Sr. Capt. Chien Gan had long ago learned that two aspects of submarine life required lifestyle adjustment. The first was discipline. Not just military discipline, but chronometric discipline, the need to keep “surface hours.” In a world that was often without sunlight, where time zones were crossed and recrossed with some frequency, it was necessary to keep a schedule that resembled “a day.” Gan kept his shipboard clocks on Beijing time and conducted the ship’s day as if they were at home. If the senior captain allowed those boundaries to change and lapse, the crew would become disoriented. It would be subtle, but subtleties mattered in a submarine. No man was dispensable and no man could afford to become unfocused.
The other quality submariners required was patience. It took time to move from place to place. Surface ships could travel relatively quickly. They navigated on what was essentially a two-dimensional surface. Submarines moved in three dimensions, with haphazardly shaped cliffs and valleys as well as multidirectional currents and clouds of detritus that made travel hazardous. Slow travel was difficult; high speed was brutal. Wherein came the pressure of command, and of this command in particular. As the flagship of a new generation of submarines, the Destiny had to prove she could handle the dangers as well as respond efficiently and effectively to crises and emergencies whenever and wherever they arose.
Such as now.
Captain Biao had received a message from the deputy director of military intelligence in Shanghai, home of the naval intelligence division. He was to divert from his current course for a rendezvous in the Spratly Islands. The senior captain was standing at the ballast control panel in the Destiny ’s control room when the coded e-mail arrived. Chien had been watching the crew prepare for a fire-fighting exercise, one of two they conducted weekly. The control room, which also included the attack center—where Biao was seated—was located directly below the conning tower. Biao informed the navigator of the new coordinates before passing the printout to Senior Captain Chien. The pass-along was a courtesy; orders from headquarters were always implemented at once, and incontrovertible.
The rendezvous was to collect a passenger, a Ministry of State Security operative named Wu Lin Kit. The message contained no information about the man, which was not unusual. The MSS, the Guoanbu, was among the most secretive and influential organizations in the nation. The communique did not even tell the captain their destination. That would be provided by the operative.
Situations like this were always awkward. When an individual like Wu came aboard, he became the de facto commander, what they called an overcaptain. Like the senior captain, Yuen Biao was happy and honored to serve. But the presence of an overcaptain created conflict. A commander tried not to give an order that might be countermanded. And the crew waited a moment longer than usual to see if an order would be reversed. Both situations were counterproductive. If the overcaptain had his own personal agenda, he might also seek to humble the captain, assert his own command style immediately. Those situations did not happen between a captain and a senior captain because there were clear rules of conduct. With a Guoanbu operative the dynamics were sure to be very different.
Naturally, all of that would be managed. What would be of greatest concern and interest to Chien was the nature of the request. An order like this could be as simple as shuttling an individual from one country to another. But Chien didn’t believe that was the case. The senior captain had read the weekly intelligence briefing for the region. Reconnoitering operations were ongoing in the Spratly Islands. The operative in question was probably part of those. If he had been moved there as part of a phased shift to another location, the MSS would not have waited until now to turn the Destiny around. Something must have come up that demanded his attention. Also, the individual was not being moved the quickest way, which was by air. Whatever this was, either the operative had to be inserted somewhere clandestinely, or else he was being moved to study an activity at sea.
They would know soon enough. Right now the crew had a drill to conduct; it was a bad idea to lose sight of routine because something extraordinary had occurred.
The ballast officer indicated that the crew was ready to undertake the fire-fighting drill. Chien asked the team leader, one of the sonar operators, if he was ready. The young sailor made sure his infrared thermal imager was operational. That would allow the team to “see” hot spots and extinguish them. The other participating members of the drill had their masks, hoses, and fire extinguishers ready.
Captain Biao went on the intercom and made sure the rest of the ship’s crew were at their fire stations. In some cases that simply meant getting into the nearest doorways and bunks. In the event of a real fire, it would put them in places where the thermal imager operator would not mistake body heat for fire. Rescue units would also know where to find them.
The captain hooked back his sleeve and glanced at his watch. The team’s objective was to reach a fire aft—signified by an “X” made of red duct tape—at the electrical switches just forward of the turbine generator. They had to get there and put it out in two minutes. He pressed a red button to sound the fire alarm. The deep bell echoed everywhere, as if someone were banging the hull itself. The team of six raced through the hatch to the reactor compartment, the squad leader in the rear shouting to keep the others running. They ran in tight, hunched positions, hugging their gear in front, shifting this way and that so they could clear the narrow corridors as cleanly as possible. Alone among nature’s creatures, only humans could achieve this: chaos with a sense of purpose.
Senior Captain Chien remembered when he’d first participated in a shipboard fire drill, toward the end of his third week at sea. He had just gotten over the nausea that most new recruits suffered, not from the ship’s motion but from the recirculated air that often included petrol fumes, cigarette smoke, and rank seawater that spilled into the bridge hatch whenever they surfaced. Chien was in charge of two weapons-loading hatches when the captain, a four-foot-eleven martinet, ordered him to take a place in the squad. Chien was twenty-one. He had seen others run drills; he was confident he could do it. The submarine was a Han-class, nuclear-powered attack boat, 120 meters long. Chien had always had the sense that it was a fairly small vessel until he had to run from one end to the other, holding thirty pounds of oxygen tank and hose and hopping the lower lips of the hatchways with someone shouting “Fire! Fire! Fire!” in his ears, on an offbeat with the alarm. It was, in fact, a very, very large ship. Chien noticed door handles, pipes, ledges, and projections he had never seen before. He also felt them against his shins, hips, arms, and skull. It took several drills before the young seaman knew to avoid these things in the dark—which he had to do on his fourth drill.
Perspective changed, depending on circumstance. But a commander could never go wrong by depending upon a well-drilled team.
Which was why Chien hoped their diversion was simply an escort mission and nothing more. The agents of the Guoanbu were accustomed to working on their own, cutting their own paths.
Independence and submarines were not just a poor mix, they were a potentially deadly one.