Fourth Crisis: The Battle for Taiwan (24 page)

Ronald Reagan
turned
attention to the two torpedoes now homing on her mighty wake.
 
At the supercarrier’s wide stern, a lattice
dispersed, spreading the wash from the ship’s four massive propellers, but this
lattice could not completely erase the mark left by such a large vessel.
 
The Chinese heavy torpedoes had a 15-knot
advantage over the American supercarrier and caught up quickly.
 
They closed to within 3,000 yards.
 
With the threat now inside the inner
defensive ring,
Ronald Reagan
’s
escorts changed plays.
 
Lake Champlain
sped up and maneuvered to
position herself between the enemy weapons and
Ronald Reagan
.

“Deploy the package,” Captain Ferlatto ordered.
 
Rushed to theater and installed on his ship,
an experimental wire net shot from a stern canister.
 
Once in the water, it fell back from
Lake Champlain
.
 
One end of the square net bobbed on floats,
while the rest unfurled beneath the surface and spread into a curtain array of
sensors and transducers.
 
The transducers
began to transmit ultra-low frequency waves that formed an outward-focused
beam.
 
The sea quivered, and dead fish
floated to the surface.
 
The sound, like
an amplified bass note, slammed the Chinese torpedoes, crippling their sonars
and sensitive critical electronics.
 
One
torpedo did a dive toward the bottom, while the other shut down and slowly sank
into the black.

“Thank you, DARPA,” Ferlatto announced appreciatively.
 
For the moment,
Ronald Reagan
was safe.
 
“Okay,
reel it back in.
 
And keep that thing out
of my props, understood?” Ferlatto ordered.
 
The watch commander rolled his eyes in dark consideration of the price for
fouling the screws: His eternal ass.

American sonar screens were now clear.
 
Much of
Decatur
remained afloat, and her injured and dead had since been transferred by
helicopter to
Ronald Reagan
.
 
The Poseidon reported they had to break off
the hunt for the offending submarine, and, with no available tankers, flew back
to Japan.
 
The Poseidon made a high-speed
pass over the Malaysian merchantman,
Bunga
Teratai Satu
.

Bunga Teratai Satu
’s
crew, not quite sure what had transpired, counted their blessings
nonetheless.
 
They breathed again and
chuckled nervously.
 
The midnight shift
came on and took the watch.
 
One of the
rattled crewmen jogged to his cabin and gulped from a hip flask full of
forbidden alcohol.

“
Secret operations are
essential in war; Upon them the army relies to make its every move
.”—Sun
Tzu

W
ith Richard
unavailable for lunch, and with no afternoon class this bright sunny day, Jade
rode her bicycle past the Widewater and along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal
that paralleled Washington, DC’s Potomac River.
 
She followed the path, passing the old locks and pedaling toward Great
Falls.
 
Picking up speed, she leaned
forward to streamline herself in the headwind.

Jade tried to outrun her conscience and raced against
stretched loyalties.
 
She pumped the
pedals until her legs burned.
 
Twisting
and turning through the strollers, tourists, and joggers, she found herself torn
between loving an American and her duty to country and her solemn oath.
 
She turned off the paved path where it crossed
the C&O canal, and where it met and skirted the Potomac.
 
The falling river roared, its sound drawing
her on.
 
Arriving at one of her favorite
thinking spots that overlooked Rocky Islands, she breathed deep and slow.
 
The mist from the whitewater hung in the air,
refreshing her sweaty face.
 
She rubbed
her aching calf, but then she stopped when a powerful primeval sense tingled: she
was being watched.
 
She looked around.

A man leaned against a rock, sipping coffee and staring back
through dark sunglasses.
 
He had a neatly
trimmed beard with a lick of grey in his brown hair.
 
The man’s lips moved and the turn of his head
revealed an earpiece.
 
She was under
surveillance.
 
She jumped to her bike and
took off.

Jade moved at an adrenaline-powered clip, certain somehow
that the man was right behind her, keeping up without his legs even
moving.
 
She reached where the path
squeezed between the C&O and Olmsted Island.
 
She brushed the sharp bark of trees lining the
path, and relied on cursing people to get out of the way.
 
She skidded her bike to a stop at Lock 24, the
point where the Potomac fell over jagged, steep rocks and flowed through the
narrow Mather Gorge.
 
Out of breath
again, Jade felt her heart pounding, amid the angst of panic.
 
She picked up her bicycle, and lugged it down
a dirt side path that wound between big rocks and crossed small streams.
 
She jumped a low rope barrier, hid her bike,
and then tucked herself into a rocky fold.
 
She closed her eyes and imagined the strong, warm safety of Richard’s
arms.

◊◊◊◊

Richard worked through lunch, though he accomplished
little.
 
Instead of attacking the leaning
pile of paperwork that occupied his desk, he pondered fatherhood.
 
He shook his head like a stunned dog and tried
to focus on the work.
 
He had to propose
to Jade…and soon.
 
Ring; wedding;
honeymoon; crib; baby clothes; breast pump; college.
 
Richard considered starting to play the
lottery.
 
He decided he needed food if he
were going to be able to concentrate, so he took out a bag of deep-fried squid
chips.

Although everyone else turned their noses up at their sight,
Richard loved the chips’ briny sweetness and planned to keep buying them from
Japantown by the gross.
 
Crunching away,
Richard felt the surge of squid power.
 
He looked to the pile of papers and popped a can of soda.
 
On top, he encountered the manila envelope
sent over by his liaison at the CIA.
 
He
straightened the towering pile to prevent its imminent collapse, flicked squidy
salt off his fingers, and grabbed the envelope.
 
On it, he saw his name, the word ‘State,’ and a question mark scribbled
in pen by a low level analyst at Langley.
 
Richard dumped the envelope’s contents.

Several photographs fanned out on his desk, apparently taken
on the ground in Taipei, with a few shot outside Songshan Airport.
 
One photo showed several Chinese officers as
they walked from the terminal to a parked infantry fighting vehicle.
 
Another showed a PLA general atop a light
vehicle.

The camera’s shutter had caught the general’s camo-striped
face.
 
Screaming orders at its moment of
capture, the greasy face showed lips stretched over yellowed teeth, the face’s eyes
hidden by sunglasses.
 
The camo and
glasses made the Chinese officer tough to identify, so Richard took a
magnifying glass from his top drawer and studied the image.
 
The bands of camouflage paint covered a
raised cheek scar, and deep lines on the forehead.
 
Richard focused on the open mouth, the
missing tooth, and the order of gold caps within.
 
He was sure: This was General Zhen Zhu.
 
He picked up the phone and called the CIA.

“That batch you sent over—photo number three-four-two
Charlie,” Richard said.
 
“That is General
Zhen Zhu, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, supreme commander
of the People’s Liberation Army.”
 
Richard grinned, proud that he had managed to accomplish
what computers and so-called experts across the river had failed to do.
 
“Yep, that’s the old bird, himself.”

“Could we, you know, take him out?” the voice on the line
asked hesitantly.
 
“Legally?”

Richard thought for a moment, and then answered.

“Hey, Zhen’s a soldier,” Richard snorted.
 
“If he’s in-country—on the battlefield—then he’s
fair game.”

Richard sat back and slurped his cold soda, grinning.

◊◊◊◊

The littoral combat ship
Coronado
sat off the beaches of northeastern Taiwan.
 
She had sneaked in, close to the beach, on fast, quiet, water jets.
 
The facets of her trimaran hull deflected enemy
radar sweeping the approaches.
 
Her
transom gate had been lowered, and two rigid-hull inflatables slid down the
launch ramp and into the calm water.
 
A
muffled outboard motor propelled each inflatable.
 
Both bristled with the assault rifles of
hunched marines.
 
Dressed in jungle
warfare fatigues and a brimmed hat, United States Marine Corps Captain Shane
Whidby rode the bow of the lead boat as they motored toward a beach cove.

Captain Whidby steadied himself with a hand wrapped in the bowline.
 
His other hand clutched a 1911A1 .45 caliber
automatic handgun, and, across his back, he carried a black cylinder.
 
The boat approached the combers that lapped
the beach, swerved through the troughs, and then turned into the gentle break
to stop.
 
Whidby jumped into the water.

Unconsciously making sure he had not dropped the .45, Whidby
squeezed its sharp-checkered grip.
 
The
large watertight cylinder strung across his back weighed him down, so he took in
some saltwater as he struggled to stand.
 
His throat burned.
 
Spitting water
and trying not to cough, Whidby dug in his boots and stood on the slippery
rolling rocks.
 
He felt for his canteen
and ammo pouch—
Still there
—and watched
the inflatables head back to
Coronado
.
 
Sand crunched between his gritted teeth.
 
If we
didn’t roll like this, we’d just be army
, Whidby thought with a crooked
smile.
 
He emerged from the water and
stepped onto embattled Taiwan.

Captain Whidby knelt and waited at the seaweed and
garbage-delineated high water mark.
 
An
animal sound drew his attention to the shadowy trees at the crest of the
beach.
 
Keeping low, his .45 pointed that
way, he moved toward the noise.
 
Several
soldiers appeared, carrying assault rifles, their helmets disguised with twigs
and leaves.
 
Whidby and the soldiers
exchanged passwords.
 
The Nighthawks,
members of Taiwan’s Special Services Company, had clearly been expecting Whidby.
 
Together, they all melted back into the
forest.

◊◊◊◊

Secretary Pierce sat in the bunker deep beneath the State
Department’s Truman Building.
 
She
shivered from the air conditioning and adjusted her jacket to keep the breeze off
the back of her neck.
 
Richard sat beside
her, his face buried in a report.
 
She
looked to the video screen that occupied most of one wall.
 
The screen flickered, and live images of the
national security advisor, the deputy director of intelligence, and the
Pentagon liaison, an army general replaced the screensaver State Department
seal.

The deputy director of intelligence opened the meeting with
a briefing on growing resistance in Taiwan, momentum regained on the ground,
and the infiltration of what he termed ‘assets.’
 
The general then cleared his throat and began
to speak.

“Afternoon,” he offered, with a thin smile.
 
Pierce nodded to the camera on the
table.
 
“Okay.
 
Based on State’s recommendations, we avoided
the Chinese base on Sri Lanka.
 
Instead,
a B-1B out of Diego Garcia used its HPM ALCMs to take out the Chinese radar and
relay facility on Myanmar’s Coco Islands.”
 
Seeing a puzzled look on the secretary’s face, the general explained
that the bomber used air-launched cruise missiles to deliver high-power
microwave warheads that disabled electronics and fried antennas at the Chinese
base.
 
“Besides the action in the Bay of
Bengal,” he added, “the attack sub USS
Dallas
fired HPM Tomahawks at, and severely damaged, the Chinese electronics and
signals intelligence facility at Changyi.”
 
The general leaned forward,
 
his
face filling the frame.
 
“The Chinese
military is going deaf,” he explained, “So, now we’re going to poke them in the
eyes.”
 
The weary general stuck his
finger into the camera lens making a cartoonish sound.

◊◊◊◊

A private yacht lay at anchor off Oahu’s Iroquois Point.
 
Onboard, a man noted traffic in and out of Hickham
Air Force Base.
 
When he heard the
thunderous rumble of another aircraft, he raised a pair of binoculars.
 
In the dark of early morning, he saw the
flashing navigation lights, and then the form of the jumbo air freighter.
 
Displaying a humped megatop, four gaping
turbofans, and ORION CARGO along its side and golden stars on its tail, the airplane
seemed like so many others he had seen. He made a note of it, recording it as
another civilian cargo aircraft, likely contracted by the US Military Airlift
Command to move materiel across the Pacific.
 
What he did not see, however, was the distinctive black nose, or the
U.S. AIR FORCE still outlined beneath the jumbo’s fresh paintjob.
 
This freighter’s strengthened fuselage was
not full of bottled water or spare jet engines.
 
Instead, it contained a built-in multi-megawatt chemical laser.

Dubbed ‘Gorgon’ by the 417
^th
Flight Test Squadron
at Edwards Air Force Base, the experimental YAL-1 airborne laser had been
rushed out of mothballs, and it now climbed out over Hawaiian waters.
 
In disguise and squawking a commercial code,
and flying an Osaka-bound flight plan, the Gorgon steadily gained altitude and
turned west over Mamala Bay.
 
It settled in
at 41,000 feet, leaving four vapor trails in the sky.

High above the cruising airplane, among flickering
constellations, there was a manmade glitter.
 
The Gorgon’s nose ball turret swiveled up.
 
A mirrored aperture and infrared sensor were then
unsheathed, scanning a patch of the heavens.
 
At an inclination of 63.4 degrees, the technician in the Gorgon’s
forward battle management cabin found what he sought: China’s Hummingbird ocean
surveillance satellite.
 
He locked the
nose turret on target and initiated auto track.
 
The thermal returns of three satellites showed on his station screen.

Orbiting in a close cluster formation collectively known as
Hummingbird, the largest of the Chinese satellites flew on solar-paneled wings,
focusing its cameras and antennas on the Philippine Sea
 
It watched and reported in real-time on the
Ronald Reagan
carrier strike group.
 
The other two satellites in formation were
small cubes that carried ocean surveillance radar.

The American airman locked the Gorgon airborne laser’s
tracking and targeting system on the largest of the Chinese satellites, and
then passed control to the turret stabilizer and the airplane’s autopilot.
 
The fire control operator pressed a red
button on her console to initiate the laser’s discharge sequence.

At the rear of the Gorgon’s fuselage, tank modules the size
of minivans mixed chlorine gas and hydrogen peroxide to create oxygen, and a
fine mist of iodine stripped photons that bounced between mirrors in an optical
resonator chamber.
 
The photons were then
squeezed and formed into a beam that entered the optical bench, where mirrors
compensated for atmospheric conditions, movement of the airplane and
vibration.
 
The beam was then expanded
and bounced to the nose turret where final adjustments compressed and focused
the beam.
 
The beam, invisible to the
pilots in the upper flight deck, instantly bridged the distance between the
Gorgon’s nose and the Chinese satellite.