Zheng dived inside the armored bridge as the air around him boiled. He yelled at the silent crew he sensed were somewhere around. “Sound collision! Lock down-”
The blast wave nearly capsized his 1,000-foot carrier. A long black train of overpressure sheared off the entire command island of the ship and chucked it playfully overboard. Only a few twisted girders remained of the massive steel structure. All the hundreds of personnel on the flight deck were simply erased from existence, nothing but permanent shadows flash-burned on the deck marked their final resting place.
Both 176-kiloton nukes, detonating exactly three miles apart and 25,000 feet high, were seen all the way across the Bering Strait. Mainly because the Russians were looking for them. Moscow, like every other nuclear capable nation on earth, received about five minutes advance notice of the US attack. Never a good idea to spook your ICBM-armed neighbors.
The high-altitude air bursts reduced fallout to a mere local weather phenomenon, but the real benefit was to maximize “ground-level overpressure.” The techy way of saying the end of the world.
While the blast disintegrated every plane orbiting the fleet, only five of the sixty Chinese ships were sunk outright. The blast vaporized a missile cruiser and a roll-on/roll-off transport, loaded down with a thousand marines, directly below ground zero. Three more small destroyers not too far away also capsized, but everything else stayed afloat.
The dead were the lucky ones. Forty more ships, including Admiral Zheng’s carrier, were left floating derelicts. The few lightly damaged vessels, and the rare unscathed ones, rushed in to pick up survivors. A noble, but fruitless gesture.
Modern warships are not the steel-clad floating fortresses of old. Such ships might have given some protection from the radiation. The thin aluminum vessels employed nowadays provided little more radioactive shielding than the skin of the crew inside.
Any of those sailors, airmen or troops in the core of the fleet blessed enough to survive already received lethal doses of neutron radiation. Even more gamma rays radiated from the ashy fallout coating their ships… and clothes. It might take minutes or it might take days, depending on how well shielded they were, but their end was never in doubt. They were dead men walking.
Deadly men walking, when the relatively “clean” ships farther from ground zero rushed in to help.
The rescue ships sprayed out thousands of gallons of radioactive seawater in self-destructive attempts to put out the fires. That only spread the radiation as fast as all the contaminated refugees they shuttled on board. None of them glowed in the dark, but throwing the survivors into the ships’ showers sealed everyone’s fate. No ship’s water recyclers were prepared to filter this type of poison.
By the time the remnants of the flotilla eventually limped back to within sight of the mainland, only five overloaded ships were still afloat. After ten days of unfathomable hell, the scabby and mostly hairless survivors cheered weakly as they neared home again. Constantly updating higher command of their plight had paid off. The first rescue ships approached them still 50 miles from the coast.
Those coastal defense vessels launched two Silkworm ship-to-ship missiles into each contaminated vessel without so much as a “good bye” over the radio. Several helicopters thudded overhead to machine gun any survivors in the water. From the perspective of what was left of the Chinese government, this embarrassing little incident was finally over. Time to move on with their much bigger problems.
“It’s done, sir. Near total destruction of the PLA task force. Seventh Fleet is standing by. Are we a go for phase two? The window of opportunity is closing fast.”
The president tried to stand, but he didn’t trust his wobbly legs. Instead, he crossed them and stared down the situation room table. Every one of his new generals and admirals nodded back at him. He cleared his throat three times before his voice caught.
“History is watching. This is your last chance. Speak up now. All it will take is one voice of dissent and I’ll shut this down right now. Anyone?”
A few of the officers and senior cabinet members shifted their gaze briefly, but no one stood up. After fifteen seconds, the latest Chairman of the Joint Chiefs spread out his hands.
“Sir, once we committed to repelling any foreign invasion with nuclear weapons, you knew we’d have to go whole hog. This conventional strike is already a risky compromise. I stand by my recommendation of a first strike on China’s nuclear arsenal. It’s not too late to modify our plans. Mr. President, with nuclear arms, there’s no room to half-ass things. Nuclear war has no scalable options. Now that strategic weapons are in play, we need to hit all of the enemy’s counterattack ability hard. Immediately. Anything less is naïve and, frankly, dangerous.”
The president closed his eyes and counted to ten. He wasn’t going to have this debate again. “Ok then. If no one has anything original to add, then let’s proceed. Release all units.”
Sixty seconds later, on the other side of the world, the placid East China Sea gave birth to 36 cruise missiles. A North Korean patrol ship spotted the smoke trails originating from the open ocean, but since they were all heading northwest, towards the Chinese mainland, it wasn’t their problem. They didn’t even bother reporting the incident. Who wanted to be the bearer of bad news in a dictatorship?
None of the three American attack submarines launching missiles would ever be caught, though everyone knew they were operating in the area. A fourth sub, which lobbed twelve more cruise missiles towards a target in Shanghai, likewise escaped. With the best of the PLA Navy deployed out of theater, the Chinese had limited options to hunt them all down. Their second string naval forces weren’t exactly chomping at the bit to take on the best of the US Navy.
Shanghai had little to do with the overall campaign, but one target in the suburbs represented an opportunity Washington couldn’t pass up. If they were already hitting the Chinese homeland, why not the headquarters and main support facilities of China’s frustratingly effective cyber warfare unit?
The US wasn’t so stupid as to believe they could destroy the internet with bombs. It was just that they had no equivalent response to China’s thousands of organized hackers and cyber terrorists. In line with America’s standard operating procedure, they proceeded to bomb the shit out of anything they didn’t understand. Some would argue the attack was crude and totally out of proportion, but no one argued its effectiveness.
The rest of the Tomahawks soared at wave and then tree top height nearly 500 miles towards Beijing. An hour later, cruise missiles slammed through the roofs of more than thirty targets. Each penetrator warhead violated the upper floors of the doomed structure and spurted its 1,000 lb. HE load deep inside the packed buildings.
Only two of the targets, a senior PLA leadership bunker and an admin building, were clearly military targets. The others wrecked seemingly random political offices, private residences and a few commercial sites. Regardless of how the attack appeared, the US just killed or severely wounded more than 50 of the PRC’s top bureaucrats, generals and businessmen (in China, the last two were often the same).
The blasts wiped out a hundred more faceless, but invaluable assistants and advisors, further crippling the surviving leadership. Not a single elected PRC official was harmed. The goal was to decapitate China’s real leadership, not to kill symbolic targets. Only three out of seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the upper crust of Chinese powerbrokers, were killed though. The rest weren’t where intelligence claimed. As things turned out, that was okay. Those three deaths opened up more than enough opportunity for ambitious younger men.