After waiting a full eighteen hours for the Chinese fleet to pass by, and another few hours of repairs, the Columbia had surfaced and communicated with COMSUBPAC. They were given new orders to head towards Pearl Harbor and had relayed their experience.
Apparently, the new Chinese ASW equipment had a hard time detecting submarines that were bottomed. This information could be useful. But in the Pacific, there were few places with depths shallow enough to perform the maneuver.
Johnston Atoll was one of them.
Quick commands, barely above a whisper, were issued and echoed throughout the submarine’s bridge. The vessel began vibrating and then went still, free from the friction of the ocean’s surface. They had been preparing for this moment for days. There were eight fast-attack submarines bottomed on the underwater terrain surrounding Johnston Atoll. A combination of Virginia-, Los Angeles—, and Seawolf-class submarines.
They had been there for days, waiting for this moment.
Over the past few hours, watching the sonar returns with excruciating concentration, Commander Wallace observed dozens of lethal Chinese warships steaming overhead. Surrounding them. With each dipping sonar ping, with each sonobuoy splash, the submarine crews winced in pained silence.
Yet they waited.
They waited for the sounds of more pings, closer in, followed shortly by the high-pitched noise of a torpedo’s propeller and range-finding system that they had borne witness to near Guam.
But that moment never came.
The submarines blended into the ocean floor and remained undetected as the Chinese fleet steamed by, hundreds of feet above.
Then, at last, the sign had come. SUS buoy explosions. Their signal to begin. The submarine crews sprang to life as their commanders began issuing orders. Each submarine had a certain section of water assigned to it.
As the submarines rose silently off the ocean floor, their screws turned and propelled them forward. Slowly. Barely a few knots. But each of the hunter-killers made their way towards their assigned waterspace. Torpedo doors opened. Eager captains gave the final attack orders.
Within a two-minute period, thirty Mark 48 Advanced Capability torpedoes began racing through the sea, each headed towards separate targets.
The US Navy submarine force was about to have its revenge.
Victoria heard a warning tone coming through the earpieces in her helmet. She saw the flashing master caution lights blinking in front of her and then felt a shudder as her aircraft released chaff and flares. Countermeasures for the supersonic surface-to-air missiles that one of the Chinese ships must have just fired at them.
A blur of white zoomed by outside the cockpit. It exploded in a burst of gray and yellow a few hundred feet to their left. Victoria was rocked as the shockwave hit the airframe of the helicopter. The sound was muffled, but still sickening.
“Shit,” muttered Plug. He was already maneuvering, his training kicking in, pulling the helicopter into a series of hard turns.
Victoria realized that air was coming in from a small crack in her window. Then she noticed a searing white-hot pain in her shoulder. She was bleeding through her flight suit.
“Motherfucker.” She winced in pain as she examined the wound. “AW1, everyone okay back there?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re all good. That was pretty close.”
Victoria ignored the pain in her shoulder and spoke over the external comms. “Magnum, flight, check in.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
There was a pause, then one of the other helicopters’ pilots radioed. “Dash Four was hit. No survivors.”
Plug continued maneuvering the helicopter, expending more chaff and flares, the other two aircraft in close formation behind them. His voice was strained as he said, “What do you want us to do, Boss?”
Victoria closed her eyes, forcing away the feeling of dread and guilt that crept up inside her. She held down the external microphone switch. “Are you sure?”
“Affirm,” replied the voice of the other helicopter’s pilot. “They took a direct hit.”
“Roger.”
Victoria checked the digital map that was being beamed to them from above. They were almost at the outer ring of Chinese warships. Their fuel would run out soon, but they still had a chance to make it to the atoll, or ditch close enough that a SAR asset might spot them.
Victoria turned her head to look out the right-side window. Her shoulder lit up in white-hot pain as she moved it, dark blood flowing from the wound. She could see a destroyer a few miles away. Two contrails of smoke floated in the air, reaching out towards them from the Chinese ship like long fingers of death. The remnants of the surface-to-air missiles it had just launched. Why weren’t they finishing the job? Maybe they would.
“Maintain this heading.”
“Roger.”
Victoria looked at the map again. If they were able to get out of range of that destroyer, they might have a chance. But it had fired at them once. It knew they were there. Surely it would strike again.
She had to do something.
“Magnum flight, prep for a right turn and engagement of the nearest Chinese destroyer.”
Plug looked up at her in surprise, then went back to his outside-the-cockpit scan, the water only twenty-five feet below, zooming by at over one hundred and twenty knots. He put in a shallow right turn.
Victoria said, “I’ve got the controls. Set up for a Hellfire shot.”
“Roger, your controls.”
“Magnum flight, spread out.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
Plug’s hands danced over his keypad. He yelled out the checklist steps, Victoria and the aircrewman in the back of the helicopters responding immediately. Then Plug gripped the hand control unit and used the forward-looking infrared camera to target the Chinese ship.
Radar warning tones began whining in Victoria’s headset again as the Chinese ship used its air defense radars to target them.
“Fire at will, Magnum…”
She hadn’t even finished her call when Plug said, “Bruiser away!” A tongue of yellow flame shot out from their left side and rose up into the sky. The laser designator from the FLIR was aimed right at the Chinese destroyer.
Another missile left the rails. Then two more as Plug emptied their stores. More Hellfire missiles fired from the other two helicopters.
Twelve AGM-114 missiles popped up into the sky and then rocketed down into their target, the shaped charges, which had been designed as antitank weapons, exploding right before impact, turning themselves into a small stream of molten-hot metal and shooting through various parts of the warship.
One of the missiles missed. Each of the others hit the target, in various locations. Multiple yellow-orange explosions, in rapid succession. The bridge, the centrally located combat information center, the engines, and the fuel cells were all hit. One of the missiles ignited a torpedo in the ship’s storage locker. Secondary explosions detonated in the center of the ship. A gray-white tower of wreckage and seawater flew up into the sky.
“Magnum flight, form back up. Continue outbound.”
“Two.”
“Three. And, Lead, FYI, we’re getting pretty low on fuel. Might have another twenty mikes.”
“Copy.”
Plug leveled out the wings on an outbound heading.
And that was when she saw the other ship. Victoria’s eyes went wide. She looked down at the map, and there it was. How had she missed that on the digital map? And they had just fired all of their weapons…
Plug saw what she was looking at. “You want me to take a different heading?”