The Poseidon scanned the surface with high-resolution thermal cameras and its periscope/wake-spotting radar. A technician inside the aircraft cabin loaded several sonobuoys into launchers, priming the tubes with small pyrotechnic charges. With a whiff of cordite, the sonobuoys shot from the fuselage and rode small parachutes to splashdown. Once in the water, each sonobuoy activated and contacted the Poseidon. Bobbing in the surf, they listened for submerged contacts, and transmitted the compass heading of anything they heard. Then Lake Champlain’s ASROCs arrived.
Each ASROC carried a Barracuda light torpedo at its tip. The Barracudas separated from their boosters, dropped to the water, and dove to a preset depth. Once there, they began helical search patterns. As these deadly fish swam about, Decatur’s Nixie towed decoy had attracted four heavy torpedoes, though two more of the Chinese wake homers continued straight at for the American supercarrier. Those weapons that homed in on Decatur started to snake back and forth within the vee of her wake. Decatur increased speed and steered to the south, pulling the weapons away from Ronald Reagan. As the guided-missile destroyer turned, the towed float slowed and allowed one of the torpedoes to catch up, exploding it. While this destroyed the Nixie and the weapon next to it, two torpedoes remained, and continued to wind their way toward Decatur’s transom. The ship increased to flank, and planed back and forth. One Chinese torpedo shot right up the edge of the wake and detected Decatur’s proximate steel hull. The weapon armed its 700-pound warhead. Just a few more feet of travel and the torpedo exploded beneath the American destroyer’s twin propellers and rudders. The pressure wave lifted the ship’s stern and drove the bow down. The overstressed hull crimped amidships. Cracks propagated through her hull and tore at upper decks.
Decatur stopped and spun in place. Her engine room and aft engineering spaces flooded with seawater. She began to sink by the stern. The second torpedo slammed into the crippled warship’s waterline and tore off the rear third of the ship. The separated wreckage pointed to the stars and bobbed momentarily before being sucked under with a belch of trapped air. Even though Decatur’s rear decks were awash, her forward watertight compartments kept dry. Sailors scrambled to rescue those thrown overboard by the blasts, and damage control teams worked frantically within the creaking forward hull as they struggled to keep the broken ship afloat. Decatur was clearly out of the fight. The frigate Thach peeled off from the main group in order to render assistance.
Ronald Reagan turned attention to the two torpedoes now homing on her mighty wake. At the supercarrier’s wide stern, a lattice dispersed, spreading the wash from the ship’s four massive propellers, but this lattice could not completely erase the mark left by such a large vessel. The Chinese heavy torpedoes had a 15-knot advantage over the American supercarrier and caught up quickly. They closed to within 3,000 yards. With the threat now inside the inner defensive ring, Ronald Reagan’s escorts changed plays. Lake Champlain sped up and maneuvered to position herself between the enemy weapons and Ronald Reagan.
“Deploy the package,” Captain Ferlatto ordered. Rushed to theater and installed on his ship, an experimental wire net shot from a stern canister. Once in the water, it fell back from Lake Champlain. One end of the square net bobbed on floats, while the rest unfurled beneath the surface and spread into a curtain array of sensors and transducers. The transducers began to transmit ultra-low frequency waves that formed an outward-focused beam. The sea quivered, and dead fish floated to the surface. The sound, like an amplified bass note, slammed the Chinese torpedoes, crippling their sonars and sensitive critical electronics. One torpedo did a dive toward the bottom, while the other shut down and slowly sank into the black.
“Thank you, DARPA,” Ferlatto announced appreciatively. For the moment, Ronald Reagan was safe. “Okay, reel it back in. And keep that thing out of my props, understood?” Ferlatto ordered. The watch commander rolled his eyes in dark consideration of the price for fouling the screws: His eternal ass.
American sonar screens were now clear. Much of Decatur remained afloat, and her injured and dead had since been transferred by helicopter to Ronald Reagan. The Poseidon reported they had to break off the hunt for the offending submarine, and, with no available tankers, flew back to Japan. The Poseidon made a high-speed pass over the Malaysian merchantman, Bunga Teratai Satu.
Bunga Teratai Satu’s crew, not quite sure what had transpired, counted their blessings nonetheless. They breathed again and chuckled nervously. The midnight shift came on and took the watch. One of the rattled crewmen jogged to his cabin and gulped from a hip flask full of forbidden alcohol.
5: FOG OF WAR
“Secret operations are essential in war; Upon them the army relies to make its every move.”—Sun Tzu
With Richard unavailable for lunch, and with no afternoon class this bright sunny day, Jade rode her bicycle past the Widewater and along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal that paralleled Washington, DC’s Potomac River. She followed the path, passing the old locks and pedaling toward Great Falls. Picking up speed, she leaned forward to streamline herself in the headwind.
Jade tried to outrun her conscience and raced against stretched loyalties. She pumped the pedals until her legs burned. Twisting and turning through the strollers, tourists, and joggers, she found herself torn between loving an American and her duty to country and her solemn oath. She turned off the paved path where it crossed the C&O canal, and where it met and skirted the Potomac. The falling river roared, its sound drawing her on. Arriving at one of her favorite thinking spots that overlooked Rocky Islands, she breathed deep and slow. The mist from the whitewater hung in the air, refreshing her sweaty face. She rubbed her aching calf, but then she stopped when a powerful primeval sense tingled: she was being watched. She looked around.
A man leaned against a rock, sipping coffee and staring back through dark sunglasses. He had a neatly trimmed beard with a lick of grey in his brown hair. The man’s lips moved and the turn of his head revealed an earpiece. She was under surveillance. She jumped to her bike and took off.
Jade moved at an adrenaline-powered clip, certain somehow that the man was right behind her, keeping up without his legs even moving. She reached where the path squeezed between the C&O and Olmsted Island. She brushed the sharp bark of trees lining the path, and relied on cursing people to get out of the way. She skidded her bike to a stop at Lock 24, the point where the Potomac fell over jagged, steep rocks and flowed through the narrow Mather Gorge. Out of breath again, Jade felt her heart pounding, amid the angst of panic. She picked up her bicycle, and lugged it down a dirt side path that wound between big rocks and crossed small streams. She jumped a low rope barrier, hid her bike, and then tucked herself into a rocky fold. She closed her eyes and imagined the strong, warm safety of Richard’s arms.
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Richard worked through lunch, though he accomplished little. Instead of attacking the leaning pile of paperwork that occupied his desk, he pondered fatherhood. He shook his head like a stunned dog and tried to focus on the work. He had to propose to Jade…and soon. Ring; wedding; honeymoon; crib; baby clothes; breast pump; college. Richard considered starting to play the lottery. He decided he needed food if he were going to be able to concentrate, so he took out a bag of deep-fried squid chips.
Although everyone else turned their noses up at their sight, Richard loved the chips’ briny sweetness and planned to keep buying them from Japantown by the gross. Crunching away, Richard felt the surge of squid power. He looked to the pile of papers and popped a can of soda. On top, he encountered the manila envelope sent over by his liaison at the CIA. He straightened the towering pile to prevent its imminent collapse, flicked squidy salt off his fingers, and grabbed the envelope. On it, he saw his name, the word ‘State,’ and a question mark scribbled in pen by a low level analyst at Langley. Richard dumped the envelope’s contents.
Several photographs fanned out on his desk, apparently taken on the ground in Taipei, with a few shot outside Songshan Airport. On
e photo showed several Chinese officers as they walked from the terminal to a parked infantry fighting vehicle. Another showed a PLA general atop a light vehicle.
The camera’s shutter had caught the general’s camo-striped face. Screaming orders at its moment of capture, the greasy face showed lips stretched over yellowed teeth, the face’s eyes hidden by sunglasses. The camo and glasses made the Chinese officer tough to identify, so Richard took a magnifying glass from his top drawer and studied the image. The bands of camouflage paint covered a raised cheek scar, and deep lines on the forehead. Richard focused on the open mouth, the missing tooth, and the order of gold caps within. He was sure: This was General Zhen Zhu. He picked up the phone and called the CIA.
“That batch you sent over—photo number three-four-two Charlie,” Richard said. “That is General Zhen Zhu, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, supreme commander of the People’s Liberation Army.” Richard grinned, proud that he had managed to accomplish what computers and so-called experts across the river had failed to do. “Yep, that’s the old bird, himself.”
“Could we, you know, take him out?” the voice on the line asked hesitantly. “Legally?”
Richard thought for a moment, and then answered.
“Hey, Zhen’s a soldier,” Richard snorted. “If he’s in-country—on the battlefield—then he’s fair game.”
Richard sat back and slurped his cold soda, grinning.
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The littoral combat ship Coronado sat off the beaches of northeastern Taiwan. She had sneaked in, close to the beach, on fast, quiet, water jets. The facets of her trimaran hull deflected enemy radar sweeping the approaches. Her transom gate had been lowered, and two rigid-hull inflatables slid down the launch ramp and into the calm water. A muffled outboard motor propelled each inflatable. Both bristled with the assault rifles of hunched marines. Dressed in jungle warfare fatigues and a brimmed hat, United States Marine Corps Captain Shane Whidby rode the bow of the lead boat as they motored toward a beach cove.
Captain Whidby steadied himself with a hand wrapped in the bowline. His other hand clutched a 1911A1 .45 caliber automatic handgun, and, across his back, he carried a black cylinder. The boat approached the combers that lapped the beach, swerved through the troughs, and then turned into the gentle break to stop. Whidby jumped into the water.
Unconsciously making sure he had not dropped the .45, Whidby squeezed its sharp-checkered grip. The large watertight cylinder strung across his back weighed him down, so he took in some saltwater as he struggled to stand. His throat burned. Spitting water and trying not to cough, Whidby dug in his boots and stood on the slippery rolling rocks. He felt for his canteen and ammo pouch—Still there—and watched the inflatables head back to Coronado. Sand crunched between his gritted teeth. If we didn’t roll like this, we’d just be army, Whidby thought with a crooked smile. He emerged from the water and stepped onto embattled Taiwan.
Captain Whidby knelt and waited at the seaweed and garbage-delineated high water mark. An animal sound drew his attention to the shadowy trees at the crest of the beach. Keeping low, his .45 pointed that way, he moved toward the noise. Several soldiers appeared, carrying assault rifles, their helmets disguised with twigs and leaves. Whidby and the soldiers exchanged passwords. The Nighthawks, members of Taiwan’s Special Services Company, had clearly been expecting Whidby. Together, they all melted back into the forest.
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Secretary Pierce sat in the bunker deep beneath the State Department’s Truman Building. She shivered from the air conditioning and adjusted her jacket to keep the breeze off the back of her neck. Richard sat beside her, his face buried in a report. She looked to the video screen that occupied most of one wall. The screen flickered, and live images of the national security advisor, the deputy director of intelligence, and the Pentagon liaison, an army general replaced the screensaver State Department seal.
The deputy director of intelligence opened the meeting with a briefing on growing resistance in Taiwan, momentum regained on the ground, and the infiltration of what he termed ‘assets.’ The general then cleared his throat and began to speak.
“Afternoon,” he offered, with a thin smile. Pierce nodded to the camera on the table. “Okay. Based on State’s recommendations, we avoided the Chinese base on Sri Lanka. Instead, a B-1B out of Diego Garcia used its HPM ALCMs to take out the Chinese radar and relay facility on Myanmar’s Coco Islands.” Seeing a puzzled look on the secretary’s face, the general explained that the bomber used air-launched cruise missiles to deliver high-power microwave warheads that disabled electronics and fried antennas at the Chinese base. “Besides the action in the Bay of Bengal,” he added, “the attack sub USS Dallas fired HPM Tomahawks at, and severely damaged, the Chinese electronics and signals intelligence facility at Changyi.” The general leaned forward, his face filling the frame. “The Chinese military is going deaf,” he explained, “So, now we’re going to poke them in the eyes.” The weary general stuck his finger into the camera lens making a cartoonish sound.
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A private yacht lay at anchor off Oahu’s Iroquois Point. Onboard, a man noted traffic in and out of Hickham Air Force Base. When he heard the thunderous rumble of another aircraft, he raised a pair of binoculars. In the dark of early morning, he saw the flashing navigation lights, and then the form of the jumbo air freighter. Displaying a humped megatop, four gaping turbofans, and ORION CARGO along its side and golden stars on its tail, the airplane seemed like so many others he had seen. He made a note of it, recording it as another civilian cargo aircraft, likely contracted by the US Military Airlift Command to move materiel across the Pacific. What he did not see, however, was the distinctive black nose, or the U.S. AIR FORCE still outlined beneath the jumbo’s fresh paintjob. This freighter’s strengthened fuselage was not full of bottled water or spare jet engines. Instead, it contained a built-in multi-megawatt chemical laser.
Dubbed ‘Gorgon’ by the 417th Flight Test Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base, the experimental YAL-1 airborne laser had been rushed out of mothballs, and it now climbed out over Hawaiian waters. In disguise and squawking a commercial code, and flying an Osaka-bound flight plan, the Gorgon steadily gained altitude and turned west over Mamala Bay. It settled in at 41,000 feet, leaving four vapor trails in the sky.
High above the cruising airplane, among flickering constellations, there was a manmade glitter. The Gorgon’s nose ball turret swiveled up. A mirrored aperture and infrared sensor were then unsheathed, scanning a patch of the heavens. At an inclination of 63.4 degrees, the technician in the Gorgon’s forward battle management cabin found what he sought: China’s Hummingbird ocean surveillance satellite. He locked the nose turret on target and initiated auto track. The thermal returns of three satellites showed on his station screen.
Orbiting in a close cluster formation collectively known as Hummingbird, the largest of the Chinese satellites flew on solar-paneled wings, focusing its cameras and antennas on the Philippine Sea It watched and reported in real-time on the Ronald Reagan carrier strike group. The other two satellites in formation were small cubes that carried ocean surveillance radar.
The American airman locked the Gorgon airborne laser’s tracking and targeting system on the largest of the Chinese satellites, and then passed control to the turret stabilizer and the airplane’s autopilot. The fire control operator pressed a red button on her console to initiate the laser’s discharge sequence.
At the rear of the Gorgon’s fuselage, tank modules the size of minivans mixed chlorine gas and hydrogen peroxide to create oxygen, and a fine mist of iodine stripped photons that bounced between mirrors in an optical resonator chamber. The photons were then squeezed and formed into a beam that entered the optical bench, where mirrors compensated for atmospheric conditions, movement of the airplane and vibration. The beam was then expanded and bounced to the nose turret where final adjustments compressed and focused the beam. The beam, invisible to the pilo
ts in the upper flight deck, instantly bridged the distance between the Gorgon’s nose and the Chinese satellite.
“Beam integrity nominal,” the airman announced. “Thermals in the green.” The beam of light reached into space for 12 long seconds, and heated the gold foil-covered metal skin of the target spacecraft. Asymmetric thrust then pushed the Hummingbird off course, smashing it into one of its mates. Pieces tumbled in all directions; some to begin a fiery fall back to Earth. Others would circle the planet for years.
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Legendary Chinese admirals and generals—Cheng Ho; Meng Yi; Shi Lang; Sun Tzu; Zhang Zizhong; and Zheng He—stared from bronze busts and oil paintings that formed a gauntlet in a dark marble corridor within Beijing’s Ministry of National Defense. The Chinese president walked the hall, leaning forward as if going uphill and mumbling all the while. At hall’s end, the president pushed through tall double doors and burst into a foyer where two soldiers snapped to attention. He waved them away impatiently and pushed into the conference room beyond, where the monitor revealed General Zhen already sitting at his airport terminal desk.
A cloud of tobacco smoke, illuminated by the dim early morning light filtering through an open window in Taiwan, veiled Zhen.
“Mr. President,” Zhen exclaimed. “Good to be able to confer with you again.”
“General, you assured me we would hold the island by the end of the third day of operations. However, we hold no more than 40 percent of the territory, and the Americans have an aircraft carrier to the south. Who knows how many submarines are lurking out there, and I have just heard that the Hummingbird system is down, likely destroyed by the Americans.”
“Please, Mr. President, sit. We must stay unemotional and think clearly. Our destinies are linked. We must cooperate. Yes, the schedule has suffered somewhat. However, our strategic goals are accomplished,” Zhen’s voice was calming, though the president snorted in disbelief and exhaustion. “President, you are a politician, and I can only imagine the pressures upon you. However, I need you to be strong. China needs you to be strong; as strong as our men on the front lines.” Zhen seemed to grow larger as he spoke. The president fell back into an oversize chair. Sensing a power shift, Zhen leaned forward. “Mr. President, you are correct. The Y-9 ocean surveillance system has failed. Before it went offline, however, the satellite provided the current position of the American aircraft carrier. We shall destroy it. Of that, I am certain.” The general paused to read the reaction of the president. He is mine, Zhen thought and surged. “I regret very much that I must now adamantly request one thing more from you, something only you have the power to grant.”
Fourth Crisis: The Battle for Taiwan Page 16