The Chinese bomber pilots were not nearly as well-trained as their Western counterparts, and they flew even fewer hours than American crews even in an age of deep cutbacks in flying time, so their bombing accuracy was poor — less than 50 percent of their bombs hit their assigned targets. But the high-altitude nuclear airbursts had done most of the devastation already — four Taiwanese military bases destroyed or substantially damaged; one small, two medium, and one large city were ravaged. Most of the Taiwanese fighters that had launched to chase down the Chinese J-6 and J-7 fighters suddenly found themselves without a base to return home to; some did not have the fuel to return to alternate landing sites, and their pilots were forced to eject over uninhabited areas of the Taiwanese countryside as their fuel-starved planes flamed out.
Admiral Sun followed the H-6 strike package in his H-7 Gangfang bomber, arriving over his orbit point northwest of the Pescadores just as the second and third H-6 bombers started their attacks. Wearing his gold- lined goggles to avoid any flashblindness damage by the nuclear bursts on the horizon, Admiral Sun Ji Guoming surveyed the results of his sneak attack. He could see every nuclear explosion clearly: a bright ball of light like a mini-sun illuminated every cloud in the sky, lighting up the island of Formosa and making it appear like a huge photograph lying on the surface of the ocean. Every detail of the tall eastern mountains, every river valley, every aberration of the vast western coastal plains could be seen for a brief instant in spectacular, frightening relief before being swallowed up by the darkness again. Although not nearly as big as their nuclear cousins, the big non-nuclear high-explosive bomb attacks looked like large, bright red and yellow flashbulbs, followed by the glow of ground fires; and the cluster bomb attacks on Taichung and Tainan could be seen as a line of tiny pinpoint flashes of light that streaked across the darkness far below.
“Radar reports rebel fighters launching from Taipei, Admiral,” the copilot aboard Suns H-7 bomber reported. “One or two at a time, disorganized flights.”
“Probably escaping, not coming after us unless one wants to be a hero looking to try to ram one of our bombers in the darkness,” Sun commented. He never even considered that his aircraft might be in danger— with those nuclear explosions ripping into the arms and legs of the Nationalist dragon, the rebels seemed completely defeated already. “In any event, our bombers will escape. Where are the returning flights of rebel fighters heading?”
“North, towards Taipei,” the copilot responded.
“Excellent,” Sun said. The rebel air forces obviously didn’t feel like fighting after learning that several Chinese bombers had slipped through their fingers and that their homeland had just been ripped apart by nuclear and high-explosive bombs. Chiang Kai-shek International Airport and Sung Shan Air Base near Taipei were probably the only large air bases surviving west of the Chungyang Mountains.
They would make easy targets for follow-on strikes. The third wave of Sun’s attack on Taiwan should be launching now — M-9 mobile ballistic missile attacks from secret presurveyed launch sites in Jiangxi and Zhejiang Provinces. The M-9 missile had a range of about three hundred miles, and Sun had targeted at least six missiles on each of the surviving major civilian and military airfields in Taiwan. The missiles were not as accurate as bombers, but they did not need to be — the first two missiles targeted against all but the airfields around Taipei had nuclear warheads, again programmed for high-altitude airbursts so as to spread out the blast effects of the warheads and minimize radioactive fallout and residue at ground zero.
The volleys of missiles aimed at Chiang Kai-shek International, all non-nuclear, should ensure that the airport could not be used to launch military strikes against the mainland. Sun was very careful not to explode any nuclear weapons over Taipei. The Nationalist capital was still the capital of the province of T’aiwan, the twenty-third province of the People’s Republic of China, and it would not do to kill any loyal Communist Chinese. He would need the support of the people to complete his task of reuniting the island with its mainland motherland.
In the meantime, an armada of two hundred Q-5 Nanchang fighters, copies of the Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich-19 attack plane, would be arriving from Guangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhu, and Wuhan Air Bases to Fuzhou. At daybreak they would conduct non-nuclear mopping-up strikes against all the Taiwanese military bases, loaded with a long-range drop tank and two 2,000-pound bombs or cluster munitions. One by one, they would attack any major surviving targets.
Sun wanted more Xian H-6 bombers for these attacks, but he had been allotted only the H-6s used by the People’s Liberation Army Navy for this raid — the air force’s H-6s were still held in reserve, committed to long-range nuclear attacks against targets in Russia, India, and Vietnam. Perhaps after President Jiang and the Central Military Committee learned of his success over the rebel Nationalists, Sun thought, it might be possible to convince them to let him have the rest of the H-6s so he could continue the air offensive against Taiwan. With most of the rebel’s long-range air defense radar system down, the H-6 bombers would stand a better chance against the surviving Taiwanese air defenses.
Then, he thought happily, perhaps the Paramount Leader would allow him the honor of destroying China’s other regional enemies and adversaries. Defeat was unthinkable at this moment.-
The nuclear-armed M-9 ballistic missiles easily reached the military bases on the east side of the island, hitting Lotung, Hualien, and Taitung. Sun could see the bright flashes of light far on the horizon as the missiles hit their targets. The accuracy of the M-9 missile was poor, perhaps one- half to one mile miss distance after a three-hundred-mile flight — poor by most standards, but perfectly acceptable with nuclear warheads.
Sun never once thought about the devastation he was creating down there. The rebel Nationalists were bugs to be squashed, nothing more. Sun truly believed that the vast majority of citizens on the island of Formosa wanted to rejoin their long-lost friends and families on the mainland, and that the subversive Nationalist government, supported by the terrorist rebel military, was preventing reunification by declaring their so- called “independence,” as if that were possible or even thinkable. Although most would probably prefer the less intrusive, capitalist society that existed there now, Sun believed that they would accept a Communist government as long as all the Chinese people were reunited. Sun was killing only filthy rebels, not fellow Chinese. If it took a nuclear weapon to reunite his motherland, so be it.
Sun Ji Guoming did not delude himself — he knew that it was very unlikely that rocket or bombing raids alone would destroy even a substantial portion of the rebels’ military force. He knew that the rebels had perfected the art of building vast underground shelters and hiding huge numbers of troops, equipment, and supplies within the eastern mountains. Quemoy Dao had turned many of their 1950s- and 1960s-era underground shelters into tourist museums, so it was possible to see the quality construction of some of these complexes — they were certainly strong enough to withstand any kind of shelling or bombing, except perhaps for a direct groundburst hit with a nuclear weapon. Sun had no plans to use nuclear groundbursts in any attack. If they had any desire at all to occupy the land they took back from the Nationalists, it was not a good idea to make that ground radioactive.
Rumors had been flying for years about huge army bases underground, where two entire generations of citizens and soldiers had grown up and trained. Sun had even heard about caves cut into the rock big enough to hide a cruiser, or massive underwater caves turned into submarine pens where the only access in or out of the base was underwater, as in Sweden. He dismissed most of these rumors. Anything big enough to house a capital warship, several submarines, or more than a few hundred men had to be carefully engineered, and that took time, money, and vast amounts of equipment and manpower — and that meant security leaks and evidence. In all of Sun’s years in the People’s Liberation Army, with all the spies they employed all over Asia and the world, no exact proof had ever been produced of any legendary rebel underground military bases.