The Ops Center was normally a very quiet place, or so Drescher had told Cooke. It wasn’t upholding the reputation and she was starting to wonder whether Drescher hadn’t undersold his unit to her. She assumed that there must have been some semblance of order or control in the room, but if so she couldn’t see it, and yet the senior duty officer seemed to have perfect knowledge of how information was flowing around the room. The man was in his element, riding herd on the mob before him, and having far too much fun, given the circumstances.
The rest of the staff wasn’t enjoying it so much. The APLAA analyst — a tall, very thin girl with a pixie haircut and angry face — was fighting down an urge to hyperventilate as she read a SIGINT report, whether from fear or pure joy that the long-awaited war with Taiwan had arrived, Cooke couldn’t tell. She gave the young woman a reassuring squeeze on her shoulder and a confident nod, which calmed the analyst down and seemed to give her a second wind. Cooke looked over the other analysts, who were all on telephones parceling out the few details they could scrounge up, all of which were surely erroneous. The first reports of any crisis were always wrong.
“You’re smiling,” Cooke noted quietly to Drescher.
“I love my job.” He pushed all the papers on his desk to the side, stacked them, and put them on the file cabinet behind. He was going to need a clean space to work. The director of national intelligence and the president would be calling Cooke, demanding answers, and she could not tell them to be patient. Politicians considered any information, even if they knew it was wrong, better than none. They would have to answer to the press and they could not, they would not, allow themselves to look ignorant. The press had to fill its airtime with something, and if the networks lacked hard facts, they would bring in paid experts to theorize and repeat the same uninformed conjectures until they finally did have real facts. Taipei had no shortage of political think-tank pundits and lobbyists on the payroll willing to spout off, and leaders on the Hill would be screaming alternately for blood and restraint, depending on their politics. But even the networks would tire of the rhetoric and would start yelling at the White House press secretary for something real. The White House would then scream at Cooke to give the president something, anything, that he could repeat to the press. She would tell them that they could not vouch for the reliability of the data, the president would demand the data anyway, and the press secretary would begin to feed false information to the reporters in a bid to buy time. The press secretary would later go off the record and blame the errors on CIA or some other intelligence organ. But to stand in front of the press and admit they knew nothing would make them look incompetent, and that was unacceptable.
“Got it!” one of the analysts yelled. The front monitor wall went black and then live with a satellite thermal video feed.
“What are we looking at?” Drescher yelled back.
“Shangyi Airport,” the analyst said.
Cooke grimaced as she stared at the front wall, stunned into silence, then looked back at Jonathan. His face showed no emotion at all.
The Kinmen Air Defense Command Center was a pyre, and the heat outlines of men dead and wounded speckled the tarmac. The closer ones to the burning building were harder to make out as the hot air rising from the fire superheated the concrete and asphalt on which the bodies lay. The corpses that close were roasting like steak in a cast iron skillet. Other men ran over and around the prone bodies further from the fire. Which soldiers were Taiwanese and which were Chinese, Cooke couldn’t tell, and she decided it was foolish to think she should know.
The rest of Kinmen’s defenders fell back to the bunkers, taking with them as many civilians as were able to reach the garrisons before the doors were closed and sealed.
The remaining command officers inside Tai-Wu Mountain sealed the complex’s heavy outer doors and spent the remainder of the day listening to a dwindling array of reports from their brothers outside. They pleaded for reinforcements and screamed for air support until PLA Navy vessels took up final blockade positions and began jamming the signal.
The Taiwanese command authorities calmly informed the Kinmen Defense Command before losing contact that its soldiers would be rescued eventually. It was a lie, though the senior Taiwanese military officers didn’t know it yet. There would be no reinforcements and no air support. The corrupt president in Taipei who had so eagerly stoked Beijing’s animosity for his own ends was terrified that he would need to save his military forces in case China’s coup de main of Kinmen was just the first of many.
Lieutenant Samuel Roselli checked his course and azimuth for the third time in five minutes and scanned the airspace ahead. It was a clear morning, 0620, visibility a hundred miles in all directions. The lack of cloud cover at least would let Roselli see the MIG patrols coming, but it left his plane nowhere in the sky to hide, and the old EP-3E Aries II would not be outrunning any Chinese fighters. The plane was an old crow, a four-engine turboprop built for surveillance, not combat. It had no offensive weapons, couldn’t fly higher than 27,000 feet or come anywhere close to Mach 1 even in a steep dive. For all practical purposes, the EP-3 couldn’t fight and it couldn’t run. If the MIGs got truly unfriendly, the best he could do was throw the Aries into a dive toward the deck, hold an altitude so low the plane would get a wash from ocean spray, and pray that the waves would confuse an attacker’s radar.
Roselli didn’t begrudge the Chinese their frustration at watching US spy planes run up and down their coast on a regular basis. He expected the politicians back in Washington would scream if PLA spy planes were making runs near Naval Base San Diego or any of the Navy’s other facilities scattered along the West Coast. One day, Roselli figured, they would be. The US wouldn’t be the world’s lone superpower forever.
“They’re going crazy back there. Radio ground traffic all up and down the coast, like an order of magnitude more than they’ve ever seen. It sounds like every PLA armor unit for a thousand miles is on the move. I miss anything up here?” Lieutenant Julie Ford crawled back into the right seat, which brightened Roselli’s mood considerably. He’d flown with copilots far less competent and pretty. The PLAAF had buzzed them several times and she’d held herself together nicely. It was harder for Roselli to imagine a faster way to earn another pilot’s trust.
“AWACS says the PLAAF is doing up here what PLA armor is doing down there. Combat patrols everywhere,” Roselli said. An Air Force Boeing E-3C Sentry was airborne two hundred miles to the northeast, flying a little higher than twenty-nine thousand feet. The AWACS rotodome was far more powerful than the EP-3’s own radar and could see every plane the Chinese had in the air for several thousand miles in all directions. Roselli’s EP-3 had links to the AWACS data feed and he didn’t like the picture. “I’ve never seen them keep this many birds in the air.”