I would like to thank Sable Cold for taking on the impressive job of being the Beta Reader for this book. As always reviews are welcome. If you find this is easier to read and follow. Thank Sable Cold and all of his hard work
I do not own Battlestar Galactica or have any connection with them, other than I have seen the shows. And it was a long time ago. I also do not own or have input into the game of Rifts. I don't even play the game. But I do own copies of some of the books, and I have used them for this story.
Chapter 40: Join the Band Wagon
Earth, Mid October 2019
The American Rivet Joint and two or three other aircraft in the area dutifully recorded every word that that was said between the retreating fighters. That, along with all the signals coming from Chinese fighters' nose mounted radars. Each of the surviving fighters was monitored in as much detail as was possible by the Earth made craft in the air and in space. Each location of where the pilots had ejected was recorded and marked on a digital map that was passed to Pearl Harbor and a few other locations around the world. No one knows how many lived to be picked up out of the water by any nearby ships. What is known is that not one Chinese pilot was reported as being alive after ejecting. Nothing about them was found even decades later in the archives of the Chinese government or military.
They all just dropped off the face of the Earth and never were heard from again after their emergency locator beacons went offline. That is, after they punched out of the jets near any Chinese flagged ships. Most historians say that the intelligence gathering ships just left the floating pilots in the water to die in their small air-filled rafts. The same thing was reported to have happened to the aircrews of the second Chinese carrier after all of them had been blown out of the sky by the few Raptors in the first engagement. Those surviving Chinese pilots might have had better chances if they had punched out near other types of ships in the area instead of the Chinese crewed 'fishing trawlers' but hindsight is always 20/20. Not one person would stand before a judge about the lost pilots. They were lost to the sands of history, and they would not even rate a footnote in most history books written in the coming decades.
Even before the Chinese had filled the skies with their attack craft, they had been far from alone. Below the waters and a lot closer than her orders 'allowed' her to be, the 688I-class submarine SSN-773 or the USS Cheyenne as she was known to the US Navy and the people who followed subjects like that stalked her prey. She was slipping closer and closer to a Type 095 and two Type 093 submarines she had been tracking almost constantly for nine days. The Cheyenne had been in complete passive tracking mode as she hunted the group of submarines. No one in the crew had made any excess noises for the entire nine days, and the smell from the barely washed bodies and stress was enough to burn the hair out of someone's nose. There was a very good reason that they were called pig boats by an earlier generation.
The Cheyenne was the last (Improved) 688-class submarine built by the US Navy, and she had just come out of an upgrade cycle that most people believed would have been her last. That is, until the Colonials made their presence known to the United States and the rest of the world. Right up until then, they had been making plans to take this whole class of submarine out of USN service. All that had changed almost overnight with the increase in worldwide tensions. Now those plans were shelved and the old update plans, which had been intended for the next upgrade of the whole class, had been dusted off and money found to start doing the work.
She did not have a normal periscope any longer. She had been fitted with the newest multi sensor device during her last maintenance cycle between cruises. It was a small box on the end of the pole that used to hold the optical tubes of a periscope. That box had a small but powerful and very high tech camera. It could work equally well in IR, visible light, UV, and few other modes. Only people with the right level of clearance and a need to was aware of the full capabilities of the new device being fitted to a rapidly growing list of vessels.
When her sonar man first started picking up strange sounds, the Cheyenne rose from the depths to see what was going on in the larger world. It had been through this stealth device that she recorded the death of the Chinese missile attack group. All in HD quality video. In a few decades, when the recording's existence was finally hinted at in certain circles, the full recording would be released to the public with very little fanfare. It would be hotly debated whether it was CGI or real by an ever growing number of viewers.
The third task force, the missile launching task force, was twenty miles to the north of where the two carriers were sinking. They had no idea what was about to happen. Not a word had been transmitted before each of the ships in the other task forces had died. Constellation Flight was also made up of two vipers and one Assault Raptor. They had fired their volley of missiles off only 30 seconds after the other two flights of Colonial attack craft had. You can cover a long distance in 30 seconds at the high Mach numbers these craft were making. Their missiles also struck their targets at about the same time that the Viper missiles hit the smaller ships of those other two battle groups.
So again, no warning was given over the radio to even hint that they were under attack. But the universe is a fickle place where each Viper were only able to carry four anti-ship missiles in the atmosphere at this speed. The Raptors were each carrying a little over a dozen of each of the larger missiles. All were Colonial made and also at the end of their designated lives. The only expendable ammunition to be brought to this planet were ones that were considered less useful against any Cylon threat. Admiral Adama was not ready to risk too much technology falling into the wrong hands too quickly.
The Raptors were meant to work together, so coordinating their attack was a lot easier than it had been for the older Viper MK VII groups, even with the latest upgrades. The ECO in the Raptor simply picked a target for each pair of missiles. The information was automatically cascaded to each of the other small craft flying close by including the Viper MK VIII's. They could not double tap all of the targets with their limited number of missiles. Their screens showed sixteen larger targets to be made to go away. It also showed that they did not have enough missiles to complete the job with only twenty-two working weapons spread between the three Colonial air frames. Four ships would not be engaged by those self-propelled weapons. This made Jarrell 'Fuzzy' Kief very happy and he had a hard time keeping focused on his missile attack run. He made sure his ion/KEW gun pod was fully charged even as his finger pulled his main trigger to let loose his flight of supersonic seeking weapons.
The CIC deep in the Longyan did pick up the ghost on the air defense screen, but she could not do much about the possible contact. Her Captain knew what was going to happen in a flash, like a nuclear weapon going off. He started screaming into the ship to ship radio about the incoming attack. The executive officer ordered the weapons officers to fire. Just fire. That was all it took to get the ship to start spitting weapons fire in a wide arc around the ship.
With the third fleet being a little father out, and the Raptor firing about 30 seconds later than her brothers, the Chinese ships had a little longer to react to the hell that was coming towards them. All thanks to the soon to be damaged frigate called Longyan. This fickle turn of events let the ships have only a heartbeat or two more forewarning that they were all going to die. Still, no matter what those ships did, they died one by one even as their weapons filled the skies with seemingly futile counter fire. The three Colonial craft followed their missiles into the third Chinese battle fleet after first letting some distance build between them and the attacking flame pencils.
As the Colonial missiles started finding targets on the outer ring of ships, the four Type 055 destroyers in the center went into crazy maneuvering. It was hoped that these maneuvers would make them harder to hit. It did not help and after a handful of seconds only four of the large 13,000 ton fully loaded destroyers closest to the Colonials were not sunk or sinking. The way the targets were selected had been by how close they were to the approaching flight of Colonial craft. The Raptor fired off all of its missiles first, followed by the missiles coming off of the wings of the two Vipers. They only fired after the Raptor was done dumping her load of firepower. If the Raptor missed a ship, then the Vipers would clean up until they ran out of missiles. Then it was going to be run and gun time on the high seas.
This battle fleet had been set up like something seen from World War Two. The four larger Type 055 ships were at the center, and the smaller Type 52D surrounding the command ship and heavy hitters in a ring of metal and firepower. It looked kind of like an orange when seen from above and he Raptor's missiles were cutting a slice out of that orange, working their way to the center where the real targets were. The missiles had left the Raptor in one mass burst of smoke and fire. The outer layer of four Type 052D's died without a shot being fired by them. They had been looking, but they did not see, at least not until the ships had been blown in half. After the battle, many would point to them not wildly firing as a sign of poor command and control.
Constellation Flight's ECO had spent a lot of time studying the threat of surface ships. He had spent months looking at all the data he could find on Chinese warships in particular. He told the missiles where he wanted them to hit on the targets and each missile brushed off near misses of exploding Chinese ordinance to reach those targets. The smaller ships in the way of the Colonial attack force were just blasted apart as the supersonic missiles hit the ships near the forward mounted gatling gun and the base of the forward superstructure. The ships would at best have broken backs, and if one of the weapons left in VLS was hit by the Colonial weapon, most of the missiles left in the VLS would help blow the ship apart just a little faster.
Two weapons had been enough to kill the carriers and the four large Type 055's turned out to not be that difficult of targets. They only were able to put up about two dozen HQ-10 missiles up per ship in defense. The target area for the Colonial missiles on those large ships were a little different from the carriers. On the Type 055 it was the massive block of the superstructure that held the four smoke stacks coming from the large engine room. That meant that when the two Colonial missiles hit those ships, they were just blasted into two parts of metal. When the fireballs cleared, each ship looked like someone had taken a bite about a dozen meters across from the middle part going all the way down and in some cases past the double keel.
And the attack continued against the Chinese warships. Even as the Raptor launched her last missile, taking out another 7,500 ton warship. As long as the enemy ships kept firing, they were legal targets and the Colonials were not in the mood to wait around for common sense to kick in. The two Vipers launched their missiles just as they overflew the first two sinking ships. Each space superiority Viper was able to claim two Type 052D's sunk.
As luck would have it, almost all of the ships left were the newer production Type 052D's that were just a little longer than the early production ships. These four newer vessels lasted a whole thirty seconds longer than the rest of the fleet. They were blasted by mega damage output ion guns and Colonial made KEW weapons mounted under the belly of the Raptor, and the pulse lasers from the wing mounted cannons on the Vipers.
A short line of ion bolts flew through the air in front of each of the low flying attack craft, flying at over twice the speed of sound only a hundred and twenty meters above the waves. Most of the blasts missed high or low on the wildly maneuvering ships but at least one of the glowing balls, invisible laser pulse, or set of 30mm KEW rounds hit the thin steel hull of a surviving warship. Only one hit was normally enough to do the required job of taking out the target from being a useful warship. It also would convince the warship to start a new life as a U-Boat.
Each ion or pulse laser blast acted like a huge and incredibly hot ice cream scooper taking huge dollops out of the top and/or sides of the ships they struck. This only lasted for a second at most before something in the targeted ship reacted badly to the chunk of ship that was now missing. It was that, or it could be that something mixed with the high heat of the assault went boom after the mixing. Then, even more damage would be done to the metal hulls by their own cargo. The term was secondaries, and the Colonials were getting these at a well above average rate. The KEW weapons would take a few more rounds to hit, but the end results were the same as the ion and pulse lasers.
Fuzzy was lining up for a firing pass on the last of the enemy warships with a thin lipped look on his face. A part of his mind had been able to force through to the front part of his brain that this was not a battle but a slaughter of helpless humans. That was when the ECO's hand flew up and was pressed to his ear, and he mumbled something before nodding his head.
"Fuzzy! Pull out! We are being recalled back to the island. I told them we were almost done. They said to drop everything and to leave the rest. They might be taken care of later, but we are to get our butts back to the landing field at best speed!"
As soon as the ECO said to pull up, Jarrell pulled out of the attack run. He let out a little bit of air from his lungs and let his feeling be heard. "Well, frak!"
The main part of Jarrell's brain did not want to let the enemy ship go. He pulled the trigger without thinking just as he yanked the stick up and to the right to leave the target area. The movement was automatic so that he could line up to RTB or return to base. He was not happy about leaving even one enemy warship able to escape but he also did not want to frak with the colonel. Not right now. He had done it a time or two in the past and he had not liked the response he had gotten from the Old Man on the planet.
Charles had made Colonel Tigh seem calm and restrained the last time he dressed Jarrell down. As he pulled away from the war zone, his radar cross signature suddenly bloomed and two Chinese HHQ-9 surface to air missiles hit him under the belly of his craft half a second apart from each other. Almost 360 Kilograms of high explosives went off with direct contact to the outer skin of his craft. This was not a small event to happen just about a half meter under someone's feet.
Fuzzy and his ECO's hearts almost stopped when the glass in front of their faces reflected the flash of the pair of warheads detonating into their eyes. When Jarrell realized that he was not dead, he did a quick system check. Everything seemed to be in working order. Both crewmembers quickly realized that the warheads had used only Earth made high explosives. The Raptor's skin was made of top quality Rifts Earth armor plate.
The chief long term concern by the Colonial flight crews was that the Chinese would try to nuke them when they did come to blows. 360 Kilograms of top of the line high explosives going off that close to you looks a lot like a nuclear weapon. At least for a few heartbeats, they seemed comparable. With that scare still fresh in his mind he directed his craft to claw for more altitude, the pair of Vipers right on his tail. He was so focused on aviating and navigating that he had no idea how his last but very short strafing run had tuned out. He would not think about that last warship for many long minutes, and by that time the battle site was well out of range of his mark one eyeballs.
The DDG-173 Changsha had been the second oldest among the new class of destroyers. Being that close to the beginning of the class, well she had had some teething problems in the early days of her service life. After some number of starts and stops in her early days, she was now thought of as a good ship. When the word came through about that counterattack, training had kicked in. Almost every ship in the fleet started firing and trying whatever evasive maneuvers their masters could think of.
The Changsha's helmsmen had just pushed the throttle through the gates and pushed maximum power to the twin props. He did not do crazy turns or anything along those lines. He just wanted to put as much distance between him and the rest of the fleet as fast as he could, if not just a little faster. It had pulled his ship out from under mutual support with the rest of the fleet, but in this case, 'run for your life' worked. At least for the short term it was a whole lot better than standing their ground with the rest of the fleet. That did not mean it ran in an exactly straight line, but any maneuvering it did was not that crazy compared to the port and starboard movements the other ships were trying as their engines went to maximum power.
The burst of ion bolts blew a line of six steaming holes in the churning water that was the 7,500 ton warship's wake. The helicopter's crew in the aft most part of the ship was watching the line of massive explosions of water getting closer and closer blast by blast. As they looked out the hangar door, it looked like death was marching up on them in the form of massive, white, steaming fountains of sea water. It was the metronome of death in the form of water spouts twenty-five meters high.
Then the last ion bolt of energy from the burst of fire from under the Raptor's belly scored a hit on the warship. It did not hit square on, as they say. It was more of a near miss than anything. The bulk of the mega damage ion blast's power hit the turbulent water just short of the ship's stern but the area of effect or blast radius of that bolt still caught part of the Chinese warship within it. The crew would say that they were well away from it in a good way. Then again, they did live through it so it could not be that bad now, could it?
The very last bolt hit the water and bled off a lot of its energy into the blue white bubbling mass of wake water at the point of impact. The water took that energy load and the energy split the water molecules into their oxygen and hydrogen component elements. It did this by the truck load, and in less time than the blink of a human eye. Both of these components did not like being in a high heat and high pressure environment. Then, into the mix was added a spark. The two elements greedily took the offered spark. They burned like the sun as long as the local area's supply of these types of fuel lasted. It was not as hot as the sun's surface or even the same level of heat as the ion bolt that started this reaction but it was very hot. The blast wave of the ion energy was still spreading out because the sea water could not dissipate the sheer heat load quickly enough.
It was only a split second between the bolt impacting water and the energy wave hitting the back part of the fleeing gray-white warship but that split second was very important to two hundred and eighty people who were within that hull. It would be the longest split second any of the survivors would ever have to endure.
The white-hot bubble of energy washed over the gray-white ship's aft. As the energy wave touched the metal, it quickly started to turn into a different color. The metal skin and supporting frames were just gone, vaporized in the heat of the bolt as soon as the human eye could tell something was wrong. As it happened, the ship had an aft mounted camera to help with helicopter operations. It was not a great video camera but it was pointed in the right direction to see what happened at 30 frames a second. With some help from powerful computers and months of effort, it became a great help to those who were able to acquire the data and wanted to study it every which way they could. The information would be used in the next generation of warships that would be laid down around the world.
The aft anchor and the massive steel chain that held it were the first to be blasted into atoms by the ion bolt's blast radius. Then the energy wave moved forward and the large twin rudders of the ship went next. Right along with everything that might be above them. That just happened to be the ship's high tech towed sonar and everything in the room holding it. The flight deck that marked the top of the ship in this area was gone next. The turning twin bronze propellers went next, along with two meters of the driving shaft for each of them. All were destroyed by the single energy wave.
The ion blast damage stopped only a bit more than a meter from the edge of the helicopter's open hangar door. That was not the end of the story of that one ion bolt however. The force of the explosion and growing fireball lifted the ship out of the water mangled tail first. The ion blast might have been spent, but the effects were still playing out faster than the human eye could keep track of the unfolding events. The force of the blast of the hydrogen and oxygen mix was not affecting the local area in equal measures, but it was very visible. It was like a Hollywood special effect for a high end war movie.
The back part of the warship being lifted up forced the bow of the warship down into the blue white water. It went deeper into the water as what was left of the stern was lifted higher in the air by the ion blast and impressive fireball. Sea water rushed down the barrel of the 130mm gun. The compressed air was pushed back down the barrel with such force it was almost enough to blow the breach out of the weapon.
The wave of energy bled off into the water, air, and metal very quickly and the same was true of what was normally used as rocket fuel. The water waves those twin but connected events caused moved farther away from the ship's axis. As it moved away, the bow of the ship came back up out of the water a little slower than it had been driven down. The top of the knife shaped bow cleared the rushing water first. This was followed by the 130mm gun turret, and finally the VLS cleared the Pacific Ocean one more time.
As the water wave trough passed down the length of the ship, the red line at the low water mark became visible. This was followed shortly by the bow mounted sonar clearing the water. The warship's keel did start to settle back below sea level where it was supposed to be. The wave caused by the blast went on, now clear of the metal vessel. The truncated aft section of the warship settled lower into the water. It was now a lot lower than it was supposed to be but the watertight hatches nearest to the now missing sections kept the sea water from advancing deeper into the ship. With her hull compromised so badly, she was in trouble.
Being the second ship of her class also gave her an advantage over the rest of the ships in any of the other Chinese task forces. When the Swift Dragon (Kunming) was inspected after surviving her close encounter with a Colonial weapons blast, they had found a lot more shock damage than had been first reported. The Changsha was the only ship in the fleet to be modified with this in mind in time for this attack. The shipyards could build new hulls or refit old ones, they could not do both within the time line of the plan.
The modifications that the lessons from the Kunming incident prompted did help her now, as the shock wave of the blast and waves of water shook the ship like a pack of dogs on a three-legged cat. She did not lose all of her systems due to this combat damage and after a few minutes, over seventy-five percent of her electronics were back in operation. That is they were in operation but at a much reduced efficiency given that the entire ship was on backup power. It would be about half an hour more before the massive diesel engines could be brought back online. Until then, the limited systems were using lithium-ion battery backups. Once the engines were tested and hooked into the power grid, they would be able to supply power to the whole ship. Or at least, the parts of the ship that were still on the surface of the ocean. Again, they were only able to do those things thanks to the last round of modifications.
The ship and her crew were not out of the woods just yet, however. Without the huge bronze propellers to push her home, the commander and crew of this ship had a lot to both do and think about. It would take some of them some time to realize the major flaw in the plan. That is, the major flaw in the whole attack plan that was just beginning to show its ugly head as the damaged ship floated dead in the water.
The Han fleet just did not have that much real world experience in supporting a fleet even close to this size this far from a friendly base of operations. They had not planned on what to do if a warship was damaged in any major way that did not sink it. They had no blue water support fleet deployed to support this operation.
During the planning phases it was decided and felt that a support fleet would have drawn too much attention to what was supposed to be training exercises. Little did they know that it was standard practice for the other global powers to do just that. It would take weeks for those very slow ships to make it to the location that the battle had been waged in. The support fleet of the whole Chinese Navy were very old, very slow, and often needed their own support ships to conduct operations close to shore. They could only make a few knots over 10 on average. That would mean a long travel time. Most of that fleet had been built back in the 1990's or even earlier. Twenty years was a long time for a ship to be exposed to the salt water and weather of the ocean.
The captain of the ship had no idea if his ship would last that long. More to the point, he had no idea if his ship would even last the oncoming night. The warship's commander had to come up with a Plan B very quickly. He spent almost an hour thinking aloud with his whole staff. Not just the command staff but also the ones with broken bones from being thrown around the ship like rag dolls. After the meeting, he still did not have any good plans worth mentioning to the rest of the crew. He and his staff could only come up with a few plans that fell into the less bad category. They did have a few plans that fell into the totally sucked category. That was the category that would almost guarantee that almost all of his crew would die in some graphic way. Like the USS Indianapolis' crew all of those years ago.
Fortunately, the planning and brainstorming sessions had yielded some good news. Now that he knew that his ship was not going to sink in the next ten minutes, he was able to take a deep breath and leave the stuffy and hot CIC for some fresh or at least different air. Both of his small boats had been crushed, but he had ordered flares to be fired at the bottom and top of every hour from one of the bridge's wings. The hope was that any of his country's ships would come to help them. It was also to show any of their people in the water where to try to make for in order to get whatever support the crippled ship and its crew could provide.
He should have been able to launch the Harbin built Z-9B to recover any survivors from the other still sinking ships. There were just two problems with that plan. One was that he did not have a helicopter landing or launching pad to support the craft. The other issue was that the two ton craft had broken lose from its tie downs when the stern was blown off. The Z-9B had been bounced around as badly as the crew of the ship had been. There was very little chance it could be repaired, much less repaired in time to help lift anyone out of the water.
The captain's main cabin was just down the passageway from the CIC. The hatch to his cabin quietly closed behind him and with a few quick motions with both of his hands, the only way to open it from the outside would be with lots of cutting torches and time. John looked around the room. He was taking in every square centimeter of the metal walled room and burning the details into his brain. He had worked so hard and for so long to make it to this level of command and responsibility. He wanted to take in every detail, because this might be the last time that he would see this room again in this way.
He walked around the whole room touching items as he slowly walked past. Then finally he went to his desk and sat down in the leather covered chair. He put his hands flat on the wooden desktop, and savored the moment before his hands moved with a mind of their own. They reached into two different desk drawers on two different sides of his desk at the same time.
His right hand pulled out an old Type 54 pistol chambered in 7.62 x 25mm. It was a Chinese copy of the Old Russian TT-33 first built in the early 1930's. This was the one that his grandfather had carried when he left to fight the capitalist invasion of North Korea in the winter of 1950. It had been in his family for generations, passed down from father to son whenever the younger generation left for military school.
The pistol went on the desk top, and the left hand pulled out a foreign made sat phone. The phone was both the reason for having the pistol and not. Having a sat phone was not why he might need the weapon. It was who he was about to notify on that sat phone that could end his life. Looking back and forth between the two devices, he first checked the weapon to make sure it was loaded and had its safety off before returning it to the desktop with a slight thud. That was the easy part, and he knew that he was dragging his feet trying to delay what he had to do next. Killing the messenger was not unknown to his country's leadership.
Captain John Lee pulled the odd shaped antenna out of the side of the device and started to slowly punch in a set of long ago memorized numbers into the phone. The person on the end only said the normal two word greeting the Chinese used on a normal phone. He replied to that greeting with his name and the pennant number of his ship. There was a metallic click and the dial tone did not return. He knew that he was being transferred to someone else. The person on the other end, this time, started talking before the Captain could say a word.
He was not surprised to find out that a report had already been passed along to the higher command of his country's military. He was glad that he did not need to pass along a detailed report of what had happened to the rest of the surface fleet he had been assigned to. The truth was that he knew very little but he had a very good idea of what had happened to the rest of his battle group and possibly to the other two task groups on this mission. Even if he could not prove it with any hard data at this time, he had seen what had happened to the battle group his ship had been par tof. He felt that it was safe to assume that the other two battle group had fared the same.
He only had to update the senior admiral about the damage to his ship. He made a formal request for a blue water tugboat to be sent out to his location. As he already knew, there was not a Chinese flagged or friendly tugboat of the right size and type in the area. He was told that there was not one within five days travel time of his location. Captain Lee had been a little surprised that one was that close. Then he thought about how quickly the officer on the other end of the sat phone had been able to give him that information. Maybe he was not being told the whole truth, and was being given a salve for his mental burns.
Captain Lee asked if he could use two of the 'auxiliary naval vessels' in the area to tow his ship to a friendly port. He was told that it would take two or three of the intelligence gathering ships to tow his command without burning out their engines. That is, even if the PLAN could get them re-tasked to help his ship. There just were not enough ships of the right size to tow another 7,500 tons worth of ship. The voice on the other end sounded almost as tired as Captain Lee's, and he did not pick on the word 'another' for some time.
Captain Lee was not told that many of the ships he was referring to were already fleeing the local area as fast as their propellers could take them. When he asked about using one of the large ships in the landing force in place of the tug or other 'auxiliary naval vessels', he was told the bad news from that front. It would seem that the Colonials had not only gone after the warships that had launched the air and missile attack against them. Part of John's heart sank at the confirmation of what happened to the rest of the operation's ships. He had visions of landing craft and army personnel floating around burning and sinking vessels.
The Landing Force had been on its way to do its specialized job. Once the missiles had taken out any large Colonial weapons, the surviving Chinese fighters were to have been on standby to provide close air support. That had been the way the plan was supposed to have worked out.
The landing fleet had been a little closer to the islands than the other combat task groups had been at the time of the attack. That was because those ships had lower speed capabilities, so being closer made the travel time still about the same as the other groups stationed farther out from the lagoon. The planners wanted as many ships in or almost in the lagoon as they could get in the shortest amount of time as possible. It was going to be their vision of 'Shock and Awe,' and it was not just aimed at the Colonials.
They were just under eighty nautical miles from the pair of islands when the carriers started to launch their fighters earlier than planned. The landing fleet was still about seventy nautical miles out when the Colonials forced the surviving fighters to flee to back towards their carriers. The long ranged air search radars mounted on four of the ships were able to pick up what had happened to those fighters that were supposed to support them after landing on the two islands. They could not tell what or who had done the shooting, but they had no problem seeing what happened to the pride of the People's Liberation Army Naval Air Force. The hearts of the crews at those radar stations sank as the few remaining fighters fled back the way they came from at very high speed.
The task group commander could sense that the attack plan was coming apart as he listened to the radio suddenly go quiet. He knew that they were not going have anyone to give them the word that they were clear to land on the targeted islands. The Chinese fleet had shut down their transponders when the UN ambassador made his little speech. A quick look to the long ranged surface search radar and mission datalink control systems showed him the rest of the battle groups. The blips started to disappear from those screens even as he watched. He had never been in a 'real' naval battle, but he was starting to think that his navy was losing ships like it had just lost attack aircraft.
Suddenly the Landing Force commander ordered the fleet to turn sixty degrees to the west and slow down to just ten knots of forward speed. This was the safest long range cruising speed for the fleet, the same speed as the slowest ship in the group. These two moves saved the lightly defended ships from being sent to the bottom of the ocean with the over 40,000 troops and crew carried within their metal hulls.
The two Type 075 LHD were on high alert of a different kind. Deep within them, senior officers started to pull out very old plans. Ones that they never thought they would ever need. Even having the plans was a throwback to a different time within the People's Liberation Army. As with many things seen in hindsight, this was just going to prove that just because it is old does not mean that it will not be useful.
The four Type 054A class escorting warships were on high alert and circling their fleet of transports at about 15 knots to save fuel. They were like sheep dogs protecting the herd from the hungry and now very angry wolves. This task was not helped by the BeiDou Satellite Navigation System going down. They were forced to fall back to using the civilian GPS network, and as a back up to that they also had to break out the paper maps to plot their courses on. The loss of the BeiDou had also caused all of the digital maps to become useless. The images would have to be moved manually to keep up, and without mapping lines and being outside of line of sight of any island, it was not an easy task.
All of the bridge crews were at full battle stations when the first message came in. It was not from their central command back on mainland China. The unencrypted radio message was from the ANZUS commander. He was sitting on the Canberra-class landing helicopter dock HMAS Canberra and was surrounded by her little battle fleet.
The Canberra was not carrying transport helicopters or even attack helicopters on this mission. On this trip she was carrying a short combat group of sixteen F35B+ VTOL fighters doing double duty as fighters and very capable ISR platforms. He ordered the little Chinese fleet of amphibious support ships to stop. If they did not obey his orders, then he, as the ANZUS commander, would order his aircraft and submarines to sink every ship in that fleet. He even listed out the names of every ship in the landing fleet, both in English and Mandarin. He wanted to make his point clear, that he knew who they were and more importantly what they were. The transmission was picked up by amateur radio operators and several news outlets in the local area, if not in other parts of the world.
The Landing Force Commander had tuned out the demand from the round-eye, and kept going on his present course. He did send an encrypted message to the other captains in the fleet. He said that the weak American puppet states of Australia and New Zealand were bluffing and to stay on course. He had too many other things on his mind to worry about something coming from a fourth rate navy's officer.
The ANZUS fleet had picked up this transmission, even if they could not break the encryption and read the blasted thing. While his crew was working on both breaking the latest transmission coming from the Chinese fleet and rebroadcasting his first message, his next call was to CINCPAC in Hawaii.
That call went straight to the person he wanted to talk to. He demanded the reinforcement of the Australian and New Zealander warships under the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty of 1951. He had a good idea why the Chinese admiral had not even replied to his demands, and that was because his country was viewed as weak compared to the Asian giant. That was going to change if he had anything to do about it. Admiral Garner was about to take his ships into battle, the first naval battle his nation had been involved in since 1945.
The Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet had been watching the data flowing from his many aircraft overflying the area but was still waiting on word from the Beltway to come in. He had already put all of his ships and aircraft on a wartime alert. He knew that all of his Air Force and Army compatriots had done the same all over the Pacific. He was waiting and waiting to get directions from the National Command Authority. One of his senior enlisted men had already been overheard saying that this was looking a lot like Benghazi all over again. The admiral could not argue with the comment, but he did send his senior NCO to put a lid on the volume of the statement if not the spirit of it.
Five minutes after passing along the official request of the treaty enforcement to DC, he still did not have a reply. Now he had to do a gut check, big time. The admiral was looking at all of the different types of data on a dozen huge screens. He made a face and took a sip of his tenth cup of coffee. He had been on shift as soon he had been awoken by his XO when the Colonials' reply to the Chinese Ambassador hit the air waves.
Admiral Alexander 'Will' Patch looked at the data and then looked around the room. He needed to make the call. "I am going to have to lawyer the frak out this. What are they going to do, fire me? I had enough time in service to retire eight years ago with over sixty percent of my base pay. Janet wanted me to get out years ago. Well, hell! I have to be able to sleep at night." Will did not even notice that his thoughts had included a Colonial curse. It was only the first of a growing list of 'foreign' loanwords being added to the world's vocabulary.
Admiral Patch walked over to his executive officer and the second ranking officer of his command. This person might well be the new boss in about half an hour. He pitched his voice low. "Jill, we have a valid request for support from a treaty partner. Do you remember when we did the ROE for RIMPAC 26 Mod 3?"
Jill Axton had seen her boss coming towards her and had noticed the set of his shoulders. She had seen how the last year had worn him down. Her heart sank when her admiral started talking. He was about to ruin his career. The bad part was that she agreed with him one hundred percent. She might have voted for the person in the White House because she was a woman, but that was then. Now, she was mad as hell waiting for something to come down after repeated requests.
Jill felt her back go ramrod straight. "You're talking about if the American commander of a fleet is taken out or rendered command ineffective and the next senior officer is an allied officer that takes temporary command of our ships?"
The admiral felt a sad smile come to his face of its own accord. He could read Jill's body language as well as she could read his. "Yes, that is the one. I want you to send that packet out to any and all ships or planes under my command that is within the vicinity of the Trading Outpost. After each ship has accepted the change of orders, send the data to the Joint Chiefs and SECDEF under my name."
He had two whole Carrier Battle Groups under his broad command, but he had been under orders to keep them in the Northeastern Pacific, or near the west coast of the United States. All of that firepower was not going to be in this game, at least not in the near term. He had come up through the submarine service himself, and he could not help but have a smile on the inside. The visible pride of the US Navy was going to be left out of these history making few days. That was going to leave a few of his fellow flag ranked officers a little butthurt.
Jill Axton nodded her head in understanding. She knew he had just covered her from what she was betting was going to be a huge blowback. At least in the short term, she was covered. The admiral did not say anymore, but returned her sad eyed nod with a matching one of his own. The two senior officers spent the next few minutes reviewing commands that needed to be given. They would only let the higher ups know what they were doing after it was done. It was not strictly against the law, but it was also not exactly legal either.
In less than a minute messages went out to very ship and plane under the orders of CINCPAC and USPACOM. They were told that they were now to support the ANZUS treaty and take orders form the Aussie admiral on HMAS Canberra, who was now listed as the on-site commander. This was the first time a US Navy command had fallen under a non US commander since 1942. Many officers would hold secret hopes that this would end up better than ABDA had turned out.
The patrolling USN submarines were contacted via UHF and VHF. They were to surface for high speed runs and new orders. It should have taken longer to get them moving in the right direction but from some reason, they were the first ships to notify the odd little baby carrier from down under and ask for orders. The Aussie admiral was stunned, as the request for orders started out as a stream and quickly turned into a flood. This was why they had done all of those training events over the last few decades. The carrier might have been small compared to other ships, but she had been designed to be a flagship from the day her first hull plates were laid out. That design foresight was about to pay dividends.
The so called leader of the free world needed her nap before an interview. While she slept, the USS Seawolf got new orders and its commander smiled a smile that the ship's namesake would have loved to share. Then he took his ship back deep underwater, all evil thoughts about a certain high ranked officer ordering them to the surface quickly forgotten. She only went deep enough to make use of her bleeding edge hydrodynamics detection gear. She had been built at the end of the last Cold War, and was designed to kill ships from a major world power. It did not take long for her sophisticated gear and its well trained crew to find what she was looking for. The Seawolf was on the hunt, and it was not a training exercise.
Her target was just over the horizon from her current location. She went to maximum power for the first time since completing her acceptance trials back in 1997. She was going to be loud at that speed, but that was going to be okay for now. With everything else that was going on above the water, that noise would seem like just more background acoustics. She kept a thermocline layer over her sail as she put the power into the water with her shroud covered pump-jet propeller. Running at that speed put the crew on edge, but that edge was good. The crew did not need to be told that they were on the hunt. They could smell it, and the speed of rumor was sufficient to let the crew know what was about to happen.
When she was only thirty miles from her target, she cut her speed back down to go into silent running. She quietly slid up through the thermocline layer and deployed her antenna and other high tech sensors behind her to listen to what was going on around her. She waited like a hole in the water, or like a trap door spider waiting for dinner.
The third round of broadcasts from the round-eyes was getting on the Chinese fleet commander's nerves. It almost sounded like the round-eye wanted to do something, like fire at his ships. The Australian government had been getting more and more backbone lately but this was a whole new level and the Chinese admiral did not like what he was hearing. He, his staff, and his subordinate ships' captains did not need the added stress that this upstart was causing every time one of the absurd demands was transmitted over the open airwaves.
Finally the Chinese officer had enough and stormed over to one part of the Command Center. He picked up the receiver and pressed the right buttons himself. He spoke perfect English into the microphone that would send those words over the radio. He had a sneer on his face that the whole room had noticed and drew some strength from. It was one of the few positive things in a long list of bad news they had received this day.
"To the Australian officer clogging the airwaves with your lies. You need to take your tiny fleet home, and stay out of the Chinese bath tub."
The Command Center on the Canberra was deadly quiet, and anger filled every eye in the overcrowded room. Admiral Garner raised an eyebrow at the speaker mounted near his head. He did not say anything for a long few seconds. He was fighting not to grab the mic and say something back to the other fleet commander that could be called very off color. Then with an evil grin, he used his chin to point to one station. He made a gun sign and waved it in the air.
That was going to start the next part of the actions today. Now that the next part of this play was set and the people were on their marks, the admiral was ready to go. He picked up the mic. The reply was not what the Chinese commander had expected at all and it would change the way China would deal with that island country the size of a continent for the next hundred years.
"To the commander of the Chinese ships. You are to stop, and be dead and quiet in the water. Or you, your ships, and all of your troops will be feeding the fish in sixty seconds. Only after we are done with you will we be able to start picking up what is left of your country's navy." He then cut the line between the two groups of ships.
At fifty eight seconds, the ships showed no signs of slowing down. Then, it happened. The MGK-335 medium frequency variable depth active/passive sonar system on all four of the 4,000 ton Chinese warships went nuts. Their systems were saying that they had just been pinged by three different submarines using active sonars. Those shipboard passive systems were normally used to try to find quiet targets. Ones that were doing their level best not to be seen or heard by anyone in or above the water. When those systems were hit with the very powerful active enemy systems the operators had to rip their headsets off of their heads to protect their well-trained ears. It would have been like someone holding a stethoscope to a door and instead of hearing termites, getting 50,000 watts of Five Finger Death Punch. Between the sound and the actions of the sonar operator, an additional layer of chaos was added to the CICs on the Chinese warships.
That chaos was soon intensified by the threat radar warning systems starting to scream. It was now saying that the ships had been painted by air attack systems. Ones that they had not noticed before going active. It now was clear to the Chinese Task Group commander that they were outgunned and outnumbered. He was very much aware that submarines did not just 'go active' and let the world know where they were in the oceans. That is, unless they had their fingers on the buttons to unleash every weapon they had on board and shoot at something. He was thinking that those somethings were his ships.
The Chinese fleet commander was stunned at all of the different threat systems targeting his little fleet. This group that had been the weakest of the four task groups assigned to do this mission in firepower. He dropped his head, and he had to fight to keep a tear from running down his face. He knew what he had to do. That did not mean that he was quick about it. He was just lucky that all of the other ships in his fleet had shut down their engines as soon as the massive threat was revealed without any orders from him.
He looked up as his brain noticed that the engine noise of the fully loaded 45,000 ton Type 075-class landing helicopter deck (LHD) had stopped. He looked around the room, and it seemed that every eye in the room was looking at him. He could tell that they were all scared. In all of the planning and war games, they had never thought that they would lose. To realize that they had lost, and it had only taken an hour, was soul crushing.
He let a breath out and then pushed the transmitter. He did not want to risk any misunderstandings. Not now with over 30,000 lives at risk. He cleared his throat and addressed his fleet and the targeting craft around them.
"This is the Admiral, to all ships. Go to all stop. We are being threatened with overwhelming force and firepower. You need to protect your ships, crews, and passengers. To all captains! You will need to take the orders of the round-eyes, or you might be sunk by those same round-eyes. They might have won today, but China will prevail in the end."
The admiral turned off the transmitter and looked over the ship's commander. "Captain, please send an update to the South Seas Fleet headquarters. Make it as complete as you can, with everything that has transpired. I will be in my cabin."
The Chinese commander left the CIC of the warship after looking around the room one more time. In his flag cabin, he took his own life with his own side arm. He had an idea what was going happen to him when this day ended. He thought that he had too many state secrets in his head to risk falling into the hands of another country's intelligence services. He had seen and been briefed on what his own country had done to people that had fallen into their hands. He gave one last measure to his country and government.
Just after the single pistol shot was heard in the LHD's CIC, the ship was rocked by an amazingly loud noise. Six Colonial Vipers and three Raptors flew by at less than six meters above average wave height, and they were going way more than supersonic. No one born on Earth had any idea how fast the nine craft were flying but their noses and the leading edges of their wings were glowing due to the friction with the almost sea-level air moving around them. The sound was so loud that all of the thick glass connected to the outer hulls of the ships were shattered like thin window pane.
The only reason that the Colonial craft had not made strafing runs on these ships was that the ships were no longer moving and were dead in the water. The Raptors' ECO's had picked up the transmission from the Earthborn admiral, so they knew what had been going on. When they were within a pair of kilometers from the Chinese task force, the seniormost Colonial in the flight got in contact also with Admiral Garner to let them know that they had not fired into the ships. They had just wanted to give the enemy task group a little wake up call.
The Colonial pilots were not happy at not being able to fire into the enemy ships but they followed orders as given to them by their commander. That is, after letting the Chinese ships know that they not only had to face Earth built weapons, but now they also had the Colonials who wanted to send them to their watery deaths. There was no better example of rock and hard place in modern times.
Ships from over a dozen different navies came over the horizon at the fastest speed they could make in anything that remotely looked like a formation. They were not going as fast as was safe. They were going as fast as possible. They all were pushing their engines past any redlines. It was a footrace to see who would get to this part of the ocean's surface first. It was a matter of Navy pride who would be first. Time to arrive at the different battle sites and the number of bodies pulled out of the water was the meter stick that they would be using in seaside bars for years to come. All to decide who would have to buy the next round of drinks, or to start a fight.
What they did not see was as important as what the Colonials were able to see. All of the Chinese ships that were in any functional capacity to do so activated General Order Number 78. That was the protection of any senior party member's blood relatives. A list of these personnel was kept at all times, and only known to a few in each warship's chain of command. Throughout the ground support ships, small groups of naval and party personnel would take several someones out of cabins. Those someones would be almost carried to the nearest flight deck. The two Type 075's should have had a larger number of transports like the Z-20 to take her troops to land. The Z-20 being more or less a knock off of the American UH-60 or S-70C-2 that they had been sold in the past. It just had five blades instead of four and a few other modifications, but the lineage was clear to the trained eye.
That was not an option for today's execution of Order #78. The LHD's and other ships only had a few smaller Z-9's or Z-11's. All of the rest of the hangar and deck space were filled with attack Z-10's. It was hoped that they could support the ground forces with mobile and very heavy fire support. Those who could fit on the passenger helicopters were in luck. The rest had no choice. With so few seats for a long list of people, the ground crews got inventive with how they enacted their very important orders. First the gunners were pulled out of their seats, and lower ranked party members were 'attached' to step rungs with D-rings and forcibly seated on the landing wheels. The riding accommodations went downhill from there. Notes on how to recover Lance Corporal Ford only went so far, but it did give them a starting point.
The little craft would roll more than take off of the ships, and drop down to a very low attitude. Like dragging the people's feet in the water if they were sitting on the landing tires low. More than a few party members' sons were doing just that. Flying this low, at sometimes below wave top height kept the helicopters from being seen on any ship mounted radar. It also just happened to keep them from being seen by the Colonial craft, which were now some distance from the surviving task force. There were just too much for the Colonial craft to do, and not enough time or testing to do it all. It would take some time for anyone to notice something had been pulled off from under all of their collective noses.
Each of the small helicopters was given a direction to go that would take it to a certain Chinese flagged vessel. There were only a few ships in the area that were of the right kind to receive these passengers, and not one of them had a real landing pad or even refueling capabilities for them. The Chinese were just lucky that today was not that rough of a wave day in this part of the world. The helicopter pilot, singular for the most part but for two occasions where a craft had two pilots, would come flying up to the ship and then land on any halfway convenient flat spot. The passengers would then be 'detached' and the crews helped from their flying craft. Most of the time it was a one way mission for those multimillion dollar craft, but not all of the time. One pilot and craft was able to make three runs before he ran out of gas or luck. No one would know for sure what had happened on the third run. All that could be found out was that this pilot never flew again, not even on a commercial liner after the war.
They had two reasons for the next move on those impromptu landing decks, one that had not been seen on this scale since 1975 on the USS Kirk. The ship's crew would push the multimillion dollar flying machines off the side of the ships to slide beneath the waves of the South Pacific. The first reason they did this was that there were no hangars on these ships, and the idea was to keep the mission quiet. That could not happen if anyone saw a gunship sitting on the tail of a civilian ship like some kind of hawk.
The second reason was that the ships receiving the packages did not know how many more helicopters they would be receiving due to the strict radio silence. They needed the room, so over the side the five and a half ton craft went. The few survivors of the Chinese blue water battle fleet were too far away from the Landing Force ships to copy these actions.
Below the waters things were not so settled as they were in the air or on the surface. Now the American, British, Indian, Japanese and Australian submarines were on the hunt for any Chinese or Russian submarines in the area. Russia had been the only country on the planet to come out in support of what the Chinese said. They had also publicly offered support and given out a list of demands that mirrored what the Chinese had already stated. Most were not able to find any of those expected submarines after the landing ships had their hulls painted.
They searched anyway, and they were given orders to herd all of them out of the area. Any of those countries' subsurface warships that did not follow the suggestion to leave the area could be fired upon. That order would only be in effect for about a dozen hours until it was rescinded, but it made lots of air time on history shows afterwards as the way to expertly control the seas. It even made it to many popular songs over the following years.
While those underwater hunters were working to sanitize the local area, the rest of the allied surface fleet encircled what was left of the Chinese fleet. There were more US Navy ships in the area than from any other single country, at least now that the Chinese fleet had just been blasted into so much fish food. That did not mean that they were in charge of the operation. It turned out that Admiral Garner was the senior naval officer on site. It seemed that any other officer that was even close in rank had come down with food poising or a bad case of the flu all of a sudden.
It took some good old horse trading for the next move to happen. The Colonials, as they were very fond of saying, were very frakking mad, and still wanted payback. A lot of it! In the end the only military port that was big enough to take over 40,000 hostiles and the 18 ships that they were in turned out to be Pearl Harbor. So that was where the captured ships were headed, at a nice and easy 12 knots for the 2,000 miles trip to the massive US navy base.
It was going to take days to complete the trip for the now slowly moving joint fleet. More warships would be added to the covering force keeping an eye on things. Russia tried to get in on the act by demanding the UN to take over the mission and change it from a now American focused operation. The US Ambassador to the UN told them to go pound sand when it came up at the UN. The President was now awake and trying to take back control of the situation, but she was not the greatest at reacting fast to sudden changes.
That was why the last Chinese Destroyer was now without any way to get home. Not without a functioning propulsion system. The Landing Force was just now starting the long journey going north under heavy enemy escort. The one damaged warship had been so quiet that she had been forgotten about by the navies on the planet and the Colonials. She was just a hole on top of the water, no longer rated as a threat, and had just slipped off the radar. That was about to change, to a point.
Captain John Lee put his satellite phone away into the foam lined desk and went back to the CIC of his damaged ship. He made his way to the vertical plotting glass and looked at the list of surface ships in the area from the last update provided by his hobbled sensors. Most of the data had come from a small office computer console that was again accessing shipping location data from the web. It did not take long to give him the information he feared but he had to double check anyway. He was finding it hard to believe that today could have gone this badly for his navy. It had and from the information he was getting, it was not good. On top of that, it was only a matter of time before heavy weather blew into this part of the ocean. That would complicate his life and risk the safety of what was left of his ship and her crew.
Captain Lee wanted to drop his head down but that would have been a bad sign for his crew to see. Instead he walked to the radio handset and picked it up. His XO and friend was watching him every step of the way and had no idea what was about to happen. He could tell something was up but he had no idea what it was. The XO knew that there was just something wrong with his commander. Then again, the captain had just lost almost a quarter of his command. All Lee knew was that their ship was still in danger of sinking, and it had no way to move besides at the will of the sea. And every seaman knows that if you let that happen for long enough, you would end up losing your life to her.
John Lee took a breath before he hit the transmit button. "Any ship. Any ship. This is the Chinese ship Changsha. We have lost all propulsion and are taking on water. We are asking for a tow to the nearest harbor for the safety of the crew."
Captain Lee repeated the call in English twice more before going back to Chinese and starting all over. He was avoiding looking around the CIC. His eyes remained locked on the small light provided by the windows that now held not one shard of armored glass. If he had looked around the room, he would have seen shocked eyes staring back at him instead of doing their jobs. He did not need to see them. He could feel the eyes. When he stopped transmitting, he turned his back to the rest of the CIC. He handed off the task to the nearest radioman, and they repeated the message again over the powerful radio but with the additional information of the ship's location. Captain Lee walked out of the CIC and left the hatch open to the sea air. He would spend the next few hours standing on one of the bridge's wings looking at his damaged ship and the sea that carried her slowly east and north.
As it turned out, two Malta flagged open ocean tug boats were about sixty nautical miles to the south of his estimated location. They were towing a prefabricated 900 meter long jetty/pier extension piece to Tahiti. That job did not need two vessels of this class to do it. The second tugboat was just there in case something happened to the number one tugboat in the middle of the ocean with its very expensive, chartered and insured load. It was not good press to have a load delayed because your towboat broke down in the middle of the job. A towboat was who you called when you broke down, not the other way around.
One of the unwritten laws of the seas said that, "If another ship was in distress and you could help, you did." The number two and spare tug called back saying that they were on the way and asked for more details about the issue the last calling station was experiencing. They had no idea about the battle that had happened just a few hours ago. When they found out who and what the ship was, it was almost enough to cause the tug captain to turn his ship back towards its buddy.
Who would want to take a battle damaged warship in tow, one on the losing side of a battle? It took a few radio calls back to their company's main office to find out what they should do. In the end, the number two tugboat did not stop its 'high speed' run to the stricken warship. It was the law of the sea, and the head office's legal department was sure that if they did not respond, it would cause them trouble in the courts. But a new company policy was written and some funds moved to cover for a few additional provisions. From now on, all of their ships would have satellite television and it would stay on as long as a ship was out of port. It would also only be allowed to access news stations.
The Ocean Tug M/V Huga made it to the still drifting and damaged Chinese Destroyer six hours after the first request for assistance. By then the pair of ships were not alone, as repeated flybys of different Earth built craft crisscrossed the area. Just after the lines were thrown across between the pair of ships, they were being circled by a dark green painted VC-22. No contact was made between the warship and the twin engine flying craft but the latter was listening in on all the communications between the warship and the tug and showing the flag to both parties. It had been ordered to let the two ships know that someone was out there watching, and that the flybys had not been done on a whim.
The little tug was able to quickly get the massive tow lines connected between the two ships even in the dark. The captain of the warship had not told his crew where the next port call was going to be. Only he and the XO knew, and they each had bets on how long they would live once that news came out to the crew and the rest of the world. They each gave themselves even odds that one of the crew would try to kill them before they made it to the next port. After they made it to the harbor, they gave themselves about a 10% chance of living to see their homes again.
It was a full day later when the tug and the attached warship made it to the nearest port. They were only a few hours behind the towed jetty the former's sister ship had been working with. This was how the fully autonomous Tahitian coast guard, that was only three years old, was able to add a 7,500 ton 157 meter long top of the line warship to their little fleet.
What happened to the surviving crew and the few countrymen they were able to pull from the water? That my friends is a different story, which is as varied in outcome as the number of people it affected.
The independent government of Tahiti were the ones to pay the fees to the towing company for the work they had done getting the warship safely into its harbor. And that was not cheap for such a little country, even one with the economic boom it had been experiencing for over a year now. It was only just a little more than what the scrap value of her hull was estimated at. It would sit for almost a year, in that port, under close armed guard while all manner of things went through the courts about who owned the damaged warship, but it was a pretty cut and dried case as these things went. By that point there were no longer any PLAN personnel living on her.
While the legal battles were starting up. The damaged Type 52D warship went into one of the floating dry docks that had been used in the past to support the cruise liners that made port call. It would stay in the dry dock for only about six months while it was worked on. When it was floated back out into the harbor. It had a new stern firmly attached to the rest of the hull. It was not fitted with a replacement towed sonar yet. This was due to the high cost of an item like that on the open market. That space would be used in other ways for some time.
It was an amazing bit of ship work that the local workers were able to do in such a short length of time. Lots of questions were asked about where such a small port could get the parts, plans, and skilled personnel to do the job in the first place. All the locals cared about was that now, Tahiti had a real flagship to command their growing fleet of surface ships. It would earn its keep by being an escort, school, and testing center for the now greatly expanded number of ships that supported the local area. It would soon be officially listed as the flagship of the Free Polynesian Maritime Security Forces, as soon as the last court appeal was thrown out. With a new name of Tahiti, she would sail the ocean for the next forty years. After that, she would become a museum and tourist attraction in her own right.
