Yellow Sea adjacent to North Korea on one side to the east, and the capitol of Beijing to the southwest, had given it the auspicious nickname of the Golden Triangle. There a long peninsula reached from the province towards the Chinese mainland and out into the Yellow Sea, and near its tip was the big naval center and harbor of Dailan.
It was a massive complex, a major terminal for the arrival and storage of the oil being burned by China’s enormous economy. Parts of the harbor were occupied by the big Dialan West Pacific Oil refinery, its squat metal storage tanks gleaming in long rows along much of the eastern arm of land that created the Gulf of Dailan.
Across that wide bay the western shores saw the city gathered in a warren of high rise concrete residential buildings that rose in massive clusters, their tops often shadowed by tall red metal cranes where new floors were being added as China continued to build its infrastructure. Ninety percent of all the large industrial cranes on earth were in the People’s Republic, and they did not sit idle. City after city was a bustling hive of energy and new construction, with some places seeing the simultaneous construction of upwards of fifty new high rise buildings as any given time. There were no more than ten to twenty new buildings of equal stature under construction in the whole of the United States, which showed how profoundly the industrial power of the world now rested on China’s broad shoulders.
South of Dialan was the Xiaopingdao Submarine base where the new Type 094 and 095 submarines were docked, along with older Ming class diesel boats that had been hand-me-downs from the Russians years ago, their old Romeo class. Even further south was Lushan harbor, the old Port Arthur that had been a bone of contention in the 1890s between China and Japan. The Tiger Tai Peninsula protecting the bay there still had old scars of war, with the ruins of fortifications dating back to the 1800s. There were also several airfields, the airbase at Tuchengzi, weapons bunkers, SAM sites and other obvious signs of military activity.
There, sitting proudly in the harbor itself, was the Liaoning, the Ex-Varyag, brother ship of the Russian carrier Kusnetsov. Its freshly painted ski-jump forward deck swept upwards in an elegant yet highly functional design. The Chinese had acquired the unfinished carrier from Ukraine for the paltry sum of only 18 million, with an additional two million for the blueprints. After haggling with the Turks for three years to get permission to tow the ship through the Bosporus Strait, the Chinese set about with loving care and considerable industry to finished the job of her construction and fitting out. The old name passed to an aging Russian cruiser now based at Vladivostok, and the Chinese christened the ship Liaoning, all 67,500 tons, now trimmed out with navy white and gray paint and festooned with colorful flags.
Being the first fleet carrier in the Chinese Navy, Laioning occupied the place of honor that any elder son would have in the family. Two newer and larger carriers had been under construction since 2012 and were rapidly being readied for their trial by fire. Liaoning was now an elder brother indeed, as the first Shenyang J-15 fighter had successfully landed on its decks on the 25th of November, in the year 2012. The decks had been given a good zinc chromate primer and then covered with a durable non-skid surface. The superstructure and island had been fitted out with the new Sea Eagle search radars and electronics, including advanced phased array radar. Air defenses were added, including four Flying Leopard FL-3000N missile batteries in a big lunchbox of 24 fire and forget TY-90 SAMs, each capable of passive RF tracking and infrared guidance with a range of nine kilometers. It was, however, a last chance terminal defense weapon, just like the two Type 1030 CWIS 30mm Gatling guns that covered her rear port and starboard quarters.
The real bite from any carrier was in its air wing, and Liaoning would carry a minimum strike wing of thirty-two J-15 fighters, a Chinese knock off of the deadly Russian SU-33, their navalized version of the SU-27 Flanker. A subflight of six Z-8 helos and two new Russian K-31 AEW helos would complete her wing. In the months prior to its initial deployment, pilots and flight crews rehearsed their roles in an extensive training program that took place on the