The South China Sea would be a battleground, but strategically it was secondary. Even if China broke out here, it would expand into empty sea. Its logistics would be vulnerable to submarine operations, as Japan’s had been in an earlier war. The allies — Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia — would fight back, to defend their own claims in the area. If Zhang pushed south, he’d lose the war.
But a penetration of the eastern, Philippines-Taiwan-Japan line would let China pincer Taiwan and isolate South Korea, crushing two of America’s oldest and best-armed allies. The next step would be to break out, threaten the second island ring, and neutralize Japan. If that happened, the U.S. could find itself pushed back so far it might never be able to return.
The world would look very different then.
“Captain.”
Chief Van Gogh, looking worried. Dan coughed into a fist, initialed the message, and handed it back. “Yeah, Chief?”
“GPS is acting up. Says we’re in central Luzon, four hundred feet up a mountain.”
This wasn’t good. “We’ve got an inertial nav system, Chief. Can we run on that?”
“For a little while, sir. But it’s going to degrade over time.”
Dan squinted out the window, at the sun sparkling on the waves. What was going on over their heads? Far over their heads, hundreds of miles up. No one had reported any shootdowns of U.S. satellites, but their comms and data links were all but useless, and now their navigation was screwed too. Something was going on. “We’ve still got a sextant, right?”
Van Gogh brightened. “Oh, yessir! A sextant, and a chronometer.”
“Get a time tick and pull out the reduction tables. We’ll shoot a sun line at noon, and do evening stars. We can run on Aegis and dead reckoning in between.” He paused, glancing out at the glittering sea again. “Now lay a course for the Bashi Channel.”
Mitscher joined that afternoon. She crossed his bow and settled on his port quarter. “Stony” Stonecipher was riding shotgun again. They raced northeast at flank speed, tails out and pinging, short-range nav radars on. The helo buzzed around ahead, laying sonobuoys. He kept the lookouts alert; you wouldn’t think binoculars would be that useful, but he’d seen from the SATYRE exercises how often a sub would get caught visually when he upped scope.
That evening the sky turned lurid and ominous: a deep russet, with high bands of gracefully scalloped cirrus hung like gaudy bunting above heaped piles of cumulus, clotted low and dark where the hidden sun was perishing. The scarlet light seeped into the gently rocking sea, as if — and he tried hard not to think this, but couldn’t help it, leaning over the splinter shield and looking aft, past the Harpoon launchers canted out from the stern — as if their wake were drawn through blood.
He was stepping out of his coveralls when the bulkhead phone chirped again. He answered it this time to Dave Branscombe’s excited voice.
The comm officer read from the message. “Para One. Mainland jets have swarmed ROCAF F-16s patrolling the Taiwan Strait, shooting four down and dispersing the rest. China now has air superiority over the strait.
“Para Two. Premier-General Zhang Zurong has made the following, quote Four Peaceful Announcements, unquote. First: China seeks no wider war. Second, no country will be attacked unless it attacks China, or refuses to help build a lasting stability and order in Asia and the Pacific Rim.
“Third, in order to build a peaceful, orderly Pacific free of weapons of mass destruction, any foreign force capable of delivering nuclear weapons will be dealt with by any means necessary, to prevent escalation.
“Fourth, any aggression against Chinese soil will be answered by a similar or greater level of destruction visited on the American homeland.” A moment of silence, then, “So far, no response from the White House. That’s the message, Skipper. Being run up to you, but thought I’d better call, soon as I saw it.”
“I’ll be on the bridge,” Dan said.
He rezipped his coveralls and climbed to the pilothouse, mulling the attack on the inner island chain’s keystone. The allies couldn’t hold the center, between Japan and Taiwan — Okinawa, the Senkakus, the Ryukyus — without air defenses and antiballistic missile coverage.
Which meant Savo Island, and her sister cruisers, would be the last line of defense.
If they failed, the inner island chain would fall. And the war would be, if not lost at the outset, enormously long and bloody.
Maybe even… like World War I.
He stumbled over something soft, and had a bad moment. Then realized, not a body; not yet, anyway. Just the watch team’s life jackets and flash gear, rolled and ready. He edged forward in the dark, arms outstretched, struggling against a sense of doom as overwhelming as the nausea that also threatened.
They weren’t ready for this. A beta-test system. Five antimissile rounds left, against hundreds of weapons poised across the strait. And a silent, faceless evil driving wedges into his already sick, exhausted crew.
His hands quivered, his neck ached, flashes seared his retinas. He stood silent for a long time, one hand spasmodically gripping the back of his command chair, reluctant to climb up into it.
The nations groped lost in the labyrinth. Once more, the god of war demanded sacrifice. Once more, human beings had miscalculated, and brought down Armageddon.
But his duty, and that of his ship and crew, was clear.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Ex nihilo nihil fit. I write from a braiding of memory, imagination, and research. For this novel, I resorted again to references and interviews accumulated for previous books about Navy and joint operations. I interviewed the master chief who inspects BMD cruisers, whom I knew from previous duty, and a commodore who skippered one cruiser and now commands a strike squadron. I sailed aboard an Aegis cruiser and did on-site research in several of the various locales.
The following background sources were also helpful. The list of Dan’s decorations in chapter 4 was submitted by longtime Poyer Crew member Bruce James. The congressional testimony owes much to an unclassified presentation by John H. James to the Tidewater ASNE. The information on monsoons in chapters 6 and 10 is from NRL Monterey, Marine Meteorology Division. The discussion of boarding regimes owes a lot to “Broken Taillight at Sea: The Peacetime International Law of Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure,” by Commander James Kraska, JAGC, USN. Chapter 13 was loosely based on U.S. Navy History and Heritage Command’s “U.S. Navy Relief Efforts After the Indian Ocean Tsunami, 26 December 2004,” and on “Multi-Service Procedures for Humanitarian Assistance Operations,” a tactical memorandum I edited while at the Surface Warfare Development Group.
For part 4’s discussion of nuclear deterrence, I read “Red Lines, Deadlines, and Thinking the Unthinkable: India, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and China,” a CSIS study by Anthony Cordesman. Also consulted were “What Might an India-Pakistan War Look Like?” by Christopher Clary, MIT, and Deep Currents and Rising Tides by John Garofano. The discussion of “no first use” was informed by Scott D. Sagan’s “The Evolution of Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Doctrine,” and a posting by Joshi Shashank of Harvard, “India and ‘No First Use.’” The operations plans and contingency plans are my fictional fabrications after reading Naval Operations Concept 2010 and William M. Arkin’s “National Security Contingency Plans of the U.S. Government.” I have never seen any actual operations plans for such a contingency. For chapter 19, I’m indebted to “U.S. Navy Missile Defense, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” by friend and fellow author George Galdorisi.