Authors: Patrick Robinson
“Do we hit back?”
“We cannot. There’s nothing for us to hit in the immediate area of the refinery. Anyway, it would not be in our interest to do so. The Americans would then start to destroy our entire Navy, and I am afraid we could not stop them. I’m rather of the opinion that our days in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Iran are over. For the moment, anyway. The Americans are in charge there now.”
“This is so unlike you, Yushu. So accepting of such terrible events.”
“Well, I did remind you I was half expecting something of this kind to happen. And now I should remind you, the essence of all war throughout our long history has been attrition. We can afford losses, both physically and emotionally. The rule is that we never take our eye
off the main objective. And that grows ever nearer. We must let the oil fires burn, and later this morning we will have our own light in the sky.”
Admirals Zu Jicai and Zhang Yushu were now joined by the recently appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Southern Fleet, Vice Admiral Yang Linzhong, a short, stocky ex—frigate captain from Canton.
“Gentlemen,” he said, entering his own office, and bowing his head. “I have just been visiting our sonics laboratory, and they are ready to demonstrate for you their work over the past six months. I think you will be impressed.”
The two senior Admirals in the entire Chinese armed forces rose, and followed Yang out to a waiting Navy staff car, which drove them immediately a distance of less than a mile to domain of Lt. Commander Guangjin Chen, the PLAN’s Mr. Underwater, their great mastermind of deep-sea listening countermeasures.
His rank of Lt. Commander was honorary. Mr. Guangjin was essentially a scientist, more at home in a white laboratory coat than a naval uniform. In fact no one had ever seen him in a uniform, even though it was rumored he was the highest-paid officer in the Chinese Navy, below the rank of rear admiral.
His kingdom was underwater, in the strange, eerie caverns of the oceans. He marched to the orders of the tides, he listened to the evidence of the echoes and he acted on the lingering ping of the sonic pulses. Much of his work had been in the field of decoys, disguising, hiding the beat of the engines of the warships, seeking always to confuse and deceive the enemy.
What very few people knew, however, was that Guangjin Chen had masterminded a private project of such brilliant deception it almost took Admiral Zhang’s breath away. He had heard about it only a year ago while he was still Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. And he had heard about it just by chance. And great was his fury when he found out that Mr. Guangjin had offered the
idea to the Navy for development 10 years previously, four years before he even joined the Senior Service. Guangjin had been turned down flat, probably because he was just a civilian.
In any event, Admiral Zhang knew brilliance when he heard it, even if it might not work. And last August he had summoned Mr. Guangjin to his home for dinner, and there he conducted an interrogation, to the great glee of the scientist.
Like all scientists, the lean and earnest Guangjin adored talking about his work, especially a project he had believed to be long dead. And he shyly admitted to the great Chinese Admiral that he had continued working on the project, just at his home, these past several years.
And the night proved to be magical. They had sat outside Admiral Zhang’s beautiful summer house on the island of Gulangyu, just across the Lujiang Channel from the South China seaport and Navy base of Xiamen.
The air was warm, a light southwest wind drifting across the great estuary of the Nine Dragon River, and Guangjin in company with the Zhangs sipped fragrant tea out on the stone patio beneath the curved red roof. The scientist was on his feet answering questions and pointing with a cane at the stone squares upon which he walked.
“But where’s the carrier now?”
“Right here, sir. In this stone square.”
“But where’s our Kilo?”
“Right here, sir, in the middle of this paler stone square.”
“Is it transmitting?”
“Nossir. Not yet.”
“Well, when will it?”
When I tell it to do so.”
“But how will you know when?”
“I’ll be watching all the time.”
“But how?”
“Via the satellites, sir. It’s very easy to track a large ship in the open ocean. You can hardly miss it.”
“How long is the transmission?”
“Oh, just a few seconds. Long enough to be heard.”
“Then what?”
“Well, if the U.S. Admiral has a modicum of sense, he’ll bear away and make a more northerly course.”
“I suppose he will.”
“And he’ll keep going until I frighten him again.”
The Admiral remembered just shaking his head in amazement, and he had said, “Chen, I am deeply impressed. And I want you to continue your work on this as a priority. Move it to a secure area in your working block, and perfect it. Essentially you will answer only to Admiral Zu, or myself. I regard it as our personal mission, and I’m going to code-name it right away, in memory of this evening. From now on, it’s Operation Paving Stone.”
Admiral Zhang would never forget the conversation. It had been on his mind for months. This very brilliant person, who had joined the Navy strictly as a sonics expert, was on to something. And now he was going to find out just how big, and whether it would work.
The three Admirals climbed out of the staff car, and two guards escorted them into an inner office of this highly classified laboratory. And there before them stood Lt. Commander Guangjin, who bowed politely, never having quite mastered the traditional Navy salute.
“Welcome, gentlemen,” he said, “to my humble quarters.” He’d never quite come to grips with the normal greeting of “sir” from a two-and-a-half to an admiral. But great scholarship has a dignity of its own, and no one noticed.
“Yushu,” he said, with an earth-shattering lack of formality to the highest-ranking Admiral in the world’s biggest nation, “it is especially nice to see you again—and I think you will be very pleased with me.”
Admiral Zhang smiled and patted this prodigy on the
shoulder. The project belonged of course to the scientist, but Zhang had made it possible, and if it worked, history would judge them both kindly.
Mr. Guangjin walked to the rear of his long, bright work area and led the way into a darkened room, lit only by the backlighting of the computer screens, in almost every respect a replica of a warship’s ops room.
He paused before a screen upon which there was an illuminated grid. “That’s it, Yushu, just as we planned it. Operation Paving Stone, eh? Ha-ha, and now, as you know, we have two test sites ready for us. We have a towed-array frigate way up in the north in the Yellow Sea, and another in the Pacific, six hundred miles off our southern coast. Both ships have in the last hour thrown the device over the side, and are ten miles distant.
“The device is at present passive…and now I am going to activate the one in the Yellow Sea. You, Yushu, will speak personally to the sonar room in the frigate.”
He handed a telephone to the senior Admiral, who spoke into it. “This is Admiral Zhang. Will you please inform me what is happening?”
“This is Lieutenant Chunming, sir. Right now we have nothing on the screen. Just the usual waterfall. Please stay on the line.”
And now, Guangjin moved to the control keyboard that was set before the grid-screen. “Activating now,” he said pressing the keys.
The room was silent, as the electronic pulses flashed to one of two Chinese satellites. And then Admiral Zhang heard down the phone, “Lieutenant Chunming, sir. I’m getting something…and it’s engine lines…transient contact…just seven seconds…but I’m certain it’s a submarine…making a turn…one moment, sir, the computer’s trying to match the lines…it’s coming up, sir, this is a Russian-built Kilo-Class diesel-electric. No doubt. The pattern fits precisely.”
The Admiral replaced the telephone. And he turned to
the scientist and held out his hand. “Remarkable,” he said. “Quite, quite remarkable.”
“And now we shall try the second one, way out in the Pacific. Please hold this telephone, and I will attempt to activate…”
Four minutes later, an almost ecstatic Zhang Yushu heard another sonar officer in a distant Chinese frigate say to him, “Here it comes, sir. Right here we’ve caught a transient on a Russian-built Kilo-Class submarine.”
201300MAY07
.
USS
John F. Kennedy
.
20N 125E. Speed 20. Course 315
.
Big John
was steaming over 3,000 fathoms of water. All flying had been canceled for two days because of a severe storm, and the personnel of the Black Aces, Top Hatters and Golden Warriors were bored by the inactivity. Nonetheless the forecast was good, the storm had abated and the carrier was currently in the Philippine Sea, 180 miles northeast of Cape Engano. That put her 270 miles southeast of the Taiwan coast, but just 150 miles short of her ops area.
These were the usual patrol waters of the U.S. Navy, the world’s policeman, protecting the rights of the citizens of the nation of Taiwan. The area was a triangle, its shortest side 90 miles long facing the central eastern coastline of the island, around 50 miles off the beaches. The other two sides were each 150 miles long, joining at a point close to the 125-degree line of longitude. Most of the water inside that triangle was 15,000 feat deep.
And the
JFK
was steaming straight toward it, high, wide and handsome, no secrets, no subtlety, no intent to deceive. Just one thunderous iron fist, the same one that had warned Red China for half a century:
Stay out of our buddies’ backyard
.
And now, here they came again, pushing through the long Pacific swells, cleaving through 30-foot waves, 88,000 tons of steel-clad power, daring anyone to raise an objection. The new emblem patch of the Tomcat pilots uttered a thousand words in just two.
Anytime, Pal
.
Five hundred and seventy miles away, on a bright computer screen in the Southern Fleet HQ in Zhanjiang, there was a replica of the op area of the
JFK
. It showed a line 100 miles long, 50 miles off the eastern seaboard of Taiwan, and it fell back 150 miles into an oblong rather than a triangle. Essentially it represented the guesswork of a dozen ex-Chinese warship commanders, and it was not a bad guess at that. The
JFK
triangle fitted very neatly into Guangjin’s “box,” and the positional accuracy of the 100-mile line opposite the Taiwan beaches was nearly uncanny.
It was, of course, the result of years of study of U.S. Navy patrols, and all around the Chinese version of
JFK
’s op area was a 600-mile-long line in the shape of a sloped roof on its side, representing Admiral Zhang Yushu’s assessment of the Americans’ likely line of approach.
That was the line they were now watching for the carrier, and in precisely three hours from now,
Big John
would breach that line at 20.41N 124.18E. And the Chinese Navy satellites would relentlessly track her wherever she went.
Back in Zhanjiang, Lt. Commander Guangjin made another adjustment to his screen, and right over his U.S. op-area chart, there was now a much bigger square, 240 miles long north to south, 240 miles wide west to east. It was divided into grid squares numbered 1 to 6, and A to F. At almost every corner of each of the 36 squares there was a black circle. And every one of the those circles of course had a number, A-5 or C-4, just like any map reference. The U.S. ops area, into which the
JFK
was headed, was bang in the middle of this computerized grid.
Big John
steamed on, now making just 12 knots since
Admiral Daylan Holt had cleared the flight wings to begin operations at 1500. And the deck once more came alive to the howl of the jets and the surge of the deck crews, as the fighter-bombers screamed into the bright skies above the deep Pacific Ocean.
The course of the carrier now became erratic, certainly on the distant Chinese chart in Zhangjiang, because the
JFK
had to keep changing course to east-southeast, into the wind, for the landings and takeoffs. But her basic northern track up to the ops area remained steady.
She crossed Admiral Zhang’s outer line of approach at 1900. And the busy flying evening wore on in the great waterborne fortress of
Big John
. The Admiral’s ops room was receiving no reports of foreign warships anywhere in the area. Nothing from either of the two nuclear submarines riding shotgun out there off his port and starboard bows. Not a thing from the S-3B Viking ASW aircraft ranging out in front, dropping sonobuoys into the water, seeking any foreign submarine that might be lurking in these deep waters.
Behind this fast, powerful, deep-field ASW screen the rest of CV-67’s Battle Group, two destroyers and five frigates, moved safely through seas that had been “swept” by possibly the world’s sharpest ears.
At the current low speed, with a lot of course adjustments,
Big John
and her men were about eight hours short of their op area. Though Lt. Commander Guangjin did not need them to be in it, just heading up that way. And at 2200 he activated, via the satellites, the Chinese decoy station B-5.
Floating in the water, identifiable only by its ultrathin aerial wire, B-5 was just about invisible at 50 feet. It made one short, sharp transmission from approximately 100 miles northwest of the carrier, and three of the sonobuoys dropped by the Viking picked it up instantly at range 15 miles and under.
Lieutenant (jg) Brain Wright had the signals on the aircraft screen instantly, and he assessed a rough position
of a patrolling submarine at 21.20N 122.21E. The engine lines fed into the Viking’s onboard computer and moments later Brain Wright was contemplating the presence of a possible Russian-built Kilo-Class diesel-electric, in the water 100 miles from
Big John
. He guessed the submarine had just made a “dynamic start” of her engines, probably to charge her batteries. Everyone connected, in any way, with a big carrier is wary of a diesel-electric underwater boat because of its stealth at lows speed.