Ashes of Victory

— 13 —

After dropping her report on Lt. Cmdr. Vince Nova’s desk at 1500 hours, Lt. Amanda Diamante went to see Lt. Cmdr. Ed Stone, but the maintenance officer was tied up in a meeting, so she had been redirected to Stone’s right-hand man in the hangar bay. While Nova’s official report would take some time to make it up the chain of command, word had it Kowalski had already cleared her to fly again.

She headed down to the hangar deck, located three levels below the ready room. It didn’t matter how many times she came down here, the sheer size of the cavernous space impressed her. At almost seven hundred feet long — or two-thirds the length of Vinson—and more than a hundred feet wide, and towering twenty-five feet high, it could hold all of the CVW-2 aircraft, plus seemingly endless assortments of spare parts and heavy-duty service equipment.

Divided into four zones by massive steel sliding doors, the hangar buzzed with activity this afternoon, as maintenance crews worked around the clock to keep Carrier Air Wing 2 in business. Amanda stared at the massive isolation doors — the same ones that had allowed the crew of Stennis to contain the flooding hangar bay following that horrible torpedo attack.

As she made her way through the cavernous place, she imagined what it must have been like for the crew aboard Stennis. She had lost friends on both Truman and Stennis and struggled with mood swings from grief to anger and back again.

All around her, maintenance crews were hard at work, tinkering, testing, and repairing dozens of jets, their wings folded up and all parked in what looked like a massive traffic jam. Organized chaos.

She spotted Maintenance Master Chief Gino Cardona in the hangar zone closest to the stern, where the air group serviced the Super Hornets of her fighter squadron.

Standing in his customary drill-sergeant pose, arms crossed, Cardona supervised a young sailor stenciling Amanda’s name under the forward cockpit of an F/A-18E that looked as if it had seen better days. The paint was peeling off the wingtips, and the tail was dark from a lifetime of afterburner work. Weld marks under both wings and the left side of the fuselage, like scar tissue, marked the repairs to ground fire damage. The fighter jet looked as tired and sore as Amanda felt. The ejection had really shaken her down to the bone.

“Miss Diamante. Do you think you can hang on to this Rhino a bit longer?” Cardona asked, without looking at her as the kid balanced himself at the top of the ladder, juggling a template, a brush, and a small can of paint — hot pink.

Seriously?

“And you!” he screamed at the sailor, who looked as if he’d just graduated from high school. “One drop of paint on my deck and I’ll have you scrub it end to end with a damned toothbrush! You feel me, son?”

“Yes, Master Chief!” he cried out.

“Ran out of black paint, Master Chief?”

The man’s mustache straightened as he grinned.

“Looks like it’s been to hell and back,” she added.

The smile faded, and he finally turned to her.

“Lieutenant,” he said in a low, grumbling voice that sounded like a train leaving the station. “This Rhino here is a fine example of American aeronautical engineering.” Then as his voice incrementally grew louder, he added, “It was servicing your country while you were still in diapers!” Then he grinned again and added in a calm voice, “This particular bird served in Operations Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom, Desert Strike, and Northern Watch, and operations off the Somali coast. It has unleashed violence on Taliban insurgents across Afghanistan, ISIS enclaves in northern Iraq, and even enforced the no-fly zone there.” Cardona pointed at the rows of bomb silhouettes stenciled on the nose. Lowering his voice, he added, “And it even shot down a Syrian Air Force Su-22.”

“I never heard of that last one.”

“Like I said, Miss Diamante. Diapers. Besides, it’s either this Rhino or the highway.”

“Copy that,” she said.

“And not a scratch. Clear?”

She raised her brows and once more contemplated the peeling paint and scarred fuselage and asked, “How would you be able to tell if I scratched it?”

Cardona groaned, but before he could reply, Amanda stretched a finger at the artwork spelling DEDDLE.

“Dammit, boy!” he exploded. “There are three Es in Deedle! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Sorry, Master Chief!” the kid wailed before producing a rag from his back pocket to wipe off the curved section of the second D to turn it into a bastardized E.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Cardona hissed at the smear job.

“It’s all right, Master Chief,” Amanda said. “It actually goes with the whole… look.”

Sighing, he said, “It’ll be ready for preflight at oh six hundred.”

As she was about to leave, Amanda noticed a pair of jets in the very rear of the hangar covered with blue tarps, but she could still spot the shape of their twin tails angled outward. However, the overall length was all wrong — almost ten-feet-shorter wrong. And the wingspan was also narrower than a Super Hornet’s by almost eight feet.

And she suddenly remembered her three-month training at Patuxent River in—

“You’re not worthy to even look that way, Deedle!” Cardona snapped when he caught her looking.

“But, Chief,” she said, growing excited. “Those are—”

“Beyond-fucking-limits.”

“But I’m certified in the Lightning, and I thought that—”

The master chief turned back and focused his laser stare on the naval aviator almost a foot shorter than his towering frame. “Lieutenant, do you really, really think I would let you anywhere near a brand-new, one-hundred-twenty-million-dollar F-35C after what you did to my Rhino?”

“But—”

“Miss Diamante, maybe your preschool teacher should have explained to you that the way to get a new toy isn’t by breaking your old one.”

“Okay, okay, I just thought—”

“This Rhino here is your new bird,” Cardona interrupted, his right index finger pointed at the weathered jet as the sailor finished the first DEEDLE with the smudged E and added a hyphen before starting on the second one. “If you have any issues with that, by all means feel free to take it up your chain of command.” Grinning, he added, “And please, do let me know how that works out for you.”

Amanda promptly retreated, letting Cardona redirect his energy back at the young sailor. She could still hear him screaming over the noisy hangar as she ducked through a bulkhead door and headed up to the ready room.

She walked down a series of hallways and climbed ladders between levels, always yielding to senior officers coming in the opposite direction. She also kept to the right or left side of the tape pasted down the middle of passageways or hatchways where sailors cleaned and waxed the floors. Work was always done on one half at a time to keep the walkways open.

Her aching body had a craving for a latte, but when she finally made it to the 03 Level and walked into the ready room, she found Mullet Malloy sitting across from a very somber-looking Ricky Ricardo.

“Hey, Ricky,” she said, “guess what I found down at the hangars when I—”

“Not now, Deedle,” Malloy said, shaking his head. His sandy hair fell over his brow and he unconsciously pushed it back. Ricardo didn’t even look up.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Our boy just got dumped.” Then lowering his voice, he whispered, “Via Facebook.”

“You know, I can hear you, Mullet,” Ricardo mumbled.

“Jessie broke off the engagement?” Amanda asked, sitting down next to Ricardo.

“Worse, actually,” Malloy decided to answer. “An old academy buddy of ours in Los Angeles posted video of some Charger’s pool party… and there she was, dancing around in a bikini, twerking with some linebacker, who then picked her up over his shoulder and carried her inside a cabana. No imagination required to know what happened next. When Ricky called her on the sat phone, she hung up, unfriended him, and changed her status to single.”

“That’s cold, man,” she said, sitting next to him and placing an arm over his shoulders. “You’re out here fighting for your country, and she’s—”

“Doing the football team?” Malloy offered, rolling his eyes.

“Seriously, man?” Ricardo mumbled, shaking his head.

Amanda burned Malloy with her stare, then said, “Ricky… I’m so sorry.”

Ricardo sat, shaking his head. “I just can’t understand it.”

“Well, screw her,” Malloy said. “We’re here for you, buddy.”

“That’s right. And better you found out now than after you’re married with kids,” Amanda said. “Besides, we’re the only family you need.”

As Ricardo sat there, still shaking his head in denial, their commander, Dover Kowalski, walked in.

“What the hell’s going on? Don’t you three have someplace better to be?” He pointed at the flight schedule board, where Amanda noticed to her delight that it once again included her for a CAP mission with Ricky the following morning. But then she frowned when she saw that her Greenie Board GPA had plummeted after getting a big fat zero for failing to bring back her bird.

Malloy said, “Sorry, Skipper. Ricky here just found out his fiancée has been banging some linebacker from the Chargers.”

“C’mon, man!” Ricardo snapped. “What’s wrong with you?”

Kowalski blinked.

“Just shut it, Mullet!” Amanda snapped.

“Ricky,” Kowalski finally said. “I’m really sorry.”

Ricardo glared at Malloy, then said, “Thank you, sir. I—”

“Don’t thank me, son,” Kowalski said. “You get over this shit right here, right now. In case you haven’t been keeping up with world events, we’re no longer fighting ragheads. We’re headed at flank speed for the Taiwan Strait. In three days, we’ll be within pissing distance from hundreds of MiGs, Sukhois, and cruise missiles, plus their subs, destroyers, and even a damned aircraft carrier. That means we have to pull together as a fighter squadron, with everyone’s head in the game, a hundred percent. You all get me?”

“Yes, sir!” the three pilots replied in unison. Kowalski turned on his heel and walked out.

“We will never again have such an opportunity,” General Deng Xiangsui said. “The time has finally come to take back what rightfully belongs to our people.”

President Xi Jiechi stood in his office overlooking the Central Sea, the name given to one of the two lakes in the gardens of the Imperial City adjacent to the vast Forbidden City. Along with the second lake, the Southern Sea, the Zhongnanhai complex with its array of palace-like buildings, pristine lakes, and manicured gardens served as the central headquarters for the Communist Party of China, the State Council, and the office of the president of the PRC. In fact, the term Zhongnanhai was used to refer to President Jiechi and his senior party officials just as the term White House referred to the American president and his cabinet.

Except that Mac controls his cabinet, Jiechi thought. I have to coexist with the PSC.

The Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China represented the highest law of the land. The PSC had placed him in Zhongnanhai and, just as easily, it could have him removed from office — even dragged to the nearest rice paddy and shot in the head. All it took was a majority vote. And at the center of this iron-gripped ruling body of nine stood the man he loved like a father.

But that didn’t mean Jiechi agreed with some of the general’s views, which dated back to the days of Chairman Mao Zedong. Although Deng had been responsible for the modernization of the PLA, including the creation and deployment of its aircraft carrier and its ballistic missile submarine programs — as well as China’s revolutionary ground-based satellite-killer laser system — it was time for him to retire.

Easier said than done.

Jiechi silently mused at another crucial difference between America and China. As commander in chief, President Macklin could replace his generals and cabinet members at will. Jiechi, on the other hand, held only the paper title of “chairman” of the Central Military Committee, which in theory meant he commanded all branches of the military. True control of the PLA, however, rested in the wrinkled hands of the vice chairman and supreme military commander standing behind him, waiting for a response.

The president, arms behind his back, continued contemplating the mirror-smooth lake, as well as Deng’s comment, before turning around and facing the man who had raised him.

“Zhǎng zhě,” he said, using the Chinese phrase for father figure. “There is no denying that under your leadership, the PLA has made great strides toward becoming a world power. But still…”

“What troubles you?”

Exhaling heavily, he said, “The math.”

Deng approached his protégé and patted him on the shoulder. “What math?”

“We have one operational aircraft carrier,” Jiechi said, referring to Liaoning, a Type 001A carrier China had purchased from Russia. “And it’s roughly half the tonnage of a Nimitz-class. The Americans have ten Nimitz-class carriers and are about to deploy their first Ford-class supercarrier. While I recognize — and am truly appalled — that terrorists have managed to disable two of them, that still leaves them with eight Nimitz class and one Ford class.”

Jiechi was aware of the developments of a Type 002 and a Type 003 carrier, the latter to compete with the Ford class. However, those vessels, currently under construction at the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai, were not scheduled for completion for another three years.

“Technically they only have four carriers in combat-ready status,” Deng said. “Vinson, Roosevelt, Reagan, and Lincoln. The rest are either in repair or still undergoing sea trials. And with Stennis out of commission, there are none near the strait at the moment.”

“In addition,” Jiechi continued, ignoring him. “We only have five Type 094 ballistic missile submarines, each armed with twelve JL-2 ballistic missiles, and each capable of deploying up to four nuclear warheads. Plus, our single brand-new Type 096 that can carry twenty-four JL-2s. The Americans have fourteen Ohio-class subs, each armed with twenty-four Trident missiles, and each capable of deploying up to twelve independent nuclear warheads. It is this math, Zhǎng zhě, that troubles me.”

Deng slowly nodded before speaking in his softer, almost endearing tone that he reserved for his most intimate father-son chats. “When Chairman Mao founded the Communist Party of China and took on Sun Yat-sen and his ruling Kuomintang in 1945, he did it with just over a million men and women — mostly peasants. At the time, Yat-sen had more than four million well-armed and battle-hardened soldiers. By 1949, Chairman Mao had driven the Kuomintang out of mainland China, forcing them to retreat to Taiwan. Your father was just eleven years old. Still, along with others of our generation, myself included, he was moved by the change and vowed to continue the fight for the complete and unconditional unification that our beloved chairman started.

“Unfortunately, every time we attempted to reclaim the land that is rightfully ours, even as far back as 1950, the Americans intervened with their carrier forces.”

He paused and once more placed a hand on Jiechi’s shoulder, his eyes filling. “Your father died in one of those interventions, Xi, killed by a weapon given to the Kuomintang by the Americans.”

He had, of course, heard the story before. “What are you suggesting?”

“Strength, my beloved Xi. I am strongly suggesting that you display the same strength of Chairman Mao — as well as every successive leader that has occupied the seat of power under your command. It is crucial that senior party members — and the Americans — see the fire in your belly, and”—the aging general tightened his hands— “the steel in your fists, by taking advantage of this unique moment of weakness in the American navy. Remember, every time you walk away from the trials of life because of the fear of failure, a part of you dies. Don’t walk away from this trial, my son. Rather, face it with overwhelming strength.”

Jiechi had heard those words before, when scaling the political mountain that had placed him in Zhongnanhai.

“And how do you recommend I show this… strength?”

Deng’s heavily lined face tightened. “By asking yourself, ‘How would Chairman Mao have handled this?’”

Jiechi inhaled deeply. “And how, Zhǎng zhě? How would Chairman Mao have handled this… opportunity?”

Without hesitation, Deng said, “By testing the American resolve.”

Considered one of the most important waterways in the world, the Suez Canal ran north to south across the Isthmus of Suez in northeastern Egypt. The canal connected the Mediterranean Sea at Port Said with the Gulf of Suez, an arm of the Red Sea.

The busy canal provided a critical shortcut for merchant ships operating between American and European ports and those in southern Asia, Oceania, and eastern Africa.

Suezmax was a naval-architecture term for the largest ship capable of transiting the narrow canal. The typical deadweight of a Suezmax tanker ship was 240,000 tons with a beam of 164 feet and a draft of sixty-six feet. In addition, all ships had to have a maximum air draft of 223 feet to clear the 230-foot-high Suez Canal Bridge. The normal transit time averaged fourteen to sixteen hours.

Captain Marvin Bennett, the skipper of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) cursed under his breath as the convoy slowly made its way down the narrow canal. With a beam of 134 feet at the waterline widening to 252 feet at the flight-deck level, someone standing at the edge of the flight deck would look straight down onto the roads flanking the canal.

A missile cruiser and a destroyer led the way, followed by Lincoln, a Virginia-class submarine, another missile cruiser, a frigate, and two resupply ships.

Standing on vulture’s row, Bennett looked down at the road alongside the edge of the canal, where a small army dispatched by the Egyptian government to protect the convoy followed the ships.

And Bennett appreciated the effort, but the skipper of Lincoln longed for the safety of the open sea, counting down the minutes until he cleared this damn waterway.

Once a small and fairly remote airport, Borg El Arab had become the principal airport for Alexandria after the closure of the Alexandria International Airport in 2011. Located twenty-five miles south of the legendary coastal city, it provided services for more than a dozen airlines with flights coming from as far away as Turkey, Kuwait, and Syria.

Tariq al-Kayyam taxied a KC-130H Hercules aerial refueling tanker to the designated parking spot on the Aswan airport ramp, next to another Hercules flown by his fellow pilot, Wassim Nuwas. Purchased from the nearly bankrupt Brazilian government, both of the massive aircraft were now painted in the colors of a regional air-cargo company.

The standard aircraft fuel tanks were full, and the portable 3,600-gallon stainless steel tank in the cargo compartment had been filled to capacity with jet fuel.

Born in Yarmouk Camp in Damascus, Syria, the nineteen-year-old Tariq had grown up in better conditions than many refugees in the Middle East. One of the more than hundred thousand “forgotten Palestinians” ignored by the international media because they did not live under Israeli “occupation,” he had been educated in UNRWA schools. His father had worked at a local hospital; his mother had died in childbirth.

Though known as a “camp,” Yarmouk had schools, hospitals, and even internet cafés. During the Syrian Civil War, it had become the scene of intense fighting between the Free Syrian Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, backed by Syrian Army forces. Thousands of residents had fled the fighting. Eventually, the Syrian Army had besieged the camp, turning it into an utter hellhole.

When ISIS forces entered the camp, Tariq had finally fled to Lebanon, where he’d met dozens of other young men like himself, homeless, without a country, without a purpose, and eager for direction. One of these other men had been Wassim Nuwas, an Iraqi-born twenty-two-year-old who had also fled ISIS. The two men had met in a mosque favored by such angry, disaffected young men as they. Then came a well-dressed British man, who offered them a unique opportunity to vent their anger.

He had given them money, papers, and instructions to find passage on a cargo flight from Beirut to Cairo, and then to Borg El Arab to begin their training. Under the close tutelage of a Nigerian instructor pilot, they had received thirty-two hours of dual basic flight training in a Cessna 172, before transitioning to the Hercules. Tariq and Wassim had flown an additional fifteen hours and made eleven takeoffs but no landings in the big turboprops.

After receiving permission to taxi, Tariq steered behind an EgyptAir Boeing 737–800 headed for Runway One-Four. He watched the airliner take off and climb into the hazy gray sky. Cleared for takeoff, he lined up the big KC-130H with the runway and slowly added power to the four powerful Allison engines, feeling the adrenaline surge in his body. Today, he flew solo in the Hercules for the first time. His heart pounded wildly as anxiety filled him, but he managed to take off without incident, and started a slow climb to one thousand feet.

As the minutes passed, a sense of peacefulness descended over him. He followed the Mediterranean coast until reaching the northern end of the canal at Port Said, just as he had practiced with his instructor. Turning south, he followed the crowded waterway until he could see the US Navy warships just beyond the horizon.

He frowned, wishing he had been given permission to strike the carrier, but his handler had been adamant he must keep clear of the Americans, who would likely be on high alert.

Rolling to a southeasterly course, Tariq tried to give the carrier group a wide berth, before turning back to the canal at a point almost ten miles ahead of the American fleet. As he approached it, he saw a pair of fighter jets that had been circling over the carrier suddenly turning toward him.

Panicking, he pushed full throttle and pointed the plane at the closest target, a small merchant vessel — maybe a hundred feet long — less than a half mile away.

It will have to do, he thought, angry that he couldn’t go after the massive oil tankers a few miles farther south, but he couldn’t risk being shot down.

Lowering the nose, he entered a shallow dive as the jets approached. With the four powerful Allison turboprop engines producing more than 4,900 shaft horsepower each, the KC-130H accelerated to four hundred miles per hour as the bridge of the ship filled his windscreen.

The heavy plane vanished in a horrendous explosion that reverberated for miles and tore through the small ship with enough force to drive the keel three feet into the bottom of the canal. Debris rained down in a quarter-mile radius around the smoking wreckage, as southbound traffic began stopping in place.

Captain Bennett ordered his crew to general quarters only seconds after the explosion. Thick black smoke billowed skyward, but well ahead of his position. The other navy ships also went to general quarters, and all traffic stopped.

A pair of F/A-18Es reported having spotted a Hercules turboprop in its final suicide dive. The fighters, accompanied by another pair of Super Hornets that had been refueling from a KC-135 Stratotanker, scrambled into two sections flying CAP over the carrier searching for other rogue planes.

“What a damned mess,” Bennett mumbled before starting to make calls to back out of the canal and return to the Mediterranean.

Wassim saw the column of black smoke rising in the distance as he began looking for a target north of the US Navy ships but far away enough not to be an immediate threat.

Spotting a large petroleum tanker almost fifteen miles north of the convoy, he added full power to the straining engines and aimed for it, making minor corrections all the way down.

As the long deck of the tanker filled his windscreen, Wassim closed his eyes in prayer.