by Peter Nealen
The Shandong’s escorts were attempting to maintain a forty-five-kilometer “safety zone” around the carrier. Frigates, corvettes, and destroyers targeted and warned off any vessel getting within that radius, and J-15s on combat air patrol hastened to intercept any aircraft nearing the carrier’s airspace. But while they were doing a decent job of maintaining their exclusion zone, there were a lot of ships out there, moving northwest of the Spratlys. Thousands of ships came and went on the sea lane past the Spratly Islands, to and from Japan. Oil tankers, bulk carriers, car carriers, container ships, and even passenger liners were cruising past the war zone, even the new world disorder failing to dampen the commercial traffic on the sea. The global economy was in bad enough shape as it was. None of the belligerents could afford to shut off the constant flow of shipping.
There were too many ships for the PLAN escorts to catalog and intercept all of them. And the Shandong was still holding her patrol route to the north of the Spratlys, rather than sailing south into the shallower waters and the cramped sea room of the islands themselves. She was close enough that if not for her escorts’ efforts to divert shipping to the north, she’d easily be able to see dozens of ships on the horizon, steaming past as she launched and recovered fighters.
Despite the warnings from the PLAN combatants and their circling helicopters and combat air patrol, the Chinese couldn’t tell how many of those ships were harmless commercial vessels and how many were disguised raiders.
None of them changed course or speed as they steamed past. Lost from view in with all the other freight, two dozen disguised arsenal ships opened their launch cells and began launching drones. Each arsenal ship, converted from bulk carriers, tankers, and container ships, carried almost five hundred drones. It took a long time to launch them all, but fortunately they were mostly built with fiberglass and Styrofoam, except for the 22lb warheads each one carried. Flying low over the water, painted a mottled blue-gray, they were extremely hard to detect, either visually or on radar.
None of the arsenal ships launched all their drones. Only about half. But that still meant there were six thousand warheads now converging on the Shandong and her escorts. None of them were large. Their warheads were each about a tenth of the size of a Chinese YJ-83 anti-ship missile’s. But six thousand of them stacked up quickly.
Fifty of them struck the Type 055 destroyer Nanchang, getting through even as her point defense Type 730 30mm Close In Weapon System knocked dozens more out of the air, as they seemed to suddenly appear out of the blue only a few hundred meters away. Rippling explosions rocked the destroyer, smashing delicate electronics and weapons systems, one diving on the CIWS turret itself and obliterating it in a puff of orange and black. In seconds, the top-of-the-line missile destroyer was burning, listing slightly from several impacts to her hull.
Hundreds more converged on the Shandong, as swarms hammered at the other escorts. Remote piloting of the networked swarms of drones was necessary to make up for the lack of precise targeting available, necessitated by the arsenal ships’ disguises, but once the swarms had visual and targets were assigned, the arsenal ships’ weapons crews had let the drones go fully autonomous, shutting down their own emissions and closing their launch cells. No one knew for sure if the launch had been unobserved or not, but the Shandong was fighting for her life right then, anyway.
All three of the carrier’s CIWS turrets were blazing away, spitting 11,000 rounds per minute at the swarming drones. Hundreds fell, detonating in midair or spiraling into the sea, smashed and coming apart. But there were hundreds more after them.
Moments after the Nanchang, the Taiyuan, and the Huanggang were hit, the Shandong’s flight deck seemed to disappear in a rolling storm of explosions.
She was still afloat when the smoke and frag cleared, but she’d been ravaged. Three J-15s on deck were destroyed, burning fiercely. Two of her three CIWS turrets were gone, along with all of her HQ-10 SAM launchers. Radar dishes and comm towers were smashed, portholes shattered, and a chunk of the flight deck itself had been peeled back by secondary explosions when the drones had detonated munitions coming up from below. Smoke thickened as it poured from the stricken ship.
The Shandong wasn’t sunk, but she was out of action. The returning J-15s overhead circled for several minutes before finally being instructed to divert to the airfield on Subi Reef.
Calls for aid went out quickly, and soon many of the PLAN vessels that had steamed south into the Spratly Islands were turning north again, steaming at flank speed to close in around the gravely wounded Shandong.
The balance had just changed again.
Chapter 34
Bits and pieces of what was happening in the north filtered through to the Jacqueline Q as she sailed the length of Palawan, heading for the rendezvous point. The strike on the Shandong still hadn’t happened yet by the time the last of the designated Triarii vessels arrived off the coast of Calibang Island.
Vetter knew it was coming, though, and called all the Triarii leadership onto the Global Sunrise, a modified container ship turned into a helicopter carrier. The shells of hundreds of shipping containers concealed the hangar deck where Vipers and S-70s waited.
“Damn, that’s a lot of ships.” Chan watched out the window as the S-70 carried him and Hank from the Jacqueline Q to the Global Sunrise.
Hank could only nod. The exact extent of the Triarii flotilla that had headed out into the Western Pacific had always been kept close to the vest. Not that the commanders didn’t know who all was out there, but they’d all filtered out of the Gulf of Mexico in ones and twos, spread out to avoid detection. Now, to see only a portion of that flotilla gathered, nearly a hundred disguised warships at anchor off the Philippine coast, was the difference between knowing and seeing. It was impressive.
Though Hank had to wonder a bit as he watched the gathering of carefully converted freighters, fishing trawlers, and yachts. The numbers were impressive for a non-state actor, but they were still converted commercial vessels, not purpose-built warships. Their numbers might be impressive on the surface, but their disguises and their dispersion were their greatest assets. To hide in plain sight, strike, and fade into the background noise was the only hope they really had against the PLAN and their auxiliaries.
So, he wondered just what Vetter had in mind to mass so many of their assets right there. They were well outside the PLAN’s operating area, but the enemy still had drones flying and satellites above. Dispersion was an asset. Vetter had to have something big in mind to sacrifice that advantage, even for a little while.
As the S-70 banked and came in on approach to land on the Global Sunrise, he saw easily a dozen battered fishing boats anchored near the helicopter carrier. Painted in blue, green, and white, their paint was flaking and peeling, rust on their hulls, sometimes showing through the Chinese ideograms on their flanks. Hank cocked an eyebrow as he took in the number of Chinese fishing vessels. Vetter’s boys had been busy if they’d captured that many. Or were these something more than met the eye?
He caught Chan’s curious glance and shrugged. They’d find out from Vetter.
The helo touched down on the pad at the Global Sunrise’s bow, a pad that could easily be covered over with tarps and false container tops. The rotors began to spin down as soon as the landing gear touched the pad, and after a moment, the crew chief slid the side door open and motioned for the Triarii section leaders to get off.
Another crew member was at the ladderwell leading down off the pad, motioning for them to come down and then pointing them along the covered catwalk on the inside of the hangar deck, leading back toward the carrier’s superstructure. They hustled past the disappearing machinegun emplacements that formed the Global Sunrise’s point defenses, ducking beneath the shade of the cut-away containers that formed the roof of the hangar deck.
Boots clattered on steel grating as they worked their way aft. The crews were hard at work below, running continuous maintenance on the helos. They hadn’t even use
d the birds much in the South China Sea so far, but that probably just meant that the pilots and crews were really chafing at the bit to get out and get some.
Tom Lehrer, who was effectively Vetter’s right hand man in the Western Pacific, was waiting at the hatch. “Hank, Mike. Good to see you again.” They hadn’t crossed paths since leaving Texas. Tom and his sections had been working a different part of the AO, in no small part to make sure that he and Vetter were far enough apart that it was exceeding unlikely that both of them could be taken off the board at the same time.
“Tom.” Hank shook the shorter man’s hand. Lehrer was a good man, but he shook hands like a dead fish. “What’s going on?”
Lehrer waved them toward the galley. “Doug’s got all the details. But I can say that the Chinese have forced us to move the timetable up.”
Hank nodded and the two of them headed toward the galley as Lehrer clapped Chan on the back.
The galley was packed with Triarii section leaders, flight leaders, ship’s captains, and what little staff the Triarii could spare. A paper chart of the Spratly Islands had been blown up, printed, and pinned up on a board at one end of the cramped compartment.
“Mike! Hank!” Greg Utes waded through the press to grab first Chan then Hank in quick, one-armed bear hug. “Damn, I was starting to wonder if you guys had come out at all.”
“Are you kidding?” Bruce Murphy had turned at Utes’ raised voice. “Didn’t you hear about Gaven Reef?”
“Holy shit! That was you guys?” Utes wasn’t a large man, but he had a voice big enough for two of him. And he liked to use it. “Damn! I never even saw who got that mission! Hot damn! You’ve got to tell me about it! I’ve been doing these pissant little pinprick intimidation ops on Chinese fishing boats. I’m bored out of my skull, and so are my boys.”
“Well, you won’t be for much longer, Greg.” Vetter had entered while Utes was talking, and the room had gone quiet, except for Utes himself.
Flushing, Utes shut up with a rueful grin and turned back toward the front.
Hank was just as glad for Vetter’s interruption. For one thing, he wanted to know what was going on, but he’d always found Utes’ gregariousness hard to tolerate. He had nothing against the man, but he was a bit much at times, especially with everything else going on.
Not to mention the pang that Utes’ yakking about being bored brought, when Hank could still see the dead when he closed his eyes, and, even months later, think he heard Tony Velasquez’s voice from time to time.
“I know the questions you’re all asking.” Vetter was in his green trousers and a T-shirt, and he looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. He folded his arms across his chest as he stood up on a table, his head practically brushing the overhead, and looked around at his small unit leaders. “Such as, ‘Why the hell are we bunching up out here, while the Chinese are probably watching?’ Well, gents, for one thing, the Chinese aren’t going to be looking at us in a little while. They’re going to have much bigger concerns.”
He turned to the chart. “First of all, where we stand. Gaven Reef has been devastated, with most of its livable infrastructure and defenses destroyed. We have reliable information that the Chinese Coast Guard took most of the survivors off several days ago, and the Chinese have made no moves yet to repair or re-garrison the outpost. So, for the moment, Gaven Reef is off the board.”
Utes punched Chan in the arm with a grin.
“The Malay pirates we’ve suborned have been all too eager to take advantage of the intelligence and support we’ve been sending them. The supply convoys for the island outposts coming from the Straits of Malacca have dropped to a trickle. Now, that means that the Chinese have shifted to supply runs from Hainan, but the pirates are whittling down their overall commercial traffic from the Indian Ocean as well. That’s going to hurt the PRC strategically, not just tactically.
“We’ve also been cutting into their fishing fleets around the shoals. We’ve captured some, and gotten close enough to invite harassment from others, giving us the opportunity to sink or capture them. That’s how we got the ships that Foss and Chan used to get in close to Gaven Reef.” He waved a hand to indicate the two of them. “We’ve made the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia proceed with a lot more caution. They’re sticking to bigger flotillas, they’re staying closer to the PLAN and the CCG, and they’re not getting nearly as aggressive with non-Chinese ships as they have in the past.”
He checked his watch. “Now, I know some of you had to run the gauntlet to get here. Not everybody made it, either. The PLAN is hitting any non-Chinese ship that gets too close to a Chinese ship or outpost. We’ve lost a few to gunfire, missiles, or airstrikes off the Shandong or one of the artificial islands. The Chinese have stepped things up against us, even though it appears that they still don’t know exactly who we are.”
Vetter’s sharp gray eyes scanned the crowd. “In a matter of hours, if things go according to plan, the Shandong will have other problems to worry about. Even if that operation doesn’t go the way we hope it does, the PLAN will most likely shift forces north. We need to be in position as that happens.”
He bent and took a clipboard from Simonsen, one of his handful of intel guys. “I’ll tell you straight up. The majority of us are heading for Mischief Reef. We’re going to blow the hell out of it.” He glanced down at the clipboard. “I’ve got a string of timetables that will have to be hit down to the minute, and there’s a lot of prep to do ahead of time. Some of your raiders are going to need to get drones loaded and programmed. This is going to be a swarm attack from just about every point of the compass, which is why the timetables are important. Time on target has to be within minutes, if not seconds, so that we can be sure to saturate what defenses they have. We don’t have hypersonic missiles or fast movers, so we have to do this the sneaky, guerrilla way.”
He looked up again, searching the crowd until he found Hank and Chan. “Foss, Chan, Laki, and Sotero, you will not be a part of the Mischief Reef attack.”
Hank felt more than saw Chan frown and stiffen. The other man was probably wondering the same thing. Why not?
“I’ve got another task for you boys. I won’t lie to you; it’s going to be risky as hell. But we don’t have the numbers to swarm every target we need to hit, so you drew the short straw.”
His gaze was level and cool. “If you want to turn it down, I’ll find someone else. But you’ve proved you can handle this sort of raid already.”
Hank glanced at Chan. He thought he knew what was coming, and frankly, he couldn’t really object. Sure, it was a risk, but they’d all taken that risk already just coming out here, going up against one of the most powerful navies in the world with a rag-tag bunch of guerrilla privateers.
Chan nodded. Hank returned it fractionally and turned back to Vetter. “We’re in, boss.”
Chapter 35
Twelve hours after the strike on the Shandong, the parts began to come together.
The USS Lake Erie, after loitering for nearly a day near Eldad Reef, had resumed her course, still steaming along at a stately and sedate fifteen knots. So far, the Navy cruiser hadn’t given any indication that anyone aboard had noticed the mayhem going on across the South China Sea, but that was more than likely a matter of physical and political self-preservation on the part of her skipper.
Several of the PLAN destroyers and frigates that had moved south to “secure” the islands against the “pirates” that had been pushing back against China’s territory grabs shifted course to shadow the Lake Erie. There was one carrier strike group, centered around the USS Carl Vinson, in the Western Pacific, having missed the LNG tanker explosion that had all but completely crippled the Seventh Fleet, but she was far to the north, closer to Japan. There was little support the Lake Erie could expect if things went kinetic with the PLAN.
So, the Navy’s prime deterrent in the South China Sea made her delicate way through the Spratly Islands, careful not to make any movements that might be
construed as belligerent, while the PLAN watched her warily, and the Triarii flotilla moved back into the islands, ready to strike.
The other half of the burgeoning blockade on Palawan—though it had never been formally declared as such—was heading north at full, racing to throw security around the wounded Shandong and her stricken escorts, as well as to confront whatever new threat had just come out of the blue from the north. With most of the Chinese attention on the instability to the south, they hadn’t been quite ready for the blow that had come from a different point of the compass.
PLAN and PLAAF flights began probing Vietnamese airspace, accompanied by harsh warnings from Beijing to Hanoi. The Vietnamese denied any involvement in the attack on the Shandong—accurately enough—but warned against any violation of Vietnamese territory or airspace. A flight of PLAAF H-6 bombers—licensed copies of the Russian Tupolev Tu-16—was intercepted by Vietnamese Su-30s, and when the escorting PLAAF J-11s drove the Vietnamese fighters off, the bombers were targeted by Vietnamese S-300 and S-75 SAM systems before they finally turned aside.
Meanwhile, the Triarii flotilla drifted deeper into the Spratly Islands, following the wake of the northbound PLAN warships.
The Chinese had not entirely abandoned their claims in the Spratlys. There were still warships and CCG cutters near the major shoals. And the combat air patrols from Mischief Reef, Fiery Cross Reef, and Subi Reef had stepped up since the Shandong was out of action.
A Jiangwei-I-class cutter was holding position to the east of Second Thomas Shoal, guarding what remained of the construction there. The cutter couldn’t get too close to the reef itself, not only because of the shallow water, but because the PLAN still hadn’t gotten the mines cleared out yet. In reality, there were only a handful left, but without a dedicated minesweeper, the PLAN couldn’t be certain of that.