by David Poyer
Dan nodded. He huddled with the exec for a few minutes, discussed messing on station, getting everyone fed during Condition Three ABM. Then went back to the command desk, and settled in as Fang let himself in the aft door. “Captain. I was about to call for you.”
“I was looking for you, too.”
“Let’s put our heads together.” He called Staurulakis over too. “Okay, Chip, want to kick off? Oh, by the way—great work getting us linked in. This is really going to help.”
Fang half-smiled thanks, then went sober again. Looking at a black wheelbook, he laid out the situation in dry sentences. The ROC Navy wanted to take action to break up the invasion force while it was loading in mainland ports. The Republic of Korea might be offering a surface task group to help.
Dan blinked. This was gutsy. Maybe seeing how Zhang had kicked the acquiescent and pacifistic Filipinos in the teeth was wising up the other regional allies.
Fang said, “For obvious reasons, even if it is a combined force, a Taiwanese admiral must be in command. Admiral Hsu has been nominated to lead the raid. His Korean counterpart would be Admiral Jung.”
“Just a sec,” Dan said. “That wouldn’t be Jung Mun Jun, would it?”
“I believe that is his full name. You know him?”
“I do. From an exercise that … got complicated.”
“I see. However, the Koreans have received a note from Beijing. Their participation will be regarded as an act of war. So it is up in the air as to whether we will actually see reinforcements.”
Dan nodded. The artichoke strategy. Peel off allies one by one. Hitler had employed it, with stunning success … until he bit off more leaves than he could chew. “Okay, we’re en route to defend Taipei. But I don’t want to sit on my thumbs waiting to be attacked. Chip, can we organize some form of interoperability training with your submarine and air?”
“I can look into it.”
“Please. Cheryl, Matt, see if you can staple together an emergency plan, at least, for how the task group can help in case China actually tries to invade. No point guarding the Miyako Strait if we lose Taiwan. Make sense?”
Fang looked doubtful. “You have orders to do this, Captain? So far, the United States has avoided any overt help to the Republic of China.”
“No, and I don’t plan to ask permission. I’ll beg forgiveness afterward.”
He eyed the screen. Operation Sheng Chi was rolling out. Years in the preparation. A skillful game of Go that blended military moves, diplomatic bullying, and China’s overwhelming land army. And once again, the democracies—optimistic, hedonistic, all too ready to look away from any threat—were going to have to play catch up.
How long had the Peloponnesian War lasted, between Athens and Sparta? Twenty-seven years. This wouldn’t run nearly as long. Not with modern armaments. But it could change the course of history just as much.
* * *
THE first missile rose at 1610, 4:10 P.M. local. Savo was still an hour from station, but the missile warning buzzered as ALIS locked on.
Dan was by the scuttlebutt, eyeing a patch on the black-painted bulkhead where a 9mm bullet had punched into the spall liner. Where his first exec had threatened everyone in CIC but, in the end, shot himself. Intentionally or not, they’d never know.
He jerked his mind back. Mills had taken over TAO. He ran his eyes over the bent heads along the consoles. Yeah. Noblos might not think so, but he thought he had the first team on deck.
Someone had turned on the audio from the SPY-1; a familiar crackle, like popping popcorn. The beam going out, five times a second.
“Sir, cuing from ROC air defense,” the Terror called. “Suspected launch. Vicinity of Fujian.”
Mills bent to the keyboard and put the raw radar output up on the rightmost display. The spoke-like beam was locked on the Chinese coast, its amber rays shifting back and forth along the narrow arc of the antimissile coverage.
A glowing dot blinked on above a scatter of mountain return. Terranova dragged in the designation hook to snag it. “Profile plot, Meteor Alfa. Altitude, angels twenty … twenty-five … angels thirty. Very fast climbout … first-stage separation.”
“Classifies as a DF-11,” Mills murmured. “Solid-fueled. Two-stage. Designate hostile.”
Dan nodded. “Concur.” The rapid climbout gave them even less time to plot an intercept. But Fujian was far south of Savo’s coverage. Given the DF-11’s limited range … He said into his mike, “I doubt that one’s gonna be IPP’d at Taipei.”
“Concur with that, Skip,” said Wenck.
The horizontal velocity callouts began to flicker. Nosing over already. Yeah, aimed at Taiwan’s west coast. Dan checked the gun radar. Shorter range than the massive phased arrays, but he hated not being able to see behind him. He clicked to another circuit and checked that the antitorpedo gear was in self-defense mode, just to be sure. In case one of those missing Songs tried to clobber him from behind.
A second buzzer sounded. Then a third. More contacts winked on, near where the first had appeared.
Then, suddenly, many more. Eight. Nine … He sucked a breath and hit the lever on the 21MC. “Bridge, we have TBM attacks starting on Taiwan. This thing’s going hot. Pass to all units Steeplechase. We’re gonna be busy in Combat.”
“Bridge aye.”
He tensed, but after ten pips, they stopped appearing. Just the first salvo? One battery’s missiles being fired, from TELs?
The ovals of the IPPs, the predicted impact points, blinked into existence as the seconds crawled by. More or less as he’d expected, they overlay the early-warning radar site at Leshan Mountain and the military airfields on Penghu Island. Mills kept passing information to the task group, but Dan tried to hover above the action. Time to start letting go, allow Cheryl to run the ship while he monitored the big picture.
Which reminded him … “Bridge, CO; XO up there?”
“Yessir, Captain, standing by. Want her on the bitch box … I mean, the 21MC?”
“No, just hadn’t heard from her for a while.” He double-clicked off.
* * *
FIFTEEN minutes into the attack, a single missile came up north of the previous launching points. Terranova designated it Meteor Kilo. It climbed as fast as the others, but the horizontal vector was different. Angled, possibly, toward Taipei.
Dan clicked to the Combat circuit. “Set Circle William. Launch-warning bell.” He reached for the covered voice net, then saw Mills was already passing it to the rest of the task group. He snapped to the Weapons circuit, and got the chaff and decoys ready to deploy.
“IPP coming up!” Terranova yelled. Dan squinted at the screen. It wasn’t a point yet, of course. Only an oval overlay on the geo plot. With each recomputation, it shifted. Clicking east, then south. But contracting with each sweep.
More and more clearly, centered on the capital.
Over the next minute, Terranova refined the solution and designated the target to two Block 4s in the forward magazine. Dan groped into the neckline of his coveralls for the firing key. “Stand by to take Kilo. Two-round salvo.”
Beside him Matt Mills was going through the checklist, listening to responses. “Launchers to ‘operate’ … Set up to take Meteor Kilo. Two-round salvo. Sound warning bell forward. Deselect safeties and interlocks. Enable battle short. Stand by to fire, on TAO’s command.”
Dan pushed back from the table, letting Mills run it. Bumping what was happening against his ROEs, his other guidance, and the common sense a commander was supposed to have. As well as trying to guess what the other side had in mind.
For just once, the situation seemed clear, which in itself was enough to set off his own personal alarm. The oval of the IPP kept shrinking. It was definitely aimed at the city.
But why had they only fired one missile?
That couldn’t be a serious attack. Unless Meteor Kilo was nuclear-tipped, which seemed unlikely. The enemy must know Savo was on station here. That she could intercept a single-round
attack. And that if she didn’t, the city’s own, closer-range Patriot batteries would.
Obviously, it was either some kind of message, or a bid to deplete their magazines before the real attack started.
But just as obviously, whatever the enemy’s aim, his own response was clear. And for once, his orders and his personal druthers coincided.
He couldn’t let a missile fall on a city.
He fitted the key into position as he reported the launch and his intentions to Fleet, tersely, not waiting for a response. He flicked up the clear plastic switch cover. Snapped the toggle to the FIRE position. “Authorized,” he announced.
Next came the same long, seemingly endless pause endured at every firing. No more than three seconds, yet feeling eternal.
The vent dampers whunked shut. The ventilation sighed to a stop.
A rumble built, growing until it shook the steel around them. Hot gas flared incandescent in the forward deck camera.
“Bird one away. Stand by … bird two away.”
The symbols left Savo’s circle-and-cross, blinking into blue semicircles as they gained speed. Dan said, “TAO, inform PacFleet, two Block 4s fired against a presumed DF-11 or DF-15 with IPP on Taipei.”
Terranova chanted, “Stand by for intercept, Meteor Kilo … stand by.…”
“Intercept … now,” called Wenck.
Dan squinted up at the display as the blue and the red callouts merged. The brackets jerked off the hurtling missile. Tracked back. Then hunted back and forth, as if unclear what they were supposed to be looking for.
“Return’s going mushy.”
“Ionization trail. Missile breakup.”
Sighs around the space. Dan checked with Slaughenhaupt again, ensuring that the chief was keeping a weather eye around them. When he tuned back in, the last traces of the hot, electrified gas that marked the reentry of the warhead were fading from the screen. “Our first round connected,” Mills said.
“Good work,” Dan said, but thinking, We expended two rounds against one of theirs. They’ve got over a thousand of the things, plus hundreds more in their production lines, probably.
Not a reassuring exchange ratio.
* * *
OVER the next hours they stayed on alert, but although warheads continued to fall on air bases, communication nodes, artillery parks, and the radar and Patriot sites that lined the west coast, no more came their way. The buzzer went off for outgoing missiles, too. The island was retaliating with a strike on the mainland’s signal intelligence station at Dongjing Shan. Taiwan’s missiles were smaller than the mainlanders’, but Dan had no doubt they’d be more accurate. One by one, radars went down as they hit.
But the air was boiling behind the coast. Scores of aircraft were rising from fields, joining up into flights, orbiting just out of range of the Taiwanese defenses.
“They’re generating a major air campaign,” Amy Singhe noted, behind him.
He glanced up at her profile. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, she reminded him more than ever of Kali, the avenging Hindu goddess. All she needed was a necklace of skulls. “Looks like it,” he allowed. “You passed that to Fleet, correct?”
“Yes sir. We going to take them on?”
“Not in our guidance, Strike Officer. Hold the strait, defend the city. That’s the mission, so far.”
“The time to strike was before they attacked.”
“No argument, Amy. Maybe the thinking is, see how they do on their own before we get involved.”
On the screen, the multiples of red carets—hostile aircraft—had merged into distinct groups. Now they began tracking east. “One headed for Penghu Island,” Mills muttered beside him. “One for, looks like, the south aircase cluster. One for the middle of the west coast. That northern gaggle’s for the airfields west of Taipei.”
Dan rubbed his face. His eyes hurt, but he couldn’t pull his gaze from the events unfolding on the screen. As the red carets crossed the coast, blue semicircles winked on above the mainland. The defenders’ numbers seemed pitifully few, considering what was coming at them.
“Never have so many,” Mills muttered.
“Yeah. The Battle of Britain all over again. On the other side of the world.”
“And both sides speaking Chinese.”
More blue contacts popped into existence. These did not orbit, but tracked quickly west. They didn’t seem directed against the incomers. “Zoom in on one of those,” Dan called to Terranova. “Get an altitude readout.”
“Altitude, angels decimal three.”
Three hundred feet … “Cruises,” Mills stated. “Deep counterstrike. Gonna hit their airfields. Cratering munitions, I’ll bet.”
Dan reflected that they might have been more effective before the attackers rose from those strips. But the ROC obviously hadn’t wanted to get ahead of the escalation curve. Make it clear to everyone who was the aggressor; not a bad tactic in the opening hours of a war. From the diplomatic point of view, at least.
Suddenly half the world died. At least, on their screens. “Data’s down, from ROC air defense,” Wenck called.
“I see,” Dan said quietly. The feed had gone out. No telling why, but their remaining contacts were from the task force’s own sensors. Which severely cut down their information on what was happening west of the island.
“Alert on bogey pack three,” Terranova announced.
Halfway across the strait, one of the flights from Fuzhou broke off the main body. Six aircraft swerved and tacked east. Toward Savo? Mills assigned weapons. Dan had to consider, quickly, whether his orders would require them to act against not a missile strike on a city, but an air attack on it. But after several tense minutes, it became evident that the flight was headed for neither Savo nor the capital, but for the Senkakus. “Putting more ordnance on the Japanese,” Wenck observed.
“There can’t be that much more to bomb.”
“Unless they’re reinforcing.”
Dan frowned. Tokyo was being closemouthed about its long-range intent. Granted, these small islands were national territory. But they were unpopulated, and much closer to the Chinese homeland than to the Japanese home islands.
In the deck cameras, their only reminder a world existed outside this air-conditioned, flicker-lit cave, the sun was setting. He reminded Wenck and Terranova to watch for launches against Savo. Intel had reported ship-killing missiles being deployed in China. But though more missiles rose, and curved, then plunged down onto the embattled island, none seemed to be aimed at them. The sheets of scratch paper taped to the diffusers fluttered. Only clicking keyboards interrupted the hiss of air-conditioning, and the occasional discordant howl of the buzzer as the red and blue symbols closed, and merged, and flared. And, many of them, disappeared.
A silent holocaust, mediated by digital electronics from hundreds of miles distant. Dan watched, rubbing stubbled cheeks. Wondering how long the embattled island, steadily being denuded of defenses, could hold out.
And when Savo’s turn would come.
14
THE 1MC woke Aisha early. The exec’s terse tones exhorted everyone to maintain material condition, uphold normal maintenance standards, and remain alert on watch. “I know we’re all getting tired. It’s stressful, plus we’re worried about what’s happening at home. But we have to maintain situational awareness and readiness for battle. We could be in contact with major Chinese forces at any time.” Then Staurulakis reminded everyone to schedule proper periods of sleep and rest.
Aisha shook her head, lying in her bunk. Obviously no one could. Other than herself, that is. But she had only one job aboard here, and no watches to stand.
After making morning salat, she decided to get on with it. She went to the wardroom, but no one was there. The mess decks too were all but deserted. Only a few steam tables were lit off. But there was coffee, and paper cups. She got scrambled eggs again, and toast, and canned peaches in sweet syrup.
When she carried her tray out, the only woman there was Terranov
a. Alone, her back to a faux-wood divider bulkhead. Aisha hesitated. Then gripped her tray more firmly, carried it over, and set it down. “Beth. All right if I—?”
A reluctant nod. The girl’s round face looked drawn. Mulberry stains underlined the protuberant eyes. Her fingers trembled. The gutted remains of several pastries, cored with cherry or strawberry jam, littered her tray. Her fingers were stained red too, and there was some around her mouth. Aisha resisted the temptation to pick up a paper napkin and dab it off, as she would have for Tashaara. “Are those good? I might have one.”
“They’re awful sticky. But sweet.”
“Everything going okay up in CIC, Beth?”
“Um, not really. Dr. Noblos keeps saying we’re screwing up, we’re stupid and we don’t tune right. It’s true, our numbers aren’t great, but—” She halted, obviously remembering she shouldn’t discuss a readiness issue. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”
“I won’t.” Aisha started on her eggs, and they didn’t speak for a few minutes. Men glanced over, then altered their courses to sit at other tables. A shrimpy messman with a face like a capuchin monkey’s leered from where he was swabbing up a spill.
Terranova picked at her sleeve. She mumbled, “How you doing? Where they got you staying? With the officers?”
“In the unit commander’s stateroom.”
“Nice. I was in there once. Your own cabin and head and everything. We gotta share, twenty girls in one room, one head with three stalls. It’s a zoo.” She hesitated, then added, “How’s it going? Your investigation, I mean. Did you figure out who … Maybe I shouldn’t be asking, I don’t know.…”
She suddenly seemed close to weeping. Aisha covered her hand with her own. Terranova’s felt sticky. “I can’t give details, Beth. But we’re making progress. I’ve done several suspect interviews—”
“The chiefs. They’re okay with this?”
“They’re not enthusiastic, but they’re cooperating. We just have trouble getting to certain people; they seem to be on watch all the time.”
“Well, right now we have to be ready to launch in like fifteen seconds. Everyone’s wound tight up in CIC. They keep saying we’re going to be in a fight soon.” She shot Aisha a frown. “If we get hit, what do you do? Got an eebie? A fire-party assignment? An abandon-ship station?”
