Kirov Saga Men of War - By John Schettler Page 0,140
airfield, Japan’s new replacement for the aging US P-3s. It was a sophisticated new surveillance plane, with advanced signals processing capability and new Artificial Intelligence to advise the Tactical Coordinator (TACCO) on best intercept course plots for its alternate role as an ASW strike aircraft. Ten such planes had been procured, giving the Japanese good coverage along the long archipelago of islands that they now controlled. With range just shy of 5000 miles the planes had excellent endurance for the surveillance role it was tasked with that night. It could sit over Hokkaido Island safe in Japanese airspace and use its excellent AESA radar to watch the ominous procession of warships to the north.
The fleet continued due east in the Sea Of Okhotsk for yet another day, making for the wide channel south of Urup Island in the Kurile chain. By day the skies above the flotilla were patrolled by pairs of MIG-29s off airfields in the Kuriles. By night the ships would deploy their own helicopters in wide arcs around the main formation to keep a wary eye out for submarines. Nothing was seen or heard, and no challenge was mounted from Japanese naval or air forces. They had enough on their hands with the angry dragon they had roused from its long slumber, and were content to watch from a respectful distance as Karpov led the fleet out towards the deep blue of the Pacific. It was soon clear to them that this flotilla of formidable warships was hastening to join the Russian Admiral Kuznetsov carrier group already operating in the waters off the southern tip of Kamchatka. That force was now heading southwest towards the Kuriles to effect a rendezvous.
South of the Japanese mainland, the wayward brother ship of Kuznetsov, sold off and adopted by the Chinese years ago, had already deployed from Dalian naval base and was poised to enter the Yellow Sea. The tickling alarm clock had run the course of the forty-eight hour ultimatum set by the People’s Republic of China, and there had not been such a breathless, agonizing wait since the countdown to the launching of the first Gulf war over 30 years ago in August of 1990.
In that war and the Second Gulf War against Saddam that followed it ten years later after 9/11, the absolute superiority of Western air and ground forces had been brutally established. Only the long asymmetric guerilla war fought by the radicalized Islamics had proved again that the modern world was not an age of conquest and occupation. American forces left Iraq and Afghanistan with little to show for the billions in dollars and the thousands of dead and wounded soldiers who fought there. It was not like WWII, where the United States had decisively joined the Allies to defeat two major world powers and liberate over ten nations that had been overrun by the enemy, and did so in only four years. No, in the early 21st century America fought for nearly 15 years in Afghanistan, and then left it much as they had found it. Two years after the last troops pulled out the Taliban were back to business as usual.
This time it was not American troops deploying from their homeland to a far distant and hostile shore. This time it was forces of a coalition that now spanned half the land mass of the world, the SinoPac alliance between China and Russia that had been signed in the year 2020. The Dragon and the Bear had settled their differences, agreed on mutual economic development of the vast untapped resources of Siberia, where China’s hungry manufacturing economy was to be fed by the oil, timber, and metals there, and Russia would be flooded with the finances it so desperately needed to get back to the glory days when it had been a dominant player on the world stage.
The fear of imminent war was circling the globe, and when Taiwan issued a joint resolution by both the executive and legislative Yuans formally declaring independence a quiet hush settled over the region. Mainland China had their answer. Washington grimaced at the announcement, failing to prevent it by diplomatic arm twisting that had gone on for the last 24 hours. Taiwan was calling the Dragon’s bluff, and whistling for the hounds to come to its aid, invoking its longstanding mutual defense treaty with the US.
Washington had walked a careful tightrope stretched between the island and the Chinese mainland since 1955. On the one hand they pledged to