The Bear and the Dragon

Colonel Turner warned. “I’ve asked General Wallace to task some F-16s with HARMs to us. They can tune the seekers on those to the millimeter-band the fire-finders use.”

“Make that happen,” Diggs ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

“Duke, how long to contact?” the general asked his operations officer.

“If we move on schedule, we’ll be in their neighborhood about zero-two-hundred.”

“Okay, let’s get the brigade commanders briefed in. We party just after midnight,” Diggs told his staff, not even regretting his choice of words. He was a soldier about to go into combat, and with that came a different and not entirely pleasant way of thinking.

CHAPTER 57 Hyperwar

It had been rather a tedious couple of days for USS Tucson. She’d been camped out on 406 for sixteen days, and was holding station seventeen thousand yards-eight and a half nautical miles-astern of the Chinese boomer, with a nuclear-powered fast-attack camped out just to the south of it at the moment. The SSN, at least, supposedly had a name, Hai Long, the intelligence weenies said it was. But to Tucson’s sonarman, 406 was Sierra-Eleven, and Hai Long was Sierra-Twelve, and so they were known to the fire-control tracking party.

Tracking both targets was not demanding. Though both had nuclear power plants, the reactor systems were noisy, especially the feed pumps that ran cooling water through the nuclear pile. That, plus the sixty-hertz generators, made for two pairs of bright lines on the waterfall sonar display, and tracking both was about as difficult as watching two blind men in an empty shopping mall parking lot at high noon on a cloudless day. But it was more interesting than tracking whales in the North Pacific, which some of PACFLT’s boats had been tasked to do of late, to keep the tree-huggers happy.

Things had gotten a little more interesting lately. Tucson ran to periscope/antenna depth twice a day, and the crew had learned, much to everyone’s surprise, that Chinese and American armed forces were trading shots in Siberia, and that meant, the crew figured, that 406 might have to be made to disappear, and that was a mission, and while it might not exactly be fun, it was what they were paid to do, which made it a worthwhile activity.

406 had submarine-launched ballistic missiles aboard, twelve Ju Lang-1 CSS-N-3s, each with a single megaton-range warhead. The name meant “Great Wave,” so the intelligence book said. It also said they had a range of less than three thousand kilometers, which was less than half the range needed to strike California, though it could hit Guam, which was American territory. That didn’t really matter. What did matter was that 406 and Hai Long were ships of war belonging to a nation with which the United States was now trading shots.

The VLF radio fed off an antenna trailed off the after corner of Tucson’s sail, and it received transmissions from a monstrous, mainly underground transmitter located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The tree-huggers complained that the energy emanating from this radio confused migrating geese in the fall, but no hunters had yet complained about smaller bags of waterfowl, and so the radio remained in service. Built to send messages to American missile submarines, it still transmitted to the fast-attacks that remained in active service. When a transmission was received, a bell went off in the submarine’s communications room, located aft of the attack center, on the starboard side.

The bell dinged. The sailor on watch called his officer, a lieutenant, j.g., who in turn called the captain, who took the submarine back up to antenna depth. Once there, he elevated the communications laser to track in on the Navy’s own communications satellite, known as SSIX, the Submarine Satellite Information Exchange, telling it that he was ready for a transmission. The reply action message came over a directional S-band radio for the higher bandwidth. The signal was cross-loaded into the submarine’s crypto machines, decoded, and printed up.

TO: USS TUCSON (SSN-770)

FROM: CINCPAC

1. UPON RECEIVING “XQT SPEC OP” SIGNAL FROM VLS YOU WILL ENGAGE AND DESTROY PRC SSBN AND ANY PRC SHIPS IN CONTACT.

2. REPORT RESULTS OF ATTACK VIA SSIX.

3. SUBSEQUENT TO THIS OPERATION, CONDUCT UNRESTRICTED OPERATIONS AGAINST PRC NAVAL UNITS.

4. YOU WILL NOT RPT NOT ENGAGE COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC OF ANY KIND.

CINCPAC SENDS

END MESSAGE

“Well, it’s about goddamned time,” the CO observed to his executive officer.

“Doesn’t say when to expect it,” the XO observed.

“Call it two hours,” the captain said. “Let’s close to ten thousand yards. Get the troops perked up. Spin up the weapons.”

“Aye.”

“Anything else close?”

“There’s a Chinese frigate off to the north, about thirty miles.”

“Okay, after we do the subs, we’ll Harpoon that one, then we’ll close to finish it off, if necessary.”

“Right.” The XO went forward to the attack center. He checked his watch. It was dark topside. It didn’t really matter to anyone aboard the submarine, but darkness made everybody feel a little more secure for some reason or other, even the XO.

It was tenser now. Giusti’s reconnaissance troopers were now within twenty miles of the expected Chinese positions. That put them inside artillery range, and that made the job serious.

The mission was to advance to contact, and to find a hole in the Chinese positions for the division to exploit. The secondary objective was to shoot through the gap and break into the Chinese logistical area, just over the river from where they’d made their breakthrough. There they would rape and pillage, as LTC Giusti thought of it, probably turning north to roll up the Chinese rear with one or two brigades, and probably leaving the third to remain in place astride the Chinese line of communications as a blocking force.

His troopers had all put on their “makeup,” as some called it, their camouflage paint, darkening the natural light spots of the face and lightening the dark ones. It had the overall effect of making them look like green and black space aliens. The advance would be mounted, for the most part, with the cavalry scouts mostly staying in their Bradleys and depending on the thermal-imaging viewers used by the driver and gunner to spot enemies. They’d be jumping out occasionally, though, and so everyone checked his PVS-11 personal night-vision system. Every trooper had three sets of fresh AA batteries that were as important as the magazines for their M16A2 rifles. Most of the men gobbled down an MRE ration and chased it with water, and often some aspirin or Tylenol to ward off minor aches and pains that might come from bumps or sprains. They all traded looks and jokes to lighten the stress of the night, plus the usual brave words meant as much for themselves as for others. Sergeants and junior officers reminded the men of their training, and told them to be confident in their abilities.

Then, on radioed command, the Bradleys started off, leading the heavier main-battle tanks off to the enemy, moving initially at about ten miles per hour.

The squadron’s helicopters were up, all sixteen of them, moving very cautiously because armor on a