Fourth Crisis: The Battle for Taiwan (25 page)

“Beam integrity nominal,” the airman announced.
 
“Thermals in the green.”
 
The beam of light reached into space for 12
long seconds, and heated the gold foil-covered metal skin of the target
spacecraft.
 
Asymmetric thrust then pushed
the Hummingbird off course, smashing it into one of its mates.
 
Pieces tumbled in all directions; some to
begin a fiery fall back to Earth.
 
Others
would circle the planet for years.

◊◊◊◊

Legendary Chinese admirals and generals—Cheng Ho; Meng Yi;
Shi Lang; Sun Tzu; Zhang Zizhong; and Zheng He—stared from bronze busts and oil
paintings that formed a gauntlet in a dark marble corridor within Beijing’s
Ministry of National Defense.
 
The
Chinese president walked the hall, leaning forward as if going uphill and
mumbling all the while.
 
At hall’s end,
the president pushed through tall double doors and burst into a foyer where two
soldiers snapped to attention.
 
He waved
them away impatiently and pushed into the conference room beyond, where the
monitor revealed General Zhen already sitting at his airport terminal desk.

A cloud of tobacco smoke, illuminated by the dim early
morning light filtering through an open window in Taiwan, veiled Zhen.

“Mr. President,” Zhen exclaimed. “Good to be able to confer
with you again.”

“General, you assured me we would hold the island by the end
of the third day of operations.
 
However,
we hold no more than 40 percent of the territory, and the Americans have an
aircraft carrier to the south.
 
Who knows
how many submarines are lurking out there, and I have just heard that the
Hummingbird system is down, likely destroyed by the Americans.”

“Please, Mr. President, sit.
 
We must stay unemotional and think clearly.
 
Our destinies are linked.
 
We must cooperate.
 
Yes, the schedule has suffered somewhat.
 
However, our strategic goals are
accomplished,” Zhen’s voice was calming, though the president snorted in
disbelief and exhaustion.
 
“President,
you are a politician, and I can only imagine the pressures upon you.
 
However, I need you to be strong.
 
China needs you to be strong; as strong as
our men on the front lines.”
 
Zhen seemed
to grow larger as he spoke.
 
The
president fell back into an oversize chair.
 
Sensing a power shift, Zhen leaned forward.
 
“Mr. President, you are correct.
 
The Y-9 ocean surveillance system has
failed.
 
Before it went offline, however,
the satellite provided the current position of the American aircraft
carrier.
 
We shall destroy it.
 
Of that, I am certain.”
 
The general paused to read the reaction of
the president.
 
He is mine
, Zhen thought and surged.
 
“I regret very much that I must now adamantly
request one thing more from you, something only you have the power to grant.”

“And, what might that be, general?”

“Release
Liaoning
,”
Zhen said bluntly.
 
The Chinese president
became quietly contemplative.
 
Zhen
studied the image of the president’s face like one of his battle maps.
 
The president took a deep, nasally breath
before nodding acquiescence.
 
Then he
stood and glared into the camera.

“And if you fail, general, it will be your head,” the
president growled, with renewed vigor, as he waved his pudgy finger at Zhen’s
face.
 
Had they been in the same room, Zhen’s
instinct may have been to bite it off, but the fox inside told him to bide time
instead.
 
Besides
, Zhen thought,
it is
really both our heads on the line
.
 
“Have the missile submarines put to sea, also,” the president ordered.
 
“We will need them if this goes wrong.”

“Yes, sir,” Zhen said and picked up his telephone, as the
president clicked off.

Zhen then made a phone connection with the submarine base at
Sanya.
 
He ordered two
Jin
-class submarines to set sail from
their pens on Hainan Island.
 
Each hauled
12 city-busting Giant Wave thermonuclear ballistic missiles.
 
The
Americans would never risk escalating this
, Zhen wagered.
 
He then pushed a red button on the telephone.
“Get me Commodore Shen.”

When the naval officer came on the line, Zhen repeated the
president’s order to get
Liaoning
and
the missile boats to sea.
 
Zhen rolled
his eyes when the commodore protested with numerous excuses, and then reiterated
the order, insisting the ‘impossible’ be made to happen.
 
Zhen hung up the receiver and settled his
face into his palms.
 
Resisting his body’s
own cries for rest, he knew there was yet one more call to be made.
 
He lifted the receiver and dialed a memorized
number.

“
Hundun
(chaos),”
the general uttered to another of his Four Fiends.

◊◊◊◊

A People’s Liberation Army colonel lowered the telephone,
his face betraying an amalgam of amazement, delight, and fear.
 
Determination stepped up, and the colonel left
his office to walk through a dark and dimly lit weapons bunker.
 
Long racks of man-sized, brick red and cone-shaped
ballistic missile warheads lined the tunnel.
 
The colonel came to a heavy blast door.
 
He removed a lanyard and key from around his neck to unlock it.
 
Inside he observed more warheads and a
machine that sniffed the air for biological, chemical, or nuclear
elements.
 
Its siren was silent.
 
The colonel touched the casing of one
warhead.
 
It was ice cold.
 
Cold as
death
, he reflected, and ran his hand over the orange peel-like
texture.
 
He donned thick gloves and
primed the 12-kiloton plutonium-powered implosion-type nuclear warhead.
 
He then attached an anti-ship guidance and
targeting package to the warhead’s base, and used a gantry to hoist and lower
it onto an auto dolly.
 
The colonel spray
painted over the warhead’s distinguishing trifoil symbol and took the dolly’s
controls in hand, remotely driving the package out of the vault.
 
The blast door closed shut behind him.

The colonel and his nuclear weapon entered another chamber
of the tunnel complex.
 
The arched room held
a ballistic missile transporter-erector-launcher rail car.
 
Soldiers crawled over the specialized
train.
 
A small, yellow crane waited to
lift and attach the warhead to its rocket.

◊◊◊◊

Three hundred miles southeast of Hong Kong, the American
nuclear attack submarine
Connecticut
met the
Ronald Reagan
carrier strike
group, and took her place on point.
 
The
frigate
Thach
was surface lead, followed
by the destroyers
Gridley
and
Mahan
.
 
Steaming behind this forward screen were the cruiser
Lake Champlain
and the nuclear
supercarrier
Ronald Reagan
.
 
The littoral combat ship
Forth Worth
and
Decatur
’s
replacement, the guided-missile destroyer
Winston
S. Churchill
, pulled up the rear.
 
The carrier strike group steamed due north and made way at 27
knots.
 
Although
Ronald Reagan
’s air wing served as the group’s primary air defense,
Lake Champlain’s
task was anti-missile
central.

In the cruiser’s dark combat information center, Captain Ferlatto
and the other sailors watched networked data from US Strategic Command: several
ballistic targets had departed China and clearly tracked for the American
carrier strike group.
 
Utilizing the
remote radar data,
Lake Champlain
launched Standard Missiles; the surface-to-air missiles departing the ship’s forward
vertical launch system.

The Chinese warheads came within range of
Lake Champlain
’s radar.
 
Hexagonal arrays on the ship’s superstructure
powered-up, found, and concentrated powerful radio beams on the missiles.
 
With positive track on the inbounds, and the
downrange Standard Missiles veering to intercept, the American carrier strike
group increased speed and began a coordinated zigzag.
 
In a fountain of fire,
Lake Champlain
put up more Standard Missiles.
 
Smoke ropes climbed through blue sky toward
the blackness of space.

Hot from their ascent from Shaoguan, the Chinese East Wind
ballistic missiles staged—dropped their booster rockets—and entered midcourse
flight in the thin air of Earth’s upper atmosphere.
 
Among the flight of conventional East Winds also
flew a nuclear ship killer.
 
It fired
small rockets around its base; the thrust finely tuning the craft’s
trajectory.
 
Once on course again, the
missile bus expelled gas that spun the warhead to keep it balanced and on
course.
 
With its job done, the bus
separated from the warhead.
 
As it did
so, decoy polyhedral-shaped balloons deployed and inflated.
 
The flight of decoys and warheads began to
spark and glow as they arced into denser atmosphere.
 
The Chinese nuclear warhead—its terminal
plunge fiery and hypersonic—passed its primary altitude marker.
 
The weapon released the first of several
electronic safeties.

Cocooned within the warhead’s ablative casing, the warhead’s
final safety released 500 feet above
Ronald
Reagan
’s flight deck, and, at 100 feet, the altimeter triggered 200 pounds
of high explosives that surrounded the weapon’s nuclear pit.
 
This explosive uniformly crushed the pit to
half its normal size, compressing it to critical mass.
 
A fission reaction began and expanded
geometrically, burning at twice the temperature of the sun’s surface.
 
It filled the sky with brilliant light.

The fireball swelled over the target, and swallowed the
American carrier strike group.
 
The
surface of the sea boiled.
 
Aboard ship,
people vaporized, paint blistered, steel warped, and all jet fuel and
ammunition combusted.
 
Infrared light and
gamma rays sped in all directions.
 
A
blast wave formed and radiated supersonically, creating an overpressure that
destroyed everything within a mile.
 
The
supercarrier’s steel island crumpled and melted.
 
The flight deck collapsed into the lower
decks, pancaking and sandwiching everything to the keel.
 
The supercarrier was sinking when the
overpressure reached the group’s escort vessels.

The burning ships capsized, rolled, and sank; their twisted,
unrecognizable metal on an express ride to the bottom.
 
Winds reached six hundred miles-per
hour.
 
They shoved the sea into
hundred-foot waves that surged from the explosion’s hypocenter.
 
Extreme heat and radiation lingered as a
massive column of debris, steam, and water rose over the area.
 
The explosion’s hot column cooled and expanded
as it climbed in the atmosphere, spreading into a giant mushroom-shaped
cloud.
 
Ash and smoke were sucked up into
the cloud where they mixed with cool, humid air in the upper atmosphere, and began
falling back to earth as black rain.
 
Radioactive particles condensed, caught the wind, and began to fall out
several miles away.

General Zhen awakened from the fiery nightmare.
 
He felt a moment of doubt, but shook it off and
checked his watch.
 
Soon
, he pondered,
the
American carrier will be on the bottom
.
 
Zhen hoped that, by using a relatively small nuclear weapon, the flash,
electromagnetic pulse, and residual daughter elements might go unnoticed or be
absorbed by the ocean.
 
China would be
able to deny the event, and even, perhaps, suggest that an American weapon or
ship’s reactor was to blame.
 
At the very
least, a denial would sow further confusion among his enemies, as well as
divide the ever judgmental and sanction-happy international community and its
pesky organizations.
 
As General Zhen
stared out his office window, the East Winds continued their plunge for the
Ronald Reagan
carrier strike group.

Riding the beam projected by
Lake Champlain
’s radar array, the cruiser’s Standard Missiles
streaked skyward, their upper stages carrying Lightweight Exo-Atmospheric Projectiles—LEAPs—that
had to hit-to-kill to be worth their weight in salt.
 
These American interceptors used onboard
homing radar and infrared sensors to orient, and frantically fired thrusters to
close with their quarry,
 
the Chinese
warheads.