Sea Strike

55

“Bridge, this is the stealth bay.”

“Bridge, aye.”

“We’re approaching radar return limits. Captain. The Reds are going to be picking us up on their screens in another couple of minutes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mckelsie. It’s not going to matter too much here presently.”

Beyond the bridge windscreen, the coast of China showed as a band of total blackness between the obsidian of the sea and the starblaze of the sky. The bow of the Cunningham was a shadow dagger aimed dead-on at its heart.

Dix Beltrain’s was the next voice to fill her earphones.

“Captain, we have verification from Task Flag that the touch has been executed. All cruise-missile streams are inbound and on course.”

“Ordnance status?”

“All missile flights are hot. All launch cell doors are open. All systems are sequencing to fire time on target. T minus forty-one seconds and counting.”

“Status on the Retainers?”

“Lieutenant Arkady reports both Retainers are at initial point, ready to move out. We are standing by for launch commit, Captain.”

“Fire when ready, Mr. Beltrain.”

“Very good, ma’am. All systems enabled. Five … four … three … two … ”

The Cunningham’s deck horns squalled their flat warning.

The destroyer’s first round lanced into the sky, the bridge crew shielding their eyes from the yellow glare of the booster flame.

The stealth cruise missiles leveled out a meager fifty feet above the wave tops, razor-blade wings and rudderators snapping open from out of their angular fuselages. As the land-attack variant of the weapon, they had the ability to strike at a target over a thousand miles away. Tonight’s mission was point-blank range for the SCM, the equivalent of firing a highpowered hunting rifle across a poker table. It did guarantee, however, that the job would get done.

The first warning the Red Chinese had of the attack was when their beach sentries spotted the light flare of the Cunningham’s launch on the horizon. Twelve missiles in twice that many seconds. The second warning came a quarter of a minute later as the first of the cruisers whined in over the beach.

The crews of the coastal radar stations had no chance. The inbound stealth weapons registered on the Red radar screens for only seconds before impact. Unlike the HARMs that had taken out the antenna arrays, these weapons went directly for the station control centers, guided in by the impulses of the Global Positioning Satellite System.

Just short of their objectives, the missiles pogoed, climbing steeply, then diving into their targets. The radar sites had all been hardened, either hunkered underground or heavily sandbagged. However, the half-ton, semi-armor piercing warheads of the SCMs struck with the force of Thor’s hammer.

Total kill.

Inland, some Red systems operators realized what was happening as the coastal stations began to drop out of the datalink net. Shouting a warning, they fled their operations rooms, throwing themselves flat on the ground or into adjacent air raid trenches. A few survived.

One third of the SCM strike had an objective other than the radar sites. Running nose to tail up the southern channel of the Yangtze estuary, they scanned the left bank with microsecond bursts of laser light, seeking the match for a specific structural template stored in their guidance systems They found it: the quay at Waigaoqiao that served as the power and communications head for the hidden ballistic missile sub. One after another, the cruise missiles peeled off, streaking in toward the target.

A string of fiery detonations flashed down the length of the pier, shattering unmanned fishing boats as if they were orange crates. Amid the smoking conflagration, there came the sharper flare of an electric arc. The Communist government’s link to its nuclear ace in the hole had just been severed.

Offshore and centered in a bull’s-eye of spray, Retainer Zero One held low over the wave crests, her sister helo hovering a few meters away. In the Sea Comanche’s cockpit, Arkady counted off the flashes of the warhead detonations.

“Ten … eleven … twelve. Twelve out and in.”

The ECM threat receiver’s warning tone went silent as the last radar sweep died.

Slightly to the northwest, a closer series of explosions rippled along the surface of the sea. The Cunningham’s followup strike had just eliminated the guardships lurking outside of the estuary mine barrier.

“Gray Lady, this is Zero One. We have a clear board and the guardships are down. We are departing initial datum point. Zero Two, move out!”

Arkady slammed down his night-vision visor, changing his world from night black and starlight silver to multitones of softly luminescent green. The instrument readouts and navigational displays that had glowed within the HUD now were being projected directly onto the retinas of his eyes, showing the path that he must follow. Tilting his aircraft’s rotors forward, he gained way down the invisible corridor that led into the mouth of the Yangtze.

It was critical that the Retainers keep precisely to their preplanned flight path. Very shortly, the airspace around them was going to become occupied by some very uncaring and dangerous neighbors. The Cunningham’s missile salvo had been only the first shots of the engagement. Even as the Sea Comanches crossed the Shanghai defense perimeter, a second wave of cruise missiles, sixty-plus strong, crested the horizon, howling down upon the city.

It was the twenty-first-century variant of the classic time-on target barrage: multiple weapons firing to simultaneously strike at the same objective. The missile flight paths radiated outward from their launching point in a fanlike pattern to engulf the Shanghai area, the lead Tomahawk flights bypassing the city, then hooking around to converge on the target area from all angles.

Each round had been meticulously programmed to impact at a specific one-meter-wide point at a specific instant in time. Each strike was carefully calculated to maximize the damage and shock effect to the city’s defense infrastructure.

The antiaircraft guns defending the deepwater hiding hole of the Xia boomer died at precise twenty-five-second intervals.

The spacing had been selected to ensure that the trailing rounds would not fratricide amid the debris clouds cast up by the initial hits.

Each big 100-millimeter mount was first smashed down into its gunpit by the overpressure wave of a half-ton warhead detonating ten feet above it. Then it was vomited back into the sky by the fiery explosion of its own ready-use ammunition magazine.

Downtown, the night-duty operators in the Shanghai civil telephone exchange screamed as a cigar-shaped eighteen-foot projectile crashed through a third-floor window with a dying whine of its turbofan engine. Shedding its wings, the Tomahawk crashed through three switching banks before piling up against the rear wall of the building. The shockproof solid-state timers within the T-LAMs detonator pack patiently ticked off three minutes before firing, giving time enough for the exchange to be evacuated. When they had, the aged brick structure burst like a pricked balloon.

At the PLAAF air-defense installation west of the city, the ready-alert flight of F-7M Airguard fighters stood poised at the end of the base runway, engines idling. They had been scrambled at the beginning of the attack and now awaited final clearance to launch. It wouldn’t be coming.

First, there had been a flicker of reflected moonlight over the air-defense control bunker, then the bunker had belched flame from its air vents and doors. A moment later, the control tower had been hit, folding into a spreading pool of fire.

With his air base going to hell around him, the lead pilot went to war power, kicking on his afterburner. Better to try for the sky than to die on the ground. With his flight mates following, he roared down the conflagration-lit tarmac.

Passing through one hundred knots and approaching rotation speed, the Red pilot glanced up. Something was coming in the opposite direction down the runway.

A cruise missile was streaking along the centerline, fifty feet above the deck. Firecracker flashes danced around its nose as bomblets were kicked out of its submunitions dispenser.

A wave of minor explosions raced along behind it as the “breaker” charges shattered the tarmac.

Frantically, the Red pilot yanked back on the joystick, but his aircraft was still a critical ten miles per hour below flight speed. A landing-gear tire hooked into a smoking crater and the fighter cartwheeled and exploded. One after another, caught in the same trap of speed, time, and distance, the three other Airguards plowed into the holocaust, drawing a curtain of flame and debris down the full length of the runway.

Well executed though it might have been, the cruise-missile attack did not go through perfectly. One Tomahawk went cybernetically psychotic, screaming away into the west on a beeline for Mongolia. Another, clipped by a 25-millimeter antiaircraft round, staggered off course to vaporize a tragically overcrowded apartment block. A third, tasked with taking out a torpedo-boat moorage on the Huangpu River, suffered a gyro table failure, burying itself in a Yangtze mud bank.

The forward machine guns of the Five Sixteen boat hosed a wild burst into the sky.

“Ceasefire there!” Lieutenant Zhou Shan yelled over the bridge spray shield. “Save your ammunition!”

The inexperienced bow gunner looked back from his mount, his fearful expression momentarily illuminated by a bomb flash. Shan could not fault him. There was any amount of fear abroad this night. The urge to do something to keep it at bay could become overwhelming.

Shanghai seemed ablaze from a thousand sources. The city antiaircraft batteries, blinded and cut off from central command though they might have been, still raged, spewing streams of pink and green tracers into the sky. Half a dozen major fires could be seen from the boat moorage, and every few seconds the thickening smoke over the city glowed from the flare of a new missile detonation.

“Is there word from Fleet Command yet?” Zhou demanded of his radio operator, half shouting over the rumble of the gunfire.

“No, Comrade Lieutenant,” the radioman replied. “Fleet Command has gone off the air. The shore line is dead as well.”

Zhou turned to face Bosun Hoong, who was leaning stolidly back against the snub mast at the rear of the cockpit.

“What do you think, Bosun?”

Hoong removed a well-smoked cigarette butt from between his lips and flipped it over the rail. “I think we have the Yankees angry with us. The Nationalists couldn’t do all of this.”

“I think you are right, Hoong.”

Something new echoed from the sky, a deeper rumble that climbed the scale rapidly into a crackling roar as it passed invisibly across the zenith: jet engines, far more powerful than those of the cruise missiles. Equally more powerful were the two massive explosions just upriver within the Hudong shipyards. Flaming wreckage spun through the air, and all hands on the deck of the torpedo boat cowered down as the shock wave cracked over them.

“Do you wish to send a runner to Fleet Command, Lieutenant?” Hoong inquired, unfazed.

Shan hesitated only a moment more before angrily shaking his head. “Fleet Command be damned! We’re getting out of here now. Start engines and prepare to cast off all lines. Signal the rest of the squadron to follow us. We’ll take our chances out in the river.”

“At once, Lieutenant,” Hoong replied, sounding faintly pleased.

More bombs racked the shipyard area; the Huangpu River was lit blood-red by the growing fires as the Five Sixteen boat backed into the channel. As Hoong had said, it had to be the Americans, and somehow, in a way that he couldn’t explain, Zhou Shan also knew that it had to be the ghost ship as well.

It had returned and it was waiting for him out there in the burning night. They had affairs to conclude.