A Trap
Ma Lin walked slowly back into the command compartment. The men watched him. They had expected to be turning for home within a few days, but the captain's expression said something had changed.1
"The Indian Navy fired on one of our cargo ships. New fleet orders. Make for the central Indian Ocean at best speed and rendezvous with our Gulf of Aden destroyer flotilla."
The compartment fell silent.
"Captain, our hydrographic and bathymetric data on the Indian Ocean are very thin. A surveillance task against the Indian Navy seems somewhat…" said the navigator. He had a point. Without a complete picture of the water column and thermal layers, a submarine running submerged was at a serious disadvantage.
"I think it makes things genuinely interesting. We can use the chance to see whether our peacetime training holds up in real conditions." Ma Lin said.
"All right. Up to periscope depth first. Get the antenna out and pull the area broadcast. Navigation, find a satellite and correct accumulated INS error. Political officer, get the Indian naval order-of-battle file out of the library. We will all bring ourselves up to speed."
"Routing?"
"Time is short. We must enter the Indian Ocean as soon as possible. No leisure to swing around Indonesia. The Strait of Malacca is the route. There will be a way. Wait and see."
"Malacca is too shallow, with no thermocline. Neither favours a boat as large as ours staying covert. India also has a great deal of acoustic equipment in the Andaman Sea. If we go around northern Australia, the depths there are more favourable, and we can slip into the Indian Ocean unannounced." said the political officer beside him. This was his concern. The submerged displacement of attack submarine 411 was over 6,000 tonnes; not easily threaded through the Strait of Malacca, where the average depth ran under 40 metres.2 If they were detected immediately upon entry into the Indian Ocean, every subsequent operation would be on the back foot.
"Let's prepare both options. Bring the heading round to 190 first. Loiter off Jakarta. If a large merchantman or tanker comes by under whose acoustic shadow we can shelter, we slip through Malacca with her. If not, we take the long way south of Sumatra."
"That can be accepted." Political Commissar Su Changjin assented to Ma Lin's plan. If they could lurk under a large vessel and creep into the strait, they had a good chance of evading the Singaporean ASW patrol craft. But identifying such a vessel by sonar alone, submerged, was difficult; better to read the name and flag through the periscope and infer from there the likely route.
"Right. Engineering, ahead two-thirds, course 195." the captain ordered. As the helmsman moved the wheel, a new track began to extend on the heading display on the bulkhead.
"Down 30 degrees, flood the main ballast tanks, descend to 150 metres."
At PAF Peshawar, Group Captain Sami, in his role as commanding officer of No. 26 Squadron, was summoned by Major General Islam to a closed meeting. Of interest: Major Song Ning of the People's Liberation Army was also seated in the room. He did not greet Sami. He was clearly still angry about the previous business.3 The agenda was how to hit back. The first item, raised by the major general himself, concerned the increasingly obvious threat from Indian AWACS.
"Gentlemen. To my knowledge, India has now moved all three of its A-50 AWACS to Uttar Pradesh. The exact airfield is still being investigated. These AWACS now pose a significant threat to us." the major general said. The squadron commanders below him did not look enthusiastic. Nobody picked up the thread.
"With our equipment, is there any way of taking one down?" the major general continued.
"I think it entirely unrealistic." Group Captain Sami said directly. "Technically impossible." A bucket of cold water poured over the major general. The other squadron commanders nodded vigorously, agreeing with him.
"There is no precedent in the history of air combat for a successful AWACS engagement. We have ready means to attack ground radar sites. The AWACS is a mobile platform. You know it is constantly moving, so the proposition is utterly unrealistic. What we should worry about now is our own AWACS. India's Phalcon has a substantially greater search range than ours, so they have the technical basis for a strike on our AWACS." Sami went on, voicing his view. He had clearly thought all of this through before coming. Islam could only nod along; he was setting great store by Sami's opinions now.
"All the same: fifty-five per cent of forward bases in Sindh and Punjab have been destroyed. What do you propose we do?"
"Endure. We do not have the strength to confront India in full. Only wait for our allies to transfer the new equipment to us; that will take time. For now, as long as the Indians keep crossing the border to attack us, we can use our advantages in ground radars and aircraft range to counter-punch and grind them down. The Indian Air Force's precision-strike performance these past weeks has been mediocre. As stocks dwindle, accuracy will fall further still."
"That may be so. But the army is anxious that the Indian ground offensive is imminent. Which is presumably why they keep going at the dams on the Jhelum."
"My view: the dam needs an AWACS keeping watch on it at all times, alongside a few additional mobile ground radar sites. An ordinary attack will not damage that dam. A squadron of Su-30s, however, can drop more than a hundred tonnes of bombs in one pass, and the result then becomes uncertain. In fact, I believe the unit they will commit is the No. 31 Lion Squadron's Su-30s."4
"Ah. We have just received an FD-2000 air-defence system.5 I will recommend headquarters deploy it nearby. Outside the Indian Air Force's expectations, perhaps. We may catch them in an ambush."
"The Phalcon system is excellent at giving early warning of ground SAM radars. Even without AWACS support, given the technical level of the Lion Squadron's Su-30s themselves, a few SAM battalions will struggle to constitute a threat." the group captain said.
"What is your suggestion, then?"
"Perhaps my squadron can lure the Su-30s into your trap. By the time the SAM radar lights up, they need to be in a place from which they cannot escape."
"Just like that?" The major general was startled.
"Hardly just like that. The Lions are famously cautious. Drawing them in is no easy thing. At the smallest hint of danger they ditch their bombs in the border mountains and run home. So…"
"Go on."
"So we have to let their radars see our type clearly, and confirm they are facing an aircraft without medium-range missiles. That distance is roughly 35 kilometres. They will then attempt an R-77 or R-27 launch. If I turn and run in time, the range is a touch long for them."
"They will fall for it?"
"In theory, yes. If we can lure them into the centre of a SAM envelope, we may bring down several."
1. Submarine 411: A Chinese nuclear-powered attack submarine of around 6,000 tonnes submerged displacement, identified later in this chapter. The hull number and tonnage point to a Type 093 ("Shang"-class) boat: the People's Liberation Army Navy's first generation of indigenously designed second-generation SSNs, with the lead unit commissioned in the mid-2000s. The novel does not name the class explicitly, but the displacement figure is unambiguous. ↩
2. The Strait of Malacca for a 6,000-tonne SSN: Charted depths along the international shipping fairway in the Strait of Malacca run roughly 25 to 27 metres in the shallowest passages near One Fathom Bank, with Singapore-side approaches deepening into the South China Sea. A submarine of this size cannot transit fully submerged; even running at periscope depth she leaves a substantial mast and exhaust signature. The political commissar's concern is well founded; the captain's preferred solution is the classic one of running shallow under the acoustic shadow of a large surface vessel. ↩
3. Song Ning's anger: A reference back to Chapters 26–31, in which Sami used Song Ning and his fellow PLAAF J-10B delegation members at PAC Kamra as cover and decoy in a series of engagements against the Indian Air Force, without consultation. Song Ning was wounded by shrapnel in the Kamra raid and his fellow officer Zhao Lin took heavier wounds. The two have not spoken since. The current scene puts them at the same table for the first time. ↩
4. The Lions' Su-30s: A reference back to C47N2: No. 31 "Lion" Squadron is the IAF Su-30MKI unit notorious within the PAF for its zero-loss record across a decade in which the IAF lost more than a hundred aircraft. Sami's reasoning is that for a politically demanding strike on an internationally protected target like Mangla Dam, the Indian Air Staff will commit precisely this squadron, both for raw bomb tonnage and for political deniability if anything goes wrong. ↩
5. FD-2000: The export designation of China's HQ-9 long-range surface-to-air missile system, broadly comparable to the Russian S-300P family. A semi-active homing missile fired from a vertical-launch transporter-erector-launcher, with the system's HT-233 phased-array engagement radar typically at the formation centre. Pakistan's procurement of the FD-2000 was widely discussed in the open press during the period the novel addresses, but the details of any actual transfer have remained closely held. ↩