Aside from the two carriers, there were thirty-nine other surface combat ships, nineteen amphibious assault ships and twenty other transports, tankers and cargo vessels making their way south flanked by submarines. Had not the intelligence gathering satellites in low orbit been attacked so comprehensively, they could not have moved an inch without the enemy knowing of it. The west had actually aided the PRC, by exploding their bombs in the Atlantic they had rendered their own Photo/Reconnaissance satellites impotent. Only RORSAT’s would be of any use for months to come, it made him worry about how his father and mother would cope on their farm, with low sunlight and too much rain.
The PRCs Special Forces and intelligence services had been at work all over the region, not just along the route they were taking, disabling shore based radars to ensure an undetected passage for the fleet. Those few ships that had endangered the fleet by their presence, risking the open seas in a time of war, had been boarded after the communications equipment had been jammed. Hong did not know what became of the vessels, crews and passengers; those were questions that would get him shot.
Thus far all was going to plan, except that they were now limited to one landing zone when they reached Australia, as the others had been discovered. It had however had one unplanned yet positive effect; the Australians were now looking the wrong way, toward the Coral Sea. Not that it mattered that greatly, the invasion forces they carried outnumbered the combined forces of Australia and the American troops from Korea by four to one. An air-mobile brigade’s helicopters sat upon the makeshift landing pads on ten container ships, and two motor rifle divisions plus a Regiment of engineers would land on ground secured by an airborne Regiment. Hong was not privy to all the operational details, but all personnel taking part were practising chemical warfare drills every day, even he was required to attend training sessions. Australia had always publicly denied ownership of weapons of mass destruction, and banned visiting warships from entering her waters if they carried them. Perhaps his government knew something, knew of some secret stockpile that the Australians had?
The latest intelligence briefing mentioned nothing of this, in fact the Australians had been very efficient in closing down the PRCs networks or just making life difficult for the spies. A large convoy had arrived from America along with the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and a larger than normal surface combat group. It did not say what the convoy contained, but it was probably war stores and new equipment to replace what the Americans had abandoned in Korea. The main source of this latest intelligence originated from a pair of Project 636 boats, Russian built Improved Kilo class diesel submarines, monitoring sea traffic to and from the ports.
The presence of the carrier group was a complication that concerned both Hong and Putchev, as it had been assumed the Americans would have staged their efforts out of Pearl Harbour. If those damned submariners hadn’t got caught at the start of the war, the invasion of Australia wouldn’t have had to be advanced by months, before the west and the Anzacs could mobilise and organise a defence of their islands. Putchev, who was privy to more than the Chinese captain had told him that the US withdrawal from Korea to Australia had been un-catered for in the plans, they had expected them to reinforce Hawaii or the Philippines with those units.
Mao had received replacements for her earlier losses in aircraft the day after the John F Kennedy was destroyed, but Admiral Kuznetsov had not, hers arrived whilst the carriers were transiting the Mindoro Strait, between the island of that name and the tiny Nanga Islands. There had been more ships in the fleet at that point, and the newly arrived Russian aircraft flew on, refuelled, bombed up and joined the strike missions against Cebu and Mactan. The invasion force for those islands had parted company with the fleet that night, cutting east, then south around Panay with four frigates for gunfire support. Two days later Chinese marines were walking through the wreckage and ruins of what had been a city, virtually levelled as punishment for their earlier resistance and the sinking of another warship.
The force bound for Cebu was still in the Sibuyan Sea, 127 miles from their landing site when the small Singaporean Riken class, coastal patrol submarine Conqueror, had got inside the ASW ring. Conqueror put a torpedo into the side of a troopship before being pounced on, and the game little vessel put another 533mm torpedo into one of the frigates from her forward tubes before ducking under her victim and adding the even smaller 400mm torpedoes from both stern tubes.
A volley of 75mm ASROCs killed the diesel boat but her main target; the troopship was too big to succumb to the lightweight munitions, and was able to limp on. The frigate was taken in tow with the intention of getting her to shallow water and beaching her enroute to Cebu for later salvage and repair, but her tow parted during the night in the Jintotolo Channel and she went on the rocks off the northern tip of Negros, with the smoking volcano of Mt Kanla-on in the background.
The carriers hadn’t paused in their journey south, whilst still providing air support for the second and successful attempt to take the islands. Once the strike missions were done with, Putchev had paid a visit to Admiral Kuznetsov and returned in good spirits, the work on the Varyag was almost complete. The ship had been all but complete when the funds dried up and she had been mothballed awaiting a buyer. Poorly maintained during those years, the completion of the work could not begin until that same neglect was first put right. That had been the next task of the shipyard once Mao had been commissioned, but now the reactor was being installed and the ship would soon come to life, Putchev’s next command.
At the time in the war when Leipzig had been taken by parachute assault, the German government would never have sanctioned the wholesale destruction of a German town or city. The pressure is definitely on; thought the commander of Serge Alontov’s 2nd Brigade, as he peered through the aperture of the rubble and sandbag bunker he presently occupied. If he had hoped for a fight like their last one, the air launched cruise missiles that had destroyed the power station two hours after they landed, had knocked that firmly on the head.
Unlike the last mission, they were not here solely to stop the NATO units being re-supplied at the front, but to hold the road for their own army to use when they broke out over the Elbe and drove to the sea.
The scream of incoming shells forced him to duck, and the earth heaved up to meet him and the dust of another building on Kalsergarten billowed outwards from the collapsing structure.
The NATO forces of the British 3rd Mechanised Brigade were gradually reducing the picturesque Lower Saxony town to rubble. Buildings hundreds of years old lay in ruins. It really was a tragedy, thought the Colonel who had been stationed in the eastern side of the town in his younger days, when the border between east and west ran through the town. There had been people living here for over three thousand years, the stone graves of the nearby Lübbensteine were proof of that.
His headquarters were sited on the junction of Kalsergarten and Magdeburger Tor, not far from the railway and south of the positions that cut Autobahn 2, a location he was beginning to suspect NATO was well aware of. Somewhere out there, probably watching right now was a team of artillery spotters, but the only way to clear them out would be to search every house, and his men were fully committed right now. Three Infantry battalions were applying the pressure to his foothold in the west, and they weren’t hanging about. His intelligence had identified them as the 7th/8th Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, an allegedly inferior unit of part-time soldiers, who were proving to be every bit as good as their regular sister battalion, the 1st Battalion Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, who were also opposing him. The other unit was the 2nd Battalion Light Infantry, and between the three of them they had overrun his outlying positions, south of the former university town. Technically he should have the advantage, a dug-in man is worth three in the open, but over six hundred of his men had not made it to the DZs, victims of shoot-downs by NATO fighters or mis-drops. He had reorganised his battalion so they each had three companies instead of four, due to his third battalion losing three quarters of its number on the way in. Lost with them were radios, heavy weapons and leaders that he was sorely missing now, and he couldn’t improvise in the way they had at Leipzig, the cellular network was down. He had no artillery, the plan made them unnecessary as by this time tomorrow the breakout across the Elbe would have been achieved. He thought it ironic that none of the planners had chosen to jump in with either airborne division, and he didn’t expect T-80s to come rolling down the road anytime soon either. He was now reliant on the mortars that had made it in, and the pallets of ammunition for them that the Il-76 transports carried in on resupply drops.