Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  The police seized the man’s laptop and handed it over the military officials after the man had tried desperately to activate some keys on his laptop. While they thought that they had had probable cause to search the man’s computer, and would have been free to do so and hold him indefinitely without charge under the Defense Authorization Act of 2011; somehow the Chinese embassy had learned of the arrest, and had had some diplomats and high-powered lawyers appear at the Atlanta PD office before the man had even been photographed or identified.

  The man had been permitted to leave the country without further interview, but had not been permitted to have his computer despite the furious protests of his embassy. The military promised to forward the computer to the embassy if they would confirm that it was the property of the Chinese government, which they refused to do. The Chinese did not press the issue, and claimed that the man had found the computer in the hotel room when he had checked in, and had no interest in the computer. Of course, they did not disclose that their spy had told his handlers that he had activated the file-destruct keystrokes, and that the data was destroyed. Or at least he had believed so. In his panic, as the police had approached his rented vehicle that night, their flashlights shining brightly in his eyes, he had been partly blinded and had hit the wrong combination of keys, merely shutting down the laptop and not activating the self-destruct mechanism. The information technologists of the RTB’s G2 section were able to overcome the laptop’s security features, and access the data.

  There was nothing to clearly link the man to the laptop, nor the laptop to the Chinese. However, the large quantity images of defense-related personnel and establishments, and the careful records of date, time and geo-coordinates that the highly organized spy had on the laptop’s hard drive were clearly the work of a foreign intelligence operative, and therefore an act of espionage.

  For the US Army, it was yet another indication of the level of effort that PLA were placing on intelligence collection on the Americans. But for Major Weir, seeing his own face in the foreign intelligence operative’s photos had put a chill down his spine. It had gotten personal.

  Major Weir began to look at Chinese nationals visiting America as potential spies for the PLA. The more Weir looked into how deeply the PLA were spying on the American military, and how deeply they had penetrated the global internet, hacking into military and corporate computer systems alike, his distrust soon verged on paranoia. At one point he even considered getting psychological counseling, until he realized that the best thing he could do was to learn as much about them as they wanted to know about us.

  That had been two years ago.

  Since then, he had come to respect the PLA, the Chinese Army, along with the PLA-Navy and the PLA-Air Force, as a professional, highly disciplined military with an immense, if somewhat low-tech, arsenal of weapons systems to go along with their five million soldiers.

  Feeling something like a fifth-wheel in the Katherine area as the Allied forces ramped up via the new CJOC construct, Lieutenant Colonel Weir had decided to go along with Captain Thorne and Major Blakely on the dangerous mission so that he could observe the weapons systems, tactics, doctrine and general behavior of the Chinese units that were by now deeply entrenched in the east coast of Australia. His intent was to return to the CJOC with valuable insights into how to neutralize their numerical superiority through psychological warfare, special operations, decapitating strikes against their command elements, and any other dirty tricks that Australian insurgents could use in the occupied sectors against the overwhelmingly powerful Chinese occupation force.

  He was certain that the PLA would have adapted their traditional tactical and operational doctrine to compensate for their presumed lack of heavy armor and logistical support at least in these early phases of their invasion. He thought that the allies needed to have a better picture of how they were making use of the Australian vehicles, equipment and infrastructure that they seemed to have put such a great emphasis on seizing in the opening hours of the invasion. And like the spy detained at the RTB in Georgia who had started him off as student of Chinese military doctrine, Lieutenant Colonel Weir took along a high-quality digital camera to capture the faces of whoever and whatever he saw, and a laptop into which to organize the data.

  Looking more like a band of gypsies, with water cans, gas cans and some hastily roped-down tenting scrounged from some of the local sheep stations, the column of fifteen generally beat-up old vehicles did not look like the sharpened spear into the enemy’s heart that the vehicles’ occupants saw themselves as. And that was the point. They wanted to look like just another gang of locals, fool-hardily moving towards the front lines.

  To even get to the area they had selected in their map recce, they would have to travel the 1,400 kilometers from Katherine, Northern Territory, to Cloncurry, Queensland, along Hwy A6. From there they would break into smaller teams and disperse into the communities from Charters Towers farther east along the A6 to the occupied sector in the north coast of Queensland, and down the A2 and A4 highways to the south-east to Longreach, Emerald and Charleville, ultimately leading to the central east coast.

  With the enemy rolling over each and every effort of local militia to slow them down, the Special Ops force had departed Katherine with no clear idea of where the front lines would be by the time they reached the half-dozen communities they had selected as critical cross-road, tactical and operational level decisive points, where they knew that local militia would put up the most spirited defenses.

  After discussing the intelligence the CJOC had received from Queensland via the School of the Air network, Lieutenant Colonel Weir and Captain Thorne had spent some time discussing their mission objectives with Major Blakely, the Marine Liaison between MAGTF and the Australian Army.

  What they knew was that the general evacuation from the combat zone had largely stalled, at about 200 kilometers inland from the coast, when the evacuees had put some distance between themselves and the Chinese and had reached towns which appeared to have put together robust security forces, hastily organized by local militia units, police, or isolated pockets of soldiers.

  From the reports they had received so far it sounded like the Chinese had captured the northerly port city of Cairns without much resistance. In much the same way as it had played out in cities and towns all along the east coast, it had started with Little Dragon agents and their local Dragonfly recruits interfering with police and military units in the critical minutes when a more coherent response could have made a difference, perhaps thwarting the sudden arrival of passenger aircraft and the rapid disgorging of highly trained Special Forces of the PLA.

  In Cairns, the invaders had seized the Cairns International Airport and the docks along the east side of Trinity Inlet in a matter of minutes, their assaulters fanning out to lock down the area and set up road blocks with layered defenses on the three highways leading out of the small city.

  In the first forty-eight hours after their arrival the Chinese had received numerous passenger aircraft, cargo aircraft, and even a squadron of Shenyang J-11’s, the Chinese manufactured variant of the super-maneuverable fourth-generation Russian SU-27 fighters. The multi-role fighters had arrived in waves of six fighters each, accompanied by Russian-built IL-76-M air tankers that had sustained them in the four-hour flight across the Philippine Sea.

  Commercial ships began arriving on the first night. According to the reports, which came from an observation post that had been set up on a ridge overlooking the city of Cairns from the west side of Trinity Inlet, in the Yarrabah Mountains, the build-up of forces had gone like clockwork.

  The reports had detailed the sequence of events, which amounted to well-coordinated Aerial Port of Disembarkation, APOD, operations at Cairns international airport. The Sea Port of Disembarkation operation, SPOD, was at the Trinity wharves, where they rapidly off-loaded the equipment, vehicles and engineering support for what appeared to be a full armored Brigade along with what could best be described a
s a hornets’ nest of highly mobile ‘technical’ squads of soldiers, darting about the city and pinning the civilians in their homes with sporadic gunfire.

  Sitting in the back seat of a Toyota Camry, a Chinese officer calmly watched the unfamiliar features of Cairns speed past him while the accompanying soldiers in the car scanned the area for any potential opposition. Leading a platoon from the Special Operations Battalion from Guangzhou Military Region, the Lieutenant was expert in the spearhead tactics that had such great success on their initial air-land assault of the Cairns International Airport. His platoon had immediately commandeered local vehicles at the airport and then put them to use in racing past the bewildered civilians straight down Captain Cook Highway, passing the five kilometers through downtown Cairns on Sheridan Street to the wharf district, and seizing the small naval base, HMAS Cairns. The makeshift motorcade had blasted into the wharf area and captured the base with lightning speed and precision. The only resistance had been a handful of security personnel, lightly armed Royal Australian Navy Shore Police and some unarmed commissionaires at the main gate. The assaulters under the Lieutenant’s command had overtaken the main gate and raised the barricade bar in under a minute; the entire base, and the three small Armidale class patrol boats of the Australian Patrol Boat Group were his in under ten minutes with no loss of life other than the two dozen Australian Navy and security personnel who had been gunned down in the fast-moving action. His men had then hung on to their objective for the next two hours until they were relieved by follow-on forces that had arrived in subsequent waves of the initial air-land assault.

  In the relative peace of the next few hours, a Chinese Colonel made his way through the base on foot. He saw a fellow officer striding briskly his way from the opposite direction. He recognized the man, and although he out-ranked him, he immediately accorded him respect. “Lieutenant,” the Colonel raised his arm in salute simultaneous to that of the Lieutenant, almost as if the Colonel had saluted the young Lieutenant. He was that impressed with what the Special Ops team had accomplished. For his part, the young officer casually acknowledged the Colonel before passing by on his way to the ward-room of the tiny RAN base, and the continuation of his important mission.

  While the Lieutenant’s men enjoyed a full day of rest in the ward-room, they had watched as specialists of the PLA Navy’s logistics element had readied the RAN facility and Cairns port facilities in general for incoming vessels that arrived overnight and quickly began disembarking the men and equipment of the larger formation, the 42nd Group Army, Guangzhou Military District. The day of rest had been more of an annoyance to the highly motivated Special Ops personnel who wanted to get out on a reconnaissance or other task that put their skills and training to use.

  So it was with great excitement that they scoured the small navy base and quickly located the inflatable boats required for their next assignment. The young Lieutenant kept a close eye on the dressing of his men as they crossed Trinity Inlet simultaneously, six men each in the five rubber boats they now used, courtesy of the Royal Australian Navy.

  The Lieutenant observed his men with satisfaction; all of the intense training was now paying off. His eyes darted left and right; constantly checking for any potential problem. But so far, there was none. They stayed in line beautifully and made quick time crossing the broad inlet before dragging their zodiac-style assault boats up the narrow beach and into the mangrove forest on the east side of the estuary. They abandoned the rubber craft without pausing as they began to fight their way through a few hundred meters of muddy, thick mangrove swamp. They soon reached the gravel road atop the levee, where the men automatically spread out on both sides with ten-meter interval spacing and advanced at an alert, jogging pace along the series of dirt roads for a half dozen kilometers until they reached Pine Creek Road. The intersection of the dirt road and the paved road told the Lieutenant that they had followed the correct levee road, and were where he had planned during his map recce.

  As briefed, the team at the front of his column darted off the road after just a few hundred meters, disappearing into the steeply rising jungle to the north-east. Staying back for a minute until the last of his platoon had left the paved road, the Lieutenant was pleased that they had not encountered anybody on the road, and that their insertion in the hills northeast of the Cairns had gone unobserved. He then raced to catch up to his men as they progressed up the hillside towards their objective.

  They had reached about the half-way point, climbing 200 meters up the mountain before they paused to prepare for battle. He watched his men catch their breath for five minutes, check their weapons and gear, and hydrate.

  On his signal, they then closed silently with the enemy, known to be at the clearing atop the 400 meter-elevation peak that overlooked Cairns, the port facility, and the airport.

  In a brief yet fierce action his men overwhelmed the half-dozen soldiers who had been operating an observation post. They fatally shot the radio operator and executed wounded defenders, but they took the officer alive – a prize to take back to the Command Post of the 124th Amphibious Mechanized Infantry Division, to hand the prisoner over to 370th Military Police Brigade for interrogation.

  The Lieutenant was proud of his men. They had carried out the action exactly as per their training and captured an enemy officer. Surely the intelligence value would bring his unit great credit. Too bad he’s not a US Marine, thought the young officer, who knew as well as any man in the 42nd Group Army of the animosity that his unit, and the US Marines, had for each other dating back to the Korean War. Of course, it’ll be the 3rd Marines, not the 1st Marines, that we will ultimately come into contact with, he thought, looking forward to the time in the coming weeks and months when the two divisions and four brigades of 42nd Group Army would gobble up the two thousand kilometers westward to reach Darwin and engage the Marines. He had been briefed that the 42nd Group Army now had a new culmination point objective for the campaign. It had been confirmed that the 13th and 14th Group Armies had been taken out of the equation and that the Generals had made drastic changes to the campaign plan.

  Thinking of so many of his countrymen who had been so mercilessly murdered by the US Navy and the RAAF shooting down the air-assaulters and sinking the follow-on forces, they’re going to pay for this when we reach Darwin, he thought, his blood boiling with hatred for the Americans in particular.

  As his men led their prisoner down from the clearing and into the jungle below, he watched with pride as his men helped each other carry the litter onto which they had loaded the captured communications equipment, and enjoyed a moment of satisfaction for a job very well done.

  Before getting up to his feet to begin his own descent he looked out across the captured city below, just a few kilometers from the captured OP. With his unaided eye he could easily make out the assembly areas, some of which he knew of; others he could only guess at. But he could clearly see that the small city was not fully under the control of PLA forces. With all the men and equipment mobilizing in Cairns, the Lieutenant felt the energy and power of the 42nd Group army, and strained his eyes to make out the lead elements of the 124th Division as it departed Cairns heading south into the farmland of Wright’s Creek, and into battle. From the morning briefing he had attended before his mission, he knew that once the 124th had wiped out the Australian’s 3rd Brigade that had deployed from Townsville, some two hundred kilometers to the south of Cairns, there would be nothing to stop the 42nd Group Army’s 80,000 personnel from locking down the entire northern half of Queensland and then pressing on with vengeance towards their revised objective, crossing the 2400 kilometers of Queensland and Northern Territory to close with and defeat the hated 3rd Marines, who he knew would be moving towards them from Darwin.

  We should be able to defeat the Americans within a month, well before the nuclear winter sets in, he thought, relishing the image in his mind’s eye. Glory is everything.

  The first organized resistance put up by the Australian
Army had been put up by 3rd Brigade, Forces Command, who had set up a defensive line at Wright’s Creek with a company of Light Armored Vehicles from 1st Armored Regiment, and a Battalion of well entrenched soldiers thrown together from 1st and 2nd Btn, Royal Australian Regiment. No. 4 Field Arty Rgmt’s contribution of a mix of 155 mm towed howitzers and a few of the newer M777A2 lightweight towed howitzers and two Observation Posts feeding into the Regiment’s Joint Fire and Effects Coordination Centre, JFECC. Before the battle was joined the Australians felt that they had assembled some formidable firepower and had set up in favorable terrain, against an untested enemy that was unfamiliar with the local terrain and was in the throes of their initial mobilization ashore. The Australians were confident that their artillery alone would be devastating to the enemy, who would be forced to throw their units piece-meal up the highway into the Australians’ kill zone.

  The battle had been short and fierce, with well-placed artillery rounds raining down on the advancing column of Chinese tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, which had been offloaded at the Cairns dockyards less than 48 hours before.

  The defenders had enjoyed a moment of hope, after taking out a dozen targets at the head of the Chinese column, but the defenders had been over-run after being hit from the air by cluster-munitions and some form of agile projectile, perhaps optically guided smart-bombs, from a squadron of SU-27s that were already operating from Cairns International Airport.

  The last report that the radio operator from 3 Combat Signals Regiment, 3rd Brigade, had been able to send to the CJOC was that Chinese were now moving out of Cairns with a variety of specialized units that amounted to the lead elements of a full division, possibly of the 38th Group Army. Based on unconfirmed reports, it even sounded as though two full divisions of the 38th Group Army had passed through the shock troops of the 42nd Group Army, taking up the lead without pause, however that assessment was met with skepticism.