Sea Strike

1

Moondog 505 cruised at 20,000 feet, a geometric crossbreed of shark and manta ray skimming effortlessly over a misty seafloor of gray starlit clouds. Under the canopy of the big F/A-22 Sea Raptor, her pilot and systems operator slouched in their ejector seats in matching postures of slack-muscled semialertness. The night’s mission was a milk run, one that left them both with plenty of brainpower to spare, enough to allow them to take a bookmark out of an old topic of discussion.

“Daggone it! You’re a woman, you ought to be able to give me some kind of a handle on this thing.”

“Dig, indeed I am a woman. I am also a rational adult human being. Your wife, on the other hand, is a certifiable dingdong with the mentality of a five-year-old.”

“That’s cutting it a bit thick, Bub.”

“Hey, I’m not the one driving you crazy. Coming up on Waypoint Echo in ten seconds. Come left to zero one zero true on my mark. Three … two … one … Mark.”

“GPU confirmation on Waypoint Echo. Steering zero one zero true on base leg for Waypoint Foxtrot. The thing is that she says that it’s fine with her if I want to do another hitch.”

Lieutenant Alan “Digger” Graves was a sandy-haired Georgia expatriate who was fighting a losing battle to hold a troubled marriage together. His backseater, Lieutenant (j. g.) Beverly “Bubbles” Zellerman, was an Oregon-born brunette who was fighting a battle of her own to stay inside the Navy’s prescribed weight-to-height parameters. They had been flying together for almost two years now. Long enough to pass through both professionalism and friendship to become a blood-and instinct bonded team. Once, dunng a rather depressed and alcohol intensive leave in Singapore, they had even slept together. Afterward, they had agreed that it had not been a cosmic experience for either of them. They had fallen back into their professional and friendly roles with a sigh of relief, the only lingering aftereffect of their encounter being an exceptional openness to one another’s frailties.

“Dig, she can say any damn thing she wants, but you darn well know that every time you bring up the subject, she turns into the psycho-bitch from hell for the next week.”

“Then what in the sweet damn-all does she want?”

“She wants you out of the Navy, and she wants you to take the blame for it. Five years from now, when you’re moaning and pissing about throwing over your career, she wants to be able to give you that smug little smile and say, “Well, it was your decision!”

Graves sighed “Yeah, I can buy that scenario, knowing her.”

As he spoke, he shifted the pressure on his rudder pads and rocked his side-stick controller, slaloming the swing fighter through a lazy scissoring maneuver. Twisting in his harness, he peered aft, trying to pick out the dark silhouette of any pursuing aircraft against the lighter cloud deck. He did not expect to see anything back there. His threat boards were clear and the Sea Raptor was state-of-the-art in stealth technology, theoretically immune to detection by any of the local air-defense nets. However, milk run or not, “checking six” was a wise man’s precaution, especially when there was a war raging off your left wingtip.

It was a remarkably little-known struggle for one taking place in the telecommunications age, especially when one considered that in scope and in the sheer cost in human life, it was rapidly developing into a major conflict. There were few news bites devoted to it on the global infonets. There were no carefully earnest young video journalists broadcasting live from the battlefields. Articles on it were rare outside of those professional publications devoted to international policy and the military sciences. It didn’t even have a recognized name yet in the historical sense, although a number of possibilities were being bandied about In fact, the only point generally agreed upon was that it had begun at a place called Tiananmen Square. It had been slow to grow. The first hint to the outside world occurred when the People’s Republic of China started to close off certain provinces to foreign visitation. The explanation was “a program of civil reorganization.”

Then came the carefully worded press releases from Beijing concerning the suppression of “bandits’ and “counterrevolutionaries.”

The satellites knew the truth, however. Arcing high over Asia on their global sentry the reconsats of the other major powers monitored the villages burning each night and the growing number of dead in the streets of the cities. By the summer of 2006 it had become obvious to the world that its last major Communist empire was tearing itself apart.

It would not be an easy breakup. The old men in the Forbidden City had watched the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, and had learned from it. They had prepared for this last stand and they lashed back ruthlessly with all of the resources available to them. The casualty count of the second Chinese civil war might surpass that of World War II. Possibly it already had. Not even the involved combatants knew for sure Moondog 505’s task this night was to peek over the wall of silence and give the West a look into the heart of this conflict.

Digger and Bubbles had launched off their home carrier, the USS Enterprise, an hour before and five hundred miles to the southeast. Making landfall off Shantau they had turned northward into the Formosa Strait, that narrow band of sea that separated the Chinese mainland and the island of Taiwan Paralleling the coast, roughly twenty miles offshore, they commenced their reconnaissance run. Five Oh Five was carrying Elint (Electronic Intelligence) and Sigint (Signal Intelligence) pallets in her internal weapons bays, and antenna pods clipped to her underwing hard points. So equipped, she could perform a multitude of tasks ranging from the location and identification of radio-and radar-transmission sites to gauging telephone net communications loads and electric power-plant outputs.

Upon returning to the earner, data would be down loaded and relayed to a number of different destinations — the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA — all to be processed and correlated with the rest of the information stream flowing in on the crisis. Another piece to be used in assembling the great puzzle of China.

“So, what am I going to do about it, Bub?”

“So, admit you’ve got a losing situation and get the hell out of Dodge while you can. Don’t wait till a kid comes along and complicates the situation.”

“Aw, shit!”

“My feelings exactly!”

There was a minute’s worth of silence as Graves stared out into the night beyond the canopy.

“Problem is that I still kind of love her.”

“I kind of love butterscotch sundaes too, pal, but I’m trying not to let ‘dictate to me.” Bubbles’s voice softened “Dig, it’s just not working anymore.”

Zellerman was about to add to that thought when, abruptly, she leaned forward, peering into one of her console screens. Graves caught her move in his rearview mirrors.

“What‘s up?” he asked, going taut.

“I don’t know.” Her fingers danced on a keypad, calling up a replay from the plane’s Forward Looking Infrared Scanner. “I think we just overflew a cruise missile stream.”

“You sure?”

“Three thermal plumes looks like small turbojet plants running nose-to-tail at wave-top altitude at about one-mile intervals. Speed about six hundred knots. Damn, there’s another one! Four bogeys this time Running east to west, just like the last batch.”

“Who’s shooting at whom?” Graves demanded.

“I don’t know. It’s got to be the Chinese, but as for which side, I don’t know. I can’t imagine why either the Rebels, or the Reds, would be firing in on the mainland from way out here. Whoa! Aircraft contact!”

“Where away?” Graves instinctively rocked the side-stick forward, plunging 505 into the overcast like a crash-diving submarine.

“Down on the deck again. Two groups of four in loose deuce formation. Twin engined fighter types. Can’t ID the model. Airspeed five-fifty, east to west. That’s an air strike, Digger!”

“Who are these guys? Don’t think either the Reds or the Rebs have night-capable strike aircraft.”

“Well, somebody does." Zellerman’s hands were flying across her console now, trying to keep pace with the accelerating data flow from the sensor packs. “Control radars are coming up all along the coast. Multiple sources, gun and SAM systems.”

“Anyone painting us?”

“Negative, negative! We’re clear so far. But we’ve also got some airborne cascade jammers lighting off to the east. Four or five of ‘Big suckers!’”

Up in the forward cockpit, a warning tone sounded.

“I’m getting something on the threat boards now,” Digger exclaimed.

“I’ve got it No lockup. We’re still below valid return thresholds It looks like we’re being scanned by an Airborne Early Warning aircraft of some kind. It’s way the hell off to the east of us, too. Might be an E2D, but I don’t think it’s one of ours.”

“What are you getting along the mainland now?”

“The side-scan FLIRs are picking up heavy thermal flares around Hsia-men and the Signal Intelligence monitors are reading defense-suppression jamming from what looks like NATO-standard ECM. Somebody’s doing some bombing out there. I’m also seeing a formation of surface ships out in the Strait Man, I wish we could use the radar for a second!”

“Have you gone certifiable?” Graves snapped “Somebody’s just declared World War Three out there! If we radiate, we’re hamburger. Hang on, I’m reversing us out of this.”

“Wait a minute!” Zellerman protested. “We don’t know what’s going on yet.”

“We don’t have to know what’s going on! We just have to stay alive long enough to tell somebody about it.”

“Let’s at least get a look at this surface group. Come on, Dig, this is hot stuff going down!”

“… All right. One look and then we’re history.”

Graves throttled back and flared the Sea Raptor’s air brakes, letting her sink through the cloud cover. As they descended, Zellerman called out the clearing image feeding into her displays from the infrared scanners.

“Looks like a convoy … Two parallel ship columns in the center … Three medium-sized contacts and one large in each, with the big guys trailing … They’re being screened by four, no, make that six, small escorts with another medium-sized guy out on point.”

“Okay,” Graves said, arming the chaff and flare launchers.

“Threat boards are clear on tactical ranges. Do you confirm?”

“Confirm surface targets are full EMCON.”

“Here’s how we’ll do it. We’ll break through the overcast about six miles out from the target and at two thousand feet. We’ll come around to the east, make one pass down the side of the formation, then we turn away and evade to the south. Get it all now, because we ain’t gonna be back.”

“Aye, aye. Gun cameras enabled and slaved to the FLIR. Recorders are running.”

“We’re doing it.”

They punched down and out of the clouds, and the powerful thermographic imagers of the camera system cut through the darkness and the residual murk.

It was indeed a convoy. A flotilla of fast missile patrol boats guarded the flanks of half a dozen tank-landing ships and a pair of huge, Seagoing Barge Carrier-class super freighters. And leading the force as it steamed westward was the unmistakable cow-barn-over-speedboat silhouette of an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate.

Staring into his targeting screen, Graves wondered for one bewildered moment why his nation had conspired to launch a surprise attack against the People’s Republic of China.

Then he recalled that the U.S. Navy wasn’t the only fleet in these waters that had Perrys in commission.

“Sweet Jesus! Chiang Kai-shek should have lived to see this,” he murmured in awe, forgetting his resolution to pitch out and flee the area. “They’re doing it. At long damn last, they’re really doing it!”

“Who’s doing what?” Zellerman demanded.

“That’s part of an invasion fleet, Bub. A Taiwanese invasion fleet. After sixty damn years, the Nationalists are going home!”