Dispatches (4 page)

“Don’t make your reports to me. Lieutenant Mosely is fighting the ship,” said Thompson.

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” said the petty officer. “TAO, Spotlight One-One—”

“Got it, make sure Spotlight drops a sonobuoy for battle-damage assessment,” said the TAO.

“Already in the water, sir. Sonar reports active torpedo pinging. It’s just a matter of time,” said the ASTAC.

Several seconds later, Clark gave them an update.

“Missiles entered terminal-guidance phase. Revised time to target estimate is one five seconds. Aegis shows a solid lock on the targets.”

Jeffries mentally counted down the seconds. He reached twelve when Clark announced their arrival.

“Splash tracks number 1025 and 1026. Aegis is picking up nothing but falling debris from the tracks.”

“Copy. Splash tracks,” said the TAO, among a chorus of cheers.

Moments later, it was the ASTAC’s turn to pass on some good news.

“TAO, all acoustic sources confirm an underwater detonation. The torpedo has stopped pinging. Sonar assesses a hit. They’re processing more data from the sonobuoy and towed array feeds to assess the extent of the damage.”

Everyone cheered except for the captain, who whispered something to Lieutenant Mosely. He nodded before abruptly interrupting the celebration.

“Keep it down! This isn’t over! ASTAC, order Spotlight One-One to re-attack the target with its second torpedo,” said the TAO.

The order quieted the crew. The captain wasn’t taking any chances with the submarine, which had very likely fired two nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at the capital—and could fire a whole host of antiship missiles on
Gravely
if it survived the first torpedo. Jeffries suspected that Guardian and Sentry would continue to drop torpedoes until they heard the Chinese submarine break apart underwater.

Chapter 7

15 miles northeast of Guangzhou, China

Early December 2019

Staff Sergeant Chen Tang-shan sat on the cold ground next to his assigned tent, peering through the fence at the orange aura visible over the darkened hilltops. Based on the distant glow, he knew the camp was due east of a major industrial area, but he couldn’t be sure where. They could be outside one of several dozen Chinese cities, coastal or inland. The truck ride from the pier in Xiamen had lasted several hours by his guess. He wasn’t sure, because his watch, along with the rest of his personal items, had been confiscated a few hours after his capture on Penghu Island.

As a Republic of China (ROC) Marine, he had devoted his career to preparing for this invasion, an unsurprising continuation of a youth spent under the constant threat of a breakdown in “cross-strait” relations. They had always understood the odds stacked against them, even with the prospect of American intervention. When the United States started to withdraw its military forces from the western Pacific theatre of operations, the Taiwanese government took immediate steps to safeguard the people. Chen’s battalion was ferried from the Taiwanese mainland to Penghu, a small archipelago in the Taiwan Strait.

To what end?
He’d spend the rest of his life in labor camps, with an occasional stint in a re-education facility. If he showed promise, and no signs of aggression, he might be returned to his family on Taiwan—if his family hadn’t been moved to a labor camp in China. He wished he had been killed on Penghu.

Instead, his tank had been hit by an antitank missile fired from a Chinese attack helicopter within the first few minutes of the battle, killing the rest of his crew and disabling the tank. He spent the next seventy-two hours sprinting from one blasted structure to the next with a Marine infantry squad, occasionally stopping long enough to fire on an unsuspecting Chinese patrol. Chen and the two remaining Marines were captured at night on the third day of the invasion while swimming across Magong Bay to an outlying island.

They had hoped to find a serviceable boat on one of the islands so they could retreat to the mainland. They felt useless on the island. At night, they saw flashes across the channel between Taiwan and Penghu. The battle for Taiwan raged on while their fight dissolved into a pointless game of hide and seek with the Chinese. Their families needed them.

His wife and children lived in the West District of Chiayi City. They would no doubt see heavy fighting as the Chinese fought their way east through the city to the provincial government complex. Chen had seen the Army Reserve battle plans for defending the mainland. It would be a fight to the bitter end for the regular and reserve units assigned to defend the city, and the civilians caught in the middle.

They hadn’t been the only ROC Marines with the same concern. The Chinese patrol boat that pulled them out of the water held several Marines from the 66
^th
Marine Brigade, all plucked out of the jet-black water. Less than twenty-four hours later, he was deposited at Camp 78 with the clothes on his back and a pair of cheap plastic sandals. Made in China, no doubt.

Chen shivered, knowing it was time to return to his overcrowded tent and the worn bamboo mat so graciously “loaned” to him by the “people.” The propaganda had started immediately.
People’s
this and
people’s
that. Intolerable on every level
.

Headlights appeared in the hills, approaching the camp. One pair turned into several, as the road turned gradually toward the entrance on the northern side of the camp. More prisoners. Just what they needed.

A high-pitched noise drew his attention away from the trucks. The sound grew louder over the next few seconds, resembling a jet engine. He caught movement in his peripheral vision and jerked his head left—just in time to see a long, dark object fly over the eastern half of the camp. The sound rapidly faded as Taiwanese prisoners streamed out of the tents, cheering at the sky. Like Chen, many of them knew exactly what had passed overhead: a cruise missile.

Moments later, the watchtowers lining the camp bathed the prisoners in blinding light. Whistles blared, and amplified voices ordered them back to their tents. A few bursts of automatic fire emphasized the guards’ urgency to restore order to the “people’s camp.” Chen wondered where the missile was headed, and if it signified anything beyond a random, desperate, retaliatory shot fired by one of their submarines or destroyers. He hoped so.

Chen had barely settled onto his mat when the tent went dark—the intense light from the watchtowers no longer penetrating the thin brown canvas. The sudden change quieted the tent, only a few whispers penetrating the silence. Absolute silence. Something was wrong.

He scrambled to the tent flap on his knees, pushing through a sea of huddled prisoners. He crawled out of the tent and lay still in the rocky dirt. Aside from a few flashlight beams sweeping across the fence line in front of the closest guard barracks, the camp was completely dark. Only the lights on the inbound trucks penetrated the night—but the trucks had stopped moving. He stood up, fixated on the lights.

Why the hell would they stop in the open?

The guards in the tower to his right started shouting at him. Chen heard the words “last warning,” so he raised his hands above his head and nodded.

He turned toward the tent, noticing something he had missed a few moments ago. Chen stopped and stared beyond the trucks.

Impossible.

He hoped his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. The prominent orange glow above the hills had vanished. The trucks. The camp’s lights. The city. It all made sense. Someone had just thrown the switch over part of the People’s Republic of China. Why had the Americans waited so long to strike back? It didn’t matter. He was deeply satisfied knowing that the
people’s
lives had been permanently cast into darkness.

Fuck the people.

Chapter 8

KJ-3000 Airborne Early Warning aircraft

153 miles east of Guangzhou

Major Xhua Hua stabbed at the button next to the console’s trackball, locking the target in the system. A flurry of voices and movement erupted around him as equipment operators scrambled to report the target to a dizzying array of People’s Liberation Air Force units on the ground. He swiveled his chair to brief his commanding officer, who had already crisscrossed through the maze of consoles to reach him.

“Colonel, I have an unidentified air track eighteen point two miles north of Guangzhou. Altitude 600 meters and rising. Speed 700 kilometers per hour. Zero horizontal trajectory. Zero squawk. Designating track number eight-five.”

“Where did it appear?” asked the colonel, leaning in to view the screen.

“Here,” said Xhua, pointing at his wide-screen display. “Eighteen point two miles north of Guangzhou.”

“It’s flying straight up?”

“Affirmative, sir. Altitude eleven hundred meters.”

“It can’t be a missile or a rocket. It’s too slow,” said the colonel, shaking his head. “And there’s nothing listed on the ground in that area.”

An officer behind them interrupted. “Colonel Jin! Southern Air Defense Command demands a personal report on the contact!”

The colonel’s face tightened, and he nodded stiffly to the junior officer before scrambling back to his station toward the front of the aircraft. Xhua turned his attention back to the display and watched the baffling contact profile.

“Altitude twenty-one hundred meters. Speed steady at seven hundred!” he yelled to the colonel.

This was a first for Major Xhua. He’d been assigned to airborne early warning aircraft since he joined the People’s Liberation Air Force, rising through the ranks to the second-most senior position in the command and control center aboard the PLA’s premier air defense platform. Only Colonel Jin and one of the pilots outranked him. In all of his eighteen years, he’d never tracked a straight-vertical contact this low to the ground. Military jet aircraft occasionally pulled this kind of maneuver during combat training, but in every case the aircraft started the steep ascent from a two- to three-thousand-meter altitude. Nothing about “eight-five” made sense. Another five seconds passed.

“Altitude thirty-two hundred meters. Speed holding,” he said.
Three kilometers
.

“Review the feeds and confirm that we didn’t miss anything prior to detection!” yelled Colonel Jin.

“Yes, sir!” he yelled, looking between the consoles behind him to assign the task to one of his junior officers.

“No!
You
review the feeds!” screamed the colonel.

Here we go.
Southern Air Defense Command had started their inquisition. He wondered if the phased array ground radars situated further inland had seen anything different. Doubtful. They were focused on higher altitude, over-the-horizon threats. He nodded and opened a separate command window on his screen.

“Captain Wu, stand by to assume primary tactical actio—”
What is this?

The data window for track eight-five couldn’t be correct. Altitude seventy-three hundred meters? Speed twenty-nine hundred kilometers per hour? Supersonic?

“Colonel! Track eight-five has increased speed to Mach two point three. Eight thousand meters!” said Xhua.

Colonel Jin snapped his head in Xhua’s direction, but didn’t respond. He kept nodding in acquiescence to the generals undoubtedly screaming at him through his headset. Xhua watched the altitude climb. Nine thousand. Ten thousand. Nearly a thousand meters per second.
What the hell is this?
A chilling thought entered his mind. ICBM? Second Artillery Corps certainly wouldn’t disclose the location of their mobile launchers, so the area would appear empty to conventional PLA forces.

It was the only thing that made sense to him. The Americans had responded to the invasion of Taiwan with nuclear weapons, and China was retaliating. He resisted the urge to get up from his seat. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do except wait.

“Southern Air Defense Command confirms your data!” said Colonel Jin. “I have been assured there is nothing in the area.”

“Retaliatory strike?” asked Xhua, silencing the command and control center.

Jin stared at him with his mouth agape for a moment before shaking his head.

“No. We would have an inbound warning by now,” said Jin, the confidence in his voice fading.

“Twenty-one thousand meters, sir,” said Xhua, grimacing.

What else could this be? A UFO?

“Guangzhou Air Base has scrambled a flight of two J-10 fighters!” yelled one of the console operators.

“I hope they brought space suits,” said Xhua. “Because the contact will be in low Earth orbit before they reach it.”

The colonel cursed and spoke forcefully into his headset, never breaking the steely-eyed glare at Xhua.
Message received. Quit speculating about nuclear weapons—do your job.
He turned to the screen. Twenty-three thousand. The altitude continued to climb while Jin talked to the Southern Air Defense Command. Thirty-two thousand. It had to be an ICBM.

At sixty-eight thousand meters, the track disappeared—followed immediately by the picture on his display. The cabin lights blinked and the plane shook violently, throwing Xhua against his seatbelt harness. The engines whined through the hull before settling into a stable pitch. The crew erupted in a cacophony of reports punctuated by cries of pain. He looked around and saw four members of the crew sprawled over the consoles and deck. They all appeared to be moving, which was a good sign. Panning toward the front of the cabin, he saw that Colonel Jin hadn’t been so lucky. Jin’s lifeless eyes stared at him from the rubber-matted deck, his head and neck jammed at an unsightly angle against the aircraft’s mid-cabin door.

He flipped a switch to talk to the flight deck, but couldn’t get the pilots to answer. His display screen reappeared with a prompt that told him that the system was in the reboot phase. The southern air defense zone was temporarily blind. He unbuckled his seatbelt and made his way to the cockpit door, grabbing anything sturdy in case the aircraft hit another patch of turbulence. Glancing down at Colonel Jin, he realized it wouldn’t matter. He couldn’t hold himself steady if the aircraft shook again. He knocked on the door, which opened before he lowered his hand.