As dawn broke, Major Mah and twenty-one privates aboard a Zil-151 truck arrived at the nomads’ campsite and began screaming at people. But if the Tibetans, already up attending to their animals, understood Chinese, none admitted to it, and they stood silently, some open-mouthed, gaping Chinese provincial style at the soldiers.
One of the children was rolling a snowball, rounding and tapping it so expertly it looked like a huge, white, round stone in his hand. He threw it at the truck, and Major Mah started screaming again — signaling impatiently for the interpreter, who then proceeded to tell them all that if they’d been found to be hiding American criminals—”pirates of the air” being the literal translation — then he would shoot one person from every tent, then burn down the huts.
All Tibetans by now, Mah said, should understand that the PLA loves the people and the people love the PLA. The child who had thrown the snowball was making another when his mother — despite her offspring’s resistance — took it from him and crumbled it. The child began to cry, and a pet goat from the nearest tent suddenly ran out, causing Mah to step back, drawing his pistol before he realized what it was. This evoked great laughter from all the Tibetans and a few of the troops. Enraged, Mah fired into the air.
“What’s he doing?” a little girl asked her father.
“Shooting at air pirates!” the father said.
By now Mah’s men had been through all the tents, causing no small confusion and panic among the pets who scattered every which way as bayonets were thrust into piles of blankets.
“If we find you have been hiding anyone we will take all your salt!” Mah warned them, upping the ante. This caused a rumble of resentment and fright among the nomads, for their salt packs filled from the salt pans of the salt lakes were precious, not only for their personal culinary use but as tender for bartering. One of the Chinese soldiers left the main body and, walking about the camp, looked through the scope of his rifle. It was infrared capable, able to pick up the temperature differentials even where snow had fallen but where a footprint had recently been. He called out excitedly to Major Mah — he had found tracks, two yaks probably heading away from the camp — not very old tracks, perhaps a half hour at most.
Mah left five men with the truck — which could climb no higher — to stay in the encampment should anyone return to the tents. He placed himself with the remaining fourteen soldiers and began to follow the man with the infrared scope.
The sonar operator aboard the Chinese sub Perch did not hear the distant thud of another hatch being closed and so stayed on station but decided to surface, for it was time to get a resupply of air and run awhile to recharge its batteries.
The periscope revealed nothing but a scud of dirty cloud to the east, and indeed when the Perch broke the surface and had lookouts posted the scud seemed just as dirty and a lot bigger through the binoculars. “Well at least we don’t have to put up with bad weather,” the captain told his officer of the deck. “Once it starts getting rough we’ll pop below where it’s nice and calm.” It was the one great consolation of being a submariner.
He kept the sub on an easterly heading, not using his active sonar for fear of giving away his position but merely going slowly and watching what, if anything, was coming in on the green screen out of the passive sonar array. All the sonar operator could hear was a frying, sizzling sound, the noise of millions of shrimp mating — either that or a very good imitation of it put out by an enemy sub. The lookouts were attentive to their tasks as the fresh, bracing sea air awoke them from the kind of torpor that overtakes submariners short of oxygen and with their lungs full of hydrocarbons from the diesel fumes.
The starboard lookout shouted that he saw something. When the captain fixed his binoculars on the horizon he saw only another scud of cumulus, and the lookout had to concede if there had been anything there it had disappeared. The captain shook his head as much in amusement as disappointment. Being a lookout was no easy business. Most people, in the way they saw faces or forms in the clouds, tended to see what they wanted, or expected, to see if you left them there long enough. The trick was to give as many men a rum as possible as lookout. In any case, everyone getting a turn in the fresh air did wonders for morale.
The Sea Wolf sub USS Reagan, traveling at fifty miles an hour, was sixty miles due east of Bo Hai Gulf when Brentwood ordered a twenty-two degree turn on the right rudder. The helmsman pushed in the wheel slightly and executed the turn. This would put them on a heading to meet a U.S. carrier force now steaming south from South Korea to join the Marine Expeditionary Force on its way to the Taiwan Strait. The sub would surface briefly to transfer the mine-field and obstacle intelligence that had been gained from the SEALs’ survey of the Middle Beach at Beidaihe, a beach whose obstacles the SEALs, aboard USS Reagan, were ready to blow once the carrier-centered force got close enough to provide support for the amphibious landing vehicles—if they were used and remained a feint to draw more ChiCom forces away from the Beijing Military Region.
Aboard his Intruder aircraft-laden carrier, Admiral Lin Kuang was handed the decoded message flashed to him by the ROC — Republic of China — agents who, like him, had remained determined to one day bring down the Communists:
American invasion fleet heading south for possible beach landing off Fukien.
“Possible beach landing off Fukien,” the taciturn admiral repeated. “Where else could it be? Where else do we have big guns like those we have on Amoy and Quemoy islands to give us cover on the beaches?”
It became not a matter of prudence or of the inclement weather building up, but rather it came down to an old-fashioned, bone-deep matter of pride. Kuang was determined that the first soldiers that should land on the Communist mainland from the sea must be Chinese troops — his troops. To all his ships and aircraft he flashed, “Summer Palace.” The invasion of mainland China from the sea was under way, as the war within China, inside her northern borders, raged along the bends and hills of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front.
Admiral Kuang was suspicious the moment he received the message from his forward AWACs — Air Warning and Control Aircraft — that there was unusually heavy sea traffic up and down the Formosa Strait. Junks were reported strung out from as far away as Fuchow to the north, south past Xiamen to the other Communist special-economic-zone port of Shantou 240 miles across the strait from Taiwan.
Kuang’s fleet of one attack helicopter carrier, an A-6 Intruder bomber carrier, and fourteen armed troop-carrying ships, together with over fourteen destroyers and frigates, under the umbrella of thirty-five ROC F-18s, was put on special alert. The AWAC estimated there were over a hundred junks plying the strait between the South China and East China seas. Admiral Kuang was surprised — he had expected opposition much earlier.
The other thing that surprised him was the reports from his underground operatives that thousands of members of the June Fourth Movement had seized the opportunity to strike against Beijing’s forces already. They had exceeded the admiral’s most optimistic expectations, having attacked and cut the rail junction 120 miles inland at Zhangping in the Guangzhou military district, thwarting any hope of the PLA quickly reinforcing its sixty-eight thousand members of Thirty-first and Forty-third Army Corps stationed on the coast around Xiamen.
Admiral Lin Kuang had also expected the PLA’s East China Fleet and planes out of Fuzhou to attack him before he was halfway across the strait. Again he had proved too cautious, for his own air force commanders in Ching Chuan Kang in Taiwan had confidently predicted that the low-level, radar-confounding, predawn strike by their F-15 Eagles, each carrying a twenty-three-thousand-pound bomb load, would all but obliterate the Communists’ opposition, destroying most of the PLA Shenyang F-7s on the ground at Fuzhou.
In any event, the few Shenyangs that did get airborne carried a maximum of only one ton of bombs, as opposed to the American-made Eagles’ ten tons, and were 345 kilometers slower than the Eagles. And the American-made planes were piloted by American-trained Taiwanese who had always, correctly it appeared, regarded the PLA pilots as brave third-raters in fourth-rate machines.
But if the Taiwanese Air Force was cocky as it continued to patrol the skies above Lin Kuang’s invasion fleet, the admiral himself never underestimated the mainland’s enemy forces. He told his captains to ignore the boasting of the air force and to keep their eyes peeled for the fast Haunan Hai Kou and the hydrofoil Huch’uan attack boats that formed the bulk of the PLA’s coastal “Great Wall of Iron,” not all of which had been destroyed either at dockside or by the air force’s attacks against the giant Shantou Base.
Many of the attack boats — it was estimated over forty— had not been accounted for, along with one of the Communist Chinese navy’s three old nuclear submarines armed with modern missiles. Reconnaissance showed that most of the PLA’s elite naval forces had in fact been deployed in the north off Manchuria rather than in China’s southern military regions that bordered on Laos, Burma, Vietnam, and India.
No doubt some of the naval forces would turn south to meet the Taiwanese threat and, if they saw it on their radar, the American Marine Expeditionary Force, but they had over a thousand miles to come down from the Yellow Sea where the bulk of the best boats had been patrolling from the mainland bases at Luda, Lushan, and Quingdao. Also Lin Kuang knew that the bulk of the guided-missile destroyers, the PLA navy disdaining bigger ships because of its commitment to its primary role as a coastal defense, were also deployed in the north. And so even if elements of the PLA’s Northern Fleet did leave Korean waters, heading south, the PLA’s fastest vessels, the heavily armed patrol boats, would not reach the Taiwan Strait for at least thirty hours. By then Lin Kuang hoped to have his invasion force of over a hundred and twenty thousand crack assault troops firmly established on the beachhead.
Everything was going so well in fact that Taiwan’s joint chiefs of staff believed that with Taiwan’s two tank divisions, eighteen motorized infantry divisions, one parachute division, and tactical air army-in all, over a quarter million highly trained, superbly American-equipped men— Taiwan might well defeat the three-million-strong, but much more poorly equipped, People’s Liberation Army— or, as many after Tiananmen called it, “the People’s Liquidation Army.”
Even so, Lin Kuang would not be swayed into taking shortcuts. He had always prided himself on being a realist, and because of that he was sticking to the original plan: to establish a beachhead and, with aerial superiority, press inland in a fan-shaped advance along the 120-mile Shantou-Xiamen axis. Such an advance was not only capable of being under a constant ROC air umbrella but could be constantly reinforced by ships coming in stream from Taiwan, less than twelve hours across the strait. Then and only then, Kuang believed, would his invasion prove a rallying point for the millions of disaffected Chinese civilians of the post-Tiananmen generations who, with the minorities, had been biding their time, waiting their chance to strike and overthrow the oppressive Beijing regime.
Lin Kuang’s strategy was further based on the fact that not only were the PLA’s two hundred divisions not nearly as well trained as the smaller, better-equipped Taiwanese divisions, but the two hundred divisions that the PLA boasted were spread all over the Chinese vastness — from Vietnam in the far south to Siberia in the north.
Fifty miles from the mainland, Lin Kuang felt the excitement mounting, some of the PLA’s shore batteries already exchanging fire with the big Nationalist guns on Quemoy, others firing beyond the line of junks on Kuang’s advancing Nationalist patrol boats, Kuang’s destroyers opening up on the lines of what they were sure were Communist patrol boats disguised as junks. From the junks, over twenty percent of which were hit by the first salvos of Lin Kuang’s destroyer escorts, bright orange flames erupted skyward, and behind the dense white clouds of smoke that could be seen pouring forth from them, creating a screen, squadrons of the two-hundred-ton Huangfen attack boats maneuvered adroitly against the oncoming fleet.
As streams of thirty-millimeter fire raced out from the high, thimble-shaped gun housings of the Huangfen boats, HY2 surface-to-surface missiles could be seen streaking from the two angled-box housings on each side of the patrol boats. Admiral Kuang’s observers also saw the wakes of several long twenty-one-inch-wide torpedoes just visible through the confusion of spray and smoke that was being penetrated by others in the flotilla of PLA attack boats, including at least a dozen Huch’uan hydrofoils speeding in zigzag patterns, bows high, closing and traversing in excess of forty knots.
In the ensuing chaos, the air filling with the thump, thump, thump of heavy-caliber machine gun fire and the churning noise of the fast patrol boats that occasionally ran into “friendly fire,” the hydrofoils tore open the sea, their wakes crisscrossing those of Lin Kuang’s destroyers, the latter trying frantically to avoid being hit by the torpedoes while throwing everything they had at the Communist boats.
Though not yet at the edge of the smoke cover themselves, a handful of officers on the bridge of one of Lin Kuang’s forward picket frigates noticed through their binoculars that the crews of the fast patrol boats were not only wearing goggles against the spray but what appeared to be gas masks. Minutes later, Lin Kuang’s advance screen of destroyers, entering the smoke proper, experienced the most debilitating attack of all, the destroyers’ crews blinded by the gas. Then it was frigates floundering as a flotilla of eight fast-moving Huch’uan hydrofoils closed on the frigates, the latter wallowing and most of their officers dead.
Next one of Kuang’s frigates was hit by three torpedoes, two of them striking it forward, the other immediately aft of midships, causing the ship’s stern to lift clear out of the water. With its back broken in two, its aft section slid out of sight amid a boiling sea, the frigate’s forward section following soon after. All 195 crew were lost, either sucked down by the vortex or already dead or dying from the poisonous gas.
But Admiral Lin Kuang had been planning this invasion all his life and was as prepared as any commander could be for such a contingency. While not about to launch his chemical-biological shells, his restraint moved not by any humanitarian concern but because the wind was coming from the shore to the sea, favoring the Communists, he ordered all ships sealed.
Within minutes automatic “flush pumps” were in action all over the ships, spraying down the contaminated decks, the ships’ chemical-biological warfare filters kicking in while every combatant of the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-man-strong invasion force in the transports donned CB masks.
Some filter systems in the hermetically sealed, air-conditioned ships failed, and these vessels had to be pulled out of the line. Among them was one of the heavy transports carrying over two thousand soldiers. In the close conditions ‘tween decks, the troops were victims of greater concentrations of the highly persistent gas, which even over the sea failed to dissipate quickly and which, being a derivative of Sarin nerve gas, killed its victims with a massive attack on the central nervous system within three minutes, creating involuntary defecation, vomiting, and acute seizures.
The admiral saw the wind shifting to the north, a gap opening two miles off his port quarter. He ordered the fleet to it at full speed, all the while calmly giving muffled and nasal-sounding instructions through his mask in the large, armor-plated and insulated combat control center aboard the carrier. So calm was he that it was difficult for some officers, were it not for the heavy thumps of the guns on Quemoy and the brisk movement of the fleet’s model ships on their own ship’s magnetized operations board, to realize that a decisive battle for China was in progress.
More Communist Shenyang fighters appeared, but their attempt to intercede, though brave, was as ineffective as their attempts earlier that morning — the American-trained Taiwanese pilots enjoying a kill ratio of five to one. For those who bailed out, on either side, there was no mercy, most of them raked by machine gun fire, a few obliterated by concentrated triple A before they, or what was left of them, hit the churning waters of the strait. A dozen or so pilots, Nationalist as well as PLA, did escape the withering fire and whistling shrapnel of the naval battle only to die horrible deaths in the gas cloud that clung low above the sea in a vast, suffocating sheet, despite the wind shift.
Once through the gap to the north, Lin Kuang’s destroyers, much lighter and faster than the troop ships, began to lay down salvo after salvo on the Chinese shore, adding to the bombardment from the big Nationalist guns on Amoy, pulverizing the PLA’s bunkers in preparation for the landings. And as the green “go” flares burst skyward through the gas-streaked and shell-rent air, there was a cacophony of noise that terrified even the hardiest of the best-trained assault troops who, as the big transports moved in closer, began boarding the LSTs that would roll down the stern slipways of the troop ships for the final run to shore.
It was then that Lin Kuang saw the first troop ship quite literally blow up, bodies spit through the massive explosion like tiny charcoal toys, and he realized that he was on the verge of disaster. Though floating mines had been cleared by his preinvasion ROK SEAL team, the junks, in the last forty-eight hours, must have sown the offshore waters with hundreds, if not thousands, of the heavy, Russian-made plastic anechoic — that is, antisonar coated — pressure mines. Dropped overboard, attached to weights and nonmetallic cables, often nylon rope, the mines lay hidden well beneath the sea’s surface, set to explode only when ships of a certain tonnage — in this case the ten-thousand-plus troop ships — passed over them.
Another troop ship, carrying two thousand assault troops with all their supporting amphibious landing craft and M-1 tanks, erupted in a huge, flame-slashed V, going to the bottom in less than four minutes. It was only a mile or so from shore, the Communists having chosen the area well, for here the wrecks would effectively form a barrier to the oncoming ships. From the bridge of his chopper/Intruder carrier, Admiral Lin Kuang saw PLA patrol boats coming in, machine-gunning anyone still alive in the water.
Also at that moment he realized that the ubiquitous mine, so easily manufactured on mass assembly lines — the cheapest naval deterrent any poor nation could hope for, and which, most importantly, such nations could easily make for themselves — had suddenly proved as devastating as its proponents in the PLA said it would be when they, like “traditionalists” elsewhere, had argued against the devotees of high tech. The latter had ignored the promise of the humble mine, not because it was ineffective, but because it wasn’t sexy — a mere slug in the flash crackerjack world of air-to-air, fly-by-wire and laser-designated targeting. The fact that the mine had been so successful both for the Arabs in the Persian Gulf during the eighties and for the U.S. blockade of Nicaragua had taught them nothing.
“Admiral, what do we do?” the captain of the carrier asked, having already rung the telegraph for “full astern” and ordered the entire fleet to maintain position. It was a turning point, and they all knew it. Except Admiral Lin Kuang.
The vision of burning down Mao’s villa, of bringing down the Communist god, was too powerful to give way so quickly. Without turning to the carrier’s captain, he ordered, “All ships re-form. Behind me. We are attacking. Air arm to strike with HE bombs ahead of the carrier.” Their explosions, he explained, would create the pressure required to detonate the mines.
“Quickly!” he ordered.
Then, having already anticipated that few of the fighters would be “bomb racked,” most of their armament load being made up of cannon ammunition, he ordered a flight of twenty A-6E Intruder bombers from the carrier, each carrying 18,000 pounds of ordnance on five external hard points, to “blast out” a corridor, two hundred yards wide, a mile into shore.
As Kuang’s F-15 Eagles flew cover for the Intruders, which rose from the carrier at the rate of one every fifteen seconds — except for the four lost to AA missile fire from the patrol boats—240,000 pounds of high explosive were dropped over the next twelve minutes, turning the sea into a boiling cauldron. Even so, Lin Kuang knew the odds were that not all of the pressure mines had been detonated. He ordered the sixteen Intruders and his choppers back to Taiwan, then told the carrier captain to proceed “slow ahead.”
There were seventeen more explosions directly under and around the carrier, and she was going down, the shore less man a half mile away. “Full ahead,” he ordered, also ordering all hoses to be played on the magazine, thus enabling the carrier to cover as much of the gap as possible before it would start to go under.
Soon the big ship was listing at more than twenty degrees to starboard as Kuang, on being informed the hoses couldn’t keep the temperature of the magazine from rising, ordered all her cocks opened. If the magazine went while the ship was even partially afloat, the concussion alone from the carrier would be enough to kill many of the men in the LSTs that were now coming down the ramps of the troop ships only two to three hundred yards behind. If the carrier could be scuttled earlier, then Lin Kuang knew any explosion from the magazine would be minimized.
Most of the carrier’s crew, including Lin Kuang, were rescued by the lighter frigates and destroyers. As it transpired, the magazine did not blow, and the first of sixteen thousand assault troops were soon wading ashore from the gaping mouths of the LSTs. The return fire from the Chinese, stunned by the sustained prelanding bombardment from Quemoy and the Nationalist warships, was sporadic, and within an hour a perimeter a half mile wide and a quarter mile deep had been established by the Nationalists as F-15 Eagles, refueling from Taiwan, kept mounting a new sortie every forty minutes.
And the Intruders, pregnant with bombs from Taiwan’s west coast Chin Chuan Kang air base, returned to widen the safety channel through the mine field, making it safer for the dozens of resupply ships already en route from Taiwan. To the south of the invasion zone, hundreds of villagers risked death from shrapnel, if not direct fire, by coming out in sampans to harvest the thousands of tons of fish floating stunned or dead in the water.
Now, Lin Kuang knew, the hard part would begin: waiting to see whether the anti-Communists on the mainland would continue to join him in sufficient numbers in his crusade against Mao’s heirs. Or would Beijing’s patriotic appeal to defend the motherland overcome the disaffecteds’ hatred of the Beijing regime? Speed was of the essence.
It was now that Douglas Freeman issued his call for operation “Spring Tea,” when the brown envelopes were opened from the safes of every ship in the U.S. Seventh Fleet. It was a request—not an order — to support as much as possible the landing by Kuang’s ROC forces. Even the normally astute Norton had had no prior knowledge that this would be part of Freeman’s idea of a “reconnaissance in force,” or, more latterly, the tarted-up “U.N. police action.” On one hand, the general’s idea of dummying the ROC into an invasion he wasn’t prepared to join himself until the ROC attacked from the sea first was by far the hardest-hearted thing he had seen Freeman do.
“What if they hadn’t gone in?” he asked Freeman.
“Kuang’s troops? Then we would have.”
Norton still wasn’t sure. “Where?”
“Beidaihe.”
“So do we go into Beidaihe now?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Freeman said. “Send in Brentwood on the Reagan to blow up the mines so—”
“Cheng thinks it’s a preparation for another invasion.”
Freeman smiled. “Plus a few of our merchantmen and a cruiser or two on the horizon to add to the feint. Yes. That way we’ll draw some of his forces away from Kuang in the south. You see, Norton, I’m not such a son of a bitch after all!”
They both knew the battle was far from over, but if the Communist Chinese yet overwhelmed Freeman, Norton knew that it wouldn’t be for the general’s lack of strategic and tactical skill.