“Foxtrot Bravo, this is Foxtrot Sierra. All known Chinese subsurface contacts in the vicinity have been destroyed, over.”
Plug and the chief looked at each other in gleeful disbelief. “Did he just say what I think he said?”
The chief nodded, a look of surprised elation on his face.
“This is Foxtrot Bravo, roger out,” answered the strike group battle watch captain on the radio.
The phone rang and Plug picked it up. It was SUBS, giving him the five-second version of events per the commodore’s direction. “Two Los Angeles — class and one Virginia-class submarine are in the area. Their location is above the Secret level and that’s why you weren’t notified during your intel brief.”
Plug rolled his eyes at that comment. “And what, they just sunk them all?”
“Yes. They had located four Chinese submarines and were silently tracking them for the past few days. When the F-18 was reported shot down, the commander of the Pacific Fleet told his forces to designate all Chinese military units as hostile. It didn’t take our fast-attacks long to do the rest. I have to go, it’s still busy here. We think we got all of the Chinese submarines in the area, but we can’t be sure.”
“SUBS, good job.”
“Yup.” He hung up the phone.
John Herndon, the Desron’s future operations officer, entered the room, looking up at the tactical display.
“What happened with the submarines?”
“SUBS said that our fast-attacks sank four of them.”
“Just like that?”
“That’s what he said.”
Herndon nodded up to the displays at the front of the room. “Looks like one of them was pretty close to us.”
Plug followed his gaze and saw a new red icon labeled “Sunk SUB.”
Herndon said, “That’s less than five miles from us. We must have been his target.”
No one spoke for a moment, and things just got a lot more real in Plug’s mind. Holy shit, he’s right.
“Commodore wants me to check on the F-18s going after the merchant ships.”
Plug said, “They haven’t reported in yet, but they should be in weapons range now.”
“Have the F-18s updated the ship locations in datalink?”
“Yes, why?”
“What are you waiting for? Why haven’t you directed fire on the merchants yet?”
“What do you mean? I thought that the F-18s—”
“What are the F-18s armed with?”
“I don’t know…”
“What if they miss, or run out of munitions? Come on, Plug, you don’t just use one weapon, use a bunch. If we have updated coordinates on the merchants, use everything at your disposal. Use the ships, man.”
Plug felt like he was in over his head. “How?”
The young lieutenant said, “I suggest that you request permission for some of the destroyers to fire anti-ship missiles at the merchants.”
“I’m supposed to do that?”
“My guess is that the captains of those ships are cursing us right now for wasting time.”
Just then, the commodore barreled into the room, glaring at Plug, and snatched up the radio handset. He spoke fast and used terms that Plug wasn’t familiar with.
A few seconds later, the tactical display began filling with high-speed air tracks. Anti-ship missiles, lifting off the four ships the commodore had just ordered to begin firing.
Suggs banked his aircraft to the left and dove to one thousand feet. He looked at his display just forward of his stick. They didn’t have the ships on FLIR, but the data on his display told them that they had a targeting solution all set up. He wasn’t totally sure. He had never fired one of these weapons before.
“It’s okay,” the duty officer told him. “She had the training,” he said, pointing to his rear-seater at the woman who was in charge of the aircraft’s weapons systems. “And besides, you’re not really going to fly, you’re just an alert.” This deployment was totally screwed up.
He hoped that they were staying far enough away and low enough that they could avoid surface-to-air missiles. He had been told by the duty officer on the air wing’s frequency that the Ripper flight ahead of him had been shot down. “Look for a chute or survivor in the water when you’re done,” he had said.
Suggs felt a swell of anger at the idea that some of his old squadron mates were now dead at the hands of Chinese missiles. But he quickly forced the thought out of his mind. He had to compartmentalize. To lock up his emotion into a box and set it aside. Now wasn’t the time.
“Almost ready,” said the naval flight officer in the rear seat. Suggs had only just met her earlier today. She outranked him, but she was also kind of cute. Why was he thinking about this now? Why couldn’t he compartmentalize that thought? He checked his heading, making a minor correction. It wouldn’t be fraternization. It wasn’t like they were in the same squadron. Maybe…
“Bruiser away,” she said, then a split second later, “Bruiser two away.”
Dark, futuristic shapes dropped from each wing mount, ignited, and shot out down and ahead of the fighter, speeding towards their prey.
The Chinese missile commander on the lead merchant ship was nervous now. Things weren’t going fast enough. His men still needed five more minutes before they were ready to launch the ballistic missiles, and another twenty before they were within range of the cruise missiles. One of the air defense teams aboard the ship next to him had fired at an American fighter jet overhead, hitting it. He was happy to see that their training had paid off, resulting in a kill. But now the Americans would know that they were here. It would only be a matter of time until…
“Sir, our air defense team reports multiple air contacts inbound. Two appear to be American fighters — we classify them as FA-18s. They’re just outside our surface-to-air missile range. But…”
The man stopped speaking. His eyes widened as he pointed to the horizon.
The commander turned to look where he was pointing. The small dark shapes skimming the water were moving too fast to see as they ran into the northernmost merchant ship. But what was clearly visible was the enormous cargo vessel erupting into a geyser of water and metal.
The missiles that the F-18s had fired were the brand-new long-range anti-ship missiles developed by DARPA. With the modernization of the Chinese navy, the Pentagon had needed a new air-launched anti-ship missile. DARPA had been working on it for years, and the SILVERSMITH team had ensured that the USS Ford received some of these high-tech weapons.
The long black missiles were fired from over seventy miles away and skimmed the surface of the ocean as they headed to their targets at just under the speed of sound. Their stealthy design made them almost invisible to radar.
The pair of F-18s carried two of the weapons each. The four missiles raced along the ocean and targeted four separate ships. Each one impacted its target in the center of the hull, just above the waterline, and the one-thousand-pound warheads exploded on impact. The four massive merchant ships began filling with water, their hulls not designed to withstand military ordnance. Within minutes, they were sinking.
Suggs tuned up the frequency for his controller, asking if they wanted him to perform strafing runs on the remaining two merchant ships.
“Negative, Ripper flight, remain clear. Additional strike inbound from the surface ships. Request you make a high pass in five mikes to obtain BDA.” Battle damage assessment. They wanted him to make sure all of the merchants had been destroyed.
“Wilco,” he replied.
Five minutes later, he brought his fighter up in altitude and overflew the target zone as his weapons systems officer manipulated the FLIR to show the surface picture.