“471, Deck, ready for numbers?” came Caveman’s voice, transmitting from the ship’s LSO shack radio.
“Send ’em.”
Caveman read off the ship’s course and speed, winds, pitch, and roll, then said, “You have green deck for one and one.” A device that looked like a traffic light stuck to the hangar emitted a flashing green light.
Victoria flew the helicopter smoothly over the deck of the destroyer and held it in place for a half second, waiting for her aircrewman’s verbal signal.
“In position.”
She waited for the ship’s rolls to settle, then lowered the collective lever with her left hand. The now-eighteen-thousand-pound aircraft floated vertically downward and into the trap.
“Beams coming closed. Trapped,” Caveman said. “Boss, Captain wants to see you.” The deck crew ran out to the helicopter, the sound of chains dragging along the flight deck as they ran in from either side of the rotor, tying down the aircraft, and placing chocks around each of the wheels.
The hangar door opened and the senior chief in charge of Victoria’s maintenance team appeared with a few of the ordnancemen next to him. He gave her a signal with his hand slicing across his neck—shut down.
“Something’s going on. I’m guessing they want to load weapons and they want us to shut down while they do it.”
The LSO confirmed her suspicions a second later. “Boss, Deck. Captain has them bringing torps your way. Senior’s asking you to shut down while they work.”
“Roger, Deck.” Then she said over the internal comms, “Spike, you have the controls. Let me get out of the rotor arc, then you handle the shutdown.”
“Roger, I have the controls.”
She unstrapped and opened her door, stepping out onto the deck, careful to balance herself as the ship rolled at high speed, sea spray spitting up and over the side of the ship and covering her tinted helmet visor as she walked. Inside the hangar, she saw several personnel rolling two MK-50 lightweight torpedoes on a pushcart towards the hangar door.
She walked through the ship and into the combat information center. The captain was there, chatting with the TAO as they looked at the tactical display in front of them.
The captain said, “Airboss, we need to catch you up. We just got a FLASH message. Here.”
FROM: CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS
TO: PACCOM
SUBJ: FLASH WARNING OF IMMINENT THREAT TO ALL US FORCES
1. DPRK MILITARY INVADED SOUTH KOREA AT 1900Z. ALL DPRK FORCES SHALL BE CONSIDERED HOSTILE UFN.
2. HOSTILITIES BETWEEN CHINA AND UNITED STATES CONSIDERED IMMINENT. ALL UNIT COMMANDERS SHOULD PREPARE FOR POSSIBLE CHINESE ATTACKS ON PACIFIC MILITARY AND STRATEGIC TARGETS, TO INCLUDE HAWAII AND GUAM.
“Oh my God.” Victoria read it twice. “Guam?”
The captain nodded his head. “We’re about one hundred and seventy miles to the east of Guam right now, but heading there fast. We think that’s where the mayday call came from.” There was a forlorn look on his face.
Victoria looked back and forth between the TAO and the captain. “You think it’s already begun?”
The captain said, “Yes. We think that the Chinese may have already begun their attack on Guam.”
Admiral Song watched as the two squadrons of Chinese J-15 fighters took off from the ski-jump-style carrier deck in pairs. Based on the Russian Su-33 fighter, the J-15 was capable of speeds close to Mach 2, had a range of fifteen hundred kilometers, and carried various weapons. The J-15 was the Chinese version of the Americans’ F-18 Hornet and was meant to perform the role of a fighter and attack aircraft.
Because of the ski-jump-style carrier deck, however, Chinese fighters had to take off with less fuel and ordnance in order to get airborne. This meant that they would need to refuel almost as soon as they took off, before continuing on their mission to Guam.
It was a gamble, Admiral Song knew. The fighters would have to travel a long distance, relegated to carrying a small payload. Because of the tight fuel constraints, any problem along the way could spell disaster. They wouldn’t be able to bingo to land-based airfields, since the mission was so far to the east. The only option was to refuel with the land-launched HY-6D tankers. A caravan of those refueling aircraft were scheduled to be at rally points along the route of flight between the Philippines and Guam.
Only two of the J-15s were equipped with anti-air weapons, while the rest were outfitted with air-to-surface weapons. The fighters would shoot down any American aircraft over the skies near Guam, assuming they could catch them off guard. Admiral Song worried about the lethality of US combat air patrols, especially their newer-generation F-22s. But considering that the island of Guam would be under the effects of China’s EMP, the Chinese fighters had a distinct advantage.
US anti-air batteries in the region had been targeted by submarine-launched cruise missiles over the past few hours, but battle damage would remain unknown prior to launch. Without American surface-to-air missiles, Song’s J-15 fighters would be able to target the airfields, submarines, ships, and military facilities at Guam, rendering them inert. With South Korea, Japan, and Guam bases removed from the American arsenal, the Chinese hold on the Western Pacific would be strong.
His only worry was the American Navy ships that had shown up on satellite imagery over the past twenty-four hours. Several destroyers, including one of the new Zumwalt-class ships, were traveling west towards Guam. He had a pair of attack submarines in the area, but those submarines needed to stay close to Guam to launch their cruise missiles at air defense targets first.
Admiral Song’s only hope was that his attack aircraft could hit their targets before the American Navy ships got in range with their surface-to-air missiles. For if they were close enough to the Guam airspace when his J-15 fighters were overhead, it would greatly jeopardize his mission success.
36
There were six Chinese-flagged merchant vessels in all. Each of them had departed from Guangzhou. They were filled with shipping containers. Steel rectangles of blue, red, green and white, neatly stacked several stories high. Most of them were empty.
Some held precious cargo.
The merchant vessels had formed up closer together as they approached the Hawaii island chain, each no farther than five nautical miles from the central ship. Dozens of men were out on the deck, moving fast. They had trained for this moment hundreds of times during their journey across the Pacific.
While an onlooker might mistake these men for typical merchant fleet deckhands, they were anything but. The members of a special-trained group of PLA missile men were opening a particularly important set of shipping containers. Those ones had removable ceilings, which were taken off and stowed for sea.
Inside of these shipping containers were specially modified mobile missile launchers. The launchers were normally attached to heavy-duty transport vehicles, but the front sections of these vehicles had been cut off so that the weapon systems could fit neatly into the shipping containers. There were dozens of different types of missiles on each of the merchants.
Some were WS-43 tactical cruise missiles, which could loiter for thirty minutes and receive a target while airborne. The launchers for these were actually already made to look like shipping containers and had needed minimal modification for sea transport.
Some were DF-12 ballistic missiles. These were the big ones. Most of these had large eleven-hundred-pound warheads installed, but a few were set up with cluster munitions. The latter would be used on runways.
But the merchants weren’t just carrying surface-to-surface missiles. On the fore and aft end of each merchant vessel, crews were setting up SAMs as well.