“Vapor, this is CROWBAR, climb and maintain eight thousand, turn left heading three-zero-zero, clear to exit R-4806W and re-enter R-4808N to PALACE intersection for approach and landing. Thanks for your help.”
“Eight thousand, three-zero-zero, PALACE intersection, Vapor copies all. Good day. Out.”
McLanahan set up the navigation radios to help Cobb find the initial approach fix, but couldn’t shake the powerful impression HADES had left on him. It was a devastating weapon and would represent a serious threat and escalation to any conflict. No, it wasn’t a nuclear device, but the fact that one aircraft could drop one bomb and kill all forms of life within a one-to-two-mile radius was pretty sobering. Just one B-52 bomber loaded with thirty to forty such weapons could destroy a small city.
Thankfully, though, there wasn’t a threat on the horizon that could possibly justify using HADES. Things were pretty quiet in the world. A lot of the countries that had regularly resorted to aggression before were now opting for peaceful, negotiated settlements. Flare-ups and regional disputes were still present, but no nation wanted war with another, because the possibility for massive destruction with fewer military forces was a demonstrated reality.
And for McLanahan that was just as well. Better to put weapons like HADES hack in storage or destroy them than to use them.
What Patrick McLanahan did not know, however, was that half a world away, a conflict was brewing that could once again force him and his fellow flyers to use such awesome weapons.
1
Just as fifty-seven-year-old Fleet Admiral Yin Po L’un, commander of the Spratly Island flotilla, South China Sea Fleet, People’s Liberation Army Navy of China, reached for his mug of tea from the young steward, his ship heeled sharply to port and the tray with his tea went flying across the bridge of his flotilla’s flagship. Well, evening tea would be delayed another fifteen minutes. Sometimes, he thought, his lot in life was as if the gods had sent a fire-breathing dragon to destroy a single lamb — and the dragon finishes drowning in the sea along the way.
The skipper of Yin’s flagship, Captain Lubu Vin Li, chewed the young steward up one side and down the other for his clumsiness. Yin looked at the poor messboy, a thin, beady-eyed kid obviously with some Tibetan stock in him. “Captain, just let him bring the damned tea, please,” Yin said. Lubu bowed in acknowledgment and dismissed the steward with a slap on the chest and a stem growl.
“I apologize for that accident, sir,” Lubu said as he returned to stand beside Yin’s seat on the bridge of the Hong Lung, Admiral Yin’s flagship. “As you know, we have been in typhoon-warning-condition three for several days; I expect all the crew to be able to stand on their own two feet by now.”
“Your time would be better spent speaking with Engineering and determining the reason for that last roll, Captain,” Yin said without looking at his young destroyer skipper. “The Hong Lung has the world’s best stabilizer system, and we are not in a full gale yet — the stabilizers should have been able to dampen the ship’s motion. See to it.” Lubu’s face went blank, then pained as he realized his mistake, then resolute as he bowed and turned to the ship’s intercom to order the chief engineer to the bridge. The most sophisticated vessel in the People’s Liberation Navy should not be wallowing around in only force-three winds, Yin thought — it only made the rest of his unit so unsightly.
Admiral Yin turned to glance at the large, thick plastic panel on which the location and condition of the other vessels in his flotilla were plotted with a grease pencil. Radar and sonar data from his ships were constantly fed to the crewman in charge of the bridge plot, who kept it updated by alternately wiping and redrawing the symbols as fast as he could. His ships were roughly arranged in a wide protective diamond around the flagship. The formation was now headed southwest, pointing into the winds which were tossing around even his big flagship.
Admiral Yin Po L’un’s tiny Spratly Island flotilla currently consisted of fourteen small combatants, averaging around fifteen years of age, with young, inexperienced crews on them. Four to six of those ships were detached into a second task force, which cruised within the Chinese zone when the other ships were near the neutral zone.
On the outer perimeter of the flotilla, Admiral Yin Po L’un deployed three Huangfen-class fast-attack missile boats, capable against heavy surface targets, and four Hegu-class fast-attack missile boats with antisubmarine and antiaircraft weapons. He had an old Lienyun-class minesweeper on the point, a precautionary tactic born of the conflict with the Vietnamese Navy only six years earlier. He also had two big Hainan-class fast patrol boats with antiair, antiship, and antisubmarine weapons operating as “roamers,” moving between the inner and outer perimeters. All were direct copies of old World War II Soviet designs, and these boats had no business being out in the open ocean, even as forgiving and generally tame as the South China Sea was. The ships in Yin’s flotilla rotated out every few weeks with other ships in the six-hundred-ship South China Sea Fleet, based at Zhan-jiang Naval Base on the Leizhou Peninsula near the Gulf of Tonkin.
Yin’s flagship, the Hong Lung, or Red Dragon, was a beauty, a true oceangoing craft for the world’s largest navy. It was a Type EF5 guided-missile destroyer that had a Combination Diesel or Gas Turbine propulsion system that propelled the 132-meter, five-thousand-ton vessel to a top speed of over thirty-five nautical miles per hour. The Hong Lung had a helicopter hangar and launch platform, and it carried a modern, French-built Dauphin II patrol, rescue, antimine, and antisubmarine warfare helicopter. Yin’s destroyer also carried six supersonic Fei Lung-7 antiship missiles, the superior Chinese version of the French Exocet antiship missile; two Fei Lung-9 long-range supersonic antiship missiles, experimental copies of the French-built ANS antiship missile; two Hong Qian-91 single antiair missile launchers, fore and aft, with thirty-missile manually loaded magazines each; a Creusoit-Loire dual-purpose 100-millimeter gun; and four single-barreled and two double-barreled 37-millimeter antiaircraft guns. It also had a single Phalanx CIWS, or Close-In Weapon System gun. Developed in the United States of America, Phalanx was a radar-guided Vulcan multibarrel 20-millimeter gun that could destroy incoming sea-skimming antiship missiles; from its mount on the forecastle perch behind and below the con, it could cover both sides and the stem out to a range of two kilometers. The Hong Lung also carried sonar (but no torpedoes or depth charges) and sophisticated targeting radars for her entire arsenal.
The Hong Lung was specifically designed to patrol the offshore islands belonging to China, such as the Spratly and the Paracel Islands, and to engage the navies of the various countries that claimed these islands — so the Hong Lung carried no antisubmarine-warfare weaponry like the older Type EF4 Luda-class destroyers of the North Fleet. The Hong Lung could defeat any surface combatant in the South China Sea and could protect itself against almost any air threat. The Hong Lung’s escort ships — the minesweepers and ASW vessels — could take on any threat that the destroyer wasn’t specifically equipped to deal with.
“Position, navigator,” Admiral Yin called out.
The navigator behind and to the Admiral’s right called out in reply, “Sir!”, bent to work at his plastic-covered chart table as a series of coordinates were read to him from the LORAN navigation computers, then replied, “Sir, position is ten nautical miles northwest of West Reef, twenty-three miles north of Spratly Island air base.”