Jake helped Olivia into a Spartan vinyl seat and placed her laptop on a foldout desk.
“The operations room is straight ahead,” Ye said. “I must go.”
Jake closed the door to the commanding officer’s quarters and knelt in front of Olivia. A purple stain blotted the outer layer of the gauze on her head.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s just a cut.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Everything’s just happening so fast,” she said.
Jake noticed a ball cap on the desk. He reached for it and slid it on her head. It was too wide until she stuffed her hair underneath it.
The cap had two large-font Mandarin characters embroidered over a handful of smaller ones.
“It says ‘Hai Lang’,” she said. “That means ‘Sea Wolf’. All Taiwanese submarines are named after the sea and a land-based predator, if you count dragons in that.”
“At least you’re starting to look less feminine,” Jake said. “The bandage is a nice touch, but a pair of baggy coveralls should finish you off nicely.”
She ignored him and slid a disk into the laptop. Her eyes sparkled as she read.
“Wow,” she said. “Rickets came through. I’ve got data on Hayat from A to Z. This is amazing.”
“Fine, I guess,” Jake said. “But I’ve got bigger problems at the moment. If I know Pierre, we’re taking on half the Chinese fleet by ourselves today.”
Olivia kept her nose angled toward the laptop. Jake opened the door and stepped out.
“See you,” Jake said.
She tapped the keyboard. He closed the door and left her to her own world.
He marched forward through a room with equipment that looked like controls and modules for radio and satellite communications. He then ducked through an ovular hatch into the Hai Lang’s operations room.
Six dual-stacked Subtics monitors spanned the left side of the room. He recognized one of the three men who filled half of the seats as Antoine Remy, Renard’s sonar expert. Short with a wide nose, Remy wore a sonar headset that made his head appear extra-wide. He reminded Jake of a toad.
Remy waved his hand but didn’t smile. The pre-battle atmosphere in the room was too businesslike for levity.
“Hello, Jake,” he said and turned back to his monitor.
The Taiwanese sailor seated beside Remy pointed and said words inaudible to Jake, and then he turned to another Taiwanese sailor. Jake surmised that the middle sailor was correlating sonar data with radar contacts as the ship navigated the channel.
Ahead, a single Taiwanese sailor sat at the front of the room jiggling a joystick that controlled the rudder. The seat beside him at the ship’s control panel was empty, and Jake realized that it would remain empty until someone needed to control ballast, stern planes, and bow planes once the Hai Lang submerged.
To Jake’s right, Renard stooped with his face in the periscope optics. His feet traced a semi-circle until the optics pointed backwards. A Marlboro wiggled in the corner of his mouth as he talked.
“Channel entrance range, mark,” Renard said.
The middle sailor at the Subtics monitors shouted in accented but confident English.
“Good fix,” he said. “Are we on track?”
Leaning over a horizontal screen to Renard’s right, one of the final two men in the room, a short Taiwanese sailor with a slumped body and thick glasses, tapped a magnetic pen against the electronic navigation chart. He stiffened his fingers over the chart and slanted his arm. Standing opposite the sailor, Lieutenant Sean Wu nodded.
“We’re twenty yards too far to the right,” Wu said. “We need to come left. Recommend five-degrees rudder.”
Renard peeled his eye from the periscope and reached above his head for a microphone.
“Jake,” he said. “We won’t need you until we’re submerged. I want you to study the battle plan. Over there.”
Renard aimed the microphone at the farthest Subtics monitor and then raised it to his lips.
“Does five degrees left rudder look good from up there?” Renard asked.
Commander Ye’s voice crackled from a speaker.
“Yes,” Ye said. “Helm, left five-degrees rudder, steady course zero-four-nine.”
Aside the ship’s control station, Jake saw sunlight peeking through an open hatch. He walked to it and glanced up at Ye’s shoes twenty feet above in the bridge.
“I thought you were in command?” Jake asked.
Renard kept his face to the optics.
“Consider Commander Ye a pilot for now,” Renard said. “Don’t worry, this ship is ours to fight.”
Jake sat at the forward-most Subtics dual-stacked monitor and console station. Two seats away, a sailor turned to him and frowned.
“Hello,” Jake said.
“Don’t waste your time,” the middle Taiwanese sailor said. “Petty Officer Zhu’s English is the worst on ship. Maybe the worst on the island. But he’s very good with the fire control system.”
“Thanks,” Jake said.
Jake had studied the Subtics system during his flights but needed to familiarize himself with it. Exploring, he tapped buttons.
Images and icons flew by his screen, and the system reminded him of the early stand-alone submarine tactical systems the United States Navy had introduced in the early nineties. The difference, he had read, was that Subtics was generations ahead in automation and integration.
The system allowed operators to read and operate all of the Hai Lang’s sensors and resources for detection, tactical data processing, navigation, external communications and weapon launching.
Where sailors of Jake’s past had to use manual intervention between each step, Subtics integrated the work. Aboard the Hai Lang, he expected less fumbling with placards, less fiddling with plastic trigonometric wheels, and less artistic work in the penciling of curvilinear sound propagation lines. As he scrolled through screens, Jake felt at one with the system.
He wondered if the Chinese sailors aboard the new Kilo class submarines had equivalent data processing, and he wondered which ship held the acoustic advantage. Data processing was irrelevant if there was nothing to process.
In submarine warfare, that meant sound and the acoustic advantage–who would hear whom first.
Jake found a screen that showed the decibel level of sounds emanated from the Hai Lang over all directions and multiple frequencies. He memorized which combinations of machinery operation created the least noise.
No reactor plant, he thought. Just run at a snail’s pace on the cruising motors, and we’re a silent ghost.
Next, he flipped to the best estimate of the sound profile of Chinese Kilo class submarines.
And we’re going to battle against ghosts, he thought.
Tapping the keyboard at his console, Jake called up a new view. A blue inverted triangle represented the Hai Lang. It overlay dozens of smaller blue inverted triangles. Jake threw his voice over his shoulder.
“What are the little blue triangles?” he asked.
The English-speaking Taiwanese sailor seated at the monitors leaned back and glanced at Jake’s screen.
“Mines,” he said.
“Mines?”
“Anti-submarine mines. They only attack targets below fifteen meters. That’s why we transit on the surface.”
“We have air superiority to the twelve-mile international water boundary,” Renard said. “We are at risk on the surface beyond that distance. We’ll dive eight miles from shore and slip into international waters.”
Tapping again, Jake called up a two-dimensional overhead view of a planned battle scene. He advanced it over time and watched Renard’s intentions unfold.
“Shit, Pierre,” he said. “I can’t tell if this is the most brilliant or most stupid battle plan I’ve seen.”
Renard’s voice echoed off the periscope.
“I’ve made a few assumptions about the Chinese doctrine of submerged battle and have placed some faith in Taiwanese technology, but it’s a sound plan.”
“What if it isn’t?”
“That’s the chance we take,” Renard said. “And after two days of arguing with a room full of Admirals to make them buy into it, I’d rather face the Chinese than try to have it changed. But if you see a flaw–”
“No,” Jake said. “No flaws. I just hope this little submarine can do everything it was built for.”