by Jeff Edwards
“We can do it,” Lu Shi said. “And we will.”
He softened his voice. “Shen Tao, my old friend. Trust me. The international community will do nothing.”
“We can’t be certain of that,” Shen said.
“I am certain,” Lu Shi said. “Recent history has given us the perfect example. Think about it. Over the past decade, the United States has conducted so many missile strikes against terrorist bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan that such attacks barely make the international news.”
He leaned forward and rested his hands on his desk. “America has laid the pattern. We will simply follow it. We will use our missiles against a terrorist base on the Indian side of the mountains.”
He felt his voice harden again. “But we will not stop until that village is completely eradicated. Not a single building left standing. Not a house, or a hut, or anything left alive.”
“The Central Committee …” Shen said. “A military stroke of this magnitude will never be approved.”
“I don’t need the approval of the Central Committee,” Lu Shi said. “The Standing Committee has the power to authorize direct military action.”
Minister Shen did not reply. The Politburo Standing Committee was the most powerful decision-making body in China. Of the committee’s nine members, one was Vice Premier Lu Shi himself; another was Premier Xiao, whose failing health led him increasingly to defer to the recommendations of the Vice Premier. At least four of the remaining seven members owed their political souls to Lu Shi. It would not have been fair to say that Lu Shi controlled the Standing Committee, but Shen knew that the man wielded great influence over the committee’s deliberations.
Lu Shi looked down at his watch. “Tomorrow morning, I will call an emergency meeting of the Standing Committee.”
His eyes returned slowly to Shen’s face. “And this will be approved, Shen. I promise you that.”
He nodded toward the door. “Go now, and prepare your missile forces. You will receive your official orders some time tomorrow morning.”
The Minister of Defense stood up and walked toward the door in stunned silence. Before he reached it, Lu Shi spoke again.
“Remember, Comrade Minister… Not a hut will be left standing. No one in that village is to be left alive.”
CHAPTER 6
FINAL TRAJECTORY:
A DEVELOPMENTAL HISTORY OF THE CRUISE MISSILE
(Excerpted from working notes presented to the National Institute for Strategic Analysis. Reprinted by permission of the author, David M. Hardy, PhD.)
Cruise missile… The term conjures up images of high-tech warfare, and the surgical precision of weapons launched with pinpoint accuracy against targets hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away. For many Americans, the first conscious awareness of cruise missiles occurred in the early 1990s, when the news media began carrying combat video footage from Operation Desert Storm, and the U.S. military’s first incursions into Iraq.
Beginning on January 16, 1991, millions of television viewers watched dramatic video of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles launched from the decks of American battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Due to the obvious technical challenges in filming a submerged missile launch under actual warfare conditions, there was no accompanying video of submarine launched Tomahawks. Nevertheless, U.S. attack subs in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea were involved in the cruise missile strikes against Iraq from the very first moments of the war.
Americans were captivated by the notion of a ‘smart’ weapon, intelligent enough to cruise the length of a city street above car level, hang a left turn at the proper intersection, and zigzag its way through a maze of urban businesses and dwellings to locate and destroy the designated target building, and no other.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command, remarked that the Tomahawk missile was so precise that it was possible to pre-select exactly which window of a building that a weapon would fly through.
Post-mission battle damage assessment would ultimately prove that General Schwarzkopf’s words were not empty boasts. The BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile really was that effective.
Desert Storm was the first battlefield demonstration of the extraordinary power of smart weapons. The government and military of Iraq were completely unprepared for the accuracy and power of America’s latest tools of war.
As public awareness of these weapons spread, several new pieces of terminology began to filter into the common lexicon. Phrases like Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM), and Digital Scene-Matching Area Correlation (DSMAC)—while not exactly the stuff of everyday conversation—became generally recognizable components of the technical jargon surrounding next-generation military hardware.
In the years since Operation Desert Storm, the multitude of available media images—reinforced by animated television news diagrams and a sprinkling of explanatory terminology—may have given the average man on the street a false sense of comprehension for cruise missile technology. At the risk of sounding elitist, the core knowledge of many laymen might be summed up in three brief statements:
(1) Cruise missiles can be launched from a variety of vessels, vehicles, and aircraft at targets over 1,000 miles away.
(2) Due to their ground-hugging flight profiles and evasive maneuvering capabilities, cruise missiles are difficult to detect and track by radar, and even more difficult to intercept.
(3) These amazing weapons are the recent result of cutting-edge technological breakthroughs.
The first two of these assumptions are essentially correct. The third statement, as obvious and unassailable as it might seem, is false.
Although the cruise missile has inarguably benefited from refinements made possible by contemporary science, the core technology is not at all a recent development. In fact, the history of the cruise missile dates back at least as far as the First World War.
For all of its exceptional capability, this so-called next generation weapon of the modern age was a century in the making. And the tale of its gestation is almost as strangely compelling as the weapon itself.
CHAPTER 7
WESTERN YUNNAN PROVINCE, SOUTHERN CHINA
SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER
8:30 PM
TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’
A micro switch clicked shut somewhere deep in the electronic belly of the launch computer, channeling power to the firing circuits. Approximately two milliseconds later, the protective membrane at the rear end of the missile launcher was incinerated by a white hot stream of exhaust gasses. With an ear-splitting roar, the missile blasted through the weatherproof cover at the forward end of the launch tube, casting a brief flare of harsh red light against the dark hillside as it hurled itself into the night sky.
For a moment, the big eight-wheeled launch vehicle was wreathed in the smoke left behind by the receding missile. The brisk mountain winds began to shove the smoke cloud aside, but not before the elevated launch tubes spat two more fiery missiles into the cold Chinese night.
The vehicle’s mission was complete now. All three of its launch tubes were empty. It had no more threat to offer, no more messengers of death to release into the darkness. But the vehicle was not alone.
There were thirty-five of them in all. Thirty-five Wanshan WS2400 transporter erector launchers, deployed in a staggered formation about a thousand meters west of the road. The matte colors of their camouflage paint schemes blended well with the scrub grasses of the local terrain, but any chance of concealment was stripped away by the roaring streaks of fire unleashed by these strange vehicles.
The launches came in rapid succession, missile after missile climbing away, and vanishing toward the west.
By the time the rising three-quarter moon broke over the foothills of the Himalayas, the area was deserted. The vehicles were gone, their passage marked only by scorched ground, and the tracks of their enormous tires.
Somewhere in the darkness, one hundred and five cruise missiles were hugging the torturous contours
of the mountains, following carefully-plotted digital elevation maps toward their mutual target—a small village on the Indian side of the Himalayas.
CHAPTER 8
GEKU, NORTHERN INDIA
SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER
7:17 PM
TIME ZONE +5 ‘ECHO’
Jampa stood in the open doorway of the shepherd’s house, the soft golden light of the oil lamps at his back, his face turned outward—toward the crisp gloom of the evening. He knew that he should close the door; the heat from the little fireplace was escaping past him, into the night. But he stood for a moment longer, enjoying the sting of the cold air against his cheeks and admiring the soothing near-darkness of the moonlit street.
The village of Geku lay spread out before him, an almost haphazard scattering of small houses and buildings under the emerging stars. It was a beautiful place, this frigid little paradise carved into the mountains on the roof of the world. Harsh. Difficult. Sometimes brutal. But always beautiful.
Most of the inhabitants were already settling down for the evening. The people here led full, but uncomplicated lives. Jampa envied them.
Here, on the Indian side of the Himalayas, there was freedom. Not boundless liberty, but at least the locals could go about their daily lives without fear that their homes would be raided by truckloads of Chinese soldiers. Their schools and their temples would not be burned, or crushed under the boot heels of an occupying nation.
Jampa felt his eyes drawn toward the east, where his own country was hidden behind the rising peaks of the mountains. The Chinese called it the Tibet Autonomous Region, which was a typical trick of communist propaganda. There was no autonomy for the people of Jampa’s homeland. There was no freedom for them. Not for more than half a century, since the ironically-named People’s Liberation Army had surged across the Jinsha River in 1950, to seize control of Tibet.
It had taken the Chinese invaders only thirteen days to conquer the vastly-outnumbered Tibetan defenders. Thirteen days, for one of the most ancient sovereign nations on the earth to become just another oppressed province in the Chinese empire.
Of course, the Chinese were somewhat more subtle about things these days, at least to outward appearances. The brute force of China’s military occupation was giving way to something more devious. The Qinghai railway was hauling in trainloads of Han Chinese, to claim and settle the land, forcing the native people into an artificial minority. If no one stopped this unnatural migration, the Tibetan people could be squeezed out of existence in just a few decades.
The ghost of a smile crossed Jampa’s lips. He had stopped it, for a while at least. He, and Nima, and Sonam had stopped the accursed train. They had blown the mechanical beast right off its tracks.
The smile faded as Jampa remembered staring into the eyes of the young PLA soldier, just before pulling the trigger of the stolen Chinese rocket launcher. The scene flooded into his mind again, the roiling ball of flame, the black smoke, the shriek of rending metal as the wounded train tore itself apart.
Jampa hadn’t wanted to kill the young soldier. He hadn’t wanted to kill anyone. He had only wanted to destroy the train, to stop the never-ceasing influx of Chinese invaders.
He felt a stab of regret, but it was quickly driven out of his thoughts by the memory of another fire. The smoke rising from the ruins of his little school in Amchok Bora. The faces of Dukar, and Chopa, and his other young students as the villagers had pulled their charred forms from the burning wreck of the school.
Jampa had been a teacher, back then. An educated man. A man of science in a land where academic learning was far too rare.
The villagers in Amchok Bora had treated him with respect. He had been regarded as a man of wisdom and enlightenment.
Jampa did not feel enlightened now. He felt angry, and tired. If there truly had been any wisdom within him, it had long since fled, replaced by a single purpose—to free his land from the Chinese oppressors.
He wondered where Sonam was now. He felt guilty about leaving his wounded team member behind after the attack on the train. He hoped—for Sonam’s sake—that the young freedom fighter had died from his bullet wounds before the Chinese had gotten their hands on him.
Jampa had a brief image of what the ruthless bastards might do to make Sonam talk. His shudder was amplified by a shiver from the cold evening air.
The shiver was followed by a yawn, and then another one. Jampa tried to push all thoughts of Sonam’s capture from his mind. Nothing could be done to help Sonam now. Either the man was already dead, or the Chinese had him in one of their interrogation cells. Either way, coming to Sonam’s aid was far beyond the resources of Jampa, or anyone else in the Gingara organization.
Jampa yawned again, and made another attempt to force his thoughts away from the fate of Sonam. There was time for a bit of reading before bed. Tomorrow, perhaps he and Nima could begin planning their next strike against the oppressors.
He started to swing the door closed, and then paused with it still half open. What was that noise?
Jampa tilted his head, and struggled to concentrate on the sound that hovered at the lower edge of his hearing. The noise started softly, but grew louder rapidly. It reminded him of an odd combination of an arrow in flight, and the hissing of a kettle just coming to a boil.
The sound, strange as it was, did not seem completely unfamiliar. He had heard that sound before, or something very much like it.
The memory of the rocket attack on the Qinghai railway flickered through his brain again. He saw himself swing the fiberglass tube of the Chinese rocket launcher up onto his right shoulder. Felt the firing trigger retract under the pressure of his squeezing finger. Heard the whistling hiss of the exhaust gasses as the anti-tank rocket had leapt from the launch tube and streaked toward the side of the nearest railroad car.
The growing hiss in the air… It was almost exactly the same sound, but louder. Much louder. It was…
Jampa’s thought was interrupted by an enormous dark shape that flashed past the half-open doorway, hurtling down the street toward the center of the village. The air current from the big thing’s passage washed over Jampa with a warm chemical stench that reminded him somehow of burning kerosene.
The thing, whatever it was, flew about chest-high above the ground. In its wake trailed the strange whistling-hiss, the noise now grown to a painful volume.
Was it some kind of rocket? It couldn’t be. It was too large. Nearly the size of a telephone pole.
Jampa was thrown sideways as the unknown flying thing reached the center of the village and detonated, splitting the night air with fire and a growing circle of destruction.
Jampa lay on the floor, his half-stunned brain trying to process the idea that the impossibly large thing was some kind of rocket after all. His eardrums were ringing from the aftermath of the explosion, but he could still hear the roar of the fireball and the screams of people thrown out of their beds by this deadly and unexpected assault.
He could hear something else, too. More of the whistling-hisses. Not just one of them. Many.
That was crazy. Who would fire missiles at a tiny Indian village? Who would bother? Who would waste that kind of expensive military hardware on a little town that most people had never even heard of?
And suddenly, Jampa knew the answer. He understood it with a clarity born of his years as a teacher, and a man of science.
He climbed painfully to his feet, and staggered to the doorway. The door hung drunkenly from a single unbroken hinge.
Two more dark telephone pole shapes streaked past the little house, each followed a second or two later by more explosions and more screams.
This was his fault. Death was coming to the village of Geku, and it was all Jampa’s fault.
The idea had been so simple. So obvious. Strike at Chinese targets on the Tibetan side of the mountains, and then retreat across the border into India. The Chinese government wouldn’t dare follow a handful of insignificant insurgents into the legal
territory of another major nation.
And many of the locals in the northern Indian provinces were sympathetic to the cause of Tibetan liberation. The Indian villagers would gladly give sanctuary to Jampa, and Nima, and their fellow brethren of Gingara.
The plan had always worked, until now. The Chinese counterstrikes had always stopped at the Indian border.
What was so different this time? Something had changed. Something major. Jampa had no idea what sort of political shift had occurred, but it was clear that the old rules were suddenly and irrevocably gone.
Whatever the cause of the change in tactics had been, this unfolding catastrophe was almost certainly in retaliation for Jampa’s rocket strike on that accursed train.
Another shockwave slammed Jampa against the doorframe. His head bounced off the wooden upright with a bone-jarring whack.
His knees buckled. He was sliding to the floor when the next Chinese cruise missile darted out of the gathering gloom, and crashed through the wall of the shepherd’s little house.
Jampa was less than two meters from the warhead when it erupted. He saw no more, heard no more, was no more.
And the man who had fired the first shot of the coming war was no longer there to witness the barrage of missiles that continued to fall from the sky.
CHAPTER 9
MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
SOUTH BLOCK SECRETARIAT BUILDING
NEW DELHI, INDIA
SATURDAY; 22 NOVEMBER
7:32 PM
TIME ZONE +5 ‘ECHO’
Indian Defense Minister Sanjay Nehru was on the phone when the door to his office flew open. The heavy door swung rapidly on its well-oiled hinges, bounced off the burnished oak wainscoting, and nearly swung closed again before the unannounced visitor stopped it with an outstretched hand.
Nehru’s eyes jerked toward the door in surprise. He was not accustomed to having people barge into his office without invitation. When Nehru got a look at the intruder, his shock transformed instantly to annoyance. It was that junior captain assigned as an aide to General Singh. What was the young idiot’s name? Kumar? Katari? Something like that.