Knowing their families and homeland had been pounded into submission by the Mainlanders, Mao’s soldiers leapt into action, eagerly seeking their afflicters. General Mao raced down the street clogged with trucks, cars, and vendors’ carts. He saw a line of enemy soldiers and crouched behind a car before realizing they were facing away from his men. Looking beyond the soldiers he saw why — they were firing at a mass of people sitting in the intersection at the foot of a large building that had to be the Party headquarters. Instantly filled with rage at the sight of butchery, Mao rose to his feet, his pistol spitting flame at the monstrous atrocity before him.
Moments later it was over. The enemy lay dead, injured or shocked into surrender. The only sounds came from the crowd with the whimpering wounded or the wailing of those who just lost a loved one. Tears began to roll down Mao’s face as he waded into the crowd, calling forth his medics to administer first aid.
Mao’s mind registered the movement of his special shock platoon as it burst into Party HQ to clear the building. The muffled sound of an occasional shot from inside the building reminded him that there was still work to be done.
Mao stopped near the center of the rapidly quieting crowd (Mao and his men were finally recognized for what they were and the surprised mob hushed in expectation). General Mao cleared his throat, then boomed forth, “We are your brothers from Taiwan! We come to help you throw off the chains of your oppressors! Join us and we can be free together!” At this, Mao threw both hands into the air and slowly rotated to a roaring crowd.
This was not quite expected, Mao thought, we must harness this momentum before the Mainlanders can recover. As he completed this thought a dignified but bloodied man walked up to Mao and put his hand on Mao’s shoulder, “You are an answer to prayer, sir. My name is Wang Ouyang. What can I do to help?”
By 8:00 AM Tuesday, the ROCs had a little more than 5,000 troops on Mainland soil. Most importantly, they had encountered little organized resistance. They even captured an entire artillery battalion, 18 guns, intact at Lianhe. Everywhere they went, enthusiastic crowds welcomed them as liberators. Soon, additional fishing boats from the Mainland were added to the effort and another 6,000 troops made it across the bay in the foggy morning hours.
General Wong was surprised at the success his landings enjoyed. His staff, knowing how extended and vulnerable they were, counseled caution. They recommended immediately fortifying the easily defensible Amoy and only sending out reconnaissance patrols to better understand the enemy’s dispositions. Wong hesitated, then thought once again of General Mao’s words and Sun Tzu, “No, we have no hope of victory if we stop now. Stopping will only give the Communists time to recover and bring sufficient force to bear to crush us no matter how strong our positions are. No…” he turned to his staff, “we are not fighting a war now, we’re leading a rebellion!”
Wong stroked his chin, “In fact, the worst thing we can do right now is mass our forces. Instead, we must divide our forces! Divide them and plunge headlong into every city, town and village we can reach in the next day! Listen, our follow-on forces are disorganized right now. We didn’t expect to land any more beyond the first 5,000. I want everyone here except for my deputy commander and the signal staff to fly over to the Mainland by 1000 hours. I want you 30 staff officers to choose objectives for today, tomorrow and the next day. Organize our forces on the beaches. Each of you should strive to reach towns and villages totaling no less than 10,000 people today, 20,000 people tomorrow and 50,000 the next day. Use civilian cars, buses and trucks. Fan out across the countryside. Recruit help from the populace, encourage them, organize them, seek out and destroy the Communist Party infrastructure! Speed! We must fan the flames before the storm from Beijing extinguishes them! Are there any questions?”
“Where will you be, sir?” someone asked.
Wong flashed a tea-stained grin back, “Fuzhou! Fuzhou is mine! I will be leading a column to liberate Fuzhou by Thursday morning. Who wants Shantou?”
Three fiery-eyed colonels stepped forward, hands raised.
“Now, I believe you understand my intent. Let’s go!”
One of the colonels said, “Shantou, hell, what about Hong Kong?”
“Or Guangzhou?” said another.
General Wong strode strongly out of the underground briefing room then turned to say, “If one of you reaches Hong Kong or Guangzhou you will most assuredly go down in history as one of the greatest Chinese military leaders of all time. As for me, I’ll settle for ‘Liberator of Fuzhou.’”
33
Last Card
Donna Klein and General Taylor were once again in the hotel near the airport. Fu Zemin had railed against them on Tuesday morning after they returned to PLA lines without the surrendered Americans. But once again, Fu was quickly occupied with more urgent matters and was forced to ignore the two Americans.
Taylor’s crypto-pager kept up a continuous stream of messages (as long as he kept it near a window) about the rapidly changing situation on the Mainland. Donna noticed that traffic at the airport diminished to half its level on Tuesday, and half again on Wednesday. By Wednesday afternoon the airport was hosting only one in-bound and one out-bound flight every half hour — and every one of those was either a 747 or a large military transport. She wished she could call the office with the observation — but she no longer had her phone and Taylor’s two-way pager no longer had enough of a charge to transmit.
Donna was in General Taylor’s room when his pager went off again. He quickly snatched it off the windowsill as he always did and ran to the bathroom to read the display near the noise of running water. He whispered, “All seaborne resupply traffic out of Fuzhou and Shantou has come to a halt now. Add that to the message an hour ago that said every airport from Shantou to Fuzhou was apparently in rebel hands and I’d say our ‘friends’ here will run out of gas in a few days.”
Donna was about to signal her agreement when the two heard a voice that made their blood run cold.
“Taylor? Klein? You in there? It’s Lindley! We need to talk!”
When General Wong made it to Fuzhou, 299 kilometers north of Amoy on the coastal highway, he could barely believe his eyes. As he and his convoy of 300 ROC soldiers and 1,000 Mainland sympathizers crossed the Min Jiang River bridge into the suburb of Louzhou on Wednesday afternoon, one body limply swung in the breeze from every lamppost and power pole. And, judging by the cheering crowds who greeted him, the bodies were probably Party members and their hated PAP enforcers. Rather than being Fuzhou’s victorious liberator, General Wong’s arrival was simply a confirmation of the obvious — that China’s affluent coastal southeast was rapidly casting off Beijing’s bonds of oppression and corruption on its own accord.
The rebellion spread to Fuzhou ahead of General Wong’s column due to a number of factors: Taiwan’s exploitive use of captured radio and television facilities to spread the news, the rapid exchange of information over the Internet to the few (mostly influential) people who had access, the lack of sufficient paramilitaries and soldiers to suppress the rebellion, the building resentment of the corrupt and arbitrary Communist rule, and, the large increase in people believing in something larger than themselves or the State in a society where no one really took the Communist line seriously anymore.