Overwhelming Force

by Andrew Watts

  David smiled. “Not quite yet. But we took a big step.”

  Chase glanced at the back of the aircraft. Lena was looking at him again. She saw that Chase’s expression had changed. And then slowly, so did hers. Concern on her face now. Then horror, as she realized what Chase’s look of triumph must have meant. She was an amazing talent, Chase had to admit. She could read him like a book.

  Chase turned back to his brother, frowning. “I still don’t understand something. You could have sent the helicopter assault team in like that no matter where the Chinese fleet was sailing. I mean…from any direction. But Lena’s message transmission…”

  David nodded. “When we saw what the Jiaolong technology was capable of at Guam, we knew that we would have one shot to defeat their fleet. Now that they know how we destroyed the Jiaolong, they won’t make that mistake again. They will be able to make more of those ships. It’s replaceable. But the entire Southern Fleet…now that is not replaceable. If they knew that we could defeat the Jiaolong-class ship, they wouldn’t risk blue ocean combat against our submarines. But they didn’t expect their Southern Fleet to be exposed without the Jiaolong.”

  Chase frowned. “What are you saying?”

  “When Lena sent that transmission, she gave the Chinese a reason to direct their fleet over a certain stretch of ocean, near Johnston Atoll. It would still take them towards Hawaii, but it would move them through an area that we wanted them to transit through.”

  “But why?”

  Susan was smiling. “Your brother is a genius, Chase.”

  David reddened. “It wasn’t all my idea,” he said. “One of the things we learned about the new Chinese ASW capability was that it didn’t do as well in detecting submarines that were bottomed. And our plan really does use a lot of mines. Just not the way we described.”

  Chase said, “I still don’t understand.”

  David said, “Brother, they’ve sailed right into our trap.”

  “Magnum one, two and three are forming up on your right side.”

  “One,” Plug said into his helmet’s lip microphone. Victoria had handed him the controls again, and together they were doing their best to navigate through the maze of hostile Chinese warships.

  “I’m taking off my goggles.”

  “Roger, me too,” said Plug. The sun would be up over the horizon any moment now, which meant the Chinese ships could see them clearly. They had only been flying for a few minutes after the Jiaolong explosion, but she was honestly surprised they had survived this long. Victoria expected surface-to-air missiles or antiaircraft gunfire to end their lives any second now. She only had one remaining part of her mission.

  “Is the buoy ready?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Send it! And signal the others to do the same!”

  Inside each of the helicopters, an aircrewman threw a heavy white cylinder out the open cabin door. The SUS buoys hit the surface of the ocean and were activated upon contact with the seawater. Each of the buoys exploded a few seconds later, emitting a distinctive-sounding noise.

  The noises were detected by US Navy submariners in sonar rooms scattered throughout the shallow ocean floor that surrounded Johnston Atoll.

  It was time for the hunt to begin.

  USS Columbia

  “There’s the signal, Captain.”

  Commander Wallace said, “Conn, get us off the bottom as fast as you can.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The USS Columbia had been thought destroyed before the battle of Guam, several weeks earlier. But in reality, Columbia had only been slightly damaged. In the confusion, and after suffering several casualties from a near-miss torpedo, Commander Wallace had ordered his crew to bottom the submarine. It was a last-ditch effort, and his only option.

  Miraculously, the Chinese had not reattacked the Columbia. And they hadn’t redetected it either, even though the sonar techs had picked up multiple sonobuoys and dippers being deployed above them for the hours after bottoming.

  After waiting a full eighteen hours for the Chinese fleet to pass by, and another few hours of repairs, the Columbia had surfaced and communicated with COMSUBPAC. They were given new orders to head towards Pearl Harbor and had relayed their experience.

  Apparently, the new Chinese ASW equipment had a hard time detecting submarines that were bottomed. This information could be useful. But in the Pacific, there were few places with depths shallow enough to perform the maneuver.

  Johnston Atoll was one of them.

  Quick commands, barely above a whisper, were issued and echoed throughout the submarine’s bridge. The vessel began vibrating and then went still, free from the friction of the ocean’s surface. They had been preparing for this moment for days. There were eight fast-attack submarines bottomed on the underwater terrain surrounding Johnston Atoll. A combination of Virginia-, Los Angeles–, and Seawolf-class submarines.

  They had been there for days, waiting for this moment.

  Over the past few hours, watching the sonar returns with excruciating concentration, Commander Wallace observed dozens of lethal Chinese warships steaming overhead. Surrounding them. With each dipping sonar ping, with each sonobuoy splash, the submarine crews winced in pained silence.

  Yet they waited.

  They waited for the sounds of more pings, closer in, followed shortly by the high-pitched noise of a torpedo’s propeller and range-finding system that they had borne witness to near Guam.

  But that moment never came.

  The submarines blended into the ocean floor and remained undetected as the Chinese fleet steamed by, hundreds of feet above.

  Then, at last, the sign had come. SUS buoy explosions. Their signal to begin. The submarine crews sprang to life as their commanders began issuing orders. Each submarine had a certain section of water assigned to it.

  As the submarines rose silently off the ocean floor, their screws turned and propelled them forward. Slowly. Barely a few knots. But each of the hunter-killers made their way towards their assigned waterspace. Torpedo doors opened. Eager captains gave the final attack orders.

  Within a two-minute period, thirty Mark 48 Advanced Capability torpedoes began racing through the sea, each headed towards separate targets.

  The US Navy submarine force was about to have its revenge.

  Victoria heard a warning tone coming through the earpieces in her helmet. She saw the flashing master caution lights blinking in front of her and then felt a shudder as her aircraft released chaff and flares. Countermeasures for the supersonic surface-to-air missiles that one of the Chinese ships must have just fired at them.

  A blur of white zoomed by outside the cockpit. It exploded in a burst of gray and yellow a few hundred feet to their left. Victoria was rocked as the shockwave hit the airframe of the helicopter. The sound was muffled, but still sickening.

  “Shit,” muttered Plug. He was already maneuvering, his training kicking in, pulling the helicopter into a series of hard turns.

  Victoria realized that air was coming in from a small crack in her window. Then she noticed a searing white-hot pain in her shoulder. She was bleeding through her flight suit.

  “Motherfucker.” She winced in pain as she examined the wound. “AW1, everyone okay back there?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’re all good. That was pretty close.”

  Victoria ignored the pain in her shoulder and spoke over the external comms. “Magnum, flight, check in.”

  “Two.”

  “Three.”

  There was a pause, then one of the other helicopters’ pilots radioed. “Dash Four was hit. No survivors.”

  Plug continued maneuvering the helicopter, expending more chaff and flares, the other two aircraft in close formation behind them. His voice was strained as he said, “What do you want us to do, Boss?”

  Victoria closed her eyes, forcing away the feeling of dread and guilt that crept up inside her. She held down the external microphone switch. “Are you sure?”

  “Af
firm,” replied the voice of the other helicopter’s pilot. “They took a direct hit.”

  “Roger.”

  Victoria checked the digital map that was being beamed to them from above. They were almost at the outer ring of Chinese warships. Their fuel would run out soon, but they still had a chance to make it to the atoll, or ditch close enough that a SAR asset might spot them.

  Victoria turned her head to look out the right-side window. Her shoulder lit up in white-hot pain as she moved it, dark blood flowing from the wound. She could see a destroyer a few miles away. Two contrails of smoke floated in the air, reaching out towards them from the Chinese ship like long fingers of death. The remnants of the surface-to-air missiles it had just launched. Why weren’t they finishing the job? Maybe they would.

  “Maintain this heading.”

  “Roger.”

  Victoria looked at the map again. If they were able to get out of range of that destroyer, they might have a chance. But it had fired at them once. It knew they were there. Surely it would strike again.

  She had to do something.

  “Magnum flight, prep for a right turn and engagement of the nearest Chinese destroyer.”

  Plug looked up at her in surprise, then went back to his outside-the-cockpit scan, the water only twenty-five feet below, zooming by at over one hundred and twenty knots. He put in a shallow right turn.

  Victoria said, “I’ve got the controls. Set up for a Hellfire shot.”

  “Roger, your controls.”

  “Magnum flight, spread out.”

  “Two.”

  “Three.”

  Plug’s hands danced over his keypad. He yelled out the checklist steps, Victoria and the aircrewman in the back of the helicopters responding immediately. Then Plug gripped the hand control unit and used the forward-looking infrared camera to target the Chinese ship.

  Radar warning tones began whining in Victoria’s headset again as the Chinese ship used its air defense radars to target them.

  “Fire at will, Magnum…”

  She hadn’t even finished her call when Plug said, “Bruiser away!” A tongue of yellow flame shot out from their left side and rose up into the sky. The laser designator from the FLIR was aimed right at the Chinese destroyer.

  Another missile left the rails. Then two more as Plug emptied their stores. More Hellfire missiles fired from the other two helicopters.

  Twelve AGM-114 missiles popped up into the sky and then rocketed down into their target, the shaped charges, which had been designed as antitank weapons, exploding right before impact, turning themselves into a small stream of molten-hot metal and shooting through various parts of the warship.

  One of the missiles missed. Each of the others hit the target, in various locations. Multiple yellow-orange explosions, in rapid succession. The bridge, the centrally located combat information center, the engines, and the fuel cells were all hit. One of the missiles ignited a torpedo in the ship’s storage locker. Secondary explosions detonated in the center of the ship. A gray-white tower of wreckage and seawater flew up into the sky.

  “Magnum flight, form back up. Continue outbound.”

  “Two.”

  “Three. And, Lead, FYI, we’re getting pretty low on fuel. Might have another twenty mikes.”

  “Copy.”

  Plug leveled out the wings on an outbound heading.

  And that was when she saw the other ship. Victoria’s eyes went wide. She looked down at the map, and there it was. How had she missed that on the digital map? And they had just fired all of their weapons…

  Plug saw what she was looking at. “You want me to take a different heading?”

  “No, that’ll just put us closer to the rest of the fleet. We need to keep heading this direction. Otherwise, we won’t have enough fuel to make it.”

  She stared at the ship. It was just on the horizon. They probably weren’t on radar yet. But the other warship must have told them they were there. And…

  As she watched the Chinese warship on the horizon, its midsection lifted in a giant geyser of gray-and-white water and then fell rapidly, the hull snapping in two. The two separate pieces of ship angled upward at an impossible angle, sinking lower and lower into the water.

  Plug’s mouth was open. “What the hell?”

  Victoria felt a surge of relief wash through her. “The American submarines are here.”

  Admiral Song watched in horror as he received word of the American submarines’ surprise attack.

  “Admiral, the Changchun and the Jinan have both been hit.”

  “Casualties?”

  The young officer shook his head. “Both destroyers have been sunk, Admiral.”

  Admiral Song gripped the table in front of him. Two more destroyers, sunk within moments. Hundreds of sailors dead, and with them, the ability to defend against further attacks.

  The Chinese fleet was now surrounding the waters around Johnston Atoll, still heading north towards Hawaii. But at this rate, they could not continue.

  “We must consider all of our options.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  Out of the one hundred and two ships they had had when the battle had begun, a third had been destroyed, including the Jiaolong-class ship. If they kept heading north, they would come closer to the range at which American surface-based antiship missiles could reach them. And closer to the American air bases on Hawaii from which they could launch further attacks.

  The old Chinese naval officer felt sick at the thought, but they needed to turn around. To regroup out of harm’s way. He studied the battlespace. With the destruction of the Jiaolong, their overwhelming advantage was gone. While the Americans had kept their surface ships far away, his fleet was now quite susceptible to attacks from both the air and subsurface.

  Still, their fleet was formidable in size and capability. If he proceeded with the attack now, they could do much damage to Hawaii’s military bases and finish the job that the Chinese had started a few weeks earlier. Perhaps he could land his forces here at Johnston Atoll and fortify his position.

  He calculated his chances of success. With the American submarines here, that would be suicide.

  He wiped sweat from his brow. “Why is it so hot in here?”

  “Sir, we have lost control of some of our systems. The heater has been put on.”

  “The heater? Why? What…?” He paused. “What do you mean, we have lost control of our systems. Which systems?”

  “We have been under some sort of cyberattack over the past hour, sir. The cyberwarfare officer is saying that they are doing the best they can, but…”

  The digital display that the admiral had been studying went dark.

  “What just happened?”

  “I will find out, sir.”

  The minion scurried off as another ran up to the admiral.

  “Admiral, I regret to inform you that the Kunlun Shan has been sunk.”

  Admiral Song felt weak at that. The Kunlun Shan was an amphibious ship. A troop transport, with over one thousand soldiers and sailors aboard. He closed his eyes, sighing.

  “We must turn south. We must turn around.”

  “Admiral?”

  “Give the order.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Regroup two hundred kilometers to the south. We can—”

  His head of air operations approached. “Sir, our fighters are ready to attack, but the strike officer has not yet fired his cruise missiles. Your orders were to accomplish a simultaneous strike, sir.”

  Admiral Song did all he could to control his rage. Everything was failing at once. No one was offering solutions or good news. Everything was a problem. A failure. A catastrophe.

  He screamed at the strike officer to approach. “Why have we not fired our cruise missiles at Hawaii yet?”

  “There is no excuse, sir. I…I…”

  Admiral Song was dripping with sweat now. It was sweltering in the combat operations center. “Say what the reason is!”

 
“Sir, we have come under cyberattack. We have not been able to fire our cruise missiles.”

  Admiral Song’s mouth hung open. This was total and utter failure to fight. Jinshan and the others would have him shot, if he lived through the next few hours. He tried to think. They had to do something.

  “Tell the fighters to proceed with the attack.”

  One of the junior officers said, “Sir, the air defense officer is reporting that another wave of enemy air contacts is approaching.”

  Admiral Song looked up at air defense screen. “Show me.”

  “They are staying two hundred kilometers away, sir. They have been identified as American B-52 bombers. They are remaining just out of our air defense range.”

  “They are not firing?”

  “No, Admiral.”

  “Why are they just circling us that far out?” one of the officers asked.

  Then the admiral realized what they were doing. It made him want to vomit.

  Thirty B-52s flew the mission, supported by JSTARS and F-15 fighter escorts. Inside each B-52 were eighteen Quickstrike ER weapons. The Quickstrikes were essentially mines with winglets. The bombers dropped their ordnance, which “flew” almost forty miles towards the Chinese fleet. This allowed the bombers to keep out of range of many of the surface-to-air missiles, which—now that the Jiaolong had been slain—were running in short supply.

  The bombers laid minefields along huge swaths of ocean on either side of the Chinese fleet, forming a giant V. The minefields were cutting off the Chinese escape route, effectively sealing them in. The US attack submarines were inside the minefield perimeter, hunting and killing everything in range of their torpedoes.

  Frigates that were positioned on the edge of the fleet’s surface screen were the first to get a taste of the American mine warfare. Three Chinese frigates, on the southern side of the formation, were destroyed as they obeyed Admiral Song’s ordered retreat.

  This confirmed the admiral’s worst fear. As the Chinese warships maneuvered to avoid the newly activated submarine threat, they ran into this wall of mines. They found that a minefield of unknown size and shape had cropped up all around their fleet.