Acknowledgements arrived, and he tapped a button to shift his monitor to a tactical overview. Synthesized information from multiple radar systems confirmed his instinct. His squadron scattered under a sky ready to erupt with hell’s fury.
Blue squares represented his eighteen fleeing patrol craft, and red triangles thirty miles away revealed a tight formation of incoming aircraft.
He grasped his executive officer’s shoulder and spoke in his ear. Expecting to be rigid with the giving of orders, Lei surprised himself with a patriarchal calmness. Whether he believed it or not, he oozed an insider’s confidence that he owned the morning.
He sent his executive officer below to the combat information center, the inner nerve where his second-in-command would oversee a tactical control team in the carrying out of his orders.
Sensing Lei’s next move, his third-in-command, his navigation officer, looked up from a chart in the room’s corner.
“Navigator?” Lei asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Take the conn.”
“I have the conn,” the navigator said.
“Get us out of here,” Lei said.
He steadied himself against the console as the deck rolled and trembled. A glance at digital gauges satisfied him that his underling turned the ship to the correct heading and accelerated it to flank speed.
After twisting his boom microphone to his lips, he tapped buttons to hail the captain of the Cheng Kung.
“Yes, sir?” the Cheng Kung’s captain asked.
“Why aren’t you shooting yet?” Lei asked.
“I’m waiting for the Sky Bow missiles, sir. If I engage now, I could waste missiles on aircraft that are about to be shot down.”
“Can’t you redirect missiles in flight?”
“It is possible but not recommended. Our radars can lock and freeze while shifting targets.”
Auburn semicircles riddled the horizon, and Lei deduced that Sky Bow missile warheads engaged low-flying targets. His monitor clarified the outcome — the defenses had thinned the incoming enemy horde to eight aircraft.
“Engage,” Lei said.
Golden exhaust flashes from the single-arm launchers of the moored frigates illuminated the harbor, and Standard Medium Range missiles roared overhead. Stepping off the bridge and onto the superstructure, Lei looked over the fantail and squinted as yellowish plumes flaring from hillocks behind a weapons hangar lifted Hawk missiles after the Standards.
He slapped his palm against flat metal as the patrol craft rolled in the wake of a sister ship. His vessel felt solid and invulnerable to his hand but exposed and ephemeral against darkness’ encroaching menace.
Brilliant bursts lit the shoreline, and he forced his eyes shut while turning his head. The shock wave of supersonic, kerosene-fueled ramjet engines screeched across the sky, compelling him to jam his moist palms into his ears. He blinked, looked to the hillocks, and saw smoke rising as moonlight-swallowing puffs.
The water reflected the chainsaw staccato of a frigate’s Phalanx point defense system spitting desperate uranium sabots. Visible above the pier’s diesel-fueled inferno, detonations danced atop a frigate. Ramjet shock waves pounded Lei’s head again, and he crouched to the superstructure’s nonskid to regain his lucidity.
Those were just the anti-radiation missiles, he thought. Fast and small, homing on the radar systems to silence our defenses. The worst is yet to come.
A damaged frigate electrically blinded and a Sky Hawk radar system silenced, Lei watched the harbor’s halved air defenses flicker with each protective missile’s outbound launch. Wanting to take action, he stepped aft and braced himself on his ship’s anti-ship missile launchers, modified to manage nuclear-tipped anti-submarine weapons, but useless against the inbound jets.
On his darkened fantail below, he saw his two-man Stinger missile team scanning the sky through night vision.
They can’t protect us, he thought. The range is too limited and the targeting too manual.
He stormed forward and reentered the bridge. The air felt dry and hot, and he smelled fearful sweat. Eyes turned to him for hope and guidance.
I must do something, he thought. And there’s only one thing I can do under an air attack — pop chaff.
He labored to decide. Shooting chaff, tiny metallic shards, into the sky may cloud and confuse active missile seekers, he realized, but it may also call undue electronic attention to his otherwise stealthy vessel.
I must do something, he thought. Doing nothing is doing something when it’s the right decision.
He knew that his squadron would need chaff in the open ocean — if it survived this attack and the ensuing trek across a hostile minefield — and it may not have time to replenish its canisters if expended now.
I must do something, he thought. I pray we can reload chaff quickly if we survive this attack.
A vessel that pops chaff and drives away from the metallic cloud gains no defense, he reasoned, and he noticed that his ships were too close together to stop running. They couldn’t pop chaff and stop.
I must do something.
Chaff is useless against heat-seeking weapons, useless against cluster munitions, he reflected.
I must do something.
He stood at his command console and pressed a button to talk to his ships’ captains.
“All patrol craft,” he said, “this is Lei. Pop one chaff canister immediately. Then pop one more canister when you stop at the keep-out zone.”
He looked to his navigator.
“Pop chaff, one canister only,” he said.
The thump reverberated through the soles of his boots, and he looked to his console.
Hazy clouds littered the sky over his fleeing patrol craft. He also noticed eight incoming triangles, confirmed by Keelung as Chinese JH-7 Flying Leopard fighter/bombers, slowing to subsonic speeds to launch their crushing blows.
A swarm of overlapping scarlet triangles, too numerous for Lei to count, signaled incoming anti-ship weapons. Speed leaders from the blue triangles of Standard and Sky Hawk missiles tickled the red menaces, but the complexity and uncertainty of defensive missiles knocking down hostile missiles at rates of closure four times the speed of sound, left him anxious. Ship-killers, inbound vampires from the sky, would slip through the defense.
Lei stepped to the starboard bridge window and grabbed a pair of night vision binoculars from a cradle. He placed the optics to his face, scanned high in the greenish night, and followed bright arcs behind the exhausts of the outbound missiles.
He looked southeast, hoping to glimpse the Chinese Eagle Strike missiles. The inbound ship-killers flew low, concealed below his horizon.
He lowered the optics, clenched his jaw, and prepared to meet his encroaching fate.
CHAPTER 18
Bright orbs on the horizon caught Lei’s eye as they swelled to a crescendo of pulsating light, flared, and died into darkness.
He checked his monitor in hopes that the harbor’s air defenses had eradicated the saturation attack, but red speed leaders showed surviving hostile missiles. He feared one would to veer towards his ship, mock his puny air defenses, and engulf his crew in a sinking blaze.
The navigator’s shrill voice startled him.
“Five hundred yards from the minefield keep-out zone.”
“Stop the ship,” Lei said. “Pop chaff.”
The ship shuddered with a backing bell, and thunder clapped to the south. He glanced at his monitor before racing off the bridge to the aft superstructure and noticed that three incoming missiles had fanned across the harbor entrance, over the escaping patrol craft.