Lethal Trajectories - Michael Conley [3]
After a brief consultation between Zhao and his fellow commander on the missile frigate Luoyang, the two ships launched a joint salvo of JY-12 missiles at all Japanese targets within a fifty-kilometer range. This included the two destroyer escorts, two nearby Japanese-owned oil platforms, and a platform-supply ship. The platform workers and crew of the support ship never knew what hit them. One of the Japanese destroyers sank immediately, but the other escaped the onslaught and ran for Japanese waters. Its captain immediately conveyed the horrifying news to the Japanese high command.
Passengers on at least three commercial flights headed toward Taiwan saw what looked like a New Year’s fireworks festival. The airline crews reporting the spectacle to air traffic control had to repeat themselves several times. A sharp-eyed reporter from Shared News Services glanced out the window of one of the Taipei-bound planes and was astonished to see fires blazing all over the East China Sea. She took what photos she could with her phone and sent out a news blast to all affiliates and subscribers upon landing. Less than two hours after the first blast, the incident was world news.
Meanwhile, international satellites as well as monitoring facilities at U.S. Naval Base Guam, several hundred miles southeast of Chunxiao, were busily accumulating data. The radio intercepts from Chinese and Japanese naval vessels reinforced the ugly picture now evolving.
Missiles deployed, the Wenzhou and Luoyang took up defensive positions near the sunken Chunxiao platform. Although the massive oil slicks burned furiously, the automatic underwater emergency shutoff systems on all of the sunken platforms—a technology perfected after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon debacle in the Gulf of Mexico—appeared to be holding. For now, the Chinese commanders were more concerned with potential counterattacks from Japanese naval forces in the general area. PLAN high command listened to their reports with horror and issued further orders.
Commander Zhao gazed gloomily off the starboard bridge at the fiery waters, then checked his watch, now showing 0105 hours—Beijing time—and marveled at how quickly things happened in warfare. He had almost certainly pulled the trigger on World War III, and all he could do for the moment was continue his watch and wait.
In Earth’s Orbit
14 September 2017
As scores of intelligence satellites monitored the naval battle in the East China Sea, three new satellites, with entirely different missions, were collecting data of a more catastrophic nature.
Orbiting Earth in a combination of circular and geostationary orbits, the new observers carried the most advanced climate-monitoring technologies known to mankind. Joining several other climate satellites launched earlier in the year, the grand-slam trifecta was expected to unequivocally clarify the climate-change puzzle. They represented the best effort yet to accurately assess Earth’s true state of health, and the diagnostic results would shake the scientific community to the bone.
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Old Executive Building, Washington, DC
13 September 2017
Half a world away, in Washington, DC, the vice president of the United States was wrapping up a meeting that might have taken a more urgent tone had they known about the conflict raging at Chunxiao.
Normally an upbeat guy, Clayton Joseph McCarty found that meetings like this left him drained. His boss, President Lyman Burkmeister, had asked him to chair this high-powered group of business leaders and cabinet members in search of ideas for incorporation into the State of the Union address in January. McCarty was frustrated by the glacial pace of policymaking in Washington and chagrined by its inability to effectively deal with the economic malaise that draped the world like a pall. No matter how you sliced or diced it, the root cause always came down to oil—more specifically, to the dual challenges of access and affordability of oil.