Warshot (The Hunter Killer Series Book 6) by Don Keith (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📗

thing I’ve learned is that bad news is nothing like fine wine. It does not improve with age.”

The trip to periscope depth was uneventful. They confirmed that they had this piece of the South China Sea all to themselves. Or at least as far as surface contacts were concerned.

The lost contact report was sent. Almost immediately, the reply came back.

“Contacts of interest bear three-five-zero from you, range sixty miles. Apparent course one-one-zero, speed twelve.”

“Now how the hell do they know that?” Foster asked, reading the cryptic report again.

Allison, lips pursed and a frown on his face, was already playing with the ECDIS tactical display.

“Looks like they turned pretty much due north while they were invisible to us, almost as if they knew they were being tailed. Then they sprinted up toward those gas fields off the Pearl River. Now they’re heading straight toward Dongsha Island. Let’s get over there in front of them.”

Foster shook her head, still reading the message as if it held a clue.

“I still don’t understand. Where did that information come from? It sure ain’t SURTASS. The latest TACSIT still has them putzing toward us on the far side of Taiwan.”

SURTASS was the Surveillance Towed-Array Sensor System, a global network of ships using passive sonar to keep track of submarines.

Chet Allison smiled and nodded slightly.

“Obviously, somebody out here has a pretty good set of ears located somewhere in this particular pond.”

“They saved our asses, whoever they are,” Foster noted.

“One other thing,” Allison said with a grim expression. “If they know precisely where those two Chinese boats are, they know exactly where we are, too.”

Ψ

Joe Glass’s IMMARSAT phone jangled alive. The commander of Submarine Squadron Seven grabbed it.

“Joe Glass,” he spoke into the receiver.

There was just a hint of static, then Jon Ward’s voice boomed out of the speaker.

“Joe, I’m sending you a link to a presentation that your next-door neighbor over Tonga way just made to the United Nations Security Council.” The head of Naval Intelligence was not sharing idle podcast recommendations with Glass. Whatever the presentation revealed, it would not be good news. “Listen to what King Tofuwanga has to say and give me a call back. I think we need to make some plans.”

Glass hung up the suddenly dead circuit. As if on cue, his computer screen blinked and Jon Ward’s email popped up. Sure enough, there was the link Ward had promised, a news feed from the United Nations.

When he clicked on the link, a video began to play. King Tofuwanga, dressed in a finely-tailored suit instead of his usual traditional Tongan garb, sat at a table with several microphones arrayed before him. The United Nations logo hung from pale blue curtains behind him. They formed an impressive backdrop for the portly monarch, making him appear almost legitimate.

Joe Glass could only appreciate the irony. This man was the titular head of a tiny island nation that even the diplomats in the room would have trouble locating on an unlabeled map. Even fewer knew anything about its long history, the recent struggles by some of its people—sometimes violently—to move toward a more democratic form of government, or this well-dressed ruler’s efforts to delay such nonsense. At any rate, the diplomats and media would typically not bother to appear for an address by such a minor player on the world political stage. But, from what Glass could see, the room was packed.

The camera slowly panned to reveal that all the seats at the kidney-shaped table were filled as well. The name plates identified the various countries whose representatives were currently sitting on the body’s Security Council. The Chinese ambassador to the UN sat on King Tofuwanga’s right-hand side. He was smiling and nodding slightly as the Tongan strongman began to speak.

After a few polite perfunctory remarks, Tofuwanga quickly got to the reason why he had bothered to travel all the way to New York City to appear in person before the Security Council. The man’s typical strong Tongan lilt was gone. Instead, he spoke with a pronounced English public-school accent. That was a vestige of his youth, spent in posh British private schools. Or at least until the stories of booze, sex, and drugs became so prevalent in the British tabloids that his father, King Tofuwanga the First, called him home to begin to prepare in a different way for his own regal term. Nowadays, the ruler conveniently switched to the English accent when he wanted to appear to Westerners to be well-educated and more convincingly king-like.

“Tonga is a small, beautiful, but poor nation,” he began. “As with many of our sister nations in the South Pacific, western colonialism has taken its toll over the centuries. But we are an ancient, proud people, one with a long sea-going tradition. Our warriors have traveled the Pacific for thousands of years to sustain and protect our people. The waters that surround the small bits of land that make up our homeland have traditionally been our domain for hundreds of years. From Niuatoputapu in the north to ‘Eua in the south, from Neiafu in the east to Esia in the west, Tonga has considered the sea to be our domain and depended on it to feed our people. Now the warm, blue waters that wash our shores have brought us a great gift. As is our ancient and long-recognized right, we are making the world aware that the Tongan people, and I, Tofuwanga, their king, have declared sovereignty over this traditional sea that continues to sustain our lives and domain.”

The screen shifted to a map of Oceania, the 169 islands that made up the Tongan kingdom clearly labeled amid all the blue of the South Pacific. But those specks of land were surrounded by a thick, bright-red boundary line at a distance of five hundred kilometers from the islands. The ocean waters between the northernmost Tongan island and Samoa to the north were divided neatly in half. So was the sea between Tonga and Fiji to the west.