The invasion of Japan had been halted in its tracks, the East Sea Fleet just a few short kilometers from Japan’s front gates.
General Wu — flying out to meet the Chinese carrier battle group — was supposed to have been arrested upon landing, and that would essentially have been the end of it.
Except that General Wu hadn’t been arrested.
‘He avoided the escort from the carrier group,’ Liu explained, translating the messages he was receiving from Beijing’s air surveillance batteries, ‘and he’s flown straight back over the mainland. We’ve lowered our defenses to open us up to military counterstrikes from the US if the invasion went ahead, but he used that window, flew straight through those open defenses.’
‘When did he pass through?’ Cole asked, and Liu relayed the question.
‘An hour ago,’ Liu translated. ‘With all the chaos, everything that’s going on, his chopper was missed, the information wasn’t relayed to us directly.’
‘And where was he headed?’ Cole asked, scared that he already knew.
When the answer came, Cole was already moving.
9
The Chinese military transport helicopters travelled fast, taking a combined assault force of Cole’s men and Liu’s special operations soldiers across the rugged countryside beyond Beijing.
It wasn’t long before they were in the foothills of the Taihang Mountains, following dips, crests and valleys towards one of the Great Wall Project’s concealed entrances.
They had used US satellite photography to check the route taken by Wu’s own helicopter, and the coordinates of the landing point had been transmitted back to the incoming pilots.
Back on the USS Stennis, Minister of National Defense Kang Xing — the only general to have remained loyal to the Politburo — confirmed the location of a hidden entrance into the Great Wall Project near the helicopter’s landing point, and this was where Cole and the assault team were headed.
The fear everyone was experiencing was all too real — if Wu had enough time, he would be able to fuel and ready the missiles for flight. He had the codes, and he had the knowledge of how the entire base worked; after all, he had helped build it in the first place.
And if he released the missiles, that would be it for whichever country he’d decided to target — utter annihilation, complete destruction.
Millions dead, tens of millions to die in the years to come from the results of radiation.
Wu had to be stopped, and they had tried contacting the secret base — again, Kang Xing providing the details — but it was apparent that communications links had been severed at the location itself, and nobody could be raised.
So it was down to the assault team and — as they landed — Cole said a prayer.
They were going to need it.
10
They interior of the subterranean missile base was incredible — an engineering marvel that defied the imagination.
It was gigantic, and Cole was left speechless by the size of the cavernous tunnels, the sheer ingenuity and will, the thousands of years of individual manpower which had been necessary to carve the incredible structure out of the mountains.
Although it was true that the tunnel network had been built at a length of some five thousand kilometers, there was a main control room, with several minor substations along its length. The tunnels themselves were just meant to hide the weapons, to keep China’s enemies from guessing where they would be launched from — there were hundreds of platforms along the underground route, and it would be impossible for a foreign power to take out all of them.
But Kang Xing, on Chang Wubei’s initiative, had informed them of the location of the main control center, the place where — if communications were ceased with Beijing — the order for the launch would have to be given, the center which housed the terminals for the secret codes to be inputted.
The gunships flew down, loudspeakers demanding that the soldiers inside the compound lay down their weapons and give themselves up, that the orders being given by General Wu were illegal and not to be followed.
By the time they landed, there was a large group of soldiers gathered in the narrow valley between two steep, rising mountains, having emerged from their hidden command center to give themselves up as demanded.
While some of Liu’s men stayed behind to secure them, Cole and the rest of the team swept through the covert entrance — a raised concrete platform hidden within a stand of tall pines — and worked their way steadily through to the command center.
Resistance was weak, the only soldiers who remained putting up a token effort before surrendering like their colleagues before them; and then Cole was there, breaching the door to the main control room, assault rifle at the ready.
There were computers and monitors everywhere, technicians hard at work, and Cole let go a burst of automatic fire at the ceiling, getting everyone’s attention immediately.
Liu followed him, screaming in Mandarin at the technicians as the other troops spread out through the command center.
Cole scanned the room, looking for Wu, for Zhou, not seeing either one of them. Were they hiding?
A man with major’s rank slides barked out orders to the technicians, obviously exhorting them to carry on, and then a single shot rang out — Liu had shot the major in the leg.
He moaned and screamed, and the technicians held their hands in the air, terrified.
Liu spoke to them again, and they returned to work.
‘What’s happening?’ Cole asked.
‘They were fuelling the birds, entering target coordinates.’
‘Where to?’
Liu looked scared. ‘Everywhere — Japan, South Korea, the US, Britain, you name it, Wu was going to hit it.’ Liu wiped his brow. ‘He was going for total Armageddon.’
‘You’ve rescinded the orders?’
‘Of course. I’ve explained the situation, they’re spinning everything back down. I think they’re as terrified as us. But they’re soldiers, and they do as they’re told.’
Cole nodded, then pointed at the major, screaming on the floor. ‘Him?’ Cole asked, as Liu’s men spread out through the hi-tech chamber, making sure everyone was doing what they said they were doing, and shutting things down.
‘Major Wang Lijun,’ Liu said. ‘A lackey of General Wu and Zhou Shihuang.’
At the mention of those two men, Cole shouted across to his colleagues, who were checking the room for potential hiding places. ‘Any luck?’
They shook their heads in unison.
‘Nowhere to hide in here,’ Navarone said. ‘Who knows where the hell they’ve gone.’
Cole looked at Liu, then down to the injured, screaming figure of Major Wang.
‘I bet he knows,’ Cole said. ‘You need to get him to talk.’
Liu nodded, smiling. ‘No problem,’ he said as he knelt down to get to work.
11
General Wu smiled at Zhou as they parked the truck in the clearing, the engineer jumping down to quickly check the ground for its suitability.
Wu was operating with a skeleton crew, but the mobile launcher he had stolen from the Great Wall had a fully-prepared and mission-capable DF31 long range ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear warhead.
It was quite capable of reaching the west coast of America and taking out, say, Los Angeles, or perhaps San Francisco; and Wu had genuinely considered these targets, a way to take his revenge on those meddling American bastards.
But there was only one target Wu was interested in, and he knew there was no point in denying it.
As the engineer checked the ground and the missile crew readied the weapon, Wu told the head technician to input the coordinates for Tokyo.