“Who in blazes is it?” Admiral Yi Kyu-pin asked of no one in particular, peering nervously through his high-power binoculars. The ship he was watching was moving slowly toward them on an intercept bearing. It had not been spotted on radar until it was only twenty kilometers away from the lead escort ship, practically within visual range; now it was no more than ten kilometers from the lead escort. The challenge was obvious. The sixty-seven-year-old admiral had already launched a Zhi-9 light shipboard helicopter to investigate and was waiting for the pilot’s report.
Yi was not too concerned about the vessel, though, because he dwarfed it and easily outgunned it. Yi was in command of the Mao Zedong, a 64,000-ton aircraft carrier of the Peoples Republic of China’s Liberation Army Navy. Although the carrier did not have its entire fixed-wing air group of more than twenty Russian-made Sukhoi-33 fighters on board — an agreement between China and Taiwan prohibited the Mao Zedong from carrying attack planes until after passing Matsu Island during its transit of the Formosa Strait — it did carry four Su-33 fighters, configured only for air defense, plus three times its normal complement of attack and anti-submarine helicopters. Accompanying the Mao were two 4,000-ton Luda-class destroyers, Kang and Changsha, the 14,600-ton replenishment oiler Fuqing, and the repair and support vessel Hudong, which acted as a floating repair shop. Flanking the Mao battle group was an armada of more than forty smaller vessels, everything from Huangfeng-class coastal patrol boats to Fushun-class minesweepers to Huchuan semi-hydrofoil missile boats — anything that could keep up with the nuclear-powered carrier and its escorts.
While he waited, Admiral Yi took a few moments to think about— no, to savor—the immense power at his command as the skipper of this vessel. Even though this warship, the first aircraft carrier owned by an Asian nation since World War II, had had a very checkered existence, it was now at the absolute pinnacle of its fighting capability.
Its keel had been laid down in June of 1985 at the Nikolayev shipyards near the Black Sea in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and it had been launched in April of 1988 as the second true Soviet fixed- wing aircraft carrier, much larger and more capable than its Kiev- or Moskva-class anti-submarine helicopter carrier cousins. It had first been dedicated as the “defensive aviation cruiser” Riga; it had been called a “cruiser” because the Republic of Turkey, which guards the approaches in and out of the Black Sea, forbids any aircraft carriers to sail through the Bosporus and so would never have allowed it to leave the Black Sea. Because of severe budget cuts and technological difficulties, it had never fully completed its fitting-out and never joined its sister ship Tbilisi in the Northern Fleet of the Soviet Navy. It had been renamed Varyag when the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, whose capital the ship had been named for and where the ship was to be based once it entered Soviet fleet service, had become the independent Republic of Latvia in 1991.
The Varyag, which means “Viking” or “dread lord,” had been sold to the People’s Republic of China in 1991 for the paltry sum of thirty million U.S. dollars in cash, completely stripped of all electronic and weapon systems; the world military press believed that it had been sold as scrap for cash to line the pockets of ex-Soviet admirals and bureaucrats, forced out of service without pensions when the Soviet Union collapsed. Because of an international embargo on any military sales to China, and because most of Asia feared what China might do with a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier — the Tiananmen Square massacre had been only two years earlier — the carrier had been sent to Chah Bahar Naval Base in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where it had been used as a floating prison and barracks. But in 1994, it had undergone a $2 billion crash rearming and refit program, and Iran and China had jointly made it operational in 1996— the first aircraft carrier and the greatest warship ever owned by a Middle East or Islamic nation.
In early 1997, Iran’s military leaders had immediately put the carrier, now called the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’ to use against its enemies in the Persian Gulf region, attacking several pro-American states with the carrier as the spearhead. They had been turned away by the American air force, using stealth bombers and high-tech cruise missiles to attack the carrier. The stealth bomber attack had caused one of the Khomeinis Sukhoi-33 fighter-bombers to crash on deck, causing a huge fire that had cooked off a P-500 Granit anti-ship missile — the ship had been one more explosion away from heading to the bottom of the sea. Iran, beaten and humiliated by the unseen American attackers, had been forced to sue for peace before its prized possession was completely lost.
The United States had been ready, willing, and happy to make the carrier into an instant artificial reef in the Arabian Sea by putting a few torpedoes or cruise missiles into it, but Iran had quickly surrendered the carrier to its real owners, the People’s Republic of China, and the United States had not wanted to anger that superpower by sinking its property. The carrier, now renamed the Mao Zedong after the People’s Republic of China’s Communist leader, had been taken in tow by the Chinese destroyer Zhanjiang and sent back to China, carefully watched during its transit by every country with long-range maritime surveillance capability. Most Asian nations were still fearful of China sailing a carrier through the politically turbulent east Asian seas, but the carrier was little more than floating scrap now — wasn’t it?
The twice-orphaned carrier was not yet ready to be cut up into razor blades. In a few short weeks, repairs had been completed, and now the little ski-jump carrier Mao was once again operational. Only a few of its complete wing of twenty-four ex-Russian Sukhoi-33 supersonic fighter- bombers were on board, but it carried a full complement of antisubmarine helicopters, as well as antiaircraft and land attack weapons. Six of the P-500 Granit anti-ship missiles in the forward launch tubes had been replaced with a navalized version of the M-ll ballistic land attack missile, each with a range of over sixty kilometers. Despite its armament, however, the carrier was considered little more than an expensive Chinese plaything — perhaps something to impress the neighbors — and not a grave military threat.
That idea, Admiral Yi thought gleefully, was going to be known as one of the biggest errors of judgment made in recent history.
After what seemed like hours, the first officer approached his captain with a copy of an intelligence report, complete with radar, optronic, and visual profiles, several weeks old but hopefully still useful. “Received the patrol’s report, sir. It is flying a Taiwanese flag,” the first officer reported. “The vessel is a French-designed, indigenously built Kwang Hwa Ill-class frigate. One of the Nationalists’ new toys, launched just last year.”
“Armament?”
“Has a thirty-six-round vertical launch system with twelve Harpoon anti-ship cruise missiles, ten ASROC rocket-boosted torpedoes, and fourteen Standard antiair missiles — the Standard missiles can be used for surface attack as well. Four side-firing torpedo tubes. Sea Sparrow close- in antiaircraft and anti-missile system, 40-millimeter bow-mounted dualpurpose gun, Phalanx close-in air defense cannons fore and aft, and several 12.7-millimeter machine gun mounts.”