Chapter 57
Hyperwar
It had been rather a tedious couple of days for USS Tucson. She’d been camped out on 406 for sixteen days, and was holding station seventeen thousand yards—eight and a half nautical miles—astern of the Chinese boomer, with a nuclear-powered fast-attack camped out just to the south of it at the moment. The SSN, at least, supposedly had a name, Hai Long, the intelligence weenies said it was. But to Tucson’s sonarman, 406 was Sierra-Eleven, and Hai Long was Sierra-Twelve, and so they were known to the fire-control tracking party.
Tracking both targets was not demanding. Though both had nuclear power plants, the reactor systems were noisy, especially the feed pumps that ran cooling water through the nuclear pile. That, plus the sixty-hertz generators, made for two pairs of bright lines on the waterfall sonar display, and tracking both was about as difficult as watching two blind men in an empty shopping mall parking lot at high noon on a cloudless day. But it was more interesting than tracking whales in the North Pacific, which some of PACFLT’s boats had been tasked to do of late, to keep the tree-huggers happy.
Things had gotten a little more interesting lately. Tucson ran to periscope/antenna depth twice a day, and the crew had learned, much to everyone’s surprise, that Chinese and American armed forces were trading shots in Siberia, and that meant, the crew figured, that 406 might have to be made to disappear, and that was a mission, and while it might not exactly be fun, it was what they were paid to do, which made it a worthwhile activity.
406 had submarine-launched ballistic missiles aboard, twelve Ju Lang-1 CSS-N-3s, each with a single megaton-range warhead. The name meant “Great Wave,” so the intelligence book said. It also said they had a range of less than three thousand kilometers, which was less than half the range needed to strike California, though it could hit Guam, which was American territory. That didn’t really matter. What did matter was that 406 and Hai Long were ships of war belonging to a nation with which the United States was now trading shots.
The VLF radio fed off an antenna trailed off the after corner of Tucson’s sail, and it received transmissions from a monstrous, mainly underground transmitter located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The tree-huggers complained that the energy emanating from this radio confused migrating geese in the fall, but no hunters had yet complained about smaller bags of waterfowl, and so the radio remained in service. Built to send messages to American missile submarines, it still transmitted to the fast-attacks that remained in active service. When a transmission was received, a bell went off in the submarine’s communications room, located aft of the attack center, on the starboard side.
The bell dinged. The sailor on watch called his officer, a lieutenant, j.g., who in turn called the captain, who took the submarine back up to antenna depth. Once there, he elevated the communications laser to track in on the Navy’s own communications satellite, known as SSIX, the Submarine Satellite Information Exchange, telling it that he was ready for a transmission. The reply action message came over a directional S-band radio for the higher bandwidth. The signal was cross-loaded into the submarine’s crypto machines, decoded, and printed up.
TO: USS TUCSON (SSN-770)
FROM: CINCPAC
1. UPON RECEIVING “XQT SPEC OP” SIGNAL FROM VLS YOU WILL ENGAGE AND DESTROY PRC SSBN AND ANY PRC SHIPS IN CONTACT.
2. REPORT RESULTS OF ATTACK VIA SSIX.
3. SUBSEQUENT TO THIS OPERATION, CONDUCT UNRESTRICTED OPERATIONS AGAINST PRC NAVAL UNITS.
4. YOU WILL NOT RPT NOT ENGAGE COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC OF ANY KIND.
CINCPAC SENDS
END MESSAGE
“Well, it’s about goddamned time,” the CO observed to his executive officer.
“Doesn’t say when to expect it,” the XO observed.
“Call it two hours,” the captain said. “Let’s close to ten thousand yards. Get the troops perked up. Spin up the weapons.”
“Aye.”
“Anything else close?”
“There’s a Chinese frigate off to the north, about thirty miles.”
“Okay, after we do the subs, we’ll Harpoon that one, then we’ll close to finish it off, if necessary.”
“Right.” The XO went forward to the attack center. He checked his watch. It was dark topside. It didn’t really matter to anyone aboard the submarine, but darkness made everybody feel a little more secure for some reason or other, even the XO.
It was tenser now. Giusti’s reconnaissance troopers were now within twenty miles of the expected Chinese positions. That put them inside artillery range, and that made the job serious.
The mission was to advance to contact, and to find a hole in the Chinese positions for the division to exploit. The secondary objective was to shoot through the gap and break into the Chinese logistical area, just over the river from where they’d made their breakthrough. There they would rape and pillage, as LTC Giusti thought of it, probably turning north to roll up the Chinese rear with one or two brigades, and probably leaving the third to remain in place astride the Chinese line of communications as a blocking force.
His troopers had all put on their “makeup,” as some called it, their camouflage paint, darkening the natural light spots of the face and lightening the dark ones. It had the overall effect of making them look like green and black space aliens. The advance would be mounted, for the most part, with the cavalry scouts mostly staying in their Bradleys and depending on the thermal-imaging viewers used by the driver and gunner to spot enemies. They’d be jumping out occasionally, though, and so everyone checked his PVS-11 personal night-vision system. Every trooper had three sets of fresh AA batteries that were as important as the magazines for their M16A2 rifles. Most of the men gobbled down an MRE ration and chased it with water, and often some aspirin or Tylenol to ward off minor aches and pains that might come from bumps or sprains. They all traded looks and jokes to lighten the stress of the night, plus the usual brave words meant as much for themselves as for others. Sergeants and junior officers reminded the men of their training, and told them to be confident in their abilities.
Then, on radioed command, the Bradleys started off, leading the heavier main-battle tanks off to the enemy, moving initially at about ten miles per hour.
The squadron’s helicopters were up, all sixteen of them, moving very cautiously because armor on a helicopter is about as valuable as a sheet of newspaper, and because someone on the ground only needed a thermal-imaging viewer to see them, and a heat-seeking missile would snuff them out of the sky. The enemy had light flak, too, and that was just as deadly.
The OH-58D Kiowa Warriors had good night-vision systems, and in training the flight crews had learned to be confident of them, but people didn’t often die in training. Knowing that there were people out there with live weapons and the orders to make use of them made everyone discount some of the lessons they’d learned. Getting shot down in one of those exercises meant being told over the radio to land, and maybe getting a tongue-lashing from the company commander for screwing up, which usually ended with a reminder that in real combat operations, he’d be dead, his wife a widow, and his children orphans. But they weren’t, really, and so those words were never taken as seriously as they were now. Now it could be real, and all of the flight crews had wives or sweethearts, and most of them had children as well.
And so they moved forward, using their own night-vision equipment to sweep the ground ahead, their hands a little more tingly than usual on the controls.
Division Headquarters had its own Dark Star terminal set up, with an Air Force captain running it. Diggs didn’t much like being so far in the rear with his men going out in harm’s way, but command wasn’t the same thing as leadership. He’d been told that years before at Fort Leavenworth’s Command and General Staff School, and he’d experienced it in Saudi Arabia only the previous year, but even so, he felt the need to be out forward, close to his men, so that he could share the danger with them. But the best way for him to mitigate the danger to them was to stay back here and establish effective control over operations, along with Colonel Masterman.
“Cookstoves?” Masterman asked.
“Yep,” the USAF captain—his name was Frank Williams—agreed. “And these bright ones are campfires. Cool night. Ground temperature’s about forty-three degrees, air temperature is forty-one. Good contrast for the thermal viewing systems. They seem to use the kind of stoves we had in the Boy Scouts. Damn, there’s a bunch of ’em. Like hundreds.”
“Got a hole in their lines?”
“Looks thin right here, ’tween these two hills. They have a company on this hilltop, and another company here—I bet they’re in different battalions,” Williams said. “Always seems to work that way. The gap between them looks like a little more ’n a kilometer, but there’s a little stream at the bottom.”
“Bradleys don’t mind getting a little wet,” Diggs told the junior officer. “Duke?”
“Best bet for a blow-through I’ve seen so far. Aim Angelo for it?”
Diggs thought about that. It meant committing his cavalry screen, and that also meant committing at least one of his brigades, but such decisions were what generals were for. “What else is around?”
“I’d say their regimental headquarters is right about here, judging by the tents and trucks. You’re going to want to hit it with artillery, I expect.”
“Right about the time QUARTER HORSE gets there. No sense alerting them too soon,” Masterman suggested. General Diggs thought it over one more time and made his first important decision of the night:
“Agreed. Duke, tell Giusti to head for that gap.”
“Yes, sir.” Colonel Masterman moved off toward the radios. They were doing this on the fly, which wasn’t exactly the way they preferred, but that was often the world of real-time combat operations.
“Roger,” Diggs called.
Colonel Roger Ardan was his divisional artillery commander—GUNFIGHTER Six on the divisional radio net—a tall thin man, rather like a not-tall-enough basketball player.
“Yes, sir.”
“Here’s your first fire mission. We’re going to shoot Angelo Giusti through this gap. Company of infantry here and here, and what appears to be a regimental command post here.”
“Enemy artillery?”
“Some one-twenty-twos here, and what looks like two-oh-threes, eight inch, right here.”
“No rocket-launchers?”
“None I’ve seen yet. That’s a little odd, but they’re not around that I can see,” Captain Williams told the gunner.
“What about radars?” Colonel Ardan asked.
“Maybe one here, but hard to tell. It’s under some camo nets.” Williams selected the image with his mouse and expanded it.
“We’ll take that one on general principles. Put a pin in it,” Ardan said.
“Yes, sir. Print up a target list?”
“You bet, son.”
“Here you go,” Williams said. A command generated two sheets of paper out of the adjacent printer, with latitude-longitude positions down to the second of angle. The captain handed it across.
“How the hell did we ever survive without GPS and overheads?” Ardan wondered aloud. “Okay, General, this we can do. When?”
“Call it thirty minutes.”
“We’ll be ready,” GUNFIGHTER promised. “I’ll TOT the regimental command post.”
“Sounds good to me,” Diggs observed.
First Armored had a beefed-up artillery brigade. The second and the third battalions of the First Field Artillery Regiment had the new Paladin self-propelled 155-mm howitzer, and the 2nd Battalion, 6th Field Artillery, had self-propelled eight-inch, plus the division’s Multiple Launch Rocket System tracks, which ordinarily were under the direct order of the divisional commander, as his personal shotgun. These units were six miles behind the leading cavalry troops, and on order left the roads they were on and pulled off to firing positions north and south of the gravel track. Each of them had a Global Positioning Satellite, or GPS, receiver, and these told them where they were located down to an accuracy of less than three meters. A transmission over the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System, or J-TIDS, told them the locations of their targets, and onboard computers computed azimuth and range to them. Then they learned the shell selection, either “common” high-explosive or VT (for variable-time). These were loaded and the guns trained onto the distant targets, and the gunners just waited for the word to pull the strings. Their readiness was radioed back to the divisional HQ.
All set, sir,” Colonel Ardan reported.
“Okay, we’ll wait to see how Angelo’s doing.”
“Your screen is right here,” Captain Williams told the senior officers. For him it was like being in a skybox at a football game, except that one team didn’t know he was there, and didn’t know the other team was on the field as well. “They’re within three klicks of the enemy’s first line of outposts.”
“Duke, tell Angelo. Get it out on the IVIS.”
“Done,” Masterman replied. The only thing they couldn’t do was cross-deck the “take” from the Dark Star drone.
SABRE Six was now in his Bradley instead of the safer Abrams main-battle tank. He could see better out of this one, Giusti judged.
“IVIS is up,” the track commander called. Colonel Giusti ducked down and twisted around the gun-turret structure to see where the sergeant was sitting. Whoever had designed the Bradley hadn’t considered that a senior officer might use it—and his squadron didn’t have one of the new “God” tracks yet, with the IVIS display in the back.
“First enemy post is right over there, sir, at eleven o’clock, behind this little rise,” the sergeant said, tapping the screen.
“Well, let’s go say hi.”
“Roger that, Colonel. Kick it, Charlie,” he told the driver. For the rest of the crew: “Perk it up, people. Heads up. We’re in Indian Country.”
How are things up north?” Diggs asked Captain Williams.
“Let’s see.” The captain deselected Marilyn Monroe and switched over to the “take” from Grace Kelly. “Here we go, the leading Chinese elements are within fifteen klicks of the Russians. Looks like they’re settled in for the night, though. Looks like we’ll be in contact first.”
“Oh, well.” Diggs shrugged. “Back to Miss Monroe.”
“Yes, sir.” More computer maneuvers. “Here we are. Here’s your leading cavalry element, two klicks from John Chinaman’s first hole in the ground.”
Diggs had grown up watching boxing on TV. His father had been a real fan of Muhammad Ali, but even when Ali had lost to Leon Spinks, he’d known the other guy was in the ring with him. Not now. The camera zoomed in to isolate the hole. There were two men there. One was hunched down smoking a cigarette, and that must have ruined the night vision of one of them, maybe both, which explained why they hadn’t seen anything yet, though they ought to have heard something ... the Brad wasn’t all that quiet ...
“There, he just woke up a little,” Williams said. On the TV screen, the head turned abruptly. Then the other head came up, and the bright point of the cigarette went flying off to their right front. Giusti’s track was coming in from their left, and now both heads were oriented in that general direction.
“How close can you get?” Diggs asked.
“Let’s see ...” In five seconds, the two nameless Chinese infantrymen in their hand-dug foxhole took up half the screen. Then Williams did a split screen, like the picture-in-picture feature of some television sets. The big part showed the two doomed soldiers, and the little one was locked on the leading Bradley Scout, whose gun turret was now turning a little to the left ... about eleven hundred meters now ...
They had a field phone in the hole, Diggs could see now, sitting on the dirt between the two grunts. Their hole was the first in the enemy combat outpost line, and their job would have been to report back when something evil this way came. They heard something, but they weren’t sure what it was, were probably waiting until they saw it. The PLA didn’t have night-vision goggles, at least not at this level, Diggs thought. That was important information. “Okay, back it off.”
“Right, sir.” Williams dumped the close-up of the two grunts, returning to the picture that showed both them and the approaching Brad. Diggs was sure that Giusti’s gunner could see them now. It was just a question of when he chose to take the first shot, and that was a call for the guy in the field to make, wasn’t it?
“There!” The muzzle of the 25-mm chain gun flashed three times, causing the TV screen to flare, and there was a line of the tracers, streaking to the hole—
—and the two grunts were dead, killed by three rounds of high-explosive incendiary-tracer ammunition. Diggs turned.
“GUNFIGHTER, commence firing!”
“Fire!” Colonel Ardan said into his microphone. Moments later, the ground shook under their feet, and a few seconds after that came the distant sound of thunder, and more than ninety shells started arcing into the air.
Colonel Ardan had ordered a TOT, or time-on-target barrage, on the regimental command post behind the small pass that the Quarter Horse was driving for. An American invention from World War II, TOT was designed so that every round fired from the various guns targeted on the single spot on the map would arrive at the same instant, and so deny the people there the chance to dive for cover at the first warning. In the old days, that had meant laboriously computing the flight time of every single shell, but computers did that now in less time than it took to frame the thought. This particular mission had fallen to 2nd/6th and its eight-inchers, universally regarded as the most accurate heavy guns in the United States Army. Two of the shells were common impact-fused high-explosive, and the other ten were VT. That stood for “variable time,” but really meant that in the nose of each shell was a tiny radar transponder set to explode the shell when it was about fifty feet off the ground. In this way, the fragments lancing away from the exploding shell were not wasted into the ground, but instead made an inverted cone of death about two hundred feet across at its base. The common shells would have the effect of making craters, immolating those who might be in individual shelter holes.
Captain Williams switched Marilyn’s focus to the enemy command post. From a high perspective the thermal cameras even caught the bright dots of the shells racing through the night. Then the camera zoomed back in on the target. By Diggs’s estimation, all of the shells landed in less than two seconds The effects were horrific. The six tents there evaporated, and the glowing green stick figures of human beings fell flat and stopped moving. Some pieces separated from one another, an effect Diggs had never seen.
“Whoa!” Williams observed. “Stir-fry.”
What was it about the Air Force? General Diggs wondered. Or maybe it was just the kid’s youth.
On the screen, some people were still moving, having miraculously survived the first barrage, but instead of moving around (or of running away, because artillery barrages didn’t arrive in groups of only one) they remained at their posts, some looking to the needs of the wounded. It was courageous, but it doomed most of them to death. The only one or two people in the regimental command post who were going to live were the ones who’d pick winning lottery tickets later in life. If there were going to be as many as two, that is. The second barrage landed twenty-eight seconds after the first, and then a third thirty-one seconds after that, according to the time display in the upper-right corner of the screen.
“Lord have mercy,” Colonel Ardan observed in a whisper. He’d never in his career seen the effect of fire in this way. It had always been a distant, detached thing to the cannon-cocker, but now he saw what his guns actually did.
“Target, cease fire,” Diggs said, using tanker-talk for It’s dead, you killed it, find another one. A year before in the sands of Saudi Arabia, he’d watched combat on a computer screen and felt the coldness of war, but this was infinitely worse. This was like watching a Hollywood special-effects movie, but it wasn’t computer-generated animation. He’d just watched the command section of an infantry regiment, perhaps forty people, erased from the face of the earth in less than ninety seconds, and they had, after all, been human beings, something this young Air Force captain didn’t seem to grasp. To him it was doubtless some sort of Nintendo game. Diggs decided that it was probably better to think of it that way.
The two infantry companies on the hilltops north and south of the little pass were clobbered by a full battery each. The next question was what that would generate. With the regimental CP down, things might get a little confusing for the divisional commander. Somebody would hear the noise, and if someone from regiment had been on the phone, the disconnect first of all would make people think, huh, because that was the normal human reaction, even for soldiers in a combat zone; bad phone connections were probably the rule rather than the exception, and they’d probably use phones rather than radios because they were more secure and more reliable—except when shellfire killed the phone and/or cut the lines. So, the enemy division commander was probably just waking up with a tug on his shoulder, then he’d be a little confused by what he was told.
“Captain, do we know where the enemy’s divisional CP is yet?”
“Probably right here, sir. Not completely sure, but there’s a bunch of trucks.”
“Show me on a map.”
“Here, sir.” The computer screen again. Diggs had a sudden thought: This young Air Force officer might eat his meals off it. More to the point, the CP was just in range of his MLRS batteries. And it had a lot of radio masts. Yeah, that was where the ChiComm general was.
“GUNFIGHTER, I want this hit right now.”
“Yes, sir.” And the command went out over JTIDS to the 2nd/6th Field Artillery. The MLRS tracks were already set up awaiting orders, and the target assigned was well within the slewing angle for their launchers. The range, forty-three kilometers, was just within their capability. Here also the work was done by computer. The crewmen trained the weapons on the correct azimuth, locked their suspension systems to stabilize the vehicles, and closed the shutters on their windows to protect against blast and the ingress of the rocket exhaust smoke, which was lethal when breathed. Then it was just a matter of pushing the red firing button, which happened on command of the battery commander, and all nine vehicles unleashed their twelve rockets each, about a second apart, every one of which contained 644 grenade-sized submunitions, all targeted on an area the size of three football fields.
The effect of this, Diggs saw three minutes after giving the order, was nearly seventy thousand individual explosions in the target area, and as bad as it had been for the regimental CP, that had been trick or treat compared to this. Whatever division he’d been facing was now as thoroughly decapitated as though by Robespierre himself.
After the initial fire, Lieutenant Colonel Giusti found that he had no targets. He sent one troop through the gap while holding the north side of it himself, taking no fire at all. The falling 155s on the hills to his front and rear explained much of that, for surely it was a storm of steel and explosives. Someone somewhere fired off a parachute flare, but nothing developed from it. Twenty minutes after the initial barrage, the leading elements of First Brigade came into view. He waited until they were within a hundred meters before pulling off to the east to rejoin his squadron in the shallow valley. He was now technically inside enemy lines, but as with the first good hit in a football game, the initial tension was now gone, and there was a job to be done.
Dick Boyle, like most aviators, was qualified in more than one sort of aircraft, and he could have chosen to fly-lead the mission in an Apache, which was one of the really enjoyable experiences for a rotary-wing pilot, but instead he remained in his UH-60 Blackhawk, the better to observe the action. His target was the independent tank brigade which was the organizational fist of the 65th Type B Group Army, and to service that target he had twenty-eight of his forty-two AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, supported by twelve Kiowa Warriors and one other Blackhawk.
The Chinese tank force was twenty miles northwest of their initial crossing point, agreeably sitting in open ground in circular formation so as to have guns pointing in all directions, none of which were a matter of concern to Dick Boyle and his men. It had probably made sense to laager them that way forty years ago, but not today, not in the night with Apaches nearby. With his OH-58Ds playing the scout role, the attack formation swept in from the north, down the valley. Whatever colonel was in command of this force had selected a place from which he could move to support any of the divisions in the 65th Army, but that merely concentrated his vehicles in a single spot, about five hundred meters across. Boyle’s only worry was SAMs and maybe flak, but he had Dark Star photos to tell him where that all was, and he had a team of four Apaches delegated to handle the threat first of all.
It was in the form of two missile batteries. One was composed of four DK-9 launchers very similar to the American Chaparral, with four Sidewinder-class heat-seekers mounted on a tracked chassis. Their range would be about seven miles, just a touch longer than the effective range of his Hellfire missiles. The other was their HQ-61A, which Boyle thought of as the Chinese version of the Russian SA- 6. There were fewer of these, but they had ten miles of range and supposedly a very capable radar system, and also had a hard floor of about a hundred meters, below which they couldn’t track a target, which was a good thing to know, if true. His tactic would be to detect them and take them out as quickly as possible, depending on his EH-60 electronic-intelligence helicopter to sniff them out. The code for one of these was HOLIDAY. The heat-seekers were called DUCKS.
The Chinese soldiers on the ground would also have simple man-portable heat-seekers that were about as capable as the old American Redeye missile, but his Apaches had suppressed exhausts that were expected to defeat the heat-seekers—and those who had voiced the expectations weren’t flying tonight. They never did.
There were more air missions tonight, and not all of them were over Russian territory. Twenty F-117A Stealth fighters had deployed to Zhigansk, and they’d mainly sat on the ground since their first arrival, waiting for bombs to be flown over, along with the guidance package attachments that changed them from simple ballistic weapons to smart bombs that went deliberately for a special piece of real estate. The special weapons for the Black Jets were the GBU27 laser-guided hard-target penetrators. These were designed not merely to hit objects and explode, but to lance inside them before detonating, and they had special targets. There were twenty-two such targets tonight, all located in or near the cities of Harbin and Bei’an, and every one was a railroad bridge abutment.
The People’s Republic depended more on its rail transportation than most countries, because it lacked the number of motor vehicles to necessitate the construction of highways, and also because the inherent efficiency of railroads appealed to the economic model in the heads of its political leaders. They did not ignore the fact that such a dependence on a single transportation modality could make them vulnerable to attack, and so at every potential chokepoint, like river crossings, they’d used the ample labor force of their country to build multiple bridges, all of heavily-built rebarred concrete abutments. Surely, they’d thought, six separate crossing points at a single river couldn’t all be damaged beyond timely repair.
The Black Jets refueled from the usual KC-135 tanker aircraft and continued south, unseen by the radar fence erected by the PRC government along its northeastern border, and kept going. The heavily automated aircraft continued to their destinations on autopilot. They even made their bombing runs on autopilot, because it was too much to expect a pilot, however skilled, both to fly the aircraft and guide the infrared laser whose invisible grounded dot the bomb’s seeker-head sought out. The attacks were made almost simultaneously, just a minute apart from east to west at the six parallel bridges over the Songhua Jiang River at Harbin. Each bridge had major pier abutments on the north and south bank. Both were attacked in each case. The bomb drops were easier than contractor tests, given the clear air and the total lack of defensive interference. In every case, the first set of six bombs fell true, striking the targets at Mach-1 speed and penetrating in for a distance of twenty-five to thirty feet before exploding. The weapons each had 535 pounds of Tritonal explosive. Not a particularly large quantity, in tight confinement it nevertheless generated hellish power, rupturing the hundreds of tons of concrete around it like so much porcelain, albeit without the noise one would expect from such an event.
Not content with this destruction, the second team of F- 117s struck at the northern abutments, and smashed them as well. The only lives directly lost were those of the engineer and fireman of a northbound diesel locomotive pulling a trainload of ammunition for the army group across the Amur River, who were unable to stop their train before running over the edge.
The same performance was repeated in Bei’an, where five more bridges were dropped into the Wuyur He River, and in this dual stroke, which had lasted a mere twenty-one minutes, the supply line to the Chinese invasion force was sundered for all time to come. The eight aircraft left over—they’d been a reserve force in case some of the bombs should fail to destroy their targets—headed for the loop siding near the Amur used by tank cars. This was, oddly enough, not nearly as badly hit as the bridges, since the deep-penetrating bombs went too far into the ground to create much of surface craters, though some train cars were upset, and one of them caught fire. All in all, it had been a routine mission for the F-117s. Attempts to engage them with the SAM batteries in the two cities failed because the aircraft never appeared on the search-radar screens, and a missile launch was not even attempted.
The bell went off again, and the ELF message printed up as EQT SPEC OP, or “execute special operation” in proper English. Tucson was now nine thousand yards behind Sierra-Eleven, and fifteen from Sierra-Twelve.
“We’re going to do one fish each. Firing order Two, One. Do we have a solution light?” the captain asked.
“Valid solutions for both fish,” the weapons officer replied.
“Ready Tube Two.”
“Tube Two is ready in all respects, tube flooded, outer door is open, sir.”
“Very well. Match generated bearings and ... shoot!”
The handle was turned on the proper console. “Tube Two fired electrically, sir.” Tucson shuddered through her length with the sudden explosion of compressed air that ejected the weapon into the seawater.
“Unit is running hot, straight, and normal, sir,” Sonar reported.
“Very well, ready Tube One,” the captain said next.
“Tube One is ready in all respects, tube is flooded, outer door is open,” Weps announced again.
“Very well. Match generated bearings and shoot!” This command came as something of an exclamation. The captain figured he owed it to the crew, which was at battle stations, of course.
“Tube One fired electrically, sir,” the petty officer announced after turning the handle again, with exactly the same physical effect on the ship.
“Unit Two running hot, straight, and normal, sir,” Sonar said again. And with that, the captain took the five steps to the Sonar Room.
“Here we go, Cap’n,” the leading sonarman said, pointing to the glass screen with a yellow grease pencil.
The nine thousand yards’ distance to 406 translated to four and a half nautical miles. The target was traveling at a depth of less than a hundred feet, maybe transmitting to its base on the radio or something, and steaming along at a bare five knots, judging by the blade count. That worked out to a running time of just under five minutes for the first target, and then another hundred sixty seconds or so to the second one. The second shot would probably get a little more complicated than the first. Even if they failed to hear the Mark 48 ADCAP torpedo coming, a deaf man could not miss the sound of 800 pounds of Torpex going off underwater three miles away, and he’d try to maneuver, or do something more than break out the worry beads and say a few Hail Maos, or whatever prayer these people said. The captain leaned back into the attack center.
“Reload ADCAP into Tube Two, and a Harpoon into Tube One.”
“Aye, Cap’n,” the Weapons Officer acknowledged.
“Where’s that frigate?” he asked the lead sonarman.
“Here, sir, Luda-class, an old clunker, steam-powered, bearing two-one-six, tooling along at about fourteen knots, by blade count.”
“Time on Unit Two,” the skipper called.
“Minute twenty seconds to impact, sir.” The captain looked at the display. If Sierra-Eleven had sonarmen on duty, they weren’t paying much attention to the world around them. That would change shortly.
“Okay, go active in thirty seconds.”
“Aye, aye.”
On the sonar display, the torpedo was dead on the tone line from 406. It seemed a shame to kill a submarine when you didn’t even know its name ...
“Going active on Unit Two,” Weps called.
“There it is, sir,” the sonarman said, pointing to a different part of the screen. The ultrasonic sonar lit up a new line, and fifteen seconds later—
—“Sierra-Eleven just kicked the gas, sir, look here, cavitation and blade count is going up, starting a turn to starboard ... ain’t gonna matter, sir,” the sonarman knew from the display. You couldn’t outmaneuver a -48.
“What about—Twelve?”
“He’s heard it, too, Cap’n. Increasing speed and—” The sonarman flipped his headphones off. “Yeow! That hurt.” He shook his head hard. “Unit impact on Sierra-Eleven, sir.”
The captain picked up a spare set of headphones and plugged them in. The sea was still rumbling. The target’s engine sounds had stopped almost at once—the visual display confirmed that, though the sixty-hertz line showed her generators were still—no, they stopped, too. He heard and saw the sound of blowing air. Whoever he was, he was trying to blow ballast and head for the roof, but without engine power ... no, not much of a chance of that, was there? Then he shifted his eyes to the visual track of Sierra-Twelve. The fast-attack had been a little more awake, and was turning radically to port, and really kicking on the power. His plant noise was way up, as was his blade count ... and he was blowing ballast tanks, too ... why?
“Time on Unit One?” the captain called.
“Thirty seconds for original plot, probably a little longer now.”
Not much longer, the skipper thought. The ADCAP was motoring along on the sunny side of sixty knots this close to the surface ... Weps went active on it, and the fish was immediately in acquisition. A well-trained crew would have fired off a torpedo of their own, just to scare their attacker off, and maybe escape if the first fish missed—not much of a play, but it cost you nothing to do it, and maybe got you the satisfaction of having company arrive in hell right after you knocked on the door ... but they didn’t even get a decoy off. They must have all been asleep ... certainly not very awake ... not very alert ... didn’t they know there was a war going on ... ? Twenty-five seconds later, they found out the hard way, when another splotch appeared on the sonar display.
Well, he thought, two for two. That was pretty easy. He stepped back into the attack center and lifted a microphone. “Now hear this. This is the captain speaking. We just launched two fish on a pair of ChiComm submarines. We won’t be seeing either one of them anymore. Well done to everybody. That is all.” Then he looked over at his communications officer: “Prepare a dispatch to CINCLANT. ‘Four Zero Six destroyed at ... Twenty-Two-Fifty-Six Zulu along with escorting SSN. Now engaging Frigate.’ Send that off when we get to antenna depth.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tracking party, we have a frigate bearing two-one-six. Let’s get a track on him so we can Harpoon his ass.”
“Aye, sir,” said the lieutenant manning the tracking plot.
It was approaching six in the evening in Washington, where everybody who was somebody was watching TV, but not the commercial kind. The Dark Star feeds were going up on encrypted satellite links, and being distributed around Washington over dedicated military fiber-optic lines. One of those, of course, led to the White House Situation Room.
“Holy God,” Ryan said. “It’s like some kind of f*cking video game. How long have we had this capability?”
“It’s pretty new, Jack, and yeah,” the Vice President agreed, “it is kind of obscene—but, well, it’s just what the operators see. I mean, the times I splashed airplanes, I got to see it, just I was in a G-suit with a Tomcat strapped to my back. Somehow this feels dirtier, man. Like watching a guy and a gal go at it, and not in training films—”
“What?”
“That’s what you call porno flicks on the boats, Jack, ‘training films.’ But this is like peeking in a window on a guy’s wedding night, and he doesn’t know about it ... feels kinda dirty.”
“The people will like it,” Arnie van Damm predicted. “The average guy out there, especially kids, to them it’ll be like a movie.”
“Maybe so, Arnie, but it’s a snuff film. Real lives being snuffed out, and in large numbers. That division CP Diggs got with his MLRS rockets—I mean, Jesus Christ. It was like an act of an angry pagan god, like the meteor that got the dinosaurs, like a murderer wasting a kid in a schoolyard,” Robby said, searching for just how dirty it felt to him. But it was business, not personal, for what little consolation that might be to the families of the departed.
Getting some radio traffic,” Tolkunov told General Bondarenko. The intelligence officer had half a dozen electronic-intelligence groups out, listening in on the frequencies used by the PLA. They usually spoke in coded phrases which were difficult to figure out, especially since the words changed on a day-to-day basis, along with identifying names for the units and personalities involved.
But the security measures tended to fall by the wayside when an emergency happened, and senior officers wanted hard information in a hurry. In this case, Bondarenko had watched the take from Grace Kelly and felt little pity for the victims, wishing only that he’d been the one inflicting the casualties, because it was his country the Chinks had invaded.
“The American artillery doctrine is impressive, isn’t it?” Colonel Tolkunov observed.
“They’ve always had good artillery. But so do we, as this Peng fellow will discover in a few hours,” CINC-FAR EAST replied. “What do you think he’ll do?”
“It depends on what he finds out,” the G-2 replied. “The information that gets to him will probably be fairly confusing, and it will concern him, but less than his own mission.”
And that made sense, Gennady Iosifovich had to agree. Generals tended to think in terms of the missions assigned to them, leaving the missions of others to those others, trusting them to do the jobs assigned to them. It was the only way an army could function, really. Otherwise you’d be so worried about what was happening around you that you’d never get your own work done, and the entire thing would quickly grind to a halt. It was called tunnel vision when it didn’t work, and good teamwork when it did.
“What about the American deep strikes?”
“Those Stealth aircraft are amazing. The Chinese rail system is completely disrupted. Our guests will soon be running short of fuel.”
“Pity,” Bondarenko observed. The Americans were efficient warriors, and their doctrine of deep-strike, which the Russian military had scarcely considered, could be damned effective if you brought it off, and if your enemy couldn’t adapt to it. Whether the Chinese could adapt was something they’d have to see about. “But they still have sixteen mechanized divisions for us to deal with.”
“That is so, Comrade General,” Tolkunov agreed.
FALCON THREE to FALCON LEADER, I see me a SAM track. It’s a Holiday,” the pilot reported. ”Hilltop two miles west of the CLOVERLEAF—wait, there’s a Duck there, too.”
“Anything else?” FALCON LEAD asked. This captain commanded the Apaches tasked to SAM suppression.
“Some light flak, mainly two-five mike-mike set up around the SAMs. Request permission to fire, over.”
“Stand by,” FALCON LEAD replied. “EAGLE LEAD, this is FALCON LEAD, over.”
“EAGLE LEAD copies, FALCON,” Boyle replied from his Blackhawk.
“We have SAM tracks in view. Permission to engage, over.”
Boyle thought fast. His Apaches now had the tank laager in sight and surrounded on three sides. Okay, Falcon was approaching the hill overlooking the laager, code-named CLOVERLEAF. Well, it was about time.
“Permission granted. Engage the SAMs. Out.”
“Roger, engaging. FALCON THREE, this is LEAD. Take ’ em out.”
“Take your shot, Billy,” the pilot told his gunner.
“Hellfire, now!” The gunner in the front seat triggered off his first missile. The seven-inch-wide missile leaped off its launch-rail with a flare of yellow light, and immediately tracked on the laser dot. Through his thermal viewer, he saw a dismounted crewman looking that way, and he immediately pointed toward the helicopter. He was yelling to get someone’s attention, and the race was between the inbound missile and human reaction time. The missile had to win. He got the attention of someone, maybe his sergeant or lieutenant, who then looked in the direction he was pointing. You could tell by the way he cocked his head that he didn’t see anything at first, while the first one was jerking his arm like a fishing pole, and the second one saw it, but by that time there was nothing for him to do but throw himself to the ground, and even that was a waste of energy. The Hellfire hit the base of the launcher assembly and exploded, killing everything within a ten-meter circle.
“Tough luck, Joe.” Then the gunner switched over to the other one, the Holiday launcher. This crew had been alerted by the sound, and he could see them scurrying to light up their weapon. They’d just about gotten to their places when the Duck launcher blew up.
Next came the flak. There were six gun mounts, equally divided between 25- and 35-mm twin gun sets, and those could be nasty. The Apache closed in. The gunner selected his own 20-mm cannon and walked it across every site. The impacts looked like flashbulbs, and the guns were knocked over, some with exploding ammo boxes.
“EAGLE LEAD, FALCON THREE, this hilltop is cleaned off. We’re circling to make sure. No coverage over the CLOVERLEAF now. It’s wide open.”
“Roger that.” And Boyle ordered his Apaches in.
It was about as fair as putting a professional boxer into the ring against a six-year-old. The Apaches circled the laagered tanks just like Indians in the movies around a circled wagon train, except in this one, the settlers couldn’t fire back. The Chinese tank crewmen were mainly sleeping outside, next to their mounts. Some crews were in their vehicles, standing guard after a fashion, and some dismounted crewmen were walking around on guard, holding Type 68 rifles. They’d been alerted somewhat by the explosions on the hilltop overlooking the laager. Some of the junior officers were shouting to get their men up and into their tanks, not knowing the threat, but thinking naturally enough that the safe place to be was behind armor, from which place they could shoot back to defend themselves. They could scarcely have been more wrong.
The Apaches danced around the laager, sideslipping as the gunners triggered off their missiles. Three of the PLA tanks used their thermal viewers and actually saw helicopters and shot at them, but the range of the tank guns was only half that of the Hellfires, and all of the rounds fell well short, as did the six handheld HN-5 SAMs that were fired into the night. The Hellfires, however, did not, and in every case—only two of them missed—the huge warheads had the same effect on the steel tanks that a cherry bomb might have on a plastic model. Turrets flew into the air atop pillars of flame, then crashed back down, usually upside-down on the vehicles to which they’d been attached. There’d been eighty-six tanks here, and that amounted to three missiles per helicopter, with a few lucky gunners getting a fourth shot. All in all, the destruction of this brigade took less than three minutes, leaving the colonel who’d been in command to stand at his command post with openmouthed horror at the loss of the three hundred soldiers he’d been training for over a year for this very moment. He even survived a strafing of his command section by a departing Apache, seeing the helicopter streak overhead so quickly that he didn’t even have time to draw his service pistol.
“EAGLE LEAD, FALCON LEAD. The CLOVERLEAF is toast, and we are RTB, over.”
Boyle could do little more than shake his head. “Roger, FALCON. Well done, Captain.”
“Roger, thank you, sir. Out.” The Apaches formed up and headed northwest to their base to refuel and rearm for the next mission. Below, he could see the First Brigade, blown through the gap in Chinese lines, heading southeast into the Chinese logistics area.
Task Force 77 had been holding station east of the Formosa Strait until receiving orders to race west. The various Air Bosses had word that one of their submarines had eliminated a Chinese boomer and fast-attack submarine, which was fine with them, and probably just peachy for the task force commander. Now it was their job to go after the People’s Liberation Army Navy, which, they all agreed, was a hell of a name for a maritime armed force. The first aircraft to go off, behind the F-14Ds flying barrier combat air patrol, or BARCAP, for the Task Force, were the E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft, the Navy’s two-engine prop-driven mini-AWACS. These were tasked to finding targets for the shooters, mainly F/A-18 Hornets.
This was to be a complex operation. The Task Force had three SSNs assigned to “sanitize” the area of ChiComm submarines. The Task Force commander seemed especially concerned with the possibility of a Chinese diesel-powered SSK punching a hole in one of his ships, but that was not an immediate concern for the airmen, unless they could find one tied alongside the pier.
The only real problem was target identification. There was ample commercial shipping in the area, and they had orders to leave that entirely alone, even ships flying the PRC flag. Anything with a SAM radar would be engaged beyond visual range. Otherwise, a pilot had to have eyeballs on the target before loosing a weapon. Of weapons they had plenty, and ships were fragile targets as far as missiles and thousand-pound bombs were concerned. The overall target was the PLAN South Sea Fleet, based at Guangszhou (better known to Westerners as Canton). The naval base there was well-sited for attack, though it was defended by surface-to-air missile batteries and some flak.
The F-14s on the lead were guided to aerial targets by the Hawkeyes. Again since there was commercial air traffic in the sky, the fighter pilots had to close to visual range for a positive ID of their targets. This could be dangerous, but there was no avoiding it.
What the Navy pilots didn’t know was that the Chinese knew the electronic signature of the APD-138 radar on the E-2Cs, and therefore they also knew that something was coming. Fully a hundred Chinese fighters scrambled into the air and set up their own combat air patrol over their East Coast. The Hawkeyes spotted that and radioed a warning to the advancing fighters, setting the stage for a massive air engagement in the predawn darkness.
There was no elegant way to go about it. Two squadrons of Tomcats, twenty-four in all, led the strike force. Each carried four AIM-54C Phoenix missiles, plus four AIM-9X Sidewinders, The Phoenixes were old—nearly fifteen years old for some of them, and in some cases the solid-fuel motor bodies were developing cracks that would soon become apparent. They had a theoretical range of over a hundred miles, however, and that made them useful things to hang on one’s airframe.
The Hawkeye crews had orders to make careful determination of what was a duck and what was a goose, but it was agreed quickly that two or more aircraft flying in close formation were not Airbuses full of civilian passengers, and the Tomcats were authorized to shoot a full hundred miles off the Chinese mainland. The first salvo was composed of forty-eight. Of these, six self-destructed within five hundred yards of their launching aircraft, to the displeased surprise of the pilots involved. The remaining forty-two streaked upward in a ballistic path to a height of over a hundred thousand feet before tipping over at Mach-5 speed and switching on their millimeter-band Doppler homing radars. By the end of their flight, their motors were burned out, and they did not leave the smoke trail that pilots look for. Thus, though the Chinese pilots knew that they’d been illuminated, they couldn’t see the danger coming, and therefore could not see anything to evade. The forty-two Phoenixes started going off in their formations, and the only survivors were those who broke into radical turns when they saw the first warheads go off. All in all, the forty-eight launches resulted in thirty-two kills. The surviving Chinese pilots were shaken but also enraged. As one man, they turned east and lit up their search radars, looking for targets for their own air-to-air missiles. These they found, but beyond range of their weapons. The senior officer surviving the initial attack ordered them to go to afterburner and streak east, and at a range of sixty miles, they fired off their PL-10 radar-guided air-to-air missiles. These were a copy of the Italian Aspide, in turn a copy of the old American AIM-7E Sparrow. To track a target, they required that the launching aircraft keep itself and its radar pointed at the target. In this case, the Americans were heading in as well, with their own radars emitting, and what happened was a great game of chicken, with the fighter pilots on either side unwilling to turn and run—and besides, they all figured that to do so merely guaranteed one’s death. And so the race was between airplanes and missiles, but the PL-10 had a speed of Mach 4 against the Phoenix’s Mach 5.
Back on the Hawkeyes, the crewmen kept track of the engagement. Both the aircraft and the streaking missiles were visible on the scopes, and there was a collective holding of breath for this one.
The Phoenixes hit first, killing thirty-one more PLAAF fighters, and also turning off their radars rather abruptly. That made some of their missiles “go dumb,” but not all, and the six Chinese fighters that survived the second Phoenix barrage found themselves illuminating targets for a total of thirty-nine PL-10s, which angled for only four Tomcats.
The American pilots affected by this saw them coming, and the feeling wasn’t particularly pleasant. Each went to afterburner and dove for the deck, loosing every bit of chaff and flares he had in his protection pods, plus turning the jamming pods up to max power. One got clean away. Another lost most of them in the chaff, where the Chinese missiles exploded like fireworks in his wake, but one of the F-14s had nineteen missiles chasing him alone, and there was no avoiding them all. The third missile got close enough to trigger its warhead, and then nine more, and the Tomcat was reduced to chaff itself, along with its two-man crew. That left one Navy fighter whose radar-intercept officer ejected safely, though the pilot did not.
The remaining Tomcats continued to bore in. They were out of Phoenix missiles now, and closed to continue the engagement with Sidewinders. Losing comrades did nothing more than anger them for the moment, and this time it was the Chinese who turned back and headed for their coast, chased by a cloud of heat-seeking missiles.
This bar fight had the effect of clearing the way for the strike force. The PLAN base had twelve piers with ships alongside, and the United States Navy went after its Chinese counterpart—as usually happened, on the principle that in war people invariably kill those most like themselves before going after the different ones.
The first to draw the wrath of the Hornets were the submarines. They were mainly old Romeo-class diesel boats, long past whatever prime they’d once had. They were mainly rafted in pairs, and the Hornet drivers struck at them with Skippers and SLAMs. The former was a thousand-pound bomb with a rudimentary guidance package attached, plus a rocket motor taken off obsolete missiles, and they proved adequate to the task. The pilots tried to guide them between the rafted submarines, so as to kill two with a single weapon, and that worked in three out of five attempts. SLAM was a land-attack version of the Harpoon anti-ship missile, and these were directed at the port and maintenance facilities without which a naval base is just a cluttered beach. The damage done looked impressive on the videotapes. Other aircraft tasked to a mission called IRON HAND sought out Chinese missile and flak batteries, and engaged those at safe distance with HARM anti-radiation missiles which sought out and destroyed acquisition and illumination radars with high reliability.
All in all, the first U.S. Navy attack on the mainland of East Asia since Vietnam went off well, eliminating twelve PRC warships and laying waste to one of its principal naval bases.
Other bases were attacked with Tomahawk cruise missiles launched mainly from surface ships. Every PLAN base over a swath of five hundred miles of coast took one form of fire or another, and the ship count was jacked up to sixteen, all in a period of a little over an hour. The American tactical aircraft returned to their carriers, having spilled the blood of their enemies, though also having lost some of their own.