“Please arrange a meeting with my Foreign Secretary.”
“Yes, Sir.”
The meeting had more than one purpose. He planned to make his Foreign Secretary the new American Ambassador. Their current Ambassador was going to be coming home shortly; he had done a good job of keeping the African Confederation low profile and out of the spotlight, but now it was time to begin serious talks with the Americans. Dangote wanted to prevent them from waging their war on his continent. A war he knew he could not win was one that he wanted to avoid at all costs.
Thompson’s Last Mission
Captain Thompson was on his last combat patrol as the Commander of the Seawolf. He had just received word that he was being promoted to Rear Admiral and would be taking over command of the navy’s submarine training squadron. It was a non-combat role, but one that would give him two years of shore duty and time with his family. It would also position him for his second star, so from that perspective, he thought it was going to be a great assignment.
His ship had survived multiple enemy engagements this year, and as a crew, had the most tonnage sunk of any US submarine. They sunk one of the Chinese Supercarriers (and one of the Japanese carriers) and damaged the others enough that it proved to be a turning point in the battle for Hawaii. Everyone on his ship had been awarded the Bronze Star with V device for Valor. He was given the opportunity to award ten members of the ship the Silver Star and had also presented two Navy Crosses. Captain Thompson himself had been awarded the Navy Cross as the commander of the sub. For their last patrol with him as commander, they had been ordered into the East China Sea, about eighty miles northeast of Shanghai, just off the coast of Qingdao, one of the largest shipping ports in the country.
With Japan neutralized and now functioning as a launch pad for the coming invasion, the Allies were now moving more and more subs and ships into the East and South China Seas, to begin locking down their ports. The Navy had finally cut the Chinese shipping lanes off from the rest of the world and their other captured territories. The Allies had been working hard to cut China off from Africa and the island nations of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. They did not plan on liberating the Philippines or invading Indonesia. Instead, their plan was to isolate them and conduct surgical air strikes against their forces to degrade them over time.
The Seawolf was given the mission of launching a series of cruise missiles at the port and then slipping away to return to their base of operations in Japan. As his sub came to launch depth, he looked at his XO and said, “Ready the missiles, I want to launch them as quickly as possible so we can get out of here.”
“Yes, Sir,” the XO responded.
Captain Thompson continued, “COB, once the missiles have launched, I want us to dive to 900 feet and begin to move away from here at eight knots.”
“Ay, Ay, Sir,” replied the COB.
Turning to his weapons officer, the Captain simply nodded, indicating it was time.
Then he announced, “Fire all missiles.”
It only took seconds, but then the ship shuddered slightly as the blast doors began to blow and a series of cruise missiles began to be ejected from the missile bays. Every three seconds, another blast door opened as a cruise missile was launched, until all sixteen had been fired.
Immediately following the launch of the missiles, the sub began a steep dive, picking up speed until it reached eight knots. “Conn, Sonar — do we have any contacts?” asked the Captain, hoping they were going to make a clean get-away.
There was a pause as they waited for the update. Petty Officer Wilks was listening intensely to his headset and watching the computer screen in front of him. They had not heard any Chinese subs in the last two days, but that did not mean they were not out there. A few minutes later the Captain called asking for an update. “Sonar, Conn — we are not showing enemy submarines in the area,” Wilks said to the Captain.
They all breathed a sigh of relief. Launching their cruise missiles was probably one of the most vulnerable positions a sub could be in.
Twenty minutes after firing their cruise missiles, the Captain was fairly certain they had not been detected, so he ordered the ship to increase speed to 12 knots and deploy the towed sonar array. If an enemy submarine was out there, then chances are the towed array would be able to find them. It looked like his final combat mission of the war was a success.
Maps and Schemes
Following the coup in Japan, the US Military quickly backed the coup leaders and helped the military seize control of the government and the country. The Chinese, of course, had their own response to the situation. The PLA had 35,000 soldiers in Japan, and those soldiers did their best to attack the government forces and try to hold on to the few military bases they operated on. The PLAAF also sent additional aircraft into the mix. After nearly three months of fighting, the US and the remaining JDF that supported the coup were able to push the PLA off the island. The US Navy put a lot of effort into preventing the PLAN from bringing in more reinforcements; the US lost a lot of ships attacking the remains of the PLAN, but after months of naval engagements, the US had defeated what was left of the Chinese navy and reasserted their dominance of the Pacific.
After the Chinese and Axis powers had been defeated in California and Alaska, General Gardner had been promoted again and given his fifth star. He had now been given overall command of all Allied forces in the Pacific. The last four months had been busy; the US had ferried over a million soldiers and supporting equipment to Japan. With the steady supply of Tritium4, the US had been cranking out F41s as fast as they could. The Air Force now had one 187 of them operating in Japan. They had quickly established air control over Japan and the East China Sea.
General Gardner’s forces in Japan had now reached 1,400,000 soldiers, and were still growing. There was still some resistance domestically from holdouts of the previous government, but they were being hunted down and dealt with. What Gardner wanted to focus on now was how best to invade China and bring a swift end to the war. He was concerned with the casualty numbers, and the last thing he wanted to do was lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Of the soldiers that he had in Japan, nearly 230,000 of them were equipped with the Raptor exoskeleton combat suits. He also had 12,000 of the new enhanced humanoid drones and 4,000 trained operators ready to use them.
Intelligence and surveillance of the major cities and probably landing zones of mainland China showed a massive increase in activity. The Chinese were building up their shoreline, and appeared to be turning their cities into fortresses. This was the exact fight General Gardner wanted to avoid. He grumbled to himself, “No one wants to fight in a city; it favors the defenders and it is a lot harder to root out the enemy. Unless I were willing to flatten all the buildings and kill the civilians in them, fighting in a city is going to cost us a lot of lives… I have to find a way to cut China up into manageable chunks.”
He opened a map on his tablet and began strategizing. Shanghai was the first region of concern that he identified; there were nearly eighteen million people living in that metropolis and surrounding area. Intelligence showed the PLA had moved nearly 600,000 soldiers into the area to defend it as well. His second goal was the port city of Qingdao and the rest of the peninsula. Next, he planned to liberate Taiwan. This would allow him to position aircraft, troops and supplies a lot closer to southern China. He also wanted to capture Tianjin, which would put his forces in striking distance of Beijing. The real question was — where should he attack first? Fighting was going to be heavy in all four areas; he needed to figure out where to use the Raptor soldiers and EHDs versus regular infantry wearing standard body armor.