The operators on the Hawkeye were the first to see it, scratching their heads as a spate of undefined contacts danced on the screen. They knew there was heavy jamming in the airwaves, and it wasn’t odd to see anomalies in the readings—land based radar signatures appearing over the sea on wild bearings. This time it looked like six surface contacts, and they were reading as two cruisers and four destroyers, now due north of Roosevelt and 225 miles out.
The Hawkeye was 180 miles to the southwest at 30,000 feet. Had it been daylight, it would have been able to spot the ships on the sea under good sighting conditions. They did a systems check, then initiated a protocol to see which assets could read those contacts.
“Whalesign, Bertha 3. We have Indians at 195. Go dark. Over.”
“Roger Bertha, Whalesign dark.”
“Wizard One, Go dark, please.”
“Roger that, Wizard One dark.”
The Hawkeye wanted the three British F-35’s to go EMCON, along with the British Merlin to see if the contacts were being made by their own equipment or being shared by those networked assets. The Merlin crew responded by shutting off its Blue Kestrel 7000 and Searchwater 2000 radars, leaving the Hawkeye as the only AEW asset that was actively interrogating. They watched their screens for a minute. Then they went passive for 60 seconds to see how the contacts might change. They were getting very specific equipment matches, Chinese Type 517H-1 Knife Rest radar sets, a typical 2D long range air search radar mounted on their destroyers. That certainly wasn’t sea clutter or abnormal wave readings.
Environmental effects could alter radio wave propagation, or cause odd diffraction to produce false readings like this, but even after the contacts were purged and the Hawkeye itself went dark, they were reacquired as soon as the system went live again. The readings had not deteriorated while the system was dark, as it should have. There was no precipitation or low level fog reported. All was clear.
“Whalesign One, Bertha. Please detach and come to 195 for a joyride.”
“Roger Bertha. Joyriding on 195.”
The British were sending one of their F-35’s out to have a closer look. Whalesign #1 broke off and turned on the assigned heading, moving closer to the contact positions. Then unaccountably, the other two fighters saw the plane disappear from their radar screens about 120 miles from the contacts.
“Whalesign One, come in. Whalesign One, please respond. Over.”
At that moment, the operators on the Hawkeye saw that USA-224 was orbiting directly above the ghostly contacts, and they all suddenly vanished. The readings disappeared, and in their place a series of contacts registered another 130 miles to the north. Two other US satellites got SIGINT detection on those, and USA-224 was using its visual camera to verify that data. Yet the new contacts did not match the ghostly readings they had earlier. They were now reading as a single cruiser, and they even had the name pegged: Heshen, the River God. With it were five destroyers and two frigates, eight ships total, and all identified by their emissions, and named.
But where was Whalesign One?
“Number three did you detect any missile firings?”
“Negative, Flight leader. All clear.”
“Bertha, Whalesign, we’ve a lost sheep. Over.”
“Roger that, Whalesign. Our ghosts are missing as well. We’ll put in a SAR request. Standby Over.”
Planes One, Three and Four had gone out that morning chasing ghosts, and one was missing. It could have been mechanical failure, so Number Three was cleared for a low elevation pass over the sea, following the same route taken by his missing mate. He reported no sign of wreckage, no survival beacon signals—nothing. It was as if the plane had simply been swallowed by the dark.
One other odd thing about the incident was that the US Seawolf Class Sub Seatiger had been just 18 miles south of the mysterious contacts, and was so convinced they had found good prey that their sonar teams were working up firing solutions. It was clear that they had identified a lot of noise coming from the group, but they would later report that they heard nothing that might be attributed to an aircraft crashing into the sea. Minutes later, the sea was deathly quiet again.
“Bertha, Whalesign. We are Bingo minus fifteen. Over.”
“Roger that, Whalesign. Saber Flight is up and heading your way. Bertha over.”
Aboard the controlling Hawkeye, a crewman was noting the newly reported contacts from USA-224 were now breaking up and beginning to exhibit uncertainty for position and bearing. The satellite was gone, and it was back to the province of radars.
“Look sir, this segment of the group is more stable, but these contacts are bouncing. They read as a single cruiser and five destroyers.”
“We had two cruisers and four destroyers earlier.”
“Yes sir, but that was a guesstimate. The system could have been wrong.”
“It’s all a guesstimate, Farley. No one ever lays eyes on these contacts. It’s all digital.”
Farley thought he had solved the problem, but there was one big missing piece he was not able to fit—Whalesign One—and he was wrong.
The moon had set long ago, and it was 48 minutes before sunrise when the Air Tasking Officers had been generating their orders for the last six hours. Roosevelt was operating round the clock. There was never any “down time” for things like sleep for the ship as a whole. The crews rotated, and the orders flowed to the Contingency Theater Air Control System (CTAPS) long before launch time. The Strike Teams from all involved squadrons were up and working, and the CAG (Carrier Airwing Commander) had already been briefed. In another hour, the Big Stick would be ready to rap some knuckles again, and let the enemy know who they were tangling with.
They had good target locations on the Chinese task forces, and a second Hawkeye was launching at 05:20 to make sure there would be no surveillance gaps when the early morning bird turned for home in another hour. Planes that had been serviced and loaded with ordnance were now making their way up the elevators to the flight deck. Bar none, USS Theodore Roosevelt was the most powerful airfield in theater. Come sunrise, it would be ready to take the fight to the enemy again, and in good strength.
On the Chinese side, Admiral Sun Wei was also busy with the task of trying to forge the first link in his Kill Chain. He had the approximate location of the Allied task groups, but it needed refinement. Without a carrier at hand to aid in that, he would now play a joker that he had kept hidden in his deck for some time.
About 100 to 150 miles off the Horn of Africa, there was a small archipelago of four islands, the largest and most prominent being the mysterious Yemeni island of Socotra to the east. Measuring 132 kilometers long by 50 kilometers wide (82 by 31 miles), the island was a desolate menagerie of exotic indigenous life forms found nowhere else on earth, and one of the most alien looking landscapes in the world. It had pristine beaches of pure white sand overlooked by craggy cliffs and twisted mountains where the strangest trees in the world grew. One was called the Dragon Blood Tree, its gnarled trunk and limbs reaching up into a saucer like canopy where its prickly needles all pointed directly up. The Chinese had come to call the island after that tree, and named it Long xue dao, or Dragon Blood Island.