The American shouted to those in the SUV. The vehicle stopped. Doors opened. Men with rifles stepped outside.
“Destroy it,” said Lu.
Lying on the snow beside him, with pines on either side of them, Wang lifted a magnetic-pulse grenade-launcher. The targeting information was on the visor of Wang’s helmet, a crosshairs appearing at whatever he pointed his grenade-launcher at.
There was a whoosh, and something dark flew. It hit the SUV and exploded. The vehicle made harsh metallic sounds, with shouts added from the men trying to climb out.
“Excellent!” shouted Lu. He swiveled around and pointed at two slope-climbing White Tigers. Then he pointed down at the flipped SUV.
Two white-camouflaged Commandos ran down the slope. They shot American survivors.
Lu was already watching north along the road for more vehicles. There were crackling sounds in the woods.
“What was that?” asked Wang.
“Militiamen are firing at us,” said a Commando. The words came over Lu’s helmet headphones.
“Give me your position,” said Lu.
“Nine-five-A,” the Commando said.
Lu checked his grid map. “Come with me,” he told Wang. “Chin has found enemy combatants.”
Lu ran toward Chin, his assault rifle ready. It was a QBZ-23. These had special cartridges. Ignoring the Geneva Convention, they had dum-dum bullets. A tiny piece of mercury was in a cavity at the front of each bullet. When the lead of the bullet struck an object, the mercury thrust forward, exploding outward and making the bullet like a fragmentation device. Dum-dum bullets made horrible, intimidating wounds.
“Down, First Rank!”
Lu heard the words in his helmet. He hit the snow and used his chin to switch his helmet sighting to infrared. Several manlike shapes hid among nearby pines. He counted them. Five American Militiamen fired into the darkness.
“Wait,” Lu whispered to the others, using his microphone to whisper into their helmets.
The Americans stopped firing and began moving single-file. An American spoke on a cell phone. No doubt, they were reporting the grenade-fire and were now checking to see what had happened.
“They have no tactical sense,” said Wang.
“They are stupid Americans,” Lu agreed. He clicked a switch on his assault rifle, going to full auto. “Ready?” he said into his microphone.
The affirmatives told him what he needed to know.
“Fire,” said Lu.
From three directions, bullpup assault rifles opened up. The five Americans went down. None of them returned fire.
“Truly they are fools,” said Wang.
“Surprised fools,” Lu agreed. “Now go, check them.”
Wang leaped up and hurried there. Moments later, he returned to report they were dead.
“We must complete our mission,” said Lu. “Come. It is time to eliminate the observation posts.”
Two hundred and twenty-six miles from Anchorage was the town of Homer. The Great American Highway System stopped here at the base of a narrow spit that jutted four miles into Kachemak Bay. There were chunks of coal along the beaches. The lumps had washed up into the bay from nearby slopes where the coal seams were exposed. In the late 1800s, Homer had first been a gold mining town and then a coal-mining headquarters for the region. Now the small town was a mixture of rundown tourist shops, a few fisheries and old repair yards. It used to boast a thriving community of artists, sculptors, actors and writers, but that had passed during the Sovereign Debt Depression.
Because of special construction ten years ago, Homer possessed one of the few good beaches on which to land an invasion force of naval infantry. Therefore, the C-in-C of Alaska, General Sims, had rushed south an Airborne battalion and a National Guard battalion. He’d also sent several companies of Militia with them. Above the beach, combat engineers with armored bulldozers feverishly created shelters for M2 Bradleys. The infantry dug holes for heavy machine guns and ATGMs. Behind them were SAM emplacements and Blowdart missile teams. Several miles back rose artillery tubes.
“Hit them before they get ashore,” General Sims had told the Airborne general in charge of Homer.
“What if they hit us first?” the general asked.
“Disperse your troops as you see fit,” said Sims. “Make a layered defense and make sure you dig in.”
The Airborne general had done just that. He had a little less than fifteen hundred soldiers of varying quality to halt a crack Chinese invasion force. But he was determined to make the Chinese pay for whatever they hoped to achieve.
The Chinese Fleet moved into position as over five hundred aircraft and helicopters took up station in the air. The landing area was five kilometers wide by four kilometers deep. Three primary control ships marked the area. The carriers remained well out of this zone, staying fifty kilometers off the coast. Large ships carrying the landing craft entered the invasion zone. It took ninety-five minutes for them to launch the landing craft.
Cruisers and destroyers began to pound the beach with their missiles and cannons, raining a hail of computer-directed munitions, guided by GPS satellites and drones. As this occurred, the amphibious boats lined up three-and-half kilometers from shore.
Now bombers, fighter-bombers and assault helicopters attacked the two American battalions defending the beach and the slopes beyond. Some Wyvern and Blowdart missiles roared out of their launchers, but it proved hard for the National Guard operators to burn through Chinese jamming. Unfortunately, the radar signals brought Hell down onto them, guiding air-to-surface missiles with unerring accuracy. That opened the defenders to a rain of terror. Bombs, napalm and guided missiles murdered the Americans in their hastily built bunkers and foxholes.
Some soldiers fled. Many fired back. That’s when the Chinese helicopters dropped into attack mode. They looked like armored insects, with stubby little wings with missiles attached. The armored choppers were ugly things that could spew death better than any old-time Apache helicopter. They hung in the air, launching missiles, destroying the remaining Bradleys and Humvees. At that point, they roared forward as their 25mm chainguns hosed the remaining Americans brave enough to fire heavy weapons up at them.
As attack-choppers hunted for anything moving, Chinese infantry-carrying helicopters flew over the beach and the town. They stayed higher up and looked heavy and deadly. None landed on the beach. None landed in Homer. The big choppers flew past the old town and soon disappeared over the mountains. They would spill their cargoes farther inland, cordoning off the amphibious-assault landing zone.
The chief control officer out at sea now ordered the first amphibious wave. A swarm of the landing boats, all carefully lined up, steamed for the coal-littered shore.
The Snapping Turtle amphibious boats were the armored personnel carriers of the assault. Each displaced thirteen tons and was eleven meters long. It had a three-man crew and carried twenty-five grim-faced naval infantry ready to charge ashore. The main assault was coming.
Sergeant Byers of the Alaskan National Guard had several FGM-148 Javelins. He hunkered in his foxhole, hidden under an anti-radar tarpaulin. Wide-eyed, with his hands on the foxhole’s dirt, he surveyed the wreckage around him.
There were overturned and burning Humvees and M2 Bradleys. One flipped Bradley had crushed a soldier, a lone hand sticking out of the wreckage. Men and body-parts were strewn here and there. One headless corpse still clutched his grenade launcher. The heavy ordnance from the ships offshore, air-to-ground missiles from the helicopters, and napalm from the bombers had smashed the defense to smithereens.
Byers had large welder’s hands—they were dry and had cracks and seams in them like a man twice his age. He was one of the few survivors of the murderous and multi-layered bombardment. There had been two others with him in the foxhole, one of them the ammo bearer of their two-man Javelin team. They had fled…and died in the shockwave concussions of five-hundred pound bombs. Byers stared out of his foxhole. The stink of napalm, the pork-like stench of burnt humans and the sting of explosives in his nostrils was a nauseating smell, one of bitter defeat.