Deep War: The War with China and North Korea - The Nuclear Precipice

by David Poyer

  Savo. A mangled wreck at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. When he’d read that, something had wrenched inside his chest. As if his heart had been popped into another shape, like a protein flipping into a prion.

  A nuclear strike on U.S. territory. Apparently the city center itself had been spared, protected by the old cruiser’s last salvos, but still there’d been thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths, both shipyard workers and civilians. While he’d been arguing with the Air Force about collateral damage.

  But now, at long last, the Allies were punching back.

  He slouched, rubbing his mouth. The screens showed only the baseline geographic plots, and feeds from mast-top infrared cameras. Deep night, deep war, and the strike group was running dark and quiet. The last enemy recon assets had been wiped from the sky, including the gauze-winged insectile spy drones he’d identified during hunter-killer operations in the central Pacific.

  In retaliation for the attack on Hawaii, the strike on Hainan he’d planned in the PACOM basement had become Operation Uppercut. Surface and submarine assets were gradually enveloping the coast in a distributed-lethality filtering-in operation, spreading out the enemy’s remaining surveillance and strike assets and complicating his targeting. SEAL teams were landing on outlying islands. U.S., Indian, and Australian submarines were clearing the lanes in, then laying mines to isolate the battlespace.

  Massive as the movement was, he still suspected this was only a diversion. Part of a long-prepared combined offensive.

  And he had to admit, since the Chinese had counted nuclear coup twice now, it was long overdue.

  He’d heard rumors, and read the tea leaves. The Allies would apply pressure at multiple points. Squeezing the Associated Powers like a ball of plutonium, until fission occurred. Without much doubt, the main event would be the long-discussed assault on Taiwan. At the same time, the Indians were carrying out an offensive with three motorized divisions, to take the Pakistani-Chinese port of Gwadar.

  He shivered in the frigid air, and reached for the foul-weather jacket he’d brought down from the bridge. Resistance would be stiff. As Allied forces closed the mainland, they’d come into range of a robust layering of defensive systems built up over decades. Some elements would be obsolescent—Soviet-era missiles, short-range diesel boats and fast missile craft—but still dangerous. Even a modern fleet could be overwhelmed by carefully timed mass attacks.

  Not that he’d be in command. He was still attached to the PACOM staff, and as such, more or less a supernumerary aboard Peralta. Verstegen, the J-3, had wanted him here to help coordinate the mission.

  “Prep going okay?”

  It was Tim Simko, in charge of the raid. Short, dark-haired, round-headed, the strike group commander had gained weight over the years since Dan had played lacrosse with him at the Academy. But his classmate had bulked up even more since they’d last met, aboard USS Vinson, as the war started. His chubby face was pale, yet mottled with red patches. His gut strained at his web belt.

  “Hot, straight, and normal,” Dan told him.

  Simko settled into the command seat with a sigh. He called up a formation diagram and meditated, head bent. Riffled through other screens fast as a card shark, fingers clicking busily. Then touched his throat mike. “EW, Simko. I don’t see any lock-ons yet.”

  Dan started to shift to that circuit too, then didn’t. Oversee the strike package, that was his job. Though all that remained, in the next few minutes, was launch.

  Simko settled a bulky helmet-headset to rest on his shoulders. An armored-cable-and-hose tail trailed from it. Black goggles covered his eyes. Tiny optical phased-array cameras were mounted around the helmet, so the wearer could toggle back and forth from virtual reality to a 360-degree physical line of sight as well. It looked ominous, as if the ship’s computers were consuming him, starting at the head.

  Dan took a deep breath, lifted his own helmet, and settled it onto his shoulders. Ventilation spun up with a whisper, blowing cool air onto his forehead as the displays lit, read the curve of his eyeballs, and refocused. He toggled through them, quickly evaluating the internal ships’ statuses, and booted up level after level.

  Until at last he floated next to another male figure, to his right. Hovering together in space, they gazed out over an immense flat blue tabletop scored with latitude and longitude lines and layered with altitude readouts. With a click of his controller, radar emanations appeared in shades of yellow and green and red: neutral, friendly, and hostile.

  Genderless and uninflected, the tactical AI spoke in a monotone. “Surface contacts. Range, two hundred forty-seven nautical miles, sortieing from Hong Kong Harbor,” it intoned. Then, “Correlates with Luyang 2, Type 52D destroyer. Accompanied by … two Houbei-class missile catamarans. And four UAVs. Course one-niner-zero. Speed just increased to twenty-seven knots. Destination uncertain, but seventy percent probability intercept course, Pack Charlie.”

  “Armament?” he muttered.

  “Type 052D destroyer armament, AESA radar, 130mm main gun, torpedoes, 64-cell VLS with CY-5, CJ-10, YJ-83 antiship missiles, HHQ long-range SAM, quad-packed medium-range SAM.”

  “Range on the YJ-83s.”

  “YJ-83 has one-hundred-fifty-kilometer range at Mach point nine. Two-hundred-kilogram HE frag warhead. Active radar terminal guidance, secondary infrared. Peralta P-sub-K ranges from point six to point eight. Optimal system is SM-2. Optimal intercept between fifty and one hundred kilometers. Optimal—”

  “Enough.”

  The voice acknowledged the command. Simko’s avatar issued another instruction, and glowing golden lines appeared. Weaving complexly, the computations converged on a solution, knitting together the advanced tracks of the moving forces to highlight nodes where they could engage the oncoming enemy with the lowest probability of loss.

  Dan lifted his chin and ascended. The horizon receded, bowing into a curve. The enemy coast, seven hundred miles ahead, pushed up over it. Flung across scores of miles in a random-looking scattering, the advancing fleet was connected not by proximity, but by quantum-linked comms squirted up into a busy lace of low-orbit microsatellites, then down again to recipients. The baud rate was low, but adequate to coordinate movements and pass warnings.

  Far ahead, over the enemy coast, blue contacts zigzagged and circled. Some of the emulators were Gremlins, air-launched UAVs dropped from mother ships. Others had come from submarines close in to the coast. They weren’t just decoys. Some detected enemy radars. Others kamikaze’d in to detonate in fiery explosions. They milled in knots over bases and cities, coordinating their jamming. A few winked out as they were destroyed, but the cloud, like a roiling swarm of stinging midges, did not seem to thin.

  Beside him again, hovering, Simko’s avatar, in a green flight suit and without the bubble helmet, turned its head. “We have to make a choice,” it said. “Go active, or see if we can get closer before we break EMCON.”

  “If you emit, you can be hit,” Dan murmured.

  It was hard to hide a fleet, even if it was communicating by vertical bursts. The answer Kitty Pickles had evolved, over dozens of game runs, had been to emulate hundreds of ships. They were converging on the coast in four separate “packs,” only one of which consisted of actual ships and aircraft. If it worked, instead of the massive air and sea defenses the enemy could still muster, they would face only a quarter of them.

  If, that is, the Chinese took the bait. And didn’t have some sensor or leak, some key to their real intentions, that the Allies didn’t know about.

  * * *

  FOUR days earlier, he’d stood sweating in the heat, observing tensely as marines cordoned off the pier and a crane slowly lowered thirteen slim gray switchblade shapes into cells aboard the destroyer.

  The last nuclear-armed Tomahawks had been pulled from service years before, but the Air Force had kept the kits to retrofit them. And Sandia had stockpiled the physics packages.

  The subsonic BGM-109G was considered slow these days,
but its small cross section and extreme low-altitude profile should get it through the Chinese defenses. The old, laboriously programmed navigation system had been replaced with GPS-independent inertial guidance, mediated and updated by terrain-reading AI.

  The cell had modeled the approach over and over. The Tomahawks would travel in three flights, separated by thirty seconds. Once air defenses had been suppressed by the Gremlins and Air Force standoff missiles, the Tomahawks would drill in from seaward, accelerating and reducing altitude as they neared the beach. The lead wave of eight, with conventional high-explosive warheads, would pass the submarine piers and the demagnetization facility six feet above the surface at low tide, below the tops of the piers. They would splay out to strike administrative buildings, repair facilities, the gates of the dry dock, and ammunition storage bunkers.

  The second wave of three would proceed up the bay to the underground submarine facility. An autonomous probe had revealed a steel net draped across the entrance, as well as batteries of ten-barreled close-in guns. The second wave would target the emplacements and the netting, blowing both off the mountain and into the water.

  The last ten simulation runs had ended with the two missiles of the final wave vanishing under the overhanging concrete brows, into the gaping maw of the access tunnels. Their warheads were the unglamorous but dependable W84. A two-stage thermonuclear package, a foot in diameter and a little less than a yard long, it could be dial-selected for yields up to 150 kilotons, ten times the destructive capacity of the Hiroshima burst. One hundred yards inside, they would trigger. The geologist they’d called in to predict weapon effects had said it would probably cave the whole mountain in, burying most of the residual radioactivity.

  It would be as close to a surgical strike as was possible with nuclear weapons. Certainly it would be less savage and indiscriminate than Zhang’s bombardment of Hawaii. Followed by additional waves of air- and surface-launched strikes from the surface group, Uppercut should end with the effective destruction of both the island naval bases, Yulin and Longpo, as well as the Southern Fleet headquarters on the mainland opposite.

  A time readout flickered into existence in his field of view. A countdown began flashing, numeral by numeral.

  They had four minutes to launch.

  * * *

  SOMEONE was tapping his shoulder. He glanced to his left, but saw no one. And frowned, confused, before he understood, and separated his virtual self from his physical one.

  He sighed, reached up, and lifted the helmet. Blinking, startled at finding himself back in the dark whirring confines of the CIC.

  It was Harriss, who’d come up behind him. “Brett? What is it? I’m kind of occupied here.”

  The lieutenant bent in to call up something on Dan’s keyboard. “A YouTube clip you need to see. Admiral Simko, too.”

  “YouTube?” Dan muttered.

  Harriss tapped the Play icon, and a lovely familiar face came up. No one was sure if Shanghai Sue was one woman, or several, who looked and sounded so much alike they couldn’t be distinguished. There were also those who said she wasn’t human at all, but a computer animation. “We know your plans for China,” she was saying, with only the trace of an accent. “And must warn those warmongers who seek to return the Middle Kingdom to the weakness and submission that the West has always desired.

  “Marshal Zhang Zurong has promised a violent response to any violation of China’s sacred sovereignty. He says again, with the most grave seriousness, that if the soil of the People’s Empire is attacked, American soil will not remain inviolate. Anyone who has relatives in U.S. cities should tell them to escape to the countryside. For their health.”

  The smooth, high-cheekboned face’s expression was so calm, its inflections and the movements of lips and arched eyebrows so symmetrical, that for a moment he wondered if it could be true, that she was an artificial visage projected by some intelligence greater than human. “As for the American flotilla advancing from their illegal and temporary lodgments in the eternally Chinese Xisha Islands,” she added, “I speak of the task force centered at eighteen degrees, fifteen point four minutes north, one hundred thirteen degrees, eleven point nine minutes east. We are aware not only of your location, but of your intent. If you are wise, you will turn back now.”

  She paused to consult a note. “We speak directly to Admiral Timothy Simko, United States Navy. My dear Tim: Save yourself and the lives of your shipmates. Turn back now. Otherwise, you will all be destroyed within the next twenty minutes.”

  The clip ended. Harriss hovered, as if ready to receive an order. But Dan didn’t have any.

  Beside him Simko had taken off his helmet too. He looked shaken, even more flushed than before. “That’s our latitude and longitude,” he muttered. “To the fucking minute. WTF, over.”

  “I don’t get it.” Dan called across to the TAO, “Are we emitting, Commander?”

  “No sir. EMCON Charlie on all circuits.”

  He fought a sinking feeling, searching desperately to understand. Detection at some point had been inevitable, but he’d hoped to get closer before launching. The shorter the flight, the less time the enemy had to react. Finally he said, “If they know where we are … there’s no reason for us not to go active.”

  After a moment’s hesitation Simko said, “I don’t agree. They have to be tracking all four packs.”

  “Then how do they know we’re the real strike force?”

  “A guess. A bluff. Based on the centroid of whatever they’ve detected.”

  “Okay … Still, they can target based on that fix, however they got it.”

  “I’m going to pull left and go to flank speed. Get off the bull’s-eye.”

  Dan wanted to say it didn’t sound like a guess, but kept silent. He wasn’t in command here, after all.

  Seconds after the task force commander passed the new course, the seat slanted beneath him, though the artificial horizon in the VR stayed level. The effect was nauseating. A distant siren screamed. Around them men and women hastily donned flash hoods and pulled out masks and emergency breathing devices.

  Burkes were sealed and pressurized against nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical attacks. Air locks protected each penetration of the skin of the ship. Peralta had heavier, more effective armor than earlier destroyers. But once that was penetrated, and toxic smoke or gas or radioactive particles filled one or more of the interior zones … He settled a flak jacket over his uniform. Pulled on flash gloves over control gauntlets, tucked trouser and sleeve cuffs, and settled the helmet back on, this time pulling out the weighted neckpieces to seal it to his shoulders. The helmets had their own filtration system, though they wouldn’t supply oxygen. Worst case, he’d have to ditch it and don an escape breathing device.

  But if that happened, they wouldn’t be fighting anymore. Only scrambling desperately to escape a flaming hell.

  He couldn’t help remembering last year. The shaped-charge warhead that had blasted through the armored hull of USS Hornet. The fiery jet of incandescent metal had caught three watchstanders at their stations. Their lower torsos remained seated, cauterized black. Above the belt line, everything had been vaporized.

  “We still launching?” he asked the avatar floating next to him. It turned its crewcut head, gaze aimed past him, and nodded.

  “Two minutes,” the sexless voice intoned. “Preparing for thirteen-round engagement.”

  He barely registered the litany as the strike team counted down the seconds, checked off switches and cutouts. He was white-knuckling it, trying not to let fear master him.

  He wasn’t afraid for himself. And not even for the men and women around him, within the skin of this ship, and aboard the dozen others flung out across miles of sea. Rushing into battle. It was what they’d signed on for, trained for, after all.

  He was worrying about Nan, and Blair.

  In World War II, Korea I, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, the civilians at home had been safe.

  Now no one wa
s. Zhang, along with his fellow dictators in Iran and North Korea, had made good on every threat they’d uttered in this war. The crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjiang and Mongolia, the mass shootings and concentration camps in Taiwan and Hong Kong had made his ruthlessness perfectly plain. He’d carried out reprisals against his own population.

  If he threatened to incinerate Seattle … neither Nan nor Blair, nor millions of other Americans, were even remotely safe.

  Yet this war had to be ended. Somehow.

  A warning note gonged. The tactical AI advised that additional enemy forces had been detected. Gesturing his avatar higher, he saw them appearing, seemingly from nowhere. Not from the coast, but from the west, from the left flank.

  But no surface units had been detected there. Aircraft? Angling out around Hainan to avoid detection? No, these new threats were emerging from a patch of empty sea. Circling, as if orienting themselves … then appearing to gain direction, intent, purposefulness.

  A wave of contacts that even as he watched accelerated, settling into courses that led inexorably to the strike group.

  The tactical AI’s flat voice stated, “Fifteen air contacts bearing two-eight-zero correlate with CM-709 submarine-launched antiship cruise missile. Range two hundred miles. Inertial guidance, millimeter wave homing. One-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram warhead.”

  “There are no fucking submarines there,” Simko observed. “We cleared that area.”

  “It’s shallow enough you don’t need a sub,” Dan hissed. “They laid them in pods, on the seabed. Waiting for us to come in range.”

  “In pods?” The admiral’s voice climbed, nearly broke.

  “One minute to thirteen-round engagement.”

  “Launch early, launch now,” Simko’s avatar said. “Shift Aegis to self-defense mode. All units, go active. I say again, all sensors released.”