by Gene Skellig
It would take years, but with the climate now warming rapidly back to normal levels, and a degree of food production becoming possible as the sky cleared, the food producing regions of the world were beginning to show hopeful signs. As long as Chinese forces could hang on long enough to be in a position to use food as a weapon, and to relieve the starving millions of Chinese at home, victory was theirs.
Recognizing that China was moving inexorably toward victory the few remaining allied military forces attempted to cut off the supply of personnel and materials flowing from China to their footholds around the world. Even with some success at interdicting Chinese reinforcements, however, American and British analysts could read the writing on the wall. China would win, and General Bing would be a global emperor. Unless, that is, the Snake’s Head could be cut off.
American military strategists at DUMB One and their British counterparts spent futile months attempting to devise an effective strategy.
In England, a small team of analysts composed of a core of MI6 personnel from the short-lived OPERATION PANDA STING and a variety of defense personnel had evacuated to an improvised facility in Cornwall. It was initiated by Royal Air Force survivors who had been off-duty when their base at nearby St. Mawgan was destroyed. They moved into a university campus and organized a civil-military team to support the British war effort. It turned out to be a geologist among them who would turn the tide of the war.
Nobody asked the university professors to leave when the British military occupied a few floors in the Earth Sciences Department at the university. With so few military survivors, the intellectuals were a welcome addition to the collective effort: Survive to Operate.
The group in Cornwall had grown very close over the years, cooperating in their efforts to survive. Their location in the town of Penzance, jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, meant they didn’t have to contend with snowfall. They faired far better than other survivors around the world and were able to continue their work analyzing the Chinese war effort.
Albert Jones, now a Group Captain, was leaning over a large chart table, examining some satellite images, when Dr. Archibald Grant, a professor of geology, walked in. He looked over Jones' shoulder, intrigued. “What are you chaps up to with these old photos?”
“Oh, hello, Archie. Opportune that you should drop by. We're looking for underground complexes along China's northeast coastline. We've identified this region as being the likely 'home' of one General Bing, the Emperor of New China – and soon the world, if we don't find him and kill him first.”
“Hmm, serious stuff! By the way, Albert, congratulations on your promotion.”
“I'll say thanks, my dear chap, but I don't feel as pleased about it as I might have done. After all, it came at too heavy a price. You know, we military types have often referred to promotion by 'dead men's shoes' but I never suspected how real it could turn out to be.”
“Indeed,” said the professor. He peeled off his half-moon reading glasses and tapped them on one of the photographs on the table. “I see that you're interested in a bauxite mine?” observed the geologist.
“Bauxite?” said Jones. “How can you tell that?”
“Well, this is one of those Canadian RADARSAT images. They're uncanny in the way that diasporitic bauxite shows up in this rather ghastly magenta color. This facility here, east of the Shihekou Delta, shows a perfectly clear rectangle of diasporitic bauxite. However, that must be an anomaly.”
“Why?” said Jones.
“Well, there isn't a surface strip-mine anywhere near there.”
Jones straightened up from the chart table and drew his shoulders back. “It may interest you to know, Archie, that this port facility became fully operational just a fortnight after the war started. See those tall cranes? They’re crawler-type derricks normally used on construction sites. Here, they've been used to offload containers and food supplies in a manner that used to be done only with gantry cranes,”
“Why do you say ‘used to’?”
“Because our American friends took out this facility five days after this picture was provided by the Canadians,” explained Jones. “It was one of over fifty facilities that the Chinese threw together to offload vessels they had seized to provide food and material for the Chinese War effort. We think General Bing has a large bunker somewhere in this region.”
Jones showed Dr. Grant other data that he had been puzzling over for the past few years. With the sky now impenetrable, even to RADARSAT, there were no recent pictures. Intrigued by the challenge, Dr. Grant went to his office in the Geology Department and returned with disks containing data from the RADARSAT program going back to ten years before the war. Searching through the data using Jones' computer, the Geologist confirmed his hunch. “Well, Albert, I know precisely where your General Bing is.”
“OK, Maestro; and where might that be?”
“500 meters below the top of this precise hilltop.”
“How can you be so sure?” said Jones.
“Because this is the only deposit of diasporitic bauxite within 200 km. The geology in this area is highly anomalous, but there is this one concentrated deposit under that 800 meter hilltop. It’s too deep for economical mining, even if it just jumps out at you from the RADARSAT data. Obviously the materials removed from the underground facility you are looking for in this region must have come from this deposit and then been used as fill for the cargo facility. And if you compare this older image to the most recent one you have, you can see subtle changes to this road, leading from your new container terminal there, east of the Chaohehe river, directly up into the mountains, east of the Shihe reservoir. And the road looks like it has seen increased load. There are new passing shoulders; see here - and here?”
After having the Geologist explain his logic to the Mr. Jessup, the intelligence team leader, Jones passed the data to the Americans. Two weeks later, the Americans flew a small Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle over the mountain-top north of the Shihe Reservoir. It confirmed the presence of unusually high-powered air surveillance radars in the region before it was downed.
Knowing where General Bing’s lair was and how deeply it was buried under the mountain top had been an insurmountable challenge to the weapons-effects planners in DUMB One. Even the most powerful nuclear bunker-buster warhead, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, couldn’t penetrate more than 200 meters into hard rock. With at least a 300 meter shortfall, there was no obvious way to kill the Snake Head.
At least, not until the same geologist was brought in on the weaponeering problem a few weeks later, when he was asked if there was anything in the local geology that could be exploited.
“No. It’s very hard rock. If you’re going kill this chap, you’ll need to go there on the surface, with a diamond drill, and drill down into this layer of bauxite.”
“Supposing we could get a team on the surface, how long would it take to drill that deep?” asked Jessup.
“Any exploration drill-crew worth their salt should be able to drill that deep in under two days.”
“What diameter hole would they make?”
“About fifteen centimeters. What kinds of warheads do you have that could fit down a six inch hole?”
“None. The smallest the Americans have is the W-46, artillery shell for tactical use, almost sixteen millimeters in diameter - too tight to slide down a 500 meter long drill-hole.”
“What about conventional explosives?” asked Preston.
“With the size of that facility, we wouldn’t be able to assure destruction.”
“And biological agents?”
“They would have effective CBRN equipment, and certainly be pre-warned by the sound of the drilling,” said Albert.
“Well, what about this for an idea. It's rather simple, but it might work..”
Four weeks later, an armada of Chinooks and other helicopters operating from the decks of commercial ships landed drilling crews and ground personnel in the valley closest to General Bing’s bunker
.
They were supported by a Combat Air Patrol of ship-borne AV-8B vertical take off Harrier Jump Jets, with British and American pilots, and as many as two squadrons of Japanese Super-Hornet fighter jets. The Super-Hornets bore the brunt of the counter-air portion of the battle, as they were the first to arrive.
The heaviest losses occurred in the first two hours of combat. Many of the electronic warfare techniques employed by the allies had failed because they had long since been compromised by the methodical commercial and military espionage which the PLA had been engaged in throughout the decade prior to the war. Chinese air defenses took out more than half of the Japanese fighters before the Chinese air defenses were finally neutralized by the allies.
Were it not for the presence of two Russian manufactured Ilyushin Il-78M air-to-air tankers of the Indian Air Force, the CAP provided by the Japanese fighters would have been stretched too thin. With Group Captain Patel’s tankers, the allies were able to maintain local air superiority, if not supremacy.
Lower down, while the Marines took heavy losses to their Harrier jump-jets and helicopters giving cover to the drilling crews, but they were able to hold off the Chinese forces for almost forty hours. SLCMs from a British Vanguard submarine were used sparingly, wiping out large concentrations of Chinese forces with small nuclear detonations in the transportation routes through the mountains to the battle area. Despite the heavy losses, the Chinese forces kept coming, intent on winning by attrition.
Inside General Bing’s command center, as the drilling had become louder and louder, Colonel Hua had been one of the last men to don his CBRN suit and confirm that his gas mask was working properly. He had just finished going over the plan with the damage control parties preparing to deal with the drills.
He told them that the enemy would need at least two hours to draw the full length of the drill back up the hole, as each two-meter section of pipe had to be unscrewed and taken away on the surface before the drill could be withdrawn the next two meters. Until the drill-shaft was removed there was little danger of any devices being thrown down the hole.
Colonel Hua’s plan was for the damage control team to attach a package of explosives to the last few meters of drill shaft. There would be a couple of minutes during which the shaft would not be rotating, as the drill crew on the surface re-rigged the drill for extraction. Then, as the drill was drawn up, the explosives package attached to the drill-bit would also be drawn up the hole. When the bomb was at least two hundred meters up the hole the explosives would be detonated, resealing the hole with rock fragments and rendering the drill rig useless. They would also stuff fire-blankets and other materials into the bottom of the hole, and brace their plug with timbers before the detonation.
Just in case the Americans had a trick or two up their sleeves, all personnel were to wear their CBRN suits and have their bio-warfare detector strips attached to their arms and legs to quickly spot any CBRN warfare agents.
With battle damage repair teams ready to carry out the assigned task, and key personnel ready to evacuate as far as possible from the penetrated areas, Colonel Hua believed that they had a good chance of survival.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t use nuclear weapons against the Americans as they had expended their arsenal in the desperate five-year war against India, fighting for the Australian prize. But Colonel Ming’s forces would soon brush the attackers out of the valley and destroy the drills before the drills could be withdrawn and a bomb thrown down the holes.
None of this helped reduce the fear that every person felt as the vibration from drilling got stronger and stronger.
Suddenly the first drill broke through the ceiling just a few meters above his head. Bits of concrete and rock-dust filled the Command Center, but Colonel Hua remained calm.
General Bing was monitoring events through closed-circuit video on the other side of the concrete wall separating his quarters from the Command Center. He was dressed in his CBRN suit and ready to evacuate if the enemy was not cleared from the surface soon. But he trusted Colonel Hua’s plan, and from the reports coming from Colonel Ming’s men on the surface, the enemy would be over-run in moments. He was surprised when the screen suddenly went blank and a strong concussion shook the facility.
Thankfully, it was not a nuclear detonation. Obviously something had gone wrong with Colonel Hua’s plan with the tethered explosives. But General Bing was certain that he still had time, as the enemy would still have to withdraw the drill before they could drop a bomb in.
On the surface, once the drill-crews were certain they had penetrated the bunker with both drills, they set off their own high-explosives rigged to a collar welded on top of each over-sized 7” diamond drill-head. The explosion killed Colonel Hua and most of the damage control team. The secondary explosion caused by the detonation of Colonel Hua’s explosives package blew a five meter hole in the concrete floor, killing dozens of personnel in the level below.
By the time the shock-wave from the drill-head explosion reached the crews on the surface they had attached a grappling-hook to the top of the drill shaft. When the Chinook helicopter took up the strain, the crew disconnected the drill rig from the shaft, and jumped clear. The aircrew applied full power and climbed the heavy helicopter as fast as it could go, pulling the 8,000 pounds of drill shaft out of the hole in two minutes flat.
The moment the metal pipe was clear, weapons’ technicians dropped three W46 warheads down each of the holes, on two-minute fuses. The security troops, drill crews and technicians rushed for the waiting helicopters. They were spurred on by an intense series of explosions taking place all around as conventional tomahawk cruise missiles put up a protective screen around the valley, wiping out the leading elements of Colonel Ming’s assault force.
After sliding down the seven-inch drill holes, the small warheads popped out of the drill holes and detonated inside the 110,000 square meter bunker.
General Bing had made it half-way to the evacuation tunnel when the first of the 0.3 kiloton warheads detonated. Any one of the modified artillery-shell warheads would have done the job, but six were used as this was a “no fail” mission.
The bunker complex was consumed in the small nuclear explosion, killing everybody inside. Two intense columns of flame jetted out of the drill holes, reaching thousands of feet into the sky.
From the vantage point of one of the Harriers videoing the battle from altitude, the twin fire spouts coming out of the narrow end of the mountain looked like an angry snort from a fire-breathing dragon laying face down in the earth.
When this streaming video was transmitted to Penzance and Mount Weather, tremendous cheers broke out.
Word quickly spread around the world that the Yinglong Dragon had been slain; the Snake’s Head had been cut off.
37
SCHNAPPS
30 May: 10 Years After NEW
Feeling the empty space beside her in the king sized bed, Tanya woke up. Casey wasn’t there, and that made Tanya worry.
With only the three of them left now, the HOTH had become a strange place in many ways.
After tying the sash around her bright yellow dressing gown, Tanya went looking. First she checked Donny’s room, and saw her fourteen year old son fast asleep. His room still had the bunk-beds and futons from when he shared it with his brothers, Grandma Callaghan, Zlata and Zlata’s son Pavel. Donny had been unwilling to let Papa remove the other beds. So much had changed for him in the last few months, he seemed to need to keep a sense of normalcy at least in his bedroom.
Tanya looked into the four other large bedrooms, all completely empty save for some calendars and posters stuck to the walls, and some furniture that had been left behind when everybody left. As she wandered around the HOTH, the silence felt very strange. In her imagination she could still hear the round-the-clock sounds that had filled the HOTH, when as many as 74 people had lived there together.
It had been very close quarters, especially in the last two years, after the Ooblec
k cleared the skies and the snow began to melt. Once everybody became excited at the rapidly improving climate they also began yearning to break out and make a new life on their own. Not so much to be free from the crowded HOTH as to rejoice in the freedom and opportunity that the restored climate now offered.
The reality had been a source of frustration and conflict. The frustration was because even with summertime temperatures of plus twenty in the months after the Oobleck fell, the snow couldn’t melt fast enough. The warm summers allowed people to begin solar green-house operations outside, but large-scale agriculture had not been possible even by the next summer. Fresh accumulations of snow came again each winter.
By last autumn, however, it was clear that enough snow had melted from the agricultural land and the main roads were clearing up fast enough that the following year, this year, should be clear of snow by May or June - in time for planting.
This led to a predictable conflict. There were at least thirty opinions as to who should be entitled to what. Certainly, during the first six years ANEW, the HOTH had been the best place to be and having shares in the collective enterprise had been a source of optimism for all involved. But as people began to conceive of what they would like to do on their own once the snow finished melting, the trouble started.
Some of the arguments were rather mild, but others were heated. Some felt that they had contributed over and above what others had, and yet had essentially the same share of ownership. A few even called into question Casey’s right to have issued the shares in the first place; however, this idea was quickly put to rest when someone asked if they had a better approach to offer.
Finally, two months ago, Casey came down with a decision. He presented it at a full meeting of the HOTH. The repaired Gate House was being manned by a few men from the Ring families, and Peyton Palaty had been brought in to hold the Ops Watch, so all the HOTH members were in attendance.