Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  “Admiral,” the President appraised McCain’s Crowley, “you’re the only flat top we’ve got in this ball game. I’ll do what I can to bleed off elements from the Gulf and elsewhere, but if you wait for them to join you I suspect it’d be too late.”

  “I understand, Mr. President. We’ll give a good account of ourselves.”

  “I know you will. Your boy excited?”

  It took Crowley aback that a President, in the midst of such a clear and present danger to the nation, was nevertheless so alert to the fact — the non — politically correct fact — that young men and women from West Point to Annapolis would see in the terrible act of war in the Strait of Juan de Fuca against their country the opportunity of a lifetime. Military men understood youth’s eagerness for combat. But for a civilian like the President, with no military experience, to be equally aware — though obligated, as the nation’s Chief Executive, to do all he could to stop the war — at once pleased and alarmed Crowley. However eager the uninitiated soldier might be, Crowley knew that the more a soldier saw of his grizzly trade up close, the less he wanted to see. Except for those like Douglas Freeman, who, in the darkness of his inner journeys, had recorded illegally in his combat diaries, that, “God forgive me, but, like old Georgie Patton, I do so love it.” The sting of battle beckoned to him, the ever-present call of Thermopylae, of being one of those who, on some great and terrible day, would save the nation in its hour of peril.

  And here in Port Townsend, in his hotel bathtub, Douglas Freeman contemplated America’s present peril, the greatest, it seemed to him, since the nation teetered on the verge of destruction — the White House in flames, the British columns advancing, the Continental Army in bitter retreat. The call reverberated in him as deeply as it had in Churchill, another great aficionado of bathtub contemplation.

  Wet facecloth over his “George C. Scott” face, the only noise that of his breathing and occasional ripple, he tried to put the pieces together like a chess player surveying the board, the clock ticking as he attempted to solve the deadly puzzle, to forestall the enemy’s next move. He tried to recollect everything, like every pawn on the table, which alone might contribute little or nothing to the puzzle but which once all assembled, brought willfully together in the mind’s eye, might reveal the who, what, and why of it all.

  The shrill ring of the bathroom phone evoked a curse worthy of Aussie Lewis, who’d been the most profane of Freeman’s SpecOps boys. Whipping the facecloth off, he barked, “Freeman!”

  It was Eleanor Prenty. He softened his tone, though still irritable at the interruption to his train of thought. “I’ve been informed of your request for Darkstar access. Admiral Jensen has been told to assist in any way possible.” She paused.

  He refused to fill the silence. Let her wait — about damn time she returned his call.

  “We’ve received a communication from the Chinese,” she continued. “Their intelligence reveals that Li Kuan, the—”

  “Yes, I know who he is,” cut in Freeman, trying to maintain his train of concentration and struck by the irony that when he’d been practically begging the White House to talk to him, he couldn’t get past Operator Eight, and now, precisely when he didn’t want to be disturbed, they were—

  “Beijing has information that suggests Li Kuan is behind the attack on Utah and Turner. If so, he could have a dirty bomb.”

  “Then he would have used it.”

  “Not if he’s here.”

  Jesus.

  “Your thoughts, General?” Which told him that, as before 9/11, no one in Washington had any more idea of precisely what was going on than he did. They were even seeking the opinion of retired generals. “I’m going to need some help. I’ll call a few of my boys. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Thank you, General.”

  Well, that was more like it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The dense white smoke rising from the hilly spine of Kinmen Island was the result of artillery smoke rounds fired by both Communist and Nationalist forces as the battle was joined. Most of the fighting was taking place on the green high ground overlooking the strands of beaches on the less verdant western shore of the island, whose pinched half-mile-wide waist accorded the island a shape that navigators throughout the McCain battle group referred to as the “bow tie.”

  Its highest point, the eight-thousand-foot Mount Taiwu, rose in the middle of the bow tie’s eastern segment. Here, Chinese paratroops, their transports having skirted Kinmen’s two southside airfields, were engaged in bitter, often hand-to-hand combat to capture the high ground to quickly establish and secure observation posts and fire bases from which they could lob 100mm mortar and 105mm howitzer rounds down upon the Nationalist forces dug in along the island’s northern and eastern defensive perimeters. The bulk of Sky Bow II missiles for Kinmen’s defense had been situated on its northern and western shores, where the ChiCom invasion was anticipated. But now ChiCom paratroops, who began falling like confetti on the ridges about the base of Mounts Taiwu and Shuhao, had attained complete surprise.

  Sky Bow missiles fired from the Nationalist island’s more heavily defended northern and western shores did bring down a clutch of six high-flying ChiCom J-5 Fresco Interceptors. But the missile flight arc of the Sky Bows fired up at the heights of Shuhao and Taiwu mountains and the hilly spine in between could not execute the abrupt C turn it would need to hit the lower flying ChiCom interceptors and ground attack aircraft. They came in low over the South China Sea, bombing and strafing the southern shore’s two vital airstrips.

  While the ChiCom paratroop transports continued to unload their men, mortars, and multichute, quick-assembly howitzers at precariously low altitudes, their low-drop zones pushed safety margins. Carrying at least 130 pounds of weapons and equipment, in addition to their own body weight, the paratroopers were jumping from the scores of transport planes at six hundred feet, in order to use the bulk of Taiwu and Shuhao mountains as protection from Nationalist ground fire.

  All over the island billions of black beetles, known as chun, rose in panicked crescendo as the normally tranquil air, disturbed only in the recent past by loudspeaker propaganda from the Chinese mainland, was now resonant with the noise of gunfire — the chunk of 60mm and 82mm mortars, and the unrelenting thudding of howitzers laying down covering fire and fire for effect, from both ChiCom and ROC forces. The Nationalists, over 25,000, dug in along the entire length of Kinmen’s western and northern shores as ROC armor moved toward Mount Taiwu and adjacent high ground in the island’s mideast sector. Here, a forward battalion of Nanjing’s Armored Division, one of those in the twenty percent of the PLA’s First Class Training Units, now dropped eighteen triple-drogue-chuted mobile howitzers. Each gun was capable of firing flat or high trajectory rounds while on the move at 34 mph, and was also equipped with upgraded infrared night vision and a 7.62mm machine gun.

  Initially, the eighteen mobile howitzers caused alarm at Kinmen Nationalist HQ, the ChiCom howitzers unleashing a deadly fire on the line of Nationalist bunkers and trenches at will. Then dots began appearing on Kinmen’s east coast radar screens. They were the ROC’s own fighters, American-made F-18s, screaming westward high above the Taiwan Strait, the 127-mile distance between Taiwan’s Ching Chuan Kang air force base on Taiwan’s central west coast and Kinmen closing fast, the estimated time to enemy contact three minutes.

  A swarm of fifty ChiCom Nanchang fighter-bombers and sixty H-6s — ChiCom versions of Russia’s glazed-nosed Tupolev TU-16 medium bombers — were now pounding Kinmen’s defenses with six-hundred-pound cluster bombs, their aerial onslaught met with dozens of ROC surface-to-air missiles. From a distance on the big screens of McCain’s Tactical Flag Command Center, the contrails of rockets and planes, and bursts of one-in-four red tracer arcing gracefully through the mayhem, looked like a huge and colorful video game. But it was a deadly, no-holds-barred struggle over whether Communist China, with overwhelming if temporary air superiority, would take Kinmen, Taiwan�
��s first line of defense.

  Then the ROC’s F-18s, engines screaming at Mach 1.2, joined battle, coming in from the sun at three o’clock low. They unleashed their air-to-air missiles with such precision and accuracy that the five ChiCom H-6s were hit and downed in the first twenty-two seconds of battle. It sent the entire ChiCom bomber swarms, 253 planes in all, retreating to the mainland’s coastal air space, which, even for the farthest ChiCom bomber and fighter escorts, was mere seconds away, and thick with SAM batteries that till now had remained silent for fear of hitting their own aircraft. Once the bulk of the returning Chinese bombers and escorts crossed the coast, however, the scores of ChiCom surface-to-air missiles opened up, the ROC’s F-18s in hot pursuit, popping orange “sucker” flares. Descending slowly, like fairy dust that belied their serious intent, the flares drew off the ChiComs’ heat-seeking missiles, whose infrared-seeking heads had mistaken the sucker flares’ intensive heat for that of the F-18s’ exhaust.

  “They’re running!” announced a young ROC pilot.

  “For now,” his wing commander replied. “But for how long?” The ROC air commander, a pilot of long experience, knew that what he was seeing was Mao’s famed hit-and-run guerrilla land tactics being ably applied to aerial combat. And he was aware, as he knew his ChiCom enemies must be, that the overriding problem for the Taiwanese fighters was that they couldn’t loiter as long as the ChiCom planes, which were much closer to their bases, only a few miles away on the Chinese mainland.

  When the Taiwanese fighter pilots heard their low fuel alarm and turned back to Taiwan to refuel and rearm, there would have to be other Nationalist squadrons to relieve them, thus stretching their resources in what was quickly becoming a war of attrition. As if to underscore his concern, the Taiwanese wing commander caught sight of a dozen or so smoking plane wrecks scattered around the base of Mount Taiwu. He had no way of knowing whether they were ChiCom or ROC fighters that had risen up from Kinmen’s two southern airfields before the airstrips were cratered, save for one clearly evident “red star” tail, visible in thick green foliage.

  Unless hostilities were either called off by Beijing, or some kind of diplomatic cease-fire came into effect under U.S. guarantee, this coastal war situation could quickly escalate to a catastrophic ICBM exchange between Kinmen and Taiwan, the stand-ins, as it were, for Beijing and Taipei. Realizing this, the Taiwanese wing commander knew he must emphasize to Taipei that if Kinmen was not to fall — on one hand a human disaster, an enormous strategic and military defeat on the other — the ROC must keep fighters aloft over Kinmen. To lose this aerial battle would only encourage Beijing to go further.

  As thirty Chinese Communist J-11 fighter interceptors — in reality Russian-made Sukhoi-27s — rose from their Fukien airstrip to meet Taiwan’s squadrons of Mirage 2000s, the ChiCom pilots of the PLA air force were confident of victory. The two Lyulka afterburning turbofans on each of their J-11s could deliver more than twice the thrust of the Taiwanese Mirage’s, rocketing the Communist fighters to Mach 2.35 versus the Mirage’s 2.2. Plus the Russian Lyulka engines could take the ChiCom J-11s, with their A-10 Alamo and AA Archer missiles to a service ceiling of 59,000-plus feet, over four thousand feet higher than the Taiwanese Mirage, though both planes’ climb rates were comparable at around 59,000 feet per minute.

  When ChiCom ground control alerted their J-11 pilots of a new development — a squadron of Taiwanese F-16s scrambling from Taiwan’s Ching Chuan Kang Air Base — the Communist pilots remained unfazed. The ChiComs’ Sukhoi-27s would still outnumber the Taiwanese challengers by two to one. Indeed, the ChiCom fighter pilots welcomed the news, knowing that their Russian-made aircraft outmatched both the ROC’s Mirage 2000s and their American-made F-16s in both power thrust and service ceiling. Even the highly touted American F-18s, which the Taiwanese were holding back in hard-shell revetments for Taiwan’s last line of defense, were not as fast as the J-11s. And studies at the China-French Friendship Polytechnic at Harbin had shown that the J-11s would defeat the American-made plane more than fifty percent of the time in tight-turning, dogfight engagements.

  But as any driver knows, a vehicle is ultimately only as good as its operator, and unlike their mainland enemies, the Taiwanese, because of their buoyant economy, had been able to give their pilots all the air time they could log. They had also been able to purchase the expensive high-tech simulators needed to train a cutting-edge air force; though, in a strange irony, even the best aviators, it was noticed, often became violently airsick in simulators — a condition most of them had never experienced in actual flight. In addition, the best ROC pilots had spent time in the United States by means of a politically hush-hush U.S.-ROC pilot exchange program at Fallon’s top gun school in Nevada. There, high above, and sometimes precariously low, over the Nevada desert, the best Taiwanese pilots from the ROC Air Force Academy flew daily against America’s elite aviators, many of whom had seen active service in both Gulf wars and in Afghanistan. And though relatively few of the Americans there had been in actual dogfights — that is, in one-on-one aerial combat — many had experienced the real-life, gut-wrenching, adrenaline-surging terror of surface-to-air missile attacks as they fought up to nine G’s in the life-or-death drama of evasive maneuvers where they used all the skills taught to them at Fallon.

  From high above the blue of the Taiwan Strait, the ROC F-16 pilots could see both the line to the west, where the deep blue of the ocean met the brown effluent of the Chinese mainland, and the dirty, greenish-brown haze of the combat-polluted zone above and around Kinmen, whose eastern sector was smothered by artillery-laid white smoke. The usual westerlies, however, were blowing the smoke quickly back over Kinmen’s western side, effectively hiding the ChiComs’ howitzer and mortar positions, but simultaneously shrouding the positions of the four Taiwanese infantry battalions who were now moving up and away from the island’s northern and eastern shore and the very positions they had so assiduously practiced to defend. They were moving toward the ChiCom paratroopers who had come in the back door and now occupied the island’s high ground. But with neither army on the island’s western side able to see one another through the man-made fog, the usual confusion of war was exacerbated into utter mayhem.

  Both the ChiCom and ROC infantry, normally well-conditioned, began firing at anything that moved in the smoke. The situation was further confused by the close similarity of both sides’ khaki/green field uniforms, which the PLA and ROC had begun copying from the Americans in the late 1990s, and which were markedly unlike the plain PLA green still used by the Chinese armies now routing the Muslim fundamentalists in Kazakhstan. While the new camouflage clothing used by both armies on Kinmen was admirably suited to the brownish green foliage of Taiwan, the ChiCom coast, and offshore islands, the all-but-identical uniforms escalated the usual danger of “friendly fire” to pandemic proportions in the battle.

  With both sides continuing to lay smoke during a lull in the westerly winds, the entire island was shrouded in a pungent, bruise-colored smoke reeking of cordite and gasoline exhaust from armored personnel carriers, mobile artillery haulers, and tanks. Vehicles moving through tinder-dry scrub began a series of fires, whose growing ferocity was due to the panic-born thoughtlessness of an ROC infantry platoon moving up toward Mount Taiwu to dislodge a dug-in section of ChiCom machine gunners. The ROC platoon, having been already badly mauled by sniper fire and now down to about twenty men, found their way blocked by a wide rush of splotchy-leafed and highly toxic yaorénmão—“people biting cat” nettles — and also came under heavy ChiCom machine gun fire from thick woods on both flanks. Rather than remain exposed in the relatively open nettle space, a corporal — the platoon’s lieutenant and sergeant having already been killed — yelled for the platoon’s flame thrower to torch the nettles, probably hoping to use the resulting smoke as a blind as well as to clear a way through. As the disembodied orange tongue of liquid fire arced into the nettles, the fire, fanned by the resumption of the winds blowing westward fr
om Taiwan, swept forward so rapidly through the trees that it overtook the ChiCom machine gunners. They were forced to abandon their heavy two hundred — round box magazines in an attempt at retreat. The sickly sweet stench of the ChiComs burning alive mixed with the smell of incinerated equipment.

  At the same time, billions of the ubiquitous black insects swirling skyward to escape the smoke that covered the island began to explode, the resulting rapid firecracker noise mistaken by younger soldiers on both sides for the sound of the ChiComs’ lightweight CQ automatic rifles. It was a burst from one of these rifles, known among U.S. and other NATO forces as a 7.5-pound M-16 “rip-off,” that felled Corporal Ahmao Pan, the youngest son of Moh Pan, as he led his rifle section against a ChiCom sapper unit that had quickly braved an intense, overlapping field of ROC mortar fire near the ROC’s big bunker near Pupien on the island’s northern side. The impact of the 3.56 gram bullets, their muzzle velocity among the highest in the ChiComs’ armory of infantry weapons, blew away Pan’s chest and stopped what up till then had been his section’s spirited charge against the enemy sappers.

  The pause enabled the ChiCom engineers to place satchel charges against the bunker. The detonations failed to wreck the bunker but created such enormous and simultaneous concussions that the bunker’s ROC defenders were so badly disorientated that they failed to prevent two hundred ChiCom marines from rappelling ashore from Mikhail-B heavy transport helos. The Communist marines captured the huge bunker complex with virtually no opposition.

  Within minutes another fleet of Mikhail heavy transport helos arrived, flying at no more than a hundred feet above an increasingly choppy sea that presaged the coming onslaught of Typhoon Jane. The transport helicopter pilots carefully watching the precipitous fall in barometric pressure had already seen satellite pictures showing the towering green columns of rain and debris that were picking up speed after having been initially slowed from 135 miles per hour to 100 mph as they passed over islands in the Philippine Sea. “Jane” had sucked up houses, entire villages, and automobiles two days before in Luzon, spitting them down miles away as the massive weather disturbance, siphoning off the power of smaller systems, continued its destructive course toward Taiwan. The CNN anchor, Marte Price, echoing reports from the East Asian network, announced that Taiwan was reportedly in for what the Chinese traditionally called a “super typhoon.”