Arabian Storm (The Hunter Killer Series Book 5) George Wallace (the little red hen ebook .TXT) 📖

the coast,” Glass said with a nod. “As long as he stays on AIP, he’s going to be tough. Let’s hope he keeps up the bad housekeeping.”

AIP—air independent propulsion—was new, super-quiet propulsion technology that could be employed for brief periods of time by submerged submarines, as long as they kept the power demand low.

Zillich smiled. “Good thing we have the TB-34 out. We’re tracking a pretty solid fifty-five hertz tonal on narrow band. I’d guess it’s a pump that needs some maintenance on a bearing. Makes a damn fine beacon.”

Glass suddenly sensed more than heard activity behind him. He turned to see LTjg Bob Ronson working furiously at the fire control station. Zillich disappeared back into the sonar shack and pressed his headphones to his ears.

“Possible contact zig,” Ronson called out. “Bearing rate falling.” Seconds later he added, “Down shift in received frequency. Zig away.”

The Chinese vessel was making a course change.

Jerry Perez, the on-watch officer of the deck, looked over Ronson’s shoulder. “Confirmed contact zig. Zig away. Resume tracking.”

Perez looked around for a moment, confirming that his team was alert, each man doing what he was supposed to. Then he announced, “Steady course and speed. Let’s get a leg on this guy and see what he’s up to.”

Perez stood next to Glass but kept his gaze firmly on the fire control solution.

“What you thinking, OOD?”

“Skipper, it looks like Sierra Five-Five turned away and slowed. Best solution holds him at course two-two-five, speed two, range three-five hundred. He’s going nowhere fast.”

Joe Glass flipped through the screens on the control room sonar display to confirm what Perez was saying.

“Looks about right. Let’s stay broad to him and deep in his baffles for a few more minutes. Let the range generate out a bit while you firm up the solution, but do not lose contact. You are over-leading him right now, so you have a max cross-bearing range. Use that.”

Perez studied the line-of-sight picture and nodded.

“Yep, see that. I’d say we’ll need to maneuver in about ten minutes. I’ll come back around to a lagging line-of-sight. That will give me a cross-bearing minimum range to play with.”

Glass smiled. It was always nice to see training in practice. The Toledo had just begun a complicated new dance with her “partner,” and it was important that the other submarine did not even suspect that the waltz was taking place.

“Good. I’m going down to the wardroom for a cup of coffee. Call me if anything comes up. I can’t wait to see what this joker is up to.”

27

The Chinese battlegroup steamed through the pitch-black night in their typical loose diamond formation, clearly confident there was no threat imminent but certain that if anything should pop up out there, they were prepared to defeat it. The Hohhot, a Luyang III air warfare destroyer, sailed in the lead, a good two thousand meters ahead of the group’s flag ship, the spanking-new landing helicopter dock ship Sin Tzu. The Renhai, a brand-new guided missile cruiser, steamed about the same distance astern of the Sin Tzu. The Zaozhuang, one of two Jiankau II-class frigates, was on station to the starboard while her sister, the Nantong, was to the port, each also about two thousand meters away. The fast combat store ship Chagan Lake stayed close to the flag ship.

The night was peaceful, but the morning promised much action, mostly delivered by the battlegroup and with little or no retaliation expected. It would be time for revenge. Time to extract a measure of blood for the insult and injury that these savage goatherds had caused with their foolish attacks on assets of the People’s Republic of China. Finally, after much show, it was time to demonstrate the awful raw power available to the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The planning was complete. The thirty CJ-10 land attack cruise missiles were nestled snuggly in the Renhai’s VLS launchers, just waiting for their targets and launch orders. Fifteen Shenyang FC-31 stealth fighters, looking suspiciously similar to the USA’s F-35B planes, sat on the Sin Tzu’s flight deck, fully fueled and heavy with bombs, bullets, and missiles. The proper amount of information and indoctrination had been shared with each crewmember on every one of the vessels, all to ensure attention to detail and the proper amount of patriotic fervor. Everything was in place to deliver a devastating attack.

The mid-watch radar operator monitoring the Dragon Eye phased-array radar on the Type 52D destroyer Hohhot was the first to see the odd smudges suddenly muddy the edge of his display. He, however, had no idea what he was looking at. He yawned, rubbed his eyes, and looked again. It had been a long, boring, uneventful watch. His relief was probably only minutes away. But the pixelated blotch was still there. The operator frowned. It was now a wavy dark line, depicting something low down on the horizon, partially hidden in the backscatter and ground clutter from Socotra Island, which lay a few dozen kilometers to their southeast. The flickering return stretched across several kilometers but seemed to be less than a meter tall. And it was moving, but slowly. Doppler showed the line was flowing toward them at about sixty kilometers per hour. But the range was twenty kilometers.

The operator scratched his chin as he tried to deduce what he was seeing. Birds? A sandstorm? A swarm of locusts? Or simply a system fault? He just did not know. And at this point, he was hesitant to notify anyone and be reprimanded for distracting from preparations for their upcoming mission.

A quick check on the system diagnostics drop-down menu showed everything was nominal with the sophisticated equipment. A couple of dozen S-band transceivers were out of service, as was typical, but the array had several thousand more on each face. Target recognition algorithms were functioning normally, but they were coming up blank.

And so was the young operator. This blotch on his display was unlike any contact he had ever seen.

It took him a