Wang glanced around at the others. “You must be careful what you say. We’re not on our own anymore, at least, not until they send us ashore.”
Lu nodded. It was good advice. These fellow White Tigers would surely not report on them. However, there could be listening devices as an East Lightning political officer gauged their morale. It would not do if theirs was found wanting.
“If it is girls you desire,” Wang said in a lighter tone, “you may find some sooner than you think in Anchorage.”
Despite his worries, Lu grinned at the idea. He’d thought about girls while trawling through San Francisco Harbor. He’d heard many stories about American women. They were very easy, giving themselves to any man who bought them alcohol.
“I know how we could conquer Alaska in a minute,” Lu said loudly.
The other White Tigers looked up questioningly.
“Tell us,” Wang said.
Lu grinned as he looked from Commando to Commando. “High Command should promise each soldier that he can keep the first girl he captures.”
Several White Tigers laughed. Others nodded. Two appeared thoughtful.
Wang also laughed as he adjusted his weapons belt. “That is an excellent idea. I would race to one of their strip clubs.”
That brought out a few more laughs.
“Yes,” said Lu, liking his idea the more he thought about it. “I would make my captured girls twirl around a dancing pole. I’d watch with a gun held in my hand as I drank American whiskey. I would tell them I’d shoot the worst dancer. Then those easy American girls would twirl around the dance pole for me, trying their hardest to please me. The one that pleased me the most, I would mount her there to test her quality.”
“Why don’t the leaders think of things like that?” shouted a White Tiger.
Lu shrugged as he headed for the hatch. “Maybe they have. Maybe that’s why we’re invading Alaska. China lacks women. Now we shall use our excess young men to grab the prettiest women in the world, starting here.”
“To victory!” shouted Wang.
“To victory and much American tail!” shouted Lu.
The rest of the White Tigers roared approval. Then as a group, they headed for the airlock.
***
Kicking through the frigid water wearied Lu. His face quickly became numb. This was nothing like San Francisco. Crawling onto the snowy gravel shore was a relief. In the darkness beside him, Wang looked like a watery monster with a grotesquely humped back.
Other White Tigers emerged from the frigid waters. It seemed to Lu that it would have been wiser to attack Alaska in the summer.
Evergreen pines abounded here, with boulders, ice and snow making a treacherous beach. They were to seek out and destroy American observation posts. The main invasion would occur to the south, but they were here to spread confusion among the Americans.
“Hurry,” said Lu.
Each of the White Tigers divested himself of his wetsuit. Each then donned a dinylon body-armor suit and a HUD helmet linked to his chosen weapon.
Taking out a computer-scroll, Lu checked his map. The Alaskan State Highway One was up and over the slope. To the south of them was the town of Homer. Lu pointed at the scroll-map to Wang. They were north of Ninilchik but south of the bigger and slightly inland town of Soldotna.
Their briefing had been intense. The Americans used a Militia organization to help them fight. Militiamen often used civilian vehicles and civilian weaponry. Their secondary mission was to destroy patrols. It was felt that every vehicle they encountered would belong to the Militia or the Alaskan National Guard. Once the spotted observation posts were eliminated, they were to destroy vehicles and kill passengers. Spreading confusion and fear would help destabilize the enemy in the invasion areas.
“I hear a vehicle!” shouted a White Tiger.
“Hurry,” said Lu. He charged up the snowy slope, having donned his body-armor suit and calibrating his weapon with his Heads Up Display faster than most.
Wang hurried beside him. “This is like our training in Siberia.”
Lu grunted. He remembered that grueling time. Fifteen seconds later, he threw himself onto the snow. The highway was below, a thin ribbon of blacktop. He spotted a darkened vehicle. It was an SUV, with a heavy machinegun bolted to the top. A man stood behind it.
The American shouted to those in the SUV. It stopped. Doors opened. Men with rifles stepped outside.
“Destroy it,” said Lu.
Lying on the snow beside him, with pines on either side of them, Wang lifted a magnetic-pulse grenade-launcher. The targeting information was on the visor of Wang’s helmet, a crosshairs appearing at whatever he pointed his grenade-launcher at.
There was a whoosh, and something dark flew. It hit the SUV and exploded. The vehicle made harsh metallic sounds, with shouts added from the men trying to climb out.
“Excellent!” shouted Lu. He swiveled around and pointed at two slope-climbing White Tigers. Then he pointed down at the flipped SUV.
Two white-camouflaged Commandos ran down the slope. They shot American survivors.
Lu was already watching north along the road for more vehicles. There were crackling sounds in the woods then.
“What was that?” asked Wang.
“Militiamen are firing at us,” said a Commando. The words came over Lu’s helmet.
“Give me your position,” said Lu.
“Nine-five-A,” the Commando said.
Lu checked his grid map. “Come with me,” he told Wang. “Chin has found enemy combatants.”
Lu ran toward Chin, with his assault rifle ready. It was a QBZ-23. These had special cartridges. Ignoring the Geneva Convention, they had dum-dum bullets. A tiny piece of mercury was in a cavity at the front of each bullet. When the lead of the bullet struck an object, the mercury thrust forward, exploding outward and making the bullet like a fragmentation device, like a grenade. Dum-dum bullets made horrible, intimidating wounds.
“Down, First Rank!”
Lu heard the words in his helmet. He hit the snow and used his chin to switch his helmet sighting to infrared. Several manlike shapes hid among nearby pines. He counted them. Five American Militiamen fired into the darkness.
“Wait,” Lu whispered to the others, using his microphone to whisper into their helmets.
The Americans stopped firing and began moving single-file. They wore assorted clothing, one of them a bright yellow color, visible in the moonlight. A different American spoke on a cell phone. No doubt, they were reporting the grenade-fire and were now checking to see what had happened.
“They have no tactical sense,” said Wang.
“They are stupid Americans,” Lu agreed. He clicked a switch on his assault rifle, going to full auto. “Ready?” he said into his microphone.
The affirmatives told him what he needed to know.
“Fire,” said Lu.
From three directions, bullpup assault rifles opened up. The five Americans went down. None of them returned fire.
“Truly they are fools,” said Wang.
“Surprised fools,” Lu agreed. “Now go, check them.”
Wang leaped up and hurried there. Moments later, he returned to report they were dead.
“We must complete our mission,” said Lu. “Come. It is time to eliminate the observation posts.”
HOMER, ALASKA
Two hundred and twenty-six miles from Anchorage was the town of Homer. The Great American Highway System stopped here at the base of a narrow spit that jutted four miles into Kachemak Bay. There were chunks of coal along the beaches. The lumps had washed up into the bay from nearby slopes where the coal seams were exposed. In the late 1800s, Homer had first been a gold mining town and then a coal-mining headquarters for the region. Now the small town was a mixture of rundown tourist shops, a few fisheries and old repair yards. It used to boast a thriving community of artists, sculptors, actors and writers, but that had passed during the Sovereign Debt Depression.
Home
r possessed one of the few good beaches on which to land an invasion force of naval infantry. Therefore, the C-in-C of Alaska, General Sims, had rushed south an Airborne battalion and a National Guard battalion. He’d also sent several companies of Militia with them. Above the beach, combat engineers with armored bulldozers feverishly created shelters for M2 Bradleys. The infantry dug holes for heavy machineguns and ATGMs. Behind them were SAM emplacements and Blowdart missile teams. Several miles back rose artillery tubes.
“Hit them before they get ashore,” General Sims had told the airborne general in charge of Homer.
“What if they hit us first?” the general asked.
“Disperse your troops as you see fit,” said Sims. “Make a layered defense and make sure you dig.”
The airborne general had done just that. He had a little less than fifteen hundred soldiers of varying quality to halt a crack Chinese invasion force. But he was determined to make the Chinese pay for whatever they hoped to achieve.
***
The Chinese Fleet moved into position as over five hundred aircraft and helicopters took up station in the air. The landing area was five kilometers wide by four kilometers deep. Three primary control ships marked the area. The carriers remained well out of this zone, staying fifty kilometers off the coast. Large ships carrying the landing craft entered the invasion zone. It took ninety-five minutes for them to launch the landing craft.
Cruisers and destroyers began to pound the beach with their missiles and cannons, raining a hail of computer-directed munitions, guided by GPS satellites and drones. As this occurred, the amphibious boats lined up three-and-half kilometers from shore.
Now bombers, fighter-bombers and assault helicopters attacked the two American battalions defending the beach and the slopes behind the beach. Some Wyvern and Blowdart missiles roared out of their launchers, but it proved hard for the National Guard operators to burn through Chinese jamming. Unfortunately, the American radar signals brought Hell down onto them, guiding air-to-surface missiles with unerring accuracy. That opened the defenders to a rain of terror. Bombs, napalm and guided missiles murdered the Americans in their hastily built bunkers and foxholes.
Some soldiers fled. Many fired back. That’s when the Chinese helicopters dropped into attack mode. They looked like armored insects, with stubby little wings with missiles attached. The armored choppers were ugly things that could spew death better than any old-time Apache helicopter. They hung in the air, launching missiles, destroying the remaining Bradleys and Humvees. At that point, they roared forward as their 25mm chainguns hosed the remaining Americans brave enough to fire heavy weapons up at them.
As attack-choppers hunted for anything moving, Chinese infantry-carrying helicopters flew over the beach and over Homer. They stayed higher up and looked heavy and deadly. None landed on the beach. None landed in Homer. The big choppers flew past the old town and soon disappeared over the mountains. They would spill their cargoes farther inland, cordoning off the amphibious-assault landing zone.
The chief control officer out at sea now ordered the first amphibious wave. A swarm of the landing boats, all carefully lined up, steamed for the coal-littered shore.
The Snapping Turtle amphibious boats were the armored personnel carriers of the assault. Each displaced thirteen tons and was eleven meters long. It had a three-man crew and carried twenty-five grim-faced naval infantry ready to charge ashore. The main assault was coming.
***
Sergeant Byers of the Alaskan National Guard manned a TOW2 launcher. He hunkered in his foxhole, hidden under an anti-radar tarpaulin. Wide-eyed, with his hands on the foxhole’s dirt, he surveyed the wreckage around him.
There were overturned and burning Humvees and M2 Bradleys. One flipped Bradley had crushed a soldier, with his lone hand sticking out of the wreckage. Men and body-parts were strewn here and there. One headless corpse still clutched his grenade launcher. The Chinese radar and advanced EW had badly outclassed American technology. The heavy ordnance from the ships offshore, air-to-ground missiles from the helicopters and napalm from the bombers had smashed the defense to smithereens.
Byers had large welder’s hands, they were dry and had cracks and seams in them like a man twice his age. He was one of the few survivors of the murderous and multi-layered bombardment. There had been two others with him in the foxhole. They had fled, and died in the shockwave concussions of five-hundred pound bombs. Byers stared out of his foxhole. The stink of napalm, the pork-like stench of burnt humans and the sting of explosives in his nostrils was a nauseating smell, one of bitter defeat.
Where had everyone gone? Were they all dead? Was he the last American defending Homer?
Byers scanned the water. His reward wasn’t long in coming. Twenty-three amphibious personnel carriers, Snapping Turtles, churned through the gray waves. They headed for Homer’s beaches with their lumps of coal and American dead.
Byers knew there were enemy minesweepers out there, enemy carriers, cruisers, destroyers and cargo vessels. Chinese air patrolled everywhere. This was a catastrophe. No one defended the landing zone anymore. After rushing here from Anchorage and working day and night—the Chinese were getting a free ride onto Alaskan soil.
Sergeant Byers shook his head. Maybe not altogether a free ride. He was still alive. Taking a calming breath, Byers studied the amphibious landing craft. The waves were low today. He doubted any of the Chinese riflemen were seasick.
Far out in the distance, Byers made out the silhouette of several Chinese warships.
I wonder what happened to our fleet.
He shrugged after a moment. None of that mattered anymore. He squeezed his eyes closed and with a flick of his fingers, he turned on the TOW2 system. There was a frozen smile on his face as he activated the controls and targeted the nearest amphibious boat. There was a popping sound. Then the missile whooshed into life, and it zoomed across the waters at a Chinese amphibious carrier.
Mentally, Sergeant Byers counted the seconds. Then an explosion over the waters showed him where the missile demolished the amphibious carrier and its invasion squads.
“Boom,” Byers whispered.
He reloaded and targeted another amphibious carrier, launching a second missile. It hit and destroyed another invasion craft. Sergeant Byers reloaded a third time and was busy targeting his third amphibious carrier when he heard a deadly whomp-whomp in the air. He glanced up over his shoulder. A Chinese attack chopper roared at him.
Small-arms fire popped around him. There were other Americans left. They fired at the armored chopper.
Breathing hard, Byers turned back to his controls, targeted another amphibious carrier—
The attack helicopter’s chaingun whirled into life. Before Byers could launch this third missile, steel-jacketed bullets, over two hundred of them, obliterated him, his launcher and the rest of the missiles. Afterward, the helicopter hunted the Americans firing at it.
Because of the helicopter, Byers missed the initial landing. He missed the amphibious craft roaring onto the coal-dotted beach. He missed the front gates crashing open. He missed the Chinese as they waded ashore. The naval infantry wore dinylon-armor jackets and most held assault rifles. In the watery distance came the second wave hot on the heels of the first. The corpse of Sergeant Byers saw none of these things, although one Chinese soldier emptied a magazine of bullets into his bleeding body.
The invasion of Alaska had begun in earnest.
PRCN SUNG
An angry Admiral Ling, the commanding officer of the invasion fleet, sipped hot tea as he watched his bank of intelligence officers. They typed information into the operational battle screens.
The OBS took up one wall of the room in the supercarrier Sung, the largest carrier in the world. The big screens showed the Kenai Peninsula. The first amphibious assault at Homer had succeeded brilliantly, almost without cost. The second assault to take Seward at a different location on the peninsula had been botched by the Vice-Admiral in command of operations
there. The Vice-Admiral was the Chairman’s nephew, however. Even now, the man was untouchable, and that galled Ling.
One-armed Admiral Ling frowned as he watched the last Chinese helicopter over Seward crash. He set his teacup into its saucer and rubbed the right side of his face, the good side that still had feeling. The attack had destroyed American Strykers defending Seward, but not all of them. The town was still in enemy hands.
Ling glanced at Commodore Yen, a tall man in his fifties wearing a VR monocle. The Chinese media loved interviewing Commodore Yen because of his good looks and military bearing. In the service, Yen was known for his political caution, always testing before making any statement. Perhaps it was the reason the Party let the media interview him so often.
“Do the Americans have our communication codes?” asked Admiral Ling. “Is that how they achieved their success in Seward?”
Commodore Yen shook his head. “Our intelligence operatives are too good to have allowed such a thing to pass to the enemy. No. I think fate aided the Americans in Seward. For reasons I cannot fathom, our helicopter assaults—”
“There was a total lack of coordination between the attack and carrier helicopters,” said Ling.
“Some unseen incident must have interrupted the good planning,” Yen said, as he glanced meaningfully at the bank of intelligence operatives at their stations.
Ling adjusted the empty left sleeve of his uniform. Then he turned on Yen. “The piecemeal attacks were a practice in stupidity.”
Commodore Yen said nothing.
Ling scowled. He had several items on his mind. The American ASBM attack had struck and destroyed two large fuel tankers. Maybe the guidance systems in the ballistic missiles had noted the large size of the tankers and assumed they were carriers. Unfortunately, the Chinese Navy only owned a few fleet tankers. Fortunately, there had been a solution.
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