“Sir, our air defense systems are being jammed.”
“Admiral, very few of the American air-to-surface missiles scored hits. But now the Americans have confirmed targeting coordinates — they know where we are.”
“Sir, our fighters are engaged in aerial combat operations.”
The ship-to-ship missile volley would be next. Sure enough, “Enemy missiles inbound…”
“How many?”
“Sir, our escort destroyer is reporting the acoustic signature of an American attack submarine. The torpedo doors have been opened, Admiral.”
A rumbling thunder rocked the room. Alarm bells and whistles sounded, and he could hear screams in the distance.
The ship-launched missiles were numerous and lethal. Multiple hits on surface ships, including two on the other carrier. Lieutenant Suggs’s antiship missile scored a hit to one of the carriers, and a Los Angeles—class submarine finished it off with a torpedo.
It was only forty minutes into the battle, but the fuel the fighters had burned in dogfights and expended in evasive maneuvers was requiring many of them to land. The Ford was recovering at the same time as the lone remaining Chinese carrier. But now the Chinese carrier had to attempt to recover aircraft from its sinking sister ship. That was less of a problem, as many of the Chinese fighters had been shot down.
In the end, it became an operations management problem. Which nation’s fleet could go through a cycle of launch and recovery, of refuel and rearm, faster and without critical errors that would slow down the entire process? This was where the American training and decades of experience came into play, and where the electromagnetic catapult helped. The Chinese were still recovering aircraft when the next American wave hit.
Twenty more F-18s and F-35s flew in, now with the assistance of US Air Force assets. The Americans jammed Chinese air defense radar, divided up the targets, and fired their weapons. They scored over twenty more hits on ships, and two on the other carrier.
“Admiral Manning, the E-2 just updated the course and speed of the Chinese fleet. They’re moving west now, sir. And both carriers have been sunk.”
A few cheers in the room at that. Then one of the personnel at a computer terminal shouted to the battle watch captain, “Sir, we have an ESM hit. A Chinese periscope radar. It’s close, sir…”
29
Some things on a ship at sea seemed to move slow. Like the journey across an ocean. Waking up to the same blue water every day. The endless waves rocking the ship. The mindless routine.
These long periods could lull you to sleep or complacency, if you weren’t disciplined and strong in spirit.
Victoria Manning was both.
She was in the empty hangar that the ship had converted into a gym. Her arm muscles were burning as she finished a set of pull-ups. Sweat covered her body.
She had faced war on the sea. The loss of shipmates. The guilt that she hadn’t done enough to protect them. The feelings had nearly broken her. She allowed herself to internalize that despair and anguish. She had accepted it and grown stronger.
The pressure to protect her shipmates still weighed heavy on her heart, but she also allowed herself to believe in a peaceful future. She would see her family again soon. The war would come to a peaceful end, eventually. Life would be beautiful once again.
In a few days, they would be in Hawaii. She wondered if her father’s aircraft carrier would be in port. He had written her a kind email, saying how much he looked forward to seeing her, and how proud he was of her. He never spoke like that. The war was causing everyone to do and say things that they never would have otherwise.
She stood at the open hangar door, the sea breeze drying off the sweat from her body.
Then the 1MC announced, “Flight quarters, flight quarters. Now launch, the alert ASW aircraft.”
The hangars and flight deck came alive with people running. The gym hangar door shut quickly, and the other hangar door opened. The aircraft was brought out as Victoria got briefed by the TAO on the phone.
“We just got datalink connected. Still getting updates, but it looks like the Ford Strike Group has been fighting the Chinese near Midway for the past few hours.”
“Why are we launching? They must have dozens of helicopters.”
“Strike Group told us to. I think they have a lot of submarines that they’re hunting.”
Victoria realized that he was probably right. They had been hearing for days how the Chinese Northern Fleet was missing from the waters near Japan and thought to be headed towards Hawaii. If they sent the surface fleet, why wouldn’t they send their submarines to support it? There could well be dozens of them.
The TAO continued, “We’re about two hundred miles away, but the Ford Strike Group is headed south now, so we’re closing.”
She looked at the helicopter. They were unfolding the blades, and a torpedo was being rolled out onto the flight deck.
“We’ll be airborne as soon as possible.”
Later, she watched as the light on the back of the hangar went green.
“Beams open. Green Deck. Lift,” came the call from the landing signals officer, who was standing behind a thick glass window in front of her.
Victoria was squatting forward in her seat. She looked from side to side, checked her instruments, and pulled up on the collective lever. “Coming up.”
“Roger,” said her copilot. “Clear right.”
She watched the torque level on her instrument panel grow precipitously high. “Getting a few red cubes.” That was the problem with carrying this much weight.
“Should we burn fuel first?”
Victoria’s MH-60R helicopter was filled to the brim with antisubmarine warfare equipment. A dipping sonar, sonobuoys, and torpedoes. Radar, ESM, and FLIR. All the extra weight was pushing her engines to their limits. If she pulled too high on her collective lever, the power required to hover would exceed the power available. Something would have to give, and she knew what it would be. Her rotor would start slowing down as the aircraft’s power supply failed to turn it fast enough. When that happened, they would start sinking back down to the deck. And the harder she pulled up on the collective, demanding more power, the more she would exacerbate the situation. This was a problem because her landing spot was moving forward at fifteen knots, and the tail rotor also would slow down, meaning that her helicopter would likely begin spinning.
But World War III had begun, and she needed every bit of equipment they had on board the helicopter.
“Okay. Let’s just watch the rpms. Once I get up into the perch, we’ll have more airflow over the rotor disk. That’ll help.”
With her right hand, she eased the cyclic backward. The ten-ton metal beast inched aft. Her peripheral vision caught whitecaps on the deep blue ocean, and the imposing outline of the USS Michael Monsoor, the Zumwalt-class destroyer that was the flagship of their surface action group.
The green digital lines that represented her torque began to tick down as the helicopter crept further backward on the flight deck. The wind, which had been blocked by the ship’s superstructure when they were close to the hangar, was now whipping around the ship and flowing directly towards them. The ship was traveling at fifteen knots, and the wind was blowing at ten knots. Since the ship was headed directly into the wind, this effectively gave them twenty-five knots of speed over the rotor disk. For a helicopter, twenty-five knots made all the difference in the world.
With a flutter of the rotors, Victoria felt the helicopter go through its transitional lift — that critical speed where the aircraft transitioned from a hover to forward flight. She pulled up further on the collective, and the aircraft responded graciously by providing her more power, increasing altitude to a spot fifty feet above the flight deck, and just aft of it.