Sky Masters

On the outer perimeter of the flotilla, Admiral Yin Po L’un deployed three Huangfen-class fast-attack missile boats, capable against heavy surface targets, and four Hegu- class fast-attack missile boats with antisubmarine and antiaircraft weapons. He had an old Lienyun-class minesweeper on the point, a precautionary tactic bom of the conflict with the Vietnamese Navy only six years earlier. He also had two big Hainan-class fast patrol boats with antiair, antiship, and antisubmarine weapons operating as “roamers,” moving between the inner and outer perimeters. All were direct copies of old World War II Soviet designs, and these boats had no business being out in the open ocean, even as forgiving and generally tame as the South China Sea was. The ships in Yin’s flotilla rotated out every few weeks with other ships in the six-hundred-ship South China Sea Fleet, based at Zhan- jiang Naval Base bn the Leizhou Peninsula near the Gulf of Tonkin.

Yin’s flagship, the Hong Lung, or Red Dragon, was a beauty, a true oceangoing craft for the world’s largest navy. It was a Type EF5 guided-missile destroyer that had a Combination Diesel or Gas Turbine propulsion system that propelled the 132-meter, five-thousand-ton vessel to a top speed of over thirty-five nautical miles per hour. The Hong Lung had a helicopter hangar and launch platform, and it carried a modern, French-built Dauphin II patrol, rescue, antimine, and antisubmarine warfare helicopter. Yin’s destroyer also carried six supersonic Fei Lung-7 antiship missiles, the superior Chinese version of the French Exocet antiship missile; two Fei Lung-9 long-range supersonic antiship missiles, experimental copies of the French-built ANS antiship missile; two Hong Qian-91 single antiair missile launchers, fore and aft, with thirty-missile manually loaded magazines each; a Creusoit-Loire dual-purpose 100-millimeter gun; and four single-barreled and two double-barreled 37-millimeter antiaircraft guns. It also had a single Phalanx CIWS, or Close-In Weapon System gun. Developed in the United States of America, Phalanx was a radar-guided Vulcan multibarrel 20-millimeter gun that could destroy incoming sea-skimming antiship missiles; from its mount on the forecastle perch behind and below the con, it could cover both sides and the stem out to a range of two kilometers. The Hong Lung also carried sonar (but no torpedoes or depth charges) and sophisticated targeting radars for her entire arsenal.

The Hong Lung was specifically designed to patrol the offshore islands belonging to China, such as the Spratly and the Paracel Islands, and to engage the navies of the various countries that claimed these islands — so the Hong Lung carried no antisubmarine-warfare weaponry like the older Type EF4 Luda-class destroyers of the North Fleet. The Hong Lung could defeat any surface combatant in the South China Sea and could protect itself against almost any air threat. The Hong Lung’s escort ships — the minesweepers and ASW vessels — could take on any threat that the destroyer wasn’t specifically equipped to deal with.

“Position, navigator,” Admiral Yin called out.

The navigator behind and to the Admiral’s right called out in reply, “Sir!”, bent to work at his plastic-covered chart table as a series of coordinates were read to him from the LORAN navigation computers, then replied, “Sir, position is ten nautical miles northwest of West Reef, twenty-three miles north of Spratly Island air base.”

“Depth under the keel?”

“Showing twenty meters under the keel, sir,” Captain Lubu Vin Li replied. “No danger of running aground if we stay on this course, sir.”

Yin grunted his acknowledgment. That was exactly what he was worried about. While his escorts could traverse the shallow waters of the Spratly Island chain easily, the Hong Lung was an oceangoing vessel with a four-meter draft. At low tide, the big destroyer could find itself run aground at any time while within the Spratly Islands.

Although the Spratlys were in neutral territory, China controlled the valuable islands informally by sheer presence of force if not by agreement or treaty.

Yin’s normal patrol route took the flotilla through the southern edge of the “neutral zone” area of the island chain, scanning for Philippine vessels and generally staying on watch. Although the Philippine Navy patrolled the Spratlys and had a lot of firepower there, Admiral Yin’s smaller, faster escort ships could mount a credible force against them. And since the Philippine ships had no medium or long-range antiship missiles or antiair missiles in the area* the Hong Lung easily outgunned every warship within two thousand miles.