At the same time as their brethren were landing their hovercraft at Kuningtou, a second company of PLA Special Operations Forces rode their own air-cushioned landing craft through the surf of Liaoluo Bay onto solid ground near Shangyi township and unloaded their gear by moonlight. Their mission was to cut off the three major roads that ran through the island’s narrow central neck, effectively splitting the island into halves that could not reinforce each other. A third company came ashore on the northwestern coast near the Mashan Observation Station. They all carried light explosives and small arms, nothing larger than a 7.62 mm machine gun. The fifth column forces the Chinese had placed on Kinmen years before had the supplies needed to cripple any targets larger than individual men, and PLA infantry would be standing on this beach by noon with far heavier arms. The soldiers shouldered their weapons, slung their light packs, and dispersed across the islands to their waypoints.
“Sir?” The APLAA analyst didn’t take her eyes off her monitor. Drescher read the woman’s face, bit off the first snarky remark that passed through his head, and made his way to the woman’s desk.
“What?” he asked.
The live feed on APLAA’s monitor was thermal, shades of reds, yellows, and grays over a black field, and Drescher needed a few seconds to realize he was looking at a beach at night. He’d never been an imagery analyst, but he could figure that much. “This is Kinmen, east coast,” APLAA told him, and then she pointed at a pair of objects sitting on the sand just past the water’s edge. “I’m not an imagery analyst, but I’m pretty sure those are Jingsah Two — class hovercraft. You can tell by the double fans on the aft ends. Engines are still warm.”
“Taiwanese?” Drescher asked.
“I don’t think so. The only people who own Jingsahs in the neighborhood are PLA. Probably the First Group Army, First Amphibious Mechanized Division staging out of Hangzhou. I zoomed out and went looking around the rest of the coastline. I found this.” She worked her mouse around on the desk and pulled up several still images. Drescher checked the time codes: the imagery was less than a half hour old. It was clear that the hovercrafts had come onto the beach at a frightening rate of speed and stopped hard enough that anyone inside must have been strapped in to keep from getting thrown around. The final photo showed the hovercrafts had dropped doors by the bows and the bright silhouettes of men were running for the trees. Drescher couldn’t see the weapons, but he was sure they were carrying carbines or rifles, given how they held their hands. What kind and caliber they might be, Drescher couldn’t tell, but he didn’t need that particular bit of information to make his next decision.
Cooke set the phone back on the handset. “That was the Ops Center,” she told Jon. “It looks like the Chinese are moving on Kinmen. I have to go.” She stood, hesitated, then turned back. “Want to come?”
“Wouldn’t miss this,” he said, rising.
The first civilian targets were infrastructure. Power, telephone, and Internet lines were cut and radio transmitters were felled by satchel charges. With the Tashan Power Plant already down, every building on the island that lacked its own generator was dark by 0400, though most of the sleeping populace didn’t know it. The few civilians who were awake and realized that the island was dark had no way to tell anyone who mattered.
The first military targets were people. The Taiwanese soldiers garrisoned on Kinmen had kept a high state of readiness for years, but all men must sleep. Sentries were killed with silenced rifles at long distance, shortly after which the commanding officer of the Kinmen Defense Command and his wife were shot in their bed. Other Taiwanese senior officers followed.
The Kinmen Defense Command’s three divisions on the larger island were decapitated in ten minutes. The assassinations left eleven dead, including three civilians.
“Assume those were PLA Special Forces,” Cooke said. “What’s on their target list?” The Ops Center had fallen quiet when the CIA director had walked in.
“The usual, I think,” Drescher said. “Power lines, communications, maybe small bridges. Assassinations of key personnel if Taiwanese security isn’t up to snuff.”
“What’s the population of Kinmen?” Jonathan asked.
“Eighty thousand, give or take a few thousand,” the APLAA analyst replied. She quietly began to type on her keyboard, double-checking to make sure she hadn’t just led Cooke astray.
“Then Special Forces can’t take that island,” Jonathan noted. “If they want to occupy Kinmen, they’ll have to bring in regular forces, and that means they need a beachhead or an airport, maybe both if they’re feeling ambitious.”
“Do you have anyone watching the airport?” Cooke asked Drescher.
Drescher just looked around the room. A half-dozen people began pounding keyboards and the room started buzzing with low conversation. “Yep,” he said.
The Shangyi Airport was the next target. The massive fireball that had been the Air Defense Command Center surged five hundred feet toward the stars and was visible on the mainland. The primary air defense system guarding the airport followed. The Hawk and Patriot 2 missile batteries purchased from the United States at considerable expense were never used.
The SOF soldiers, joined with their fifth column supporters bearing heavy machine guns, overran the landing strip. They established overlapping fields of fire and killed anyone, soldier or civilian, who entered them. They moved through the buildings and terminals, eliminating security forces and seizing grounded fighter aircraft and weapons stores as they went. It was here that the PLA took its first casualties. A Taiwanese sergeant advanced toward the enemy, took cover behind a concrete Jersey wall at a small construction site, and used his sidearm to kill two PLA commandos running toward the main terminal. The cement barrier gave him excellent protection against small arms fire, and he managed to hold back the enemy for almost five minutes until they flanked him. When the commandos breached the front door, they met their first organized resistance of the morning — Taiwanese soldiers finally armed with weapons heavier than pistols. They held the buildings for almost an hour.
With Kinmen’s air defenses suppressed, the first of thirty IL-76 PLA transports filled with reinforcements lifted off in sequence from a runway at Xiamen. The total flight time was less than ten minutes. The transport landed, the pilots lowered the rear access ramp, and almost two hundred PLA soldiers erupted from the back. The plane was stationary for less than one minute before closing the ramp and taxiing off to clear the approach for the next plane and begin its own run back to the mainland. Every IL-76 would make ten runs by dusk. Together they moved a total of four infantry divisions and their associated equipment by nightfall.
The Liaoluo Pier and its two hundred soldiers followed. The PLA used the same tactics there as at the airport. The same results were achieved, though the casualties on both sides were marginally higher. Liaoluo had no landing strip, so PLA Navy amphibious transports and helicopters were used to bring the reinforcements ashore. Small numbers of Taiwanese troops managed to get to the beach with their own heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and even a pair of mortars. The first amphibious assault craft that landed on the beach suffered a direct hit from a mortar crew that got lucky, jamming the landing ramp closed and trapping its cargo inside. Dozens of landing craft followed and the Taiwanese troops held their defensive positions for almost an hour until they saw the Yuting II landing ship, the first of seven, approaching the shore. Each carried two hundred fifty men and ten amphibious tanks, marking the arrival of the PLA’s armored cavalry. The Taiwanese struck back with Javelin antitank weapons and turned the first three tanks into flaming pyres fed by diesel gasoline and the bodies of the tanker crews, but they had no chance to win without air support—where was the air support? The only combat planes overhead were Su-30 fighters escorting the monstrous IL-76s. The island’s defenders cheered when a vapor trail raced up to one of the Chinese transports and tore it from the sky in a raucous flash. The IL-76 went down, the entire airframe tumbling through the surf before settling in water barely deep enough to drown the crew and troops trapped inside. PLA helicopters began low runs under the transports, strafing covered ground to kill or flush out anything alive under the greenery.