Terminal Run

Throughout the heavens, missile trails began at the wings of the jets of the Jolly Roger squadron and descended in snakelike wiggles to the ships of the battle group While the JSOWs flew down to their targets, the Equalizer cruise missiles all turned to fly straight up over the ships of the fleet, then arced over and descended straight down from directly overhead-partly because antiair warfare was usually designed to defend to an angle of seventy degrees above the horizon, and partly so they would avoid interfering with the incoming JSOWs.

At zero three thirty-three Beijing time, ninety plasma-tipped American missiles sailed toward the ships of the Red Chinese formation, all of them supersonic, all of them unstoppable, and of the ninety, only one missed the intended target, its airframe crashing into the sea forty feet west of the frigate it had been aiming for. The others impacted within sixty-five seconds of each other, and during that minute the heavens rained down fire and brimstone upon the ships of Red Chinese Battlegroup Two. By zero three thirty-five, the attack was over. Only fourteen ships of the original sixty remained on the surface.

Sixteen minutes after the initial attack, twelve Vortex missiles coming in from deep beneath the surviving ships impacted. Twelve more explosions mushroomed over the darkness-made-daylight. The supply ships untargeted by the Jolly Rogers’ JSOWs and the Equalizer cruise missiles all vaporized or were blown to splinters. The surviving fourteen ships dwindled to a paltry two.

Commander Fuzzy Whitworth listened to the radio chatter on the way back. The overhead radar aircraft made a battle damage assessment for the admiral on the carrier. From what it sounded like, the attack had been a success. Whitworth was almost sorry there had been no Chinese Pandas to engage in a dogfight, but then, an easy ambush meant she and Baldy would live to fly another day. She lined up in sequence, the night still pitch-black as she descended on the glide slope to the deck of the John Paul Jones. She brought the heavy fighter in, hit the deck on the numbers and caught the tailhook on the arresting cable, and decelerated from 120 knots at full throttle to zero in a half second, her eyeballs wanting to leave her eye sockets. She taxied off the landing area and lifted the canopy and smiled at her maintenance chief petty officer, climbed out of the cockpit and walked into the island to the squadron room for the debrief.

The fleet oiler Taicang labored through the gentle seas, the mid watch routine as the ship steamed in formation with the battle group toward the Strait of Formosa. The deck officer on the bridge was a junior-grade lieutenant named Fang Xiou. He’d been qualified as deck officer for a year, but had spent much of his childhood in the water on his father’s fishing boat. If his father could see the bridge of the Taicang he would scoff at all the modern conveniences. Navigation by GPS satellite, phased-array surface search radar to see the distant shoreline and the closer blips of the ships of the formation, computer controlled high-resolution display screens showing the charts updated with the positions of the fleet’s ships, air-conditioning, and tilted polarized bridge glass with circular spinning glass sections that could see through heavy weather. The helm station looked like a prop from one of the Westerners’ science fiction movies.