The Art of War: A Novel Read Online Free

swept over Zhang. Ignoring the body on the deck, he seated himself in the captain’s chair.
    They were halfway there. Halfway. Now to plant the bomb.
    He reached for the book of charts they had used to navigate up Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore and flipped through it. He quickly found the one he wanted.
    Norfolk, Virginia. The biggest naval base on the planet.
    Zhang lit another cigarette and studied the chart, as he had dozens of times in the past month. There were, of course, no marks on the paper. Still, he knew every depth, every distance. His finger traced a course.
    There. Right there! That was where he and his men would plant the bomb.
    *   *   *
    Seven days later Ocean Holiday passed the Cape Henry light on its way out of Chesapeake Bay and entered the Atlantic. Lieutenant Commander Zhang steered a course to the southeast. A few degrees north of the equator, three hundred miles from the mouth of the Amazon River, on a dark night with no surface traffic on the radar, Zhang rendezvoused with a Chinese nuclear-powered, Shang-class attack submarine. Swells were moderate.
    Both the yacht and sub could be seen by satellites, of course—even through the light cloud layer, by infared sensors—but the chance of a satellite being overhead at just this moment was small, since the crew knew the orbits and schedules of most of them. The night and clouds shielded the vessels from anyone peering through an airliner’s window, which was the best that could be achieved.
    Captain Vanderhosen, the Ukrainian prostitutes and the Russian couple were dead by then and, like Lawrence, consigned to the sea in weighted sacks that Zhang had brought on this voyage for just this purpose. Demolition charges were set as near the keel of the yacht as possible and put on a timer, and every hatch on the vessel was latched open. The life rings around the top decks were removed. Four of the Chinese rode the ship’s boat over to the sub. One man brought it back for another load of people. Zhang Ping went with the final boatload of crewmen.
    He was standing on the sub’s small bridge when the demolition charges detonated and the yacht began settling. He stood watching for the four minutes it took for the yacht to slip beneath the waves on its journey to the sea floor eighteen hundred feet below.
    When the mast went under and there was nothing on the dark water to be seen by searchlight except a few pieces of flotsam and a spreading slick of diesel fuel that would soon be dissipated by swells, Zhang went below. Sailors from the sub chopped holes in the bottom of the ship’s boat and the flotation tanks that were built in under the seats. Then they cast it adrift and watched as it too settled into the sea.
    Sixty-five minutes after the sub surfaced, it submerged.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    Whoever rules the waves rules the world.
    —Alfred Thayer Mahan
    Six miles away and two hundred feet below the surface of the ocean, the officers and sonar technicians of USS Utah listened to the dead-in-the water surfaced Chinese submarine and the gurgling noise of the sinking yacht. They knew exactly what made the noises. And they wondered what was going on.
    Utah had picked up the Type 093 Shang-class sub as it exited the Chinese sub base at Sanya, Hainan, four weeks ago, and listened to her submerge. The American sub had fallen in trail about six miles behind her quarry and had no trouble maintaining that position. The Chinese sub was quiet, but that was a relative term. At 110 decibels, she was much noisier than Utah, which was a Virginia-class attack boat with all the latest technology. Utah was so quiet she resembled a black hole in the ocean and was undetectable by Chinese sonar beyond the range of a mile at this speed. She never once got that close.
    The American skipper was named Roscoe Hanna, and he was an old hand at following Russian and Chinese boomers, as well as conventionally powered Chinese Kilo- and Whiskey-class boats. This was the first time since