M. P. Woodward
Red Tide
A Novel of the Next Pacific War
Also by M. P. Woodward
The Handler
Dead Drop
Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Jr.’s Shadow State
Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Jr.’s Line of Demarcation
Tom Clancy Jack Ryan Jr.’s Terminal Velocity
Dedication
For Stacia,
my love and my life
Epigraph
Let China sleep; when she wakes, she will shake the world.
LETTER TO THE READER
Esteemed Reader,
Before you proceed with the narrative contained herein, I wish to clarify some significant points. While I have tried to present naval units, ranks, and weapons systems accurately, the characters, events, and settings depicted in this work are entirely products of my imagination. They exist solely within the creative confines of this fiction and are not intended to represent, resemble, or portray any real individuals or occurrences. Please also note that for the sake of brevity, I have simplified some high-level command structures.
While fiction often reflects facets of reality, the content of this story remains firmly rooted in artistic invention and speculation.
Respectfully,
M. P. Woodward
PREFACE
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
President Reagan’s quote is framed in glass on a large display on the quarterdeck of the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier built at the tail end of World War II that is now a museum in San Diego. Reading the Gipper’s quote as I recently crossed Midway’s quarterdeck — something I’d once done as an ensign in Subic Bay — I experienced a ghostly chill. The quote felt oddly prescient. I hope it has the same effect on other visitors.
May we always remember that the carrier’s namesake, the Battle of Midway, turned the tide of World War II in an unlikely ambush on a superior Japanese task force, a blow from which Japan’s mighty navy would never recover.
Midway was, quite literally, a battle for the ages. Had it gone the other way in those dark days of 1942, America’s Pacific Fleet — already diminished at Pearl Harbor — would have been finished. With the loss of three U.S. Navy carriers, Japan would have taken Midway Island and built a base from which to threaten Hawaii, perhaps even California. The repercussions would have reverberated to the European theater, possibly closing the supply spigot of Lend-Lease that kept Russia and Britain hanging by a thread. An American-led liberation of Europe might never have happened.
Intriguingly, Midway’s historic pivot rested on several hit-or-miss chances: The location of the Japanese task force was based on a triangulation using unproven code-breaking intelligence; one of the three Pacific Fleet carriers, Yorktown, had been through a hasty round-the-clock refit shaved from an estimated three months to a paltry three days; and the fleet’s commander, Chester Nimitz, selected Raymond Spruance as task force leader to replace Bull Halsey, who was sidelined with shingles. An untested leader without flying experience, no one knew how Spruance would perform — least of all the aviators under his command.
In the battle’s initial stages, confusion reigned. American squadrons struggled to find the Japanese carriers. When they did, the Navy’s core air tactic — dive bombers flying high to distract enemy fighters while low-flying torpedo planes delivered the knockout blows — reversed itself because of timing errors. Sixty-eight brave men from three torpedo squadrons sacrificed their lives in doomed wave-skimming attacks because they’d arrived too early.
But somehow — through sheer luck, divine Providence, or flat-out grit — the Americans prevailed. It would take three additional years of heart-rending struggle for the Japanese to succumb, but there is little argument among historians that Midway had turned the tide.
Addressing reconstruction at the war’s end, 720 delegates from 44 nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1945. They agreed that henceforth the world’s oceans should be considered a “commons” available to all nations. Thus, the “Greatest Generation” assumed the mantle of maintaining a worldwide fleet, allies, and base architecture to protect the chokepoints and waterways known to naval professionals as the sea lines of communication.
The world has since flourished under the open-ocean policy decreed at Bretton Woods and enforced through American sea power. Wherever nations have participated in commerce enabled by free seas, economies have expanded, living standards have improved, and life expectancies have lengthened.
A chief beneficiary of the Bretton Woods system is the People’s Republic of China — though it took years for that to happen. The PRC was first forced to endure Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” which caused the worst famine in the world’s history, and his “Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution,” which purged the country of competent workers and leaders. Its next leader, Deng Xiaoping, turned to capitalism, heralding the shift in a visit to the United States in 1979.
America switched its diplomatic recognition from the “Republic of China” — an exiled government in Taiwan — to Deng’s PRC. In so doing, the U.S. government finessed the sticky relationship between the two Chinese governments in a “One China” policy. While guaranteeing peace under the congressional Taiwan Relations Act, the PRC was welcomed into the free-seas global trading system with open arms.
Mainland China flourished. Its ruler, the Chinese Communist Party, enjoyed decades of commercial expansion in what the International Monetary Fund has termed “the fastest economic growth in history.” Guarded by the One China policy, Taiwan also prospered, developing the semiconductor fabrication plants on which our technology economy now depends.
So, here we Americans sit, inheritors of the free seas catalyzed by the Battle of Midway. We have made much of those seas, efficiently allocating capital to far-flung factories, developing cross-border supply chains, and building merchant ships capable of carrying 12,000 tractor-trailer-sized containers — always under the aegis of the U.S. Navy.
While we preside over this peace and prosperity, an increasingly assertive China seeks exclusive dominion over the South China Sea, through which one-fifth of world trade flows. China militarizes reefs stolen from other countries, oversees the fastest naval buildup in history, and demands Taiwan’s return, threatening the global economy.
As Western civilization’s first historian, Thucydides, chronicled in his History of the Peloponnesian War, when a ruling power is challenged by a rising power, only the creativity, wisdom, and leadership of great minds can avoid a tragic war. Will we, inheritors of the free seas, be up to President Reagan’s challenge as memorialized on USS Midway’s quarterdeck?
That is what Red Tide is about. May God grant it remains a work of fiction.
Michael Patrick Woodward
Cle Elum, Washington
February 2025
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS