Kilo Class (55 page)

The professional head of China’s Navy shook his head at the gentle chaos of this quasi-commercial carnival taking place on the brown waters of the Huangpu. It was vibrant but not entirely typical, because Shanghai also represented the very heart of the Chinese Navy. Here, in the massive shipyards of Jiangnan, Hudong, and Huangpu, they built some of China’s finest warships — the four-thousand-ton Luhu Class guided-missile destroyers, the twenty-five Jianghu Class frigates, and the guided-missile Luda Class destroyers like the 3,670-ton
Nanjing
, which been home to Admiral Zhang for several years.

He could see her now if he closed his eyes — her stubby, sloping funnels, her sleek 433-foot-long hull, the state-of-the-art antisubmarine mortar launcher, positioned up on the bow, just for’ard of the main 130 mm. gun. Captain Zhang could handle that ship all right, old Number 131. Such days they had been. And he imagined the 120 mortar rockets he used to carry. He would have given his life for the opportunity to fire those mortars into the waters somewhere east of the Kuril Islands, where he
knew
an American nuclear submarine ran silently and deep, waiting for a new chance to hit the surviving Kilo.

He cast his mind back to the early morning of September 5, when the message had come in from Vladivostock, relayed from the
Admiral Chabanenko
off the Siberian headland of Ol’utorsky: “
Short transient contact picked up on three sweeps radar, six miles off our port bow… possible US SSN
.” And he recalled too the imprudent smugness of the Russian Captain: “
No reason for additional defensive measures… sound barrier well in place… US powerless
.”

Yeah, right. Admiral Zhang walked grimly back along the Bund and into the gardens, returning to the huge ginkgo tree, which to him seemed to embody the ancient soul of his land. He loved to stand in its shadow, and he did so whenever he came to Shanghai… just to stand there, beneath a tree that had already lived for four hundred years and would live for six hundred more — a tree whose natural heritage in his beloved country made the dinosaur look like an upstart.

The rain had stopped, and his anger was abating. He walked around the small lake to the Pavilion of the Nine Lions and strolled down the long east bank of the central lake, past the Tower of Elation, which did not reflect his mood. And he considered how he should deal with his masters. He could, he felt certain, buy some time if he could just obtain a private audience with the Paramount Ruler. Surely the old man would grant him that. Only one thing would change the tide in his favor — if sometime in the next two weeks Kilo number 10 would slide, unharmed, up to her berth in the port of Shanghai.

Wearily he walked back to the gates of the Gardens of Yu the Mandarin, and he stepped into the Navy staff car. Now he must prepare to face the inevitable inquisition. It would end, inevitably, with him, Zhang, and his senior Admirals trying to explain to civilians why a simple delivery of a few submarines, conducted in peacetime, in the waters of their friends and allies the Russians, was proving to be so catastrophically difficult.

Admiral Vitaly Rankov had been in the Kremlin for most of the night — ever since the signal had come in from the Pacific Fleet at 0200 that one of the two Kilos bound for China was lost off the northern Kuril Islands. He had tried to stay calm and had listened carefully to the reports of the Captains of the Russian escort ships, who noted that they could find no suspicion of foul play. But they would, wouldn’t they?

They reported that no one had any evidence of an attack. The Americans could not have detected the Kilos on sonar, and could not have seen them either. No one could have attacked the Kilos — unless an American submarine commanding officer had recklessly decided to blast a torpedo straight past the escort, somehow dodge the decoys, and swerve past the world’s biggest submarine and crash into the Kilo. No, Admiral Rankov did not really understand that either.

The giant ex-Russian Intelligence officer may not have been a submarine weapons expert or a scholar of Naval warfare like his Chinese counterpart, Admiral Zhang, but he knew the capabilities of the US weapons systems well enough.

Nevertheless, despite the lack of evidence, he
KNEW
whose hand was behind this. It was the same hand that had somehow smashed three submarines, two Tolkach barges, and a sizable length of the Belomorski Canal in one diabolical strike three months ago. It was the hand of Admiral Arnold Morgan.

Right now he would have loved to call the White House and remonstrate with Morgan, threaten him with everything, reprisals, the Court of Human Rights, the United Nations, humiliation in front of the world community. But he just could not face the inevitable degradation of a conversation with the stiletto-sharp Morgan, the awful, criminal-smooth tones of the Texan: “Hey, Vitaly… you gotta get your security beefed up… stuff happens.”

No. He just could not bear it. Instead he
must
placate the Chinese. And above all he must do everything in his power to ensure the last Kilo would arrive in Shanghai. Despite all of the wicked efforts of the fugitive from justice who rejoiced in the title of the US President’s National Security Adviser.

Columbia
was 150 miles clear of the datum, moving swiftly south-southeast in twelve thousand feet of water toward the Midway Islands. Boomer had been driving men and machinery hard for over a month now, and he was happy to be heading to the American submarine base at Pearl Harbor. He and his crew would get some much needed R and R, and
Columbia
would receive overdue routine maintenance. They would shut down the reactor, replace supplies, load on stores, and check working parts. But they’d do it all alongside, because
Columbia
would not require a bottom scrape. The freezing waters in the Arctic do not support the warm-water crustaceans and weeds that always take root on the hull when the submarine is in warmer seas.

Columbia
made a peaceful seven-day voyage down the Pacific, passing to the north of Midway, and staying north of the Hawaiian Ridge. Boomer left the island of Kauai to starboard and then swung down the Kauai Channel past Barbers Point and along the rocky southern coast of Honolulu. They steamed into Pearl Harbor on September 17, exactly one week after dispatching K-9 to its six-hundred-foot grave off Paramushir.

The crew of the Black Ops submarine was glad to stand in the bright sunlight of the island. They would remain here for four weeks while
Columbia
was restored and given her minor overhaul. Officers would catch up on paperwork; many of the crew would assist the Pearl Harbor engineers, and others would supervise the loading and logging of supplies. They would be permitted ample shore leave to visit the island and Honolulu’s legendary nightspots.

Boomer telephoned Jo in Connecticut when he arrived, despite the appalling hour of the morning on the East Coast of the United States, and broke the equally appalling news that
Columbia
might be required to accompany the new Carrier Battle Group on a three-week patrol in the Arabian Sea in early December. However this was by no means definite. Jo received the news of another Christmas shot to pieces with equanimity. She was just so relieved that her husband was safe.

He told her he was at Pearl Harbor for a while, and Jo ventured to ask him how the hell he got there. “I thought you were somewhere in the Atlantic, not the Pacific,” she said.

“Sorry, sweetness, can’t tell you that,” he replied breezily. “Remember always, our business is classified” — he deepened his voice and added — “my name’s Dunning… Cale Dunning… double O six and three-quarters.”

171630SEPT. 34N 142E. A hundred and fifty miles off the east coast of Japan, in thirty thousand feet of water, the Kilo Class submarine, Russian-built but now under Chinese command, was making nine knots three hundred feet below the surface, running south on its battery.

Captain Kan Yu-fang, formerly commanding officer of China’s eight-thousand-ton nuclear Xia-Class (Type 093) submarine, was now expert at operating the Russian diesel-electric submarine that meant so much to his C in C. The most senior officer in the Chinese Navy still serving on operational submarines, Captain Kan had built a distinguished record in the notoriously difficult Xia, which had experienced countless problems with its CSS-NX-4s, the huge nuclear-warhead missiles.

Admiral Zhang regarded Kan Yu-fang as the ideal commander for the new Kilo and this most dangerous voyage. A native of Shanghai, the Captain was a disciplinarian of the old school. When K-9 had vanished off Paramushir, he had told the Russian officers still on board that he was going to clear the datum, dismiss the escort, and move silently at five knots toward Shanghai, submerged. He instructed the Russian Lieutenant Commander on board to inform the Escort Group Commander what he was doing, and from there on Captain Kan ignored all other ships and signals, ordered a general decrease in speed for a day, and just crept away.

Thereafter they would make all speed to Shanghai. In a western phrase, Captain Kan had decided to go for it.

He had no time for unnecessary heroics. And he had no wish to seek out and engage a possible US nuclear boat. Because he knew there was but one achievement for which he would be rewarded by the C in C — the safe delivery of the tenth Kilo to Shanghai.

He was now well on his way, seven days farther south from Paramushir, and running free. For the first time in a long while he could take responsibility for his own actions. And he was going to deliver. He liked the new ship, which handled well. And he especially liked its overall feel of steadfast reliability. Captain Kan expected to dock in Shanghai on the afternoon of September 23. When he snorkeled east of the central Kurils on that first night, he accessed the satellite and informed the C in C of his intentions. Two hours later he went deep again and pressed south, with his torpedo tubes loaded, toward his beloved home city, in his beloved China. Captain Kan was a very dangerous man.

Quite how dangerous was unknown to the Pentagon. But the fifty-two-year-old Kan had been handpicked for his command by Admiral Zhang himself, not merely because he was the most seasoned of China’s front-line submarine commanders but also because of his background and his political “pedigree.” Kan Yu-fang was a former Red Guard, one of Mao Zedong’s teenaged fanatics, back in the mid-1960s, when the Chairman had willfully and deliberately unleashed a bloody insurrection upon the Chinese populace.

Kan was then, and was now still, a zealot in the cause of a greater China. In 1966, at fifteen, he had led the “First Brigade of the First Army Division” of Shanghai’s infamous “Number Twenty-Eight School.” This was a fearsome group of twenty young Red Guards who made national news when they tortured three of their own teachers, blinding two and causing two others to jump to their deaths from a sixth-floor window. Kan Yu-fang led what amounted to an armed street gang. He changed his name to “Kan, the Personal Guard to Chairman Mao,” he carried a gun and a stock whip, and he made nightly rampages through his poor local streets in the cause of the Cultural Revolution. He searched for those he judged were “enemies of the people,” or in Mao’s phrase, “capitalist-roaders” — which broadly meant anyone who was successful.

During the twelve months in which Mao gave power over adults to the most violent elements of Chinese youth, Kan was responsible for torturing so many teachers and intellectuals that he took over an entire theater in central Shanghai where he and his colleagues routinely beat scholars, intellectuals, and professors to within an inch of their lives. The suicide rate in his district approached alarming levels because Kan always made spouses and children watch the shocking torture of the other parent. It was said that his greatest joy was enforcing the “jet-plane position” on women, which required him to twist their arms right back, up to their shoulder blades, until they dislocated. It sometimes became necessary for his men to kick protesting husbands to death.

Kan made no allowances for women. He was, in a more modern phrase, gender blind, and he had never married.

When the vicious and hated regime of the teenage Red Guards came to a close, young Kan made a smooth and efficient change to the Rebel Red Guards, endlessly broadcasting in the streets, shouting Mao’s thoughts — “The savage tumult of one class overthrowing another.”

By the end of the 1960s his brutality had come to the notice of one of the cruelest women in the entire history of China, the former actress Jiang Qing, who had became Mao’s wife. She made Kan one of the youngest leaders in her rampaging cabal as it roamed through the country destroying schools, universities, and libraries, burning books, smashing windows, and enforcing a reign of pure terror on the academic communities of China’s great cities.

Madame Mao employed the young Kan for four years, at the end of which she personally granted him his wish to join the People’s Liberation Army-Navy. And as a kid born a block from the Shanghai waterfront, he made the most of his chances, quickly attaining officer rank. He was a tall, distant man, dark, smooth, and friendless, but he was an efficient commander of a surface ship. Never popular, he was involved only once in a scandalous incident when he was suspected of cutting the throat of a Shanghai prostitute. It was however never proven.

When Kan made the transfer to submarines his stature improved rapidly. He became a fearless underwater commander, reputed to be the best Weapons Officer in the entire Navy. A few senior commanders, however, knew of his terrible past, and most of his colleagues preferred to give him a wide berth.

Admiral Zhang had known all along that the bloodstained hands of this strange and emotionless killer were the precise hands he wanted at the helm of K-9 or K-10. Zhang knew instinctively that if the US Navy was hunting down the Chinese submarines, it was being done by a Black Ops nuclear boat. He also knew that the American commanding officer on such a mission would be a merciless opponent.