Read Online U.S.S. Seawolf by Patrick Robinson - Free Book Online

Mexico, before President Clinton held out the red carpet for China to learn anything she damn pleased, to the obvious fury of the Joint Chiefs, not to mention a whole generation of U.S. Navy admirals.
    Now, according to the Chinese, the new Xia was designed to be fast and silent, her ICBMs would work, and they would have a significantly longer range than the old ones. She also carried the very latest sonar. Would the U.S. really trade Taiwan for Los Angeles ?
    More important, so far as Judd was concerned, the new Xia was ready to begin her trials. The American satellites had been watching her for months, nearing completion up in the remote Huludao Yards, way up the Yellow Sea on the desolate eastern shore of Liaodong Bay. The Xia was the reason Seawolf had made the journey to Pearl Harbor in the first place. And last Saturday afternoon through its probing lens, the satellite had spotted the telltale infrared “paint,” the sign of heat inside the submarine. The Chinese had begun to take Xia ’s reactor critical, which explained the Americans’ hurry, leaving in the middle of the night.
    So far only Captain Crocker was privy to all of the information, and every 12 hours he was ordering Seawolf to periscope depth, to suck a fast message off the satellite, telling him whether the Xia was still testing her systems moored alongside in Huludao or whether she was at last heading south, into deep waters.
    Right now, with Judd Crocker and his team 1,300 miles out from Pearl, the Xia was still at her jetty, and Judd fervently hoped she would stay there until he had covered 3,000 more miles to reach the eastern waters of the Yellow Sea, where he hoped to pick her up as she steamed south, probably on the surface. The rest was going to be truly hazardous.
    The CO planned to brief his senior officers as to the precise nature of the mission. But first he was trying to familiarize himself with the vast but somewhat shallow waters of China’s submarine production area. The only available charts were Japanese, and their underwater surveys were, Judd thought, pretty unreliable. But the northern waters of the Yellow Sea have been for centuries almost bereft of foreign shipping, except by invitation of mainland China.
    Because it is essentially a cul-de-sac, there is literally no reason to go there. Running north from Shanghai, the Yellow Sea quickly becomes 300 miles wide, but after less than 200 miles it becomes bounded by South Koreato the east. Three hundred northerly miles later it runs into a choke point, only 60 miles wide, at the entrance to a massive bay stretching almost 300 miles northeast-southwest. There is no escape from the bay except back through the choke point.
    Way up to the north of that bay, on the borders of the old province of Manchuria, lies the great shipyard of Huludao, on the north side of a jutting peninsula, bounded by a gigantic sea wall. It is here that China builds her attack submarines. All five of the 4,500-ton Han-class (Type 091) guided-missile boats were constructed in Huludao. It was here that the original Xia itself was built.
    But Liaodong Bay is not much deeper than 100 feet anywhere, bounded as it is by great salt flats, so when an SSN leaves here it must not only run to the choke point on the surface, it must proceed south on the surface for another 400 miles before reaching any deep water whatsoever. The northern Yellow Sea is a strange place to build underwater warships. The weather in winter is shocking, the border of the snowswept plains of Inner Mongolia being only 100 miles away. Huludao possesses only one advantage, that of privacy, indeed, secrecy.
    Curiously, another of the major Chinese shipyards is also located up in those northern waters—the one at Dalian (Dawan), on the northern peninsula of the choke point, where they build most of the great workhorses of the Chinese Navy, the Luda-class destroyers.
    Judd stared at the chart, trying to put himself in the Chinese captain’s mind: What