Red Sky Mourning: A Thriller (7) (Terminal List)

PROLOGUE

Chang Zheng

Jin-Class Type 094 Submarine

38° 48' 95" N, 174° 48' 32" W

Pacific Ocean

1,767 Nautical Miles Northwest of Hawaii

COMMANDER LIU ZHEN OF the People’s Liberation Navy had given his crew the order to change course four days earlier. The Chinese Jin-class submarine had last surfaced north of Japan in the Sea of Okhotsk and received an encrypted high-priority message from the commander of the North Sea Fleet. The message had been routed from the chairman of the Central Military Commission through the PLA Joint Staff Department. In all his years at sea he had never read a message that originated at the level of chairman. That meant it came directly from the president.

The message simply ordered Commander Zhen to open a safe, one that could be opened only with the concurrence of and physical keys from his executive and political officers. Even before they read the order, Zhen knew what it was going to say.

They had been ordered to start a war.

Zhen slowly inhaled the soothing warmth of his Chunghwa cigarette in violation of his own orders regarding smoking while underway. He closed his eyes, savoring the slight taste of plum in a cigarette that was rumored to have been a favorite of Chairman Mao, though Zhen wondered if that was nothing more than a clever marketing campaign. The red carton emblazoned with the Tiananmen Gate was a traditional gift given to him by Admiral Jun, who had seen them off from the North Sea Fleet’s Xiaopingdao Naval Base in the Yellow Sea. Zhen much preferred to sail from the caves at Laoshan Submarine Base in the Shandong province or Yulin Naval Base on Hainan Island southwest of Macau in the South China Sea. Natural caverns had been excavated on the resort island to create tunnels for an underground naval base in an effort to counter U.S. spy satellites constantly collecting over the Middle Kingdom. It was there that the next generation of Chinese submarine, the Type 096, would enter service. Zhen hoped he would live to see it.

Had the admiral known what lay ahead? He obviously knew what was in the safe, but did he know the execution of those orders—for a mission that would change the course of world history—would come on this particular voyage? Zhen suspected he had.

The Chang Zheng had been at sea for close to two months. One of six operational Chinese Jin-class Type 094 ballistic missile submarines, she was armed with twelve new JL-3 SLBMs—intercontinental-range, submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Zhen’s boat had been retrofitted prior to sailing, her twelve JL-2s replaced with the longer-range JL-3s, giving her the ability to hit targets at a range of 10,000 kilometers. Six of the JL-3s were equipped with MIRVs—multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles—with varying nuclear yields. Curiously, on this deployment Commander Zhen’s remaining six JL-3s were equipped with conventional, nonnuclear payloads. They were participating in a training exercise when the new orders had come in.

One more cigarette? He would soon be needed on the bridge, where he would address the crew. He would let them know that the Chang Zheng would fire the first shots in a campaign that would allow China to annex Taiwan. Would the Party leadership go further? Would they push the Americans from the South China Sea and fight to extend Chinese territory all the way to Australia? That would give China control of trade routes and access to the oil and natural gas the country desperately needed to fuel its economy. When combined with their reserves, controlling that territory would also allow them to dominate the world energy market. Zhen and the Chang Zheng would be ready.

China was feeling the pressure. The new trilateral AUKUS—Australia, United Kingdom, United States—defense partnership was “defensive” in name only. It was a direct threat to Chinese autonomy. The agreement was cloaked in phrases crafted around “deterring Chinese aggression” that were endlessly repeated in the Western media. In reality, the pact extended U.S. subsurface capabilities up to China’s doorstep. Australia would acquire three, possibly five, Virginia-class submarines in the coming years followed by a new AUKUS-class submarine codeveloped by Australia and the United Kingdom. U.S. submarines would also begin to make regular deployments to naval bases in Western Australia as part of the new force posture. The enemy was massing its forces and would soon be able to park an undersea flotilla off the coast, threatening China’s fleet, command and control, and industrial base.

Zhen also knew his country had to take Taiwan before the Americans deployed their new Block V Virginia-class submarines, scheduled to hit the water in less than a year and certainly before the Columbia-class submarines came online. Intelligence analysts projected that the entire surface fleet would be connected to an artificially intelligent quantum computer that would counter China’s current superiority in hypersonic missiles and passive targeting capabilities. If the U.S. fleet were to be synchronized with next-generation AI technology, China’s options for expansion would be severely limited. At least the Columbia-class sub was years away from sea trials. Once they were in the water, Jin-class subs like Zhen’s would become obsolete.

Zhen had been serving in the People’s Liberation Navy since his time in the Dalian Naval Academy. He had studied his American adversary since he was seventeen. With the Americans divided at home and their leaders sending untold billions to Ukraine and Israel, he understood why his president and National Security Commission had decided that this was the time to strike.

He had participated in enough war games and classified briefings over the years to know that his submarine’s actions would be coordinated with other subsurface platforms tasked with launching missiles at Alaska, California, Washington State, and Guam. He suspected that the Chinese intelligence services had leveraged their contacts in Iran to distract the Americans with terrorist attacks across their nation in population centers like Los Angeles and New York City through their Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad proxy forces. Chinese hackers would concurrently wreak havoc on critical U.S. domestic infrastructure, disrupting the electrical grid, internet, cell towers, air traffic control, water treatment plants, and oil and natural gas pipelines, as well as erasing credit cards, bank accounts, and driver’s licenses. He also knew that a cyberattack would simultaneously target Guam, as had been tested so successfully in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.

COVID. That had been a turning point. Zhen had lost his parents early. His wife’s parents had succumbed to the illness a few months later while sequestered in their apartment. They had died without being able to hold their daughter’s hand or look into her eyes one last time. The state had seen to that. His wife would take her own life a year into the lockdowns. Neighbors in their government-subsidized housing complex had found her hanging from the exposed pipe that ran the length of their ceiling. Through his contacts in the regime, he had discovered that she had first taken rat poison.

In these later years, he now regretted the abortion he had convinced his wife to have when they found out she was pregnant with a girl. China’s one-child policy, a policy that ironically had forced them into their current position, was responsible for the gutting of Chinese society. The policy that had so devastated the nation had also shattered Zhen’s life. Men in China wanted sons. Sons who could carry on the family name. The result of the one-child policy, other than the inevitable demise of Chinese civilization due to declining birth rates, was the aborting of millions of female babies. By the time the government realized the folly of its policy and lifted the mandate in 2016, it was too late. Too late for China and too late for Zhen and his wife; both in their fifties, their time for children had passed.

But Zhen’s family name would now live on; Commander Liu Zhen of the People’s Navy would launch one of the first volleys of the war. His targets were military and data centers in the Hawaiian Islands. Of his six nonnuclear missiles, three would target the United States Pacific Fleet Headquarters on Oahu at Makalapa Pearl Harbor; one would target the National Security Agency and Central Security Service’s Hawaii Cryptologic Center near Wahiawa in central Oahu; one would target the Aloha NAP data center in Kapolei; and the final missile would target the Endeavor Honolulu data center. Decommissioning the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System at Barking Sands had been a mistake. That facility would have knocked at least one of his missiles out of the sky.

Other submarines would target the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Guam and Pearl Harbor, though he had no confirmation of their locations or intentions; that was the way when one fought from beneath the waves. Submarines operating at these depths were cut off from outside communications. Zhen could ascend and raise an antenna or float an antenna buoy, but that increased the possibility of detection. His orders had been explicit. There were to be no further communications.

He knew that the United States had two carrier battle groups in the Mediterranean and one in the Persian Gulf to deter Iran from opening a second front in Israel’s war with Hamas. Other American naval assets were patrolling the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to counter Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. Zhen wondered if Iran’s use of proxy forces to attack Israel and then using the Houthis to attack U.S. naval ships and commercial vessels off the coast of Yemen, while ordering militia groups to hit U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, had been orchestrated as part of the current campaign. Was it done to draw the U.S. fleet into the Middle East so that China could annex Taiwan? How much had Russia, China, and Iran collaborated on plans that put him and his crew on the front lines of what was about to be the defining conflict of the twenty-first century?

A knock on his stateroom door intruded on his thoughts.

“Enter.”

“It’s time, Captain,” said his executive officer. “The men await your orders.”

Zhen looked at his cigarette and at the red carton on the table before him.

He then leaned forward and extinguished it in an ashtray.

“Very well.”

The captain stood and straightened his dress uniform. His hand confirmed that the Norinco QSZ-92-5.8 pistol was on his hip.

It was time to go to war.