Shock of War

Commander Silas put the night glasses to his eyes. The ocean was already heavy, even with the storm front some hours away. The waves had white crusts; the bow of the McLane crashed hard against them.

The Chinese cruiser Wen Jiabao loomed on his starboard side, pushing through the waves in a blatant attempt to cut the McLane off. She had her lights blazing, spotlights playing across the American destroyer.

Silas was strongly tempted to shoot them out.

“Steady as she goes,” Silas told the helm. “We’ve played this game before.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Bearing long, classic lines, the Wen extended some six hundred and ten feet, a good hundred longer than the McLane. When she’d sailed in the Russian navy, her decks were littered with unsightly ash-can tubes for missiles. The Chinese had replaced those with modern four-pack YJ- 83s. The deck was still crowded, but the newer, more potent missiles added an ominous beauty.

She was a pretty ship, Silas thought. The Wen displaced in excess of 11,500 tons — again, a good deal more than the McLane or her sister Arleigh Burkes. The additional bulk did not slow her down; on the contrary, she was capable of mustering a knot or two more than the American destroyer, at least on paper.

At the moment, she had an angle on the McLane. One of the ships was going to have to turn off soon, or there would be a collision.

These weren’t a pair of canoes. Even a glancing blow would do considerable damage to both vessels.

“So, tell me, Captain,” Silas muttered to himself, as if speaking to the master of the Chinese vessel. “What will happen to you if your beautiful ship comes back to port with a big gash in her bow? Do they still hang captains in the Chinese navy?”

The only answer was a howl in the wind. Silas could see across to the ship’s lighted bridge, though he couldn’t quite make out the captain.

He couldn’t afford a collision, either. Not only was the McLane likely to sustain more damage, but any damage would undoubtedly mean that he wouldn’t reach the merchant ships before they got into Hai Phong, if that’s where they were going.

The Wen closed in.

“Hard right rudder,” said Silas suddenly.

“Starboard, Captain?”

“Aye, into the bastard,” he told helm. “Don’t worry. We’re cutting inside him.”

The destroyer began to pivot. As she turned in the choppy water, Silas gave another order to cut their power. The heavy waves quickly tugged at their momentum. The big Chinese ship continued past. The McLane’s bow came within a few yards of clipping the cruiser’s stern. If the Chinese had been towing an array, it would be Silas’s now.

Advantage mine, Captain, Silas thought. Your move.

The McLane turned smartly, straightening her course back to its original mark. The Wen, meanwhile, slowed. Silas watched for another few minutes — she drew to a parallel course aft, unnerved perhaps by the close call.

“Helm, if you need relief, holler,” said Silas.

“I can do this all day and all night,” said the man at the wheel.

“You may have to.”

18

Hanoi

Zeus walked from Anna’s apartment in a hollow, silent fugue, everything outside him numb and his own mind blank. He was not so much smitten as consumed, absorbed in what he felt for her.

Under ordinary circumstances, such a sensation would have shocked, if not repelled him. Zeus had always compartmentalized his life, carefully separating his feelings into easily handled boxes, partitioning love affairs far from his everyday life.

And certainly from work.

But this was not an ordinary time.

He found the street. He was about halfway to the hospital when a yellow light swept up across the pavement behind him. He turned and saw a large, black Hyundai sedan approaching, using only its running lights to illuminate the roadway. Christian opened the rear window.

“Hey, lover boy — sorry to interrupt your date.”

Anger snapped Zeus out of his fog. He jerked open the door and grabbed Christian by the neck of his open- collar shirt. He pulled him from the car, holding him close to his face.

“I’ll break every fucking bone in your body,” growled Zeus.

“Major!”

It was Perry: he was in the back, on the other side.

Zeus released Christian, who tumbled down out of the car and onto the sidewalk. Zeus ignored him. He pulled open the front door and got in. He could feel the heat rising to his head. He knew his face would be beet- red.

They drove in silence to the bunker.

* * *

The Chinese advance had begun an hour and a half after midnight, along exactly the lines the Americans had predicted.

Which was not surprising. The night attack was a page directly out of the American Army playbook, doctrine the Chinese had thoroughly dissected and learned following the famous Shock and Awe campaign during the Second Gulf War. The advances during that war, using a force much smaller than the enemy’s but highly leveraged by technology, had shocked the Chinese. Until that point, Chinese military doctrine had been based on the idea of numbers: vast numbers of soldiers, using relatively simple but dependable weapons, could defeat any enemy. It was an idea not all that much different from Soviet doctrine during World War II, or Chinese doctrine during the Korean War. In both contests, the superior technology (and, at least arguably, superior soldiers and leadership) of the enemy had been overcome by the sheer size of the victorious army. While there were contradictions — the American counteroffensive in Korea, for example — by and large the philosophy behind the doctrine had seemed stable throughout the postwar period.

But the ease of the American advance during the Second Gulf War showed that the time had passed for that strategy. An overwhelming attack leveraging technology could produce such destruction in the opening phase of a campaign that numbers became meaningless.

So the Chinese went to school. The most obvious lesson they had learned was that their technology had to be improved. They didn’t necessarily have to exceed the U.S., but they had to close the gap to an acceptable level, at least close enough so that numbers could once more make the difference.

There were many other lessons. One was that certain “environments” enhanced the power of technology. That was what fighting at night was all about. Nighttime gave a technologically superior army a clear advantage over a poorer one, since it had sensors (and extensive training) that turned the night into day. The Chinese had installed infrared sensors in their tanks, and had trained to attack in darkness.

In that context, waiting an extra twenty-four hours to launch the tank attack made sense. Though they had lost strategic surprise, the Chinese still hoped to press their technological advantage. Choosing the exact timing of the attack preserved, to some slight degree, a narrow tactical advantage. And since the attack on the fuel depot would have taken several hours to compensate for under the best of circumstances, waiting a full twenty-four hours to attack would make sense.