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

ORCA Extra Large UUVs that Jon Ward had promised him. Those long-range, long-endurance, unmanned submarines would be a vital tool for keeping tabs on what was happening in what was turning into a very busy neighborhood.

Joe Glass had jobs for both ORCAs. And, he knew, for some of those old-fashioned underwater vehicles, too.

The ones with living, breathing human beings aboard.

He headed back toward his office. Enough sight-seeing. He owed Jon Ward a return call.

14

“I don’t understand. Where the hell are they?” LCDR Aston Jennings was paging through the sonar displays on the George Mason’s command console. “If they stayed on the course they were supposed to, they should be here by now.”

There was no sign of the Chinese diesel submarines they were tasked with trailing. The ones George Mason had risked an international pissing match to keep an eye on. The four Yuan-class AIP boats had maneuvered themselves right into a fleet of Philippine fishing boats, no doubt to hide while they snorkeled long enough to recharge their batteries. As soon as the Yuans had shifted over from AIP propulsion to their diesel engines, the eleven-hertz tonal had disappeared. But even then, the broadband diesel noise had been easy to track.

That is until they got in amongst all the fishermen. Then there were dozens of diesels, all pretty much sounding alike. With no way to track their prey in the midst of all that noisy mess, Brian Edwards had decided to run around it. The intent had been to catch the Chinese when they came out the other side of the fishing fleet, continuing on to wherever they were going.

It all appeared to be a good plan. Just someone forgot to tell the Chinese. Or maybe somebody had told them and they decided to follow a different and far less obvious plan. Regardless, the George Mason had been making slow circles in a barrier search in the passage between Cagayan and Negros Islands. Not a hint of a scent on either the TB-29 thin-line array or the hull arrays. Lots of surface traffic—fishermen, coastal freighters, even the occasional cruise ship and ferry—but nary a sign of the missing Yuans. They had effectively vanished.

Jackson Biddle, George Mason’s executive officer, stood looking over the tactical display on the ECDIS with a puzzled expression. He measured the distance from where they had lost the Yuans to where they now sat helplessly, listening to the frustrating clatter. It was just a bit over seventy nautical miles and pretty much straight down the track that the Chinese submarine group had been steaming when the tail went off kilter.

“Well,” Biddle drawled, “the laws of physics tell us that if they ain’t here, they are somewhere else.”

Jennings, who was quite proud of his master’s degree in nuclear physics from MIT, shot back, “XO, there you go applying that old Newtonian physics solution to what is clearly a quantum physics problem. Quantum physics tells us that they are simultaneously nowhere else and everywhere else. We just need to figure out where Schrodinger left the cat.”

Several nearby crewmembers looked at each other, frowning and shrugging. They were accustomed to the esoteric arguments between Biddle and Jennings but, as usual, decidedly in the dark about what the hell they were talking about.

Biddle chuckled dryly. “Well, we have a couple of hours before we have to call home. If we don’t find your cat before then, that particular chat will not be a fun one.”

He drew a circle around the last location they held the Chinese with a radius of how far they could likely have steamed in the last couple of hours.

“Using my antiquated and outdated physics approach, they could be anywhere in this circle. We thought they were heading to the Surigao Straits, then out into the Philippine Sea.” He moved the cursor to the west and, lips pursed, thought for a short moment. “But what if they are really heading south, toward the Celebes Sea. From there, they could head further south into eastern Indonesia or make a turn out toward the South Pacific.”

Biddle drew an X a few miles to the west and a little south of Cagayan. “No point in sitting here idling. Let’s get our butts over there as fast as we can. Maybe we can see if our friends slid between there and Palawan. Come to course two-four-zero, ahead full.”

The George Mason jumped ahead and raced across the Sulu Sea. Biddle and Jennings, soon joined by Brian Edwards, their skipper, watched the clock’s inexorable movement toward their next communications window and the accounting they would need to make for the failure of their mission. For his part, the captain of the boat agreed with the idea of searching more aggressively to the west.

Skirting to the south of tiny Cagayan Island, an atoll almost in the center of the Sulu Sea, the submarine slowed to search speed a few miles to the west. From here, they could cover the western portion of the circle that Jackson Biddle had drawn.

Edwards, Biddle, and Jennings clustered around the command console, staring at the sonar display, willing a submarine contact to suddenly appear. But there was nothing that could be classified as a submarine. Only plenty of fishing boats, their blips on the display like a sky full of stars winking in defiance at them from all directions. The sonar team was doing their best to sort it all out, but ST1 Joshua Hannon could only shake his head when Edwards shot a questioning look his way. Nothing.

Jackson Biddle pointed at the clock. “Skipper, hate to say it, but it’s time to talk to the boss. Ship is rigged for a broadside.”

Edwards blinked hard and nodded. They had delayed the inevitable as long as they possibly could. They were already as late in the communications window as possible. Now he had to tell the boss that they had failed. Barging into Philippine territorial waters had come up with nothing except egg on his face. And