In the broader sense, look at what we have lost! We have had to abandon all our bases in the Mediterranean, and along the West African coast. Sun Wei has been wrestling with the British and Americans, and now he withdraws to the Gulf of Oman. I cannot even secure the waters off Singapore and maintain a fleet there, and the loss of Shandong burns….
Consider our naval losses. Half our carriers are laid up with two on the bottom of the sea. Eight of 25 Type 055 destroyers have been sunk. We have lost 22 other destroyers, and 18 frigates! This does not even include the five Korean destroyers lost, and the single ship from Vietnam. So add those and we have lost 56 ships!
The Americans? We managed to put damage on one of their new destroyers, and a scratch or two on their battlecruiser, but not a single ship in their navy has been sunk! We can only console ourselves with the fact that we could easily master the Royal Navy, sinking a submarine, two of their carriers, five destroyers and 13 frigates, with six more sunk from the Singapore fleet. That makes 27 warships, but we lost twice as many ships as our enemies. This does not bode well.
Sun Wei was unable to match even a single American carrier group in the Arabian Sea, and he had over 30 ships! The Americans strike him time and again with their fighters, and he can do nothing in return. I think we have been fooled by the success of our YJ-18 against the British. That missile killed their ships easily enough, but against the Americans, it cannot reach their speedy aircraft carriers. Yes… They can stay outside our range, and hound us with fighters day and night. We should have loaded out with a preponderance of YJ-100’s instead of the YJ-18. Those have a 430 mile range, and they would push that carrier farther off, perhaps to the limit of its fighter strike radius. I must inform Beijing of this. Surely they must see it as well. Yet how many more of these missiles do we still have?
I suppose I should be more realistic. War is war. We must expect losses, but right now, Beijing must be getting concerned, particularly after the loss of Shandong. It was that damnable Siberian battlecruiser. It sunk the Sea God, Haishen. It damaged Shandong earlier, and now it finished the job…. So what to do?
I have 112 of those longer range YJ-100’s, but look, the enemy ships have disappeared from our radar screens again, and now I must re-acquire them. At least Shandong was able to launch most of her J-31’s before it went down. Yet now I must find a place to base them. I will have to transfer all ten of my helicopters to ships that do not have one assigned. Then I can make room for more J-31’s. I will order my fighters to sweep south, destroy the enemy CAP, and find those damn ships again! To aid in that, the Vietnamese group will continue to pound their airfields.
Beijing cannot be happy with what I have done here. I may have but one chance to redeem myself, and I can only do that by sinking enemy ships and driving them off. And at the top of my list I must kill that Siberian ship—Kirov, the demon no one even knew about until it suddenly appeared. Yes… That ship must die.
Admiral Wu Jinlong was a very determined man.
“Whalesign Three, Come in. Whalesign Four, do you copy? Please acknowledge. Over.”
The pilot of Whalesign One was confused. He had been ordered to investigate the sea ahead, a dangerous mission, because he would be flying right into the potent SAM envelope of the contacts ahead. They were registering as destroyers, and that meant HQ-9’s, with an 80 mile range. Thus far, the F-35 had been able to penetrate that deadly airspace unseen, but there was always a chance of being detected.
Yet now he had lost contact with the two other planes in his flight, which was most unusual. He had detected no missile firings, and all his equipment seemed to be functioning normally—but was it? Those ghostly radar emissions ahead kept moving, disappearing, returning. The radar had never acted like that. His first thought was that he was being heavily jammed, but that wasn’t the case here, the radio spectrum was quiet and clear. He should be getting pristine returns on those surface ships. Was his radar dodgy?
The radar may be fouled, he said, but why the difficulty making radio contact? They had to hear those calls…. “Whalesign Leader, this is number one. Come in please….”
Silence….
His plane suddenly ran into turbulence, and he decided to climb a bit. Then he would point the nose down and have a look at the sea from good elevation. The radar continued to show hazy uncertainty on the contacts ahead, and then there came a bright light, and seconds later a strong jolt. It was as if his plane had been hit with a shock wave, buffeted by a strong force that saw him struggling to recover control. Turbulence was never really anything that mattered to most pilots, but this was something different.
Now his radars saw what it was, and the tried and true Mark-1 eyeball confirmed it.
“Damn,” he said aloud. “Someone threw a nuke!”
He could see the angry fire of a massive mushroom cloud ahead off his left wing, climbing into the sky with its terrible wrath. What in the world was happening? Was that ours? Did we throw one at the fleet I was out here to investigate? Nice of them to clue me in on it. Damn!
“Flight leader, this is Whalesign One—Firebright! I repeat Firebright! I have eyes on the mushroom. Over. Whalesign Three, come in!”
There, down on the sea, he saw what he had come to find, ships, ships, ships —glowing red and gold in the evil light of that detonation. Now his missile warning came on, and the blood chilling warning told him he was under attack. He turned left into a barrel roll, then came around and dove for the sea. Both maneuvers were good for befuddling missiles, which could not track a barrel rolling plane easily, or turn as tightly as a fighter could. Diving for lower altitude would also force the missile’s radar to fight clutter from the sea if it was trying to reacquire the plane. The dive gave the plane much needed speed, and speed was your friend when under attack like this. If he had to, he would turn again, putting the missile at his three o’clock position, and forcing it to make a continuous turn to follow him. The intention was to bleed energy from the missile as it tried to track and close on his plane.
The maneuver seemed to work, and now he poured on the power. Missile range decreased at lower altitude and for every 100 knots he threw on the fire, that missile would have to work all that harder to catch him, further bleeding off its energy.
He was up over 700 knots, felt another hard jolt, more turbulence, and then clear air. His warning light went dark, alarms quiet, and he seemed to be completely alone on that cold December morning. He pulled into another turn, radar active, looking for that broiling mushroom cloud again, still wary of that missile…. But both were gone.
WTF?
“Whalesign Leader, this is Whalesign One. Come in! Whalesign Leader, do you copy?”
No one came back.
It was as if he was the only living man within a thousand miles. The mushroom was gone, the ships were gone. There was no missile after him, only the dark morning sky, glittering with stars.