Liu Qi was still pouting. Let her! he thought. The men on Blood Moon had work to do, and maybe she wasn’t good wife material after all, demanding a diamond ring trinket at a time like this. Women. When Bai and his squadron returned to Guangzhou in victory, he would be able to pick from plenty of others.
Bai found his jet, and, with a broad smile, bounded up the ladder and settled in. His ground crew sensed his enthusiasm; Today was the day!
As he taxied the big fighter out of the sand-swept parking spot, he pulled in line next to his wingmen as four hulking H-6s approached the runway, big antiship missiles hanging from their wings.
At the same time, 1,400 miles west in the Bay of Bengal, a DF-26 was in a terminal dive — on an American warship.
An hour earlier, USS Les Aspin had been alongside the oiler USNS Tombigbee taking on aviation fuel. Tombigbee was a Kaiser-class oiler crewed by civilian merchant mariners. The two ships were spotted by several merchants and fisherman that crisscrossed the Bay of Bengal. One mate on a bulk cargo ship called to a shore station in Myanmar about what they saw and where they saw it.
A spy network passed the information to the PLA Southern Command Post. Rocket Force DF-26 alert crews fed the targeting coordinates into the guidance system, and, thirty minutes later, two DF-26s blasted off their launchers toward a patch of water hundreds of miles away in the Indian Ocean.
As Bai taxied, a Triton out of Diego Garcia, on station in the northern portion of the Bay, intercepted the ship-to-shore comms, and this information was fed to Les Aspin’s combat information center. With the replenishment almost complete, Les Aspin, executed an emergency breakaway and, once clear of Tombigbee, turned southwest at flank speed as the carrier’s EW suite generated dozens of false radar contacts around her.
Tombigbee, only knowing that an attack was imminent, set a course southeast as the Bosuns were still securing the fueling hoses to the kingposts. The master set General Quarters, and the civilian crew scrambled to close all watertight doors and hatches. Meanwhile, one of the DF-26s went off course early and was destroyed by its launch crew in the ascent.
The remaining antiship missile was now in a hypersonic terminal dive from its apex in near space. Once committed, its Lock-on-After-Launch seeker head opened up to track and lock the carrier. The sensor was met a confusing array of false radar contacts on the water and could not discriminate between them. As it streaked down at 2.4 miles per second, the guidance computer shifted to infrared logic, and, with a smaller aperture scanning the surface, the missile saw several heat sources, one much larger than the others and with a silhouette that matched images loaded in the software. It was Tombigbee.
Ten miles away and running with Les Aspin, the Aegis guided-missile cruiser USS Bastogne picked up the plunging ship-killer and launched two SM-6s to intercept.
It was too late.
As the missiles leapt from their vertical launch cells with fire and smoke, they almost immediately shallowed their ascent and roared downrange to the east as they tried in vain to knock down the DF-26 as it zeroed in on Tombigbee. Bastogne broadcast a frantic warning on the tactical net, a warning that received no acknowledgment.
At Mach 3, the missile, modified with a unitary warhead, tracked the ship as it moved through the water at 18 knots. Like a giant spike, it impaled Tombigbee forward of the forward king post. The enormous force of the blow buckled the ship down by the bow and unleashed a massive explosion of the aviation fuel bunker as crewmen aft were catapulted into the overheads — or overboard. On the horizon, those on Bastogne’s bridge winced in horror at the flash and the cloud of black smoke that bloomed from the bow of the doomed oiler.
Once the dazed and bleeding master got to his feet, he ordered all stop, and, with the remaining way he had on, turned his 31,000-ton ship starboard abeam the wind to keep the noxious and blinding smoke away from the after part of the vessel. He then ordered Abandon Ship! As the oiler slowed and turned, a burning slick from her ruptured tanks grew along the port side. Then, as the screws stopped turning, the stern began to lift out of the water.
Orange lifeboats were lowered from davits as Tombigbee settled on an even keel. Due to the heat and smoke, only one port side boat was lowered, and the crew jammed into the remaining starboard boats. Some of the 87-person crew jumped into the sea, and two MH-60 Sierras that were airborne during the replenishment arrived on scene to pick up survivors. Bastogne also raced east to render assistance. After ten minutes, the three lifeboats were free of the derelict and motored away. Crewmen could be seen on the bridge wing and flight deck control tower as the stern rose higher. Tombigbee was in her final plunge, and the helo crews watched as one man on the tower waited for the ship to sink a reasonable distance before throwing himself clear about 20 feet above the surface. He swam for his life in his inflated float coat, and, as the waves swallowed Tombigbee, he struggled against a sea of gurgling foam and debris, with a slick of burning oil thirty yards away. A helo put a swimmer in the water and rescued him first.
After Tombigee’s crew was taken aboard the cruiser—Les Aspin was still running hard to the southwest — a muster revealed eight missing, including the master. Word was passed through the Triton radio relay to Singapore, and, an hour later, the news arrived in Washington. The sudden and violent loss of the almost 700-foot vessel shocked the Pentagon, and, in a hasty news conference, the media were notified. One reporter asked if there were any women or minorities listed among the dead or missing. The Pentagon spokesperson forwarded the question to Clark.
Losing Tombigbee hurt, but Cactus Clark knew he had dodged a bullet. Qin Chung sighed his disappointment when he learned the DF-26 had locked on the oiler vice the carrier. Clark kept Les Aspin at the edge of DF-26 range until he could get some more Aegis ships to defend the carrier. Meanwhile, he maxed out the parking area for USAF tankers at Diego Garcia to fuel the air wing jets for a 1,000-mile transit over Thailand and Vietnam to the SCS. John Adams and Hancock among the Philippine islands were well within Rocket Force range, with Hanna especially at risk, but he had recon on the enemy’s launch site and plenty of Aegis escorts to defend the carriers. Time was not on his side. He needed to neutralize the Spratlys and get Hanna out of there before Qin and the PLA(N) got lucky. Meanwhile, LCDR Van Winkle was still missing.
CHAPTER 54
From 30,000 feet, Bai Quon sensed Palawan Island slide under his nose, with the crystal blue Sulu Sea ahead.
Like the strike weeks ago at Cam Ranh Bay, Bai and the others in his flight were projecting power far from Blood Moon, this time in Philippine airspace. But the prize was in the Celebes, another 30 minutes away. The American carrier was there in open water, and as they flew into the midmorning sun, Bai ensured his weapons stations were armed.