Tipping Point: The War With China - the First Salvo (Dan Lenson Novels) (47 page)

That complete, though little the wiser, he sallied out onto the main deck, clutching his cap against the wind.

Savo
charged unpityingly forward at twenty-five knots, blowers roaring, stack gas a fading stain on a cloudless sky. He could just make out the whale-call of her sonar. The sea rushed past, a bleached-looking, light-filled blue, dotted with knots of sallow floating weed. No one else was out, except for the lookouts, who lowered binoculars and nodded as he passed.

He lifted his face to the sun and closed his eyes, relishing the heat-lamp glow, the scarlet flare behind his eyelids, the bluster of the wind. In the old days half the crew would’ve been out here, manning AA guns, passing ammunition, hoisting flag signals. Now their battle stations were inside the skin of the ship, in front of consoles and digital displays.

As was his. When he opened his eyes again a bird was hovering, a motionless speck so far above, so disappearingly infinitesimal in the immense blue, he couldn’t make out exactly what it was. He blinked up, wanting to linger, to drink in the beauty of the passing sea one last time.

Instead he turned away. Dogged the door behind him, and clambered up to the CIC level, placing each steel-toed boot heavily and carefully on the next gritty, dusty tread.

*   *   *

HE
shivered in the arctic blast of the A/C. A glance at the LSDs told him GCCS was still down. Staurulakis got up from the command chair. “All yours,” she said, not meeting his gaze. “Course 010 at twenty-five. A hundred and twenty miles to Point Charlie. One hour to
Vinson
’s launch of the main strike.”

At Point Charlie the battle group would shift into attack formation, to cover the Vietnamese landing. As sole antimissile asset,
Savo
would position between the mainland and the carrier while the initial Tomahawk and then air strikes went in. But until then, there wasn’t much to do with the sensors down, so he climbed the last ladder to the bridge.

He was reclining in his chair, mind vacant, when a petty officer handed him an envelope. “Mail, Captain.”

“What? How in the hell—?”

“Red Hawk hot-refueled on the carrier. Brought it in on their bounce last night.”

Mail. It seemed like something from the Neolithic. He ripped the envelope open. Laser-jetted, with Blair’s signature handwritten at the end.

Dear Dan,

They tell me your communications are shut down, but that there’s a chance mail might get through. I still have contacts I’m working in DoD, so maybe you’ll get an e-mail from me before this, or we’ll get to talk on the phone. But just on the off chance, I’ll drop this in the box.
    We’re in Maryland, at Dad and Mom’s, since they’re worried DC might be a target in some way. They broke in like kidnappers, hustled me and the cat into the car. Half an hour to pack—I could hear you laughing! The campaign is on hold right now. Fund-raising’s a moot issue—since the banking system’s frozen, and credit cards don’t work anymore. But everyone seems to think this will all be over by election day. Surely China and the U.S. aren’t crazy enough to think a war will settle anything.
    The stores are getting empty, though. If you see anything you might need, you buy it then and there, since you might not see it again. We’re stocking up on canned food, Scotch for Dad, Mom’s meds, and toilet paper. Also we bought new tires. Anything that depends on the Internet, sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t. Everyone who had anything in the cloud has lost it. Cash is still good, but you can withdraw only $200 a day. Dad has multiple accounts at multiple banks, but not all the terminals work. There was a program about rationing in World War II on NPR yesterday, which Mom thinks is some kind of warning.
    By the way, Nan says hi. Heard from her on Facebook before it went down. She said, “Tell Dad not to go anyplace dangerous.” I told her you had the seniority now to stay out of trouble. Just didn’t want to worry her.
    Anyway, I’ll write again. So far we’re all right, is the main thing I wanted to say. We don’t hear much about what the military’s doing. The administration’s slapped censorship on the networks. All you hear is patriotic bullshit about how we have to defend our old ally Japan, and noble democratic India. How North Korea’s set to bomb and invade the South. We do get some actual news from the
Post
and the BBC, but we’re mainly just in the dark about what’s really going on. Has Vietnam really come down on our side? Dad can’t believe that. You know he fought there in ’67, in the Marines.
    Anyway I’ll write again. E-mail me when you can. I’ll watch the news for anything about
Savo
Island.

Much Love,

Blair.

PS—Tom’s checking on your boat every couple of days. He says the bilge pump is working. Whatever that means.

*   *   *

MIDMORNING
.
He was rereading Blair’s letter when the duty radioman presented the clipboard. Dan ran his gaze down it, then started again at the top.

After taking the Spratlys, Strike Group One was to remain in the South China Sea, holding the islands and intercepting remaining commerce.
Savo
and
Mitscher,
accompanied by
Pittsburgh,
would detach to head east. Off Luzon, they would rendevous with USS
Curtis Wilbur
and two Japanese destroyers. Dan would command the Ryukyus Maritime Defense Coalition Task Group as something like a temporary commodore.

The joint U.S./Japanese surface strike group would fill the blocking position behind Taiwan that the
George Washington
battle group had been intended to occupy. A second TBMD-capable cruiser, USS
Monocacy
, was en route from Guam. The third ALIS-capable cruiser,
Hampton Roads,
was finishing a hasty fitting-out in Pearl Harbor and would be under way to join shortly.

A separate SI message advised that the U.S. submarine force was leaving the exits to the Pacific, where it had patrolled so far, and moving closer to shore. There, the subs would clear the path for future offensive operations. But Intel cautioned that much of the enemy sub fleet—like, Dan thought, the Songs that’d passed them on their way out of the IO—had already vanished.

Almost as an afterthought, the message said the allies and the “Opposed Powers” were now in a de facto state of hostilities. All satellite comms and data links were down, reducing the Navy to HF radio and UHF/VHF line of sight. On the other hand, all Chinese reconnaissance assets, at least that the U.S. knew about, had been taken down as well.

He kneaded his neck, understanding, reluctantly, the repositioning of
Savo
to the east. Only one day’s steaming distance. But they’d be entering a wholly different theater, against a wholly different threat.

The South China Sea would be a battleground, but strategically it was secondary. Even if China broke out here, it would expand into empty sea. Its logistics would be vulnerable to submarine operations, as Japan’s had been in an earlier war. The allies—Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia—would fight back, to defend their own claims in the area. If Zhang pushed south, he’d lose the war.

But a penetration of the eastern, Philippines-Taiwan-Japan line would let China pincer Taiwan and isolate South Korea, crushing two of America’s oldest and best-armed allies. The next step would be to break out, threaten the second island ring, and neutralize Japan. If that happened, the U.S. could find itself pushed back so far it might never be able to return.

The world would look very different then.

“Captain.”

Chief Van Gogh, looking worried. Dan coughed into a fist, initialed the message, and handed it back. “Yeah, Chief?”

“GPS is acting up. Says we’re in central Luzon, four hundred feet up a mountain.”

This wasn’t good. “We’ve got an inertial nav system, Chief. Can we run on that?”

“For a little while, sir. But it’s going to degrade over time.”

Dan squinted out the window, at the sun sparkling on the waves. What was going on over their heads?
Far
over their heads, hundreds of miles up. No one had reported any shootdowns of U.S. satellites, but their comms and data links were all but useless, and now their navigation was screwed too.
Something
was going on. “We’ve still got a sextant, right?”

Van Gogh brightened. “Oh, yessir! A sextant, and a chronometer.”

“Get a time tick and pull out the reduction tables. We’ll shoot a sun line at noon, and do evening stars. We can run on Aegis and dead reckoning in between.” He paused, glancing out at the glittering sea again. “Now lay a course for the Bashi Channel.”

*   *   *

MITSCHER
joined that afternoon. She crossed his bow and settled on his port quarter. “Stony” Stonecipher was riding shotgun again. They raced northeast at flank speed, tails out and pinging, short-range nav radars on. The helo buzzed around ahead, laying sonobuoys. He kept the lookouts alert; you wouldn’t think binoculars would be that useful, but he’d seen from the SATYRE exercises how often a sub would get caught visually when he upped scope.

That evening the sky turned lurid and ominous: a deep russet, with high bands of gracefully scalloped cirrus hung like gaudy bunting above heaped piles of cumulus, clotted low and dark where the hidden sun was perishing. The scarlet light seeped into the gently rocking sea, as if—and he tried hard not to think this, but couldn’t help it, leaning over the splinter shield and looking aft, past the Harpoon launchers canted out from the stern—as if their wake were drawn through blood.

He was stepping out of his coveralls when the bulkhead phone chirped again. He answered it this time to Dave Branscombe’s excited voice.

The comm officer read from the message
. “Para One. Mainland jets have swarmed ROCAF F-16s patrolling the Taiwan Strait, shooting four down and dispersing the rest. China now has air superiority over the strait.

“Para Two. Premier-General Zhang Zurong has made the following, quote Four Peaceful Announcements, unquote. First: China seeks no wider war. Second, no country will be attacked unless it attacks China, or refuses to help build a lasting stability and order in Asia and the Pacific Rim.

“Third, in order to build a peaceful, orderly Pacific free of weapons of mass destruction, any foreign force capable of delivering nuclear weapons will be dealt with by any means necessary, to prevent escalation.

“Fourth, any aggression against Chinese soil will be answered by a similar or greater level of destruction visited on the American homeland.”
A moment of silence, then,
“So far, no response from the White House. That’s the message, Skipper. Being run up to you, but thought I’d better call, soon as I saw it.”

“I’ll be on the bridge,” Dan said.

He rezipped his coveralls and climbed to the pilothouse, mulling the attack on the inner island chain’s keystone. The allies couldn’t hold the center, between Japan and Taiwan—Okinawa, the Senkakus, the Ryukyus—without air defenses and antiballistic missile coverage.

Which meant
Savo Island,
and her sister cruisers, would be the last line of defense.

If they failed, the inner island chain would fall. And the war would be, if not lost at the outset, enormously long and bloody.

Maybe even … like World War I.

He stumbled over something soft, and had a bad moment. Then realized, not a body; not yet, anyway. Just the watch team’s life jackets and flash gear, rolled and ready. He edged forward in the dark, arms outstretched, struggling against a sense of doom as overwhelming as the nausea that also threatened.

They weren’t ready for this. A beta-test system. Five antimissile rounds left, against hundreds of weapons poised across the strait. And a silent, faceless evil driving wedges into his already sick, exhausted crew.

His hands quivered, his neck ached, flashes seared his retinas. He stood silent for a long time, one hand spasmodically gripping the back of his command chair, reluctant to climb up into it.

The nations groped lost in the labyrinth. Once more, the god of war demanded sacrifice. Once more, human beings had miscalculated, and brought down Armageddon.

But his duty, and that of his ship and crew, was clear.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ex nihilo nihil fit.
I write from a braiding of memory, imagination, and research. For this novel, I resorted again to references and interviews accumulated for previous books about Navy and joint operations. I interviewed the master chief who inspects BMD cruisers, whom I knew from previous duty, and a commodore who skippered one cruiser and now commands a strike squadron. I sailed aboard an Aegis cruiser and did on-site research in several of the various locales.

The following background sources were also helpful. The list of Dan’s decorations in chapter 4 was submitted by longtime Poyer Crew member Bruce James. The congressional testimony owes much to an unclassified presentation by John H. James to the Tidewater ASNE. The information on monsoons in chapters 6 and 10 is from NRL Monterey, Marine Meteorology Division. The discussion of boarding regimes owes a lot to “Broken Taillight at Sea: The Peacetime International Law of Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure,” by Commander James Kraska, JAGC, USN. Chapter 13 was loosely based on U.S. Navy History and Heritage Command’s “U.S. Navy Relief Efforts After the Indian Ocean Tsunami, 26 December 2004,” and on “Multi-Service Procedures for Humanitarian Assistance Operations,” a tactical memorandum I edited while at the Surface Warfare Development Group.

For part 4’s discussion of nuclear deterrence, I read “Red Lines, Deadlines, and Thinking the Unthinkable: India, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and China,” a CSIS study by Anthony Cordesman. Also consulted were “What Might an India-Pakistan War Look Like?” by Christopher Clary, MIT, and
Deep Currents and Rising Tides
by John Garofano. The discussion of “no first use” was informed by Scott D. Sagan’s “The Evolution of Indian and Pakistani Nuclear Doctrine,” and a posting by Joshi Shashank of Harvard, “India and ‘No First Use.’” The operations plans and contingency plans are my
fictional
fabrications after reading
Naval Operations Concept 2010
and William M. Arkin’s “National Security Contingency Plans of the U.S. Government.” I have never seen any actual operations plans for such a contingency. For chapter 19, I’m indebted to “U.S. Navy Missile Defense, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” by friend and fellow author George Galdorisi.