, the light from the companionway outside shining in on the sleeping CO.
    “Sir, wake up,” called Frank. “I think you should see this. The Xia ’s moved…cleared Huludao at nine last night. She’s making twenty-five knots through the Yellow Sea heading southwest on the surface, straight for the choke point.”
    The captain’s brain whirred. “What time is it, Kyle?”
    “’Bout oh-one-twenty, sir.”
    “That means it’s been running for, what? Six hours. That’s one hundred and fifty miles. She’ll be right off Dalian now. What’s that…four hundred and fifty milesnorth of us…we wanna be looking for her around eighteen hours from now, right? Say around nineteen-thirty this evening.”
    “Yessir. That’s what I have on this piece of paper, ’cept it took me ten minutes to work it out.”
    “Okay. Access the satellite again at oh-six-hundred, check her course and speed. Call me at oh-five-fifty-five.”
    “Yessir.”
    By midday it was apparent that the Xia was running toward the eastern reaches of the Yellow Sea, down the shores of South Korea, and on into the first reasonably deep water, where Judd Crocker and his men awaited her.
    1400. Tuesday, June 27 .
Chinese Eastern Fleet Naval Base, Shanghai .
    Five hundred miles west of the lurking Seawolf , Admiral Zhang Yushu, Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Liberation Army/Navy (PLAN), had placed the entire Eastern Fleet on high alert for a prowling American nuclear submarine. His own overheads had seen Seawolf clear Pearl, but they had not spotted her since, which was not a great testimony to their skill with the stolen American sub-spotting system from the satellites.
    And now he sat in the office of the Eastern Fleet Commander, Admiral Yibo Yunsheng, himself a former commanding officer of the first, disastrous Xia . They were ruminating, over endless cups of fragrant China tea, on the problem of getting the gleaming new 13,000-ton Xia III safely under the water, away from the prying eyes and, they hoped, the sonars of the U.S. Navy.
    “You just know they’re going to be out there somewhere,” said Admiral Zhang, scowling, his dark eyes at the same time hard and irritated behind his heavy, hornrimmed spectacles. At the age of 59 he was, without question, the most forward-thinking C-in-C the People’sLiberation Navy had ever had. A tempestuous man of six feet, he was tall for that country, and he wore his thick black mop of hair longer than is customary in the Chinese military.
    But he had the ear and the trust of the Paramount Ruler of China. Zhang was enormously powerful, and if he had a mind to mobilize the entire fleet, to seek out and destroy any American interlopers, then that command would be carried out to the letter.
    A former commanding officer of a Luda-class guided missile destroyer, Zhang was a worthy opponent for Captain Judd Crocker, and indeed for Admirals Arnold Morgan and Joe Mulligan, half a world away, strangers at arms, their minds locked on to the precise same