IT was going for his throat. Dan tried to fend it off with bare hands, but its black, slavering muzzle kept coming in. He threw an elbow into its jaws, but it evaded him. And darted in again, growling.
Sinking its teeth into his throat—
He woke, heart hammering, flinching and struggling. To catch Singhe’s astonished look, her hand on his shoulder. “Captain! You okay?”
“Yeah. What—”
“You were having a bad dream, I guess.”
Dan blinked at the time readout above the main displays. Stretched, until the vertebrae in his neck cracked. He rubbed grit and crap from his eyes. God. Had he been drooling on the command desk?
Suddenly he was terrifically hungry.
Pancakes, coffee, and sausage in the wardroom fixed that. In his sea cabin, he shaved, showered, and changed into fresh coveralls. He showed his face on the bridge, and went over the nav plot with Van Gogh. The navigator was also on as OOD. They were getting half-hourly radar fixes off three distinctive land features on Miyako Shima. Dan nodded, satisfied they didn’t have to rely on celestials anymore. But glad he had them in reserve, in case the radar went down.
When he clattered down the ladder back to Combat, a bearlike man-shape waited at the command desk. Bart Danenhower, chief engineer, complete with striped locomotive-driver’s cap. After discussing the rotating assembly on fire pump number four, the CHENG threw down a clipboard of graphs.
“We’re burning more than usual,” Dan noted.
“Been under way a long time, Captain, and in warm water—the Med, Arabian Sea, the IO, WestPac. Crap builds up. On the bottom. The screws. Heat exchangers. Over time, it takes a toll.”
Dan rubbed his mouth, not liking how fast the fuel percentages dropped toward the trigger point for an off-station call. Usually cruisers were refueled every three to four days, to maintain above 50 percent. But as far as he’d heard, the nearest resupply was still back at Guam, waiting for the Roosevelt battle group. “Maybe we’d better plan on reducing speed even further.”
Danenhower shook his head. “Long as we’re keeping fire in the turbines, there isn’t any regime below what we’re doing. Aside from going dead in the water. And I don’t think you want that.”
Dan was studying the displays over the engineer’s shoulder. A lot of activity around the Senkakus. Traffic to and from the coast, some high-speed: hovercraft or patrol boats. Transporting troops? Reinforcing?
Danenhower cleared his throat, and Dan grimaced. No, he didn’t want to be dead in the water. Not with a hostile sub somewhere around. “And we can’t reduce generator load?”
“Not if you still want radars, sonars.”
“Hotel load? Cut back on that?”
“Cut back on hot water, you’re gonna risk regrowth of that Crud. Boxed in, we are.”
“Okay, Yoda.” At least it was a change from Harry Potter.
The 21MC, at his elbow. “Combat, Radio. Flash incoming. Want it on your screens?”
Dan hit the lever. “Put it on the LAN. ’Scuse me, Bart. Might be important.”
Taipei was reporting early warnings of ballistic missiles being prepared for launch along the coast. PacFleet wanted Savo on ABM alert, positioned to cover the capital and population center at the north end of Taiwan.
He looked from the terminal to the Aegis console, but neither Wenck nor Terranova was there. “Petty Officer Eastwood. Chief Wenck on deck?”
“Turned in a couple hours ago, sir.”
“Get him up again.” Dan passed the word to the XO over his Hydra, then dialed the J-phone for Noblos’s stateroom. The scientist didn’t answer, though Dan let it ring. He tried the wardroom next, and caught him there. “Bill, we’re getting early warnings on launch preps. Can you double-check that we’re in the best intercept position?”
“We already did those calculations, Captain Lenson.” Noblos sounded annoyed. “I gave you my recommendation. You chose to ignore it.”
“I didn’t ignore it, Bill. We had to compromise, for the barrier mission.”
“Anyone can do ASW. You’re the only ABM-capable unit out here. Though calling us ‘capable’ is a stretch.”
Dan reflected sourly that at least he’d used “us” this time, instead of “you” or “your team.” “Well, look, we’re going to full-on ABM mode. I could use your help here.”
Noblos agreed, but irritably. Dan hung up and massaged his brow. Talking to the guy always gave him a headache. But he’d helped design ALIS. They were lucky to have him aboard. It would help, though, if the bastard were less of a pain in the ass to deal with.
He propped chin on fists, pondering the screen. The SPY-1 picture extended out over two hundred nautical miles, but from their current position, that didn’t reach the mainland. It covered the northern tip of Taiwan; to the north, Okinawa; to the west, about halfway across the strait. But not to the coast. Unless, as in the case of the recon aircraft, their target was above the radar horizon.
With no satellite cuing either, he was blind, as far as the ABM mission went.
The TAO, beside him, murmured that the EWs were reporting test emissions from a Ku-band radar on Uotsuri, largest of the Senkaku Islands. “Correlates with NATO Tin Shield radar. We call it as an S-300. Surface-to-air missile.”
A heavy, advanced antiair missile. Fifty miles’ range. Multiple target tracking and engagement. The next time the Japanese sent fighters to the Senkakus, they’d lose some.
The Chinese were digging in. Probably already starting on piers, a port, an airfield. Turning the islands into another forward base, like they had in the South China Sea. Creeping around Taiwan’s northern flank, and less than a hundred miles away.
Not for the first time, he cursed the Navy’s reliance on satellites for over-the-horizon reconnaissance and targeting. The Chinese were actually in better shape, with their legacy squadrons of H-6s and shore-based radars … like the ones that had been scanning the task group since they arrived on station. The missing piece was high-altitude ISR—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. If the carrier had made it out of port, it would have supplied it. The Navy’s E-2s, their eyes in the sky, provided a long reach, along with the new UAVs. The Air Force was probably running drones and U-2s out of Kadena, but their output was stovepiped; he couldn’t get his hands on it.
Leaving him groping, able to see only a little way around him. Like lighting a match in Carlsbad Caverns.
The allies had lost information dominance. They’d lost the strategic initiative. Now they were losing territory, too.
Fang might be the answer. If the Taiwanese liaison could link them up, get the ROC air-defense network to share real-time data, he’d no longer be nearsighted. Taiwan had just built a massive new surveillance radar on Leshan Mountain. Dan twisted in his seat, but Fang wasn’t in CIC. He tried his stateroom on the J-phone. No answer.
Donnie Wenck, hair on end, eyelids swollen, cheeks blotchy. “Y’wanted me, Skipper?”
Dan outlined the situation. Wenck nodded halfway through and began backing toward his console. “I’ll get us a reposition. But, you know, we’re gonna lose our air picture when ALIS boots up.”
Operating in BMD mode, the SPY-1 dropped its 360-degree search function and focused a much narrower beam far into space. The mission took so much bandwidth, Savo basically lost all her self-defense but the Sea Whiz and the five-inch guns. Instead of a godlike overview, he would be reduced to peeking through a telescope. High magnification, but leaving himself open to getting clobbered from behind. “I’m familiar with the problem, Donnie. We’ve dealt before.”
“Yeah, but we had somebody riding shotgun then. Who we gonna have watching our butt this time?”
Dan didn’t have an answer, which irritated him. “Just get me the position, Donnie. Can you do that for me, without—ah, never mind.”
Silence descended around the command table, and he realized he’d probably snapped that out louder than he’d meant to. Short temper was a human failing. But not a good trait in a CO. He added, loud enough that the others could hear, “Sorry, didn’t mean to go ballistic on you. But I’m working that issue, all right?”
* * *
THEY worked it through the morning. Fang came in and got on the horn to his opposite numbers in the air-defense network. Noblos and Wenck argued, debating geometries and probabilities.
It wasn’t a simple problem. A modified antiaircraft missile, the Block 4 Standard had limited range, limited speed, and a low-altitude envelope. It could intercept an incoming terminal vehicle only near the end of its trajectory, from shortly before to the beginning of atmospheric reentry. Also, tests had confirmed that the meeting angle was critical. The Block 4 didn’t do well against crossing targets.
Thus, probability of kill depended on four variables: the type of warhead, its launch point, its target coordinates, and Savo’s position. The calculation was complicated even more by the fact that they knew neither where the Chinese launchers would be located, nor their intended impact points.
On the other hand, his orders weren’t to defend everything on the island. Only Taipei, the capital and major population center.
Around eleven, they came to him with a result. Assuming the TBMs were fired from somewhere around Fujian, opposite the island, Savo should position fifty miles northeast of the tip of Taiwan. That placed the oval-shaped intercept envelope over the city.
“That puts me pretty far from the ASW barrier,” Dan observed, running both hands through his hair as he looked down at Noblos’s laptop. It would also, though he didn’t say this, put Savo’s back to the newly established Chinese position in the Senkakus.
“You asked us for the optimal positioning, Captain,” Noblos said stiffly.
“Thank you, Doctor. I did.” Dan sighed. “Okay, make it so. I’ll move Curtis Wilbur up to take our place. That leaves us without a second line of defense, unless Fang can break us loose those frigates.”
“Are you continuing that fight, Captain? Seems to me we’re getting very isolated out here.”
“Well, this is where our orders put us, Doctor.” Dan debated his next offer, but made it anyway. “You’re not ship’s company, Bill. We can still airlift you out. Put you on a helo, lily-pad you to Okinawa.”
“You need me too much, Captain.” Noblos looked down a long nose at Wenck and Terranova, at the console. “We’ve discussed the shortcomings of your team before.”
“At length. Yes.”
“I’m afraid I owe it to you to stay.”
“Well,” Dan said, very reluctantly, “we’re glad you’re here.” He felt like a hypocrite, but if it would help mission effectiveness, he was willing to soft-pedal his personal feelings.
The deck slanted. A buzzing vibration wormed through steel and aluminum and Kevlar. Savo’s turbines, spinning up. “Coming to course two niner zero,” the TAO called.
Dan nodded; they would dogleg around Miyako Jima, then alter course west, toward Taiwan. “Time to station?”
“Five hours, twenty minutes.”
When everyone was working he stood irresolute for a few moments. Started for his stateroom. Hesitated outside its door.
Then kept on, climbing the next ladder, too, until he reached the bridge.
Hermelinda Garfinkle-Henriques was on watch. He returned her salute, and told the boatswain to stand by for an announcement.
The earsplitting whistle echoed over the weather decks. He took a couple of deep breaths, and accepted the mike.
“This is the captain speaking.”
The echos were disorienting. He took another breath, trying to ignore them.
“A couple of issues, to keep everyone updated.
“We are proceeding to a location north of Taipei, to defend the population of that city should the mainland Chinese carry out their threat of a missile strike.
“I know we’re all short on sleep. So am I. But we may be called on to save thousands of innocent lives in the next few hours. Or defend ourselves from cruise-missile, air, or torpedo attack.
“All gun crews, self-defense teams, Weapons Department, and Ops Department personnel, make final preparations to fight the ship. Engineering, Damage Control, and Firefighting: we have to be ready to take a hit and keep steaming. I depend on you to keep us able to do that.
“We’ve trained for this. Now it’s time to earn our pay.
“You’re the best crew in the Navy, and I’m proud to serve with you. Proud to lead you. And confident in your abilities. Savo Island. ‘Hard Blows.’
“That is all.” He clicked off the 1MC and looked at the faces around him on the bridge. They looked impressed. Good.
If only he himself could muster more enthusiasm for what was looking more and more like a long, bitter struggle.
* * *
AFTER lunch he did a walk-through, stopping at every work center. At each, he emphasized focus. They could skate on admin requirements, but not on safety or operability. The crew seemed upbeat. Everyone wanted to shake his hand, for some reason. He was in the forward passageway when Sid Tausengelt pulled him aside. The lean, leathery senior enlisted adviser looked either deeply worried or extremely angry. “Captain. A word.”
“How’s the crew holding up, Master Chief?”
“Basically, they’re gonna do, sir. Good talk on the 1MC, by the way. And that part about the best crew in the Navy—they ate that up.”
“You said I needed to get on the horn more. Keep everybody in the picture.”
“Yessir, I did. A CO that listens to the chief of the boat, that’s a good thing.”
“We talked about healing this crew,” Dan murmured. “Are we on our way?”
“Basically, this is gonna help, sir. Combat, it’s a self-licking ice-cream cone, where your basic morale’s concerned. But we got another problem.” Tausengelt glanced around, then led them into a quieter nook. “It’s that Ar-Rahim.”
“What about her?”
“You talk to her, sir? Last couple days, I mean.”
“We had a short conversation,” Dan said cautiously. He didn’t want to blurt out anything that might compromise the investigation. “Why?”
“Well, sir, it’s like … basically, she suspects all of us. Barged her way into the Goat Locker. Now she wants tapes from the cameras. DNA from everybody.”
“Not everybody, Master Chief. She’s going to narrow down her list, then subpoena, I guess is the word, samples from the suspects.”
“You want to know what I hear, well, a lot of people aren’t happy.” The old chief hesitated, then added, “She suspects you, too, Skipper.”
Hmm. Dan ran that through his circuits. “Why do you say that?”
“I got my sources. And I didn’t want to bring this up, but—that head scarf—”
“What about it? The crew wears savo shemaghs. What’s the difference?”
“Nothing,” Tausengelt said, but the reluctant tone made it significant.
“Look, Master Chief. You and I remember how weird the NIS used to be. But they’re more professional now. I trust her. She just seems really intent on getting this guy. And you got to admit, having a rapist loose is not helping the women focus.”
“Basically, I got no beef with that. It’s the way she’s doing it,” Tausengelt insisted.
Dan patted his shoulder. “I’m taking what you said aboard, all right? Keep an eye on her. Let me know if she really goes off the rails. Now, let’s get back to making sure we’re ready to go into harm’s way.”
The grizzled master chief nodded and left. Dan looked after him, wondering who was in the right here.
* * *
LATER that afternoon he was up on the forecastle with Chief Quincoches and Noah Pardees, the first lieutenant, inspecting the wood-and-canvas deckhouse the hull techs had built over the exposed crane, when his Hydra beeped. He snatched it off his belt. “Captain.”
“Sir, TAO. Link 16’s up with ROC air defense.”
“Great news, Matt.” With access to data from Taiwan’s radars, he could get advance keying on any missile launch, too. “Was that Chip’s doing? Captain Fang?”
“Yessir, he worked that magic. Some not so good news, too, though.”
“Hit me.” Dan halted at the deck edge, looking out over the sea. Wind from the north, about ten knots. Low overcast. He smiled at Pardees and mouthed Good work as he strolled aft.
Mills said that a second Japanese air strike was headed for the Senkakus. Also, a force of marines had landed on one of the smaller islands.
Dan halted inside the break, startled. “U.S. Marines?”
“No sir, not U.S. Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force.”
“Oh.” He turned that over as he undogged the door, nodding to a sailor who came to attention. “I wonder how they got there. We never saw them. So they’re gonna fight?”
“Looks like it, sir.”
“Anything on size of the troop commitment?”
Mills said there wasn’t, just a short press release from Tokyo that their forces had been engaged on the islands for three days now. The Western Amphibious Regiment had been mentioned, out of Nagasaki.
“Okay. But why is that bad news?”
“That’s not it, sir. The Philippines are reporting an invasion of the island of Itbayat.”
Dan started climbing the ladder. “Itbayat … which is where?”
“South of Taiwan. Also, Captain Fang says the cross-channel assault’s still building. They’ve identified the amphib fleet loading out in Ningbo. And a lot of small boats clustering opposite the strait.”
Ningbo, near Shanghai, was the base for the Eastern Fleet, a huge complex of military bases and airfields. A concentration of small craft had been the classic signature of an impending assault, from Napoleonic times to 1940.
CIC was dark, the air at sixty degrees of chill. “Captain’s in Combat!” someone yelled. The word passed down the ranked consoles, and faded into the hiss of air-conditioning, the murmur of circuits, as he headed for the command desk. Everyone had coverall pants tucked into socks, with gas mask, helmet, flash gloves, and emergency escape breathing device handy. Flash hoods draped their necks. He bent and tucked his own cuffs. In a flash fire, something that simple could save a life.
Their renewed access to data was evident with his first glance at the displays. The air and surface picture, fed from the ROC network, teemed with contacts. Now he could look deep into eastern China, too.
He sagged into his chair like a man with sight restored. He’d dreaded going into missile-defense mode without situational awareness. Now, added to the coverage he was getting via his drones and task force units, he could see all the way from Okinawa to the Babuyan Channel, north of the Philippines.
Heavy air and surface activity to the south drew his attention. The screen flickered, then suddenly zoomed in.
“That’s Itbayat,” said Mills, from his keyboard. “Eighty-six miles south of Taiwan. Commands the southern approaches the same way the Senkakus do the north. There’s an airfield. Single strip, but big enough for fighters. Which the Chinese have apparently already captured.”
“Already? How the hell did they get ashore?”
“Landed on the airstrip. The Filipinos never garrisoned it.”
Dan reflected grimly on how history repeated itself. How could Manila have overlooked a garrison? Even as he wondered, he knew. They’d feared to anger the dragon. But an undefended island, in such a strategically important position, must have looked like unguarded chocolate to Zhang Zurong. “Anything from Manila? Do they plan to recapture it?”
Cheryl Staurulakis said from another console, “They’re filing a diplomatic protest.”
Dan nodded. He huddled with the exec for a few minutes, discussed messing on station, getting everyone fed during Condition Three ABM. Then went back to the command desk, and settled in as Fang let himself in the aft door. “Captain. I was about to call for you.”
“I was looking for you, too.”
“Let’s put our heads together.” He called Staurulakis over too. “Okay, Chip, want to kick off? Oh, by the way—great work getting us linked in. This is really going to help.”
Fang half-smiled thanks, then went sober again. Looking at a black wheelbook, he laid out the situation in dry sentences. The ROC Navy wanted to take action to break up the invasion force while it was loading in mainland ports. The Republic of Korea might be offering a surface task group to help.
Dan blinked. This was gutsy. Maybe seeing how Zhang had kicked the acquiescent and pacifistic Filipinos in the teeth was wising up the other regional allies.
Fang said, “For obvious reasons, even if it is a combined force, a Taiwanese admiral must be in command. Admiral Hsu has been nominated to lead the raid. His Korean counterpart would be Admiral Jung.”
“Just a sec,” Dan said. “That wouldn’t be Jung Mun Jun, would it?”
“I believe that is his full name. You know him?”
“I do. From an exercise that … got complicated.”
“I see. However, the Koreans have received a note from Beijing. Their participation will be regarded as an act of war. So it is up in the air as to whether we will actually see reinforcements.”
Dan nodded. The artichoke strategy. Peel off allies one by one. Hitler had employed it, with stunning success … until he bit off more leaves than he could chew. “Okay, we’re en route to defend Taipei. But I don’t want to sit on my thumbs waiting to be attacked. Chip, can we organize some form of interoperability training with your submarine and air?”
“I can look into it.”
“Please. Cheryl, Matt, see if you can staple together an emergency plan, at least, for how the task group can help in case China actually tries to invade. No point guarding the Miyako Strait if we lose Taiwan. Make sense?”
Fang looked doubtful. “You have orders to do this, Captain? So far, the United States has avoided any overt help to the Republic of China.”
“No, and I don’t plan to ask permission. I’ll beg forgiveness afterward.”
He eyed the screen. Operation Sheng Chi was rolling out. Years in the preparation. A skillful game of Go that blended military moves, diplomatic bullying, and China’s overwhelming land army. And once again, the democracies—optimistic, hedonistic, all too ready to look away from any threat—were going to have to play catch up.
How long had the Peloponnesian War lasted, between Athens and Sparta? Twenty-seven years. This wouldn’t run nearly as long. Not with modern armaments. But it could change the course of history just as much.
* * *
THE first missile rose at 1610, 4:10 P.M. local. Savo was still an hour from station, but the missile warning buzzered as ALIS locked on.
Dan was by the scuttlebutt, eyeing a patch on the black-painted bulkhead where a 9mm bullet had punched into the spall liner. Where his first exec had threatened everyone in CIC but, in the end, shot himself. Intentionally or not, they’d never know.
He jerked his mind back. Mills had taken over TAO. He ran his eyes over the bent heads along the consoles. Yeah. Noblos might not think so, but he thought he had the first team on deck.
Someone had turned on the audio from the SPY-1; a familiar crackle, like popping popcorn. The beam going out, five times a second.
“Sir, cuing from ROC air defense,” the Terror called. “Suspected launch. Vicinity of Fujian.”
Mills bent to the keyboard and put the raw radar output up on the rightmost display. The spoke-like beam was locked on the Chinese coast, its amber rays shifting back and forth along the narrow arc of the antimissile coverage.
A glowing dot blinked on above a scatter of mountain return. Terranova dragged in the designation hook to snag it. “Profile plot, Meteor Alfa. Altitude, angels twenty … twenty-five … angels thirty. Very fast climbout … first-stage separation.”
“Classifies as a DF-11,” Mills murmured. “Solid-fueled. Two-stage. Designate hostile.”
Dan nodded. “Concur.” The rapid climbout gave them even less time to plot an intercept. But Fujian was far south of Savo’s coverage. Given the DF-11’s limited range … He said into his mike, “I doubt that one’s gonna be IPP’d at Taipei.”
“Concur with that, Skip,” said Wenck.
The horizontal velocity callouts began to flicker. Nosing over already. Yeah, aimed at Taiwan’s west coast. Dan checked the gun radar. Shorter range than the massive phased arrays, but he hated not being able to see behind him. He clicked to another circuit and checked that the antitorpedo gear was in self-defense mode, just to be sure. In case one of those missing Songs tried to clobber him from behind.
A second buzzer sounded. Then a third. More contacts winked on, near where the first had appeared.
Then, suddenly, many more. Eight. Nine … He sucked a breath and hit the lever on the 21MC. “Bridge, we have TBM attacks starting on Taiwan. This thing’s going hot. Pass to all units Steeplechase. We’re gonna be busy in Combat.”
“Bridge aye.”
He tensed, but after ten pips, they stopped appearing. Just the first salvo? One battery’s missiles being fired, from TELs?
The ovals of the IPPs, the predicted impact points, blinked into existence as the seconds crawled by. More or less as he’d expected, they overlay the early-warning radar site at Leshan Mountain and the military airfields on Penghu Island. Mills kept passing information to the task group, but Dan tried to hover above the action. Time to start letting go, allow Cheryl to run the ship while he monitored the big picture.
Which reminded him … “Bridge, CO; XO up there?”
“Yessir, Captain, standing by. Want her on the bitch box … I mean, the 21MC?”
“No, just hadn’t heard from her for a while.” He double-clicked off.
* * *
FIFTEEN minutes into the attack, a single missile came up north of the previous launching points. Terranova designated it Meteor Kilo. It climbed as fast as the others, but the horizontal vector was different. Angled, possibly, toward Taipei.
Dan clicked to the Combat circuit. “Set Circle William. Launch-warning bell.” He reached for the covered voice net, then saw Mills was already passing it to the rest of the task group. He snapped to the Weapons circuit, and got the chaff and decoys ready to deploy.
“IPP coming up!” Terranova yelled. Dan squinted at the screen. It wasn’t a point yet, of course. Only an oval overlay on the geo plot. With each recomputation, it shifted. Clicking east, then south. But contracting with each sweep.
More and more clearly, centered on the capital.
Over the next minute, Terranova refined the solution and designated the target to two Block 4s in the forward magazine. Dan groped into the neckline of his coveralls for the firing key. “Stand by to take Kilo. Two-round salvo.”
Beside him Matt Mills was going through the checklist, listening to responses. “Launchers to ‘operate’ … Set up to take Meteor Kilo. Two-round salvo. Sound warning bell forward. Deselect safeties and interlocks. Enable battle short. Stand by to fire, on TAO’s command.”
Dan pushed back from the table, letting Mills run it. Bumping what was happening against his ROEs, his other guidance, and the common sense a commander was supposed to have. As well as trying to guess what the other side had in mind.
For just once, the situation seemed clear, which in itself was enough to set off his own personal alarm. The oval of the IPP kept shrinking. It was definitely aimed at the city.
But why had they only fired one missile?
That couldn’t be a serious attack. Unless Meteor Kilo was nuclear-tipped, which seemed unlikely. The enemy must know Savo was on station here. That she could intercept a single-round attack. And that if she didn’t, the city’s own, closer-range Patriot batteries would.
Obviously, it was either some kind of message, or a bid to deplete their magazines before the real attack started.
But just as obviously, whatever the enemy’s aim, his own response was clear. And for once, his orders and his personal druthers coincided.
He couldn’t let a missile fall on a city.
He fitted the key into position as he reported the launch and his intentions to Fleet, tersely, not waiting for a response. He flicked up the clear plastic switch cover. Snapped the toggle to the FIRE position. “Authorized,” he announced.
Next came the same long, seemingly endless pause endured at every firing. No more than three seconds, yet feeling eternal.
The vent dampers whunked shut. The ventilation sighed to a stop.
A rumble built, growing until it shook the steel around them. Hot gas flared incandescent in the forward deck camera.
“Bird one away. Stand by … bird two away.”
The symbols left Savo’s circle-and-cross, blinking into blue semicircles as they gained speed. Dan said, “TAO, inform PacFleet, two Block 4s fired against a presumed DF-11 or DF-15 with IPP on Taipei.”
Terranova chanted, “Stand by for intercept, Meteor Kilo … stand by.…”
“Intercept … now,” called Wenck.
Dan squinted up at the display as the blue and the red callouts merged. The brackets jerked off the hurtling missile. Tracked back. Then hunted back and forth, as if unclear what they were supposed to be looking for.
“Return’s going mushy.”
“Ionization trail. Missile breakup.”
Sighs around the space. Dan checked with Slaughenhaupt again, ensuring that the chief was keeping a weather eye around them. When he tuned back in, the last traces of the hot, electrified gas that marked the reentry of the warhead were fading from the screen. “Our first round connected,” Mills said.
“Good work,” Dan said, but thinking, We expended two rounds against one of theirs. They’ve got over a thousand of the things, plus hundreds more in their production lines, probably.
Not a reassuring exchange ratio.
* * *
OVER the next hours they stayed on alert, but although warheads continued to fall on air bases, communication nodes, artillery parks, and the radar and Patriot sites that lined the west coast, no more came their way. The buzzer went off for outgoing missiles, too. The island was retaliating with a strike on the mainland’s signal intelligence station at Dongjing Shan. Taiwan’s missiles were smaller than the mainlanders’, but Dan had no doubt they’d be more accurate. One by one, radars went down as they hit.
But the air was boiling behind the coast. Scores of aircraft were rising from fields, joining up into flights, orbiting just out of range of the Taiwanese defenses.
“They’re generating a major air campaign,” Amy Singhe noted, behind him.
He glanced up at her profile. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, she reminded him more than ever of Kali, the avenging Hindu goddess. All she needed was a necklace of skulls. “Looks like it,” he allowed. “You passed that to Fleet, correct?”
“Yes sir. We going to take them on?”
“Not in our guidance, Strike Officer. Hold the strait, defend the city. That’s the mission, so far.”
“The time to strike was before they attacked.”
“No argument, Amy. Maybe the thinking is, see how they do on their own before we get involved.”
On the screen, the multiples of red carets—hostile aircraft—had merged into distinct groups. Now they began tracking east. “One headed for Penghu Island,” Mills muttered beside him. “One for, looks like, the south aircase cluster. One for the middle of the west coast. That northern gaggle’s for the airfields west of Taipei.”
Dan rubbed his face. His eyes hurt, but he couldn’t pull his gaze from the events unfolding on the screen. As the red carets crossed the coast, blue semicircles winked on above the mainland. The defenders’ numbers seemed pitifully few, considering what was coming at them.
“Never have so many,” Mills muttered.
“Yeah. The Battle of Britain all over again. On the other side of the world.”
“And both sides speaking Chinese.”
More blue contacts popped into existence. These did not orbit, but tracked quickly west. They didn’t seem directed against the incomers. “Zoom in on one of those,” Dan called to Terranova. “Get an altitude readout.”
“Altitude, angels decimal three.”
Three hundred feet … “Cruises,” Mills stated. “Deep counterstrike. Gonna hit their airfields. Cratering munitions, I’ll bet.”
Dan reflected that they might have been more effective before the attackers rose from those strips. But the ROC obviously hadn’t wanted to get ahead of the escalation curve. Make it clear to everyone who was the aggressor; not a bad tactic in the opening hours of a war. From the diplomatic point of view, at least.
Suddenly half the world died. At least, on their screens. “Data’s down, from ROC air defense,” Wenck called.
“I see,” Dan said quietly. The feed had gone out. No telling why, but their remaining contacts were from the task force’s own sensors. Which severely cut down their information on what was happening west of the island.
“Alert on bogey pack three,” Terranova announced.
Halfway across the strait, one of the flights from Fuzhou broke off the main body. Six aircraft swerved and tacked east. Toward Savo? Mills assigned weapons. Dan had to consider, quickly, whether his orders would require them to act against not a missile strike on a city, but an air attack on it. But after several tense minutes, it became evident that the flight was headed for neither Savo nor the capital, but for the Senkakus. “Putting more ordnance on the Japanese,” Wenck observed.
“There can’t be that much more to bomb.”
“Unless they’re reinforcing.”
Dan frowned. Tokyo was being closemouthed about its long-range intent. Granted, these small islands were national territory. But they were unpopulated, and much closer to the Chinese homeland than to the Japanese home islands.
In the deck cameras, their only reminder a world existed outside this air-conditioned, flicker-lit cave, the sun was setting. He reminded Wenck and Terranova to watch for launches against Savo. Intel had reported ship-killing missiles being deployed in China. But though more missiles rose, and curved, then plunged down onto the embattled island, none seemed to be aimed at them. The sheets of scratch paper taped to the diffusers fluttered. Only clicking keyboards interrupted the hiss of air-conditioning, and the occasional discordant howl of the buzzer as the red and blue symbols closed, and merged, and flared. And, many of them, disappeared.
A silent holocaust, mediated by digital electronics from hundreds of miles distant. Dan watched, rubbing stubbled cheeks. Wondering how long the embattled island, steadily being denuded of defenses, could hold out.
And when Savo’s turn would come.