Wet facecloth over his “George C. Scott” face, the only noise that of his breathing and occasional ripple, he tried to put the pieces together like a chess player surveying the board, the clock ticking as he attempted to solve the deadly puzzle, to forestall the enemy’s next move. He tried to recollect everything, like every pawn on the table, which alone might contribute little or nothing to the puzzle but which once all assembled, brought willfully together in the mind’s eye, might reveal the who, what, and why of it all.
The shrill ring of the bathroom phone evoked a curse worthy of Aussie Lewis, who’d been the most profane of Freeman’s SpecOps boys. Whipping the facecloth off, he barked, “Freeman!”
It was Eleanor Prenty. He softened his tone, though still irritable at the interruption to his train of thought. “I’ve been informed of your request for Darkstar access. Admiral Jensen has been told to assist in any way possible.” She paused.
He refused to fill the silence. Let her wait — about damn time she returned his call.
“We’ve received a communication from the Chinese,” she continued. “Their intelligence reveals that Li Kuan, the—”
“Yes, I know who he is,” cut in Freeman, trying to maintain his train of concentration and struck by the irony that when he’d been practically begging the White House to talk to him, he couldn’t get past Operator Eight, and now, precisely when he didn’t want to be disturbed, they were—
“Beijing has information that suggests Li Kuan is behind the attack on Utah and Turner. If so, he could have a dirty bomb.”
“Then he would have used it.”
“Not if he’s here.”
Jesus.
“Your thoughts, General?” Which told him that, as before 9/11, no one in Washington had any more idea of precisely what was going on than he did. They were even seeking the opinion of retired generals. “I’m going to need some help. I’ll call a few of my boys. I’ll get back to you.”
“Thank you, General.”
Well, that was more like it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The dense white smoke rising from the hilly spine of Kinmen Island was the result of artillery smoke rounds fired by both Communist and Nationalist forces as the battle was joined. Most of the fighting was taking place on the green high ground overlooking the strands of beaches on the less verdant western shore of the island, whose pinched half-mile-wide waist accorded the island a shape that navigators throughout the McCain battle group referred to as the “bow tie.”
Its highest point, the eight-thousand-foot Mount Taiwu, rose in the middle of the bow tie’s eastern segment. Here, Chinese paratroops, their transports having skirted Kinmen’s two southside airfields, were engaged in bitter, often hand-to-hand combat to capture the high ground to quickly establish and secure observation posts and fire bases from which they could lob 100mm mortar and 105mm howitzer rounds down upon the Nationalist forces dug in along the island’s northern and eastern defensive perimeters. The bulk of Sky Bow II missiles for Kinmen’s defense had been situated on its northern and western shores, where the ChiCom invasion was anticipated. But now ChiCom paratroops, who began falling like confetti on the ridges about the base of Mounts Taiwu and Shuhao, had attained complete surprise.
Sky Bow missiles fired from the Nationalist island’s more heavily defended northern and western shores did bring down a clutch of six high-flying ChiCom J-5 Fresco Interceptors. But the missile flight arc of the Sky Bows fired up at the heights of Shuhao and Taiwu mountains and the hilly spine in between could not execute the abrupt C turn it would need to hit the lower flying ChiCom interceptors and ground attack aircraft. They came in low over the South China Sea, bombing and strafing the southern shore’s two vital airstrips.
While the ChiCom paratroop transports continued to unload their men, mortars, and multichute, quick-assembly howitzers at precariously low altitudes, their low-drop zones pushed safety margins. Carrying at least 130 pounds of weapons and equipment, in addition to their own body weight, the paratroopers were jumping from the scores of transport planes at six hundred feet, in order to use the bulk of Taiwu and Shuhao mountains as protection from Nationalist ground fire.
All over the island billions of black beetles, known as chun, rose in panicked crescendo as the normally tranquil air, disturbed only in the recent past by loudspeaker propaganda from the Chinese mainland, was now resonant with the noise of gunfire — the chunk of 60mm and 82mm mortars, and the unrelenting thudding of howitzers laying down covering fire and fire for effect, from both ChiCom and ROC forces. The Nationalists, over 25,000, dug in along the entire length of Kinmen’s western and northern shores as ROC armor moved toward Mount Taiwu and adjacent high ground in the island’s mideast sector. Here, a forward battalion of Nanjing’s Armored Division, one of those in the twenty percent of the PLA’s First Class Training Units, now dropped eighteen triple-drogue-chuted mobile howitzers. Each gun was capable of firing flat or high trajectory rounds while on the move at 34 mph, and was also equipped with upgraded infrared night vision and a 7.62mm machine gun.
Initially, the eighteen mobile howitzers caused alarm at Kinmen Nationalist HQ, the ChiCom howitzers unleashing a deadly fire on the line of Nationalist bunkers and trenches at will. Then dots began appearing on Kinmen’s east coast radar screens. They were the ROC’s own fighters, American-made F-18s, screaming westward high above the Taiwan Strait, the 127-mile distance between Taiwan’s Ching Chuan Kang air force base on Taiwan’s central west coast and Kinmen closing fast, the estimated time to enemy contact three minutes.
A swarm of fifty ChiCom Nanchang fighter-bombers and sixty H-6s — ChiCom versions of Russia’s glazed-nosed Tupolev TU-16 medium bombers — were now pounding Kinmen’s defenses with six-hundred-pound cluster bombs, their aerial onslaught met with dozens of ROC surface-to-air missiles. From a distance on the big screens of McCain’s Tactical Flag Command Center, the contrails of rockets and planes, and bursts of one-in-four red tracer arcing gracefully through the mayhem, looked like a huge and colorful video game. But it was a deadly, no-holds-barred struggle over whether Communist China, with overwhelming if temporary air superiority, would take Kinmen, Taiwan’s first line of defense.
Then the ROC’s F-18s, engines screaming at Mach 1.2, joined battle, coming in from the sun at three o’clock low. They unleashed their air-to-air missiles with such precision and accuracy that the five ChiCom H-6s were hit and downed in the first twenty-two seconds of battle. It sent the entire ChiCom bomber swarms, 253 planes in all, retreating to the mainland’s coastal air space, which, even for the farthest ChiCom bomber and fighter escorts, was mere seconds away, and thick with SAM batteries that till now had remained silent for fear of hitting their own aircraft. Once the bulk of the returning Chinese bombers and escorts crossed the coast, however, the scores of ChiCom surface-to-air missiles opened up, the ROC’s F-18s in hot pursuit, popping orange “sucker” flares. Descending slowly, like fairy dust that belied their serious intent, the flares drew off the ChiComs’ heat-seeking missiles, whose infrared-seeking heads had mistaken the sucker flares’ intensive heat for that of the F-18s’ exhaust.
“They’re running!” announced a young ROC pilot.
“For now,” his wing commander replied. “But for how long?” The ROC air commander, a pilot of long experience, knew that what he was seeing was Mao’s famed hit-and-run guerrilla land tactics being ably applied to aerial combat. And he was aware, as he knew his ChiCom enemies must be, that the overriding problem for the Taiwanese fighters was that they couldn’t loiter as long as the ChiCom planes, which were much closer to their bases, only a few miles away on the Chinese mainland.