Billy Ray was close enough now and John tapped Reese. “Enough showboating,” John said sternly. “Time to move.”
A few well-placed shots could often have a devastating effect on enemy morale, especially when they weren’t sure where the fire was coming from or couldn’t match its surgical accuracy.
Reese clambered up and grabbed his rifle as both men sprinted for the Cessna. Thankfully, a handful of buildings blocked their escape, but if the Chinese began flanking them, they might be caught out in the open.
Billy Ray had the Cessna pointed into the wind, away from the incoming Chinese troops. The pilot leaned over and opened the passenger door for John.
“You like to cut it close, don’t you?”
“Did you miss us?” John asked, climbing aboard.
“I thought I was gonna have to hop on that train,” Billy Ray said, checking to make sure both men were in. “Where’s Jerry?”
John shook his head.
Billy Ray buried the throttle. “That’s a real shame,” he said. “Didn’t know him more than a couple hours, but already I could tell he was a good guy.” Buildings sped by as they picked up speed and lifted off, careful to keep low and away from the anti-aircraft fire. Below them, the AA crews on the buildings were leaving their positions and running for the train as it slowly began pulling away.
The plane banked left, toward Oneida, toward home, and John glanced back just in time to see the balloon disappear into the clouds.
“So, Colonel,” Reese said, that unlit cigarette back between his teeth. “What are the odds this crazy plan of yours is gonna work?”
John gritted his teeth. Rising at a thousand feet per minute, the balloon would reach the optimum altitude in a little over two and a half hours. But it wasn’t a question of whether he wanted the plan to work. The fate of the country depended on it.
Chapter 8
Not long after John and the others fled from Oak Ridge, the Supreme Commander of Chinese and North Korean forces, General Wei Liang, was attending his mid-afternoon briefing on the war’s progress.
Tall and broad-faced, General Liang struck an imposing figure. It didn’t matter that he preferred to keep his military hat on to hide his bald head, a condition far less common in Asia than it was in the Western world. Nor did it matter that the few scraps of hair he had left had long ago gone from a dusty grey to pearl white.
His current field headquarters was a humble series of buildings at Berry Field Air National Guard Base near Nashville. General Liang had come from an equally humble background. The son of a poor carpenter, and one of four siblings, he’d started out on the bottom rung. Now, at the ripe old age of sixty-four, he’d spent a lifetime clawing his way through the PLA ranks, waging far more battles against his political rivals than actual military engagements.
His ethnic Han background had helped open a few doors, no doubt. But being able to trace his roots back to the third-century-B.C. Han dynasty had only greased the wheels for his entry into the Xinyang Infantry School. A major-general before he was fifty, he’d led the 20th Army to enforce martial law in Beijing to suppress the Tiananmen Square protests.
His best years still lay ahead of him. When what remained of the United States was at last conquered, he would be installed as military governor, not unlike Dwight D. Eisenhower after Germany’s defeat following World War II.
Although his reverence for Western military leaders seemed odd to some in the Communist Party, General Liang was quick to point out that the PLA itself was largely modeled after the United States’ armed forces. Perhaps the most striking area where they differed was the initiative and flexibility demonstrated by their American counterparts. Chinese soldiers were taught to follow orders without question. Western troops were given a greater range of freedom and input when it came to planning and implementing operations. The word ‘why’ was simply not in a Chinese or North Korean soldier’s vocabulary. As a result, American battlefield commanders from generals down to squad leaders were able to assess an ever-changing environment and make decisions on the fly.
The recent stubborn resistance they’d encountered at a small town north of Knoxville called Oneida was a case in point. Units that had nearly been destroyed a few days prior had managed to reform and fend off multiple attacks. The EMP blast, launched secretly from a Chinese sub along the western US shoreline months before, might have crippled the enemy’s command and control infrastructure along with their ability to coordinate troops, but many of the pockets of resistance they’d encountered on their push eastward had proved harder to defeat than expected.
Setbacks aside, China was closing in on its final objectives and that was exactly what Colonel Li Keqiang, head of military intelligence, was telling them in his briefing. The scale of their achievement still surprised General Liang. Like Japan in December of 1941, they’d managed to launch a sneak attack American military planners had been too arrogant to believe was even possible. But the EMP, spectacular as it was, had only been the first part of a well-coordinated attack. With the simultaneous destruction of US military satellites and missile silos as well as Washington itself, the Eastern Alliance had taken the bold step Japan had failed to more than seventy years before.
To the Western nations, an invasion of Taiwan would have been seen as a likely precursor to conflict with America and that was precisely why they’d decided to save that for after the sleeping giant was put to bed once and for all.
But Colonel Li Keqiang’s cheerful briefing didn’t address a far more serious concern—the current naval war being waged in the Pacific. Chinese codebreakers knew that when word of the EMP finally reached American fleets sailing around the world, some had sought shelter in allied ports in order to re-establish communication with home and determine the best strategic course of action. Others that were caught out in the open as they rushed back had been hit with nuclear weapons and destroyed.
By some unfortunate stroke of luck, the US 3rd and 7th Fleets happened to be in Sydney and Melbourne harbors respectively at the time and escaped the worst of it. According to Chinese intelligence reports, US liaisons at Pine Gap had quickly organized high-level talks with the governments of Australia and New Zealand. Both countries had thrown in, offering support and combat vessels in a bid to take back the Pacific. Thankfully for the Eastern Alliance, Russian counter-submarine warfare had meant only three nuclear missiles had been fired from the sea, destroying St Petersburg, Nanjing and Shanghai. That the capitals of all three Eastern Alliance nations had been spared was a testament to Russia’s ability to intercept the US boomers in time. Thus the need to knock the United States out of the war as soon as possible. Once that was accomplished, the handful of her allies who’d rushed to her side would inevitably withdraw from the conflict.
General Liang’s attention returned to his current surroundings. Generators around Berry Field provided power and lights for laptops and sensitive equipment brought over from China following the EMP strike. The screen of his laptop moved to the final PowerPoint slide as Colonel Li Keqiang ended his presentation with a quote.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
“That’s Sun Tzu,” Colonel Guo Fenghui whispered in Liang’s ear. He was a thin man with boundless energy who was the most competent of Liang’s four aides.
“Keqiang sure likes to be poetic, doesn’t he?” The general’s mind was still on the struggle to maintain control of the Pacific. “We must begin increasing production in our slave labor camps. If our supply lines over the Pacific are severed, we could be in trouble. I’ve got a Cuban cigar in the desk drawer of my office I’m saving for the day we announce our victory and I intend to smoke it.”