Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  One of the Taiwanese mercenaries was grazed in this fusillade as he rose up to fire at the army and his mate slapped a bandage hurriedly on his wound. Wong and Murray ordered the uninjured hired trooper to support the casualty in an escape run to the boats. They were mercenaries and since their skin was their living they complied with admirable alacrity. This left Murray and Wong alone. The pair continued to crouch, artfully keeping the wide axle hubs and dense rubber of the tire remnants between them and their opponent’s fire. Infrequently Wong or Murray would pop up like a whack-a-mole or lean down under the truck’s frame and throw a couple rounds down range to remind the Chinese army that TESS still had weapons and pluck.

  Eying their final henchmen and compatriots tight-roping over a ten inch wide gang plank to a boat deck in the distance, Murray yelled a witticism over to Wong.

  “This sucks!”

  “I know…” Wong shouted back. “I just hate getting shot at. It makes me break out in red spots!”

  “Hives?” Yelled Murray obligingly.

  “No! Bullet holes.” He completed the ancient joke.

  They set to arguing over which of them would go last. Murray made the case that Wong was higher ranking and therefore more valuable to TESS and that Murray should have the honor of being the one to remain until the end; Beau Geste-like. Wong on the other hand claimed that his very rank required him to remain with his ‘ship’ until all his men were clear… it was a critical leadership trait that duty and history required of him. 14.5 millimeter rounds chose that moment to remove the last of the truck’s glass and punch still more holes though the vehicle’s skin and the exchange of bravado between them. Simultaneously the pair of TESS leaders agreed to detent and tried to maintain their dignity as they skedaddled side by side. Wong won because Murray was so out of shape that he was gasping and sweating a river by the time they reached the boats.

  One boat had already departed at top speed and despite Murray’s tendency to wheeze loudly and groan they just made the remaining boat’s deck as darkness swept in like a curtain. The last junk cut her cables, shoved off and gunned their engines to get out of range from belated, but increasing accurate automatic weapons fire from shore towards the boat as more and more army soldiers pelted up past the wreck of TESS’ Alamo of trucks and fired their rifles at extreme range from the area of the other abandoned TESS vehicles. The Taiwanese mercenaries, carrying the chip of their father’s and grandfather’s Guomindang grudge on their shoulders plinked back with rifles to spoil their mainland cousin’s aim which worked pretty well as there was limited cover on the jetty so the soldiers tended to be hugging the rocks on the far side of the breakwater or hiding behind the TESS convoy remnants. Much hunkering ensued which spoiled whatever aim they had though there were few casualties on either side as the range was already extreme and widening.

  The army was not bone idle however. Once they realized their quarry was beyond their reach they called directory assistance and asked for the local coast guard flotilla. The coast guard station was some miles away, but by chance they had a heavier patrol boat which was in the area and it was dispatched by its headquarters to support the troops with something actually resembling professionalism.

  Since the time of Yi Sun Shin though coordination between military arms of land and sea has never been an easy business. The land and sea parts are often at cross purposes and speak quite different technical languages. The Chinese versions were no exception. The TESS Junks had been gone only ten minutes when the big boat arrived off shore of the OK corral. Technically the ground commander outranked the nautical one and began to issue preemptory and badly phrased commands while his insulted Coast Guard support withdrew further and further into a protective shell of feigned ignorance, inability and endless clarifying questions shouted over a bullhorn and the radio. The Coast Guard officer kept his boat inching away from shore for some time while this was going on. Finally the ground commander, a major, peremptorily ordered the coast guard boat alongside the jetty in no uncertain terms. The sailor reluctantly complied and the commander charged aboard with a half dozen of his men who proceeded to get hopelessly underfoot as infantry tends to do when aboard a ship. One of the soldiers even contrived to hit the ‘off’ switch on the radar unit with his elbow and the Coast Guard Lieutenant screamed insult after insult at the now cowed ground pounders who were in terra incognita with only planks under foot. The boat commander’s intensity drove the soldiers into tiny corners where they would be out of the way. Even the Major stood aside joining in the now pervasive sense of collective guilt among the troopers. The boat turned and rocketed straight northwest on the dubious assumption that the junks were most likely fleeing to mask themselves from any pursuit behind Xiaoping Mountain Island and Fushun Island to the Northeast and perhaps planning from there to turn due East for the East China Sea beyond Dazitou and the other barrier islands. After a couple minutes the radar finally heated up again and the skipper realized that in spite of all logic the junks had been instead driving due Southeast. This was precisely perpendicular to the shore. It defied logic, but he brought his boat about and applied some more of the power in her huge marine engines to pursue and catch up to the quarry’s lead.

  It developed that the Junks with their bluff bows were not really very fast at all and visible progress was being made in catching up to them as they blundered on in a straight line from the breakwater, apparently making for what the locals called the Huibie Ocean. Strategically it was a strange choice, but their arrow like course meant that out-thinking the Junk’s actions was unnecessary. The boat’s commander mentally assigned their odd behavior to panic. A matter of a few minutes chase would bring the coast guard vessel up with the junks and they would have no real place to get away since the Huibie Ocean, though the deepest water in the area was surrounded by land forms that would stop them cold on their current headings. They were essentially trapped and their capture was assured.

  The master and commander ordered his gun crew forward to ready their heavy bow gun with orders to engage once in range. He estimated that event would occur in perhaps four minutes. He gave some additional instructions to various crewmen and gleefully informed the now sheepish army troops, including their asshole of a Major of the junk’s imminent interception. He returned to look at his little radar screen and just as he did so he cried out in astonishment, an exact echo of his radar operator’s bleat.

  In the space between two sweeps of the radar’s turning the two dots of the junks electronic signature had been joined by a much larger radar return that was directly in front of their direction of travel. A submarine? The naval officer frowned. He knew that though an emergency blow by a sub could allow it to surface rather suddenly, that the post script to the initial act of shoving the sub to the surface was that they tended to slip back below the water’s surface for many seconds before popping up again. This radar signature had held its position once visible and not changed. It bothered the boat’s commander for that this image did not fit the profile of an emergency blow of ballast tanks. Still, an emergency blow seemed the likely conclusion since it had essentially materialized from nowhere into the radars “eye.” Something rising from the depths below seemed the only option to explain its abrupt appearance.

  Within another minute the three images ahead had merged on screen.

  The skipper watched with a puzzled expression as they hovered next to each other for two more full minutes. The junks were not fleeing at all anymore and were stationary. It could only mean that they were boarding the sub. Transferring their personnel. He knew his boat. They would reach the cluster of objects in a minute and a half and he was picking up a radiophone to warn his crew of that imminent arrival and to shoot as soon as they could see something to shoot at. His hand halted with the mike inches from his mouth. Suddenly all three images had disappeared together. One moment there was a blob of returns, then in the next they had simply… disappeared. He shouted in astonishmen
t again and kept shouting as he raced about frantically giving orders. He carefully guided the boat at maximum power to the coordinates of the last radar sighting. They were there in one minute ten seconds maximum. He swept the area with his powerful spot lights. They found little except some pieces of spars and the top of the mast from one of the junks floating on the low surf. Nothing else. A crash dive in a world war two era submarine could take a little as 30 seconds with a well-trained and experienced crew. Modern day submarines, depending on type would take from three to five minutes to reach periscope depth from the surface and there was no way they had enough time to accomplish off loading the junks and diving before his boat had come up. The radar pulse repetition rate on his radar was set at a constant rate of 50 cycles per second. That meant the radar unit sent out electromagnetic energy 50 times every second with a rest state to gather in the returned energy off the targets of around 19,900 microseconds. He knew of no submarine on earth that could dive between one single pulse of the radar and the next. It was a timeframe measured in tiny fractions of seconds. It was physically impossible. And where were the junks? Abandoned by a sub as she dove, they should still have been left to float on the surface. They were gone too! The coast guard boat had only found a few small pieces of them instead.

  Sailors are superstitious by nature and culture, but the commander prided himself on being a modern man. At least he had thought so until now. This was like nothing he has ever seen and it sent a thrill of superstitious dread through him from somewhere near his gonads up to the back of his head. Ship eating dragons lived! Monsters from the deep were real! The Kraken had come to life and swallowed two junks—appearing and disappearing as if by magic.

  General Fun looked over his reports of the attacks made by the Hú Militia for work units over several nights. Grudgingly he admired their coordination and the neat execution of their well thought out activities as they seized personnel and assaulted targets across China. Their efforts were aimed at striking a maximum of terror and sowing mountains of confusion throughout their opponent’s camp and they had certainly succeeded to a wide extent. But Fun was made of sterner stuff and knew they had overlooked one thing. They were playing with the big boys now. Communist movements everywhere had their roots in an ideology which had grown out of subversive actions and organizations designed to destabilize established orders, foster maximum chaos and set the conditions for military action to exploit confusion and bring communism into political power through revolution. When it came to mixing things up the communists and the CCP in particular had lived through whole decades of disorganization, disunity and civil unrest that they had caused themselves. Revolting against revolutionaries carried risks. The CCP had always come out on top in history despite huge setbacks that repeatedly threatened to take them out.

  In short, while Hú showed a certain native talent as an agent of entropy. Fun thought of him only as a gifted amateur. General Fun was the penultimate professional. The carrier of the communist torch at the revolutionary Olympics.

  It was a matter of vision. While Hú was chasing mere tactical objectives, Fun had been bidding his time, lining up national resources designed to win the strategic battle. Time for step one in that battle. The only step that mattered. The counterstroke.

  Every communist military organization tended to contain two chains of command. The first was the regular military structure of commanders and officers, but the second level worked directly for Fun. They were the political officers in every unit down to company level. In the bad old days of a hard core Marxist-Leninist state organizing principles no military unit had been allowed to act unless these representatives of the party had given their OK. In more recent times though the Chinese nation had realized that the world was leaving them behind economically and to pay for much of the expansion of the economy they had reduced their professional army from four million down to a million and a half men. With this reduction and motivated by the notion that ‘less is more’ the military overall had moved toward greater and greater military professionalism. The regular troops had begun to build a meritocracy instead of an old boy network. Their military leadership had shifted emphasis and embraced a military ethos rather than a political one. Redundant command structures had become themselves redundant in that kind of atmosphere. The secondary mirror of political officers arrayed opposite their line officer counterparts had found their numbers and functions atrophied steadily for decades. They were still there nominally to monitor, report on, record and ensure each regular officer and NCO’s ideological trustworthiness. In recent years though the reductionist curve had accelerated to devolve the political structure even further from its earlier Maoist roots so that the political teams in units in this day and age consisted of a single man only. More and more General Fun’s political officers had been turned more into teachers than action officers. In most units they could be found giving PowerPoint presentations on the superiority of Communist ideology to the troops while their ‘students’ nodded off in class and their commanders held the political officers in less and less esteem and fear. Fear was out of the question in the 21st century. Political officers were apparently irrelevant.

  Predictably, during the current crisis, in those Military districts that Hú controlled, his people had acted instantly to neutralize or liquidate these still politically loyal personnel. Virtually all were arrested and Fun had several reports that a large number had been shot outright.

  Fun smiled. What Hú and many of his Army leaders did not know was that the formal political officers were only the visible face of political reliability. After Tianamen square a decision had been made at the highest level. For every political officer you could see, Fun and his predecessors had for years been reinserting secondary and tertiary political personnel into the same units who were essentially undercover. The CCP had slowly developed a covert assurance of continued Communist control of armed troops. Though the known and visible political personnel were now gone in the face of firing squads, by Fun’s own estimates these covert agents had largely not been detected by Hú. Fun’s latest estimate told him that 96.2% were still in place, reporting as best they could through the static of chaos caused by the developing civil war. They were largely available for use. It had taken a while to organize properly in the vacuum of increasing entropy, but the planning was now done and they had their instructions.

  They would strike tonight in concert.

  Time for Hú’s wake up call.

  Within the United States of America the Joint Functional Component Command for Space (JFCC Space) is a component of US Strategic Command tasked to maintain freedom of access in outer space for the United States. In it is the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Inside the JSpOC Major Spruance scratched his on head and glanced at the clock.

  It was ten minutes until the 0800 staff meeting and he was still editing slides to be presented to the commander which made him a bit nervous.

  As the G2 his job was to somehow render a clear image of the space borne efforts of the entire planetary spread of nations who might pose a threat to the United State’s freedom of use and maneuver in the ultimate high ground above the atmosphere.

  Like many people in his line of work TESS had been a massive game changer. Spruance had taken to mentally dividing time in space operations into Pre-TESS and Post-TESS. The first change was that the pace of operations of TESS was ridiculously fast. What would have taken 10 to 15 years to get done in space had changed almost instantly to mean that a payload could be placed in space in a matter of mere weeks or months instead of waiting for NASA’s or other launch agencies to work a payload into a multiyear launch window using rocketry. It was also a decreasing curve. TESS had announced that their new ship the SS Tellus was advancing nicely through her space trials and would be coming on line for mission work very soon. That meant that their pace of operations would more than likely double and halve the time impacts furthe
r down to mere days and weeks. Spruance knew that this meant new and unprecedented pressure on existing space contractors who had once dawdled and tested satellites for years, accepting software and firmware changes at an almost leisurely engineering pace. Those contractors were now under constant pressure to update themselves on a space situation that was currently splayed out on an orbital landscape that was in danger of changing daily. The contractors suddenly were getting pressure to package things for launch now. Pre-TESS the engineers had enjoyed a decade to ‘get it right and safe’ and now found they had to design and build their payloads in a year or even less. It was driving them nuts and they were constantly bitching at his own bosses, perched up there on the top of the soapbox labeled ‘safety.’ TESS had undercut the safety box long ago. Nation-states had absorbed and treated space disasters like Challenger and Apollo 13 as traumas that must be avoided at all costs by implementing greater and greater safety protocols. The pirates over at TESS went up into the dangers of space with a laugh, a spit and a notarized copy of their last will and testament clutched in the hands of their families on Earth. Inside TESS risk and danger meant little next to results. They were going further and faster than anyone had before. TESS was a game changer.