Trouble
The Jin Wang was a 19,000-tonne bulk carrier. When she had cleared Beilun port the world had still been at peace, so Captain Li Zhaojin1 had no idea his ship was steaming straight into the edge of a war zone. Only when he stood on the bridge and saw a large foreign helicopter circling did he realise something was off. What in heaven's name was going on?
On the maritime channel, somebody kept shouting in heavily accented English. Li could pick out the rough sense, an instruction to stop the ship, but the rest he could not follow. He did not stop, but had the engines slow and waited to see. In all his sea-going career, the only such trouble he had encountered had been a single brush with pirates in the Gulf of Aden. The captain checked the satellite navigation and confirmed he was still in international waters, then had the second mate use the satellite phone to ring the shipping company and find out what on earth was going on. The duty officer at the company was as bewildered as he was.
On the horizon, a grey warship was emerging slowly. A not-small Indian warship, closing on the Chinese freighter at high speed.
Kirish was now standing with a stopwatch in hand, waiting for the Plank Shave to complete its illuminate-and-lock so he could time the targeting cycle. He had run several relay-targeting drills via the helicopter and they had all worked. The technique was less difficult than it appeared, since the helicopter was free of extraneous electromagnetic clutter overhead, and the Chinese freighter was so very large. Now, however, a problem appeared. The gun's fire-control system could not refresh target position promptly at fifteen nautical miles. The radar had to give way to the surface-search radar on the bridge top.
"Captain. Missile is on the target. The gun is on optical fire control for now, but the weather is good today." said the executive officer beside him.
"Surface-search radar takes too long to find the target." the captain said, watching the watch.
"Our helicopter relay is decent enough. We can sink her at a hundred kilometres without waiting for the ship's own radar to see her."
"Mediocre. Remember, in wartime an enemy air defence will not allow a helicopter to take its time targeting. Signal the fleet: Chinese freighter intercepted, slowed to four knots." the captain said. He wanted to know fleet headquarters' next step. If a boarding was wanted, now was the time. Otherwise the Sea King aloft would not have the fuel to remain on station.
"Captain. Signal from the helicopter. The vessel's deck is too cluttered for a direct landing."
"Acknowledged. Recall them." The captain swept the sky with his binoculars and finally found the helicopter in the distance.
"Communications?"
"Their radio has been on the whole time. No reply. I have run into this before. Chinese masters often do not understand English." said the XO.
"Signal from the fleet: do not board. Release her." A man from the cipher room hurried over and bent to the captain's ear.
"Goddamned lunatics." Kirish swore. He could no longer endure the games these distant New Delhi politicians were playing. Intercept, then release. A few months earlier, his ship had been searching the East African coast for pirates alongside three Chinese vessels. Now they were running petty stunts against a Chinese-flagged civilian. As an officer, he could not understand it.
"Why suddenly cancel the inspection?" the XO asked, casually.
"Maybe Singh lost his nerve at the last minute. Maybe he reckons the point is made. The Defence Ministry has always been impossible to read."
"Like that?"
The combat alarm on Mumbai had never been sounded; every officer on board had relaxed and was preparing to recover the helicopter. A morning spent on a fool's errand. Lunch was nearly upon them. The forward main gun's gunnery officer had grown careless. He had left the 100-millimetre mount's control room without authorisation, and had forgotten to alert the two gunners that the autoloader had a moment earlier rammed a shell into the breech which had not yet been cleared.
The gunner casually pressed the firing button (assuming, as in all previous drills, that the breech was empty). A vast crack stunned the captain on the bridge. Kirish looked down and saw the muzzle of the forward gun smoking. He swung the binoculars at once toward the distance. A column of water was rising near the Chinese freighter ten nautical miles out.2
"Damn it. Who gave the order to fire?"
"I don't know, sir."
Lin Huaisheng was still bent over his desk. These past days, given his specialism, he had been handed the work of vetting weapons supplied to Pakistan. He provided only advisory opinions, but for the first time in his career he felt he was being relied upon. He was now waiting impatiently for his predictions to come good, so he might have a chance to lay out his whole reading to his superiors. From the look of things, however, Prasad's seat as Chief of Army Staff remained firm. He somewhat regretted having pushed so hard at the time to prove a thing or other; he had spoken too absolutely. Xu Jingzhe had never liked intuition-based predictions. If you were lucky enough to be right, he would clap your shoulder and say you had picked up some of his real lessons. If you were wrong, he would tell you bluntly that the word "guess" did not appear in the intelligence analyst's dictionary, and that any prediction divorced from reality was simply, in his preferred phrase, a piece of shit.
Captain Ding from the General Staff hurried into the intelligence room. He whispered in Lin's ear: the Indians have fired on one of our civilian vessels on the high seas. Lin could scarcely believe his ears. Such a thing he had never imagined.
"How many rounds? Casualties?"
"Unclear."
"Could it be an accident?" Lin said. His instinct told him Singh was a gambler, not a madman.
"How would I know? By the way, what do you think happens next?"
"Accident or not, the diplomatic side will be a mess. But I will guarantee you this: if India thinks force can pressure us, they have miscounted. The picture will not move in their favour."
"Go on."
"Smaller neighbours of India may shrink before her armed strength. The Chinese character is different."
"You mean we eat soft food but not hard?"
"Hmph." Lin smiled and said nothing.
"But we only have two destroyers off the East African coast. Far too thin."
"No no. A counter does not necessarily require a warship standoff. Have a look at this. Pakistan's latest list of requested ground-force weapons and spares. Headquarters has me sorting these into urgency tiers." Lin produced a stack of paper from a drawer, more than a dozen pages thick.
Captain Ding took it and began leafing through. He found himself with growing respect for this intelligence officer brought in from a regional command. Within a few short days, the man's words now carried real weight. Of course, had this war not erupted, Lin Huaisheng would still be tucked away in some mountain valley as a staff officer whose farts made no sound.
1. Captain Li Zhaojin: Master of the Chinese-flagged bulker Jin Wang (literally "Golden Prosperity"), out of Beilun, the deepwater port complex at Ningbo. The Chinese source slips between 李兆金 and 李赵金 in the same scene; treat as a typo for the same character. The English uses a single canonical spelling. ↩
2. The accidental round: A neat piece of authorial mischief. Singh has spent the previous day arguing for, in escalating order, a boarding inspection, then forced course-change under exercise pretext, then a shot fired across the bow as a warning. Kahan has rejected each in turn. The order finally issued, "intercept and warn off," is rescinded after the helicopter cannot land. The captain stands down. And then, through pure crew negligence with the autoloader, exactly the round Singh had wanted three days earlier is fired anyway. The novel's repeated argument that escalation produces consequences nobody ordered is, in this scene, made literal. ↩