Eagle Station

Four

Navy Captain Commandant Yang Zhi glared at the pictures transmitted by his Silver Eagle drone. The two American warships steamed on unscathed, still heading north as though nothing had happened. The waves emanating from each DF-26 warhead’s distant impact point rippled past those ships without doing more than rocking them a few degrees from side to side.

His secure phone buzzed. “Yang here.” He straightened up to his full height as he listened to the staccato orders barked out from Beijing. When the furious voice fell silent, he nodded rapidly. “Yes, Comrade Admiral. It will be done!”

Yang hung up and turned to his chief of staff. “That was Admiral Cao. This American interference with our missile test was a hostile act. We are authorized to engage and sink those destroyers without further warning.” He eyed the other man. “Your recommendation?”

Liu’s brow furrowed in thought, but only for a moment. “I recommend that we attack using our YJ-62 anti-ship cruise missiles, Comrade Captain,” he said confidently. “The Americans are only twenty kilometers offshore. That is practically point-blank range for our weapons. By the time the enemy detects our missiles in flight, their close-in defenses, jammers, and decoys will have little or no time to react.”

Yang nodded. Liu’s thoughts matched his own. His island garrison had two full batteries of YJ-62 missiles — each equipped with four launch vehicles carrying three missiles. Attacking each enemy destroyer with a full salvo of twelve sea-skimming missiles should guarantee at least three or four hits, and probably more. And each of those cruise missiles carried a 210-kilogram, semi-armor-piercing warhead. Even a single hit could send an Arleigh Burke—class vessel straight to the bottom… or leave it a burning cripple that could easily be finished off later.

His teeth flashed in a quick predatory smile. “Let it be so, Commander. Order both coastal defense batteries to open fire at once. We’ll hit the Americans before they finish congratulating themselves on avoiding our last attack.”

“Warning. Emissions from the enemy’s land-based Type 366 radars indicate transition to fire control mode,” Brad McLanahan’s threat analysis computer announced.

He frowned. “These bastards aren’t giving up.”

“Would you?” Nadia Rozek asked.

“Probably not,” he admitted. “Okay, it’s showtime. Cue SPEAR.”

Nadia’s fingers danced across her touch-screen displays as she brought their ALQ-293 Self-Protection Electronically Agile Reaction system online. Like most of their advanced equipment, including the S-29 Shadow spaceplane, SPEAR was the product of Sky Masters Aerospace — easily the world’s most innovative aviation, electronics, and weapons design company. When it was active, SPEAR transmitted precisely tailored signals on the same frequencies used by enemy radars. Altering the timing of the pulses sent back to those radars enabled the system to trick them into believing their targets were somewhere else entirely. And for this mission, Sky Masters technicians had integrated SPEAR with McCampbell’s incredibly powerful AN/SPY-1 phased-array radar — massively increasing both its speed and accuracy and the range of frequencies it could cover.

Her eyes widened in delight as she realized the full range of capabilities now at her fingertips. Operating the basic SPEAR system was like being a highly gifted musical soloist as she single-handedly fought for the attention of an audience. But this merger with the destroyer’s enormous radar was like conducting an entire symphony orchestra made up of the world’s finest musicians — effortlessly wrapping thousands of listeners in an intricate cocoon of sound and rhythm.

Within seconds, Nadia effectively controlled every military-grade Chinese radar on Woody Island. None of their surface search or fire control radars showed an accurate position for the two American ships. And not one of the garrison’s air search radars could offer a clear picture of the airspace anywhere within a hundred nautical miles. They were all dazzled by hundreds of false contacts moving along random courses on dozens of different bearings.

She turned toward Brad with an exultant expression. “SPEAR is active. The enemy radars are completely blind. They cannot provide correct targeting data to any of their missile launchers or antiaircraft batteries.”

“Nice work!” Brad felt his own eagerness for battle rising. He’d hated just sitting helpless while those damned Chinese ballistic missiles plunged down out of space toward their slow-moving ship. Now it was their turn to hit back. He looked at Vasey. “All right, it’s your turn, Constable. Go ahead and slip the leash on our Ghost Wolves.”

The Englishman nodded, with his own fingers already blurring across his interactive displays. “Attack parameters laid in. Flight systems are nominal.” He tapped a final icon with deep satisfaction. “Autonomous programs engaged. The Wolves are on the hunt.”

Twenty miles south of the two U.S. Navy destroyers, a group of six black flying-wing aircraft orbited in a tight circle barely one hundred feet above the surface of the ocean. Abruptly, one by one, they broke out of the circle and darted north toward Woody Island at more than five hundred knots — accompanied by the shrill howl of wing-buried turbofan engines going to full military power.

All six aircraft were covered in a special radar-absorbent coating that sucked up most of the electromagnetic energy from radar waves and shunted it off as heat. No windows or cockpit canopies broke their smooth lines. On radar, the entire group would have shown up as nothing more than a small flock of seagulls.

These were Sky Masters — designed MQ-77 Ghost Wolf combat drones, unmanned aircraft flown entirely by remote control or under the guidance of their own sophisticated onboard computers. They were a larger and more expensive evolutionary variant of an earlier Sky Masters model — the MQ-55 Coyote — which had proved itself many times over in combat service with the Iron Wolf Squadron against the Russians. Significantly harder to detect, faster, more maneuverable, and with a larger weapons payload than their predecessors, the MQ-77 Ghost Wolves were designed to fly and fight on their own, or in tandem with manned modern jet fighters like the F/A-18 Hornet, F-22 Raptor, and F-35 Lightning II.

Just four minutes after receiving their attack orders from Peter Vasey, the first Ghost Wolf drones screamed in low toward the tiny island. Aboard each batwing-shaped aircraft, bay doors whined open. Dozens of small, tear-shaped bombs rippled out and fell toward the earth along precisely calculated arcs.

One by one these tiny, twenty-five-pound bombs detonated within a few yards of every PLA Navy radar, missile launcher, barracks, headquarters building, and hardened aircraft shelter on the island. But rather than exploding in a fiery cloud of lethal fragments, each device went off in a large and relatively harmless puff of white smoke. Instead of wartime munitions, each Ghost Wolf had just dropped a full load of BDU-33 practice bombs.

Engines howling, the six combat drones banked away and flew back out to sea — vanishing as quickly as they had come.

Watching through their long-range cameras from twelve miles out, Brad grinned appreciatively at the sight of dozens of smoke clouds rising above Woody Island’s tree-lined shores. “Man, I bet there are a ton of guys over there who just pissed their pants.”

Nadia nodded more seriously. “And, I imagine, there are a great many more red faces, both on the island and elsewhere in the PRC.”

To the Chinese military garrison and its masters in Beijing, the message conveyed by those drifting puffs of white smoke was unmistakable: if this had been a real air strike, the island’s defenses would have been obliterated by a single, unstoppable attack. And when it mattered most, every one of the advanced weapons and sensors the People’s Republic had spent so much time and money developing had proved absolutely useless.

With the Stars and Stripes streaming proudly from their radar masts, USS McCampbell and USS Mustin paraded slowly past Woody Island.