Chimera

As the vehicles made their way along the road, their auto-cannon turrets kept sweeping left and right for targets. General Potgam had pulled all the strings he could with General Suman to get these light armor forces airlifted to Paru and then driven up from there to Thimpu. Now they were here, along with the rest of his paratroopers. Spear team had also been inserted.

Misra smiled as he walked back inside to rejoin his staff at the makeshift command center on the ground floor.

DAY 9

THE MERCHANT SHIP AAA-FU YUANKOU

FIVE HUNDRED KILOMETERS SOUTHEAST OF THE MALDIVES

INDIAN OCEAN

DAY 9 + 0520 HRS

Captain Bingde walked onto the bridge just as the first streaks of dark blue skies started to replace the dark night sky from the east. He saw the bridge crew at their posts looking tired and near the end of their shifts. He walked out to the ledge after picking up his binoculars from the dashboard nearby. The cold morning air refreshed him as did the noise of swashing waters moving around the hull of his ship…

The Yuankou was the not the only ship sailing to home waters off mainland China. They were part of a convoy of five merchant ships and one medium oil tanker taking a circuitous route around India in order to avoid the naval combat zones. They were avoiding the entire Malacca Strait and planning to go around the Indonesian coastline and through the South China Sea.

All in all, there was no reason to be worried.

These were merchant ships and therefore civilian in nature. Besides, two PLAN warships, the Changzhou and the Yulin, were escorting the convoy back to home waters. Both of these warships were Type 054 Frigates and part of the Chinese anti-piracy fleet near the Somalia coastline until the start of the war. Now they had been tasked as escorts for the vulnerable merchant shipping convoys.

Bingde noted the Yulin off his port side to the northeast, operating in total darkness and wartime conditions. That did not make him very comfortable. They had another thousand kilometers of sailing to the southeast before they would be effectively out of the range of Indian naval forces. Over the last day they had been intermittently shadowed by long-range patrol aircraft, so Bingde knew that the Indian navy knew their location but had left it alone. He hoped that would continue.

As he watched, the Yulin superstructure became backlit with a flash of light and then a small smoke cloud as a missile rose into the air from its forward decks. The swishing noise and the rising plume of smoke trailing the missile exhaust caught the bridge crews of the merchant ships off guard and they all rushed to the ledge to see…

Then another missile fired and reached for the sky.

Bingde realized that the missiles fired were anti-air missiles. He ran to the door of the bridge and pulled it open:

“We are under attack! All personnel report to their stations! Prepare for damage control!”

The crew was still stunned by the abruptness of it all, and while they fumbled around trying to find their bearings, Bingde went back out on the ledge to see what the two navy Frigates were doing. He leaned over the railings to see the Changzhou turning course and gaining speed while the Yulin was continuing to ripple-fire its supply of HQ-9 anti-air missiles…

He spotted a speck of movement on the horizon to the northeast and brought up his binoculars to see. But the specks turned out to much faster than his actions. They quickly turned out to be long tubes flying several meters above the dark waters of the ocean. The Yulin opened fire on them with its close-in-weapon-systems: seven barreled cannons. The yellow-white tracers silhouetted the Yulin and lines of tracers flew out towards the incoming missiles.

Bingde had a moment to utter a curse just as one of the nearest incoming missiles exploded under hits from tracers but still the debris completely peppered the port side of the Yulin. He saw pieces of debris from the Yulin fly hundreds of feet into the air and the ship listed a little to the starboard before balancing.

That is when the second and third missiles went straight in…

The bone-jarring explosions ripped the ship superstructure apart. The starboard side of the Yulin was shredded into a thousand fragments of metal and these flew towards the Yuankou. Bingde instantly dived back through the door of the bridge and fell on his stomach as large pieces of metal shrapnel smashed through the glass and instantly killed several of his bridge crew. The ship rocked back and forth as the shockwave of the explosion rippled through the waters from the Yulin and hit the hull.

Then a large chunk of the superstructure of the Yulin fell on top of the cargo containers aboard the Yuankou, splitting the harnesses and dropping two of them into waters to the starboard, ripping a large gash on the side of the ship…