Jay looked over at PFC Wellington, pointing to the machine gun, maybe 300 meters away. Wellington nodded. That would be their target.
The Osprey to the north could still be heard when the faint addition of the ones coming in to the south became noticeable. Jay was listening for it, so he heard it first, but after only a few moments, the Chinese became more focused. They had picked up on it, too.
With the southern part of the island so flat, visibility was limited anywhere through the trees, so neither Jay nor the Chinese could see the incoming birds. It looked like the Chinese were orienting down the open area towards the runway, which made sense as the brush was so dense as to make passage extremely difficult.
But the Ospreys never broke past the edge of the trees. If the runway was the top of a T, the open area leading to the town was the lower stem of the T. The Ospreys went down the west end of the T, then did a U-turn and took off again, never coming into the heavy machine gun’s sights. But the Marines who had been on those Ospreys would be in view momentarily.
As the six recon Marines and Doc were on the east side of the open area, they would be able to see the Marines just before the Chinese could. And the moment Jay saw that first Marine bounding forward, he opened fire on the machine gun. Within seconds, the rest of them opened up as well.
Three hundred meters across an open, flat area was not particularly far, but it seemed as if their rounds were bouncing everywhere except on target. The Chinese soldiers wheeled around to fire at them, and the machine gunner started to turn his gun around when he slumped. Another soldier pushed him out of the way and started firing, the heavy rounds cutting through the bushes just a foot or so above the recon Marines’ heads.
It looked like two rounds impacted the soldier simultaneously, and the heavy gun went quiet. The other soldiers backed away taking cover behind a small white building. Five of them were left motionless on the ground where they had been hit.
Kilo Company Marines were pouring around the edge of the corner in the tree line, rushing forward, covering each other. They were in a kill zone, and the best way to get through it was to move quickly. One of the Ospreys made a long turn out over the sea and started a run in. With the civilians intermixed with the Chinese, it might be limited in where it could fire, but any added support was welcomed.
Recon had taken out the missile battery and a machine gun. Now Kilo Company was in the attack.
Chapter 17
Pagasa Island
Sgt Harrington Steptoe followed in trace of Capt Niimoto. As soon as they had landed, he had tried the comm, but as expected, whatever was jamming them still worked. So he was down to Plan B. Three junior Marines, PFC’s Bouchard and Toti and Pvt Sullivan, in turn followed him in trace.
As the company comm chief, he had to ensure there were some means of communications. With normal comm being jammed, he had to reach back to WWI tactics and employ runners and wire. As runners, the young Marines would carry messages back and forth as the skipper required. Once they got in a static position, then the wire would come into play. The Makin Island and provided the wire as well as the hand-held phones.
“Come on, Toti, keep it tight,” he admonished the slightly-built Marine.
Toti seemed to jump each time rounds went off, and Steptoe wondered if he was the right man for the job. There was nothing that could be done about that at the moment, though.
This was Steptoe’s third taste of combat. He had been with the skipper back in New Delhi, then with him again in Somalia. This was his first experience against an actual professional foe, but as before, he had a surprising lack of fear. He wasn’t sure why this was. A rational man would have a degree of fear, or at least apprehension. Steptoe really didn’t have any.
No one who knew the young Harrington Steptoe would ever have guessed he would end up being a Marine, much less an NCO. While tall for his age, he had always had a degree of softness about him. His father, an accountant, had moved the family when Steptoe was a young boy from Philly to Winsted, Connecticut where they were the only African-American family in the neighborhood and one of the few in the entire town.
On his first day at school, Mr. Martin, the PE teacher had made him one of the captains of that day’s basketball teams, and rather obvious case of racial profiling, but Steptoe was able to immediately dispel the idea that all blacks were somehow experts in b-ball with an extraordinary display of a lack of coordination. Steptoe was not a jock. However, the lack of physical coordination he displayed in sports did not follow through on a Wii or PlayStation. As a gamer, Steptoe became quite skilled and even took a second place finish at an All-New England Battlefield 4 tournament.
Steptoe was not sure what made him sign up for the Marines. He had seen an old advertisement for the Corps on YouTube, one that made the subject Marine look like he was in a video game, and that had caught his interest. But while on a trip to New York for a tournament (in which he bombed out early), he wandered into the recruiting station and at the spur of the moment, signed up.
At boot camp, he had done quite well in the course work, even if he wasn’t the fastest runner or the quickest over the obstacle course. With a first name of Harrington, he was ripe for a nickname. He wasn’t happy with the one he received: “Cracker.” With his lighter skin and splash of freckles across his nose, his partiality to country western music, and his love of gaming, the other African-Americans had jerked his chain about him not really being black. That hurt him more than he let on, but thankfully, that nickname had fallen out of use by the time he was with his second duty station, New Delhi. There, because of his rather obvious hero-worship of SSgt Child, he gained the new nickname of Stepchild.
That nickname was only used by a few people now, those who had survived the embassy takeover. No new nickname had stuck, and with his formal-sounding first name, he was either Steptoe or Sgt Steptoe, depending on who was addressing him.
Captain Niimoto got up from his kneeling position and ran 10 or 15 meters down the edge of the tree line, so Steptoe got up to follow, motioning for his shadows to get up and move as well. Up ahead, 2d Platoon was in contact, but with the dense brush and trees alongside the opening leading into town, the headquarters element had to stay at the edge of the open area as well, out of direct sight from a good portion of the buildings in the town. This still left them vulnerable to fire, either aimed at them or that aimed at the Marines in Second.
One of the Ospreys flew overhead, its Gau-17 minigun letting loose a burst. It swung back to return to the runway area, probably to make another run.
One of the machine gun teams attached to Second was laying a base of fire into the town itself. Steptoe was only a hundred meters or so back, but he couldn’t yet see the target. From the return fire, though, it sure seemed like there were more than just 20 Chinese soldiers on the island. They had seen five dead soldiers around the destroyed anti-aircraft battery, so that would have left only 15 or 16 in the town.
He could see firing coming out of the tree line on the east side of the open area, but the small yellow ribbon tied to the top of one of the stunted trees was the signal that this was the recon unit. Steptoe wanted to send a runner over to them to find out what they knew about the enemy, but ordering one of his runners to go across 200 meters of open area while it was under fire was asking a bit much.
A Marine from Second, Cpl Ayala, it looked like, was hugging the tree line, leading a recon Marine. They spotted the skipper and made a last sprint to flop down beside him. Steptoe edged forward.
“Sir, Cpl Kinney from recon here. We took some friendly fire from your platoon coming in through the trees. We popped the smoke to get them to quit firing us up, but I think that gave away your position to the Chinks… oh sorry sir, I mean the Chinese.”
“Shit,” the skipper replied, seemingly oblivious to the slur. “Anyone hit?”
“Yes sir, LCpl Mater. He’s pretty fucked up, but one of your docs is hooking him up now,” came the reply.
A flurry of
rounds hit the dirt not 2 meters to their right.
“Here, get in here for a moment,” Capt Niimoto ordered, and the two Marines, Steptoe, and the three runners wormed their way into the dense brush where they could at least sit up and look each other in the eyes.
Steptoe knew what the skipper was thinking. With 1st Platoon out to the north, making themselves a target of sorts, he had hoped that the Chinese in the town wouldn’t know which way to turn when Second began its rush to get into position. But if smoke was popped in the dense brush, that would give away 3d Platoon’s position, coming in from the southwest. The Chinese would now know from where their point of main effort was assaulting.
“OK, we’re still on track. There were five dead soldiers back on that battery. Your work, I presume?” he asked the recon Marine, who nodded back. “OK, good job on that. Cpl Ayala, what were you able to see in front of you?”
“Well, sir, there were another five KIA’s around a machine gun, but they were dead by the time we got up there. And we’ve been firing back at some others, but I don’t know if we hit anyone yet.”
“Well, that means there can only be 10 or so soldiers left. We’re OK.”
“Sir, didn’t you get the message?” asked the recon corporal.
“What message?”
He looked to Steptoe out of habit, but without any working comm, Steptoe was just as much in the dark as he was.
“There’re around 60 Chinese on the island. We signaled that back to the sub.”
“We never got that,” the skipper told him as he leaned back, eyes not focusing on anything as he thought.
He came to a decision.
“Where’s your lieutenant?” he asked Cpl Kinney.
“Over there, sir,” he replied, pointing across the open area to the east tree line.
“OK, who’s your team leader?”
“That would be Staff Sergeant Tolbert, sir. But we’ve also got Gunny Sloan with us.”
“You do? OK, then, I want to see the gunny here. Stepchild,” he said, turning towards his comm chief.
Capt Niimoto rarely called him by that nickname in public, but old habits had a way of surfacing when stress levels were high.
“I want your runners to get me the platoon commanders for Second and Third, the XO, and Weapons. I don’t know if we can get to 1st Platoon and the first sergeant, but I want to try. Then, can you run wire around the perimeter of the town? Inside the tree line?”
Sgt Steptoe looked down at the aerial photo he had been carrying, slowly calculating. It would be close.
“I think I can sir, but it’ll take awhile. We have to make our way through this stuff here,” he told him, indicating the dense vegetation.
“OK, get on it then. Shanghai whomever you need. Just get it done. And tell the runner you’re sending to First that feints and subterfuge are over. They know where we are now. I want that platoon up and in position on the north side. Don’t engage unless they’re fired upon, but I want to coordinate this better.
“Gunny,” he said to GySgt Dailey, who had crept up to join him. “Get some bodies in here and clear this out a bit. I need to be able to talk to everyone. But be subtle. The Chinese have to be watching, so let’s not give us away.
“OK, then, let’s get to it.”
Chapter 18
Beijing
General Li stopped inside the rest room to check himself in the mirror. He looked liked he had been up all night, which was pretty much the case. His meeting with General Li Huang-fu, the Air Force chief of staff, had not gone well. The Air Force General Li had flatly turned him down.
General Li didn’t know if that was because the other General Li truly didn’t have the vision to see how important this was to China, if he just didn’t have the balls to do anything on his own, or if this was part of the growing rivalry between the two branches of the PLA. For years, the Air Force had been the weaker sister in the armed forces, but over the last decade or so, it had been increasing in political clout. The Air Force General Li might be seeing this as an opportunity to further his service’s position, putting politics above the needs of the country.
At least that meeting had forced the general’s hand. He now had to bring General Chen into the loop. He wished he knew who exactly on the Politburo was in back of all of this. That would help with Chen. But regardless, he needed more assets to bring the plan to fruition, and at this stage of the game, that meant getting more people involved.
While he had considered the possibility that the Americans would get involved, he was still surprised at the speed in which they had gotten troops on Taiping and were actually assaulting Thitu. He had hopes that Major Ching could hold out, even if the Americans got a foothold on the island. That would give him more leverage.
He had thought the Americans would not risk an all-out war over the islands. Their politicians were no different from those in China, afraid to take action and more inclined to talk, talk, talk. And they hadn’t committed their carrier battle group nor their Air Force assets, whether because of fear of the cyber-infection that pervaded their war machines or because doing so could trigger a full-scale war neither country wanted, Li didn’t know. But the troops they had committed were bad enough, and before he could order another assault on Taiping, he had to have some air assets.
He straightened his tunic, then turned around and walked out. It was time. He knew his presence back at the headquarters would have been reported back to General Chen, so there was no use delaying. Besides, he wasn’t a man who waited. He was a man of action.
“General Li,” shouted one of Chen’s aides, waiting outside the chief of staff’s office, “General Chen wants to see you right away! Please come with me.”
The general didn’t respond to the aide, but he did follow the man. Normally, the general took pains to acknowledge subordinates, but in this case, he needed to project himself in a position of power, of authority.
The bustle of activity in the outer office stopped momentarily as he walked through, all eyes on him. No one there could really know what was going on, but his absence for the last two days had to have created a stir.
General Chen’s secretary jumped up, choosing to announce Li’s arrival in person rather than over the intercom.
“General Chen, General Li is here to see you,” she said as she opened the door to Chen’s office.
General Li didn’t wait for a response but brushed past her and entered the large and well-appointed office. General Chen had been meeting with Colonel Ho, one of his protégés. The chief of staff looked up with an expression that showed both annoyance and relief.
“General Li, where have you been? I have needed you here, but you disappeared and have been out of communications. I assume you know what’s been happening?”
Li inclined his head towards the colonel. General Chen shrugged his shoulders and dismissed him, leaving only the two generals in the room.
Once they were alone, General Chen asked, “You have heard that the Americans, Japanese, Filipinos--just about everybody has accused us of launching an invasion of the Wanli Shitang?”
Li nodded.
“Well, what you don’t know, since you have absented yourself, is that this might be true. I have seen evidence that someone has manipulated our own communications and data records. I have the Fourth Department working to unravel it, but evidence points to the possibility that units within the PLA might have taken the opportunity to seize Taiping Island.”
“Yes, I am aware of all of that, and you are correct.”
Emotions warred on General Chen’s face as he digested that. Li could see anger rising, but being pushed back down, if with an effort.
“Your attitude confirms what I feared. At first your absence was an annoyance. I needed you here. But when it stretched through to today, I wondered if you might have some inside knowledge. It had to be you or General Hing. Only you two were really in position to pull something like this off.”
Hing? He thought. The comman
der of the Southern District didn’t have the fortitude to act with this degree of conviction.
“So tell, me, why I should not have you arrested right now.”
“I think you know why. I am merely a tool in this. I am not acting alone.”
“So this is not a coup?” General Chen asked, relief obvious in his voice.
“A coup? Against my own country? Against the party leadership? I think you underestimate my loyalty,” was the measured response.
“So if not a coup, then who ordered this?”
“At the moment, I am not at liberty to reveal that.”
He would have revealed it, had he only known just who he or they were. Instead, he had to bluff.
General Chen looked down at his desk for a moment before looking back up at the still standing Li.
“So this is being kept from me?”
General Li had anticipated the question, so he had a ready answer.
“It has been decided to keep you clean, in case events did not work out as planned. Someone would have to take the fall, of course, and you were deemed too valuable to the nation. You would be left with cleaning up the mess.”
He could see the emotions warring on the chief of staff’s face. For someone who had risen to the top of the Chinese military, he sure lacked a poker face. General Chen obviously wanted to believe what he had told him. Anything else meant that he was merely a figurehead, something Li knew to be unpalatable to him.
The chief of staff was silent for a moment before responding.
“And now?” came the unspoken question.
“Now, General Chen, events have transpired so that more resources will be needed to finish the task at hand. What you may not know is that not only have the Americans been going through diplomatic channels to address this, but they have landed troops in opposition to us.”
Once again, the chief of staff was silent for a moment as he digested this.
The Return of the Marines Trilogy Page 51