At a safe distance, Weed saw the boat turn back to the spot Flamer went in. Bastards, he thought. What happened? Directed energy?
With Olive still gathering her wits, Weed assumed lead of the formation. He had to get them back to the island and debrief Olive, but also manage the Search and Rescue effort. From five miles, he could see the boat stop in the area of disturbed water, no doubt to pick up any debris it could. Bastards!
“Olive, can you fly form on us?” Weed asked.
“Affirm,” she answered. “Want to get my wingman back.”
“Concur, but we need to give this guy some room. Dash-two rode it in, no chute. I’m sorry. What happened to you?”
Olive grappled with the news that her wingman Flamer was lost, her wingman, her responsibility. She watched the boat wallow in the slick created by Flamer’s jet. With sudden clarity, she realized it could have been her.
“I felt like I was on fire… couldn’t fly the jet. I was awake but couldn’t move for a long time. It’s like G-LOC after the most intense pain I’ve ever experienced. Still feeling something like sunburn.”
“Okay, join up as dash-three. We’re at your ten-o’clock high, about two miles…. On your nose now.”
“Visual,” Olive replied.
As Weed coordinated with Lookout and the MH-60 Romeos to keep a track on the fishing boat, Olive thought about Flamer. Only 26, he was single, and she was not aware of a girlfriend. He was “solid,” with an easy smile, not prone to mistakes and dependable. Now he was gone. Had Flamer experienced the same burning sensation? The same dazed incapacity while strapped into the cockpit of a single-seat jet? What did the boat have? Some kind of “ray gun?” She thought of the letter she would write that evening to his family. But first, what was this new threat?
Weed orbited east of the boat before it moved away and to the west. He checked out with Lookout and put Iwo Jima on his nose.
We have a problem, a big one.
CHAPTER 35
Hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels dotted the Pacific Ocean, from modest trawlers like She Kou to 600-foot factory vessels of 12,000 tons. With growing concern that each carried a microwave weapon that could destroy an airplane or disable the crew inside, the Americans had to suspect and track all of them. That the vessels, part of the fishing militia, could contribute to the PRC open-ocean intelligence and targeting picture was a given, but unknown to the Americans, each night every PRC fishing vessel dropped a sonobuoy over the side during their normal seining and net retrieval operations.
The expendable floating cylinders acted as line-of-sight radio relays for coded broadcast messages to PLA units, submarines in particular. A Y-8 in “safe” near seas airspace could transmit a burst of code that would be picked up by passive buoys that would transmit their own bursts to adjacent buoys that would repeat the process in a chain reaction until all buoys were in contact with another — a network spanning hundreds of miles and extending well beyond the second island chain. The fishing militia vessels themselves could receive tasking messages from the mainland, a poor man’s artificial intelligence that allowed a degree of swarm coordination, albeit with a slow lag time and little agility to provide mainland commanders with real-time targeting information.
Could the Chinese field microwave weapons on every rusty scow in their fishing fleet? The Americans had to think they could, and one option was to disable or sink every Chinese fishing vessel they came across. In the Pacific alone this meant hundreds of thousands of vessels; even if one piece of ordnance could disable or sink a vessel, Cactus Clark knew it would stretch his ordnance stockpiles to put that one piece into each boat his forces came across. With targeting errors, probabilities of kill, fusing hiccups and the size of some of the boats, he would need much more ordnance than he had in order to deal with the militia and PLA(N) forces he expected to encounter. Furthermore, if an “innocent” boat were hit or sunk, he would have to deal with the public relations fallout in a media front that was as real as the threat along the first island chain.
With the exposed American aircraft parked at Iwo Jima, a relatively soft target, the Chinese needed to hit them and destroy what they could, soonest. A burst transmission went out, and through a network of sonobuoy relays, specific tasking came to Shen Ju-Lang and Changzheng 8, now only a day away from a launch position to send a volley of cruise missiles toward the vulnerable island.
Shen had fewer than a dozen of the new YJ-18 antiship cruise missiles that could also be used for land attack. The tasking order had detailed coordinates for each weapon, and his targeting team plotted them on existing charts. The dots formed a jumble on the eastern part of Iwo Jima — the chart scale was too big for targeting, and who would have ever guessed Iwo Jima would be a target for Shen on what began as a routine near sea patrol. His Weapons Division Officer spoke.
“Comrade Captain, we do not have target imagery to program into the weapon computers, and we know we cannot depend on satellite navigation. Terminal guidance will be degraded, even with a radar sensor.”
Shen didn’t dare come up and transmit to request additional targeting information, knowing the Americans and Japanese were looking for him with live weapons. He kept to himself the knowledge that launching the missiles would highlight him in what would be the last action of his boat. If this new miracle-weapon from the People’s armories could perform its mission without imagery, it would have to do so.
“No,” Shen said, shaking his head in vigorous motion. “We cannot risk detection by an alerted enemy.”
Knowing their captain was not going to budge, and that it would take hours to program each missile, the Weapons Officers got to work.
Wilson picked up the secure phone, already encrypted. “Captain Wilson, sir.”
“Flip, Randy Johnson. How are you guys?”
“Doing okay, sir… trying to assess what happened and how to prevent it.”
“How’s Olive?”
“She’s taking it easy right now. Spots on her neck and hands look like a bad sunburn. She’s lucky, and her jet checks good.”
“Yes… and I’m sorry about Lieutenant Volk. His family has been notified.”
“Yes, sir,” Wilson said. The Big Unit then changed course.
“Okay, here’s the latest. They must have turned out the whole shipyard to swarm the bow and waist cats, so we are getting out of here with the morning tide, probably with fifty strap-hangars from the shipyard.”
“Wow. What did they find?”
“Looks like we’ll have both bow cats,” Johnson said. “Replaced the shuttle and water brake pistons on both, along with some track plates. The waist cats are more messed up, with brake piping and track rail damage that needs extensive repair. They are essentially welding blank-off plates on the damaged areas, and we’ll just avoid taxiing jets on that part of the deck.”
“Testing, sir?” Wilson could hear Admiral Johnson take a breath.
“We’ve got some Rhinos in the hangar bay. We are going to do no-load shots first; then each cat is going to shoot a test sled. All this is going to happen on the transit. We’ve got Zip in the Snipers and Woody in the Broncos. With their carrier suitability experience, both guys have been indispensible working with the shipyard guys. They are going to take the first live shots tomorrow afternoon. If all goes well, we’re back in business.”