Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (5 page)

           
“Cool,” was all Cobb said—and for
him, that was akin to a long string of epithets and exclamations.

           
McLanahan turned his attention away
from the ugly bum mark and the holocaust below: “CROWBAR, this is Two- One,
flyover complete, request approach clearance.”

           
“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.

           
Near the Spratly Islands, South
China Sea Wednesday, 8 June 1994, 2247 hours local

           
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 bom 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 bn 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.”

           
“Depth under the keel?”

           
“Showing twenty meters under the
keel, sir,” Captain Lubu Vin Li replied. “No danger of running aground if we
stay on this course, sir.”

           
Yin grunted his acknowledgment. That
was exactly what he was worried about. While his escorts could traverse the
shallow waters of the
Spratly
Island
chain easily, the
Hong Lung
was an oceangoing vessel with a four-meter draft. At low
tide, the big destroyer could find itself run aground at any time while within
the
Spratly
Islands
.

           
Although the Spratlys were in
neutral territory,
China
controlled the valuable islands informally
by sheer presence of force if not by agreement or treaty.

           
Yin’s normal patrol route took the
flotilla through the southern edge of the “neutral zone” area of the island
chain, scanning for Philippine vessels and generally staying on watch. Although
the Philippine Navy patrolled the Spratlys and had a lot of firepower there,
Admiral Yin’s smaller, faster escort ships could mount a credible force against
them. And since the Philippine ships had no medium or long-range antiship
missiles or antiair missiles in the area* the
Hong Lung
easily outgunned every warship within two thousand miles.

           
They were currently on an eastward heading,
cruising well north of the ninth parallel—and as far as Yin was concerned, the
“neutral zone” meant that he might
consider
issuing a warning to trespassers before opening fire on them. The shoal
water was also south of their position, near Pearson Reef, and he wanted to
stay clear of those dangerous waters.

           
“CIC to bridge,” the interphone
crackled.
“Wenshan
reports surface
contact, bearing three-four-zero, range eighteen miles. Stationary target.”

           
Captain Lubu keyed his microphone
and grunted a curt, “Understood,” then checked the radar plot. The
Wenshan
was one of the Hainan-class
patrol boats roaming north and east of the
Hong
Lung;
it had a much better surface-search radar than the small
Huangfen-class boat, the
Xingyi,
in
the vicinity; although the
Xingyi
was
equipped with Fei Lung-7 surface attack missiles, often other ships had to seek
out targets for it.

           
Lubu turned to Admiral Yin. “Sir,
the surface contact is near
Phu
Qui
Island
, in the neutral zone about twenty miles
north of Pearson Reef. No recent reports of any vessels or structures in the
area. We have
Wenshan
and
Xingyi
in position to investigate the
contact.”

           
Yin nodded that he understood.
Phu
Qui
Island
, he knew, was a former Chinese oil-drilling
site in the
Spratly
Islands
; the well had been capped and abandoned
years ago. Although
Phu
Qui
Island
disappeared underwater at high tide, it was
a very large rock and coral formation and could easily be expanded and
fortified—it would be an even larger island than
Spratly
Island
itself. If Yin was tasked to pick an island
to occupy and fortify, he would pick Phu Qui.

           
So might someone else. . . .

           
“Send
Wenshan
and
Xingyi
to
investigate the contact,” Yin ordered. “Rotate
Manning
north to take
Wenshan's
position.”
Manning
was the other
Hainan-class patrol boat acting as “rover” in Yin’s patrol group.

           
Captain Lubu acknowledged the order
and relayed the instructions to his officer of the deck for transmission to the
Wenshan.

           
Yin, who had been in the People’s
Liberation Army Navy practically all of his life, was proud of the instincts
he’d honed during his loyal career. He trusted them. And now, somewhere deep
down in his gut, those instincts told him this was going to be trouble.

           
Granted,
Phu
Qui
Island
, and even the Spratlys themselves, seemed
the most unlikely place to expect trouble. The Spratlys—called
Nansha Dao,
the
Lonely
Islands
, in Chinese—were a collection of reefs,
atolls, and semisubmerged islands in the middle of the
South China Sea
, halfway between
Vietnam
and the
Philippines
and several hundred kilometers south of
China
. The fifty-five major surface formations of
the Spratlys were dotted with shipwrecks, attesting to the high degree of
danger involved when navigating in the area. Normally, such a deathtrap as the
Spratlys would be given a wide berth.

           
Centuries ago Chinese explorers had
discovered that the Nansha Dao was a treasure trove of minerals—gold, iron,
copper, plus traces or indications of dozens of other metals—as well as gems
and other rarities.