Fourth Crisis: The Battle for Taiwan (8 page)

“It’s got a bead on us,” the controller shrilled.
 
Some that operated the tower’s functions had
the presence of mind to dash for an exit, although most of them failed to
move.
 
A Humvee halted in the shadow of
the tower, and an air policeman jumped out and reached for a Stinger
man-portable air defense system.
 
He brought
the anti-aircraft missile to his shoulder and its reticle to his eye.
 
He led the fast-moving East Sea and waited
for a tone from the weapon.
 
When a buzz
like an electric razor indicated the seeker had locked-on to a heat source, he
squeezed the trigger.
 
The small blue
interceptor leaped from its tube and ignited.
 
It streaked for the East Sea, but blew right by, missing the Chinese
cruise missile before careening toward one of the hot ground fires.
 
A tardy HAWK interceptor also plummeted from
the sky, nose-diving into the pavement, and sacrificing itself to the
pyre.
 
The East Sea approached Kadena’s
control tower.

The Chinese cruise missile crashed through the tower’s
concrete wall, penetrated to an interior stairwell, and exploded.
 
The tower burst, and the upper floors hung
weightless for a moment, before telescoping down into a cloud of grey
dust.
 
Debris fell on firefighters and
the damage control teams that dashed around.
 
The thunder of an orbiting airplane drew nervous glances skyward until relieved
personnel recognized its outline as friendly.

The Lancer’s second pilot contacted Guam’s naval base,
transmitting imagery of the raid.
 
A few
minutes later, the Lancer received orders from command, instructing them to
meet a tanker over Thailand before continuing on to their original destination,
Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

◊◊◊◊

The
Ronald Reagan
carrier strike group passed north of Wake Island on its westward odyssey.
 
The supercarrier’s hull buzzed with speed,
her lower decks warmed by Pacific waters.
 
Startled from a disturbing dream, Lieutenant Pelletier showered again
and walked to one of the commons’ video phones where she waited with shipmates to
contact family and friends.
 
Pelletier
watched a Marine typing a familygram and a pimpled sailor chatting and smiling
in front of a small screen.
 
Each had a
three-minute allotment to communicate with home.
 
Her turn came, and she sat down at a terminal,
logged-in, and saw her dad already online.
 
He answered her video call immediately.
 
Pelletier combed her hair with her fingers and leaned into the
camera.
 
Her father’s stuttering face
tiled with interference as they made their greetings through limited bandwidth.

“How’s Hobbes?” Cindy asked.
 
She’d had that damn cat since he was a kitten, sharing an almost psychic
link with the no-good, lollygagging, mollycoddled rabble-rouser.
 
Besides her dad, that damn all-terrain feline
flea transporter was all she had known.
 
She remembered her dream: Old Hobbes was gravely ill, yellowed with
jaundice, and crying a pathetic meow for help.

“Uh… he’s fine,” her dad lied.
 
“Hey, you won’t believe who called.”

Cindy let her father off the hook about the cat, allowing him
to change the subject.

“Who?”

“Robby.
 
Robert
Gerardi.
 
Can you believe it?
 
He wanted to know if you were part of the
fighting, and…” Pelletier’s father continued, although his voice was drowned out
by the music in her head.
 
For a moment,
she flashed back to high school and the night of her prom.
 
She was looking at the boy with the broken
heart, the husband that might have been.
 
Seeing his little girl taken aback, Pelletier’s father wrapped up the
conversation with: “Give ‘em hell,” and the usual, “I love you.
 
Be safe.”
 
The video screen went black.
 
Pelletier
sat for a moment.
 
A sailor waiting to
use the kiosk cleared his throat.
 
Pelletier
gathered herself and got up.

She made her way toward the fantail through the twists and
turns of
Ronald Reagan
’s cramped
corridors.
 
The inescapable, maddening
hum of machinery was louder than usual.
 
She needed a moment of peace.
 
She
swung open a final hatch, felt the blast of cool air and tasted salt.
 
Pelletier stepped out onto a wide balcony.

The balcony hung low to the water, roofed by the flight deck,
and covered with equipment and catwalks.
 
A sailor balanced to replace a bulb in the instrument landing system,
the T-shaped set of lights Pelletier and the other aviators used during
landings to judge the motion of the ship.
 
Another working sailor saw Pelletier and threw his cigarette overboard,
then returned to the jet engine he had strapped to a test stand.
 
He saluted.
 
Pelletier waved it away.
 
He took
this to mean he could light another cigarette.
 
Pelletier went to one of the two close-in weapon systems that protected
Ronald Reagan
’s rear end from sea-skimming
missiles.

She perched herself under its barrel-shaped radar and rotary
cannon, and swung her boots from its base.
 
Several stories down flowed the black water.
 
Churned by the ship’s four gigantic propellers,
organisms phosphoresced and laid a neon carpet that was both wondrous and
worrying, a big, glowing arrow that pointed right at the American
supercarrier.
 
Pelletier glanced at the
sailor.
 
He had stopped pretending to
work on the engine.
 
Smoking again, he
looked thoughtfully to sea.
 
Pelletier got
a tight feeling in her stomach.
 
She
decided it was time to go back to bed.

◊◊◊◊

Stationary above the western Pacific, an American Defense
Support Program satellite performed a graceful orbital pirouette.
 
Squinting through a telescope, its infrared
sensors detected the heat plume of ballistic missiles rising from Chinese
soil.
 
The satellite alerted the 460
^th
Space Wing in Aurora, Colorado, which informed Strategic Command at Offutt,
Nebraska.

In the war room deep below Offutt Air Force Base, a bearish
four-star general—an old WWII Mustang pilot— studied the computer-generated
missile plots presented on the bunker’s screen.
 
My
hibernation den for the coming nuclear winter
, he thought.
 
“Take us to DefCon 3,” the general growled.
 
On a colorful countdown board that went from DEFCON
5 to DEFCON 1—Armageddon—the big green number ‘4’ changed to a yellow ‘3,’ and the
armed forces of the United States increased their defense readiness condition.
 
Security zones around Midwestern Minuteman
III inter-continental ballistic missile silos doubled, strategic bombers were
loaded with nuclear cruise missiles and gravity bombs, and Trident missile subs—‘boomers’—were
alerted that they may be needed.

“Get SBX on this.
 
And
cue Beale…”
 
The general ordered the beams
of Sea-Based X-band radar, and the big pyramidal radar in California, swung
toward China.
 
“Those missiles could be
headed our way.”
 
The general grumbled,
as he crossed thick arms.

Off Midway Island’s shallow barrier reef, an old Japanese
Val bomber rested on the sandy bottom.
 
Upright,
it sat in the water, as though still being flown by a spectral pilot.
 
However, the old warplane dripped with rust
and colorful fish congregated in its nooks and crannies.
 
SBX floated above it on twin torpedo hulls.
 
As if teed up for King Neptune himself, the converted
oil rig had in place of its drilling tower a giant white ball.
 
From inside this weatherproof dome, an
antenna bounced powerful radio waves off the ionosphere, bent them around the
curvature of the Earth, and found the boosting Chinese ballistic missiles.

Pulling in SBX’s data, US Strategic Command analyzed
trajectories with superfast computers, and confirmed that the Chinese launch was
intra-theater rather than intercontinental.
 
Impact zones were projected.
 
They
were located within the Philippine Sea, the current operating area of the
George Washington
carrier strike
group.
 
Word was forwarded to Hawaii, and
then on to the American supercarrier.

◊◊◊◊

White Pacific dolphins frolicked in the supercarrier
George Washington
’s bow wave.
 
They vaulted acrobatically and led the
gargantuan warship and its procession through the Philippine Sea.
 
Some of
George
Washington
’s anti-submarine warfare helicopters, early warning aircraft,
and fighter-bombers perched on the deck.
 
Just beneath their beefy landing gear was a dimly-lit and chilled
environment better suited to electronics than human beings: the combat
information center, or CIC.

Vibrations from aircraft landing and launching overhead
transmitted down bulkheads.
 
The sounds
melded with the murmur of sailors speaking into headset microphones while seated
at computer terminals.
 
The combat
information center’s Kevlar-lined walls were covered with flat video screens that
displayed anti-air, anti-surface, and anti-submarine tactical data.
 
A strike controller communicated with planes
coming and going from the ship, as four different tactical action officers
watched respective warfare teams.
 
Cold,
hostile stares stayed glued to perpetually refreshing data, and each waited and
watched for any threat to the
George
Washington
.

The air defense officer brought up a large graphic of the
western Pacific on his screen.
 
Parabolic
lines represented several missile tracks reaching from China and advancing toward
a large diamond that represented the carrier strike group.
 
The officer in charge lifted a telephone and
notified
George Washington
’s command.

The carrier’s executive—a rear admiral with a face like an
old sea chart—stood from his flag bridge chair and ordered the strike group to
battle stations.
 
Aboard ship, hatches
closed and locked, and damage control parties reached their ready stations.
 
The anti-air warfare commander observed the
menacing advance of the Chinese ballistic missiles.

“It’s up to
Lake
Champlain
,” he said.

Like Pallas Athena—the goddess of warfare and truth—the
American guided-missile cruiser
Lake
Champlain
bore her own buckler.
 
Her
protective shield was not of tightly woven gold tassel.
 
Instead, it bristled with electronics and
kinetics.
 
Lake Champlain
’s Aegis combat system included networked radar,
powerful computers, and capable weapons.
 
Aegis could track 100 targets out to 100 miles.
 
Under the supervision of seasoned sailors,
Aegis controlled the cruiser’s vertical launch system—the VLS—a grid of
lid-covered cells on
Lake Champlain
’s
after and forward decks.
 
Each cell
contained Tomahawk cruise missiles in the anti-ship and land-attack variety, or
a Standard Missile—the US Navy’s primary long-range surface-to-air
missile.
 
Several third-generation
Standard Missiles had been loaded at Pearl onto
Lake Champlain
.
 
Each Standard
lofted a sophisticated lightweight exo-atmospheric projectile, or LEAP, able to
kill ballistic missiles at the fringes of space—a bullet to hit a bullet.
 
Lake
Champlain
’s crew hustled to general quarters.
 
Captain Ferlatto departed the bridge and rushed
below to the cruiser’s combat information center.

The Chinese missiles advanced within range of
Lake Champlain
’s radar, their steady
approach shown as white lines on the CIC’s big blue screens.
 
Ferlatto joined several sailors huddled
around the glowing panels.

“Update,” the tactical action officer demanded.

“SM-3s are targeted and ready for launch, sir,” the weapons
officer reported.

“Shoot,” the officer barked.
 
Buttons were pushed at the fire control terminal.

A sheet of crackling flame vented from between
Lake Champlain
’s five-inch deck gun and her
forecastle.
 
The first Standard Missile lifted
away.
 
It roared skyward on a pillar of
fire and white smoke.
 
Aegis contacted
the interceptor and guided it out.
 
Another SM-3 fired, and then a third.
 
An unnatural fog wrapped
Lake
Champlain
as her surface-to-air missiles dashed for the Chinese ballistic
ones.

The East Winds skirted the upper mesosphere, pointed back toward
Earth, and started their plunge at the ships on the Pacific.
 
Along with the warheads, polyhedral decoys released
from the East Wind’s booster buses.
 
They
would generate heat and reflect radar, confusing and drawing away the American
interceptors, while the real warheads used their aerodynamic shape to generate
lift, and used actuating chine tabs to swerve during their charge at the
American ships.