Lei barked the command into his sound-powered telephone. “Fire battery two.”
Three seconds later, another blaze of light, this one from the aft quad launcher. A salvo of four more Harpoons, one after the other, leapt from the tubes.
Lei kept his eyes on the orange plumes until each missile had vanished in the murk. The Kai Yang’s primary mission was completed. The Harpoons were away. They would find their way to the targets — or be destroyed en route.
Commander Lei still could not overcome his astonishment. Taiwan attacking China! In the scramble to gather his crew, arm his ship, and rush the Kai Yang to sea, Lei had not taken the time to reflect on the gravity of the situation. Now, with his missiles soaring toward their targets on the mainland, he felt himself filled with a mixture of awe and fear.
Fourteen years. That was how long he had been an officer in the Taiwanese Navy, and for his entire career he had prepared for this moment. In every hypothetical battle scenario, he had fought the People’s Liberation Navy for control of the Taiwan Strait. In each instance, it was assumed that the PLA navy would strike first.
Now this. A pre-emptive strike by Taiwan. Why?
Staring into the black void, Lei tried to make sense of the situation. The President’s plane had gone down. That much he knew. Was China responsible?
Probably.
So who ordered the strike?
Taiwan’s politicians, at least those in the current ruling party, were known for their exaggerated sense of caution. Although Madame Soong, the Vice President, was the acting head of state, Lei could not imagine her giving such an order. Lei had met her once, during the inaugural ceremonies, and though she seemed attractive and bright enough for a woman, it was inconceivable that she could function as commander-in-chief. It had to be one of the cabinet ministers. Leung? Or perhaps Wu Hsin-chieh, the Air Force chief of staff.
God help us, thought Lei.
In the darkness over the strait, he could barely discern the outline of the lead destroyer escort, on a parallel course a thousand meters to starboard. His second escort was in trail, displaced another thousand meters to port and out of view. Except for the two hand-me-down escort vessels, the Kai Yang was on her own in a sea filled with PLA navy warships. The Taiwan Strait would soon become a killing field.
As if tuned to Lei’s thoughts, the Officer-of-the-deck, a young lieutenant, broke the silence. “Han Yang reports a sonar contact, Captain.”
Lei’s attention snapped back to the bridge. Han Yang, the Kai Yang’s missile-firing sister ship, was on station five kilometers southeast. “Get the range and bearing,” he said to the Officer-of-the-Deck. “Be quick about it.”
“They say it’s a momentary contact. Possibly spurious.”
Lei shook his head. There was no such thing as a spurious contact. Not tonight. They were all real as far as he was concerned. “Keep the channel open. Tell them we want the contact data.”
Lei silently cursed the obsolete command and control system that was common to Kai Yang and Han Yang, as well as most of the frigates in the Taiwanese Navy. Every modern navy in the world, including the PLA navy, possessed real-time data-linked exchange of information between units. Every navy except Taiwan’s. It was another item of super-sophisticated equipment the United States chose to withhold from them. It meant that whatever Han Yang’s captain was seeing on his sonar displays would have to be relayed by radio to Kai Yang.
The seconds ticked past as Lei waited for details. He paced his narrow bridge, staring into the darkness. What kind of contact was it? His own sonar operators weren’t picking up any returns. A submarine? China had four new Russian-built Project 877 Kilo class submarines as well as half a dozen indigenous Ming class boats. The Kilo class, with their diesel-electric drives and anechoic tile coating, were the stealthiest and most difficult to hunt of all undersea vessels. They were even quieter than the newer Xia class nuclear attack submarines. The Kilo class emitted almost no acoustical signature.
Don’t let it be a Kilo, thought Lei. Not yet. They had just begun to fight.
He glanced at the luminous face of his watch. His Harpoon missiles were five minutes from their targets. Only thirty kilometers. What an irony it would be if Kai Yang were sunk before its own missiles had reached their targets.
“Active contact,” the OOD reported. “Han Yang reports a target — definitely a submarine — zero-three-zero degrees, four thousand meters.”
Lei felt a cold chill run through him. That put the contact between Han Yang and Kai Yang. His own sonar array was still showing nothing.
It had to be a Kilo. If it were a noisy Ming class, they would have identified it already. Who was he tracking?
In the next minute, he knew. To the southwest, an orange glow lit the blackened sea. For several seconds, Lei could see the line of the horizon as a pulse of flame boiled into the sky. In the glow of the fireball, he saw a familiar silhouette.
Han Yang. In its death pyre, the guided missile frigate was tearing itself apart. As its ordnance magazines exploded, flaming debris pierced the sky like roman candles.
Stunned, Lei stared at the blazing spectacle. Within seconds, Han Yang’s bow separated from the hull and slipped from view into the churning sea. Her destroyer escorts were racing like greyhounds to the location of the original contact.
“Sonar contact, captain. Two-two-zero, five thousand meters.”
Lei’s attention went to the repeater display at his own console. Yes, there it was. He could see it winking yellow in the green screen. That distinctive seven-bladed propeller signature identified it as a Kilo class.
It had just torpedoed the Han Yang.
“Deploy decoys,” Lei ordered. “Commence acoustical jamming.”
“Aye, sir.”
The sonar decoys were designed to simulate the signatures of Kai Yang and her escorts. If the submarine put more torpedoes in the water, they might be fooled into tracking the decoys.
Or they might not. Lei had never placed much faith in defensive devices like decoys and acoustical jammers. The best way to deal with a killer submarine was to engage him. Put him on the defensive. Then kill him.
“Ready torpedo tubes.”
“Aye, captain. Torpedoes loaded and ready.”
It was going worse than Boyce expected. He gnawed on his cigar, keeping his silence while he watched the debriefing of the Hornet pilots.
“What happened to the Airbus?” asked the Strike Group Commander, a rear admiral named Jack Hightree.
Brick Maxwell answered. “I don’t know, Admiral.”
For several seconds, a silence fell over the flag conference space. Along one side of the long steel table sat the other three pilots, Gates, Gordon, and Johnson, all looking like prisoners on death row. Next to the admiral was the flag intelligence officer, an owlish-faced commander named Harvey Wentz.
Boyce could see the strain of the long mission in Maxwell’s face. His eyes were red-rimmed, the lines of the oxygen mask still etched on his face.