But, as newly named President Li Lau made clear, “The moral rot does not end with Enlai. No, it reaches much deeper into our government, and that includes the military. Painful though it will be, we must find each tendril of corruption and cauterize it, just as the ancient text, the Su wen, recommends.”
Few if any Chinese citizens were fooled. They knew Enlai had been assassinated. But they also knew that he was a profligate spender. That made the evidence against him all the more compelling. Plus, who in their right mind would go up against Li Lau? He was president now … And all powerful.
So more than a thousand public officials and military officers were fired, imprisoned, or “disappeared.” Among them was a Ministry of State Security official named Diu Zang, an MSS agent named Bo Ang, and Senior Captain Peng Ko’s commanding officer, Admiral Jinhai Wen. All of whom had been sent to work in the cavernous gypsum mine in Pingyi County, Shandong Province.
A development that left Ko, and his Chief Engineer Bohai Hong, free to employ the Sea Dragon as a semi-autonomous raider. And that’s what they were doing.
It was just past 0500 and the cruiser’s YJ-91 surface-to-surface missiles were almost within range of Singapore, which was located 252 miles to the southwest. Its port had been ranked as the world’s top maritime hub prior to 2005, when it was surpassed by the Port of Shanghai in China. Singapore’s container facilities alone boasted 50,000 feet of docks, 52 berths, and 190 quay cranes. Which was to say nothing of the terminals, warehouses, and other structures related to shipping.
Any other ship of the Sea Dragon’s size would have been identified by that time and attacked by Singapore’s modern navy. But the Sea Dragon wasn’t just any ship. Traveling at barely ten-miles-per-hour, the cruiser managed to creep into Singapore’s primary defensive zone with only her twin conning towers showing above the water. A stratagem that made the cruiser look like two fishing-boat-sized blips on Singapore’s radars. Blips like hundreds of others.
As for sonar, Singapore had both the money and the expertise to deploy a system similar to the U.S. Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), which made use of fixed arrays on the sea floor to track submarines as they approached Singapore.
But thanks to the Sea Dragon’s nuclear-powered waterjet propulsion system, she was as quiet as the submarines assigned to protect her, all three of which managed to penetrate Singapore’s outer defenses.
Captain Ko was eager to unleash the full weight of his arsenal on the enemy. The Sea Dragon’s primary target was the port’s container docks and cranes. But there were secondary objectives as well, including the Changi Naval Base, the Tuas Naval Base, and carefully selected government structures.
To whatever extent possible, civilians were to be spared. And for good reason. Nearly 75 percent of Singapore’s 5.6 million population were ethnic Chinese. A group that President Lau hoped to subsume after the war. A war which Lau was certain the Axis would win.
Present among Singapore’s Chinese population were hundreds of spies. And thanks to their efforts, cameras had been placed throughout the city, which meant Ko would be able to monitor the effects of his bombardment in real time via encrypted video feeds. The time had come. “Prepare to fire the railgun.”
“All indicator lights are green,” the gunnery tech replied ritualistically. “The railgun is ready to fire.”
Ko took a quick look at the faces around him. They were largely expressionless, the single exception being that of his executive officer Commander Shi. He was smiling. “Fire!”
The deck lurched as the popup railgun fired and sent a smart shell arching high into the air. No sooner had the first shell departed than another was loaded and sent toward a preprogrammed target. Death was falling from the sky.
***
Newly promoted Lieutenant (OF-2) Jev Jing was stationed in the CIC as the shells landed. As a result, he could see the screens and witness the devastation first hand when the first shell struck the container cargo terminal. The resulting explosion tossed pieces of wreckage high into the air, threw cranes to the ground, and destroyed a freighter.
The other shots were no less impressive as a shell scored a direct hit on a navy frigate, another plunged down through the roof of a submarine pen, and a third laid waste to the building where Singapore’s naval operations staff were headquartered.
And so it went. Nine shots were fired before the railgun’s barrel burned out. But the attack wasn’t over. Ko still had 150 individually targeted surface-to surface missiles to call upon, along with 50 anti-aircraft weapons, which the Sea Dragon could use to protect herself from planes.
The YJ-91s had a maximum range of about 75 miles, could be launched from ships and planes, and used against shore targets if necessary. Once in flight the supersonic weapons would travel at a speed of Mach 2.5 before slamming into their targets.
“Prepare to fire missiles 1 through 150 in sequence,” Ko ordered. “Fire!”
Jing could feel the deck shudder as missile after missile shot out of their vertical launchers and rocketed upwards before reorienting themselves for horizontal flight. Each weapon was traveling at roughly 1,900 miles-per-hour. That meant Singapore’s armed forces would have very little time in which to detect the incoming YJ-91 and intercept them.
Fortunately, Singapore was a wealthy state. Wealthy enough to buy and install Raytheon’s S-3 Interceptor system, which was designed to destroy short to intermediate range missiles. Rather than an explosive warhead the interceptor missiles were designed to “hit-to-kill.” A process which had been likened to intercepting a bullet with another bullet. And they worked.
But the magnitude of the incoming onslaught was beyond anything Singapore’s military planners had anticipated. And even though half of the Sea Dragon’s YJ-91s were intercepted, the rest struck their targets. As Jing watched the monitors, he witnessed dozens of hits on everything from warships, to power plants, and two of Singapore’s three
