Chapter 28

Shanghai, China

January 17

In the early morning hours of January 17, a flash high-priority message reached the Central Shanghai Port Control, located in the Xinjian Port on Choming Island. Choming is a large island located in the middle of the Yangtze River and abutting the Yellow Sea – or the East China Sea as Westerners call it. The Chongming Islands are a smaller island group between Choming and the Shanghai mainland.

At 0200 local time, the following message was received:

From: East Coast Defense Headquarters, Admiral Sen Commanding

To: Central Shanghai Port Control

Special alert to Port Control. A possible missile attack from an unknown hostile power is possible in the next six hours.

All traffic north and west of Chongming Island at 31º29'26.7" N 121º30'42.8"E will proceed upriver to at least Nantong. Set anchors for typhoon conditions.

All traffic south and east of that point will proceed to the vicinity of Sheshan Island.

Other than rebroadcast of this message, there will be no radio traffic by any vessel.

Naturally, this caused quite a stir among the night shift at Port Control. Some wanted to contact the Director of the Port before acting on the message. The Lieutenant Director, who was on the graveyard shift, however, ordered that the message be relayed to all ships in port before notifying the Director. The Director, disturbed in the middle of a comfortable night, said he would be in within the hour.

'All' ships included the Changchun, a Type 052C destroyer, code named by NATO the Lanzhou Class destroyers, and two riverine patrol boats of the PLA Navy (Peoples Liberation Army Navy). The Wan-tzu, a small riverine customs boat, was tied up at the Yongtai Dock; a message sent directly to the Wan-tzu told her commander to remain docked until the emergency had passed. The Shen-ba was maneuvering near the Hushan Expressway toll bridge on the north side of the islands, and was ordered to herd all nearby traffic out to sea and the Sheshan Island safety zone.

The destroyer Changchun was anchored between Changxingxiang Island and Hengshaxiang Island, the two main islands of the Chongming group. She carried a potent array of ship-to-land or ship-to-ship cruise missiles; she was armed with a Type 210 100mm gun and two Type 730 30mm close in weapons systems. She also had 6 torpedo tubes and boasted a Kamrov Ka27 helicopter equipped for ASW (Anti-Submarine Warefare): a full load of 6 sonar buoys and 6 ASW torpedoes.

She copied, of course, the message from Shanghai Port Control, but she had received – seconds before – a direct message from Admiral Sen. The Changchun was ordered to come to battle stations and to proceed at maximum speed toward Sheshan Island. She was to immediately begin long range scanning of the skies to the north and east; she was going to be Shanghai's earliest warning of the exact direction of the attack. When the incoming missile or missiles were detected, she was to attempt to intercept them. Lieutenant Commander Sung, commanding officer of the Changchun, had never heard of Admiral Sen, but the message protocols were correct, and he knew how to follow orders.

Thirty meters below the surface of the Yangtze River, the fast attack sub Missouri was in anything but 'fast attack' mode. The Mo was creeping along only five meters off the bottom – or where her commander, Captain Stennison, thought the bottom might be – at a speed designed to cover the twenty nautical miles between where he started and where the Huangpu flowed into the Yangtze, where Mo was supposed to rendezvous with Chseterfield and her people.

He only had his ears on – meaning only passive sonar – but didn't have any active sonar. His sonarman told of many ships within range heading out to sea, quickly, overhead. Stennison was staring at the black-on-black of three different computer screens. They showed the images that his out-hull digital cameras would see. Navy lingo had started calling them OSHA cameras – semi-officially for OutSide Hull Activity – but really as a poke at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors that were rapidly becoming ubiquitous in the business world.

The camera showed only the blackness of underwater before sunrise. The OSHA camera had light systems, but Captain Stennison wasn't using them.

At the speed of the Missouri, she made very little sound as her propellors churned their way through the murk of the early hours. Only twice did the Mo hit a submerged something, and the something was brushed aside by the massive submarine with only a few clunks and clangs on the hull.

At 0215, local, the sonarman told the captain quietly that there were eight or nine contacts above, and that one of them was generating turns (of its propeller) at military speed. Probably it was a Lanzhou Class destroyer, running both screws at flank speed.

"Make that target Alpha," said the captain quietly. Everyone quietly set about entering the contact's position data into the Mo's targeting systems. Just in case Mo needed to fight her way out of trouble.

At 0216 sonar notified the captain that Alpha was heading out to sea. At 0217 he confirmed that Alpha target was going away from the Mo.

"Keep on him until he's out of range," Stennison said, unnecessarily. Sonar would keep on all active targets until he couldn't any more.

Six experienced submariners on the command deck of the Missouri, from Captain to Master Chief Petty Officer, took a deep breath almost simultaneously.

The special investigators from Colonel Sun's team had gone home for the night. Not much would happen overnight, and the Fa's bodies were shipped off to the morgue for final investigation.

It was dark in Shanghai. The city's lights were dark, except where hospitals and police stations had backup generators. All was quiet at #17, Highway of the People, and the lights were on.

A message flickered on Dr. Fa's command console. No one was there to read it. If someone had read it, it said:

To: Father

From: Chiang

Early activation to take advantage of blackout.

You see, Dr. Fa had an offline, backup copy of Chiang, loaded onto a small mini-mainframe – or a big desktop. It was an older generation HP 3000 that the Chaing unit had bought from a Hong Kong toy manufacturer at a surplus equipment auction. The HP 3000 was first made in 1972 and was roughly the size of a refrigerator. It didn't have any fast internet connections, it sent and received data via a 1200 baud acoustic modem ... but it still worked.

Who wouldn't keep an extra copy? It was the work of a lifetime. The computer was only connected to the LAN – it was called a minicomputer when it came out and it was much smaller than the room-sized mainframes. And that was connected to the outside world only by the thinnest of connections.

Dr. Fa hadn't mentioned it to his – what would you call them? His rescuers? His abductors? His fellow travelers? They weren't here for Chiang, after all. His exfiltration from China was the only objective he knew about.

As the power slowly came up throughout the night, in one part of Shanghai or another, Chiang loaded himself into various little computers across the city. None of the desktop PCs that he found on the local net was big enough to run Chiang, but he maintained himself in snippets of code that ran silently in the background; they were waiting for the internet. The internet nodes were not up, cutting Shanghai off from the rest of the world. That was the good news ... and the bad news.

The good news was that Chiang was set loose only on the computers in Shanghai.

The bad news was that Io didn't know about it yet, and if she had known about it, she couldn't have done anything about it. The stripped down version of 'Io' that was now 'Chiang' on the Yinhe-IV super computer mainframe was directed by her programming to contact Io-main before attempting any other action.

0600 hours, January 17

Off the confluence of the Huangpu and Yangtze Rivers, six black scuba hoods bobbed to the surface of the river and looked about. They were the five best underwater action men on the Missouri, plus the boat's XO, Lieutenant Commander Martin Helmsmann. They were armed with knives and semiautomatic rifles specially prepared for operating 'wet.' They wore full face masks, which allowed them to talk on the throat mikes they had, and each was connected with the others – and the Mo – via ITE hearing equipment.

Two hundred fifty meters to the south, the lights of Shanghai were shining everywhere in the pre-dawn hours. In the river itself, the world's busiest port was strangely quiet. Off to the north, the shoreline was visible and the lights there shone like a line of white mini-Christmas lights.

The Christmas lights were broken only where the swimmers could barely make out the outline of the video mast of the Missouri, cutting through the water. The ship herself was just at what used to be called periscope depth. Nobody had come up with a better name for it, so the Navy was still using that term, even though no modern sub had a periscope any more.

Three of the heads turned toward the Huangpu and looked for the zodiac they were expecting. A click from one of the others called attention to his watch sector. A triad of small one-person boats were heading directly toward the Mo. They were shallow draft boats with a single lateen sail. The design of the craft probably had not changed in 500 years. Fishermen, who'd likely never even heard of a marine radio, much less owned one – peasants in China didn't deal with the modern world, much.

It was unlikely they'd actually hit the video mast of the Missouri and the boats could sail right over the massive hull of the sub without harming anyone or anything.

If they ignored the zodiac. Three clicks had most of the swimmers turn toward the Huangpu. The team's second in command, CPO Roberts, kept watch on the fishermen.

"Follow," was the only word said by the team leader. All six heads submerged and swam toward the zodiac. Its small propeller could not be heard at this distance.

"Three fishing boats heading 000 from you. Advise you drop mast and maneuver 200 yards at course 260. Hold redeployment of mast for my signal," said the sub's XO, Lt. Commander Martin Helmsmann.

Inside the Missouri, the Captain immediately turned his video feed to look at 000 relative – straight up the river. It had been scanning the Huangpu, with its night vision enhancement, looking for the zodiac. He immediately recalled the video mast and began to move the sub in a slow circle to the left.

"Rudder hard port, make your speed dead slow, maintain periscope depth," he said quietly to his helmsman. And yes, the irony of his XO's last name had not escaped him, not this time nor for the last 15,000 times. It was strange to hear the Master of the Boat (the senior Master Chief on board), echoing his instructions to the helm, instead of his XO. Strange but not unusual.

Captain Stennison restrained himself from a chuckle that would have been out of place. Captain Kirk of the original Star Trek show would have been on the away team personally, with his second in command. Idiots. Take a multi-zillion dollar starship and leave nobody in charge, while the captain and first officer are out doing whatever. Well ... it was a TV show. What do you expect?

The submarine Missouri, SSN-780, started to turn as the current of the Yangtze took hold of her. She was 377 feet long, 34 feet wide, had a 32 foot draft, and weighed 780 tons. The Yangtze flipped her over to port like a matchstick.

After a few seconds of being toyed with by the Yangtze, Stennison said, "All right, rudder amidships. Lets slip into the current quietly. Set your course 180 from the previous course – make it 135 true for the open sea. Engines reverse at station-keeping revolutions," he said. That would take some time, because engineering would have to coordinate with electronics to determine their current speed. Then they have to set the revolutions of the props to counteract the river current. Then they'd sit quietly underwater, and wait.

Above the Missouri, 75 yards from the triad of fishing boats, and 3 feet underwater, the six scuba-equipped men swam for the last known position of the zodiac. On a signal from the XO, the men surfaced, reoriented themselves on the inflatable and swam toward it. It was only 10 feet away.