Fourth Crisis: The Battle for Taiwan (9 page)

A sprinting Standard Missile closed with an East Wind.
 
However, it blew across the sky and,
seemingly pushed by a gust, missed.
 
A
second Standard Missile passed its target and another flew into a Chinese
decoy.

The winds purged launch smoke from around
Lake Champlain
’s bridge.
 
Captain Ferlatto raised binoculars.
 
He trained them on
George Washington
a mile to starboard.
 
The supercarrier had sped up, he noticed.
 
Awesome nuclear power shoved her through the
sea.
 
The precipice of
George Washington
’s bow rose like a speedboat’s
as her endless hull planed.
 
She was a
stampeding elephant.
 
Best not to get in her way
, Ferlatto thought.
 
He reminded the helmsman to mind his course.
 
Another sailor slammed down a telephone.
 
The sound drew the captain’s attention.

The sailor’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in a dry
swallow.
 
He struggled to announce, “Sir,
all SM-3s failed to intercept.
 
The
admiral has ordered the group to disperse.”

The helmsman spun
Lake
Champlain
’s wheel and the cruiser heeled in, her deck plates vibrating with
increased power to the turbines.
 
Captain
Ferlatto returned his magnified gaze to
George
Washington
.
 
Announcing a turn with a
blast from her horns, the supercarrier’s flight deck leaned to angles not seen
since her shakedown cruise rudder trials.
 
The other ships of the group added to the racket as they, too, made
coordinated maneuvers.
 
Lake Champlain
and the destroyers
scattered waywardly, and the group’s attack submarine,
California
, went deep and sped off into the gloom, distancing her
from a possible thermonuclear explosion at the surface.
 
Lake
Champlain
established a course perpendicular to the other warships, her
turbines slammed to full power.
 
She turned
again, leaning top-heavy hard.
 
Captain
Ferlatto clamped down on his cigar, shaking his head with concern and
frustration.

“Goddamn it,” Ferlatto lashed out, pounding a fist on a
panel.
 
He stared out again at the
immense yet vulnerable
George Washington
.
 
Networked to and controlled by
Lake Champlain
’s Aegis, the destroyers
Mahan
and
Paul Hamilton
, and the frigate
Rodney
M. Davis
ripple fired a last ditch fusillade of Evolved Sea Sparrow
Missiles.
 
In the name of
self-preservation,
her escorts were
shunning George Washington
, leaving a naked behemoth.
 
The frigate bolted like a spooked horse that broke
for blue hills.
 
Lake Champlain
turned hard again, her hulk bent and leaned as waves
smacked her long sides and washed over the gunwale.
 
Mahan
and
Paul Hamilton
turned their sterns
to one another and dispersed.
 
The
supercarrier’s airborne aircraft went high and sped from the area.

George Washington
—her
flight deck clear of aircraft and personnel—wept.
 
Her fallout wash-down system pumped seawater
through hundreds of deck- and island-mounted sprayers, enveloping her in a
salty mist.
 
Water cascaded from her
vertical sides.
 
The American
supercarrier became the pot of gold at the end of an ironic rainbow, her sun-baked
steel cooled by the wash-down.
 
This reduced
the heat signature presented to enemy weapon’s sensors.
 
At the very least, her captain reasoned, the
water might suppress any fires.
 
Blast,
flame, and watertight doors closed, and damage control and firefighting teams
stood ready.
 
Overhead, consecutive sonic
booms ripped the clear blue sky.
 
Over
5,000 American men and women awaited their fate.

The Chinese warheads were now hypersonic, shoving through
the troposphere.
 
They pierced and shoved
aside dense air, their ablative skin glowing and flaking off.
 
Onboard targeting systems contrasted the hot
ships against the cool sea.
 
The warheads
zeroed on the largest of the thermal signatures.

“Brace.
 
Brace.
 
Brace for impact,” shouted
George Washington
’s public announcement
system.
 
Everyone grabbed a wall or crouched
to lower their center of gravity.
 
An
unusual quiet permeated the nuclear supercarrier and her crew.

The outer casing of the first Chinese warhead separated.
 
Tungsten flechettes, released from inside,
fanned out and showered
George Washington
.
 
The flechettes ignited as they ripped into
the antenna tree and domed radars that crowned the supercarrier’s seven-story
island.
 
Then they entered the island and
pierced PRIFLY—primary flight control—before continuing through to the next
level: flight deck control.
 
Even running
out of energy, they kept going, then deformed and came apart, spraying the
supercarrier’s navigation and flag bridges with their burning remains.

George Washington
’s
island became a frappé of torn metal, flesh, and bone.
 
Surviving equipment lost power.
 
Fires started and the ship’s alarms sounded.
 
The American rear admiral glared at his
gushing gut and stared at the headless sailor slumped beside him in a
chair.
 
Then he collapsed and crashed to
the vibrating steel deck.
 
Mustering his last
energy to move a thumb, he touched his beloved
George Washington
for the last time.
 
The sky cracked again.

The second surviving Chinese warhead slammed headlong into
the American supercarrier’s flight deck. Crashing through its non-skid rubber
and thick steel plate, it burrowed through the gallery and three-deck, all before
it dropped into the hangar.
 
Within the
hangar’s open expanse, the warhead felt itself speed up, and the 660 pounds of high
explosives contained by the armor-piercing jacket was triggered.

George Washington
’s
stowed aircraft were consumed in the detonation, and one massive blast door
jumped its track, pancaking other airplanes like a junkyard compactor.
 
The eruption exhausted at the supercarrier’s elevators
and fantail, shooting out fireballs and parts of men and machines to the
sea.
 
George
Washington
shuddered.
 
Black smoke
spurted from air vents and portholes, and flame licked up the blackened sides
of the ship as she lurched and started a dead wheel turn.
 
The broken island’s communication with the
ship became disengaged, and auxiliary steering initiated from deep within the
hull.
 
To the tumultuous din of a cycling
alarm, power to the shafts was reduced.
 
George Washington
straightened out and
slowed down.

◊◊◊◊

Below hilltop apartments, in a field not far from the Taipei
Zoo, a double perimeter of razor wire surrounded a Taiwanese air defense
site.
 
Within the berm that surrounded
the site were PATRIOT surface-to-air missile launchers, antenna masts, and a
radar unit.
 
Heavy cables connected
everything to a shipping container that housed an engagement control
station.
 
Inside it, Taiwanese airmen
watched the skies on consoles.

A bland, concrete condominium overlooked the site.
 
Just one of many, inside the building, at its
sixth floor, was a small but expensive apartment where a man ate a breakfast of
cold rice and salted fish.

The man listened to the radio, and to the sorrowful cries of
a pipa—a four-string Chinese lute—it delivered.
 
He drenched the day-old food in soy sauce and looked to a kit-cat clock
on the wall whose eyes and tail swung back and forth, as it ticked to the top
of the hour.
 
This lone man had lived in
Taipei for years and held a simple job at an electronics factory.
 
Despite the innocuous façade he had erected,
the man at the breakfast table was in fact a member of the People’s Liberation
Army Special Operations Forces; an ‘operator’ in military parlance.
 
This operator chewed his fish and spun the
radio dial.
 
He left behind the lulling
pipa it broadcast and settled instead on a station full of static.
 
The radio clicked.
 
The white noise cleared.

A woman began to broadcast numbers in Chinese.
 
Her voice enunciated each as though reading a
love poem.
 
The operator’s specific
identifier block was spoken, and was then followed by an activation and
verification code.
 
Momentarily stunned,
he abandoned the table, went to the closet, and removed a trunk from behind
piles of clothes.
 
He lugged and set the
trunk upon the sofa and unlatched it with a resounding snap.

The operator emerged from behind wafting curtains and stepped
onto the apartment’s balcony.
 
Wearing
dark protective goggles, he emerged with a loaded rocket-propelled grenade
launcher, and surveyed the enemy’s air defense site from on high.
 
Several bulbous reloads of grenade-tipped rockets,
he hastily tossed onto the balcony’s chaise lounge.
 
He then rested the RPG on his shoulder and
raised the weapon’s metal sighting rail.

The rail included four drill holes. The Chinese operator
settled its central one on the air defense site’s radar set.
 
Then he angled the weapon up and re-centered
the radar on the next drill hole down, to compensate for distance.
 
Happy, he squeezed the weapon’s trigger
bringing forth a familiar, satisfying and friendly surge.
 
Hot gas kicked out the launch tube and
ignited the apartment’s willowy curtains.
 
The first rocket-propelled grenade shot away.

Fins that sprang from the grenade’s control column
stabilized the missile as it flew over the fences and outer berm of the
Taiwanese PATRIOT missile site, before it hit the radar dead center, shattering
it with explosives and fragments.
 
With
the living room engulfed in flame behind him, the Chinese operator clicked
another rocket into the launcher.
 
A
neighbor peeked around the balcony partition, choked on smoke and covered his
mouth and nose before retreating from the nightmarish scene.
 
The Chinese operator braced himself against
the balcony railing and fired another grenade at the site’s control
center.
 
It hit, exploded, and tore into
the trailer.
 
After a millisecond delay,
the trailer burst, its metal skin peeling back in sheets to vent the
overpressure within.
 
With a dark giggle,
the operator reloaded and sent another round.

This one went wild, slamming into the air defense site’s berm.
 
Dirt and rock bounced.
 
He cursed and clicked another rocket into the
launcher.
 
This one connected with the nearest
PATRIOT missile station and consumed it in a massive fireball, swallowing it
and the truck-mounted launcher and interceptors it contained.
 
Elated by the spectacle of his work, the
Chinese operator loaded again and fired.

The rocket-propelled grenade whooshed away, and impacted the
concrete beneath another missile station.
 
It cooked off an interceptor that broke free and, uncommanded, shrieked
toward the hillside building before it pitched up and corkscrewed into the
sky.
 
Accepting it as a salute to his
masterful destruction, the Chinese operator paused to watch the missile dive
and slam into the ground some miles away.
 
Despite the raging fire in his apartment, the screams of fleeing
neighbors and the sirens in the distance, the operator—high on adrenalin and
rocket fumes—laughed.
 
He did not see the
puff of concrete dust kicked-up behind him.

“Right and high one meter,” the Taiwanese sniper’s spotter told
him.

The sniper lay across the roof of a Humvee inside the air
defense site’s perimeter.
 
He had seen
the RPG’s smoke trail that led his attention straight to the apartment
balcony.
 
He then had used this trail to
guide his magnified scope and settled it on the center of mass of the
perpetrator.
 
He settled the reticle of
the high-powered rifle on the man’s chest.
 
Then the sniper clicked the scope’s dials to compensate for the breeze,
bullet drop, and range.

“Send it,” the spotter said.

The sniper rifle barked and bucked.

700 grains of lead punched the Chinese operator in the chest,
tearing through his breastplate before fragmenting.
 
The shards of lead from the broken bullet then
spread out and bored through flesh—muscle, lung tissue, and the Chinese man’s
superior vena cava.
 
Thrown backward, he
fell to the floor inside the roaring fire.
 
To be alive just a few more moments, all he was able to summon was a
twisted chuckle.
 
He realized he had
landed beside his favorite chair and a picture of his mother. A cracked,
melting frame was his last blurred image.
 
He died quickly, thereafter.
 
His
purpose was done. His duty, complete. It was time to sleep.