The Shark Mutiny (38 page)

“
How many buildings are we planning to hit
?”

“Probably three, but the big one’s the power plant. That’s our mission critical. We slam that, the base is useless. There are also a couple of Chinese warships in there. We’ll take a crack at both of them if we can. Just a couple of stickies.”

“
Any idea of the strength of the guard, sir
?”

“Well, our guys have counted only about eight men patrolling at any one time. Four on the main jetties, and four back here a little, where this destroyer seems to be farther inshore. That probably means if we arrive there at around zero-one-hundred, there’ll be eight guards we may have to eliminate before we enter the power plant. If we’re quiet we may not see any more for two or three hours, by which time I hope we’ll be on our way out.

“If we do have to fight again, we may have to eliminate eight more. But I am not sure that will be necessary.”

“
How about knocking down the guardhouse with everyone in it, maybe at midnight when they probably change over
?”

“We thought about that. But it’s awfully noisy. And we’re not quite sure where the Chinese keep reinforcements. But we don’t want a bunch of Chink helicopters chasing around all over the goddamned place. Especially as one of ’em might locate and kill us. Generally speaking, we think stealth is the best way to accomplish our objectives.”

“
Okay, sir. No problem
.”

“Final refinements will be made throughout our journey, via the satellites. We got a lot of guys working on this, and things will develop before we reach the coast of Burma. Broadly speaking, we think the element of surprise will be decisive in our favor.”

“
How about the getaway, sir? Can we board the inflatables up close to the base…like we don’t want to end up running through a fucking paddy field for about ten miles pursued by the goddamned coolies, right
?”

“Dallas, no we don’t. Neither do we want to look as if we’re running boat trips round the fucking harbor in the middle of the night. We’ll have that organized in another day or so. My own view is we take the edge of the swamp in the south.”

“
But that’s a hell of a distance, sir. Do we have any chance of immediate help if we come under fire, or if we are seriously pursued
?”

“No, Dallas. I am afraid we do not.”

0900. Monday, June 4
.
Northern Taiwan
.

The Battle for Keelung had now lasted for five days, and despite heavy casualties, the Chinese began inexorably to win it. They kept coming forward, landing thousands more men on Chinsan Beach, and calling in more and more air sorties from the mainland. But they left more than 3,000 dead along the Yehliu Road, before they finally forced their way into the inner suburbs of the seaport.

Street by street, block by block, yard by yard they fought their way toward the docks. The Taiwanese defended with their courage high, and they were never really defeated. Merely engulfed.

And then, as the Chinese Army prepared for the one push that would drive them into the vast container port area, the Taiwanese pulled off a master stroke. A team of their Special Forces crossed the railroad out along the Chungshan-1 Road, swam in to the harbor and severed
the mooring lines of two massive container ships, just as the tide was turning.

Thirty minutes later, with these two gigantic ships slewed beam-on across the entrance to the docking areas, the Taiwanese scuttled them both with high explosives, partially blocking the main route both into and out of the harbor. It would take the Chinese Navy three more days to drag the wreckage clear and make a free passageway for their big troopships.

Scuttling the containers caused a momentous commotion on the docks, and it allowed the Taiwanese Army to escape cross-country, dropping back to Taipei, leaving the invaders from the mainland victorious but in something less than good order.

For a start, Keelung was a shambles both in the harbor and in the streets. There were debris and rubble everywhere. No one knew how to get anywhere. In addition, there were several isolated pockets of local resistance, and the Chinese were desperately trying to avoid killing civilians.

This was a serious hindrance, since the civilians were well supplied with grenades, rifles and machine guns. And they fought furiously, night and day, to eliminate the invading army using ancient tactics of snipers and booby traps against unsuspecting troops.

Not in living memory had the Chinese armed forces been so extended, engaged in highly complex combined operations. This was an adventure the like of which they had had absolutely no previous experience in modern times. Much of their equipment lacked any form of sophistication, and there were glaring shortcomings in their military processes and procedures.

And it all began to take its toll. There were Chinese commanders who began to believe the only way to capture Taiwan was to knock it down. And everyone knew China’s top Special Forces units were trapped in the museum, without supplies. Their helicopter squadrons had
been savagely depleted both over the ocean and in the air above northern Taiwan. Attempts to air-drop food into the museum grounds had been met with vicious rocket, shell and missile fire from regrouping Taiwanese antiaircraft battalions.

General administration of those who had been in battle was very poor. No one was being fed on a regular basis, personal equipment was often inadequate and almost all the logistics systems had fallen apart. Lines of combat resupply were crashing. Ammunition, fuel, lubricants, rations and water simply could not be brought in fast enough to keep up with the thousands of troops on the ground.

There was of course scope for the Chinese forces to requisition water and fuel supplies from local sources, even to scavenge food supplies, but this was a hostile area. Everyone was a sworn enemy, and it took a huge amount of time and effort just to stay alive and moving. Failure to bring forward munitions for armor, artillery, air defense and attack helicopters took another heavy toll.

Chinese progress was thus becoming fearfully slow, and the morale of the ground troops was beginning to suffer. By midday on this June morning the High Command, now meeting in Beijing, was being informed that the Taiwanese Army was again moving north, throwing pontoons across the rivers, heading back to defend their beloved Taipei. This was too much even to contemplate, another ferocious fight through city blocks, having to fight around every corner, not knowing what lay ahead, around any corner.

Admiral Zhang Yushu knew about warfare in all its facets, but specialized street combat in a foreign capital, against a reinforced enemy, was too much even for him. But, wily old warrior that he was, he came up with the only solution there was: He decided their best strategy was to stretch the limits of the remaining Taiwanese resources, and at 1300 on that Monday afternoon, he or
dered the Chinese Navy to open up another front in the south, with immediate effect.

More particularly, he ordered a Naval bombardment of the northern beaches of Taiwan’s banana-belt city of Tainan, followed by a second full-scale amphibious assault at Luerhmen. In Zhang’s opinion, this would surely stop the headlong rush north of the Taiwanese Army.

And Luerhmen had precisely the correct historic credentials to attract a strategist of Zhang’s abilities, with his curious mixture of grim reality and flights of
folie de grandeur
.

Luerhmen, a beachfront suburb of Tainan, was where the great Koxinga had landed 400 war junks, containing the 35,000-strong Ming Dynasty Army, and hurled the ruling Dutch out of their Tainan stronghold in 1661.

As far as Zhang was concerned, the ruling Taiwanese were at least as alien as the Dutch, and the vibes about the old provincial capital were all good. And he turned the full might of his Navy against the southwestern city, sending in his second Sovremenny destroyer with three frigates, to soften up the area for the forthcoming landing the next day.

His principal mistake was miscalculating the strength of the Taiwanese Air Force at the Naval air base outside Kaohsiung. They still had 19 F-16As and they had repaired the long-range radar facility on the outskirts of the base. At first light on the morning of Tuesday, June 5, they picked up China’s Sovremenny, cruising six miles off Tainan, making a racetrack pattern in a light-quartering sea.

Admiral Feng-Shiang Hu, C-in-C of the Taiwanese Navy, was on duty himself, pacing the ops room, still determined to fight off the marauders from across the strait. He instantly dispatched a flight of five of his F-16s, the ferocious little single-seaters, converted now to carry a 500-pound bomb under each wing instead of their usual Sidewinder missiles.

They took off overland at 0620, swung out south of the island and made a long right-hand loop over the strait, coming in from out of the west, 50 miles off the Taiwan coast at 600 knots, wavetop height, in a formation of three, and then two, dead astern. The 8,000-ton Sovremenny destroyer was silhouetted against the rose-colored eastern sky, and her ops room acquired at 0628. The missile director’s fingers flew over the keyboard, sending up four SA-N-7 Gadfly weapons into the launchers.

But the CO of the Sovremenny was devoid of real-time battle experience, and he spoke swiftly to his accompanying frigate, which had also picked up the incoming Taiwanese fighter-bombers. They conferred briefly, and the destroyer captain ordered his ship to make a hard turn to port in order to reduce his radar echo signature to the incoming bombers. In a grotesque, elementary error he offered them the knife edge of his narrow bow, instead of the broad beam of his ship.

Temporarily the radar control operator lost the F-16s altogether when they ducked down below the radar, but at 27 miles they “popped up” again, and the Sovremenny instantly acquired, the operator calling, his voice rising:

“…
Track one-zero-four-eight…incoming six hundred knots…bearing two-seven-zero…range twenty-five
…”

Higher now above the waves, the Taiwanese pilots heard the Sovremenny’s radar locking on, squealing on their radar warning receivers, but they pressed on grimly toward the Sovremenny. Streaking in over the water, making 10 miles a minute, a mile every six seconds, the three leaders aimed their aircraft straight at the huge Chinese warship.

They spotted it eight miles out and lined themselves up only just in time. Then they unleashed all six of their bombs in a dead line at the bow of the ship, the one non-variant, the one computer calulation that could not significantly change.

The machines were fighting the engagement, but it was men who were directing it. The Chinese missile director, in the same split second, launched the Gadflies, which blasted into the air even as the bombs flashed across the waves propelled by the colossal speed of the aircraft.

The F-16s tried to bank away, but the one on the left took the missile head-on and blew up in a fireball. The center bomber was also hit right behind the wing and exploded as it made its turn, both pilots dying instantly.

The third and fourth missiles both missed, and now the bombs were screaming in, bouncing like flat pebbles hurled across the water. The first one smacked into the waves and leaped high over the destroyer’s bow. Had it been the beam, it might have cleared the ship and gone right by, but it was not the beam. It was the bow, and the bomb slammed off the water, shrieked over the foredeck and smashed straight through the bridge windows and down deep into the hull before it exploded.

The next bomb came in a fraction of a second later, again clearing the bow in a high arc and down through the middle of the superstructure, wrecking the ops room, the communications room and every missile-control system on board. The third bomb cannoned into the water, 30 yards off the bow, and slammed into the hull, just aft, crashed through the plates on an upward trajectory and removed a large slice of the foredeck of the ship.

But it was bomb four that did the real damage, albeit entirely accidentally. This one, dropped from beneath the wing of the escaping F-16 out on the right, crashed into a rising wave 100 yards in front of the Sovremenny, deflected left, and rose high, 150 feet into the air. It screamed down into the aft area behind the main superstructure, its descent so steep it slammed straight through the deck, into the engine room, and detonated with a shattering blast, close enough to the keel to blow the bottom out of the ship.

The Sovremenny, listing sharply to port, capsized within three minutes, and, 10 minutes later, sank with all hands to the bottom of the strait.

The two Taiwanese backup bombers, running in four miles astern, were not acquired by the stricken Sovremenny, and they raced past the already burning warship and banked hard left, straight to the frigate that was supposed to be riding shotgun for the bigger ship, but had made no move to fire her missiles.

The ops room of the frigate, distracted by the carnage on the destroyer, finally launched her shorter-range missiles. But it was too late. One malfunctioned, and the other blasted off way after the F-16s had launched their four weapons and turned away.

Nonetheless the CO was well trained, and he offered the incoming bombs the beam of his ship, as indeed the destroyer should have done. The first one flew harmlessly overhead; the second one flew almost harmlessly but smashed the mast and radar equipment as it came through. The third one came in low, crashed through the hull and went straight out the other side, demolishing almost the entire central deck area.

The fourth bomb detonated in the water before it reached the ship, and miraculously no one was killed, though two sailors were wounded, mostly by bomb splinters. Equally miraculously, the frigate was still floating; crippled, largely useless, but still floating. Generally speaking, Admiral Feng-Shiang considered it a very good hour’s work by the Taiwan Navy fliers, since it was not yet time for breakfast. But one of the downed pilots was his nephew, age only 20, and it was 15 minutes before he could bring himself to face his senior commanders.

Admiral Zhang was furious. The sheer numbers of the bombs that had hit his Russian-built ship meant that plainly there had been a monumental mistake. And Zhang Yushu had been in the Navy sufficiently long to believe the most common mistake by Naval commanders
in all of modern warfare: the realization that any bomb, hurled forward at low level by an aircraft making over 600 knots, hardly
drops
at all. It is flung forward with enormous force, and when it finally catches a wave, it slows right down, then ricochets upward, maybe 80 feet, and onward. Still on line, but high.

In Zhang’s view, to stay alive in the path of this ship killer, you should offer your beam, which will afford a fair chance of the lethal bouncing bomb whizzing over the top, since the deck is only about 50 feet wide. Offer your bow, especially on a ship as large as the Sovremenny, and you present a target the entire length of the ship, 500 feet from bow to stern, 10 times more surface area than its width: a 1,000 percent greater chance of being hit and sunk.

Admiral Zhang knew the overriding temptation to turn bow-on, presenting a target so narrow it must be safer. But he remained convinced of his theory, since the incoming bomb’s line trajectory is pinpoint accurate to about three inches. Zhang’s Law on Bombing said, the only issue is the
length
of the target, not the width.

And now his commanding officer had paid for his error not only with his life, but also with the lives of his ship’s company. Not to mention the $500 million ship itself.

“
What a complete and utter
…,” ranted the Admiral, employing a Chinese colloquialism normally heard on the lower decks of his ships, rather than in the offices of the military’s highest command in Beijing.

He simply could not believe the price he was paying for the rebel island of Taiwan. He could not believe the manpower, the death rate, the number of lost ships, the near-destruction of dozens of his aircraft. And now the great destroyer.

Zhang Yushu was going to end this war. And he was going to end it fast.
If this goes on, the damned U.S. Navy will get here, and then there’ll be all hell to pay. I cannot allow this to go on. We have to move, and move big
.

Meanwhile, the airborne troops were piling out of the transporters high above the drop zone, three miles northwest of Tainan airport, and the Taiwanese Army was awaiting them on the ground, raking the landing fields with a steel wall of ordnance. All attacking armies, down the centuries, have sustained far greater losses than the defensive forces. But this was getting right out of hand. It took a succession of air strikes, sustained for more than two hours, finally to clear the Taiwanese Army out of the area.