They took off overland at 0620, swung out south of the island and made a long right-hand loop over the strait, coming in from out of the west, 50 miles off the Taiwan coast at 600 knots, wavetop height, in a formation of three, and then two, dead astern. The 8,000-ton Sovremenny destroyer was silhouetted against the rose-colored eastern sky, and her ops room acquired at 0628. The missile director’s fingers flew over the keyboard, sending up four SA-N-7 Gadfly weapons into the launchers.
But the CO of the Sovremenny was devoid of real-time battle experience, and he spoke swiftly to his accompanying frigate, which had also picked up the incoming Taiwanese fighter-bombers. They conferred briefly, and the destroyer captain ordered his ship to make a hard turn to port in order to reduce his radar echo signature to the incoming bombers. In a grotesque, elementary error he offered them the knife edge of his narrow bow, instead of the broad beam of his ship.
Temporarily the radar control operator lost the F-16s altogether when they ducked down below the radar, but at 27 miles they “popped up” again, and the Sovremenny instantly acquired, the operator calling, his voice rising:
“…Track one-zero-four-eight…incoming six hundred knots…bearing two-seven-zero…range twenty-five…”
Higher now above the waves, the Taiwanese pilots heard the Sovremenny’s radar locking on, squealing on their radar warning receivers, but they pressed on grimly toward the Sovremenny. Streaking in over the water, making 10 miles a minute, a mile every six seconds, the three leaders aimed their aircraft straight at the huge Chinese warship.
They spotted it eight miles out and lined themselves up only just in time. Then they unleashed all six of their bombs in a dead line at the bow of the ship, the one non-variant, the one computer calulation that could not significantly change.
The machines were fighting the engagement, but it was men who were directing it. The Chinese missile director, in the same split second, launched the Gadflies, which blasted into the air even as the bombs flashed across the waves propelled by the colossal speed of the aircraft.
The F-16s tried to bank away, but the one on the left took the missile head-on and blew up in a fireball. The center bomber was also hit right behind the wing and exploded as it made its turn, both pilots dying instantly.
The third and fourth missiles both missed, and now the bombs were screaming in, bouncing like flat pebbles hurled across the water. The first one smacked into the waves and leaped high over the destroyer’s bow. Had it been the beam, it might have cleared the ship and gone right by, but it was not the beam. It was the bow, and the bomb slammed off the water, shrieked over the foredeck and smashed straight through the bridge windows and down deep into the hull before it exploded.
The next bomb came in a fraction of a second later, again clearing the bow in a high arc and down through the middle of the superstructure, wrecking the ops room, the communications room and every missile-control system on board. The third bomb cannoned into the water, 30 yards off the bow, and slammed into the hull, just aft, crashed through the plates on an upward trajectory and removed a large slice of the foredeck of the ship.
But it was bomb four that did the real damage, albeit entirely accidentally. This one, dropped from beneath the wing of the escaping F-16 out on the right, crashed into a rising wave 100 yards in front of the Sovremenny, deflected left, and rose high, 150 feet into the air. It screamed down into the aft area behind the main superstructure, its descent so steep it slammed straight through the deck, into the engine room, and detonated with a shattering blast, close enough to the keel to blow the bottom out of the ship.
The Sovremenny, listing sharply to port, capsized within three minutes, and, 10 minutes later, sank with all hands to the bottom of the strait.
The two Taiwanese backup bombers, running in four miles astern, were not acquired by the stricken Sovremenny, and they raced past the already burning warship and banked hard left, straight to the frigate that was supposed to be riding shotgun for the bigger ship, but had made no move to fire her missiles.
The ops room of the frigate, distracted by the carnage on the destroyer, finally launched her shorter-range missiles. But it was too late. One malfunctioned, and the other blasted off way after the F-16s had launched their four weapons and turned away.
Nonetheless the CO was well trained, and he offered the incoming bombs the beam of his ship, as indeed the destroyer should have done. The first one flew harmlessly overhead; the second one flew almost harmlessly but smashed the mast and radar equipment as it came through. The third one came in low, crashed through the hull and went straight out the other side, demolishing almost the entire central deck area.
The fourth bomb detonated in the water before it reached the ship, and miraculously no one was killed, though two sailors were wounded, mostly by bomb splinters. Equally miraculously, the frigate was still floating; crippled, largely useless, but still floating. Generally speaking, Admiral Feng-Shiang considered it a very good hour’s work by the Taiwan Navy fliers, since it was not yet time for breakfast. But one of the downed pilots was his nephew, age only 20, and it was 15 minutes before he could bring himself to face his senior commanders.
Admiral Zhang was furious. The sheer numbers of the bombs that had hit his Russian-built ship meant that plainly there had been a monumental mistake. And Zhang Yushu had been in the Navy sufficiently long to believe the most common mistake by Naval commanders in all of modern warfare: the realization that any bomb, hurled forward at low level by an aircraft making over 600 knots, hardly drops at all. It is flung forward with enormous force, and when it finally catches a wave, it slows right down, then ricochets upward, maybe 80 feet, and onward. Still on line, but high.
In Zhang’s view, to stay alive in the path of this ship killer, you should offer your beam, which will afford a fair chance of the lethal bouncing bomb whizzing over the top, since the deck is only about 50 feet wide. Offer your bow, especially on a ship as large as the Sovremenny, and you present a target the entire length of the ship, 500 feet from bow to stern, 10 times more surface area than its width: a 1,000 percent greater chance of being hit and sunk.
Admiral Zhang knew the overriding temptation to turn bow-on, presenting a target so narrow it must be safer. But he remained convinced of his theory, since the incoming bomb’s line trajectory is pinpoint accurate to about three inches. Zhang’s Law on Bombing said, the only issue is the length of the target, not the width.
And now his commanding officer had paid for his error not only with his life, but also with the lives of his ship’s company. Not to mention the $500 million ship itself.
“What a complete and utter…,” ranted the Admiral, employing a Chinese colloquialism normally heard on the lower decks of his ships, rather than in the offices of the military’s highest command in Beijing.
He simply could not believe the price he was paying for the rebel island of Taiwan. He could not believe the manpower, the death rate, the number of lost ships, the near-destruction of dozens of his aircraft. And now the great destroyer.
Zhang Yushu was going to end this war. And he was going to end it fast. If this goes on, the damned U.S. Navy will get here, and then there’ll be all hell to pay. I cannot allow this to go on. We have to move, and move big.
Meanwhile, the airborne troops were piling out of the transporters high above the drop zone, three miles northwest of Tainan airport, and the Taiwanese Army was awaiting them on the ground, raking the landing fields with a steel wall of ordnance. All attacking armies, down the centuries, have sustained far greater losses than the defensive forces. But this was getting right out of hand. It took a succession of air strikes, sustained for more than two hours, finally to clear the Taiwanese Army out of the area.
Wind speed for the airborne landings was around 15 knots, and there were heavy Chinese casualties because wounded men were being blown off course from the central area. The commander on the ground had set up his “hospital section” way upwind, and several troops became involved i
n bringing the wounded in for emergency treatment. Eventually they would be transported on for evacuation, to the airport, which was of course China’s immediate objective.
The opening assault force was late reaching the airport. It was broad daylight now, and due to a total failure of communications—as usual, Taiwan’s weakest link—the Chinese, by some miracle, achieved an element of surprise. They stormed the perimeter fence and swarmed onto the runways, capturing entire sections of the complex.
They moved 2,000 troops into the roads surrounding the airport, securing the area. They dug in and established their portable low-level air-defense weapons, principally the QW-1 surface-to-air missile. They blasted their way into the control tower and occupied it. They also secured the fuel farm, and commandeered a vast supply of gasoline and jet aviation fuel. They seized every airport vehicle and sent a task force back to the drop zone to evacuate the wounded paratroopers.
By midday Tainan Airport was in Chinese hands, their first major airhead on the island. Within a half hour, massive troop reinforcements and equipment began to fly in. Almost two complete divisions were on the ground by 1400, and they were accompanied by 30 attack helicopters, checked, refueled and armed, ready for the assault, first on Tainan, and then on to the great Taiwanese port of Kaohsiung.
By this time, a division of Marines was attempting to land on the beaches at Luerhmen, and scores of landing craft, protected by warships from China’s East Sea Fleet, were driving forward into the shallows, only to be met by a strong, well-disciplined force of Taiwanese militia.
Again the Chinese commanders on the landing beach had little option but to fight, and the two forces met on the main road at Tucheng. The early advantage went to the home troops, and they mowed down the invaders, firing at will from rural positions more in tune with guerrilla warfare than a formal confrontation of twenty-first-century armies.
With hundreds more troops pouring onto the beaches, the Chinese began to crash forward in a major breakout early in the afternoon. They left more than 500 dead on the field, but the remnants of the Taiwanese militia, bombarded now by Chinese mortars and howitzers, were forced to retreat, and the newly landed Marines kept moving up, marching on toward the airport to join the massed divisions of the Army, which would surely now capture the southern part of the island.
Meanwhile, back in Beijing, Admiral Zhang Yushu stared in dismay at the reports coming in from the front. He could see there had been a long delay in the attack on the airport; he could read the reports of more heavy casualties, and what seemed like carnage both in the drop zone and on the Luerhmen beaches. He weighed all this against the crushing loss of the Sovremenny. And, with fury in his heart, he ordered a total abandonment of the new beachhead at Tainan and instructed his commanders to maximize the airhead at Tainan airport. He also demanded to know the precise position around the city of Taipei.
And from here, things almost went into slow motion. Again, on the outskirts of Tainan, the Taiwanese fought heroically. China’s huge army was stopped dead, just as it had been on the outskirts of Keelung. And again there was bitter fighting, block by block, street by street, as houses, shops and industrial buildings were systematically cleared. But there was a huge price to pay, both in manpower and a colossal expenditure of ammunition.
Simultaneously, in the north, the Chinese Army had reached the outskirts of Taipei, and they too ran into a fight that would drain their limited resources. Casualties were appalling. The Chinese lost more than 1,000 men in the first two hours.
The Chinese commander on the ground was in satellite contact with Beijing, and Admiral Zhang himself decided that if he had to knock down Taipei in order to subdue the island, then so be it. He ordered his senior battle commanders to take drastic measures, whatever it took to reduce the level of casualties. As things stood, the invading Chinese would need to capture and control the National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei, and certainly the Chengkung University Hospital in Tainan.
And so China began to send in an armada of Z-9W Dauphin attack helicopters, heavily armed with antitank missiles. These 140-knot monsters cruise at 15,000 feet, and with the airhead established at Tainan Airport, and the main airport outside Taipei now under Chinese control, they were free to clatter over the strait, land and refuel and await deployment.
That happened late in the afternoon. The Dauphins took off and swooped into the western approaches to Taipei. They came in low over the Tamsiu River, through sporadic antiaircraft fire, and slammed four missiles straight through the granite outer wall of the Presidential Building on the corner of the Paoching Road
. They hit the Armed Forces Cultural Center, almost blew apart the Tower Record Building and for good measure banged a missile into the great Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. That killed eight people but failed to put a dent in the giant white statue of the departed father of the Taiwanese nation.
This was the first attack on the city, and members of Taiwan’s ruling party were petrified, because from where they stood among the crushed masonry and collapsing ceilings in the Presidential Building, it seemed as if China had reluctantly decided to knock down the entire capital.
And things seemed even worse far to the south in Tainan, where again, the Chinese Navy’s Dauphin choppers came in hard and sudden, firing their big missiles at will. They slammed the biggest religious temple in east Asia, the Shengmu, flattened the police station, blew up the Department of Motor Vehicles. Knocked down an outside wall of the biggest department store in the city.
And right behind this apparently indiscriminate air attack, the Chinese sent in their hard-trained Marine and airborne forces. In both cities, they moved forward tactically, behind the air attack. The remainder of the Taiwanese forces began to melt away, some throwing down their weapons. Civilians fled the central areas by the thousands, women and children picking their way through the rubble, accompanied by local soldiers who had discarded their uniform jackets.
The Chinese Army kept coming, but there was a subtle change taking place. The massed soldiers and Marines of Admiral Zhang’s military had no stomach for killing civilians, especially Chinese civilians, which the Taiwanese still plainly were. And the commanders on the ground knew it. The Army marched on to the entrance to the Presidential Building near the Peace Park, and blew open the locked main doors with three hand grenades. The guards fled, and six minutes later the President of Taiwan, in company with eight of his senior ministers, sued for peace.
They came out with their hands high, and were greeted with immense respect by their conquerors. The leaders of both sides went formally to the high cabinet room, and the national televison station was summoned to hear their government command the Army, Navy and Air Force of Taiwan to lay down their arms and surrender.
Communication lines were immediately opened up to Beijing, and Admiral Zhang, with his senior commanders, announced they would land at Chiang Kai-shek Airport at 1030 the following morning, to agree to the terms of surrender.
Thus, shortly before 6 P.M. on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 5, 2007, the independent Republic of China, known internationally as Taiwan, returned to the rule of the “other China,” the Peoples’ Republic, the communist successors to Chairman Mao Zedong. It was the ultimate horror, the endless dread of the peace-loving, profit-worshiping populace of the defiant little island across the strait. And thanks to the guile of the smiling Admiral Zhang Yushu, Taiwan’s mighty friends in Washington had been powerless to raise a finger to save them.
Which left Admiral Morgan in his dressing gown, sitting in the book-lined study in Kathy’s house in Maryland at 6 A.M., watching the news, sipping black coffee, with buckshot, in a mood that hovered somewhere between disbelief and rank poison.
“Just so long as they don’t think for one moment they’re going to get away with this,” he growled. “They got the island. Needless to say they got the museum, which was why they went to war in the first place. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about any of it, short of going to
war ourselves. But there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat, and we’re gonna make those little bastards regret the day they decided to fuck around with Uncle Sam.”
“Sorry, darling, lay that on me again, will you?” Kathy O’Brien had slipped into the study bearing orange juice and hot croissants with preserves.
The Admiral’s eyes were still glued to the screen, but he was hungry, having been there, on and off, all night. He said nothing but reached out absentmindedly for one of the croissants, and he let out a yell, it was so hot.
“Jesus Christ!” he cried, adopting one of his favorite mock-wounded expressions. “What the hell is that? A pastry grenade?”
Kathy was wearing a dark green silk robe, and she laughed as ever at the speed with which Arnold Morgan could coin original material.
He turned toward her, smiling in appreciation of the woman he loved. “I shouldn’t think this burn’s worse than second degree,” he said pompously, shaking both his head and his right hand. “I shall require ice, cold water, towels and the home number of my lawyer. You did keep your insurance premiums up? I do hope so.”
The Shark Mutiny (2001) Page 35
