The Long-Wave Signal
Singh's call reached the Eastern Naval Command headquarters; the secretary told Vice Admiral Vijaypat, who was reading a report, that the Defence Ministry had an urgent matter for him. He thought it would be about the carrier-borne MiG fighters still overdue for delivery, but when he picked up the phone, Singh's subject took him by surprise. Singh told the vice admiral a piece of reliable intelligence: a Chinese nuclear submarine was hiding in the east-coast waters under his charge. This time Singh did not, as of old, carp fault-findingly at the navy's abilities; he only demanded that the Eastern Fleet find this submarine without fail and sink her without the least hesitation. The vice admiral questioned whether this was necessary, since that position had not yet entered territorial waters, and the two countries were not at war. Singh said it was the Prime Minister's wish, and that they must on no account indulge an enemy prying at India from so close a range.
Vijaypat thought a while; such talk, heedless of political risk, did indeed sound like the Prime Minister's style. Then he set out several plans. The first was to search with the anti-submarine helicopters already on hand at his base; the drawback was that such helicopters were not very good against a nuclear submarine that never broke the surface, the more so given the attenuation in the shallow waters off Chennai and the dwell time of a dipping sonar; to find a nuclear submarine within an uncertain area was no easy thing, unless one used active means to increase the detection range. The vice admiral hinted that they might use the active method of dropping bombs to make sound waves and sweep the area.
Singh voiced no view; he only waited for the vice admiral to go on. The other plan Vijaypat put forward was to use low-frequency communication to recall the attack submarine Chakra, which was at present watching the American fleet;1 this ex-Akula-class boat was a nuclear attack submarine Russia had designed specially for anti-submarine work, well found in propulsion, quietness and weapons, India's best anti-submarine asset. Only, at present no one knew Chakra's exact position; from the American fleet's movements it was reckoned to be near the Cocos Islands, and the trouble was that to recall her to head off the Chinese submarine would take time, the more so as long-wave communication was hard to keep secure. No sooner was this plan put forward than Singh rejected it; he had not the patience to wait so long.
So Vijaypat put forward a third plan: to move, from nearby Visakhapatnam, the newly refitted, home-built nuclear submarine INS Arihant to the search. From the situation, the enemy was in a state of blank ignorance, and Arihant would hold an absolute advantage in the search; and given her full grasp of the thermal layers and the local hydrography and geography, once battle was joined that advantage would multiply again. But the vice admiral did not forget to remind the Defence Minister that there was something not quite safe in this too, for Arihant's propulsion had great problems; a steam-valve accident in the secondary-loop piping last month had caused a steam leak that scalded two petty officers. Though the valve had been repaired, and the radiation level of the propulsion compartment was now tolerable enough, morale for the moment was low; and once a problem recurred, she could only run on auxiliary machinery or batteries.
To the vice admiral's surprise, it was this last plan that most interested Singh. But it was not all he wanted; he thought at once of running all three plans together, requiring the Sea King helicopters to launch first and act with Arihant, while the Chennai VLF station sent a signal and Chakra was recalled at the same time.2 But he vetoed the Sea Kings' method of making sound waves with bombs, for he felt the helicopters' anti-submarine ability was not yet reliable enough, and if it startled the snake it would be a disaster.
India's east coast, seventeen nautical miles southeast of Chennai. Sixty metres down.
Boat 411 had been running slowly here for several hours; and this while was very strange, for the surrounding waters had suddenly grown very quiet. On the electronic chart only a few small dots moved slowly nearby.
The drawbacks of staying in this area had already shown themselves. First, its value for gathering intelligence was slight. The Chennai VLF station had sent out no order at all; the Indian submarine fleet was small, and with the American fleet watching nearby, that they used no long-wave or ELF traffic was only to be expected; the naval movements were, one supposed, all conducted over encrypted VHF. For 411 to raise its electro-optical mast now to gather the surface radio traffic would land it in a very dangerous plight, and to little purpose besides.
As for sonar listening, it could only confirm that the American fleet had at last vanished; the water here was fairly shallow, with no suitable sound channel, so it could not effectively track the other warships going in and out of the Bay of Bengal.
"Comrade Captain, shall we move a little? Toward Visakhapatnam, to watch their submarines?"
The duty officer asked quickly, seeing Captain Ma Lin step into the command compartment once again.
"We cannot go north rashly; they have an Akula-class boat, very likely just there. Our task is not to probe their anti-submarine strength but to gather as much useful information as we can. Even if we move, we ought to move west."
Ma Lin picked up the intercom and was about to issue a new order when the sonar operator turned his head and waved a hand, signalling the captain and the others to be silent. The command compartment fell dead quiet at once.
Ma Lin leaned over the sonar operator's shoulder and saw no change in the acoustic trace ahead; the man must have heard some very faint sound.
"Cannot fix bearing or range, perhaps at one-four-five or two-one-five, very weak. Three times in all."
"What sort of sound?"
"Not clear yet; perhaps a few big fish leaping out of the water one after another, the sounds close together, or air-dropped sonobuoys falling into the sea."
"Wait and see; they may set off a device as well," Ma Lin said, dropping his voice. This was what he rather feared: if even the sound of a sonobuoy hitting the water could be heard, then the enemy's helicopter was all but overhead. Once the enemy used an explosive acoustic search, 411 would have nowhere to hide. This kind of sound search was very effective, able to fix even a submarine sitting motionless on the seabed, the more so given how far from ideal the water depth here was.
After a wait, nothing further happened; perhaps it had been misheard. Ma Lin walked round behind the sonar petty officer and looked at the acoustic trace; nothing abnormal.
"Perhaps some sound the fishing boats made," the captain said; they had been tracking a few fishing boats nearby. For twenty-four hours 411 had been trying to compute the tracks of their comings and goings from the ports on the chart, to check the accuracy of the inertial navigation, for it had been fully three thousand five hundred nautical miles since the inertial data were last checked against the BeiDou system, and in all that while the submarine had run underwater without ever raising a mast.
"That is possible; perhaps tuna they startled to the surface. But it seemed rather large," the listener said, unsure.
"Mm, better to keep further off from them, I think," Ma Lin turned and patted the duty officer on the shoulder. "Take special care of their trawl nets; to cause an international incident would be a disaster."
Ma Lin was just about to leave the command compartment when the duty cipher clerk from the radio room came in.
"Report, their VLF traffic detected."
He at once thrust a slip of paper into Ma Lin's hand.
The paper had only a very few characters on it: 1470 SATPURA3
Sink the Sheffield!
For the full account, see my short story "Cold Sea."
4 May, 7:00 a.m.
At the end of the runway of Argentina's Río Grande base, two Super Étendard fighters stood ready for takeoff. In the fighting of 1 May the air force had gained no advantage. So today the navy meant to use its secret weapon, the Exocet missile, in a fresh round of attacks on the British; but the effectiveness of these weapons was still an unknown, for an air-to-surface missile had never yet played a part in actual combat.
"Mercury's voice channel is on 77.9 megahertz," came fresh word from the tower.
"Understood," Lieutenant Commander Bedacarratz answered. He could not launch yet, for the track of the British fleet was still not certain; he had to await the search of the P-2 reconnaissance aircraft (callsign Mercury). Since the sinking of the General Belgrano, every Argentine pilot burned to take revenge; whether a chance would come today the lieutenant commander did not know, but his spirit was high, and the target in his heart was the core of the British carrier group: the carrier Invincible.
"Capricorn, word just in from the islands, the British have sent Sea Harriers to bomb Port Stanley airfield; Invincible must be hidden nearby."
"Understood." Lieutenant Commander Bedacarratz flicked the communications switch as he spoke. He was a little excited, for the Sea Harrier's combat radius was short, so the British carrier could not be hidden too far off.
"Mercury has tracked the Sea Harriers' return route. Bearing one-nine-five. Please reset your navigation route." More heartening news kept coming over the radio. The lieutenant commander turned his head, waved to Lieutenant Mayora in the wingman's aircraft behind to signal the action, then started his engines and slowly advanced the throttle.
Within a few minutes, the external compressed-air lines and cables were all removed.
"Capricorn requests immediate takeoff."
"Cleared for takeoff. Good luck to you."
The fighter shuddered slightly in the roar of its engines; when the revolutions passed seventy-five per cent, the lieutenant commander released the brakes, and the aircraft began to roll slowly forward. This was no very nimble aircraft, the more so carrying a heavy drop tank and an anti-ship missile. The lieutenant commander worked to hold it steady, waiting patiently for the speed to build. Only at the very end of the runway did he steadily haul it up; looking back, he saw the wingman had lifted off too.
South of the Falklands, the P-2 kept a distant, on-and-off radar contact with the British fleet. From the search there was at least one fairly large warship in the British fleet; but the P-2 dared not keep its radar on for long, for fear the British would sense the threat from a steady radar signal and take defensive measures.
The two Super Étendards flew toward the rough bearing Mercury gave; the target was very far off, so before the attack they had to take one aerial refuelling; at the same time, feint groups launched from other airfields had also taken off, their sole aim to sow confusion and draw the Sea Harriers over the British fleet, in their weary rushing about, away from the real direction of threat.
The refuelling took fifteen minutes; meanwhile, far off, Mercury switched its radar on to probe again, only to find the large target gone, replaced by two medium-sized targets.
"Aries, this is Mercury. No enemy carrier found; two medium warships still linger near the target area, by their size close to Type 42 destroyers."
"All right, leave them to us," the lieutenant commander answered, a little disappointed.
"We must return home. Good luck to you." Mercury's last message, its fuel spent.
The two fighters quietly dropped their height and flew on toward the last bearing the reconnaissance aircraft had given. That they could not catch the carrier was a real pity, but the lieutenant commander did not want to let the other British targets go either. If the British fleet lingered near the Malvinas, it might land on any lonely, desolate beach of the isolated islands, and then the thirty thousand cut-off troops on the islands would fall into a hopeless plight.
1. INS Chakra (恰克拉 / 恰卡拉): India's leased Akula-class attack submarine, built by Russia for anti-submarine work and India's best ASW platform, at this moment watching the American fleet somewhere near the Cocos Islands. The source spells the name two ways, and later calls the same boat 猎豹 ("Cheetah"), an apparent slip; Chakra is used throughout. ↩
2. The hunt and INS Arihant: Singh's answer is to run every method at once: the Sea King helicopters, the domestic nuclear submarine INS Arihant (歼敌者, "slayer of enemies," built at Visakhapatnam but plagued by a reactor secondary-loop accident that scalded two of her crew), a VLF signal from Chennai, and the recall of Chakra. He forbids only the helicopters' active bomb-search, for fear of startling 411 into flight. ↩
3. The intercept and the tie in: 411 intercepts an Indian VLF transmission reading only "1470 SATPURA" (INS Satpura is a Shivalik-class frigate), on which the chapter's main narrative breaks off. What follows next can only be described as odd: Chinese web novelists are known for their narcissism their thing of tying in unrelated stories to the original story as some form of metaliterary device. By plugging in his own short story "Cold Sea" (冷海), the author seems to be tying in the fate of the INS Satpura to be the same fate of the HMS Sheffield. Or, again, likely just a tie in for promotional purposes. ↩