Choke Point

“You heard anything from him that we don’t already know?”

“No, sir. He’s missing.”

“Missing? I thought he would have been up in the island.”

“He was, Mr. President — over by the bridge’s starboard wing lookout. Word is, the force of the explosions flung them both overboard. Apparently, the lookouts on the fantail suffered the same fate. Rescue helos he’d sent out earlier to pick up any Utah survivors hadn’t yet returned to the Turner. Anyway, it was pitch-dark.”

“They would have been wearing life jackets, though,” said the President.

“The two lookouts at the stern, yes, sir, but I don’t know about the admiral.”

A sky-blue folder with the presidential seal, containing a thick pile of pages, was placed in front of the President. On the first of the 230 pages was the heading CVN TURNER — PERSONNEL. There were six thousand names, a quarter of them asterisked with either KIAor MIA. The very battle group he’d intended to use to prevent a war in Asia, in a world already at war against terrorism, now lay immobile in the Juan de Fuca Strait. And for one overwhelmingly simple reason: the proudest and most powerful navy in the world had been grievously wounded and humiliated by a bunch of mines, weapons that, the U.S. mining of Haiphong notwithstanding, elicited the kind of contempt in naval officers as that accorded a backshooter in the Old West.

“If terrorists can sink two of our capital warships before we can even reach our littoral seas,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s editorial, “what possible defense can we expect from the Navy?”

US SUB SUNK was the less erudite but more effective verdict of the tabloids.

As first editions hit the street on the East Coast, it was 3:00 A.M.

in the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca, where the rescue effort of hundreds of small boats, together with a dozen U.S. Coast Guard patrol vessels and Canada’s two coast guard cutters, had begun.

Mayhem quickly followed in the wake of good intentions, as congested sea traffic, strong tides, and fog combined to endanger the would-be rescuers. Indeed, the fog was so thick that it obscured even the monolithic carrier, which, with her power cut, the gash in her side expanding till it was now over eleven feet wide, seemed beyond saving. The crippled leviathan’s aft section, from Elevator 4 to stern, looked to Admiral Bressard as if it would detach itself from the rest of the ship at any moment. The bone-grinding sounds of more bulkheads giving way, mingled with the cries from sick bays now rendered useless as air flows in the carrier — superheated by burst steam pipes leading from the reactors — made it necessary to bring hundreds of the wounded, many already suffering from severe scalding, up onto the forward flight deck. There, as corpsmen and other medics performed triage, surgeons did what little they could under the circumstances, the navy chaplains all but overwhelmed administering last rites. And yet, as the CNO and everyone else knew, there had been no battle in the strait — no enemy sighted.

During the massive if largely ad hoc rescue effort, which the media was referring to as “America’s Dunkirk,” the Turner’s captain, like all his fellow commanders in the CVBG, were ordered by the CNO to remain in DEFCON — Defense Condition—1. Maximum force readiness.

“Cautious,” said the New York Times.

“Scared,” said Le Monde.

Everyone on the remaining ships of the CVBG was increasingly nervous following the fate of Utah and Turner. It seemed that both the Times and Le Monde were right, the ships not daring to proceed through the strait for fear of three possibilities that Aegis analysis sensors now suggested but could not confirm: simultaneous detonation of five mines, two against Utah, three against Turner, either combinations of pressure/acoustic mines or coil rod induction fused bottom mines; a much more advanced, highly sensitive and comparatively cheap triple-axis fluxgate magnetometer- triggered mine; and finally, that the Utah and the Turner had been blown up by sensor mines measuring the electric current sent into the sea by the electrochemical reaction generated when steel hulls slice through iron-rich salt water. This latter type of targeting, however, was considered least likely by the Aegis electronic warfare officers, given the presence of the anechoic coating on the Utah, which would have minimized the metal/seawater electrochemical reaction.

For the Pentagon, the question of what type of mines had been used against the two warships was crucial to any planned defense in the future, because obviously neither of the comparatively sophisticated underwater defense systems aboard Utah and the Aegis cruisers had worked.

All right, the CNO asked, but what or who had laid the mines? A “mini” or “midget” sub? If mines had been laid from an unmanned mini, where was the mini being controlled from? All U.S. and Canadian submersible companies had been cleared. And if it had been a manned mini or midget sub, then where was its “milch cow,” its mother supply ship?

Amid the winking of scores of rescue boat lights in the mist-shrouded strait, the sailors, offloading wounded into a Coast Guard cutter, saw one of the lights for a second become as bright as a struck match. It was the backblast of a missile streaking toward the huge gash on Turner’s aft port side. The speed of the missile registered by the computers on the Aegis nearest Turner was Mach 1.9, which meant it reached the already gravely wounded carrier in.3 seconds, the blink of an eye. Even so, the Aegis’s Phalanx close-in weapons system, with its state-of-the-art, superfast radar-guided response, did intercept. It was disastrous however, the impact of the incoming missile and outgoing 20mm ordnance resulting in a fiery rain of white-hot debris that showered Turner’s island, knocking out its cluster of vital antennae and radar dishes. For this reason, a second missile, fired a millisecond later, was able to disappear into the cavernous V cut, exploding at the waterline. Six minutes later the order was given to abandon ship. She would not hold.

At 0431 the 95,000-ton carrier, tow lines attached, began a twelve-second death roll to port. Two tugboats — one out of Vancouver, the other from Seattle — were unable to release their lines quickly enough. One was dragged under, and the other, its line already taut, whipped through the air like a toy as the Turner’s stern inverted, the oceangoing tug slamming into the carrier’s prop like a box of matchsticks, the tug’s crew flung into the maelstrom of the carrier’s immense propellers.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

From China’s coast province of Fukien, the PLA’s sixty Xian H-6 medium bombers that attacked the offshore Nationalist island of Kinmen, about one-eighth the size of Rhode Island, did not come directly from the west, as expected. Following the PLA’s thousand-gun artillery assault, a prelude to what Kinmen’s Nationalists anticipated would be the invasion, the ChiCom bombers, augmented by 120 Q-5 ground attack aircraft and protected by three hundred-plane swarms of PLA Shenyang J-5 Fresco interceptors, flew south of Fukien, not east toward Kinmen.

The ChiCom pilots, using their own hilly Amoy Island, ten miles directly west of Kinmen, as a screen, turned their fighter-protected bombers westward in a sixty-mile crescent, sweeping in low over the arc of Liaolo Bay on the island’s forty-mile-long southern coast, thus attacking the Nationalists’ heavy fortifications on the island’s northern shore from behind. Only now did Taipei and Washington realize that the fast Chinese attack boats, seen earlier on SATPIX as white scratches heading east from the Chinese mainland, had been a feint, making the Nationalists on Kinmen think the ChiCom fast attack patrol boats were the forward elements of a head-on invasion of the island from the west. This had duped the Nationalists on Kinmen to rush the bulk of their north coast garrison to the southernmost shores, thus leaving their flank exposed.

As Freeman and the rest of the Army’s USO team packed up for their flight back to the States, the general sent an e-mail to David Brentwood, who was to be sent home from Tora Bora for R&R, telling him, “I’ll come to see you back in the States. Fort Lewis is pretty close to this Northwest chaos, and I’d like to have a look-see for myself. Washington sure as hell doesn’t know what’s going on. It just occurred to me that probably the best place to meet would be in Port Townsend, right on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Will confirm later. By the way, I don’t think