“Up!” Sergeant Collins barked. First Squad’s two fire teams — weapons raised and at the ready — advanced across front lawns on opposite sides of the street. Fire Team Alpha — Stephie, Burns, Scott, and Corporal Johnson — took the left side. Fire Team Bravo took right. Collins and the weapons team — Animal and Massera on the -60, and the two men with the all-threat missile launcher — advanced tree to tree down the sidewalks. The thirteen-man protective screen moved in formation around the exposed engineers and driver, but the going was tough for the infantry through the two-foot-tall grass.
At the next street corner, Stephie found cover behind a stone-walled flower bed. She had good fields of fire down the intersecting streets. She could fight from there. She liked her position. You just gotta look ahead for cover as you advance, she lectured herself. Her rifle barrel crackled through withered flowers as it traversed the junction they defended. John Burns plopped down beside her. “Hey,” Stephie whispered, “spread out!” But Burns ignored her and remained at her side.
There was movement to the left. John rushed that way, putting his body in Stephie’s line of fire, absolutely infuriating her. “Friendly!” Corporal Johnson called from the side street at the far left. “Friendly,” John repeated to Stephie.
“I know,” she replied, annoyed.
“I mean pass it down,” John said.
“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Friendly!” she called out in a loud whisper to Scott, the next person to her right. The warnings continued into the distance.
The arriving Second Squad joined up with them from the left. Stephie heard other calls of “Friendly!” from the right. Their entire platoon was gathering at their intersection.
“All right,” came Collins’s voice over the squad’s net — its Minimal Emission System — in Stephie’s right ear, “we’re pullin’ out. Secure your weapons. Safeties on!” There was a hint of urgency in his voice. They all rose, muscles aching, got in formation, and dressed right with Simmons at the far end of their rank.
“Squad leaders?” Staff Sergeant Kurth inquired.
He got one, “All-presn’t-an’-’counted-for, Staff Sergeant!” and three, “All present!” replies.
To be doubly sure, Kurth counted helmets with his trigger finger.
Stephie watched him closely. Don’t leave people behind, was her mental note.
The trucks, filled with street signs, pulled up from side streets. It was just like the dozens of field exercises that had filled Stephie’s four months in the army: playing soldier then waiting around for the trucks to arrive. The end to training was always waiting around. This exit, however, was hurried and quick.
There was a stirring among the twenty men and women as they climbed onto the trucks’ tailgates. Their attention was drawn to the dark street behind them. “What is that?” someone asked. Stephie heard nothing, but her skin began to crawl. “Mount up!” Kurth bellowed. Soldiers on the ground shoved the butts in front of them up into the trucks. A woman’s curse drew laughter. Packs were lobbed into the trucks’ rears. A fight almost broke out in Third Squad, and then Kurth — fists balled but remaining at his sides — almost pounded the two pissed-off guys. Adrenaline pumped through Stephie’s veins.
Light flashed in the treetops that formed their horizon like the headlamps of a turning vehicle. “Shit,” Peter Scott said in disgust. “Rain again.”
Stephie shook her head, “No,” absolutely terrified. Deep down, she had thought that they would never come. That something — some secret weapon — would stop them.
A low rumbling rose from the ground all around them. “Earthquake!” someone shouted. John Burns appeared at Stephie’s elbow.
The sonorous roar, emanating from a great distance, ascended in ten seconds to unbroken thunder. The southern horizon — the Gulf Coast — was on fire.
3
Lieutenant Wu stood in the darkened combat command center next to the fleet commander. On the screens, they watched thousands of inbound American missiles approach the first of a half dozen layers of fleet air defenses arrayed around the command ship. The sailors on the ship were nervous. All feared a secret American superweapon. Lasers and particle beam weapons were their favorite fears.
“Don’t worry,” the ship’s captain had said. The naval officer now stood on the bridge as they plied deep water a few hundred miles off the coast of southern Alabama surrounded by two hundred missile-firing surface combatants. Wu had descended into the bowels of the ship to the combat information center. “We’re not at risk from the enemy’s missiles,” the captain had pledged. “We can withstand anything that the Americans throw at us.”
But not so the exposed periphery of the fleet, which even now was entering the mouth of Mobile Bay.
The missiles approached slowly on the large, rectangular plasma display. But Wu knew that they streaked through the night sky at the large shapes of Chinese warships at supersonic speed.
“First missiles away,” the air defense coordinator announced.
New blips — these emanating from the rearmost ships in the fleet — appeared on the screen. The tiny specks of light flew northward to meet the American missiles. As the formation of Chinese missiles overflew the next ships to the north, more missiles were fired, adding dozens, and then hundreds to the wave. They numbered over a thousand by the time they reached the center of the screen. The center of the fleet. Wu felt the decks of the supercarrier shudder at a gut-shaking pitch. He grabbed onto the console but found the vibrations through his hands disturbing.
Television screens lit up with fiery rocket thrust from flat decks at the stern as the command ship added its fire to the fleet’s defense. Choppy reflected light danced off the black sea. On the screen, the wave of antimissile missiles, heading north, extended from one side of the fleet’s roughly circular formation to the other. One hundred miles from east to west.
“Where are our aircraft?” the fleet commander asked.
The radar technician punched a few buttons, and the screen was suddenly filled with a totally confusing clutter. Thousands upon thousands of new symbols — combat and electronic warfare aircraft and helicopters flushed from decks of ships now under attack — rendered the scene incomprehensible.
“Show only our air defense aircraft,” the old admiral — a contemporary of General Sheng’s — instructed. With a few more taps on the console, the technician removed hundreds of symbols.
The pattern was now much clearer. The navy’s combat aircraft flew in dozens of hundred-plane formations from the southeast and southwest. Although there were murmurs into microphones from dozens of stations all around the dimly lit nerve center, the large compartment seemed to Wu strangely quiet and surreal. It wasn’t like the war Wu had spent his childhood imagining. All the field training exercises he’d been through in military school had been cacophonous, noisy affairs. War was loud and messy: a furious tapestry woven of swirling bravery and violence.
“Thirty seconds to intercept,” the air defense coordinator announced calmly from his console next to the radar screen. Banks of television monitors toward which everyone turned showed huge missiles dropping from open bays of sleek fighter-bombers. There suddenly appeared several thousand additional Chinese missiles from the larger blips representing combat aircraft. “Naval air wing commander reports missiles away,” came the matter-of-fact voice. “Repeat. Missiles away. Timed on target. Joint strike combined time to intercept: twenty seconds. Long live the glory of China.”