AADMs arrived next, and, using their own AI network, saw through the smoking ruin of Stingray that much had survived. With two weapons on one small target, the swarming drones found plenty to home in on, and several found a J-10—with a pilot inside — at one runway end and destroyed it in a massive explosion. Others found a supply vessel in the small lagoon, a pump house, the control tower, water tanks, AAA radars, and a tactical SAM vehicle. Personnel on the outpost could do little more than lie flat, or run terrified into the coral surf, to escape the unseen and heartless machines that poured blow after killing blow onto their outpost.
It wasn’t over.
The SLAMs arrived last, recording the devastation as they flew toward their assigned targets. The crews in the FA-18Fs controlling them could see if their target was already destroyed or on fire, which allowed them to grab the missile and slew it onto an intact target. A missile was flown into a maintenance shack next to a burning helicopter, another into an undamaged portion of a two-story building. One WSO saw AAA rising into the air from a boat in the lagoon, and slewed his SLAM on to it. Aiming for the waterline, the WSO held his missile there and blew the patrol corvette in half. The crew never knew they were targeted, barrage-firing AAA in wild arcs till the end.
No American aircraft overflew Stingray Reef, using stand-off precision to savage the exposed and unprotected outpost. To the west, a small strike of Super Hornets and Growlers launched from Les Aspin in the Bay of Bengal. They were accompanied by two B-1s from Diego Garcia loaded with JASSMs. These jets attacked the Chinese outpost at Song Ca Island, destroying the over-the-horizon early warning radar and the long-range SAM batteries on the sparsely manned facility. While not massive, the forces based in the Indian Ocean could contribute small pulses of power to hold the western Chinese outposts at risk.
Next were Blood Moon Atoll and Yawu Cay, major outposts that the Americans had to eliminate and that the Chinese had to keep at all costs.
Olive was able to breathe easier as she steadied up on a southeast heading and engaged the autopilot. Giving the smoking Jiangkai a wide berth just in case, she conducted a roll call. Everyone made it, and, despite still being over the South China Sea, her wingmen joined up on her in a comfortable cruise formation. She wondered again about Rip, hoping the snake-eaters or Filipino partisans had him.
Olive made her post-strike report crossing Palawan, and the E-2 forwarded the report to Hancock: Mission Success and all are present and accounted for. The ship was over an hour away, and all the strike jets had to tank before they could marshal for their approaches. With over a dozen jets converging on the tankers like hungry piglets to a sow, the night tanker rendezvous was a dangerous routine evolution followed by another dangerous routine evolution of a night EMCON carrier recovery. Their wounded carrier had a jittery crew ready to shoot if any radar contact was not where it was supposed to be, even Commander Teel in her Rhino. With no margin for error, Olive had about thirty minutes to relax over the Sulu Sea before she had to be on her A-game again.
She was not unfamiliar with combat let-down, but it grabbed her with a swiftness she had never experienced. She was on autopilot; everyone was okay and safe. She could sleep for fifteen minutes. Just a short nap. At 37,000 feet, she was fearful of taking a drink of water lest she fall into the deep — and fatal — sleep of hypoxia. Olive twisted her torso to fight sleep and suppressed her yawns. Napping in a single-seat fighter on autopilot was never smart.
Olive had flown two strikes into the South China Sea and been shot at twice by advanced missiles. The first time they got Rip, and Olive wondered how much longer her luck would hold. She was the mother of a small child, yet she was here, fighting a dug-in peer competitor high above hundreds of miles of open sea. Even the interior Philippine waters were dangerous with Chinese partisans in banca boats or trawlers with microwaves. Abu Sayef lived down there, too, and America’s enemy was suddenly China’s friend. Nothing down there could be trusted, and nothing below trusted anything flying above.
Olive checked her fuel—100 pounds less than the last time she checked. How she wanted to sleep, to forget, to dream about her baby, the precious girl she abandoned. Guilt rushed in, the guilt of her career choice, exacerbated by the memories of other young moms at the daycare who exclaimed in well-meaning dismay, “I could never leave my kids for even a day.” It felt more like an indictment: “How could you?” What those millennial girls lacked in sympathy, other women made up for in sneering judgments about her career choice as a trained killer. How could you indeed, who claim to be a sister, kill? And for our awful country? Men were spared this type of scrutiny. Indeed, the bar was low for men who were just this side of domesticated barnyard animals, but for Olive having it all often meant the contempt of women. Women who talked about her choices, women who judged her looks, her every action. I couldn’t… How could she?
Olive remembered the shopping trip with three neighbors to Rodeo Drive. Weeding the garden in 105-degree San Joaquin heat was more appealing, but, hopeful to make a friend, she had gone and endured it. On the interstate, Amy tried to draw her out and asked what it was like to fly a plane off a ship. Before Olive could finish a sentence, Kari blabbed about the time a giant wave rolled over her head in La Jolla and tangled kelp in her hair. Excited to share, the others joined in about their beach-experiences-from-hell, the consensus being that beaches are for sunning and nothing more. All the clothes and shoes they had bought on that trip to adorn their manicured, moisturized, tucked and plucked bodies were made in China and transported over the South China Sea and eventually to their favorite Sex-and-the-City fantasy boutiques. They probably didn’t even know Olive was here, fighting, risking her very life to keep this place open to commerce. Commerce? Is that why she was here? Olive knew that, like her own socialite mother, the girls had no framework from which they could ever begin to understand her. No wonder Olive much preferred the company of men. Why was she there, high over the Sulu Sea? Oh, yes, Cape Esperance.
Always in the middle, Olive could never win, and there was no shortage of men who felt she didn’t belong flying combat fighters, like Mother Tucker. Jerk.
Olive’s own negative emotions, her pride, and her insecurities were additional enemies she fought. She worked hard to advance in this unforgiving and masculine culture of excellence, a world of zero-tolerance perfection that focused a microscope on her. She worked even harder for the love that had eluded her for many long and lonely years. Her silent yet unhealthy thoughts had kept her awake for ten minutes of mindless transit time. Now her fuel was seven hundred pounds less than when she checked last. The winds had shifted, and a small tailwind pushed them home a little bit faster. Life’s simple joys…
Commander Kristin Teel was a confident, combat-experienced carrier squadron CO, and, despite her silent suffering, carried herself like one.
Hours later, all the Stingray Reef strike aircraft had returned to their bases, and the KC-135 tankers had recovered at Guam. As the last Stratotanker turned off the duty runway at Andersen, it was warned that an attack was inbound. With nowhere to hide and no ground crew to park it, the aircraft held its position on the taxiway throat next to the parking area. The one DF-26 that got through the THAAD defenses opened up its seeker head above Guam, oriented itself, and, using the KC-135 as a centroid, released its cluster munitions to tear into smooth aluminum, aluminum that held thousands of pounds of jet fuel.