“If you drill down in the exact right place, you hit one of these lakes, and the compressed, boiling water flashes off into steam. If you let it, it will blast three thousand feet into the air, in a clean, clear white plume of steam. The Nevada Desert is the big steam-well area in the USA. Some of ’em light half of San Diego and occasionally Las Vegas.”
He paused to let everyone absorb what he was saying. “Right,” he added. “Got that? Now look at the picture. See that building? Well, here’s how it got there. The Chinese geologists located the steam lake and capped the drill hole. Then they dug deep and poured a solid concrete foundation, probably fifty yards by fifty yards by fifty yards deep.
“Clean down the middle of this, they sank their main shaft into the vast cavern that contains the lake. They capped it with a massive valve at the top, right on the concrete, and then they built their power-generating station all around it, right on that big concrete cube. They installed the electric turbines to run on steam power, and when they completed their electronic grid for the whole dockyard, they opened the valve.
“The steam surged straight up the shaft in the middle of the fifty-yard cube, into the system, and began to rotate the turbines. The clever little Chinks thus had virtually free, endless electric power for years to come. It sounds complicated, but it’s not really. It’s just a kinda upside-down dam with the force coming upward from the earth, rather than downward from released water. One thing about electric turbines: The only thing you have to do is turn ’em.”
“And our guys have somehow to get in there and blow it up?” said the General.
“I think that would do very nicely,” replied the Admiral. “Because that would shut down the base indefinitely.”
“Is John Bergstrom on side?” asked the CNO.
“He is. Right now they’re consulting their main demolition guys, and I have to get this stuff to Coronado right away. Then two of the main SEAL explosives officers will leave immediately for Diego Garcia to brief Commander Hunter and his team.”
“Do we have any handle on how well this place is guarded?”
“Fort Meade’s been watching it carefully for some weeks now. And there is some security. But not overwhelming. Haing Gyi is in such a strange, inaccessible place. It’s literally surrounded by Burma, whom the Chinese have been financing. It looks to me as if they have not even considered the possibility of an attack on the base.
“But of course it is a military installation. And there will be patrol boats, and guard patrols on the jetties. But we have not found any sign of patrols in the interior of the base. Just some activity close to the visiting ships. The trick is to get in there nice and quiet. Then cause absolute havoc, and get out while everyone’s trying to find out what’s going on. It nearly always works. Surprise. You can’t beat surprise.”
“Meanwhile, where’s the SEAL team?”
“They’re all in Diego Garcia, waiting. The refinery team are all there too, waiting to fly back to Coronado. They made it back from Hormuz in one of the carriers. The Shark’s in there too, waiting to embark the SEALs for the coast of Burma.”
All four men took a break from the charts to watch the CNN evening news, and the lead item was more or less what Admiral Morgan had expected. The Chinese were fighting fiercely for the port of Keelung, and according to the news had swiftly secured the actual dockyard area with a team of Special Forces, which had overpowered the mainly civilian security guards. Most of this information had leaked out through merchant ships’ radios via Hong Kong.
But the rest of the picture was very blurred. The Chinese had breached the wire fences and now controlled the container docking areas, but the surrounding town was still very much Taiwanese. The local garrison was well equipped and was backed up by continuing air strikes from a remote strip in Hsinchu County. The Chinese assault force thus found itself badly bogged down, sustaining heavy casualties out on the Yehliu Road, four miles from the town.
The Taiwanese had somehow managed to conserve eight of their most modern ground-attack aircraft. Armed with cluster bombs and cannon, the Taiwanese pilots came in groups of four, from the south, constantly harassing the great mass of Chinese troops, tracked vehicles and artillery moving ponderously toward Keelung.
CNN had found access to satellite photographs that showed a mass of fire out along the western approaches to the seaport. And, in some ways, the Chinese were in a very difficult position. They had a Special Force in control of the port area, but it could not hold out forever, and right now the advancing army from Chinsan was at a standstill. The Taiwanese had found the range with a battery of cruise missiles, which were currently smashing up the entire road system from the west. They had 40 M-48X medium tanks on that side of the town, arranged defensively, and the Chinese commanders knew beyond doubt they were in a serious fight for this seaport, and they were not winning it.
The problem was they had to win it. Otherwise this local war might drag on for weeks. The Chinese needed heavy reinforcements. They needed possibly 300,000 men on the island of Taiwan in order to secure it. And they could not land that many without capturing a major container port and bringing in major transport ships that could land men in the thousands. They needed the jetties, they needed the docking facilities. They needed Keelung.
And out on the Yehliu Road things were going from bad to worse. The Chinese army was having constant problems with its surface-to-air missiles, and after 16 hours of sustained attack from Taiwan’s brave fighter pilots they had hit only one, and had themselves sustained hundreds of casualties. It was impossible to evacuate them all back to the beachhead, and their hospital capacity on the long sands was negligible. The fact was, China had to take Keelung, not just to provide a proper inbound port for her massed armies, but to give her a proper mechanized base for supplies of both food and ammunition, treatment of the wounded and communications. Right now they had no base on the island of Taiwan.
Admiral Morgan stared at the screen, trying to read between the lines. He was a military officer attempting to picture the scene in his mind. As were General Scannell and Admiral Dixon.
And it was the CNO who spoke first. “They don’t get ahold of that goddamned seaport in the next two days, they could find themselves in serious trouble,” he muttered.
“Think they might switch the attack altogether, maybe go south to Kaohsiung?” asked Bob MacPherson. “That’s as big as Keelung.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so,” replied Admiral Dixon. “According to our information, the bulk of the Taiwanese Army is trapped in the south, can’t get back north. But that army is probably in pretty good shape, mainly because they’re kinda stranded, with nothing to fight. By the look of this, the Chinese are determined to win the battle in the north, and right now they’re in some trouble.”
“They are that,” interjected Arnold Morgan. “They got a foothold in the container port, and another in the museum, which is what this war is at least partially about. But they have to consolidate, and that does not seem to be happening.”
“You know what their real problem is?” said General Scannell thoughtfully. “They are bound and determined not to knock down Taipei. And you take that option away from an invading army, you cut its balls right off. You render them unable to use the ultimate force. If they rolled up their sleeves and began a bombardment of the capital city, flattening major buildings, destroying the downtown area, Taiwan would surrender inside of an hour. It’s not like the London blitz, or Berlin. It’s different. More like a civil war.
“And, faced with imminent death, or normal life under an ultimately benevolent ruler on the mainland, there’s only one answer for Taiwan. And until China gets prepared to slam Taipei, she’s gonna be fighting a half-assed conflict, against a very proud enemy. And that’s gonna cost them a lot of guys.”