Red Shark

Park watched the needle on the compass repeater at the diving station swing left and steady up on 120. Satisfied, Park ordered, “Activate flank sonar array.”

Park gambled that the FAS-3 flank passive sonar array, a long, tubular affair mounted on the Red Shark’s port side, working in tandem with the bow’s wide aperture array, would allow the integrated tracking system to identify the target with greater precision.

The sonar warrant officer lined up switches, then held up his right hand, palm and fingers open. Abruptly he made a fist and said, “Activate array.”

A sailor in the sonar room muscled a hydraulic actuator. After a brief delay, a suite of green lights on a panel above the sonar workstation flashed twice to indicate that each of the ten receptor modules in the array had activated.

Park stuck his head into the sonar room. The sonarman had his eyes glued to the monitor and both hands clamped to the earmuffs of the headphones he wore. He sensed Park’s impatience and squirmed in his seat.

“Contact?”

“Yes, Captain. Very clear contact. Bearing, still zero-two-three.”

The first officer bulked behind Park in the sonar room.

“We have him now,” Park said.

“A PLAN submarine, Comrade Captain?” asked the first officer.

Park gave the officer a thin smile. “We’ll know very soon. If he is, we will go to silent operation, and when we do, it will seem as if we have vanished.”

The sonar officer twisted around in his seat. “Comrade Captain… I have a computed range to the target: eighteen thousand yards.” Nine miles.

Park waited while the integrated tracking system ran comparisons, hunting for a positive identification of the target.

If the target is a Chinese sub, Park thought, the Red Shark would not only have to run silent but possibly seek cover in the littorals, where bottom irregularities, salinity, turbidity, and temperature gradients would provide cover and impede detection. Risky business running silent in the littorals, and he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Better to quietly sidestep the Chinese boat and simply disappear.

The sonar officer started. Park heard it too: a sudden silence. Where there had been a faint stuttering hiss coming from the speaker, now there was nothing.

Park didn’t wait. “Commence silent operation,” he commanded.

37

Kabukicho, Tokyo

The banister was worn smooth. So were the steps that led downstairs to the back door of the hotel. Tracy, in stocking feet, heels clutched to her chest, followed Scott down the stairs. When they came to the back door of the fortune-teller’s shop, he signaled “stop” by raising a hand.

Scott peered between the strands of a beaded curtain into the empty shop. Normally it was busy, but all he saw now was a low table surrounded by pillows and, on the floor, a stack of utagaruta cards, the kind fortune-tellers used in the traditional poem-matching games they played with clients. There wasn’t a sign of the fortune-teller, an elderly woman in her eighties. And no sign of the whores and their customers, the salarymen. Scott’s heart thudded and his palms sweated. At Matsu Shan, he’d been lucky to see his targets before they’d come at him. That wouldn’t be the case here, he realized, even though he sensed someone might be hiding in the darkened hallway or behind a door.