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.