Lennox, his RIO, and their beloved machine disappeared from the FITCOMPRON’s Prowler’s radar.
This second explosion shocked the already stunned Combat Information Center in the McCain, the room so quiet that only the hum from the air conditioners’ vents and the whir of the 24/7 digital disc recorder could be heard. Four men and a hundred million dollars lost in less than six seconds.
“Hope to hell our screen’s working,” opined a veteran chief petty officer, referring not to the CIC’s blue board, but to the carrier’s protective screen of Aegis cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and two attack subs whose sole reason for being there was to prevent a ChiCom “box” or missiles getting through to the heart of the CVBG.
In McCain’s SSES, the chief boffin called Admiral Crowley with more bad news. Seven, possibly eight, of the ChiCom Flankers had reached Penghu Island, penetrating its defensive ring of Chaparral SAM sites. In fact, five-man Chaparral crews — each made up of commander, driver, gunner, and two loaders — belonging to the reservists’ battalion on Penghu, were still frantically launching Chaparrals. The fiery backblasts from quads of the eleven-ton U.S. missiles were clearly visible to the ChiComs’ seven remaining Sukhoi fighter-bomber pilots. Quickly going to their Lyulka afterburners, they rapidly climbed to eleven thousand feet, placing themselves a thousand feet beyond the Chaparrals’ maximum altitude.
From this high ground they fired a rain of air-to-surface TV-guided missiles at Penghu installations, and dropped seven 1,100-pound bombs, knocking out six of the quad Chaparral launchers in a series of head-thudding explosions whose gases created a dust storm that swept across the island before being blown leeward by gusts heralding Typhoon Jane’s approach. The hurricane of shrapnel from the bombs, however, was not so readily dispersed, scything through the reservists, who, unlike the regular ROC troops in the 1st Battalion, had failed to dig enough slit trenches along Lintou Beach. Instead, the reservists had clumped together in the tactically futile but psychologically understandable belief that protection lay in numbers.
In Makung, panic reigned in the fish markets and town itself, clustered about the picturesque harbor, and families who would normally have fled down to fishing boats to make good their escape from any man-made assault on their small island were afraid to do battle with the huge seas stirred up by Jane. Taipei radio had now upgraded Jane to supertyphoon, the winds off Taiwan’s east coast reportedly reaching 140 miles per hour with gusts to 180. It meant that even if the families of Makung, their town ablaze from the ChiCom bombing and strafing, managed to escape the wind-fanned inferno and reach their boats, their Taiwanese navy could not help them, the wind-whipped seas drowning all hope of rescue. Meanwhile, the Americans could not help much, their Rules of Engagement requiring them to hold their fire for fear of overshooting the enemy planes and killing Taiwanese civilians. Penghu’s sacred banyan tree was also destroyed, having been used by the ChiCom bombers as their initial aiming point.
“Damn!” said Johnny Reisman. “Can’t do a damn thing!”
Crowley and Cuso heard and shared their FITCOMPRON leader’s frustration, his voice remarkably clear through the crackle and labored breathing of an aviator who had just overseen the worst aerial defeat of American arms in the last quarter century.
Within minutes of the ROC 1st Battalion on Penghu sounding the air raid warning, 350 presumed tourists trapped on the island had quickly sought refuge from the Flanker blitz by taking cover in and around the popular Fengkuei cave on the rocky southwestern isthmus of the island. When the air raid finally ended, these “tourists” emerged from their ad hoc shelter, heading toward the fiercely crackling ruins of Makung, armed with Kalashnikov 47s, bandoliers of 7.6mm ammunition, grenades, and light but deadly 60mm mortars. The arms had been planted months earlier by PLA navy commandos during clandestine landings by diesel-electric subs that had come in close to Penghu during stormy weather, the rough seas having subsumed the already quiet running of the subs’ battery-power propulsion, making the ChiCom presence in the strait undetectable by even the best Taiwanese sonar.
The island was now hostage to the PLA.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“So,” pronounced Choir Williams, as the SpecFor group watched CNN’s Marte Price reporting the Chinese-U.S. conflict in the Taiwan Straits. “Looks like we don’t need to wait for Petrel’s water sample results after all, me boyos. It’s the Chinese!”
Salvini nodded in agreement.
“Choir!” Aussie announced triumphantly. “I think you just lost a bet, boyo.” His tone, however, was devoid of the usual follow-up jabs that characterized the relationship between Freeman’s Special Forces team. The bloody animal and human carnage they had seen in the waters of their strait disallowed the usual spirited repartee — at least for now.
“What d’you think, General?” Aussie asked.
Freeman’s attention had shifted from Marte Price to the TV screen’s sidebar weather map of Typhoon Jane. “Doesn’t make sense,” he concluded. “Starting a war on two fronts. Fundamental. Even for a superpower. Beijing attacking Taiwan and us at the same time? Anyway, if they were going to do that, why one offensive in the open, the other not?”
“Maybe,” suggested Aussie, “their planned invasion of Taiwan — which we know they’ve always had on the shelf — was triggered prematurely by the Taiwanese firing the first shot. ChiComs had to react?”
“I think so,” agreed Freeman, “and I’ll tell you why. It’s that damned typhoon. No planned offensive by Beijing would willingly battle that bitch and the Taiwanese armed forces at the same time.”
“So you think Taipei did fire first?” asked Salvini.
“Don’t know, Sal,” answered Freeman. “Sometimes we never know who fired the first shot.” He paused. “ ’Bout ourselves, war, or anything else. I don’t know if the ChiComs started it, but something — don’t ask me what — tells me they’re not the ones sinking our ships here in Juan de Fuca.” He glanced across at Choir. “I wouldn’t claim that wager with Aussie just yet.”
“Then who is it, General?” pressed Choir.
Before Freeman could answer, the phone rang with the Coast Guard’s IMU test. The Darkstar-detected anomaly was positive. Definitely isotope-tagged. There was a problem, however, in that the isotope match-up was for the oil used by a Caribbean Panama-registered cruise ship, Bermuda Star. Obviously, it had illegally jettisoned or leaked it en route to either Vancouver or Seattle, the two major Northwest cruise ship ports.
“Shit a brick!” said Aussie, crushing the plastic water bottle from which he’d been drinking and throwing it violently into the wastebasket, the mood of the other three no different. For a few seconds no one spoke. But if Choir, Salvini, and Aussie’s silence was a measure of their bitter disappointment in having failed to narrow the search for the killer sub whose sheer audacity Freeman couldn’t help but grudgingly admire for the utter chaos and humiliation such a small gutsy force had brought about — as his own team had in the past — the silence afforded the general a moment to think, uninterrupted by the others’ theories.