Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  “This is not New York City. There’s only one hundred and thirty thousand citizens to move. We’ve got to save as many of them as we can. Order the full evacuation, don’t waste time trying to reach infrastructure and utilities personnel. They’ll understand what to do when they hear we are evacuating. Use the local radio stations, like it says in the EOP. Follow the plan,” she ordered.

  “Yes, your Honor,” said the Watch Officer, when suddenly a bright flash lit up the skies over Darwin, followed by a sudden boom.

  The windows of the Territorial Government building shook, but did not break.

  As he dove for the floor and covered his face with his arms, expecting to be shredded by glass or burned to a crisp, the Staff Sergeant thought that the shock wave felt something like the mild earth-quakes that occasionally happened in the Darwin area.

  Had it not been for the quick thinking Lieutenant Commander on night watch aboard DDG 116 Thomas Hudner, who had put the ship on high alert the moment he received the DEFCON ONE message from the communications cabin, the 550 kiloton warhead carried by the Russian R-29 Vysota Sea-Launched Ballistic Missile, SLBM, launched from a Delta-III Sub Surface Ballistic Nuclear, SSBN, submarine, would have obliterated everybody aboard the American warship, the ship itself, the dockyard, and most of the city of Darwin.

  Intercepted in its terminal descent towards the target, the missile had been destroyed as it passed through 30,000 feet. But despite being over six miles away from Darwin, the bright flash and accompanying shock wave was powerful enough to set off car alarms throughout the city.

  It was the first of three missiles to target Darwin over the next hour, which were tracked, identified, and intercepted by Thomas Hudner’s Lockheed Martin SPY-1D passive RADAR, fire control system and SM-3-A Standard Missile.

  The Captain had made his way to the command deck long before the first missile engagement and had quickly gotten himself up to speed on the message traffic, while his crew activated defensive systems and brought the warship to full operational status, but he was having great difficulty comprehending the data.

  He simply could not believe his eyes.

  “This can’t be correct. Have you looked at this, XO?”

  “Yes, Captain. I have. It doesn’t make any sense to me either, but the tracks don’t lie. The first one was one of ours.”

  “And the next two, those were Russian? Am I reading this correctly?”

  “Yes, Sir. The best I can figure is that somehow, in our counter-strike, USSTRATCOM accidentally targeted Darwin, or perhaps us.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I know. Why would we hit our allies, not to mention one of our own warships?”

  “No. That’s not what I mean. I mean, how could the first missile have been ours, if ours was a counterstrike? You would think that the Russian missiles would have come first.”

  “Shit! Here comes another missile.”

  The crew of Thomas Hudner carried out their antimissile procedure for the fourth time, which amounted to watching the SPY 1D weapons system carrying out lightning-fast calculations, and firing the SM-3-A missile for its two minute acceleration to meet the incoming target, the Russian missile closing with the warship at thirteen thousand miles per hour; the smaller missile from the air warfare destroyer closing at a more modest Mach 5. In the Combat Information Center, CIC, the violence of the explosion in the lower reaches of space was reduced to a few changes to the icons on the RADAR display, and the sudden termination of the two missile tracks at the point at which they had momentarily co-existed.

  With the fourth missile destroyed over forty miles out, the crew let out a cheer and breathed a sigh of relief. Those who were focused on the strategic situation, such as the Captain, XO and senior officers also felt some relief that the missile had originated in Russia, and not from US forces.

  After a tense few minutes watching the plot, waiting for any subsequent missiles, the Captain and XO resumed their discussion.

  “I don’t’ know, Skipper. None of the message traffic fits either. There are reports that cities all over the world have been hit, that we are at war with Russia, that we struck Europe, that France struck England, and so on. It’s a complete mess. Heck, it’s as if someone got into the Joint Priority Integrated Target List and changed all the targets, so that we attacked everybody.”

  “And the Russians also attacked everybody?” asked the Captain, suddenly looking even more focused as he read another dispatch that he had just been handed.

  “How many missiles do you suppose have hit China?”

  “Hard to say. We’ve lost the uplinks to Honolulu and San Diego, but we’ve still got comms through the USPACOM net. Want me to find out?”

  “Yes. Do it right now, while there’s still time.”

  As the XO headed into the communications cabin, just off the CIC. The Captain and the Lieutenant-Commander on watch focused on the RADAR displays.

  “So no more missile tracks? What are these air-breathing tracks?”

  “That’s a pair of RAAF F-18s that got off Tindal before it was hit. They’re headed for Brisbane, for reconnaissance, to confirm how bad the city was hit.”

  “How bad was Tindal hit?”

  After the XO gave some instructions to one of the systems operators, data appeared on a corner of one of the smaller screens. “Utterly destroyed, I am sure. It was hit four times.”

  “Us or them?”

  “Both.”

  “Jesus,” the captain said, thinking of the airmen and support personnel who had seemed so friendly when he had been through the RAAF air base on a familiarization tour just weeks before.

  “Sir. There seems to be a bit of a pattern here.”

  “How so, Lieutenant?”

  “Well, look. Here are the tracks we got off the Alligator, before we lost the link to Honolulu. See the way these tracks converged on their targets from two sides, here in Darwin, and Tindal; and here, where the Carrier Task Group MALACCA is – or was – and there, in Singapore. It’s the same over there, in the Philippines. Everywhere in this region targets were hit by both us and the Russians.”

  As he spoke, data began flowing on another monitor, the image making an obvious, terrible statement.

  “Holy shit. It’s the Chinese! That explains everything!” said the XO.

  On the monitor, pushed out on the secure Very Low Frequency secure feed from USPACOM, a global summary was depicted in 3D, with red, blue and white lines strung out all over a rotating globe. Launch areas in Russia, in red, were linked with gossamer-thin red lines to their targets in America, Europe, Asia – all over the world. Only slightly less numerous were the lines in blue, from the continental United States, to the same targets, the world over. There were also a considerable number of targets from other source areas, at sea in the North Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean.

  There were white lines, from “all other” nuclear powers.

  “Oh, My God! It’s Armageddon. There must be thousands of tracks,” observed the Lieutenant-Commander.

  “And almost none of them are into China,” observed the Captain, confirming the logic of the XO’s conclusion.

  Captivated by the tracks that were still making their way to targets, they watched in silence as missiles hit anonymous cities in the Asia Pacific region, and more well-known cities they recognized in Europe and North America. Watching it unfold on the high-resolution displays was hypnotic, and deeply disturbing.

  Suddenly a yellow spark terminated one of the missile tracks in flight. And then another.

  “Look! Something took out that missile. And there’s another one! What is it, antimissile defenses?”

  “I don’t think so. If it is, it’s too little, too late.”

  As they watched, the number of yellow sparks rapidly increased.

  “Hey, it’s the red ones. All the Russian missiles still in flight are being taken out.”

  “That’s right. Maybe they’re being aborted!”

  Minutes later,
yellow sparks began appearing at the lead of the blue tracks, rapidly accelerating until all the blue missiles in flight were aborted as well.

  “Sir. We just got Mission Orders on the Secure VLF.”

  The captain took the sheet of paper, and then activated the ships intercom to pass it on to the crew.

  The Captain was about to inform the crew of their situation when he noticed new tracks appearing on the plot.

  “What are those tracks?”

  “Air breathing, Sir, subsonic.”

  “Transponders?”

  “None, Sir.”

  “Project them along their courses.”

  After the SPY 1D system operator typed in the commands, thin lines shot ahead of the airborne tracks.

  “Could those be Cruise Missiles?”

  “No, Sir, too big. That’s why we can see them at all. Normally we would not see anything that far out, but look, this one will have Closest Point of Approach with us at four hundred miles.”

  “What’s along their flight paths after the CPA? Any bases or military installations? Cities?”

  As the display operator scrolled through his screens, examining one track after another, he suddenly leaned back and took a breath.

  “They’re aircraft from China, Sir. Some of them will pass pretty much on-top us, but at high altitude. These ones, ten or twelve, seem to be eventually converging on the Adelaide region. The rest of them seem to be headed to eastern Queensland and New South Wales.”

  “You sure they are from China?”

  “Yes, Sir. Look, watch the regression and back-track.”

  He entered a series of commands and then rolled a track-ball on his console, flying the symbols backward on their flight-paths. This also sent the track-predicting lines on reverse course, each track making a bee-line for their places of origin, clearly inside China.

  “Roll that forward again.”

  “Aye, Sir.”

  “Do the Australian F-18s have Link 16?”

  The system operator smiled, understanding what his Skipper had in mind.

  “Yes, Sir, they most certainly do!”

  In the cockpit of a Xian JH-7 “Flying Leopard” Fighter-Bomber just approaching Adelaide, a highly skilled pilot was operating his weapons systems as he closed on the target area, adroitly defeating enemy radars and imagining himself like a pilot at Pearl Harbor. “Target visual,” he reported over the secure UHF link back to an airborne platform that extended the eyes and ears of the fighter package comprised of his and eleven other customized variants of the JH-7.

  Suddenly his Electronic Support Measures and other automated threat-detection systems lit up all at once. Shit! Someone has me locked-up! thought the pilot as he began evasive maneuvers. Suddenly he became free from the restraints of his ejection seat, enveloped inside a cauldron of searing heat. The last thing he was conscious of was the feeling that his arms and legs were simply gone. He was dead before any signals of pain, or of the flesh and bone being torn apart in the violence of the explosion, reached the boiling bucket of goo that had been the brain of one of China’s most skilled fighter pilots, Commanding officer of one of 7th Fighter Division’s JH-7 squadrons.

  The strike package of twelve JH-7s had been configured for an Air-Ground strike on enemy air defenses in the Adelaide region. Their weapons systems, jammers, Electronic Counter Measures and other systems had been carefully tuned with the most up-to-date downloads extracted from the RAAF’s own computers, so they were confident in their ability to evade and defeat enemy air defenses. What was supposed to be a complete surprise had turned out to be even more one-sided than any of the planners back in Jinan had even war-gamed. Unfortunately for Colonel Yip and the other Flying Leopard pilots, the Australians were the ones who had surprised the Chinese thanks to the Link-16 data passed to RAAF Adelaide Sector Air Defense from DDG 116 Thomas Hudner up in Darwin.

  The first volley of SM-3A Standard Missiles had come up to greet the leading elements of the Chinese attack from the Royal Australian Navy’s sole air warfare destroyer, RAN Hobart, still at anchor in Adelaide Bay. Those of Colonel Yip’s formation that had survived the first wave of missiles, and had begun to turn their attention to the threat from their ten-o’clock low then had to deal with a sudden new threat only moments later, that of a dozen Australian F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters coming in on them from their three-o’clock, at the effective limit of their threat detector’s range, the RAAF fighters closing at Mach 1.7.

  One of the more mathematically gifted of the Chinese pilots struggled to calculated the closure rate as he turned to face the incoming Super-Hornets, his Wingman barely able to stay with him in the abrupt turn to starboard. Just as Major Duan concluded that the 40 nautical miles between them would be closed in just over two minutes, his mind was challenged again with a new rate of closure to apply to the quickly reducing standoff distance – that of the missile tracks that had suddenly detached from the Australian attackers.

  The AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles tore into his and his wing-man’s JH-7 twenty seconds later. From the point of view of the active seeker in the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile, the fact that the Chinese fighter pilot had pulled hard in an attempt to turn away from the missiles had made the microcomputer brain of the missile’s vector geometry and probabilistic time-and-space projections that much easier as the JH-7 profile changed from head-on to an almost perfect 90-degrees, presenting the AMI-120 with the underbelly of Major Duan’s aircraft, as if embracing the inevitability of the missile impact.

  With dozens of other missiles soon flying in from the Australian F/A-18s, and a second wave of missiles coming up from RAN Hobart, not to mention a few other surface to air missiles coming up from other units on the ground in the Adelaide area, the entire PLAAF strike package was soon obliterated.

  To residents on the ground, who had had no idea that war had broken out between Australia and China, the first few explosions in the sky over the Barossa Valley and the northern suburbs of Adelaide had looked to many as some terrible air disaster, perhaps a mid-air collision.

  But when the sky filled with the razor sharp lines of the missile tracks from the north-west, and the rising plumes from the local air defenses on the ground and from the warship in Adelaide Bay, and the brilliant cacophony from the series of explosions that took place directly over Adelaide, the civilians simply stared up in open-mouthed astonishment.

  To one old man, what was taking place was very familiar. It brought back memories of his youth in London, during the Battle of Britain.

  9

  FOG OF WAR

  Colonel Ferebee was satisfied that his new Command Post was fully operational. With the Australian and Indian military personnel adequately integrated, the CJOC would truly be a Combined Joint Task Force Op Centre. There were problems that would still take considerable time and effort to resolve, such as comms back to the continental United States and some of the remaining elements of 3rd Marines across the Pacific. But Ferebee felt that he was getting enough information to form an accurate assessment of the strategic situation. And that assessment was that Ferebee and the MAGTFA were on their own. With the world still reeling from the devastation wrought by the Chinese - controlled nuclear war between the United States and the Russian Federation, and the rapid destruction of military facilities, warships and strategic sites across the globe, it was clear that the opening moves in this Nuclear Extinction War, NEW, this total war against the Chinese military, had been won hands down by the Chinese.

  Some of the best information had come in from warships of the USN, much of it from the 5th and 7th Fleets. The naval forces had assembled a picture of all known warships into a global database termed “Recognized Maritime Picture”, RMP, which was a snapshot of all known maritime activity, be it commercial, enemy, neutral or friendly, at any given time.

  With America’s naval forces now largely destroyed, entire Carrier Battle Groups obliterated by nuclear weapons, and smaller task-forces and individual warships taken o
ut by anything from SLBMs, SLCMs, ALCMs, torpedoes, mines, port-side sabotage and in some cases ship-on-ship warfare with conventional guns, the revised RMP, some five days after the NEW commenced, was largely guess-work. Whether all the warships were sunk, or merely exercising extreme emission-control measures to disguise their locations, it seemed to the Naval LnO at the CJOC that the only known warships still operational in the South Asian AOR were a handful of Australian frigates, the 3 USN and sole RAN air warfare destroyers, and perhaps two dozen warships of the Indian Navy.

  On the enemy side, other than the scores of commercial ships that the Chinese were using to deploy follow-on forces into the port cities and towns under their control, largely along Australia’s east coast from north of Sydney all the way up to Cairns, there did not seem to be any Chinese Naval presence anywhere near Australia. It was highly unconventional to land their forces from these commercial vessels without naval protection, however the gamble certainly had worked for the Chinese, with reportedly tens of thousands of Chinese forces staging through the captured port facilities and quickly pressing inland right through the thin lines of bewildered Australian soldiers.

  There were some indications of a few Chinese warships. Of greatest concern were the Jin Class SSBNs and likely two or three SSKs that were lurking around in the littoral waters of the Indonesian Archipelago, north of Australia.

  That the Chinese were operating in the Indonesian waters with impunity indicated to Colonel Ferebee and the Australian General Davis that Indonesia had fallen quickly to the Chinese. This fear was soon confirmed by one of the spooks up from Pine Gap who reported that the Indonesian military frequencies had made a smooth transition to operations in Chinese, rather than Indonesian – but that the vocal signatures of unit operators had not changed, meaning that some of the Indonesian comms techs were bilingual in Chinese. Ferebee had found this hard to believe at first, but had come to accept that the degree of influence that the Chinese had had over the Indonesians had been thoroughly planned, and to the most minute of details.