Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (80 page)

           
After several long moments, the aged
Cheung rose, assisted by two bodyguards. In a low, creaking voice, he said,
“You can guarantee nothing, General Chin, but death and destruction. However,
for your sake, I hope you can inflict more on the enemy than he does on us. I
will require updates every thirty minutes.”

           
“Yes, Comrade Premier,” Chin said,
bowing. “Be assured, we will see victory today.”

           
Cheung ignored Chin’s boasting. To
his Foreign Minister, Cheung said, “Comrade Zhou, I will speak with you for a
moment.” Chin was not invited in on the brief discussion. Cheung said a few
words to Zhou, who bowed deeply and hurried off. Chin was left alone with his
thoughts.

           
The Americans were doing incredible
damage to his fleet in the south
Philippines
, Chin thought grimly. There was a very real
possibility that he could lose this conflict—if the American bombers managed to
sweep across to the landing ships, every last one of the Marines landing near
Davao
could be wiped out. He would be completely
disgraced. He could not allow a defeat in
Davao
. . .

           
Zhou criticized him for putting
Admiral Yin Po L’un in charge of the invasion, but suddenly a fearsome thought
occurred to General Chin that Admiral Yin might provide a way out of this mess.
The question was: was Admiral Yin really insane enough to do it?

           
He stepped quickly out of the
Premier’s office suites and directly to the palace communications center to put
through an urgent call to Admiral Yin on the destroyer
Hong Lung.
The answer to his question: yes, Yin was that crazy.

Andersen Air Force Base,
Guam

           
“General, we got the satellite
picture back!” Jon Masters said.

           
Generals Stone, Elliott, Harbaugh,
and the rest of the Joint Task Force staff crowded around the reactivated high-
definition computer screen. It showed the entire
Davao
Gulf
area in extraordinary detail, with IFF data
blocks on every American aircraft, and computer-generated data blocks on the
Chinese vessels.

           
“Great, Jon, just great,” Stone
said. The staff studied the board for several moments. “WeTe going to have to
divide the screen up between the staff and prepare a summary of the Chinese
ships that are still out there. We’ll have to make a decision about the second
wave pretty soon.” After checking that the individual consoles were working out
properly, Stone assigned each staff member a section of the
Davao
,
Celebes Sea
,
and
Philippine Sea
areas to search for Chinese ships.

           
“Looks like the southern packages
are coming off the target, the eastern packages are over the target, and the
northern packages are two minutes out,” Calvin Jarrell summarized. “The
southern group got hit pretty hard ... the eastern group looks almost intact .
. . God, the northern planes are taking a beating from that one ship right
there near the airport.”

           
“It’ll take awhile to see which
ships have been hit or not,” Masters said, “but several are showing zero
velocity—we can probably assume those were struck. Luckily we’ve still got
memorized satellite data, so we can retrace a ship’s movements along with our
aircraft and determine whether or not someone hit it.”

           
Elliott called Stone over to his
console after only a few minutes. “I think you better see this, Rat Killer,” he
said. There were two large vessels and three smaller escort vessels in a small
group, farther west than the main battle group. “Obviously reinforcements,”
Elliott said. “But the ISAR radar report that Cobb and McLanahan got for us
said something about this group ...”

           
As Stone watched, Elliott zoomed in
on the group of five vessels, zoomed in on the largest one in the group, then switched
to an ISAR view of the ship. Using ISAR, or inverse synthetic aperture radar,
mode, the motion of the ship itself as well as the motion of the satellite
created a very high-definition three-dimensional view of the vessel, which when
run through a computer’s stored catalog of ships could yield the identity of
the ship itself. . .

           
And when they found out, Stone
muttered a curse to himself.
"Hong
Lung, ”
he said. “They’re sailing
Hong
Lung
itself back into battle ...”

           
“General Stone,” one of the battle
staff communications officers said. “Sir . . . the base operator received an
urgent phone call—from the embassy in
Manila
.” The officers turned to face the
communications officer—they could tell from the man’s voice that something was
happening.

           
“What is it?”

           
“Sir ... the embassy got a call from
an officer who identified himself as a member of the Fleet Admiral’s Staff of
the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy South Philippines Task Force. He
advises us that Admiral Yin Po L’un, the Fleet Admiral, has ordered that the
city of
Davao
be attacked and destroyed with nuclear
weapons if the American bombers do not withdraw immediately.”

           
“What?”
Everyone in the command post was on their feet.

           
“That was the ship ... the guy . . .
that launched the antiship nuclear missile ... wasn’t it?” Masters asked Stone.
No one replied, but the answer was clear.

           
“It’s a bluff,” Cal Jarrel said
resolutely.

           
“The message origin was verified,
sir,” the communications officer reported. “Came directly from the Premier’s
offices themselves through military channels. The State Department is notifying
the White House now.”

           
“Back up that call with one of our
own,” Stone ordered. “Get the President on the line for me immediately.”

           
“Can he do it?” Elliott asked. “Can
his missiles attack ground targets?”

           
“Easily, and with pretty good
precision,” Stone replied. “The Fei Lung-9 has a range of almost two hundred
kilometers—that’s over a hundred nautical miles. It was originally a mobile
land-based missile, modified for shipboard use.”

           
“You can’t take this seriously,”
Jarrel protested. “We were expecting something like this. The next call that
comes in will say that the Chinese will launch a sea-launched ballistic missile
on
Guam
or
Hong Kong
or
Okinawa
if we don’t withdraw.” But faces were still
grave—they were taking the threat very seriously. Jarrel said, “There’s nothing
we can do anyway—the planes are over their targets now. In three minutes the
B-ls will go over the target.”

           
“We can withdraw them,” Harbaugh
said.

           
“That’s crazy, Tom . . .”

           
“Look at the board, Cal,” Harbaugh
said. “Your boys have done enough damage already. What’s the big deal if we
abort the northern strike group?”

           
“The big deal is, the Chinese
Marines will make it on the beach,” Jarrel argued. “We would have used all the
other bombers for nothing ... we will have lost all those other crews for
nothing.”

           
“We can’t take the chance that he’ll
do it,” Harbaugh said.

           
“He’ll wipe out a bunch of his own
guys, won’t he?” Masters asked.

           
“If they’re already wiped out by the
Air Battle Force, he might not care.” <

           
“Order a strike by the Tomahawk
cruise missiles again,” Elliott said. “What’s the range from the
Wisconsin
group to the
Hong Lung?”
But the measurement was quickly made and verified—it
was over six hundred miles. The Tomahawk cruise missile crews would need at
least thirty minutes to program a new strike, and then the missiles would take
at least an hour to fly that distance.

           
“We can order one of the bombers to
attack the
Hong Lung, ”
Harbaugh
said. “They can withhold a couple weapons, head south, and attack. We can use a
couple of the B-ls in the northern strike group—they only have mines and
fuel-air explosives left by now, but that should do the job.” He pointed at the
high-definition monitor.
“Hong Lung
will
need to move farther north, right to the mouth of
Davao
Gulf
, before firing. That means we have about
twenty minutes to get someone in position ...”

           
“There isn’t time to send
retargeting data to the B-ls, Tom,” Jarrel said. “We’ve got two orders we can
give the bombers now—attack or withhold. If we order two planes to withhold,
they abort right in the middle of all that air defense.. They have to traverse
a hundred and twenty miles of stiff defenses, find the right ship, and attack.
It’s crazy. I say send the B-ls in and finish the job. This is an obvious
bluff, and we’re falling for it . .

           
“But if it’s not a bluff . .

           
“I have a suggestion, sir,” Masters
said. “I think I have a way we can strike that Chinese destroyer in time.”

           
And Jon Masters began to outline his
plan to his audience. . . .

Mindanao
,
the
Philippines

           
The frigate
Xiamen
had been hit by no less than six Harpoon missiles and was
burning as fiercely as a volcano in the mouth of Davao Gulf—its patrol boat
escorts could not get within five kilometers of it because of burning fuel oil
on the water, the intense heat, and the occasional explosions in her weapon
magazines. Three of
Xiamen
's
six patrol boat escorts had been hit by
Harpoon missiles, which left
Davao
Gulf
wide open for the strike package to enter.
Two B-52s took heavy-caliber gunfire hits from patrol boats and were forced to
jettison their ordnance armed before penetrating into the target area, and one
was shot down as it withdrew from the area; all of the crewmen safely ejected and
were taken prisoner.

           
The destroyer
Yinchuan
,
which had few antiair weapons in its
arsenal, was the next to fall. Ten B-52s from the three southern strike
packages descended on it and her escorts, filling the air with forty Harpoon
missiles designated just for one vessel. Most of the missiles struck other
vessels or were intercepted by
Yinchuan
's escorts, but ten Harpoon missiles found
the heavy destroyer. It sank in less than twenty minutes.

           
The destroyer
Dalian
,
which was equipped with the Hong Qian-91
surface-to-air missile system, and its antiair- equipped escorts wreaked havoc
on the six B-52s that were fragged to attack it. Two B-52s sustained heavy
damage and were forced to withdraw; one crashed over land to the east of
Bangoy
Bay
, while the other was attacked by fighters
and destroyed as it tried to escape the target area. But
Dalian
had expended most of its weapons defending
the amphibious assault force against Tomahawk cruise missiles, and it soon
found that it could not defend itself against an onslaught of twelve Harpoon
antiship missiles launched against it. Battered and listing to starboard, the
destroyer’s captain finally decided to beach his vessel near Matiao rather than
have it sink in
Bangoy
Bay
.

           
The vertical-plot greaseboard in the
flag bridge of the destroyer
Hong Lung
was physically painful to look at. Destroyed vessels were in red, damaged and
out-of-commission vessels were in black, damaged but operational vessels were
in green-and-black stripes, and fully operational vessels were in green—and
there were damned few of those. Fortunately, most of the green vessels were
amphibious assault ships—the attackers still had not reached the Marines on the
beach.