Red Shark

Like a mountain climber ascending an icy north face, he hand-over-handed it out of the sonar room to the control room. The first officer, also scrabbling for handholds, followed.

“Rudder hard a-port,” Park commanded. “Ultra-slow start on Permasyn motor; three beats then secure. Maintain current depth. Perhaps we can pinpoint him.”

“Aye, sir,” responded the officer of the watch, who, struggling to hang on, repeated the orders.

A subdued hum and the Red Shark lurched ahead, gained momentum, and leveled out.

Park counted down three beats of ten seconds’ duration and nodded approval when the officer of the watch rang up Full Stop on the propulsor control. Tonals from Park’s start-and-stop, sprint-and-

drift technique, even if detected by the Kilo’s sonar, wouldn’t necessarily give away their position. Park counted on littoral irregularities to partially cover their movements. He gambled, too, that even if the Chinese skipper heard them, he would have a hard time pinning them down.

“Sonar report,” Park commanded, impatient.

“Steady contact, Comrade Captain,” said the sonar officer, leaning into the control room from the sonar room to make his report.

The Red Shark coasted, her deck slowly tilting up, up, up as the planesmen compensated for the sub’s gradual loss of speed. A loose technical manual slid across the top of an electronics cabinet; the first officer grabbed it before it crashed to the deck.

“Sonar report.”

“No change, sir.”

Park nodded approval. “He is still looking for us where he thinks we should be, waiting for us to fall into his arms. Instead we will open out to the east and work around him.”

The Red Shark’s bow continued its steady rise as she lost more way, making footing ever more treacherous, the deck tilting up at an alarming thirty-five-degree angle.

“Officer of the watch, I want six beats, then secure,” Park ordered. “Maintain current depth.” He looked at the first officer and allowed a small smile to soften his hard features. “I think he has lost us.”

45

The Reno, southeast of Haizhou Wan,

the Yellow sea

“Conn, Sonar.”

“Conn, aye,” replied Scott.

“Captain, we have a new contact bearing three-one-zero. Range just a tick under forty thousand yards. No tonal matches, and we only have blade-turn information. Could be a submarine, sir.”

“‘Could be,’ Chief?”

“Can’t say for sure, Captain. You might want to take a look at this baby.”

Scott turned the conn over to Kramer and entered the sonar room.

“That there’s Sierra One, the Kilo,” the chief said. “She ain’t hardly moved in the last half hour, not since we picked her up. It’s this other one, Sierra Two, what’s got me. She’s sprintin’ and driftin’ in a regular six-cycle pattern, each interval between cycles is about ten minutes duration. Pretty sure it’s a sub, but what kind, I don’t know. Want to give a listen, sir?”

Scott took the sonar officer’s seat at the console next to the chief, donned headphones, and heard the tonal pattern the chief had described, even as he watched the upper monitor’s display of what the bow array was hearing.

“I hear it,” Scott said.

“It’s nothing we have archived,” said the sonar officer over Scott’s shoulder, pointing to the weak tone line crawling down the monitor.

Scott heard the cycle start again: a pulse from the target’s seven-bladed screw.

“Definitely a sub,” said Scott.

The chief turned his gaze on Scott. “Maybe a German Type 213?”

“Bet on it. But what’s this Chinese Kilo up to?”

“Maybe he’s as curious as we are,” the sonar officer said.

“Or maybe he found the Red Shark and doesn’t know it,” Scott said, vacating his seat at the console. “No sign from either of them that they hear us, so we’ll take advantage of that as long as we can. We’ll run on up there and see what’s what.”