And there wasn’t a goddamned thing they could do about it.
He smiled.
At 04:00, all enemy contacts went dark on the tracking screens. Admiral Wu had composed himself, and was now leaning over the radar operator, and checking his watch. There had been no sign of the Enterprise for the last 30 minutes, and at 04:30 he ordered one of the three J-31’s on forward CAP to move out and conduct a long range radar search.
As it happened, the scout moved up right in the middle of a US CAP replacement cycle, and was able to advance to a position about 150 miles from the Enterprise unnoticed, and therefore unchallenged. The J-31 quickly picked up a pair of surface contacts, heading south at 30 knots, but there was nothing else for several minutes until another Skunk was detected about 65 nautical miles further on.
The Admiral realized what he was seeing. That farthest contact had to be part of the carrier escort, and the two first contacts were most likely the Siberians. His eyes narrowed at that, seeing them as nice isolated targets, too far from the Americans to gain their support if attacked. That farthest on contact was now almost 350 miles away, and at 35 knots, so he knew he would never get any closer to the carrier now.
So I will strike the Siberians, he decided. They are only 285 miles away—inside the radius of our YJ-18’s. It is high time they suffered for all they have done to hurt our cause in this damn war. He would throw down the gauntlet with 34 missiles, and test the defenses of those ships.
At that point, his scout was finally detected by the enemy. A flight of three F-35’s, Watcher-3, had seen them on radar, and so had the Siberians. Kursk put two missiles in the air, the 9M96D with its 65 mile range good enough to reach the fighter, which prompted it to immediately turn and accelerate to military speed, 900 knots.
Watcher-3 reported the fleeing enemy contact, and was given clearance to pursue. A whisker faster than the J-31 at military speed supercruise, the F-35’s accelerated to 920 knots. They were carrying AAMRAM’s, with a 75 mile range, but the J-31 was a slippery target, and they would have to get closer than that to have any chance of locking on. That pursuit took Watcher-3 out into the no man’s land in the center of the Celebes Sea, and they flashed their radars to see if they could get a lock. It was at that point that their 200 mile range radars picked up Vampires, low on the sea.
“Nemo-1, Watcher-3. We have Vampires, low and slow. Over.”
“Roger, Watcher. Lock and Engage all hostile targets. Cleared Hot.”
That scout had triggered a defensive response that might not have been in place if Wu Jinlong had not been so curious that morning. As soon as the Forward CAP patrol engaged, the ship’s Captain, now on the bridge while Admiral Cook got some much needed rest, sent the Air Boss an order to launch the ready CAP fighters, two flights of two planes each, designated Linebacker 1 and 2.
Aboard Kirov, Kalinichev was standing in for Rodenko when the contacts came in. Karpov and Fedorov were both getting rest, so he was the Senior Watch officer on the bridge when the Vampires were seen. He followed procedure and sounded Air Alert One. Then, seconds later, all the contacts vanished. Kalinichev saw three American fighters overfly his position, returning to the Enterprise while others passed the ship a little to the southeast, outward bound. Then the Vampires reappeared, about 100 miles out, and he saw the American fighters engage. They unleashed all their arrows, and then turned for the carrier.
That still left 13 contacts inbound. The missiles disappeared again, lost on radar, then suddenly reappeared, this time just 20 miles out. With a standing order of weapons free, Kalinichev ordered Gromenko at the CIC to engage, and the Gargoyles leapt off the forward deck.
Karpov, sleeping in the ready room, was now out through the hatch as the missiles roared away. He immediately took stock of the situation, giving Kalinichev a reassuring pat on the shoulder.
“Well done,” he said, watching the Gargoyles engage on the radar screen. They were getting out to the Vampires just before they were close enough to enter their high speed terminal run, and they got every last one. That dropped his missile count to 29, but he had 90 medium range missiles behind those, so he was not concerned. You always put your best foot forward in combat, using the weapon most likely to get you a kill.
It was still too early for the morning strike, which had been postponed to 08:00 to give the ordnance crews more time to ready the planes. So Enterprise would recover the seven fighters it had sent out to engage those Vampires, and then posted its dawn watch, this time just one ready fighter and Hawkeye #3.
Karpov noted that the Chinese fleet had now changed course, and they were heading 325 degrees northwest. One look at the map told him they were going to Zamboanga, forsaking their effort to close with the Americans. There they would likely cover the base, or utilize the small port to refuel thirsty ships.
Enterprise was down through the narrow bottleneck of the Makassar Strait by sunrise, and into the bottle. Once through that northern gap where the US subs had dueled with Chinese boats earlier, the strait widened considerably for the next 300 miles until it gave way to the Java Sea. The morning seemed strangely quiet, but that was soon about to change.
Fighter deployments on the Chinese side started to thicken up just after sunrise. Six J-20’s rose from Davao, headed west to Zamboanga, and Taifeng sent up a flight of six J-31’s for morning CAP. They would be joined by six more from Davao, survivors from the carrier Zhendong. These planes would form the outer shield against an air strike expected that morning. Admiral Wu Jinlong knew his enemy by now, and could count the hours it took to rearm their planes well enough. The Chinese field at Miri on the west coast of Borneo also sent up a couple J-20’s. They would have a good angle to make a run at the US carrier and fix its position on radar.
On the US side, SAG Guam met TF South from Australia, and the two groups now formed one cohesive task force, designated Bougainville. There the US Navy Captain Jack Dorne would command a Marine Amphibious Group, with the LHD’s attached, Arlington, Portland and Green Bay. That was a force capable of making a landing anywhere on Mindanao to deal with the Chinese encroachment at Davao.
So while both sides prepared to launch air strikes, the threat Wu Jinlong would have to face would not come from the sky, but from beneath the sea. Two US boats, Franklin and Chancellorsville, were quietly stalking the enemy fleet, and they were getting close. Franklin was 20 miles off the port side of the enemy formation, and Chancellorsville 30 mile off the starboard side, both moving on intercept vectors like a pair of predatory sea demons.
Chapter 8
You never knew just where an enemy submarine might be lurking. They could be closing on your flanks, as the two US boats were now, but they might also be stalking you from behind, hiding in the noise of your wake, or just silently waiting dead ahead, the proverbial silent hole in the sea—with torpedoes. And of all weapons designed and deployed in this war to kill ships, torpedoes were the most deadly and consistent killers. Of those that had been fired, over 90% had found a steel hull, killing ships at an alarming rate.