Drone Command

Onizuka nodded, smirking. “Yes, of course. Urgent.” He turned away and ordered his men to prepare to surface.

Another ping slammed into the submarine’s hull.

Pearce swore under his breath.

So much for not abandoning friends.

THREE

BASE 51 (SECOND ARTILLERY CORPS)

LAIWU, SHANDONG PROVINCE, CHINA

2 MAY 2017

Vice Chairman Feng was arguably the second most powerful man in China after President Sun, and he was thinking about Hawaiian shaved ice.

Feng was thinking about Hawaiian shaved ice because he was staring at the Wu-14 hanging in its gimbals in the giant test facility at Base 51. The hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) was shaped like a nearly flattened shaved-ice paper cone. He’d like to go back to Honolulu someday, he thought, and get another shaved ice.

“It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” General Chen said. He was a missile man who rose through the ranks of the Second Artillery Corps, China’s strategic rocket command. Feng and Chen were the two vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission (CMC). The CMC was primarily a Party instrument, a political device to maintain control of the generals and admirals, long seen as the main competitors to the Party’s rule.

“Yes, it is,” Feng agreed. The Wu-14 was the stuff of science fiction — push-button warfare in its purest form. And Feng had climbed the ladder of his ambition by shepherding the HGV through years of bureaucratic entanglements, engineering crises, and interservice turf wars. Unlike General Chen, Vice Chairman Feng had no prior military experience. He was the only civilian in the governing ranks of the CMC. (This wasn’t unprecedented. Former president Hu Jintao was also a civilian vice chairman and used his post to catapult to the top of the Party hierarchy, a career trajectory Feng himself hoped to emulate.)

The two men stood alone in the cavernous test hangar. All of the technicians had been dismissed earlier to give them some privacy. Feng was the shorter of the two, though trim and athletic. Today the well-groomed vice chairman was impeccably dressed in a custom-fitted dark green Mao jacket and slacks, an anachronistic but potent symbol of proletarian power. The long tunic with its high buttoned collar and large cargo pockets looked like a soldier’s uniform, which was why it had been largely abandoned by China’s ruling elites in favor of Western-style business suits over the last decade. But Feng found the Mao suit useful when dealing with uniformed military officers like Chen, especially the older ones who had suffered under Mao’s regime.

The Wu-14 was China’s most advanced missile warhead and a true “carrier killer.” Launched on top of the DF-21 medium-range mobile-missile platform, the maneuverable Wu-14 warhead could fly at ten times the speed of sound, nearly eight thousand miles per hour. No nation in the world, including the boastful Americans, possessed a missile defense system that could stop the highly maneuverable vehicle at those speeds. One Wu-14 launched from a DF-21 or, for that matter, a submarine launch tube or some other platform could take out an entire American aircraft carrier, the strategic center of America’s power-projection capabilities.

Vice Chairman Feng understood that the Wu-14 wasn’t just another missile capable of taking out a large target. It was what the Americans called a “revolution in military affairs.” The United States dominated the globe and fought its far-flung wars primarily through its power-projection capabilities, which were entirely dependent upon its navy, and the heart of the United States Navy was its aircraft carrier battle groups. Before World War II, the battleship was seen as the predominant naval weapon, and few admirals anywhere in the world saw the potential of the aircraft carrier, in part because they couldn’t appreciate the strategic value of aircraft operations. From Pearl Harbor forward, it would be aircraft carriers that would dominate the ocean battle space.

Until now.

The Wu-14 would make the twelve-billion-dollar Gerald R. Ford—class aircraft carrier, and all those like her, obsolete. That meant the Americans could be stopped cold virtually anywhere in the Pacific, opening up the South and East China seas to Chinese dominance. It meant the end of Taiwanese independence, too. The end of all Western meddling in Chinese affairs.

The end of the aircraft carrier also meant the beginning of China’s rebirth as a great-power nation. Perhaps the greatest, given America’s precarious economic and political condition. Ironically, China was now hell-bent on building four aircraft carrier groups of her own, beginning with the refurbishment of an abandoned Soviet aircraft carrier, the Riga, which the PLAN named the Liaoning. It was now fully operational after nearly a decade of work and training. At least the PLAN was smart enough to know that such carrier groups would only be effective against weaker naval powers like the Philippines.