Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  Without giving a great deal of detail on how they accomplished their mission, the two surviving members of the eight man team who had set out on the mission were able to hand-off the captured PLA Communications Specialist, for interrogation by a uniquely talented team that Major Becker had sent forward and had waiting for the fresh prisoner at a remote cattle station south of the A6 highway, thirty kilometers west of Charters Towers.

  It had only taken the Becker’s torture team four hours to break the young conscript before he sung like a bird for Yao Ming, Major Weir’s ace in the hole.

  Sunny Yao, after being intercepted on the highway by Major Becker on his tour of the front line communities in Queensland and New South Wales, had accompanied the team as they linked up with small units of the Royal Australian Army’s 2nd Division, local militia units, and some of the more well-managed militia groups that were harassing the advancing units of the People’s Liberation Army. Sunny quickly proved to be indispensable, not only for his perfect command of Chinese languages and accent-free English, but also for the close bond of trust that Major Becker had for the young man, making Sunny’s translations of the radio intercepts and verbal interviews of Chinese subjects tortured by the Australian Special Forces and Marines of the MAGTFA to be without the uncertainty that normally comes when third parties are used for translation services.

  Both the Australian Army and the Americans had had negative experiences related to bad intelligence generated by locally employed persons used as translators in Afghanistan and Syria, so the demand for Sunny’s skills was high. For his contribution to the Allied Cause, Major Becker gave Sunny a field – designation as a member of his personal staff, and put him on the payroll of the MAGTFA as a civilian contractor reporting directly to the CJOC J2 Intelligence Section via Major Becker or Captain Thorne in his absence.

  According to Sunny Yao, what the conscript gave up provided the CJOC with an entirely new picture of the enemy’s plans for the sector.

  Despite the trust given to Sunny, the information still had to be verified. However, that could be done by collecting long-range digital images of the insignia, markings, recognition features and observations of the standard pattern of vehicles of the new unit deploying into the area, and, if lucky, a few more prisoners. However, they come at such a high cost, thought Major Blakely. So while he continued his due diligence to validate the Intel, he had Captain Thorne brief it to Task Force Billabong with his own personal assessment of its reliability.

  The was detailed, accurate, and timely and had an immediate impact on the personnel, particularly the Marines. The tone at the Billabong camp tightened up, with the men sharpening their bayonets, preparing their weapons, and redoubling their already strenuous fitness routines.

  They were getting ready to go to war.

  At about the same time, Zhong Jiang ranked Lieutenant-General Leung was in his Command Post set up in the auditorium at Lord Byng Academy in Charters Towers, receiving the latest intelligence reports from the Army Group North’s Battle Staff.

  “Before we move on to our own forces, show me those aerial photographs again, from Hughenden all the way to Cloncurry.”

  “General!” replied the Intelligence officer.

  As he clicked through the slides, displayed on one of the 56-inch plasma screens that they had inherited courtesy of the boarding school, at the front of the horse-shoe of folding tables that made up General Leung’s Command Post, he looked to the Lieutenant General for a nod to move on to each successive slide. From time to time the General would ask questions about the occasional cattle station, farm, cross-roads or other location on the 400 kilometer route from the Forward Edge of the Battle Area, FEBA, to the final objective in the Queensland Sector, the town of Cloncurry, which had been assessed as the Operational Center of Gravity for the Allies.

  The final cross-roads town before the long, solitary highway through Northern Territory to their ultimate objective of Darwin, the capture of Cloncurry would give the Chinese absolute control of all ground-based movement in the region.

  Based on the intelligence, it was clear that the enemy’s main effort would be a defensive line comprised of the Australian Army’s 1st Brigade and a Battalion of US Marines from the MAGTFA who were busily preparing entrenched positions and engineering improvements at Cloncurry, where the Allies were expected to put up one final, desperate attempt to stop the juggernaut that Lieutenant General Leung now commanded.

  With elements of both the 41st and 42nd Group Armies now fully deployed in Queensland, General Leung enjoyed the two stars now on his shoulder – the NATO equivalent of a three-star General. Once I have Queensland sewn up, General Hengyan has to give me the 20th “All Brigade” Group Army to serve as my strategic reserve in Queensland while I alternate fully five Regiments in turn as we leap-frog our way through to Darwin and onwards to Perth in the west, and south through Alice Springs to Adelaide, he thought, relishing the prestige of having an entire Field Army Group under his command, with five Regiments forming the two Divisions pressing westward and the remaining three Divisions of his two Group Armies, 41st and 42nd Gas, deployed mostly in the vital coastal areas of Queensland.

  The 20th Group Army is one of General Bing’s own units. He’ll have to promote me to Er-Chi Shang Chiang grade! He thought to himself, visualizing the I-Chi Shang Chiang, General Byng – future Emperor Byng – putting the three-star epaulet on his shoulder, making Leung the western equivalent of a four-star General, a Chinese General Eisenhower.

  He brought his attention back to the pictures.

  “So there has been no activity in the Richmond to Julia Creek sector?”

  “None, General. Since they completed the evacuation there’s been nothing but the occasional dingo there. It’s deserted. Scorched earth. You see here? They set their petrol tanks off, and the engineers from 3 Combat Engineering Regiment brought down the water tower. ‘No worries’, as the Australians say.” He smiled at his little joke, but the General continued staring coldly. The officer got back to business. “We’ll just bring along more of those captured Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Units and a few extra water bowsers to make up for the loss. Once we capture Julia Creek we’ll be able to move our logistics base of operations forward, get the ROWPUs operational, and begin stockpiling for the next push with the 370th Regiment rotating into the breach first.”

  “But won’t that clog up the highway? I mean, it’s already a traffic jam, what with moving both the 124th and 163rd Divisions along with the Air Defense Brigade from the 41st Group Army up from Charters Towers. We have to put the follow-on Regiments of the 163rd Division up the road first and then follow up with their log trains…and the front line units, the 370th, 371st and 372nd Regiments of the 124thth Division last.”

  At risk of interrupting the General, Colonel Wu interjected: “General, we’ve gone over this carefully with your staff, and they agree that we have the right balance here. We’re moving the two divisions up in six waves of a Brigade each with a log train interspersed between each Regiment. Except for the first of the 372nd, Colonel Yip’s Regiment, who we are now holding at Emerald until they are full-strength. They have fallen out of the order of march - some delay with their Combat Engineering Battalion stuck up in Cairns. Anyhow, as long as we can leap-frog one Regiment through the lines at a time, at the towns designated as re-assembly areas, and replenish them in place as they sort themselves out in individual Regiments before the major engagements. Our sequence will work better that way and we can stick to your original timetable.”

  Not convinced, the General pressed: “But what if we do not encounter as much resistance as our Intelligence Directorate expects? Won’t we run the risk of seeing our tanks and APCs sit idle, with an open road in front of them and no more gas in the tank, like the Germans in ’41?”

  “General, this won’t be another ‘Operation Barbarossa’. We have enough air power to cover our logistics lines of communications. The enemy has less than a full squadron of F/A-18s
still operational at Katherine and Darwin, with the destruction of their base at Tindal, so they won’t be able to penetrate our air defense umbrella to interdict our supplies. So what we send up the road at this end will make it through all the way to the front like xiangqui marbles down a pipe. All we have to do is schedule the log trains in the same sequence as we rotate our front-line units in before the next phase of advance, as per the timetable.”

  “No.”

  “General?”

  “No. I do not accept your recommended Course of Action.”

  “But General, you want us to begin the advance on Thursday, don’t you? If you make any drastic changes to the plan at this late stage we will have to re-write the orders altogether, and there isn’t sufficient time. You...”

  “Shut up and listen, Colonel Wu.” said the General, in a voice so quiet that the entire Battle Staff stopped breathing in order to hear him. There could be an opportunity for promotion for some unlucky Lieutenant-Colonel, if General Leung were to execute his chief of staff for his insolence.

  “No. You invoked Barbarossa. So let’s discuss it in those terms. I want you to make your ‘assumption critical for planning’ as the enemy puts it in their operational planning process, that the enemy will fold like the Russians did at Smolensk. As you say, they won’t have enough air power to make a dent in ours – we have regional air superiority. And the Air Force assures me that we’ll have air supremacy when their additional tankers arrive. So I accept your assessment of our air defenses as a fact. But you are not thinking strategically over the long term here. Unlike General von Brock, we will not over-run our logistics and face a terrible, Napoleonic disaster in the coming winter.”

  “Winter, General? But General, you’ve just heard the meteorologists tell us that the nuclear winter won’t affect us here in the southern hemisphere for another six months. Plenty of time to wipe out those Marines and take Darwin.”

  “That’s what the Germans thought about what was left of the Russians at Klin. I’ve been there myself, you know, and seen the Panzer that the Russians put on a pedestal in Solnechnogorsk to mark the farthest the Germans got into Moscow. To this day it marks the offensive culmination of Operation Typhoon, when they ran out of gas and were hit by a brutally cold winter and the tide was turned.

  “Well that’s not going to happen to me. No, Colonel Wu, I want you to completely invert the orders. Lead off with a logistics train for the 3 Regiments from the 163rd Division, then their 3 Regiments themselves. Send a Battalion ahead to seize Julia Creek until the first log train arrives. Have the engineers follow, to begin putting together the fuel farms, and then have the 370th, 371st and 372nd Regiments from 124th Division pass through the 163rd Division at Julia Creek and advance in convoy rather than combat formation until their leading patrols come into contact with the Marines at Cloncurry, at which time the Regiments of the 124th switch into combat formations and press on into engagement with the defenders at Cloncurry. On their heels, have the second log train, for the 163rd Division ahead of the 163rd itself. Have this log train push through to be as near to the Cloncurry front as possible, and have them improvise an assembly area in that flat terrain about 30 kilometers west of Cloncurry.”

  Following the General’s extremely aggressive line of thought, the Colonel wrapped his mind around the new concept of ops.

  “You mean here, just west of where the A3 comes up?”

  “Yes. That will be the logistics base for the two divisions from the 42nd Group Army, ready to resupply them after they wipe out the defenders at Cloncurry.”

  “So with them we fortify Cloncurry and replenish the 42nd for what, two weeks instead of the 30 days the schedule lays out, and we have the 163rd pass through Cloncurry, and take the lead, to press on right away? How far, Mount Isa?” asked the Colonel, now fully grasping the audacity of his general.

  “Exactly. By that time, the 20th Division from 41st Group Army will be moving up to join us, and we will have already moved our logistics support over what, 500 kilometers west of here. That will have us in Darwin and Katherine fully two months ahead of schedule and long before the winter sets in. The enemy will not be able to reconstitute their defenses that fast – we’ll be inside their OODA loop.

  “So those are your orders? I understand the directed COA. Your innovative plan to completely invert the orders will simplify matters greatly for us, as it does not require a complete re-planning of the entire campaign. It really is a stroke of genius, General.” The Colonel knew how to kiss ass, and pull his own out of the fire in the process.

  Three days later, Highway A6 rumbled with two full Divisions on the road or moving into line behind those that had already departed. There was a continuous stream of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, light armored vehicles, reconnaissance vehicles, water trucks, fuel bowsers and an astonishing variety of engineering support, air defense, transport support and command vehicles stretching from Hughenden for two hundred kilometers to the west.

  If the enemy had been able to penetrate some strike aircraft into the sector it would have been a killing spree like the Americans had in the First Iraq war, making the long lines of Iraqi soldiers flowing out of Kuwait into a macabre highway of death. As it was, the worst thing about the unending columns of the 42nd Group Army was the constant annoyance of bumper-to-bumper driving, their normally much more disciplined vehicle spacing now totally out the window thanks to General Leung’s audacious plan.

  As a Regiment from the 163rd Division passed just a few hundred meters south of the Billabong camp, the fifty men of Task Force Billabong hunkered down to hug the shaking earth.

  With Chinese fighter jets, helicopters and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles patrolling the skies and providing top cover for the seemingly endless series of convoys, and highly mobile reconnaissance squads probing every dirt-path and animal track as far as twenty kilometers either side of the narrow highway, the Marines’ very lives depended on the accident of geology that had created the illusion at the rock dome, making the entrance to their billabong invisible.

  “Top, they’re going to see us!” said one Lance Corporal, who was becoming shell-shocked after the excruciating hours of constant rumbling.

  “Relax, Justin. I’ve felt this sort of shaking before,” Top lied, “It’s not as close as it feels. They can’t see us, and if they do, we’ll open up on them and then flee to the north, to those mountains the Aussies told us about,” Top reassured the terrified young man.

  It had been a mistake to mention their contingency plan, the one place they could run to if they were discovered. With all the air power buzzing in the skies the Marines would be quickly spotted and wiped out in a matter of minutes if they abandoned their camouflaged sanctuary and tried to run.

  “Let’s go there, Top! There’s just too many of them. They’ll come in here for water or something, and find us.” Justin said, as he started to get up out his fox-hole as though he was going to run.

  The lights went out for Justin as his Corporal butt-stroked him. He fell into his trench, unconscious but not permanently damaged.

  He was the lucky one. The other Marines had to endure four more hours of rumbling before the entire Chinese Army – so it seemed – had passed by their position.

  They were not detected.

  On several occasions, Master Gunnery Sergeant Gannon, watching the images being transmitted from an optical system that had been set up near the dome and was being displayed on the monitor in his LAV deeper in the billabong. He saw a series of Chinese reconnaissance patrols, each in turn had driven right over the dome and then carried on farther north, each time coming with a few tens of meters of the hidden track leading to their sanctuary.

  Each time the patrols must have assessed the terrain as impassable, and carried on with their patrol, keeping station with the massive force that was flowing west along the narrow highway.

  By the end of the day of thunder, surprised to be alive, the Marines began to believe that the Chinese
had all passed. They began making preparations for the next phase of the operation.

  And then the next wave of Chinese units began to pass.

  There were three more days of nearly continuous rumbling before it was all over and they received the signal to mount up.

  “How sure are you about this, Jock?” asked Major Blakely.

  “No doubt about it, Major. They’ve taken the bait. Looks like they have pushed their log trains ahead of their formation, other than this pesky Brigade that came in to ‘sus’ the town,” said the intelligence Warrant Officer from the Australian Army.

  “Any word from the townsfolk?”

  “Yes. The recon teams reports that Pandas are going for the schools, the warehouses, and the other facilities, as per Lieutenant Colonel Weir’s Combat Estimate. Other than that, Combat Engineer Brigade of the 124rd Division, which entrenched a defensive perimeter it’s a whole lot of engineers and supply types transforming the town into one massive logistics supply base of operations. Similar logistics facilities have been set up another 30 kilometers to the east, and of course there’s their massive fuel dump and logistics traffic jam in Julia Creek, as we discussed earlier.”

  “And your observation teams in the outback, they can be relied upon for these numbers, they are accurate?”

  “Dogs balls, mate, they’re absolutely solid. They have those PLA recce booklets Lieutenant Colonel Weir provided, and at some of the cattle stations we have our own people – trained Int Ops to guide the locals – so yes, Major, this is good data.”

  “So they’ve sent two divisions up, with enough supplies to take them how far, Mount Isa?”