Deep War: The War with China and North Korea - The Nuclear Precipice by David Poyer

Author:David Poyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

14

USS Rafael Peralta, DDG-115 The South China Sea

THE Combat Information Center was darkened, its frigid air underscored with a solid grumble of noise. It leaned as the destroyer sliced through the night sea. Screens glowed with frosty light, as if the world outside could be viewed only through panes of ice.

Dan hadn’t fully grasped the layout yet. Unlike the cruisers and destroyers he’d served on before, the functions here seemed fragmented. Antisubmarine here. Antiair, there. Antisurface, in yet a different place. Strike, ditto. Antiballistic defense, all the way across the compartment.

Oh, he understood. They were linked digitally, rather than by proximity. No one had to shout to another console to pass a command. Even a comment into a throat mike was rare. But seated in front of the large-screen displays at the command desk, he missed the sense of stovepiped support backing him up. He couldn’t trade glances with the operator at the SPY-1 console, the way he’d done so often aboard Savo Island.

Savo. A mangled wreck at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. When he’d read that, something had wrenched inside his chest. As if his heart had been popped into another shape, like a protein flipping into a prion.

A nuclear strike on U.S. territory. Apparently the city center itself had been spared, protected by the old cruiser’s last salvos, but still there’d been thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths, both shipyard workers and civilians. While he’d been arguing with the Air Force about collateral damage.

But now, at long last, the Allies were punching back.

He slouched, rubbing his mouth. The screens showed only the baseline geographic plots, and feeds from mast-top infrared cameras. Deep night, deep war, and the strike group was running dark and quiet. The last enemy recon assets had been wiped from the sky, including the gauze-winged insectile spy drones he’d identified during hunter-killer operations in the central Pacific.

In retaliation for the attack on Hawaii, the strike on Hainan he’d planned in the PACOM basement had become Operation Uppercut. Surface and submarine assets were gradually enveloping the coast in a distributed-lethality filtering-in operation, spreading out the enemy’s remaining surveillance and strike assets and complicating his targeting. SEAL teams were landing on outlying islands. U.S., Indian, and Australian submarines were clearing the lanes in, then laying mines to isolate the battlespace.

Massive as the movement was, he still suspected this was only a diversion. Part of a long-prepared combined offensive.

And he had to admit, since the Chinese had counted nuclear coup twice now, it was long overdue.

He’d heard rumors, and read the tea leaves. The Allies would apply pressure at multiple points. Squeezing the Associated Powers like a ball of plutonium, until fission occurred. Without much doubt, the main event would be the long-discussed assault on Taiwan. At the same time, the Indians were carrying out an offensive with three motorized divisions, to take the Pakistani-Chinese port of Gwadar.

He shivered in the frigid air, and reached for the foul-weather jacket he’d brought down from the bridge. Resistance would be stiff.

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