Hancock’s four steam catapults were now clear of aircraft, except for a MH-60 Sierra turning on the waist cats. Two of the weapons, now speeding down on the carrier in a steep dive below 10,000 feet, targeted the ends of the two hot lines on the bow, the catapult tracks. The other two oriented themselves on the waist catapults, and with the helicopter on the track of Catapult 4, the weapon assigned the shorter line of heat was “confused:” the image did not match the memory target file. As the weapon imaged and rejected two times per second, passing 2,000 feet, it went stupid and did not fuse. The number five missile then took over, identified it as proper, and armed up.
Wilson had just dropped his launch bar on Catapult 2 when a small explosion at the end of the track caught his attention. Before the explosion could register in his mind, another occurred on Cat 1, and sailors on the bow scurried aft. Then, a blast to his left jolted him, as he felt impacts on the Rhino’s left side. More sailors ducked in the catwalk and by instinct scampered for safety inside the ship. Wilson then saw a red ENG FIRE light illuminate as his WSO yelled something unintelligible on the ICS. Another sharp boom hit over his left shoulder, and sailors near the helicopter ran toward the island.
“CAG, shut it down! We’ve got fire out the left tailpipe!”
Hancock’s flight deck was characterized by confusion and fear as another explosion occurred at the end of Cat 3. With flame and black smoke billowing, fire-fighting parties with hoses attacked Wilson’s burning jet as he and his WSO raised the canopy and egressed over the right side, jumping eight feet to the steel deck. The Air Boss was bellowing on the 5MC as sailors ran from the sudden and mysterious explosions only to run back to fight the fires and help the wounded.
Within minutes, Blower knew the worst. All four catapults were hard down, hit at the end of their slots where the shuttle engages the water brake. The shuttles were all forward when the weapons went off on the tracks, damaging the shuttles, the slot plates, and water brake piping. Cat 3 at the end of the angle was hit twice, and steam poured from the mangled catapult track plates.
As residual smoke from 200 swirled about, Wilson ran over to a stretcher on the foul line that held a young sailor, no more than twenty, with blood staining his wounded arm and leg. Hancock had turned to put the wind on its beam to help the firefighters, and the MH-60 on the waist was pelted and damaged. Flight deck chiefs shouted commands and moved aircraft into spots with some of the jets still turning. Debris covered the flight deck. “Shut ‘em down!” Wilson yelled to the yellow shirts who looked at him in confusion before noting the eagles on his shoulders. “Where they are! We don’t wanna FOD an engine!” Wilson stayed on them, and soon the last jet engine wound down.
In his flight gear, Wilson raced up five ladders to the bridge. When he got there, Blower was on the phone to his Air Boss.
“What happened?” Wilson asked, panting for breath.
“They hit us with something like small guided bombs, and right on the catapult slots — the worst place. The tracks, the water brakes, pistons — hard down, and it’s going to take a yard period to fix.”
Wilson was stunned.
“We can’t launch airplanes,” Blower reiterated. “We’re done.”
Wilson watched white smoke pour from the bow catapult tracks as green-shirted sailors assessed the damage. “Must have been that UAV, but it’s gotta still be a hundred miles ahead of us.” Blower’s phone rang and he picked it up.
“Cap’n… yes, sir… all four hard down, and we don’t have the capability to repair them in-house. Yes, sir, I saw something streak down on Cats 3 and 4. I think it was a small guided bomb. Guessing from the UAV. Yessir… yessir.”
Blower put the receiver down and turned to Wilson. “Okay, the Admiral is breaking EMCON, and we’re radiating. Think we’re officially at war now.”
Wilson nodded, but his fixed-wing aircraft were trapped, out of the fight. Without them Hancock was all but useless as a combat asset, and with fifty combat airplanes unable to fight, it was as if China had eliminated them.
“They put those weapons right where they wanted, minutes from launch,” Wilson surmised.
“Yeah, we steamed into an ambush. Fuck,” Blower muttered, frustrated.
“I’m going to flag plot. Talk to you later,” Wilson said as he slapped Blower on his shoulder. He then glanced at Cape St. George on the horizon and noted a bright flame above and white smoke sliding down the superstructure as the ship charged forward. “Hey, check it out!”
Both officers watched a missile launched from the cruiser’s vertical launch tubes climb and streak ahead, picking up speed and altitude. Another bright fireball burst from the ship and followed the lead missile.
“They shot two — gonna knock that UAV down. Good,” Wilson said as they craned their necks and watched the white fingers of smoke continue their climbs.
“This is it, man. Holy shit,” Blower said, careful not to let the watchstanders hear the concern in his voice.
At the same time, 2,000 miles away in central China, two slender rockets burst from underground silos and climbed through an overcast sky. They increased speed, and, passing 40,000 feet, the second stage kicked in, lifting a sleek missile on a trajectory that would end in low earth orbit. When the motor stopped, the missile engaged its terminal phase seeker, and, using tiny thrusters, maneuvered toward an American military reconnaissance satellite. The second missile went for a satellite in the GPS constellation, higher above the earth but with plenty of inertia to get there. As the missiles closed in on their quarries, two more rockets were launched, and then another — and fifteen minutes later, another.
The first weapon clipped the edge of a KH-11 electro-optical satellite, and the force of the 250-pound intercept vehicle moving at 10,000 miles per hour obliterated the eyes and ears of the National Reconnaissance Office, transforming it into thousands of aluminum and steel pieces hurtling through space. In the next ninety minutes, over one dozen Chinese interceptor rockets knocked out a sizable portion the American ISR, communications, and GPS constellations, blinding American satellite reconnaissance and hindering satellite communications and navigation. Hundreds of thousands of PRC computer hackers were able to degrade the computer code of civilian communications satellites so they could not be co-opted for military use.
The Chinese were far from finished. From Hainan Island, four waves of DF-16s were launched within a three-minute time span from 20 transporter-erector-launchers along the coast. The ballistic missiles headed east across the South China Sea, and at an apex of 60 miles, just inside the atmosphere, the missiles were travelling at almost 4,000 meters per second. One by one they nosed over, and with preprogrammed maneuvers to throw off ballistic missile defense interceptor missiles, the warheads screamed in on their targets.
The former American airfields at Subic Bay International Airport, the former NAS Cubi Point, and the former Clark AFB, now known as Clark International Airport, were potential American staging bases and served as emergency airfields from attacks into the South China Sea. Hypersonic conventional warheads slammed into the concrete and asphalt runways, forming huge craters and rendering the airfields unusable for tactical aircraft. Other missile warheads, seconds from impact, opened up 3,000 feet above two fuel storage facilities at Cubi Point. Hundreds of cluster bomblets, forming a predetermined pattern as they fell from their canisters, whistled out of the sky and riddled the thin tanks with high explosive. With blinding flashes, two massive explosions bloomed on the Subic shoreline, breaking windows and knocking those within a mile off their feet. Secondary explosions set a moored bulk cargo ship afire and destroyed the POL offload pier near Olongapo, and flaming debris pelted the bay and surrounding jungle as two columns of dense black smoke lifted into the sky. Twenty-seven Filipinos perished in the Subic blasts, most of them stevedores on the wharf. At Clark, eight died from concussive causes, including a woman who suffered a heart attack.