No one at the embassy questioned why they would receive the call as opposed to the information going directly to Washington over the Sino-American hotline (a telex rather than a phone). The embassy thanked the Chinese for their consideration and then called Washington with the news.
Each one of the five payload spheres weighed just under 1,000 pounds. The spheres were slightly flattened on one side and covered with a heat resistant ablative material. The flattened side also sported a small solid rocket motor. Called aeroshells, the spheres’ purpose was to enable the cargo inside to survive a fiery reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The Smart Dispenser released the first sphere 100 miles over Alaska’s Unimak Island. A few moments later it released the second. Once clear of the Smart Dispenser each of the spheres’ onboard guidance computers oriented the small vehicles and fired their retro rockets. The two packages began their de-orbit maneuver. In a few more minutes the other three vehicles would begin their sequences too. It was all very precise. The Chinese-adapted American technology worked perfectly.
All three kids were terrorizing the puppy. Dan bought it a month before he was called up for duty and the little dog, Moxhe, was barking back, joining in the fray. Judy Alexander was ironing clothes and watching MSNBC with half an eye looking for any fresh news about Dan and Taiwan when her neighbor called to tell her about a car chase on TV. Judy reluctantly changed the channel. She hadn’t slept much since Dan’s aircraft was forced down in Taiwan—maybe the local news will take my mind off of Dan for a bit, she thought.
The chase was about half an hour old when Judy changed the channel. All the local networks were covering the latest Southern California carnival from their news helicopters. Judy didn’t know with whom to be disgusted the most: the networks for constantly catering to mindless visual images that had zero impact on her life, the stupid thugs for endangering the lives of others, or herself for being even partially captivated by the spectacle. The chases always ended the same way. The fleeing suspect was inevitably captured — dead, wounded or in one piece — then the news would proceed to replay the most exciting portions of the chase for the rest of the evening. It all had kind of a predictable regularity about it; just another car chase on an L.A. evening.
Uncharacteristically, just as the chase was coming to its inevitable climax, the station broke into its special coverage to bring an even more important news flash.
The government clerk was hurrying to the deli on the corner of West 5th and South Spring streets in downtown Los Angeles for her customary dinner. She normally took an hour for dinner from her evening shift job at the Board of Public Works office, but today was different — she planned on eating in half an hour so she could take off from work early. Her thoughts were divided between the savory anticipation of the lox and bagel she would order and the date she had planned with her boyfriend at the beach in Santa Monica.
A puff of wind blew the deli’s aroma under her nose. She had almost made it to the deli’s door when a tiny leaflet came fluttering down right in front of her face. Annoyed, she brushed it away, looking around to see who had been so rude as to thrust a leaflet at her. Everyone around her had stopped. Some were looking skyward. She followed their eyes up to the sky. A small blizzard of white leaflets, each about three times larger than the fortune in the cookie she ate last night, was floating down between the buildings. What in the world. ? Probably some marketing gimmick — boy are they going to get in trouble!
She grabbed at the next leaflet that came floating down and read the tiny text:
A Warning to the American imperialists!
Warning! Warning!
China is engaged in a patriotic struggle to liberate Taiwan from the remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces. Do not let your politicians interfere in this just struggle, America! Withdraw your forces from Chinese territory now, before it is too late!
This message was delivered by China's new and powerful Dong Feng-31 missile to the people of the United States.
Warning! Warning!
As she read the leaflet her hand started to tremble. She had forgotten all about food. Instead she looked anxiously up at the sky. The leaflets had all fallen to the ground, and only the gray haze of a Los Angeles summer afternoon greeted her gaze.
Since moving to Los Angeles from the San Joaquin Valley five years before, she had lived in fear of earthquakes in the Big City. But this was a new and unanticipated threat. She knew from the news that America and China were edging closer to war—but who would have ever believed such a conflict could come home? What if the Chinese started firing other missiles, this time not loaded with leaflets? Having a degree in political science from Cal State Fresno, she vaguely remembered that the Chinese had threatened to do just that several years before in 1996 when Taiwan held its first free elections. Then again when the Taiwanese moved to declare their independence after their last election a few months before. She recalled China’s fury on the evening news for a few days last March — fury that was muted by the ongoing crisis in Indonesia.
She suddenly decided that she was going to go visit her parents who lived in Fresno half a day’s drive away. She would leave the city tonight if the news confirmed the source of the leaflets as being from China and not from some sick pranksters.
She remembered an emotional discussion from high school about the horrors of nuclear war — just before her school voted to declare itself a nuclear-free zone. She paused. No!, she said to herself after a second, she would leave now. She had some vacation time coming. She would call her boss from her parents’ house after she arrived and make an excuse for not returning to work.
Judy stood, steaming iron in hand and mouth agape, watching the television. Leaflets purporting to be from a Chinese rocket had just fluttered over downtown Los Angeles. An unidentified object dangling from a bright orange parachute floated down just west of the Los Angeles Civic Center. As soon as it hit the street it began belching a deep purple smoke, sending pedestrians scurrying in terror. All five news helicopters assigned to the now-forgotten car chase were en-route to the scene. One sharp-eyed chopper pilot saw a small brush fire on the tinder-dry hillside below the HOLLYWOOD sign. The cameraman shot the growing flames as the helicopter swooped by heading for downtown. Just as the “D” started going up in smoke and flames he had to break away to begin to shoot the more alarming (and presumably better rating) image of the purple smoke fuming UFO.
Remote in hand, Judy clicked through the local stations. All of them were covering the action with growing alarm. She stopped cold at ABC Channel 7. There, coverage featured a picture within a picture with the dateline Everett, Washington. There, as in downtown Los Angeles, a mysterious pod landed and was letting loose with purple smoke. The coverage switched to an ABC reporter on the street in Everett while the L.A. airborne coverage shrunk to the upper left corner of the screen. The young reporter was almost breathless with her excitement, “I’m here in Everett, Washington, a city just north of Seattle, where a strange and threatening object has parachuted onto a community college football field. About the same time the object appeared thousands of leaflets appeared scattered over several city blocks nearby.” The reporter held the leaflet in front of her face and began to read it…