Fourth Crisis: The Battle for Taiwan (6 page)

“I’ll be blunt.
 
I was
raised on Ivan the Terrible, not Ming the Merciless.
 
I’m going to need you in my ear on this one,”
she confided.
 
Richard laughed.

“Ma’am, Ming the Merciless is the villain in Flash
Gordon.
 
But the Mings actually were a
Chinese dynasty.”
 
He giggled.
 
However, he then saw it was time to answer
properly.
 
“Secretary Pierce, I
appreciate your faith.
 
I am at your disposal.”

“Good.
 
Now, go home,”
she said, and turned to the windowpane to again address the diplomatic chess
game that played in her head.
 
Richard got
up to leave, and, hopefully, salvage what was left of an evening with
Jade.
 
“You know…” she said to the
window.

“Yes?” Richard turned, but not sure he wanted her to
continue.

“There were some who didn’t want to trust you with this
one.”
 
Her voice had grown husky.
 
Richard had to think.

“Who? Why?” He replied, his voice cracking.

“Some.
 
And, if you
think about it, you already know the ‘why’ part.”
 
She let that hang and fell quiet again.
 
The rain took an ovation and tapped at her
reflection.
 
“Goodnight, now.”

Goodnight, ma’am,” Richard replied.
 
As he walked down the hallway, past the
portraits of former secretaries, Richard realized he knew the answer to the ‘why’
all too well.

◊◊◊◊

General Zhen sat before China’s president and the men of the
Central Politburo of the Communist Party.
 
His head was high, and his chin jutted like a shelf from between bulldog
jowls.
 
The president directed the
supreme political body to vote.
 
A
majority of the hands went up, and Zhen’s was proudly among them.
 
‘Operation Red Dragon,’ the invasion of
Taiwan, was on.

Zhen and several other non-permanent members were then dismissed.
 
The general was last to leave the golden
chamber.
 
He strutted through the
colorful mural-lined halls and snickered.
 
Then, as he strutted farther from the guarded door, the snicker morphed
into a gruff laugh.

“
The art of war is of
vital importance to the State.
 
It is a
matter of life and death, A road either to safety or to ruin
.”—Sun Tzu

A
t Datong Air
Base outside Beijing, Operation Red Dragon began just after midnight, local
time.
 
Two People’s Liberation Army Air
Force H-6 Huan medium bombers held at the threshold of Datong’s main
runway.
 
Copies of Soviet Badgers, the
twin-engine Chinese warplanes featured long, sleek fuselages with swept-back
wings, and were painted off-white, with big, red pennant numbers just behind
airliner-style cockpits.
 
Massive red
stars embellished the bombers’ tall empennages and declared for whom they fought,
while tail cannons warned of a very painful sting.
 
Ungainly birds, the Badgers sported double
chins housing radar, huge air inlets at the shoulders, and antennae blisters
covering the long, thin, tapering fuselages.
 
Despite appearances, the formidable warplanes, when coupled with
advanced standoff systems like the six bright red Dong Hai-10 ‘East Sea’
land-attack cruise missiles slung from each of the bomber’s wings, the Badgers proved
as ferocious and sneaky as their namesake.

The cockpit radio crackled, and Datong’s controllers
transmitted clearance for departure.
 
The
lead bomber’s young Chinese pilot shifted and looked to his copilot, who raised
a bushy eyebrow in amazement.
 
After
being roused from sleep, they had found their bombers in the hanger, armed and
fueled.
 
The aircrews had asked questions
as to the mission, and naturally assumed they were going to hit Taiwan.
 
Over breakfast and guarded conversation, they
guessed their target to be the Sky Spear missile base on Taiwan’s Dongyin
Island, the installation that had fired at Fuzhou.
 
Air Force General Piao had then arrived.
 
He ended their meal and their suppositions
with sealed codes and orders, and commanded them to go to their bombers.
 
Hangar doors rolled open, and the old planes
were kicked out of bed.

Taxiing in the moonless night, the Badgers rolled over the
yellow chevrons of Datong’s runway blast area, and held at the threshold. With
gloved hands, the lead Badger pilot gripped two big throttles and nudged them
forward.
 
Nestled where the wings met
fuselage, two massive turbojets spooled up and shook the large airplane.
 
The long runway’s green centerline and white
edge lights shimmered in the rattling windscreen.

“Release brakes,” the pilot ordered.
 
With a squeal, the Badger began to roll on its
oversized tires.
 
Even though encumbered
by a heavy load of both fuel and weapons, the Chinese bomber accelerated
quickly.
 
Their speed increased.
 
Marking the end of the runway, red lights
appeared and drew nearer.
 
The Badgers were
loaded to slightly above maximum take-off weight, so the copilot anxiously
watched the ground-speed indicator before announcing ‘V2’—take-off safety
speed.
 
The runway-end marker lights rushed
at them, with the Badger still hugging the ground.

“We’re heavy.
 
Pull
back now,” the copilot urged, while tugging at his duplicate control column.

“Stop pulling.
 
I am
flying this airplane,” the pilot yelled.
 
He had decided to get a bit more speed before
rotating skyward.
 
The nose wheel breached
the runway-overrun area and the pilot pulled back, hard.
 
The Badger’s main gear trucks approached the end
of the strip.
 
Beyond they could see only
grass and a horizontal metal bar of marker lights.
 
Just in time, the spinning tires left the
ground.
 
With hydraulics whining, they folded
and tucked into the bomber’s belly.
 
The
doors sucked closed.
 
The Badger was
aerodynamically clean now and generated more lift.
 
Blasting thick black ribbons of smoke, the
lead Badger lumbered out as the second Chinese bomber began to roll.

The Badgers linked-up and banked south.
 
They accelerated to 480 knots and climbed to
38,000 feet, just above standard commercial cruise altitude, and transmitted the
electronic tags of passenger jets.
 
The
Chinese bombers settled into filed commercial flight-paths bound for Shanghai
International Airport.
 
Soon thereafter,
both Badgers went electronically silent and dove toward the East China Sea.

The controller at Shanghai saw two transponders go dead on
his radar screen.
 
He rolled his chair to
another display, where two blips reported rapidly decreasing altitude.
 
He was about to call the airplanes, but his
supervisor and a man showing military credentials told him to ignore the
readout.
 
The controller stammered for a
moment, but complied when the military man’s eyes grew wide with warning.

With the Badgers now nose-down and shedding altitude fast,
it took both pilots to pull each of the clumsy, fragile machines out of their
dive.
 
The plane was a hog at high-speed,
barely answering frantic throttle and stick inputs, kicking and bucking all the
while.
 
They’ll bite you, too, if you’re not careful
, the lead pilot thought
as he felt his airplane trying to pitch over.
 
He counteracted the force expertly.
 
Chosen for their ability to control the Badgers, the Chinese aviators
used radar altimeters to settle just 200 feet above pitch-black water and race
east.
 
Inside each cockpit, pilots opened
their orders, revealing launch points and target coordinates.
 
A somber quiet came over the Chinese
aircrews.

In the windscreen, the rising sun outlined several islets on
the horizon.
 
The pilots used them to
correct for deviation over the long-distance flight.
 
The now-low altitude bombers screamed over a
trawler, drawing curses from the deckhands tending their nets.
 
They hoped they had not been recognized, or,
worse, reported by these foreign fishermen.
 
The lead Badger’s copilot flashed wing lights to tell his trailer they were
nearing position.

In the bombers’ cockpits, tucked behind the flight crews,
weapons officers played their instruments like mad musicians.
 
They programmed and warmed up the load of East
Sea land-attack cruise missiles.
 
Now
wing-to-wing, both Badgers began a slow, unified climb to 500 feet.

“Hurry, we’re visible,” the lead pilot said and shifted
within the tight confines of his harness.
 
The Badgers were as stealthy as the Kremlin Church and had probably just
appeared on radar screens across the region.
 
The bombers shuddered as East Seas departed wing pylons and dropped into
the slipstream.
 
Booster packs ignited,
pushed the missiles up to cruise speed, and, when burned out, fell to the sea.
 
Then the East Seas’ stub wings deployed,
inlets opened, turbofans started with a belch of black smoke, and small
satellite dishes in the nose sniffed for signals.
 
The American Global Positioning System and
European Galileo constellations were now limiting their standard positioning
services over the western Pacific, so the East Seas instead found the Chinese
Compass and Russian Global Navigation Satellite systems.
 
The twelve Chinese land-attack cruise
missiles now knew where they were, where they were going, and the path of
avoidance to get there.
 
Their faceted
skin, draped in radar-absorbent material, made them nearly undetectable.
 
The East Seas sprinted away.
 
Relieved of their load, the Badgers turned
back.
 
One of the cruise missiles
malfunctioned and tumbled into the pink sea, but the rest of the swarm flew on.

◊◊◊◊

A leviathan traversed Pacific deeps, the Chinese nuclear
attack submarine
Changzheng 6
, nearing
the end of her long march.
 
Captain Kun had
taken
Changzheng 6
from China’s
Hainan Island, past a Vietnamese patrol, and out into the Philippine Sea.
 
Steaming just above crush depth, the
submarine’s hull groaned with strain.
 
Give me the heaving, nauseating surface over
this silent, steady crush
, Kun thought.
 
The other half of his brain surveyed the panorama of instruments
indicating
Changzheng 6
’s
health.
 
A pressure tone resonated
through the submarine’s metal bones.
 
Kun’s eyelids twitched.
 
Worrying
the tic was perceptible, and in an attempt to hide it, the captain gulped the
last of his jasmine tea to block his face with the clay cup.
 
Then he cleared his throat.

“Sonar post: Tell me your targets,” Kun ordered.
 
The sonarman reported his screen was clear,
and recommended a clearing of the baffles, the acoustic blind spot behind the
submarine’s bow array.
 
The executive
officer nodded in agreement.
 
Captain Kun
took dice from his jacket pocket and rolled them on the chart table.
 
He would let the universe decide the
direction of his next turn.
 
The pips added
up to less than six.
 
Kun announced,
“Make your turn to starboard.”
 
Adapting
the Soviet ‘Crazy Ivan’ tactic,
Changzheng
6
leaned and began to circle back on its original course, to listen for anything
that might be following.
 
The attack
center’s collective eyes rested on the sonarman, who scrutinized his scope,
adjusted dials and knobs, and squeezed the headphones against his ears.

“All clear, sir,” the sonarman reported.
 
Good
,
Captain Kun thought, and licked his warrior chops, as secrecy and surprise were
the order of the day.

“Coming back on original course,” the chief officer reported.
 
The submarine leveled off again.
 
“Steady as she goes.” He leaned in close to
Kun and whispered, “Captain, we are ready.”
 
Kun signaled affirmation and then ordered that the boat be taken up to
launch depth.
 
The hull popped as it
expanded.
 
The attack center floor pitched
up.
 
Captain Kun stepped to the periscope
pedestal.
 
He drew a deep breath.

“Forward compartment: Immediately load tubes one through six
with East Seas.
 
Chief Officer: hover the
boat at 20 meters,” the captain said with a firm, emotionless affect.
 
The order was acknowledged.
 
In the submarine’s weapons room, six
waterproof canisters holding East Sea land-attack cruise missiles were winched
from their storage racks and loaded into torpedo tubes.
 
The chief officer confirmed the submarine holding
steady at a standstill just beneath the glassy surface, and Kun ordered that the
periscope be raising the periscope, which
 
climbed from its hull well, poked from the
submarine’s sail, and pierced the surface.
 
Kun unfolded the periscope’s handholds and leaned into its viewfinder.

“Dawn has broken,” the captain noted as he scanned the
horizon, adding, “Surface clear of contacts.”
 
Kun snapped the handholds closed, and ordered, “Down periscope.”

“Sir,” the chief officer said, “forward compartment reports all
tubes are loaded.”
 
Captain Kun surveyed
Changzheng 6
’s young submariners.
 
They fidgeted with excitement, blissfully
ignorant of all that could still go terribly wrong.

“Shoot,” Kun ordered.
 
The technician complied, and pushed an illuminated button on his weapons
console.
 
One after the other, missile
canisters blew from the submarine’s bow.
 
The canisters raced toward the sea’s surface; each swaddled in bubbles.

The Pacific Ocean lived up to its name there: peaceful and
calm.
 
A bubble rose to the surface and
disturbed the still waters.
 
Where it
popped, a boil erupted.
 
The boil spit a missile
canister from its foamy center, a canister that leapt into the air, peeled
apart and opened like a flower, a flower whose pistil was an East Sea cruise
missile.
 
The missile’s upward momentum
stalled, and its booster ignited, pushing the missile into the sky.
 
Six more such blooms occurred and the
canister petals fell onto the gently undulating surface of the Pacific.

◊◊◊◊

A Soaring Dragon flew high above the Pacific.
 
A stealthy Chinese unmanned aerial vehicle,
it sailed on a pair of long wings joined at their tips.
 
Sneaking from the mainland and out to sea, the
Soaring Dragon’s radar detected a large group of surface ships that had entered
the theater.
 
This aircraft transmitted the
group’s coordinates up to a satellite that bounced them to a People’s
Liberation Army ground station.
 
Chinese
command then relayed them to an HY-1 Hummingbird reconnaissance satellite
parked over the ocean.