"Our airborne radar reports the Chinese flotilla will be able to detect us in the next few minutes," the Taiwanese admiral in command of the Lotung said to Benson.
"Power to the cable," Benson shouted.
Scaramelli looked through his binoculars across the water. Far in the distance he could just make out a blinking red light he had ordered attached to one of the nearly thirty metal barges that had been loaded with scrap iron and then magnetized at the docks in Kaohsiung. When that was completed, the barges had been towed into place in the Taiwan Strait and anchored. The thick copper cables that hung from the sides of the barges into the water were designed to act like lightning rods and attract the current from the cable. The electricity would increase the barges' magnetism and attract the molecules of the plane from the ionosphere.
At least that was the plan.
And then to the west, directly in the path of the Chinese flotilla, the night sky began to lighten and roil with a massive thunderstorm.
"Here comes the storm," Scaramelli shouted to Benson over the increasing noise. Benson watched through infrared binoculars as a cloud of fog grew on the surface of the Taiwan Strait several miles away. A stiff wind arose, forming whitecaps on the water and blowing the fog toward mainland China. A roiling wall of clouds began to form. The clouds began to emit light from deep inside, yellow and orange with peach and red in the center. The outer edges turned deep purple, then black as the cloud expanded at an alarming rate. From the top of the clouds random bolts of lightning streaked downward, then all at once they linked and formed a wall of electrical energy. A loud clap akin to a gigantic sonic boom spread in all directions from the center of the cloud. Then a hail of aircraft parts along with misshapen blobs of molten metal rained down from the skies. Parts of wings and propellers sliced through the air like a cleaver to a butcher's block. Suspended in the windstorm, they spun ever faster as the storm began to track west.
Benson managed to shield himself behind a deck gun before the boom reached the frigate and lost only his hat in the gust of wind that rocked the massive missile ship like a giant hand. The commander of the Taiwanese navy was not so lucky. Blown off his feet, he smashed his head against the deck. When the first blast abated he had to be carried to the infirmary with a mild concussion. A tornado was created in the center of the cloud. Unlike those naturally formed, which have a tendency to wander back and forth like a dog's wagging tail, this one remained centered. Less than a minute later the decks of the ships of the Taiwanese navy were covered in a rain of fish and other sea life. And still the storm grew stronger.
Minutes before, the Chinese fleet commander had stared from his command post aboard the largest destroyer in the Chinese navy as a freak storm began to form directly in front of the flotilla. Less than ten seconds after he first noticed the cloud, a fury of wind, rain, and lightning struck the fleet with an intensity he had never witnessed before. On board the Chinese fast-attack boat Fuzhou the situation was turning from bad to worse. Captain Ling Chow had watched as a cloud of fog enveloped his vessel. Seconds later the steel decks of his forty-foot boat were being pelted by hail the size of tangerines. He watched from the pilothouse as the two crewmen manning the front and rear gun emplacements began to dance as if they were trapped in a swarm of bees. Stupidly, the sailor in the front emplacement sought to remove his battered combat helmet. Chow watched as the man was knocked unconscious by a flurry of hail pounding his bare head. The crewman slumped over his gun, a trickle of blood seeping from his head.
Another crewman dashed to his aid but a moment later reversed himself and began to run toward the safety of the cockpit. He was halfway to the cockpit when a ten-foot-long plate of metal appeared seemingly from out of nowhere. Cutting the crewman in two at the waist, the metal imbedded itself in the gun emplacement, the man's upper torso skewered on the metal.
Three seconds later Chow watched as a violent gust of wind sucked the lower body of the crewman, still clad in pants and shoes, into the heavens. The wind continued to suck upward until it ripped the upper half of the torso from beneath the slab of metal and flung it against the window of the cockpit.
Chow screamed as the lifeless face pressed against the window was then flung, arms askew, off the ship.
The crewman in the rear emplacement fared better, as he had left his helmet, now dented, firmly attached. His mistake, however, was to look up into the sky. A large hailstone, moving with the velocity of a baseball tossed by a major-league pitcher, smashed him squarely in the nose. Blood spurted forth from the center of his face. A second hailstone hit him in his left eye and he raised his hand to cover the wound. He jammed his feet into the emplacement to avoid being sucked out into space. And then the tornado struck.
Chow ducked as the windows of the pilothouse were sucked outward. He jammed his leg under a table bolted to the floor and held on tight. The Fuzhou rocked on its end beam to the port side. Thousands of gallons of sea-water flooded across the decks, then raced down an open passage toward the lower decks. Chow glanced up just as the body of the forward gunner slammed into the wall of the pilothouse. The tornado lifted him into the air, dragging his unconscious body against a sharp steel edge on the corner of the pilothouse. Chow watched in horror as the man's chest opened up like a salmon under a filet knife.
And then the crewman, his entrails trailing outside his body, was sucked upward in the tunnel cloud and disappeared from view. Chow swiveled his head and glanced toward his helmsman. The helmsman's legs were being sucked out the opening where the port window had been only seconds before. Screaming at the top of his lungs for help he clutched the edge of the wheel in an attempt to keep his body from being sucked out the opening.
It was not to be.
The tip of the tornado shifted for a millisecond and he was dropped onto a large shard of broken glass that was still firmly attached to the window frame. His body was severed in half as neatly as if he had been placed under a guillotine.
Chow stared in horror as the tornado sucked the lower half of his torso into the air. In a cruel twist of fate the helmsman had managed to jam the knuckle of his left hand into a space between the wheel and the helm station. The upper half of his body remained in the pilothouse, a grisly reminder of the devastation aboard the Fuzhou. Chinese Fleet Commander Zang Pochan watched in horror from the pilothouse of the Hainan, the largest destroyer in the Chinese navy, as his crewmen on the deck of the destroyer were decimated. He glanced out the window as part of the wing of an airplane, the engine still attached, a twenty-year-old U.S. Air Force emblem still clearly visible, landed hard on his deck, shaking the pilothouse.
With horror he could see that dozens of communication antennae, ripped from their mountings by the storm, were being flung through the air. Like spears from a long-ago war, they skewered the men on the deck before the tornado lifted them into the heavens. Zang shouted to his radio operator to alert the other ships in his fleet to abort, but with no antennae to transmit the message it was all for naught.
And then the lightning hit.
It came not as random bolts but as a wall of electrical energy, surging from one end of the ship to the other, plunging the ship into darkness and blowing every fuse on board. The main engines continued to run but the pumps, lights, and all else electric ceased functioning.
And then the Hainan plowed into the Yantai.
At the beginning of the storm, Tsung Chan, captain of the Yantai, had ordered his helmsman to ring the engine room for full stop. They were sitting in the water when the Hainan appeared through the fog and struck them amidships. The lower holds of the Yantai were crammed to full capacity with artillery shells, land mines, and infantry ammunition. As the Yantai rolled over on her back, with timing that would be impossible to duplicate, several bolts of lightning struck the exposed ordnance and ignited a conflagration.