But from here on, China’s true designs would become evident— there would be no more feigned innocence, no more pointing fingers at the Nationalists and the Americans for their aggressive acts. Although some of what had occurred could be explained away as acts of selfdefense, it would be much harder to cry “Foul! ” in the future if he gave the order that Admiral Sun Ji Guoming was seeking.
“I want reports on American, Japanese, Korean, and ASEAN member reactions to the attacks on Juidongshan and Xiamen,” President Jiang ordered his staff. “I want a media statement prepared, explaining that our activities were purely defensive in nature and provoked by the Nationalists’ aggression. I want reports from our ground forces commanders near Xiamen, asking about the readiness of our forces. I want an intelligence report on the Nationalists’ troop situation on Quemoy and Matsu Dao.” Jiang turned to the radio: “Admiral Sun, I have ordered reports from Xiamen and from our embassies and information offices in the Pacific to get reaction on the attacks. I will issue my orders when these reports are transmitted to me and I have had a chance to evaluate them.”
“With all due respect, Comrade President, you cannot wait—you must give the order now, or abandon the invasion plans,” Admiral Sun replied. “This decision must be made immediately. Our bombers must strike while the rebels are confused and stunned by the aftermath of the attack on Xiamen, and before they disperse their aircraft or hide them in reinforced underground storage facilities. We can cripple the rebels’ air forces in one night if we strike right now, comrade. We must not hesitate. Our bombers are airborne and can only remain in this orbit, below the Nationalists’ long-range radar coverage, for a few minutes longer before our fuel status will render us non-mission effective. We can midair refuel the H-6 bombers, but the other bombers must return to base to refuel, which will upset our strike timing and prevent success. I need an order right now, sir. ”
The overcrowded, stuffy, noisy, smelly underground bunker suddenly became as quiet as a grave, as if everyone could somehow hear the conversation between their Paramount Leader and the enigmatic, almost legendary navy admiral who had turned their tranquil, blissfully isolated lives upside down these past few weeks. They all knew that the conflict between the People’s Republic of China and the rebel Nationalists on Formosa was about to move to a whole new level—and they were glad to be sixty feet underground right now, too.
ABOARD AN H-7 GANGFANG BOMBER, OVER THE WUYI MOUNTAINS, EASTERN CHINA MOMENTS LATER
Sun Ji Guoming was a career navy man, but he had to admit that the power and the speed of the heavy bomber was something to behold, something that could easily make a sailor trade in his slickers and sea bag for a flight suit.
Admiral Sun was strapped into the instructor pilot’s seat of an H-7 Gangfang H-7 supersonic bomber, one of six ex-Soviet Tupolev-26 “Backfire” bombers the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force purchased from Russia in 1993. Sun was leading an attack formation of thirty Xian H-6 bombers, Chinese-built copies of the Soviet Tupolev-16 bomber, which launched from Wuhan People’s Liberation Army Air Force Base, three hundred miles west of Shanghai, about an hour before sunset. Along with the bombers were six HT-6 Xian tankers, which were H-6 bombers configured to act as aerial refueling tankers.
Once reaching the air refueling orbit areas, each bomber took on a token on-load of fuel, around thirty thousand pounds each. The HT-6 tanker unreeled a long, six-inch-diameter hose with a large three-foot- diameter basketlike drogue at the end from each wingtip, and the H-6 bombers engaged the drogue with a probe protruding from their wingtips. Even with an observer guiding the two planes to the contact position from observation blisters near the tail of the HT-6s, Admiral Sun was astounded by the precision of the bomber pilots, able to stick the six-inch probe into the drogue in the semidarkness and then stay in formation long enough to successfully transfer the fuel, even in a turn—it took almost ten minutes, with the two planes flying less than thirty feet apart at over three hundred miles an hour, to transfer a relatively small amount of fuel. Sun’s H-7 bomber used a long refueling probe that extended far ahead of the nose, so they did not need an observer—they simply flew right up into the basket and plugged in. How the pilot could maneuver a 250,000-pound aircraft inflight to within three feet of a moving point in space was amazing.
After refueling, the gaggle of bombers broke up into three cells of ten planes and proceeded to orbit points on the west side of the Wuyi Mountains, about two hundred miles from the Formosa Strait, staying at 5,000 feet to keep below the top of the Wuyi range. The reason: Le Shan, or Happy Mountain. The Taiwanese Le Shan air defense system was one of the most sophisticated in the world. Radar information from three long-range radar arrays based in the Chungyang Mountains of central Taiwan, along with radar data from radar planes, ships, civilian air- traffic-control radar systems, and even some fighter radars, were combined in the Happy Mountain underground air defense center located south of Taipei. One hundred military controllers scanned over a million and a half cubic miles of airspace, from the surface to 60,000 feet, and directed almost one hundred American-made F-5E Tiger II air defense fighters, ten Taiwanese-made Ching Kuo fighters, more than fifty Hawk air defense missile sites, twenty Tien Kung I and II surface-to-air missile sites, fifty Chaparral short-range antiaircraft missile sites, and more than two hundred antiaircraft artillery sites located throughout the Republic of China’s islands. Le Shan’s mountaintop radars could see deep into mainland China, and its air defense weapons were first-class. The Tien Kung II antiaircraft missile system, based on the American Patriot antiaircraft system, had a kill range so great that the missile battery located at Makung on the Pescadores Island thirty miles west of Formosa could shoot down Chinese aircraft launching from three major coastal bases in eastern China shortly after takeoff!
After the order was received from Beijing, Admiral Sun ordered the bombers to start moving eastward out of their staging orbits and begin their attack runs, and he radioed for the first phase of the attack to begin. More than three hundred fighters, mostly J-6 fighters led by radar- equipped J-7 or J-8 fighters, lifted off from Shantou and Fuzhou Air Bases and streamed eastward—launching two or three planes at a time, it took nearly twenty minutes for each base to launch its full complement of planes. In that time, the H-6 bombers accelerated to attack speed of 360 miles per hour, streaming over the Wuyi Mountains in three different tracks. One hundred Chinese fighters therefore became the “spearhead” for each ten-plane bomber formation, with the three spears headed right for the heart of Taiwan. With the fighters three to five minutes ahead of the bombers, the six large formations rendezvoused over the coastline and move en masse toward Taiwan.
The first target was the Pescadores Islands, about three-fourths of the way across the Formosa Strait. The first Chinese attack formation, directed by a Ilyushin-76 Candid radar plane, occupied the high- and mid-CAPs, or Combat Air Patrols, and were met by five formations of four F-5E Tiger fighters at their same altitude. Although the Taiwanese F-5s were outnumbered five to one, the Chinese 11-76 radar planes could give only an accurate range and bearing to the Taiwanese fighters, not altitude, so an accurate fix on the Taiwanese fighters’ position was hard to establish. Also, because the formations of Chinese fighters was so large and they were inexperienced in night intercepts, it was difficult for the Chinese fighters to maneuver in position to attack. The Taiwanese fighters were able to use their speed and maneuverability to get in an ideal counterattack position, and the fight was on.
The massive formations of Chinese fighter planes fired their Pen- Lung-2 air-to-air missiles at extreme range, whether they had a radar or heat-seeking lock-on or not. The sky was soon filled with Chinese air-to- air missiles screaming toward the Taiwanese defenders, but most were simply unguided projectiles, more distractions than threats. One by one, the Chinese attackers fired, closed range, fired more missiles, then turned and headed back to the mainland just before reaching optimum AIM-9 Sidewinder missile range. When the
Taiwanese fighters pursued the retreating Chinese fighters, the Chinese fighters occupying the mid-CAP started a climb, hoping to get behind the Taiwanese fighters and into the PL-2’s lethal cone, but this attack was broken up* by Taiwanese fighters coming in lower and chasing the newcomers away.
There were some brief “dogfights,” with Chinese and Taiwanese fighters turning and dodging one another trying to get into attack position, but the Taiwanese pilots and their superior air defense radar system had the upper hand. Seventeen Chinese fighters were shot down, versus one Taiwanese F-5E. The Taiwanese defenders easily pursued the Chinese fighters across the Formosa Strait nearly all the way back to the Asian coastline, picking off J-6 and J-7 fighters one by one, then darting away before getting in range of Chinese long-range air defense sites that dotted the coast.
But while the Chinese fighters engaged and diverted the bulk of the Taiwanese fighter force, the first formation of ten Xian H-6 bombers was able to stream in just a few dozen feet above the dark waters of the Formosa Strait in toward the Pescadores Islands. The air defense radar controllers were concentrating on the huge numbers of fighters and gave all their attention to them, and so they didn’t see the bombers until it was too late. Taiwanese Tien Kung II surface-to-air missile sites at Makung and Paisha in the Pescadores attacked the incoming bombers at over forty miles, but the H-6 bombers attacked first.
The lead bomber in each ten-plane formation carried two Hai-Yang- 3 cruise missiles on external fuselage hardpoints. The HY-3 was a massive 6,600-pound missile powered by a rocket engine. Once programmed with the target coordinates and navigation and flight information dumped into the missile s onboard computers, the missiles were released. Seconds after launch, a solid-fuel rocket engine propelled the missile past the speed of sound; then a ramjet engine deployed from the missile and automatically ignited. The HY-3 missile climbed to 40,000 feet and accelerated to almost four times the speed of sound in just a few seconds. At over 2,000 miles per hour, the missile covered sixty miles in less than twelve seconds . . .
... and each HY-3 missile carried a small low-yield nuclear warhead.
The first missile worked perfectly, exploding five miles over Penghu Island, the main island in the Pescadores Island archipelago, and creating a bright nuclear flash that blinded dozens of unwary, unprotected Taiwanese pilots and flattened most aboveground structures on Penghu Island. The nuclear burst also released an electromagnetic wave that disrupted communications and damaged unprotected electronic circuits for almost a hundred miles in all directions. The second HY-3 missile had been programmed the same as the first to be used as a backup, so it was merely destroyed by the blast of its brother.
Three of the follow-on Chinese H-6 bombers were damaged by the nuclear blast and had to turn back for home, but seven of its wingmen survived the shock wave, intense flash, and electromagnetic pulse and raced in to their target. The lead bomber that had carried the HY-3 missiles carried 12,000 pounds of gravity weapons in its bomb bay; the others who had not been carrying cruise missiles held 19,000 pounds of bombs. The fires on Penghu and Yuweng Islands, the two main fortified islands in the Pescadores, made initial target location easy, and the H-6’s bombardiers picked out the crucial military targets with ease. The lead bomber began the attack with four 2,000-pound high-explosive bombs, cratering the naval yard, headquarters buildings, radar sites, and fixed coastal air and ship defense sites. Two of the follow-on bombers also used large high-explosive bombs, while the rest followed with eighteen 1,000- pound cluster bombs, which scattered thousands of antipersonnel bomblets and anti-vehicle mines throughout the islands.
With the outer air defense structure collapsed, the attack on the Taiwanese home island of Formosa itself could begin. The northern attack group launched nuclear-armed Hai-Ying-3 missiles at the Republic of Chinas air force base at Hsinchu, just forty miles southwest of the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, and at the air force base at Taichung; the southern strike package launched nuclear HY-3 missiles at the air force base at Tainan and another missile at the Taiwanese naval facility at Tsoying, just a few miles north of the large industrial city of Kaohsiung. All of the attacks were devastating. Even after suffering heavy losses when the bombers flew close to surviving air defense sites, more than two-thirds of the Chinese H-6 bombers survived and successfully attacked their targets with bombs and cluster munitions.
The Chinese bomber pilots were not nearly as well-trained as their Western counterparts, and they flew even fewer hours than American crews even in an age of deep cutbacks in flying time, so their bombing accuracy was poor—less than 50 percent of their bombs hit their assigned targets. But the high-altitude nuclear airbursts had done most of the devastation already—four Taiwanese military bases destroyed or substantially damaged; one small, two medium, and one large city were ravaged. Most of the Taiwanese fighters that had launched to chase down the Chinese J-6 and J-7 fighters suddenly found themselves without a base to return home to; some did not have the fuel to return to alternate landing sites, and their pilots were forced to eject over uninhabited areas of the Taiwanese countryside as their fuel-starved planes flamed out.
Admiral Sun followed the H-6 strike package in his H-7 Gangfang bomber, arriving over his orbit point northwest of the Pescadores just as the second and third H-6 bombers started their attacks. Wearing his gold- lined goggles to avoid any flashblindness damage by the nuclear bursts on the horizon, Admiral Sun Ji Guoming surveyed the results of his sneak attack. He could see every nuclear explosion clearly: a bright ball of light like a mini-sun illuminated every cloud in the sky, lighting up the island of Formosa and making it appear like a huge photograph lying on the surface of the ocean. Every detail of the tall eastern mountains, every river valley, every aberration of the vast western coastal plains could be seen for a brief instant in spectacular, frightening relief before being swallowed up by the darkness again. Although not nearly as big as their nuclear cousins, the big non-nuclear high-explosive bomb attacks looked like large, bright red and yellow flashbulbs, followed by the glow of ground fires; and the cluster bomb attacks on Taichung and Tainan could be seen as a line of tiny pinpoint flashes of light that streaked across the darkness far below.
“Radar reports rebel fighters launching from Taipei, Admiral,” the copilot aboard Suns H-7 bomber reported. “One or two at a time, disorganized flights.”
“Probably escaping, not coming after us unless one wants to be a hero looking to try to ram one of our bombers in the darkness,” Sun commented. He never even considered that his aircraft might be in danger— with those nuclear explosions ripping into the arms and legs of the Nationalist dragon, the rebels seemed completely defeated already. “In any event, our bombers will escape. Where are the returning flights of rebel fighters heading?”
“North, towards Taipei,” the copilot responded.
“Excellent,” Sun said. The rebel air forces obviously didn’t feel like fighting after learning that several Chinese bombers had slipped through their fingers and that their homeland had just been ripped apart by nuclear and high-explosive bombs. Chiang Kai-shek International Airport and Sung Shan Air Base near Taipei were probably the only large air bases surviving west of the Chungyang Mountains.
They would make easy targets for follow-on strikes. The third wave of Sun’s attack on Taiwan should be launching now—M-9 mobile ballistic missile attacks from secret presurveyed launch sites in Jiangxi and Zhejiang Provinces. The M-9 missile had a range of about three hundred miles, and Sun had targeted at least six missiles on each of the surviving major civilian and military airfields in Taiwan. The missiles were not as accurate as bombers, but they did not need to be—the first two missiles targeted against all but the airfields around Taipei had nuclear warheads, again programmed for high-altitude airbursts so as to spread out the blast effects of the warheads and minimize radioactive fallout and residue at ground zero.
The volleys of missiles aimed at Chiang Kai-shek International, all non-nuclear, should ensure tha
t the airport could not be used to launch military strikes against the mainland. Sun was very careful not to explode any nuclear weapons over Taipei. The Nationalist capital was still the capital of the province of T’aiwan, the twenty-third province of the People’s Republic of China, and it would not do to kill any loyal Communist Chinese. He would need the support of the people to complete his task of reuniting the island with its mainland motherland.
In the meantime, an armada of two hundred Q-5 Nanchang fighters, copies of the Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich-19 attack plane, would be arriving from Guangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhu, and Wuhan Air Bases to Fuzhou. At daybreak they would conduct non-nuclear mopping-up strikes against all the Taiwanese military bases, loaded with a long-range drop tank and two 2,000-pound bombs or cluster munitions. One by one, they would attack any major surviving targets.
Sun wanted more Xian H-6 bombers for these attacks, but he had been allotted only the H-6s used by the People’s Liberation Army Navy for this raid—the air force’s H-6s were still held in reserve, committed to long-range nuclear attacks against targets in Russia, India, and Vietnam. Perhaps after President Jiang and the Central Military Committee learned of his success over the rebel Nationalists, Sun thought, it might be possible to convince them to let him have the rest of the H-6s so he could continue the air offensive against Taiwan. With most of the rebel’s long-range air defense radar system down, the H-6 bombers would stand a better chance against the surviving Taiwanese air defenses.
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