But retaliation against what?
Tsang was sure that the launch must have been a mistake, an horrendous accident that might never be explained.
Could Abrams believe him?
And what could she do if she didn’t believe him? The truck which launched the missile could already have packed up and left the area by now; even if its launch location could be traced back retrospectively, there would be no point in launching a retaliatory strike against a target which wouldn’t even be there.
Attack China’s own aircraft carrier group?
But what then? Where would it end? China would be forced to respond, and that’s how wars started.
The nuclear option? A strike against a US carrier group was tantamount to an act of war, but Abrams didn’t even want to go there; a best-case scenario still placed the Chinese inventory at three hundred warheads, worst case scenarios at upwards of five thousand; some would be bound to find their way to the United States in counter-retaliation, and nothing was worth the consequences of that happening.
And so she decided on the only course of action available to her at that moment; accept the story of it being an accident, not fight back, and just hope and pray that the damage wouldn’t be as bad as it could be.
Unless…
Captain Meadows watched the face of his commander drop, and knew that President Abrams had ordered them to stand down; no action was to be taken.
He sighed and shook his head.
He could hear the approaching missile now, and knew that all their attempts at countermeasures had failed.
Looking across the bridge at Decker, he smiled and braced himself for the impact.
Tsang Feng still had an open line to President Abrams, but was for the moment silent.
He had told her the launch was an accident, because it must have been; the only other option was…
Unthinkable.
No. It was an accident. These things had happened before; with everyone keyed up over exercises, sometimes mistakes were made. On an individual level it might be live ammunition being used instead of blanks; people still died as a result.
But was it a mistake?
Tsang didn’t even think that the DF-26 was to be used as part of the exercise. How likely was it that one would be fully fuelled and targeted unless ordered to be so?
His thoughts were interrupted by the frantic voice of Ellen Abrams.
‘Can you self-destruct the missile from your end?’ she asked, her voice shaking, knowing that this was truly their last chance.
Tsang cursed himself inwardly, turning to General Xi Yang, the commander of the Second Artillery Corps.
Why hadn’t this occurred to him already? He cursed himself again, then had a different thought entirely.
Why hadn’t it occurred to General Xi either?
If the launch was truly an error, surely the general would have leapt up to contact the errant truck himself?
He cleared his thoughts away; he nevertheless had to try.
‘General,’ he said to Xi Yang, ‘contact the crew of the truck immediately, order them to destroy the missile.’ When the general didn’t move, Tsang’s face contorted in rage. ‘Now!’ he screamed, all too aware that there were just seconds left.
In the end, it was General Wu De who answered, rising from his chair, his massive, imposing bulk moving slowly towards the Paramount Leader of the PRC.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said in mock deference, ‘but I rather think it’s too late for that.’
Meadows felt the impact, which — despite the colossal one hundred thousand ton steel bulk of the ship to soak it up — was still enough to bring him and everyone else on the bridge to their knees.
They received the report over the bridge’s communications system instants later, and Meadows’ first reaction was an instinctual sigh of relief — the missile hadn’t hit the island or the main crew quarters, but had instead dealt a glancing blow to the very rear of the ship.
The downward force at the rear had lifted the nose of the Gerald R. Ford clear of the water, and she settled back down with a tremendous crash which again brought everyone to their knees.
As damage reports came thick and fast — fires in the hangers, three airmen lost overboard, all rear units lost including an unknown number of sailors and aircrew — Meadows started to understand the reality of the situation.
A blow by a missile like the Dong Feng — however angled, however glancing — to the rear of the ship meant that the four thirty-ton, twenty-one foot bronze propellers that drove the Ford would now be nothing more than useless scrap metal.
He also accepted that the missile had been traveling too fast, its guidance systems were simply too good, for the target to have been accidentally missed; which meant that the Chinese intention had never been to destroy the aircraft carrier, but merely to disable her. With the ship compartmented and stabilized, Meadows hoped it would continue to float despite the damage to its rear end; but without the propellers, it wouldn’t be capable of moving anywhere.
The relief he had felt moments ago quickly wore off as he recognized his ship’s situation.
She was a sitting duck, Meadows and his crew of four and a half thousand now hostage to the Chinese military.
Tsang watched in incredulous horror as the huge wooden doors to the stateroom opened, armed soldiers pouring inside, quickly surrounding the council members with their assault rifles up and aimed.
A large man, who seemed to be the leader of the troops although he wasn’t in uniform, strolled through the room towards General Wu, stopping and bowing in front of him.
The big man worried Tsang more than the rest of the men combined; there was something in his eyes, a barely restrained violence that threatened to spill out on those around him at any moment. There was his sheer bulk as well, nearly three hundred pounds of muscle and hard fat. Tsang noticed then that one of his eyes was glass, scar tissue gathered around it from a wound of some sort. Tsang thought it might have been a bullet.
All of these thoughts occurred to Tsang in mere fleeting moments — the same time it took the huge man to approach Wu, pull out a semi-automatic pistol from his black robes, and hand it to the general.
General Wu De stepped in front of him then, aiming the weapon directly at Tsang’s heart.
The Chinese president quickly scanned the faces of the other members of the CMC but was met only with looks of stony silence.
Nobody was going to come to his aid, not even his loyal friend Kang Xing, the Minister of National Defense, who merely looked back at him through hooded eyes.
Tsang looked to his Vice President, Fang Zemin, but the man’s head was lowered in fear; although perhaps not a part of the coup himself, he obviously had no wish to try and stop it.
‘I am sorry,’ Wu said to Tsang with mock deference, ‘but I am in charge now.’
And before Tsang could respond, Wu pressed the trigger and sent a 5.42mm bullet ripping into the man’s heart at fourteen hundred feet per second.
Abrams listened incredulously to the gunshot over the open line to the Chinese CMC.
With one ear she listened to the damage reports from the Gerald R. Ford, relieved that it wasn’t more serious; with the other, she heard what could only be a murder.