Ashes of Victory

— 30 —

Frank Kelly watched Marshon Chappelle tracking the cavitation from the twin screws of the 488-foot destroyer Qingdao, which continued trailing the carrier strike group by six thousand yards.

Vinson and its escorts had left the operating area southwest of Taiwan and sailed through the Luzon Strait to a position one hundred miles northwest of Laoag City, Philippines.

In doing so, the US warships had taken themselves out of the footprint of China’s Leung-2 reconnaissance satellites positioned over the Taiwan Strait. Twenty minutes before, the American vessels had slowed to a crawl while Kelly received his confirmation orders from the White House via Commander, US Pacific Command, to Commander, US Pacific Fleet, and finally Admiral Jack Swift.

Kelly said, “Sonar, Conn. Range and bearing.”

“Conn, sonar,” Chappelle replied. “Six thousand yards. Three-two-zero.”

“You sure Beijing isn’t watching?” Giannotti asked.

Kelly shrugged. The latest intel from the Pentagon and reports from an airborne E-2D Advanced Hawkeye had convinced the commander of the Mighty Mo that no Chinese satellites or reconnaissance aircraft were tracking the flotilla this far out.

“But if they are,” he finally said, “screw ’em.”

“Range five thousand six hundred yards,” Chappelle reported. “Bearing three-five-zero.”

“Fire one,” Kelly said, counting to five before adding, “fire two… fire three… fire four.”

Giannotti blinked before repeating the order. Then, leaning over, he whispered, “Jesus, boss. Two would have done it.”

Kelly ignored him, and a moment later, the Virginia-class attack submarine fired four MK 48 ADCAP torpedoes in sequence from its bow tubes.

“Conn, Sonar,” Chappelle reported. “The destroyer is turning to port and releasing countermeasures.”

Kelly nodded. It wouldn’t matter. Missouri carried the Mod 7 CBASS (Common Broadband Advanced Sonar System) version of the MK 48 ADCAP, meaning it had improved resistance to countermeasures and a new propulsion system.

The quartet of powerful explosions happened in sequence. Four 650 pounds of high explosives engulfed the destroyer’s starboard from amidships to its stern.

A moment later the vibrations from the shockwave reached Missouri’s hull as the Chinese ship broke up in three sections and vanished in less than a minute, along with its 260 sailors.

“Not much time to launch lifeboats,” Giannotti observed.

Kelly fought his emotions. For the past two days, the US Navy had ordered him to slaughter Chinese military personnel without any regard to the rules of engagement he had grown up on. The conflict between his sense of morality and his Oath of Enlistment was tearing him apart. But he knew better than to let an ounce of any sentiment show externally. “My orders were clear, Bobby. No witnesses and no time to send out a distress signal. You have the conn.”

Kelly returned to his cabin and his daughters. Over the next thirty minutes, the strike group gained speed and made a wide sweeping turn to steam over what little debris remained on the surface of the water, dispersing it. Then slowly, they turned back to their operating area west of Taiwan.

“The plane was on a reconnaissance mission,” insisted General Deng Xiangsui, standing at the end of the conference table briefing President Xi Jiechi and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, which included five members of the Politburo Standing Committee. One of his colonels worked a computer keyboard linked to the large projection screen next to him. “I personally dispatched it to search for our missing Type 096 ballistic submarine.”

“But, General,” Jiechi said. “What about satellite surveillance?”

“It only covers the strait. The last reported coordinates placed her south of the Luzon Strait, just beyond range. This is why I sent the H-6.”

“Which,” Jiechi said, “the Americans claimed was armed with missiles and attempting to fire on the Vinson.”

“Nonsense,” Deng said, shaking his head before nodding to his colonel. A moment later, the screen depicted a real-time satellite video of the carrier force in the strait. “If I had wanted Vinson destroyed… it would be on fire by now, or sunk. The Americans, once again, lie to us, fabricating evidence. But we can’t prove it because they destroyed the H-6, just as I know they sunk our submarine. And now the Qingdao has failed to report. What do you think happened to it?”

The PSC members began their whispering.

“And on top of that,” Deng continued, “the Americans have brought their F-35 stealth fighters to our doorstep. Our intelligence indicates there are over forty of them in Okinawa. But we can defeat them if we act now.”

President Jiechi looked confused. “How do we contend with something that can down our planes from a great altitude and distance, and which we can’t even see on our radars?”

Deng knew the Chinese pilots were poorly trained and no match for the Lightning flyers, but he refused to back down from fighting the good fight. He never had before and he wasn’t about to start now.

Every time you walk away from the trials of life because of the fear of failure, a part of you dies.

Remembering the words of his father, the general glared at the civilian leaders. “We can overwhelm the Americans with superior numbers, firepower, and tactics,” Deng blustered in his booming voice. “Remember that the American strategy relies on midair refueling of their fighters, and that includes the F-35s out of Kadena. While we may not be able to see their stealth fighters, we can see those large and slow tankers. Take them out and leave the fighters stranded. Remember, we have the home-field advantage.”

Deng leaned back and stared at President Jiechi to let his message sink in, leaving out the fact that fighter jets closely guarded the tankers to prevent precisely that scenario.

“The White House doesn’t want to lose any of those extremely expensive fighter planes,” the general added. “If they’re outnumbered, or lose more than a few Lightnings, the Americans will turn tail and immediately retreat to their base in Okinawa.”

President Jiechi and the committee members huddled in whispery discussions for several minutes. Finally, the president sighed with a grim set to his jaw. He spoke in soft, measured words. “General Xiangsui, it is our collective opinion that we should not provoke the Americans at this time. Tensions are too high. We can’t afford to lose any more of our forces.”

“You’re making a great mistake,” the general said with disgust. “You have the capability to chart your own destiny, the future of China, and you choose not to act with overwhelming strength in our own waters. You are cowards.”

With that, he stormed out of the room.

“But, sir, we’re breaking protocol!” Keith Okimoto protested as President Cord Macklin stepped off Marine One near the edge of the kill zone. “We always send a team ahead of your visits to scout the—”

“C’mon, Oki,” he said. “Do you really think someone’s gonna get me here? I mean, look at this place.”

Macklin himself looked around, taking it all in. He had come to gain perspective. He had come to show how much he cared. And he also had come to feel the heat and smell the air, validating his decision to launch an unprecedented strike across China and Saudi Arabia, neither of which had responded to his multiple threats.

But above all, Macklin had to come to speak directly to the army of volunteers arriving from all over the nation to search for survivors.

He stepped up to the makeshift podium erected on a mound of rubble while Okimoto and his team formed a defensive perimeter. Flanked by the mayor of Newport News, the commander of Naval Station Norfolk, and the governor of Virginia, Macklin began to address the crowd gathered north of the smoldering shoreline.

As Lt. Amanda Diamante sat in her brand-new F-35C, Dragon Two-One-Four, the carrier version of the Air Force F-35A Lightning, two words came to mind: badass motherfucker.

The advanced jet’s use of the latest radar absorbent materials, plus its revolutionary infrared and visual signature reduction technology, made it virtually undetectable by radar stations.

She grinned under her oxygen mask, waiting behind the raised jet blast deflector as the nose wheel of Lt. Cmdr. Juan Ricardo’s Lightning was secured to the catapult shuttle. He was at the controls of the second stealth fighter, Dragon One-Zero-Eight.

“All set, Deedle?”

“Yup. Living the dream,” she replied, reviewing the information displayed in the full-panel-width glass cockpit touchscreen integrated with her helmet-mounted display system. The Lightning truly made the Super Hornet’s cockpit look dated.

Placing her right index and thumb on the sidestick controller, she tilted it in each direction and verified that the corresponding control surfaces obeyed the fly-by-wire system.

The word out was that tonight the United States of America would settle all military business with the People’s Republic of China, after the White House had received undeniable evidence that Beijing had been behind the carrier strikes, including the nuclear attack on Newport News.

Bastards, she thought as she scanned everything one more time, just as Ricardo advanced the throttle to the military setting and turned on external lights, signaling readiness. A few seconds later, the stealth fighter shot off Cat I over a river of hissing steam and in burner.

As the jet took off like a rocket, Amanda waited in Cat II for the signal to increase power.

Here we go, she thought as she also pushed the left-hand throttle to the military setting and flipped on her lights.

The catapult yanked her hard as Amanda staged the blower of her Pratt & Whitney F135 turbofan, as the flight deck rushed by at a dizzying speed.

She volleyed off twenty seconds behind Ricardo, ignoring the darkness beyond the canopy by keeping her eyes on the wide glass panels. Achieving a positive rate of climb, she reduced power back to military setting and worked the sidestick control, following the departure route to meet up with Ricardo.

The Dragons continued on a northeasterly heading over the South China Sea at Mach 1.2 until reaching a KC-135 Stratotanker circling eighty miles west of Fuzhou.

The midnight sky was unusually dark, with only a hint of moonlight on the horizon as the stealth Dragons topped off their tanks before turning north. Ricardo and Amanda turned off their planes’ exterior lights as they set course for their target.

Amanda got her mind in the game, constantly scanning her instruments and being sure to hold a tight formation.

In her briefing, after getting over the excitement of learning she would be flying a mission in the Lightning, Amanda learned that they would be hitting the colossal Three Gorges Dam. The hydroelectric facility spanning the Yangtze River was the world’s largest power station at more than 22,500 megawatts. By comparison, the largest power plant in the US, Palo Verde in western Arizona, peaked at 3,900 megawatts with all three reactors operational.

Complete radio silence was paramount to their stealth mission, so Amanda had her radio muted and her AN/APG-81 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar off, making her invisible to China’s coastal defenses.

She checked her watch. One minute to showtime.

Don’t let us down, flyboys.

If everything went according to the plan reviewed during the briefing, the same scene was supposed to be playing out at other power-generating stations across the country by the fleet of US Air Force F-35A Lightnings out of Kadena AB, Okinawa. The strike package included Baihetan Dam, the country’s second largest at 16,000 megawatts, and Xiluodu Dam at 13,060 megawatts. In all, close to forty stealth fighters entered Chinese airspace completely undetected and in full synchronization. And in the Middle East, two more F-35Cs from USS Abraham Lincoln were performing a similar run over the power-generation stations in Saudi Arabia.

Ricardo and Amanda approached Three Gorges at two thousand feet, holding their speed at six hundred knots, before releasing two BLU-114/B submunitions.

The weapons contained bomblets of chemically treated carbon-fiber filaments, each only a few hundredths of an inch thick and able to float in the air like a dense cloud. As the conductive haze descended over the hydroelectric facility, it engulfed transformers and other high-voltage equipment. In the minute that followed, hundreds of thousands of short circuits occurred as current flowed through the fibers, which vaporized on contact, leaving no evidence behind.

As Ricardo and Amanda — as well as the rest of the Lightnings — turned back for their respective home bases, massive blackouts occurred across mainland China. From Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Tianjin to Beijing, Suzhou, Harbin, and Shanghai — and across dozens of military installations. In the span of sixty seconds, the People’s Republic of China had been blinded by an attack they could not detect.

Well, that’s something you don’t see every day, Amanda thought as the countryside beneath her went completely dark, from large metropolis to small towns, giving the country a taste of what it would be like in the aftermath of a total power loss due to Armageddon. She couldn’t even contemplate the magnitude of the economic impact. The rolling blackouts that hit California in the summer of 2000 had an estimated cost of forty billion dollars — child’s play by comparison to this coast-to-coast shutdown.

Still, in Amanda’s mind, it was a small price to pay for the attack on Newport News.

But the World Famous Golden Dragons had an additional mission before returning to Vinson: meet up with a KC-135, top off, and head straight to Yulin Naval Base.

Once more fat with fuel, the pair of Lightnings shot off at Mach 1.4, covering the four hundred miles in twenty minutes before reducing speed and dropping completely undetected over the most fortified and heavily defended naval base in China. Spanning more than sixteen square miles of military infrastructure, the base accommodated China’s emerging fleet of Shang-class Type 095 attack submarines and Jin-class Type 094 ballistic missile submarines — all protected by a vast array of short- and long-range SAM batteries, as well as anti-ship cruise missiles. It also housed more than a hundred Shenyang J-11s, the Chinese equivalent of the Sukhoi Su-27, a fighter as capable as the F-15E Strike Eagle.

Yet no one detected the Lightnings as they crossed right over the submarine fleet and the missile defense systems at five thousand feet, holding just four hundred knots, minimizing their acoustic signature.

Once again, the F-35Cs released two more sets of carbon-fiber BLU-114/B submunitions right over the island’s power-generating station and radar installations. The dense clouds descended over electric transformers, distribution centers, and power substations, sparking an electrical chaos visible for thirty seconds as Ricardo and Amanda flew back over the South China Sea to rendezvous with a KC-135 for the third and last time this night.

General Deng Xiangsui found himself suddenly blinded. His military had gone dark, not to mention the power loss in multiple major cities.

Fearing the worst, and in a moment of panic — and without consulting with President Jiechi — Deng used his encrypted satellite phone to place an emergency call.

Captain Ching Shubei and his crew had trained endlessly for this moment. His country had gone completely dark and General Deng Xiangsui had just informed him directly that they were under attack by the Americans.

The moment of truth had arrived for Shubei and his crew as they prepared to follow their commander’s orders…to shower the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group and every military installation in Taiwan with JL-2 ballistic missiles.

Staring at his officers in the control room, the submarine captain gave the order.

Amanda spotted a missile igniting as it surged above the surface, and the sight certainly warranted breaking radio silence.

“Ricky, are you seeing this shit?”

“Yep. JL-2 for sure. Big sucker. And it’s angled to the northeast.”

“In the direction of the fleet.”

“Liberty Bell, Liberty Bell,” Ricardo said. “Beware of a vampire heading your way! It’s a JL-2!”

A moment later, Lt. Cmdr. Barlow replied from an E-2D Advanced Hawkeye circling south of the carrier group, “Dragons, we just detected it and are already tracking and preparing to intercept.”

“Say, Ricky, we still have half our fuel plus the winders and the SDBs,” she said, referring to their two Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for self-defense and the twin GBU-39 small-diameter bombs for opportunity targets.

“Worth a try, Deedle.”

She powered up her AN/APG-81 radar and immediately started tracking it just as a second missile broke the water surface. “There’s another one!”

“Take it out, Deedle!” Ricardo ordered before roaring away in burner. “I’m going after the first one!”

“Copy that,” she replied as the Lightnings parted ways in the dark.

Amanda also staged her blower as the second missile rumbled by while starting to gain altitude. Unlike the first missile, which they had spotted from almost twenty miles away, this time she had the advantage of being closer, catching it in its initial launch phase. And only now, as Amanda got within three miles of it as it rose through five hundred feet, did she fully appreciate its size, almost fifty feet tall.

“But going nowhere,” she said, achieving lock on its superhot exhaust and firing an AIM-9X Block III Sidewinder from her starboard pod.

The nine-foot-long missile shot away, reaching Mach 2.5 in seconds, quickly closing the gap before its infrared proximity fuse detonated its 20.8-pound WDU-17/B annular blast fragmentation warhead. The blast spread into a large circle that cut through the base of the ballistic missile.

But as the JL-2 trembled in midair before exploding in an impressive fireball almost five hundred feet in diameter, Amanda spotted a third flash by the waterline just aft of her starboard wing.

Seriously?

“One down, Ricky,” she said. “But they just fired a third one!”

Ricardo heard Amanda, but he was too busy accelerating like a damn rocket after the first missile while his nose-mounted Electro-Optical Targeting System tracked the JL-2 soaring past twenty thousand feet at Mach 1.8.

It’s getting away, he thought, firing a Sidewinder, which blazed skyward as its IR seeker tracked the superhot plume of the missile rising higher in the night sky.

Reaching its maximum speed of Mach 2.5, the Sidewinder went nearly vertical as it followed its target, but it could not close the gap. The ballistic missile was already rocketing past Mach 3 above forty thousand feet.

“Can’t catch it, Deedle,” Amanda heard Ricardo say as she squirmed from the g-forces halfway through her turn to get a better angle on the third JL-2.

The F-35C sensors tracked and targeted the missile climbing past three hundred feet at her ten o’clock two miles out. The system painted the information on her helmet-mounted display as it provided the seeker head of her second Sidewinder with sufficient information to launch.

“Adios,” she whispered as it shot out of her port pylon, scrambling after the powerful heat source. In the time that she completed her turn and leveled her wings, the Sidewinder had sliced through the ballistic missile’s solid-fuel rocket booster. Reverberating over the water, another impressive fireball stained the ocean in hues of orange and yellow.

“Two down and fresh out of winders,” she reported, coming back around and noticing the three radial ripples where the missiles had surfaced. They were in a line and spaced around three hundred feet.

Checking her timer and doing some quick math — and assuming the sub had continued in a straight course — she took an educated guess at its current position. And if she remembered her Annapolis classes on submarine warfare, the average depth to shoot those ballistic missiles was around 120 feet — give or take.

Pointing the nose of her Lightning at the suspected spot on the water, she armed her three Raytheon SDBs. The precision-guided bombs’ tri-mode seekers responded to radar, infrared homing, and semi-active laser guidance. Amanda selected the latter, staring at the target on the water and locking the laser.

The SDBs dropped from her center rails and immediately deployed their “diamondback” type winglets, gliding beneath the F-35C for a second before dropping right over the painted spot on the water.

As Amanda pulled up, the SDBs stabbed the surface at nearly three hundred feet per second. The 206-pound warheads, set to detonate by a cockpit-selectable delay function, went off twenty feet below the surface with a combined high-explosive charge equivalent to a pair of World War II MK9 depth charges.

Captain Shubei was about to give the order to fire the sub’s fourth missile, when the shock wave from twin blasts at a distance of one hundred feet tumbled the Type 094 submarine on its side, sending him crashing against a console.

Lights flickered and screens turned to snow while sonar operators jerked back, yanking off their headphones. The hull trembled and sailors rolled inside the control room as the ship absorbed the acoustic energy piercing the depths. Resonating across its full length, it popped dozens of rivets like machine guns, shattering panels and consoles, injuring sailors, and sparking off bulkheads.

Water began streaming from several places, short-circuiting systems as panels went dark. The submarine struggled to straighten itself.

Shubei regained his footing under the crimson glow of emergency lanterns. “Take us down!” he finally shouted, holding the side of his bleeding face. “All ahead flank! Right full rudder! Set depth seven-zero-zero feet! And get those leaks under control!”

As his crew went to work, Shubei tried very hard to hide his shock, wondering how in the world someone had managed to drop depth charges right on top of his vessel while operating well within the kill zone of the naval base’s batteries of surface-to-air missiles.

Amanda climbed towards Ricardo’s Lightning high up in the sky. But even higher, and barely visible in the upper atmosphere, she spotted the very faint plume of the first ballistic missile.

Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Giannotti was the OOD on the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser when the call came in from Liberty Bell.

She immediately placed the ship on general quarters and said, “Get the captain on the bridge, pronto!”

Champlain cruised a mile aft of Vinson, equipped with the general-purpose, multi-mission Aegis weapons system that integrated air, surface, anti-submarine warfare sensors and engagement systems. The globally deployed Aegis provided the first line of defense for the fleet and land-based targets.

Standing behind the Aegis operators, Barbara tracked the JL-2 missile’s speed, altitude, and range as it arced through the stratosphere in a parabolic flight that left little room for speculation as to its intended target: the middle of the carrier group.

“Commander, I have three MIRVs,” the Aegis operator reported the instant the JL-2 missile released its payload of three multiple independent reentry vehicles, each presumably carrying a nuclear warhead.

“What’s happening, BG?” the captain asked, rushing inside the bridge, followed by two more officers.

“Incoming MIRVs, sir,” Barbara replied, pointing to the complex Aegis system already locked on the incoming warheads, one aimed at the front of the carrier group, the second at the center, and the third at the rear.

“Carry on,” the captain said.

“Cut them loose,” she said, giving the order to fire three RIM-174A Standard Extended Range Active Missiles with a range of 250 nautical miles and a ceiling higher than 110,000 feet.

Her heartbeat rocketing and her throat going dry, Barbara turned to see the first stage of the twenty-one-foot ERAMs ignite in a blaze that painted the surrounding night sky in shades of orange and white. The solid-propellant plumes splashed against the sleek outline of the guided-missile cruiser as they shot off from their respective Vertical Launching Tubes.

Don’t fail me, babies, she thought as the ERAMs hurtled skyward toward their respective targets, which were starting their descent through the upper atmosphere, entering their terminal phase.

Reaching a speed of Mach 3.5, the ERAMs became mere specks high in the southwestern skies before a bright flash indicated their second stages igniting, propelling them through their final interception courses.

“Eight seconds to impact,” the Aegis operator reported as Barbara felt a pressure in her chest and realized she had been holding her breath.

She exhaled slowly as three back-to-back flashes sparked high in the sky over the South China Sea, and a few seconds later, she heard their distant sonic booms, the sounds reminding her of Fourth of July reports.

“Targets down,” the Aegis operator replied.

As the bridge exploded in celebration, Barbara turned to her smiling CO and whispered, “Gotta hit the head, sir.” She barely had time to make it before she vomited.

The first signs of dawn graced the horizon with a pencil-thin line of lavender as Amanda approached Vinson’s stern.

Using fingertip touch on the sidestick and minute power adjustments, she called the ball and followed the LSO’s commands to bring her Lightning onto the dark flight deck.

Snagging the number two wire, she was thrown into her restraining harness. She felt damn lucky — and grateful — to have a carrier to come home to.

But as she idled the engine and raised the canopy of the finest stealth fighter jet ever made, she spotted Cmdr. Kowalski and Capt. Buchelle standing next to Maintenance Master Chief Cardona — all glaring at her under the lights washing the island in a grayish glow.

Now what?

In unison, as the Lightning’s tailhook released the arresting wire, the navy men brought their right hands up, middle fingers grazing their temples.

And in this night of nights, as the smell of jet fuel and burned rubber tingled her nostrils amid the controlled chaos reigning on the busy flight deck, Amanda proudly saluted back.