Men of War (2013) (45 page)

Pyongyang
had responded to the rising tension in typical fashion by setting its military
on high alert. The tiny starving enclave of repressive hegemony in the north
fielded the world’s fourth largest standing army, with over a million men under
arms on active duty at any given time and another eight million in reserve.
With 1000 ballistic missiles, including a handful that could reach the west
coast of the US, 5400, tanks, 2600 AFVs, 1600 SPGs and MLRS systems, its ground
forces were a snarling dog on a thin leash that stretched all the way back to
Beijing.

The
“incident” was  another grim reminder to the US that if it wished to rush
to honor two existing mutual defense treaties with Japan and Taiwan, it would
soon find the ante upped and have South Korea to worry about as well. The
ravenous North was only too happy to oblige, with its massive armed forces all
dressed up and with only one place to go. It was going to be a very long day in
the situation room of the White House deep underground bunker.

* * *

The
long line of warships sailed east, past the submarine base where SSN
Kazan
had slipped away hours earlier, then northeast into the Sea of Okhotsk. Karpov
was taking the fleet north of Hokkaido Island, to the one Russian controlled
channel there south of
Aniva
Bay, Sakhalin Island. It
would be a long day’s sailing at 25 knots, and they timed the transit to occur
at midnight the following day. There the Japanese watch post at
Wakkanai
at the northern tip of Hokkaido would surely spot
the ships, and relay the count to JDF Headquarters in Tokyo.

A
Kawasaki P-1 Maritime Patrol aircraft was already up from Misawa airfield,
Japan’s new replacement for the aging US P-3s. It was a sophisticated new
surveillance plane, with advanced signals processing capability and new
Artificial Intelligence to advise the Tactical Coordinator (TACCO) on best
intercept course plots for its alternate role as an ASW strike aircraft. Ten
such planes had been procured, giving the Japanese good coverage along the long
archipelago of islands that they now controlled. With range just shy of 5000
miles the planes had excellent endurance for the surveillance role it was
tasked with that night. It could sit over Hokkaido Island safe in Japanese
airspace and use its excellent AESA radar to watch the ominous procession of
warships to the north.

The
fleet continued due east in the Sea Of Okhotsk for yet another day, making for
the wide channel south of Urup Island in the Kurile chain. By day the skies
above the flotilla were patrolled by pairs of MIG-29s off airfields in the
Kuriles. By night the ships would deploy their own helicopters in wide arcs
around the main formation to keep a wary eye out for submarines. Nothing was
seen or heard, and no challenge was mounted from Japanese naval or air forces.
They had enough on their hands with the angry dragon they had roused from its
long slumber, and were content to watch from a respectful distance as Karpov
led the fleet out towards the deep blue of the Pacific. It was soon clear to
them that this flotilla of formidable warships was hastening to join the
Russian
Admiral Kuznetsov
carrier group already operating in the waters
off the southern tip of Kamchatka. That force was now heading southwest towards
the Kuriles to effect a rendezvous.

South
of the Japanese mainland, the wayward brother ship of
Kuznetsov
, sold
off and adopted by the Chinese years ago,
had already deployed from
Dalian naval base and was poised to enter the Yellow Sea. The tickling alarm
clock had run the course of the forty-eight hour ultimatum set by the People’s
Republic of China, and there had not been such a breathless, agonizing wait
since the countdown to the launching of the first Gulf war over 30 years ago in
August of 1990.

In
that war and the Second Gulf War against Saddam that followed it ten years
later after 9/11, the absolute superiority of Western air and ground forces had
been brutally established. Only the long asymmetric guerilla war fought by the
radicalized
Islamics
had proved again that the modern
world was not an age of conquest and occupation. American forces left Iraq and
Afghanistan with little to show for the billions in dollars and the thousands
of dead and wounded soldiers who fought there. It was not like WWII, where the
United States had decisively joined the Allies to defeat two major world powers
and liberate over ten nations that had been overrun by the enemy, and did so in
only four years. No, in the early 21st century America fought for nearly 15
years in Afghanistan, and then left it much as they had found it. Two years
after the last troops pulled out the Taliban were back to business as usual.

This
time it was not American troops deploying from their homeland to a far distant
and hostile shore. This time it was forces of a coalition that now spanned half
the land mass of the world, the SinoPac alliance between China and Russia that
had been signed in the year 2020. The Dragon and the Bear had settled their
differences, agreed on mutual economic development of the vast untapped
resources of Siberia, where China’s hungry manufacturing economy was to be fed
by the oil, timber, and metals there, and Russia would be flooded with the
finances it so desperately needed to get back to the glory days when it had
been a dominant player on the world stage.

The
fear of imminent war was circling the globe, and when Taiwan issued a joint
resolution by both the executive and legislative
Yuans
formally declaring independence a quiet hush settled over the region. Mainland
China had their answer. Washington grimaced at the announcement, failing to
prevent it by diplomatic arm twisting that had gone on for the last 24 hours.
Taiwan was calling the Dragon’s bluff, and whistling for the hounds to come to
its aid, invoking its longstanding mutual defense treaty with the US.

Washington
had walked a careful tightrope stretched between the island and the Chinese
mainland since 1955. On the one hand they pledged to defend Taiwan from outside
aggression, while on the other they threw a bone to the People’s Republic by
inserting careful language into the treaty upon its ratification: “
It is the
understanding of the Senate that nothing in the treaty shall be construed as
affecting or modifying the legal status or sovereignty of the territories to
which it applies.”

It
suited the US for decades to favor both Japan and Taiwan with promises of
military aid and support in exchange for bases and allied states that would
help America contain the great Dragon of the East. But now the Chinese had
finally gone to sea, building a navy that would allow them to project real
power there.

Tonight
that navy was also moving. Amphibious ships were slipping away from their quays
and piers, escorted by fast new frigates, China’s new destroyers formed up in
flotillas in the vanguard of these task forces, and a host of silent submarines
crept out from the long coastline. They were all bound for the contested choke
points and routes of approach to the region, the first trip wire that any
intruder would have to face.

Back
on the mainland hundreds of aircraft were queuing up at the military airfields,
ready for takeoff, some sleek and stealthy, already climbing into the night
with missiles hidden within their sculpted bellies, others more conventional,
with their wings heavy with bombs and other ordinance. At locations all over
the mainland coastline thousands of mobile ballistic missile launchers emerged
from hidden caves, bunkers, and tunnels and their blood red noses lifted slowly
toward the silver moon. A cold “East Wind” was about to blow as the deadly
Dong
Feng
missiles prepared for launching. There were
over 1100 DF-11 and DF-15 missiles available for land based targets and a
another thousand older tactical missiles. With these were up to 200 of the
deadly DF-21 ship killers like those that had hit a bull’s eye and ravaged the
Japanese helicopter carrier DDH
Hyuga
in the
recent hot engagement over the Senkaku / Diaoyutai Islands.

Lt.
Commander Reed had explained it as a game of darts and arrows to the White
House Chief of Staff Leyman, but it was about to become a very real nightmare.
Signals intelligence and satellites were watching it all with tense alertness
while a great debate raged in the White House Situation Room: should the United
states preemptively attack and destroy China’s intelligence and GPS satellite
network?

While
they were talking about it 2nd Lieutenant Matt Eden at US NAVINTEL saw
something very interesting on his own spy satellite monitoring station at Hawaii.
Satellite NROL-50 picked up the obvious back flash of three missiles being
launched from
Shuangchengzi
Space and Missile Center
and Eden quickly reached for his alert phone.

“Deep
Black Ten reporting. Red One, Red One, Red One,” he said three times quickly.
“I have back flash on three Red Arrows out of Sierra-Mike-Charlie, confidence
high. Do you copy?”

“Roger
that Deep Black Ten, Red One, three times. Will confirm.”

Hot
damn I hope they move on this one in a hurry, he thought, because one of those
bad boys could be coming up after my NROL-50. NORAD, STRATCOM, and J-SOC, the
Joint Space Operations Center, would be all over this as well. They surely
picked up that back flash on infrared and know what’s coming. If he was going
to have to move his bird he need confirming radar and SIGINT on the missiles,
and a clear line on their presumed orbital entry point and threat vector.
Satellites were killed by simply putting an infrared seeking warhead into orbit
for what would end up looking like a collision of two particles in an
accelerator. The warhead would take an orbital path retrograde to that of the
target satellite and come flashing in to collide with it at over 18,000 miles
per hour.

So
while the West discussed the matter and debated the relative merits of this and
that, the East acted. All that came before in the Senkaku Island group was just
an overture. The three missiles Eden had spotted were now the opening salvo of
a war that might indeed be the one to end all others, but they would be the
last he would see.

Far
below, in the rugged mountains of Xinjiang province, two well camouflaged
concrete doors slowly opened and a ‘device’ resembling a massive searchlight
slowly emerged from a deep hidden cave bunker and rolled out on two thin rails.
It rotated, angling its massive circular shape to the sky as if it were an
enormous telescope peering into the heavens. Seconds later a powerful laser
fired, its intense beam vanishing into the heavens above. The Dazzle Gun had
just blinded Matt Eden’s satellite eyes.

Chapter 35

Karpov
stood on the bridge of
Kirov
, watching the sun rise over the wide
Pacific. They were right on its doorstep, just passing through the channel
south of Urup Island, some 250 miles northeast of Hokkaido. He was peering through
his binoculars, north to the rising cone of the island where the long sleeping
volcano called the Demon was slowly rousing from its slumber. A Holocene
stratovolcano with no known historic eruptions, it had begun stirring with
fitful dreams that shook the region with a spate of earthquakes over the last
month, and now a geologic watch was posted. The Demon was awakening.

 Up
ahead he could see the three lead ships of his formation. The new frigate
Admiral
Golovko
led the way, with the superb new destroyer
Orlan
cruising in
her wake. Then came the heart of his surface action group. The old cruiser
Varyag
of the
Slava
Class was beyond its prime but still a potent threat with
sixteen supersonic P-1000
Vulkan
cruise missiles that
could range out to 700 kilometers. It was the last ship in the fleet that would
use that older missile. The ship also carried sixty-four of the same S-300 long
range SAMs that
Kirov
used so effectively to savage the air forces of
Britain, the United States, Italy and Japan on her mysterious sorties to a
distant past. No one on
Varyag
knew any of that, and her Captain
Myshelov
was more than happy to look over his shoulder now
and see the fleet’s most powerful surface ship at his back.

Kirov
was last in the main line, wounded but up and running again, the hull patch
holding well in the open seas and the ship’s speed good at a steady 25 knots.
Fresh new missiles were loaded in the underdeck silos, twenty Moskit–II
Sunburns, ten
Mos
-III Hypersonic Starfires and ten
more P-900 cruise missiles—more than twice the firepower of the
Varyag
.
Karpov had taken his tail of four older
Udaloy
Class destroyers and sent
two to either side of this main formation as screening ships.
Marshal
Shaposhnikov
and
Admiral
Tributs
were off the port side, and
Admiral
Vinogradov
and
Admiral
Panteleyev
off the starboard side.
Deep beneath the sea ten submarines were fanning out in a protective arc as the
fleet prepared to make its rendezvous with
Admiral Kuznetsov.

Rodenko
reported an air contact just ahead and coming in at high speed, but there was
no alarm. It was a flight of three Mig-29s and a single SU-33 in a low diamond
formation flying in tribute to the new King of the Northern Pacific, Vladimir
Karpov. The planes came in low, the sun gleaming off their swept back wings,
the long white contrails lacing through the blue morning sky. The roar of the
flyby was followed by cheers from the men on deck, who waved excitedly at their
comrades in the sky. The three
Migs
then turned their
noses sharply up and created a wide fan as they splayed apart in the climb, and
the sole SU-33 kept strait on, saluting with a wag of its wings.