The Art of War: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

single day of it, for it would be all over too quickly. He visited every space in the boat every day, inspected, asked questions, praised, cajoled, encouraged, looked every one of his officers and sailors straight in the eyes. With the tight spaces, submarines were intimate places. There was no place to escape even if you wanted to. Roscoe Hanna loved the whole experience.
    Finally, one day off the Amazon, the Great Leap slowed to three knots and began a giant square-search pattern. The slow speed allowed her sonars to listen with maximum efficiency. Utah kept well away from her.
    On the surface, ships came and went occasionally. Single and double-screw freighters and tankers.
    On the night of the third day at this low speed, the Great Leap turned into the center of the search pattern. A double-screw small vessel was approaching from the northwest. The Utah sonarman on duty recorded her sound signature and assigned her a symbol.
    The Great Leap came up to periscope depth. She remained there for twenty minutes, then began blowing her tanks. The sound was unmistakable. Captain Hanna had the sound put on the control room loudspeaker, so everyone could hear it. There was no danger the Chinese boat would hear the noise that was now radiating from Utah since she was making so much herself.
    The small vessel rendezvoused, then killed her engines. The buzz of a small outboard engine came from that location. After a while sounds of small explosions, then the sinking sounds.
    Utah heard the prop of the Great Leap begin to turn and her ballast tanks flooding. A mile away from the sinking site, at a depth of two hundred feet, she turned to a heading of south and began accelerating.
    A day later it seemed likely she was heading back for the Cape of Good Hope, to round Africa and reenter the Indian Ocean.
    While the officers squabbled over the money in the destination pool—the junior officer was holding out for a right turn around Cape Horn and a transit of the Pacific, a circumnavigation—Captain Hanna composed a report to SUBPAC, with a copy to SUBLANT since he was now in SUBLANT’s ocean. The next day, after the Great Leap had slowed and cleared her baffles, then accelerated away, he rose to periscope depth and sent the encrypted report, recorded the messages waiting for him on the satellite, then set off again to follow the Shang-class attack boat … as it turned out, all the way around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and northward to Hainan.
    In the wardroom of the Utah a victor was named in the Acey-Deucy tournament, the Great Leap destination pool was awarded to the lucky winner, who had given the matter some thought and picked the Azores as his entry because it was close to Europe and a lot of other places, and another Acey-Deucy tournament was begun.
    *   *   *
    Utah ’s report of the Atlantic rendezvous and the subsequent sinking of the small surface vessel raised eyebrows at submarine headquarters in the Pentagon and in the Office of Naval Intelligence. This secret rendezvous was obviously for a purpose, but what was it? The National Reconnaissance Office was tasked to find satellite imagery that might be of help. When ONI finally received the sound signature of the rendezvousing yacht, the computer records from the acoustic arrays lying on the ocean beds and harbor entrances of the American East Coast were studied carefully. A candidate emerged. Ocean Holiday. She had cleared Norfolk in late March bound for Barbados. She never arrived there. Routine inquiries of port authorities around the Atlantic basin were negative. Cuba and Venezuela didn’t bother to answer the telex messages. Still, even if Ocean Holiday had visited those countries, she had left them and rendezvoused with the Shang-class Chinese attack boat just south of the equator, in midocean. And sank there.
    A covert operation? Was a Chinese spy taken aboard secretly in the United States? Presumably her