Six kilometers away, the flight’s trailing two MiG-35s split past each other and then banked back hard as they raced toward the center of an imaginary X. That X was located in the middle of the largest U.S. Marine Corps base in Japan. The nine thousand Marines living there were supposed to have been moved to Guam five years earlier. But political wrangling between Congress and the Japanese government over just who would pay the $8.6 billion tab to relocate the Marines had delayed the transfer of forces. Time had run out.
The two planes passed each other at less than a hundred meters. At the imaginary point of their crossing lines, the MiGs dropped four KAB-1500S thermobaric bombs, each weighing just over thirteen hundred kilograms. The bombs opened to release a massive cloud of explosive vapor, which was then ignited by a separate charge. It was the largest explosion Japan had experienced since Nagasaki, and it left a similar mushroom cloud of smoke and dust hanging over the base as the jets flew away.
Denisov finally turned off the spoof audio recording and ordered his flight to report in. The strikes on the air bases, the ground bases, and even the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier harbored offshore had been a success. He’d lost only five jets to the late-reacting air defenses. Amazing.
He wasn’t sure the Americans would appreciate the irony of the Russians following the plan of attack the Americans had used on the Japanese some eighty years earlier, but Plan Doolittle had worked. Trying to conceal the relief in his voice, he ordered the remaining fighters to bank toward the Chinese coast.
That was the other part they’d copied from the raid the Americans had pulled back in the early months of their previous war in the Pacific: by coming in from an unexpected approach and making it a one-direction flight, they could strike at twice the range the enemy believed possible. The Russian navy had held up its end; now it had to trust that the Chinese aerial refueling tankers would be there as promised.
The raid wasn’t Denisov’s idea, but neither had the original raid back in World War II been Jimmy Doolittle’s idea. Maybe, he thought, history would call this one after its commander as well; Denisov’s Raid had a nice ring to it.
USS Coronado, Joint Base Pearl Harbor — Hickam, Hawaii
From the deck of the Coronado, Horowitz saw a sudden ripple in the water where the REMUS had turned, almost like what a fly fisherman would take for a fish rising. It made him pause, then he focused on firing at the threat. The shell casings bounced off the deck and into the water, sizzling as they floated for a brief moment and then sinking beneath the surface.
“REMUS is coming back around, sir,” said Jefferson on the bridge. “What now?”
“I want you to ram it up that diver’s ass,” said Simmons.
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Jefferson gently nudged the joystick to the right and then the left, centering the diver on the screen. Then he throttled it to full speed.
On deck, Horowitz’s M4 clicked; his magazine was empty. Without looking, Horowitz reached into the pouch attached to his belt for another magazine and tried to slam it into the rifle, but his last mag slipped from his hands into the water. Thirty rounds that could have made the difference were lost.
Horowitz cursed at the water as only a sailor could but stopped when he saw a fast-moving shape coming toward the ship. Great; not just terrorists but torpedoes now!
The underwater view was projected onto the REMUS control station. The diver was in the midst of attaching the mine to the hull when some sixth sense warned him what was coming. He turned his head to look over his shoulder. The last picture on Jefferson’s video screen was the diver’s surprised expression behind the goggles, just before the REMUS smashed into his left jaw and then plowed into the ship’s hull behind him.
On deck, Horowitz felt the crunch of the REMUS impact and then saw a roaring wall of white water flash up. And then silence.
Ruby Empress, Gatún Lake, Panama Canal
Arnel Reyes picked at a flake of black paint from the rail of the Ruby Empress, a Cyprus-flagged oil tanker.
“I like blue, you know, like the sky in the afternoon, and as a little boy, he will love it,” said his wife. Arnel wanted to say that neither a newborn baby nor a full-grown man could care less about wall colors. But it was best to humor her with all the love he could scrape up, especially given that he was standing on the deck of a ship in the Panama Canal and she was back home in Manila.
“Blue it is, my love. I’ll be back in two weeks and we can paint for him then,” he said. “We’ve got plenty of time, you know.”
“There’s not enough time with you gone. There’s just so much to do. And we haven’t even talked about his name,” Anna-Maria said over the phone. “Baby, I know your mother thought —”
Then the call dropped.
He worried Anna-Maria would think he’d hung up on her, but when he tried to reconnect, the call wouldn’t go through. He put his phone back in his pocket and leaned away from the hot deck rail. It didn’t help his mood that the transit through the Panama Canal was the slowest part of the trip, since ships had to wait in line to make their way through the canal locks.
As Reyes climbed back up the series of ladders, he heard the commotion on the Ruby’s bridge. Everything was squared away aboard the ship, but the radios were alive with traffic. Two ships ahead, the Xianghumen, a Chinese-flagged freighter, had turned on its engines. This was craziness. What was Xianghumen’s captain thinking, speeding up inside the transit zone? The canal master was screaming over the radio for the Xianghumen to acknowledge and stop. But there was no reply.
Reyes ran topside to see. It was like watching a slow-motion train wreck. The Xianghumen was moving at a mere four knots, slower than a jog. But with a hundred and twenty thousand tons of force behind it, the ship slowly ground its way into the canal locks, crushing the doors inward.
Reyes wasn’t sure how long it would take the Chinese companies that ran the Panama Canal Zone to fix this mess, but their investment had clearly gone down the tubes.
“Well, it’s not my hundred and eighty billion dollars,” said Reyes to one of the crew, who chuckled in reply.
In any case, the highway between the oceans was likely going to be closed for a while. He reached into his pocket. He’d better try to call his wife again.
USS Coronado, Joint Base Pearl Harbor — Hickam, Hawaii
When Horowitz came to, he was floating on his back in the water. A broken shard of yellow metal drifted a few feet away, and just beyond that was the diver’s body, floating face-down.
He looked up at the Coronado, trying to remember how he’d gotten here. His ears rang and his head ached worse than any shore-leave hangover. He saw the XO looking down at him from the bridge. He saluted the officer from the water, and the XO smiled and saluted back.
A launch pulled Horowitz and the black-clad body out of the water. The sailors hauled him aboard with smiles, but they handled the body with fear.
The launch stopped beside the Coronado and the diver was carried up to the helicopter deck at the stern. Horowitz scrambled up after it and joined the small crowd that had quickly gathered around the body. They all spoke quietly around the dead diver, as if worried their voices might revive him.