Sky Masters pm-2

by Dale Brown

  “Eight thousand, three-zero-zero, PALACE intersection, Vapor copies all. Good day. Out.” McLanahan set up the navigation radios to help Cobb find the initial approach fix, but couldn’t shake the pow~ul impression HADES had left on him. It was a devastating weapon and would represent a serious threat and escalation to any conflict. No, it wasn’t a nuclear device, but the fact that one aircraft could drop one bomb and kill all forms of life within a one-to-two-mile radius was pretty sobering. Just one B-52 bomber loaded with thirty to forty such weapons could destroy a small city. Thankfully, though, there wasn’t a threat on the horizon that could possibly justify using HADES. Things were pretty quiet in the world. A lot of the countries that had regularly resorted to aggression before were now opting for peaceful, negotiated settlements. Flare-ups and regional disputes were still present, but no nation wanted war with another, because the possibility for massive destruction with fewer military forces was a demonstrated reality. And for McLanahan that was just as well. Better to put weapons like HADES back in storage or destroy them than to use them. What Patrick McLanahan did not know, however, was that half a world away, a conflict was brewing that could once again force him and his fellow flyers to use such awesome weapons. NEAR THE SPRATLY ISLANDS, SOUTH CHINA SEA WEDNESDAY, 8 JUNE 1994, 2247 HOURS LOCAL nst as fifty-seven-year-old Fleet Admiral Yin Po L’un, comander of the Spratly Island flotilla, South China Sea Fleet, People’s Liberation Army Navy of China, reached for his mug of tea from the young steward, his ship heeled sharply to port and the tray with his tea went flying across the bridge of his flotilla’s flagship. Well, evening tea would be delayed another fifteen minutes. Sometimes, he thought, his lot in life was as if the gods had sent a fire-breathing dragon to destroy a single lam-and the dragon finishes drowning in the sea along the way. The skipper of Yin’s flagship, Captain Lubu Vin Li, chewed the young steward up one side and down the other for his clumsiness. Yin looked at the poor messboy, a thin, beady-eyed kid obviously with some Tibetan stock in him. “Captain, just let him bring the damned tea, please, ” Yin said. Lubu bowed in acknowledgment and dismissed the steward with a slap on the chest and a stern growl. “I apologize for that accident, sir, ” Lubu said as he returned to stand beside Yin’s seat on the bridge of the Hong Lung, Admiral Yin’s flagship. “As you know, we have been in typhoon-warning-condition three for several days; I expect all the crew to be able to stand on their own two feet by now.” “Your time would be better spent speaking with Engineering and determining the reason for that last roll, Captain, ” Yin said without looking at his young destroyer skipper. “The Hong Lung has the world’s best stabilizer system, and we are not in a full gale yet-the stabilizers should have been able to dampen the ship’s motion. See to it.” Lubu’s face went blank, then pained as he realized his mistake, then resolute as he bowed and turned to the ship’s intercom to order the chief engineer to the bridge. The most sophisticated vessel in the People’s Liberation Navy should not be wallowing around in only force-three winds, Yin thought-it only made the rest of his unit so unsightly. Admiral Yin turned to glance at the large, thick plastic panel on which the location and condition of the other vessels in his flotilla were plotted with a grease pencil. Radar and sonar data from his ships were constantly fed to the crewman in charge of the bridge plot, who kept it updated by alternately wiping and redrawing the symbols as fast as he could. His ships were roughly arranged in a wide protective diamond around the flagship. The formation was now headed southwest, pointing into the winds which were tossing around even his big flagship. Admiral Yin Po L’un’s tiny Spratly Island flotilla currently consisted of fourteen small combatants, averaging around fifteen years of age, with young, inexperienced crews on them. Four to six of those ships were detached into a second task force, which cruised within the Chinese zone when the other ships were near the neutral zone. On the outer perimeter of the flotilla, Admiral Yin Po L’un deployed three Huangfen-class fast-attack missile boats, capable against heavy surface targets, and four Hegu-class fastattack missile boats with antisubmarine and antiaircraft weapons. He had an old Lienyun-class minesweeper on the point, a precautionary tactic born of the conflict with the Vietnamese Navy only six years earlier. He also had two big Hainan-class fast patrol boats with antiair, antiship, and antisubmarine weapons operating as “roamers, ” moving between the inner and outer perimeters. All were direct copies of old World War II Soviet designs, and these boats had no business being out in the open ocean, even as forgiving and generally tame as the South China Sea was. The ships in Yin’s flotilla rotated out every few weeks with other ships in the six-hundred-ship South China Sea Fleet, based at Zhanjiang Naval Base on the Leizhou Peninsula near the Gulf of Tonkin. Yin’s flagship, the Hong Lung, or Red Dragon, was a beauty, a true oceangoing craft for the world’s largest navy. It was a Type EF5 guided-missile destroyer that had a Combination Diesel or Gas Turbine propulsion system that propelled the 132-meter, five-thousand-ton vessel to a top speed of over thirty-five nautical miles per hour. The Hong Lung had a helicopter hangar and launch platform, and it carried a modern, French-built Dauphin II patrol, rescue, antimine, and antisubmarine warfare helicopter. Yin’s destroyer also carried six supersonic Fei Lung-7 antiship missiles, the superior Chinese version of the French Exocet antiship missile; two Fei Lung-9 long-range supersonic antiship missiles, experimental copies of the French-built ANS antiship missile; two Hong Qian-9 1 single antiair missile launchers, fore and aft, with thirty-missile manually loaded magazines each; a Creusoit-Loire dual-purpose 100-millimeter gun; and four single-barreled and two double-barreled 37-millimeter antiaircraft guns. It also had a single Phalanx CIWS, or Close-In Weapon System gun. Developed in the United States of America, Phalanx was a radarguided Vulcan multibarrel 20-millimeter gun that could destroy incoming sea-skimming antiship missiles; from its mount on the forecastle perch behind and below the con, it could cover both sides and the stern out to a range of two kilometers. The Hong Lung also carried sonar (but no torpedoes or depth charges) and sophisticated targeting radars for her entire arsenal. The Hong Lung was specifically designed to patrol the offshore islands belonging to China, such as the Spratly and the Paracel Islands, and to engage the navies of the various countries that claimed these islands-so the Hong Lung carried no antisubmarine-warfare weaponry like the older Type EF4 Luda-class destroyers of the North Fleet. The Hong Lung could defeat any surface combatant in the South China Sea and could protect itself against almost any air threat. The Hong Lung’s escort ships-the minesweepers and ASW vesselscould take on any threat that the destroyer wasn’t specifically equipped to deal with. “Position, navigator, ” Admiral Yin called out. The navigator behind and to the Admiral’s right called out in reply, “Sir!”, bent to work at his plastic-covered chart table as a series of coordinates were read to him from the LORAN navigation computers, then replied, “Sir, position is ten nautical miles northwest of West Reef, twenty-three miles north of Spratly Island air base.”

  “Depth under the keel?” “Showing twenty meters under the keel, sir, ” Captain Lubu Vin Li replied. “No danger of running aground if we stay on this course, sir.” Yin grunted his acknowledgment. That was exactly what he was worried about. While his escorts could traverse the shallow waters of the Spratly Island chain easily, the Hong Lung was an oceangoing vessel with a four-meter draft. At low tide, the big destroyer could find itself run aground at any time while within the Spratly Islands. Although the Spratlys were in neutral territory, China controlled the valuable islands informally by sheer presence of force if not by agreement or treaty. Yin’s normal patrol route took the flotilla through the southern edge of the “neutral zone” area of the island chain, scanning for Philippine vessels and generally staying on watch. Although the Philippine Navy patrolled the Spratlys and had a lot of firepower there, Admiral Yin’s smaller, faster escort ships could mount a credible force against them. And since the Philippine ships had no medium or long-range antiship missiles or antiair missiles in the area, the Hong Lung
easily outgunned every warship within two thousand miles. They were currently on an eastward heading, cruising well north of the ninth parallel-and as far as Yin was concerned, the “neutral zone” meant that he might consider issuing a warning to trespassers before opening fire on them. The shoal water was also south of their position, near Pearson Reef, and he wanted to stay clear of those dangerous waters. “CIC to bridge, ” the interphone crackled. “Wenshan re ports surface contact, bearing three-four-zero, range eighteen miles. Stationary target.” Captain Lubu keyed his microphone and grunted a curt, “Understood, ” then checked the radar plot. The Wenshan was one of the Hainan-class patrol boats roaming north and east of the Hong Lung; it had a much better surface-search radar than the small Huangfen-classboat, the Xingyi, in the vicinity; although the Xingyi was equippe~Fei Lung-7 surface attack missiles, often other ships had to seek out targets for it. Lubu turned to Admiral Yin. “Sir, the surface contact is near Phu Qui Island, in the neutral zone about twenty miles north of Pearson Reef. No recent reports of any vessels or structures in the area. We have Wenshan and Xingyi in position to investigate the contact.” Yin nodded that he understood. Phu Qui Island, he knew, was a former Chinese oil-drilling site in the Spratly Islands; the well had been capped and abandoned years ago. Although Phu Qui Island disappeared underwater at high tide, it was a very large rock and coral formation and could easily be expanded and fortified-it would be an even larger island than Spratly Island itself. If Yin was tasked to pick an island to occupy and fortify, he would pick Phu Qui. So might someone else. . “Send Wenshan and Xingyi to investigate the contact, ” Yin ordered. “Rotate Manning north to take Wenshan ‘5 position.” Manning was the other Hainan-class patrol boat acting as “rover” in Yin’s patrol group. Captain Lubu acknowledged the order and relayed the instructions to his officer of the deck for transmission to the Wenshan. Yin, who had been in the People’s Liberation Army Navy practically all of his life, was proud of the instincts he’d honed during his loyal career. He trusted them. And now, somewhere deep down in his gut, those instincts told him this was going to be trouble. Granted, Phu Qui Island, and even the Spratlys themselves, seemed the most unlikely place to expect trouble. The Spratlys-called Nansha Dao, the Lonely Islands, in Chinese-were a collection of reefs, atolls, and semisubmerged islands in the middle of the South China Sea, halfway between Vietnam and the Philippines and several hundred kilometers south of China. The fifty-five major surface formations of the Spratlys were dotted with shipwrecks, attesting to the high degree of danger involved when navigating in the area. Normally, such a deathtrap as the Spratlys would be given a wide berth. Centuries ago Chinese explorers had discovered that the Nansha Dao was a treasure trove of minerals-gold, iron, copper, plus traces or indications of dozens of other metals-as well as gems and other rarities. Since the islands were right on the sea lanes between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the “round-eyes” eventually found them, and the English named them the Spratlys after the commander of a British warship who “discovered” them in the eighteenth century. It was the British who discovered oil in the Spratlys and began tapping it. Unfortunately, the British had not yet developed the technology to successfully and economically drill for oil in the weatherbeaten islands, so the islands were abandoned for safer and more lucrative drilling sites in Indonesia and Malaysia. As time progressed, several nations-Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines-all tried to develop the islands as a major stopover port for sea traffic. But it was following World War II that the Chinese considered the Spratlys as well as everything else in the South China Sea as their territory. As oil-drilling platforms, fishing grounds, and mining operations began to proliferate, the Chinese, aided by the North Vietnamese, who acted as a surrogate army for their Red friends, began vigorously patrolling the area. During the Vietnam War radar sites and radio listening posts on Spratly Island allowed the Vietcong and China to detect and monitor every vessel and aircraft heading from the Philippines to Saigon, including American B-52 bombers on strike missions into North Vietnam. But the most powerful navy in the postwar world, the United States Navy, exerted the greatest tangible influence over the Spratly Islands. Through its sponsorship, the government of the Philippines began patrolling the islands, eradicating the Vietnamese espionage units and using the islands as a base of operations for controlling access to the western half of the South China Sea. The Chinese had been effectively chased away from the Spratlys, ending five hundred years of dominance there. That became a very sore point for the Chinese. After the Vietnam War, the American presence weakened substantially, which allowed first the Vietnamese Navy, and then the Chinese Navy, to return to the Spratly Islands. But the Philippines still maintained their substantial American-funded military presence there, although they had ceded most of the southern islands to China and Vietnam. The lines had been drawn. The Philippines claimed the thirty atolls north of the nine degrees, thirty minutes north latitude, and the territory in between was a sort of neutral zone. Things were relatively quiet for about ten years following the Vietnam War. But in the late 1 980s conflict erupted again. During the war, Vietnam had accepted substantial assistance from the Soviet Union in exchange for Russian use of the massive Cam Rahn naval base and airbase, which caused a break in relations between China and Vietnam. Vietnam, now trained and heavily armed by the Soviet Union, was excluding Chinese vessels from the oil and mineral mining operations in the Spratlys. Several low-scale battles broke out. It was discovered that the Soviet Union was not interested in starting a war with China to help Vietnam hold the Spratlys, so China moved in and regained the control they had lost forty years earlier. Faced with utter destruction, the Vietnamese Navy withdrew, content to send an occasional reconnaissance flight over the region. That was when Admiral Yin Po L’un had been assigned his Spratly Island flotilla. To his way of thinking, these were not the Spratlys, or the Quan-Dao Mueng Bang as the Vietnamese called them-these were the Nansha Dao, property of the PeopIes Republic of China. China had built a hard-surfaced runway on Spratly Island and had reinforced some stronger reefs and atolls around it enough to create naval support facilities. Their claim was stronger than any other nation. Several other nations had protested the militarization of Spratly Island, but no one had done anything more than talk. To Admiral Yin, it was only a matter of time before all of the Nansha Dao returned to Chinese control. But the Filipino Navy, such as it was, still held very tight control over their unofficially designated territory. Yin’s job was to patrol the region, map out all sea traffic, and report on any new construction or attempts to move oil-drilling platforms, fish-processing vessels, or mining operations in the neutral zone or in the Philippine sector. He was also to report on any movements of the Philippine Navy’s major vessels in the area and to constantly position his forces to confront and defeat the Filipino pretenders should hostilities erupt. Not that the Filipino Navy was a substantial threat to the Chinese Navy-far from it. The strongest of the Filipino ships patrolling the Spratly Islands were forty-year-old frigates, corvettes, radar picket ships, and subchasers, held together by coats of paint and prayers. Still, a threat to Yin’s territory-no matter whom it was from-was a threat, in his mind, to all of China. Thirty minutes later, Yin’s task force had closed to within nine miles of the contact while Wenshan and Xingyi had closed to within one mile; Yin positioned his ships so that he could maintain direct, scrambled communications with his two patrol boats but stay out of sight of the contact. “Dragon, this is Seven, ” the skipper aboard Wenshan, Captain Han, radioed back to Admiral Yin. “I have visual contact. The target is an oil derrick. It appears to be mounted or anchored atop Phu Qui Island. It is surrounded by several supply barges with pipes on board, and two tugboats are nearby. There may be armed crewmen on deck. They are flying no national flags, but there does appear to be a company flag flying. We are moving closer to investigate. Request permission to raise the derrick on radio.” So his instincts had been right An oil derrick in the neutral zone? How dare they place
an oil derrick on Chinese property.” Yin turned to Lubu. “I want the transmissions relayed to us. Permission granted to hail the derrick. Tell Captain Han to warn the crew that they will be attacked if they do not remove that derrick from the neutral zone immediately.” A few moments later, Yin heard Han’s warning: “Attention, attention the oil derrick on Phu Qui Island. This is the People’s Republic of China frigate Wenshan on international hailing channel nine. Respond immediately. Over.” Captain Han on Wenshan was speaking in excellent English, the universal sailors language even in this part of the world, and Yin had to struggle to keep up with the conversation. He made a mental note to congratulate Han on his resourcefulness-the Wenshan was not a frigate, but if the crew of the oil derrick believed that it was, they might be less inclined to resist and more inclined to follow orders. “Frigate Wenshan, this is the National Oil Company Barge Nineteen on channel nine. We read you loud and clear. Over.” Admiral Yin seethed. The National Oil Company. That was a Philippine company run by a relative of the new Philippine president, Arturo Mikaso, and headquartered in Manila. Worse, it was financed by and operated mostly by rich Texas oil drillers. American capitalists who obviously thought they could, in their typically imperialistic way, just set up an oil derrick anywhere they pleased. The audacity. To even attempt to build a derrick in a neutral zone. And Yin knew it wasn’t really neutral at all. It was Chinese territory. And the Americans and the Filipinos were trying to rape it. “National Oil Barge Nineteen, ” Han continued, “you are violating international agreements that prohibit any private or commercial mineral exploration or facilities in this area. You are ordered to remove all equipment immediately and vacate the area. You will receive no further warnings. Comply immediately. Over.”