Red Cell

by Mark Henshaw

  The Kinmen Defense Command’s three divisions on the larger island were decapitated in ten minutes. The assassinations left eleven dead, including three civilians.

  CIA OPERATIONS CENTER

  “Assume those were PLA Special Forces,” Cooke said. “What’s on their target list?” The Ops Center had fallen quiet when the CIA director had walked in.

  “The usual, I think,” Drescher said. “Power lines, communications, maybe small bridges. Assassinations of key personnel if Taiwanese security isn’t up to snuff.”

  “What’s the population of Kinmen?” Jonathan asked.

  “Eighty thousand, give or take a few thousand,” the APLAA analyst replied. She quietly began to type on her keyboard, double-checking to make sure she hadn’t just led Cooke astray.

  “Then Special Forces can’t take that island,” Jonathan noted. “If they want to occupy Kinmen, they’ll have to bring in regular forces, and that means they need a beachhead or an airport, maybe both if they’re feeling ambitious.”

  “Do you have anyone watching the airport?” Cooke asked Drescher.

  Drescher just looked around the room. A half-dozen people began pounding keyboards and the room started buzzing with low conversation. “Yep,” he said.

  KINMEN, TAIWAN

  The Shangyi Airport was the next target. The massive fireball that had been the Air Defense Command Center surged five hundred feet toward the stars and was visible on the mainland. The primary air defense system guarding the airport followed. The Hawk and Patriot 2 missile batteries purchased from the United States at considerable expense were never used.

  The SOF soldiers, joined with their fifth column supporters bearing heavy machine guns, overran the landing strip. They established overlapping fields of fire and killed anyone, soldier or civilian, who entered them. They moved through the buildings and terminals, eliminating security forces and seizing grounded fighter aircraft and weapons stores as they went. It was here that the PLA took its first casualties. A Taiwanese sergeant advanced toward the enemy, took cover behind a concrete Jersey wall at a small construction site, and used his sidearm to kill two PLA commandos running toward the main terminal. The cement barrier gave him excellent protection against small arms fire, and he managed to hold back the enemy for almost five minutes until they flanked him. When the commandos breached the front door, they met their first organized resistance of the morning—Taiwanese soldiers finally armed with weapons heavier than pistols. They held the buildings for almost an hour.

  With Kinmen’s air defenses suppressed, the first of thirty IL-76 PLA transports filled with reinforcements lifted off in sequence from a runway at Xiamen. The total flight time was less than ten minutes. The transport landed, the pilots lowered the rear access ramp, and almost two hundred PLA soldiers erupted from the back. The plane was stationary for less than one minute before closing the ramp and taxiing off to clear the approach for the next plane and begin its own run back to the mainland. Every IL-76 would make ten runs by dusk. Together they moved a total of four infantry divisions and their associated equipment by nightfall.

  The Liaoluo Pier and its two hundred soldiers followed. The PLA used the same tactics there as at the airport. The same results were achieved, though the casualties on both sides were marginally higher. Liaoluo had no landing strip, so PLA Navy amphibious transports and helicopters were used to bring the reinforcements ashore. Small numbers of Taiwanese troops managed to get to the beach with their own heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and even a pair of mortars. The first amphibious assault craft that landed on the beach suffered a direct hit from a mortar crew that got lucky, jamming the landing ramp closed and trapping its cargo inside. Dozens of landing craft followed and the Taiwanese troops held their defensive positions for almost an hour until they saw the Yuting II landing ship, the first of seven, approaching the shore. Each carried two hundred fifty men and ten amphibious tanks, marking the arrival of the PLA’s armored cavalry. The Taiwanese struck back with Javelin antitank weapons and turned the first three tanks into flaming pyres fed by diesel gasoline and the bodies of the tanker crews, but they had no chance to win without air support—where was the air support? The only combat planes overhead were Su-30 fighters escorting the monstrous IL-76s. The island’s defenders cheered when a vapor trail raced up to one of the Chinese transports and tore it from the sky in a raucous flash. The IL-76 went down, the entire airframe tumbling through the surf before settling in water barely deep enough to drown the crew and troops trapped inside. PLA helicopters began low runs under the transports, strafing covered ground to kill or flush out anything alive under the greenery.

  CIA OPERATIONS CENTER

  The Ops Center was normally a very quiet place, or so Drescher had told Cooke. It wasn’t upholding the reputation and she was starting to wonder whether Drescher hadn’t undersold his unit to her. She assumed that there must have been some semblance of order or control in the room, but if so she couldn’t see it, and yet the senior duty officer seemed to have perfect knowledge of how information was flowing around the room. The man was in his element, riding herd on the mob before him, and having far too much fun, given the circumstances.

  The rest of the staff wasn’t enjoying it so much. The APLAA analyst—a tall, very thin girl with a pixie haircut and angry face—was fighting down an urge to hyperventilate as she read a SIGINT report, whether from fear or pure joy that the long-awaited war with Taiwan had arrived, Cooke couldn’t tell. She gave the young woman a reassuring squeeze on her shoulder and a confident nod, which calmed the analyst down and seemed to give her a second wind. Cooke looked over the other analysts, who were all on telephones parceling out the few details they could scrounge up, all of which were surely erroneous. The first reports of any crisis were always wrong.

  “You’re smiling,” Cooke noted quietly to Drescher.

  “I love my job.” He pushed all the papers on his desk to the side, stacked them, and put them on the file cabinet behind. He was going to need a clean space to work. The director of national intelligence and the president would be calling Cooke, demanding answers, and she could not tell them to be patient. Politicians considered any information, even if they knew it was wrong, better than none. They would have to answer to the press and they could not, they would not, allow themselves to look ignorant. The press had to fill its airtime with something, and if the networks lacked hard facts, they would bring in paid experts to theorize and repeat the same uninformed conjectures until they finally did have real facts. Taipei had no shortage of political think-tank pundits and lobbyists on the payroll willing to spout off, and leaders on the Hill would be screaming alternately for blood and restraint, depending on their politics. But even the networks would tire of the rhetoric and would start yelling at the White House press secretary for something real. The White House would then scream at Cooke to give the president something, anything, that he could repeat to the press. She would tell them that they could not vouch for the reliability of the data, the president would demand the data anyway, and the press secretary would begin to feed false information to the reporters in a bid to buy time. The press secretary would later go off the record and blame the errors on CIA or some other intelligence organ. But to stand in front of the press and admit they knew nothing would make them look incompetent, and that was unacceptable.

  “Got it!” one of the analysts yelled. The front monitor wall went black and then live with a satellite thermal video feed.

  “What are we looking at?” Drescher yelled back.

  “Shangyi Airport,” the analyst said.

  Cooke grimaced as she stared at the front wall, stunned into silence, then looked back at Jonathan. His face showed no emotion at all.

  The Kinmen Air Defense Command Center was a pyre, and the heat outlines of men dead and wounded speckled the tarmac. The closer ones to the burning building were harder to make out as the hot air rising from the fire superheated the concrete and asphalt on which the bodies lay. Th
e corpses that close were roasting like steak in a cast iron skillet. Other men ran over and around the prone bodies further from the fire. Which soldiers were Taiwanese and which were Chinese, Cooke couldn’t tell, and she decided it was foolish to think she should know.

  KINMEN, TAIWAN

  The rest of Kinmen’s defenders fell back to the bunkers, taking with them as many civilians as were able to reach the garrisons before the doors were closed and sealed.

  The remaining command officers inside Tai-Wu Mountain sealed the complex’s heavy outer doors and spent the remainder of the day listening to a dwindling array of reports from their brothers outside. They pleaded for reinforcements and screamed for air support until PLA Navy vessels took up final blockade positions and began jamming the signal.

  The Taiwanese command authorities calmly informed the Kinmen Defense Command before losing contact that its soldiers would be rescued eventually. It was a lie, though the senior Taiwanese military officers didn’t know it yet. There would be no reinforcements and no air support. The corrupt president in Taipei who had so eagerly stoked Beijing’s animosity for his own ends was terrified that he would need to save his military forces in case China’s coup de main of Kinmen was just the first of many.

  THE TAIWAN STRAIT

  120°00’ EAST, 25°00’ NORTH,

  800 KILOMETERS SOUTHWEST OF OKINAWA

  Lieutenant Samuel Roselli checked his course and azimuth for the third time in five minutes and scanned the airspace ahead. It was a clear morning, 0620, visibility a hundred miles in all directions. The lack of cloud cover at least would let Roselli see the MIG patrols coming, but it left his plane nowhere in the sky to hide, and the old EP-3E Aries II would not be outrunning any Chinese fighters. The plane was an old crow, a four-engine turboprop built for surveillance, not combat. It had no offensive weapons, couldn’t fly higher than 27,000 feet or come anywhere close to Mach 1 even in a steep dive. For all practical purposes, the EP-3 couldn’t fight and it couldn’t run. If the MIGs got truly unfriendly, the best he could do was throw the Aries into a dive toward the deck, hold an altitude so low the plane would get a wash from ocean spray, and pray that the waves would confuse an attacker’s radar.

  Roselli didn’t begrudge the Chinese their frustration at watching US spy planes run up and down their coast on a regular basis. He expected the politicians back in Washington would scream if PLA spy planes were making runs near Naval Base San Diego or any of the Navy’s other facilities scattered along the West Coast. One day, Roselli figured, they would be. The US wouldn’t be the world’s lone superpower forever.

  “They’re going crazy back there. Radio ground traffic all up and down the coast, like an order of magnitude more than they’ve ever seen. It sounds like every PLA armor unit for a thousand miles is on the move. I miss anything up here?” Lieutenant Julie Ford crawled back into the right seat, which brightened Roselli’s mood considerably. He’d flown with copilots far less competent and pretty. The PLAAF had buzzed them several times and she’d held herself together nicely. It was harder for Roselli to imagine a faster way to earn another pilot’s trust.

  “AWACS says the PLAAF is doing up here what PLA armor is doing down there. Combat patrols everywhere,” Roselli said. An Air Force Boeing E-3C Sentry was airborne two hundred miles to the northeast, flying a little higher than twenty-nine thousand feet. The AWACS rotodome was far more powerful than the EP-3’s own radar and could see every plane the Chinese had in the air for several thousand miles in all directions. Roselli’s EP-3 had links to the AWACS data feed and he didn’t like the picture. “I’ve never seen them keep this many birds in the air.”

  “Nobody’s come by to check us out,” Ford said.

  “Give ’em time.”

  “Time” was two minutes, forty seconds. “Incoming,” Roselli said. “Three contacts inbound bearing zero-one-five, range one-two-four kilometers, speed five-two-five knots. Intercept in four minutes.”

  “They’re lighting us up,” Ford said, her voice calm despite what the EP-3’s threat receiver was telling her.

  We’re still in international airspace, Roselli thought. Just trying to scare us. They were flying inside the letter of the law and the PLAAF knew it.

  Roselli heard the obscene roar of the fighters through the cockpit glass, the rising and falling pitch of the jetwash scream left by the Doppler effect louder than he could remember ever hearing during flight. They passed the EP-3 in succession less than a second apart and missed the Navy turboprop by less than fifty feet on either side. The EP-3 was heavy for its size, weighing 140,000 pounds on takeoff, but the jet-propelled wake still bounced the prop-driven Navy plane on turbulent air currents, throwing both pilots against their restraints. The Navy technicians in the back grabbed for their chairs and consoles. Two fell, one against a bulkhead, which cost him a cracked rib, the other sprawling on the floor and wondering whether it wasn’t safer to stay there.

  “They’re coming around,” Ford said. “Immelmann turns.”

  The Chinese fighters came about, the two on the flanks peeling around in opposite directions to come in behind. The lead plane’s pilot pulled straight up into a circular turn that left him upside down and a thousand feet higher when he matched course with the EP-3. He rolled the Su-27 onto its belly, lowered the nose to drop the altitude, and increased speed to make up the six miles he had lost in the ten seconds it had taken him to come about. His wingmen took up station on either side of the EP-3, doing their best to match speed. The fighters weren’t designed for optimal stability at such low speeds in the thinner air and the Chinese pilots had to finesse their aircraft to hold their positions. The lead pilot slowed his plane to a relative stop less than five hundred feet behind the US Navy plane.

  “Lead bogey is on our six,” Roselli said. He didn’t have to tell Ford about the other two at the three and nine o’clock positions. She was looking out the window.

  “They don’t learn, do they?” Ford said. “This isn’t 2001, you know? Touch wings and we have a prayer. They don’t.”

  “Maybe their ejection seats got better,” Roselli said. “Or maybe they want us to spend a couple weeks on Hainan Island.”

  Roselli watched the nine o’clock fighter holding station off the port-side wing. He was too close for comfort. That’s the point, he thought. Cat-and-mouse, and we’re a fat old rat.

  Ford watched her partner but said nothing, her own poker face holding steady. No sense in being scared until there was something to be scared about.

  The lead pilot provided the reason a minute later. The American pilots hadn’t changed course or altitude or given him a sign of any kind that they even took notice of his presence. The Americans’ conceit angered him. These surveillance flights were arrogance on display, open espionage done in full view of his country. To disregard the pilots sent to confront them showed disdain heaped upon disrespect. The PLAAF flight leader wished he had orders more liberal than those he had received, but they were liberal enough. He turned his radar to fire control mode.

  The EP-3’s threat receiver almost screamed at the pilots. “Bogey at six o’clock just lit us up!” Ford yelled. “He’s got a lock!”

  Roselli pushed the stick forward hard and the EP-3 dropped into a dive steep enough to lift the pilots out of their seats until the harnesses pushed back. He pulled hard left, sending the EP-3 into a corkscrew turn as it raced for the deck. Ford activated the electronic countermeasures, and the Chinese pilots suddenly faced radar clutter and air filled with chaff. The dive broke the flight leader’s missile lock, but he had never intended to work hard to maintain it. He ordered his wingmen to hold their altitude while he stayed behind the plane as it fell through four miles of air, leveling out less than a thousand feet above the waves. He followed the US Navy plane until it took up course zero-one-five, its four bladed engines pushing it as fast as it could go. Convinced they were going home, the flight leader pulled back on his own stick to do the same.

  Roselli watched the S
u-27s fall away on the scope. He looked down at his hands and didn’t see the tremors his mind told him were there, but he let the computer take over the duty of returning them to Kadena. “He’s falling back,” he said, relieved. Did my voice just shake?

  Ford relaxed, let go of her stick, and looked back to the cabin. Prayers and profanities had been uttered aft, some more vocal than others. She stuck her thumb over her shoulder to point toward the SIGINT technicians, who were doing their own best to calm themselves. “I hope they got something that was worth it.”

  CIA RED CELL

  “They almost shot down an EP-3?” Kyra put the cable behind the manila folder of satellite imagery and started to file through it, splitting her attention between the pictures and Jonathan’s voice. The first image was an overhead shot of PLA tanks moving in formation down some Chinese highway. She had climbed on M1 Abrams tanks, beige sixty-ton metal monsters whose thirty-foot length was covered with depleted uranium armor, and it wasn’t hard for her imagination to fill in the gaps about the formation of dozens rolling across the asphalt.

  “And overran Kinmen while you were asleep in bed,” Jonathan confirmed. “They’ve been busy little buggers.”

  “Sorry I missed it,” Kyra said, and she meant it. “They were definitely outside Chinese airspace?” she asked.

  “Depends on your definition of Chinese airspace,” Jonathan said. “The Chinese think they own the Strait, so by their standard, no. By everyone else’s standard, yes. AWACS out of Kadena AFB on Okinawa tracked the entire flight path. EP-3s don’t carry weapons. The PLA knows that. They got to take one apart a few years back.”

  “You’d think the Chinese would be averse to midair collisions after that one,” Kyra mused. “Makes you wonder whether they learned anything from the last time they buzzed an EP-3.”

  “They learned that for the cheap price of one dead PLA pilot and a crashed MIG, they might get their hands on a US Navy plane full of classified gear,” Jonathan told her.