“May I ask how the battle fares? I sense mixed emotions.”
“The exchange is thus far costly for both sides,” Ye said. “Two Falcons held the air-to-air fighters to a stalemate while the Ma Kong shot down half of the incoming aircraft, but the surviving aircraft overwhelmed it with missiles.”
“Overwhelmed?” Renard asked. “Lost?”
“Destroyed, with few survivors expected.”
“I am sorry.”
“The admiral you saw me dismiss,” Ye said, “is one of my best destroyer sailors.”
“I had thought otherwise after observing your exchange with the man.”
Renard noted compassion in Ye’s eyes.
“His son was the executive officer on the Ma Kong,” Ye said. “There are times to ignore human suffering, and there are times for grieving. I determined his son’s death to be the latter case and relieved him.”
“A bold but necessary decision,” Renard said.
“This is now beyond scenarios foreseen in our doctrine,” Ye said. “Bombers are attacking stealth patrol craft tied to their piers. There is no prescribed response. There has been no training.”
“Indeed,” Renard said. “This is the fog of war.”
“Do you have any advice?”
Renard scanned his mental inventory of airborne weapons hardware and the tactics of using them, and the contradiction shot to his mind.
“They proved against the Ma Kong that they are employing weapons that inflict maximum damage to a solitary target, using a combination of radar and infrared seekers, I suspect,” he said. “Set a blaze to your piers to conceal the craft behind fire. This will blind the infrared seekers. Also, burn nearby piers to disorient the pilots visually. You must have trucks available to spread fuel.”
Ye curled his finger at a captain who jogged to his side. He relayed the order.
“It will be done,” Ye said. “But this seems a partial solution. They will surely strike with a multitude of weapons.”
“I suspect cluster bombs,” Renard said. “The kind used against tanks. The bombers will want to damage as many patrol craft as possible in a single pass. They will use their remaining missiles, but then they will employ cluster bombs as well.”
“I see,” Ye said. “From their perspective, it is better to cripple two patrol craft than to sink one. They are stopping a mission.”
“Precisely,” Renard said. “And unfortunately, the best defense against cluster bombs is immediate deployment of the ships to sea in a scattered formation.”
“Unfortunately, because they will have no protection from the infrared seekers of single-target missiles?”
“Correct,” Renard said. “Your best defense is a combination of fire and chaff for ships that remain pier-side. For those that can get underway quickly, I recommend dispersing them far from each other to limit the effect of cluster bombs.”
“I will relay the tactical insight to the squadron commander.”
“I don’t envy him his situation,” Renard said. “But I pray that he is a leader ready to prove his merit.”
“I selected him personally for the mission,” Ye said. “If anyone can lead the squadron out of this mess, he is the one.”
CHAPTER 17
Lieutenant Commander Yang Lei replayed visual echoes of pulsating platinum flashes, digesting them as missile explosions beyond the horizon. As he looked eastward through the bridge windows where the sea’s opaqueness met the stars, a flaming orb from the sinking Ma Kong destroyer flickered, contracted, and yielded to the darkness.
He looked through the starboard bridge window at silhouetted sailors who unraveled nylon lines from the mooring cleats of patrol vessels, low shadows of stealth nestled beside concrete piers. The men moved with warranted urgency, but Lei found the noise of scared voices on the radio net cumbersome.
He impressed himself with his calm grit.
“This is Lei,” he said. “Silence on the line.”
Tickling his peripheral vision through the far bridge window, bands of fire sliced the sky. He slid behind members of his bridge team, brought dimension to his perspective, and watched missiles trace arcs seaward from their launch platforms high in the island’s eastern mountains.
He recognized the Sky Bow missiles, the longest reach of the Taiwanese air net, retaliating against the airborne assailants that had eradicated the Ma Kong. Reckoning fewer rocket plumes than he hoped, he scowled, wanting for stronger shore-based defenses. Despite their supersonic speeds, he resigned to waiting a minute for fate, physics, and the skill of the targeted Chinese pilots to learn if the missiles would hit.
With Taiwan’s focus west toward the mainland, Lei presumed that the Chinese had flown southerly and angled back to punch through a weakness in the air defense net. Having witnessed the fiery end of the destroyer buttressing that vector, he choked back his rising fear of a crushing raiding force and braced for battle.
A vocal cacophony lingered on his headset.
“I said silence on the line!”
Silence held.
“Patrol craft only,” he said, “cast off all lines and make all engines ready. Frigates remain by the pier. Acknowledge via data link. Keep the voice line quiet except for urgent updates.”
He watched his command console accumulate acknowledgments of the orders. Glancing at a nautical chart of Suao Harbor, he calculated how to disperse his ships from its dark morning waters.
“All patrol craft get underway and make top speed outbound,” he said. “At channel marker bravo, I will turn Craft One on bearing of due north. Craft Two, steer bearing zero-one-zero. Three, steer bearing zero-two-zero. That’s ten-degree increments per craft. Each craft acknowledge your outbound bearing via data link.”
Data arrived on his console, each craft’s commander proving he had selected his proper course. Lei appreciated his squadron’s alertness.
“Get underway when capable,” Lei said. “If you reach the minefield keep-out zone, stop. Keep all Stinger missile teams topside, weapons free to engage any aircraft.”
The moonlit silvery wake of a patrol craft two piers away caught his eye, and he saw propeller wash as another ship accelerated past his beam. The silhouettes of two more craft converged in his view, appearing to merge as they crossed paths into the exit channel.
He tapped his executive officer on the shoulder.
“How long?” he asked.
“Twenty seconds, sir. The diesels are online, and the last mooring line is coming off.”
“Stinger team?”
“Topside and ready, sir. On the fantail.”
Lei watched his squadron in exodus slice wakes into the harbor’s tormented waters, and he checked through the port window that the pier’s cleats had released their hold on his ship.
“Now?” he asked.
“Yes!” the executive officer said.
“All ahead standard,” Lei said. “Make turns for fifteen knots.”
As his craft lurched, an inferno rose behind a fuel truck to the south, masking the frigate mated to the far pier. Lei watched the fuel truck sprint along the wharf to replicate the wall of fire beside the frigate at the northern pier, and as flames rose on a distant pier, Lei assumed a second truck contributed to the burning.
“Frigates light up all radars and anti-air defenses,” he said. “Coordinate with shore-based surface-to-air missile batteries. Frigate Cheng Kung has command of all air defenses except Sky Bow. All other assets engage air targets at will. All air defense assets acknowledge via data link.”