SSN

    Mack smiled to himself, remembering how well it had all gone. Those activities had mainly been Cheyenne's responsibility, and they had all occurred on their first day alongside McKee. After that, Cheyenne's officers and crew had been able to rest while the refit crew took over the rest of the normal operations.

    After the rigors of their contested ingress and transit of the South China Sea and the relatively simple TLAM-C and TLAM-D attack on the Chinese submarine base at Cuarteron Reef, the officers and men of Cheyenne appreciated this rest a great deal. Even more, they appreciated the assistance of McKee's crew. In peacetime, a tender like McKee would not have been employed for such a short refit. But this was war now, and peacetime rules did not apply. Especially since it appeared that Cheyenne would be the only U.S. submarine in the South China Sea for a good while.

    Cheyenne's officers and crew understood this. "No rest for the weary," as the saying went. It was simply an extension of a policy established for returning war patrol crews in Pearl Harbor during World War II. The only difference was that this time there was no relinquishment either of command or of the individual officers' responsibilities. Refits like this one were merely opportunities for rest and recreation, unlike the twenty-four-hour refit/repair periods that so many submarine crews had experienced during peacetime.

    All of which meant that the policy was logical and intelligent-but policy was generally not made by the people it most directly affected. Cheyenne's officers and crew agreed with the policy, and they appreciated it-but they appreciated the hard work and extra effort put forth by the sailors and engineers from McKee even more.

    McKee was good, with a seasoned crew, and the refit had gone well. Cheyenne was restocked and resupplied. The executive officer, engineer officer, the remaining junior officers, and their leading petty officers would attend to the final details of turnover from the refit crew. As soon as this briefing was over, Mack and his officers would be ready to return to active patrol.

    Entering the war room, Mack immediately noticed that the eagles (captain's insignia) on the collar of the Commander Submarine Group Seven (CSG 7), also known as Commander Task Force Seventy-four (CTF 74), had been replaced with single stars. Mack had expected that. With war declared in his theater of operations, it was standard procedure for the commodore, as he was addressed during peacetime, to be frocked to rear admiral, lower half.

    After exchanging greetings with the captain of McKee and CTF 74, Mack and his officers quietly took their seats in the front row as the briefing officer dimmed the lights for his presentation of the bomb damage assessment at Cuarteron Reef.

    The satellite photography provided clear evidence that each TLAM-C and TLAM-D, which had been launched from Cheyenne's vertical-launch tubes at a comfortable uncontested datum]nortft or the apratiy isiana cnam, nau[reached a mark. Not necessarily the intended mark, but at least damage enough to put the Chinese submarine base out of business for a while.

    Mack had seen the smoke and fire from the explosions through the high-power, 16X magnification of the Type 18 periscope, but, because the Chinese submarine base was beyond the horizon of the periscope's height of eye, he hadn't been able to discern the actual targets that were hit. He listened carefully as the briefing officer said that the main repair facility and weapons stowage buildings had been hit as planned, with 1,000 pounds of explosives per Tomahawk.

    The national command authority and the USCINC-PAC target staff had done a nice rush job in providing both the terrain contour matching (TERCOM) data for the entire length of the Philippine Island of Palawan, and the final, more accurate, digital scene-matching area correlation (DSMAC) data, especially since Palawan was not previously a high-priority digital terrain-data-collection effort. With the Tomahawk Block III Global Positioning System (GPS) providing updates to the missiles, the three hundred-nautical-mile flight from the last DSMAC update on the southwest tip of Palawan had not degraded the targeting accuracy.

    As the briefing officer went over this, Mack found himself thinking that the last-minute sighting of missiles arriving at Cuarteron Reef from the east must have been totally confusing to the Chinese. Moments later, the briefing officer confirmed that guess. If the Chinese had known Cheyenne^ position, they would have sent some of their assets after her. But that hadn't happened. Although the base infrastructure was essentially out of commission, satellite imagery showed that a number of Chinese submarines and a few surface ships remained in port, still moored to only slightly damaged piers.