part0037

Kirov had come a long way to get in on the action here, which was no problem for Karpov’s flagship, but required Kursk to find fuel. The US graciously sent an oiler up from Darwin, and Kursk topped off in the East Java Sea before they continued west. They were now in the heart of Indonesia, the old “Dutch East Indies” that were such a bone of contention in WWII.

“They don’t have to come all the way down here, Fedorov. In fact, they could attack us now, presuming they were the old hostile force we faced so many times. Remember, their Tomahawk has a 1600 mile range. Besides, they have an aircraft carrier, so they will probably just sail into the west Celebes Sea and throw air strikes across Borneo. That’s what I’d do if the Kremlin were here.”

“Don’t remind me. Yes, why build an aircraft carrier if you don’t make one that can fight? No other nation on earth has been able to build a carrier that could remotely match the performance of an American big deck ship. They learned well in the last war, and carrier operations have been at the heart of their naval strength ever since. Yet this navy here has its power more distributed, fewer carriers, but with destroyers cruisers and heavier ships that are real monsters in combat. I think they took a leaf from our book, Fedorov. Remember, they were terrorized by a massive battlecruiser with missiles in WWII. The shadow of Kirov lays heavily on them.”

“Those who knew what we really were, and where we came from, will not be surprised by that,” said Karpov. “The Royal Navy certainly knew about us, and formed that group to keep a watch on us. Surely they told the Americans.”

“I would assume so,” said Fedorov. “They called us Geronimo , a mysterious raider that seemed to appear out of thin air, and then vanish as the hunting Royal Navy closed in. The Japanese called us Mizuchi , the name of a sea demon.”

“That must have chilled his blood, to think our presence there was even possible. Well, we lived that through. Now we have another war to fight. What will happen here? Are we going to watch the British get hammered before we can get up there to help? We’re 450 miles southeast of Singapore.”

“Don’t worry, Fedorov. I’m fine. Yes, I grieve the loss of my brother. Yet his very presence here was terribly haunting in some ways. Imagine seeing yourself thirty years from now, bent with age, and grey. Strangely, now that he’s gone, I feel more myself. I’m all here now, if that makes any sense. My mind is not always drifting out to that of my brother self, wondering what he is experiencing, and worrying about him. Now I know all that—everything he experienced, all memories within me now.”

“Unfortunate, but true,” said Karpov. “This may seem callous but, in one sense, I felt that didn’t matter, because here I was, still alive. Time had to choose which of us would survive, and she chose me. That wasn’t the first time that has happened. I survived the coming of my brother, and now he is gone, but I’m still here, all one man now. Time and Fate have chosen me yet again.”

“We’ll continue north towards Singapore. The British have already identified the general position of the Chinese task forces. They’ve even spotted one of their carriers. It will be heavily protected, but that’s never stopped me before. At the moment, it’s about 500 miles from us, and that’s an easy throw for our Zircons. I could swing them over the British fleet, and then dogleg them toward the Chinese—making it look like the British fired them.”

“All because they built inadequate air defense into both their destroyers and frigates,” said Karpov. “The Type 42’s they’re still floating are obsolete. Their Daring class is a good ship, with superb radar, but it needs twice the number of Asters to survive in high intensity modern combat. So they’ve already lost a third of all their destroyers. As for their frigates, only the Type 31 is effective. Their Sea Ceptor can’t catch high supersonic or hypersonic missiles, and that makes those ships easy to kill with a missile like the YJ-18, something they stole from us, mind you. So they’ve lost a third of their frigates too. Those are heavy losses—ships, officers, and good crews going into the sea, and all because their Navy did not build ships that could fight and defeat known threats.”

“Hell,” Karpov continued, “their carriers are so ineffective that the British Admiral Wells had to use his entire air wing defensively, trying to shoot down incoming Chinese missiles. They had no effective strike capability. Sound familiar?”

“Indeed, but then they were forced onto the defensive because their escorts were inadequately equipped for modern air defense. I’m not demeaning the Royal Navy. God knows they are a fine, professional force at sea. Give them the right tools, and they’ll beat you Monday through Friday. In this case, I think their government’s penny pinching left them in the lurch, even though their navy here is twice the size of the Royal Navy we left behind in 2021. Britannia no longer rules the waves in that history, and they are struggling here too.”

“Outstanding,” said Karpov. “He had no carriers, very limited air support, yet he used the few assets he had to get his targets, and then he just pounded them. He struck at every weakness in the British fleet that I’ve noted here, and certainly had the victory. No Fedorov, if we beat the Chinese in this war, the United States Navy will really have to step up and do the heavy lifting. That said, let’s see what we can do to help the Royal Navy here. A lot is riding on this. If they lose Singapore as a functioning base, then a standing naval task force will have to be at sea here to keep the Strait of Malacca closed, and given the Chinese tactics to date, it will have to be strong. They are close enough to these objectives to be able to really use mass in their engagements. The situation shaping up in the Indian Ocean is a perfect example. By withdrawing their Mediterranean Fleet, they bulked up their Indian Ocean Fleet to over 40 ships!”

The New Jersey Task Force was nearly 1300 miles away from the nearest Chinese ship in the South China Sea that morning when they fired, but the missiles would not be aimed at any ships. The Big J, or the “Black Dragon” as the ship was called, is sitting in harbor as a museum in our world, but here the ship had been extensively modernized with a major refit. The navy wanted to see what a ship could do if it retained armor to resist damage from missile strikes, and then carried a load of firepower to deal out devastating blows in reprisal. Big J was one of two chosen, the other being the Iowa , and now it was steaming forward of the new US carrier Independence , in effect, acting as the forward screen with two companions, destroyers Buckner and Thomas .

The battleship had four Mark 41 VLS bays, or twice the missile load of a Ticonderoga class cruiser. It also retained one of its former 406mm main gun turrets, which could still fling shells out over 20 miles. Throw in six twin 127mm secondary batteries and four Phalanx mounts, and the Black Dragon could really breathe fire. Those VLS cells presently held 32 SM 2’s, 32 SM-3’s, 48 SM-6’s, 160 ESSM’s and a whopping 96 Multi Mission Tomahawks. For all that power, New Jersey would not fire that hour. The mission was instead handed off to her two escorting destroyers They each carrier 28 TACTOMs and 28 more MMT’s, and it was the TACTOM that would rule the hour. Those missiles were going out after the Chinese airfield at Miri.

The long arm of the US fleet wanted any assets there reduced or destroyed, because they intended to take up a position about 300 miles east of Miri, in the Celebes Sea, and they did not want their operations challenged or interfered with by Chinese fighters based there. Malaysian Borneo (the provinces of Sarawak and Sabah), was independent from the long Malaysian Peninsula in this history, and China had been cozy with it for some time. So it had secured basing rights at Miri, and permission to build a radar site. There it placed a dozen J-10 fighters, and six J-31’s to act as replacements for the carriers, along with several helicopters and a single J-20 that had landed there after having engine trouble.

A massive fan of cruise missiles were launched creating a vast arc as they all veered off on separate vectors. In time the missiles formed a great letter C on the US radar scopes, extending over 350 miles from north to south. They were going to cruise right over the Philippines in the northern half a of that arc, and the rest would come in over the Celebes Sea. Their targets at Miri were 1025 nautical miles away, and cruising at 500 knots, it was going to take them a little over two hours to get west to Miri.

As they made that long approach that morning, the British were using a few of their F-35’s off the Invincible to scout the Chinese positions. They had found one of the two Chinese carriers, cruising southwest of the main Riau Island in the South China Sea, another of the many island bastions in those waters that had been claimed by China. Admiral Pearson’s problem was that he had no means of striking that target, as it was presently 160 miles away, outside the range of his ship’s missiles. But that was not a problem for Admiral Wu Jinlong that morning. He had the range hours ago….

The four DDG escorts with the carrier Zhendong would open the battle from the Chinese side that morning, each one picking a target in the British formation and firing four YJ-18’s. At the same time, five J-31’s would rise from the upturned ski-lift deck of the carrier, each carrying a pair of anti-radiation missiles to target the British radars once they went active. They would be detected on radar about 110 miles out, coming at 530 knots, which raised the adrenaline in the British Fleet. Their assumption was that these were the fast YJ-18’s, or Sizzlers as they called them, and they were the missiles that had killed the majority of Royal Navy ships lost in the war to date.

That detection triggered alarms all through the fleet, and a scramble order rattled Tengah airfield on Singapore, where six ready Eagles took to the sky. Two had launched earlier as a radar picket, and now they turned towards the threat, each carrying six AIM-120C missiles. As with Admiral Wells earlier, the British would rely heavily on the support of fighters as a defensive shield, and they knew they had to get to the YJ-18’s before they started their high speed sprint. Two F-35’s were the first to fire four Meteors, then those first two Eagles engaged.

Those four fighters would score a heartening 14 kills. The last two leakers were then taken down by the Type 31 frigate, Battleaxe . Seconds later the missile warning lights came on and those two Eagles were under attack.

“Break right!” came the call as the two planes maneuvered. They had been fired on by unseen J-31’s, stalked by the long range PL-15 missile, and one of the two planes was hit. The other evaded, diving for the weeds, the riveting nature of the moment smothering the realization that a friend was suddenly gone. There would be no time to grieve. That second Eagle pilot would not get home to think about it, dying 30 seconds later when a PL-15 ran up his flaming tail.

The ready alert Eagles that had just scrambled from Tengah AFB were now 35miles off the coast, moving swiftly at 520 knots. Up ahead they got radar hits on a tight formation of J-31’s, surprised they could see the planes. That could mean only one thing—the planes were carrying something externally which was reflecting the radar. Otherwise, the stealthy Chinese fighters would have been damn near invisible.

The Eagles had the AIM-120C, with a 60 mile range, and might have been under fire by now if the Chinese fighters were carrying the PL-15, but with those anti-radiation missiles, the loadout called for the lighter PL-12, which had just a 50 mile range. Now the Eagles would have their revenge, firing a flurry of AIM-120’s. The AMRAAM’s were good that day, finding and killing all five of the valuable J-31’s, much to the chagrin of Admiral Wu Jinlong. Only one of the Eagles was killed in return. Eagle Flight had avenged the loss of the radar picket planes, and then some.

That was a great waste of five good planes, thought Wu Jinlong. The attack was ill timed, and had no saturation. It was entirely defeated by their fighters, and no more than two missiles off one of their ships. Now I must order the six reserve J-31’s to deploy from Miri Airfield to replace those losses. This carrier must maintain a full air wing. That leaves me with 15 fighters, but those from Miri will bring us back up to strength.

“The task force will now come to 105 degrees west,” he said. “Also, signal Captain Zheng on the Shandong . If they have any J-31’s armed with the YJ-91 externally, they must switch to air superiority loadouts at once. They are to use the PL-15, and only in the internal weapons bays. The British are using their fighters as an air defense shield, and we must smash it.”

The Admiral was going to use his J-31’s in their strongest role, to sweep the skies clear of enemy fighters, radar pickets and AEW planes. His mood would soon lighten, because his forward sub screen had a boat up quite close to the advancing British fleet, and it was about to fire.