Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  Bantry gave in. Not as someone deflated by failure, but as a professional strong enough to snap-to and change course when required. “OK, Joe, I’ll go along with you on this. Just as long as you get the Aussies to push the facilities’ footprints and capabilities to me. I’ll send the convoys to the bare bones sites, along with as many traffic techs and movements people as I can spare. But in each and every case the Aussies will have to set up local support, engineers, heavy equipment and general duty personnel to help break down the loads, sort out the facilities in terms of deficiencies, required maintenance, structural issues and security overlays - and handle the PA suppression too. If I can assume all of that, then, OK, I’ll get the trucks rolling.”

  Blakely appreciated the cooperation and returned the familiarity. “Thanks, Ken. You’ll have it. So how soon can you get the first convoys out the door?”

  “How about a week?”

  “Sorry, that’s not good enough,” Major Blakely pressed, suddenly back into hard-ass mode, “The Aussies were expecting to see convoys rolling right off the ships and right through town. I want to see some advance parties out the door tomorrow night, with the larger convoys to follow within 72 hours. Can you accomplish that, or do we have to take this up with Colonel Millar?”

  Bantry sighed at the thought of the ass-kicking that he would get if he had to interrupt Colonel Millar from his meetings with RAA’s 1st Division, their Training Command, in Brisbane.

  “No, there’s no need to bother Colonel Millar. I really should have gotten to this point on my own. And no,” he continued, his back up at Blakely’s nagging. “I’m not going to get into some pissing contest with you. I’ll give the orders tonight, but there’s going to be some problems caused by the way things have piled up. If we do it your way, and push things up the road in haste, there’s bound to be a lot of stuff that goes to the wrong place. Deliberate planning will be out the window. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but far better to have it dispersed and screwed up than all piled up here and screwed up! So great, get on with it. I’ll be at my desk with the Aussie’s 1st Brigade by 0600 hours, to help coordinate. Just give me one of your junior officers to help with liaison and load-planning. Have him report to me by 0700 hours, OK?”

  “Sure. I’ll send you Lion.”

  “Great. I know that kid. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

  Three days later, after some challenging days getting the advance parties to their dispersal sites, the backlog of sea cans and trucks began to disappear from Darwin and Tindal. It did not take Major Blakely and Lieutenant Lion very long to become intimately familiar with the ‘bare base’ facilities at such strange sounding places like: “Weipa, Exmouth, and Derby”.

  Lacking sufficient guidance on the USPACOM contingency material, they had to rely on their own judgment. So they had fallen into a habit of sending first-line command-and-control related supplies to the facilities in Bachelor and Katherine, which were considered far enough south of Darwin, yet accessible from the few road lines of communication to constitute fairly accessible contingency stores. The facilities dispersed in the remote communities of Northern Territory had been loaned to the MAGTFA HQ Battalion by the Australians until more centralized, secure facilities could be constructed for the storage of the war-fighting stores. Similarly, the second and third-line items were being stockpiled in more distant, similarly non-descript warehouses in the remote communities farther along the 1500 kilometers from Darwin to Alice Springs.

  For the more sensitive equipment, such as Information Management material and certain types of ammunition, from depleted uranium 0.50 caliber rounds to vast quantities of C4 and other Explosives Ordinance Disposal resources which required climate controlled and high-security storage facilities, Alice Springs was seen as the most strategic destination, not only because it was located virtually in the center of the Australian continent, but also because there was a great deal of infrastructure already there and under US control.

  The American-operated facility at Pine Gap, some eighteen kilometers from Alice Springs, was ostensibly a Satellite Tracking Station, but that was only part of it. The facility was actually a multi-agency, multi-purpose installation, hosting a surprisingly robust Central Intelligence Agency presence with a variety of communications eavesdropping and analysis capabilities comprising the core of the South Asian intelligence gathering operation for CIA Headquarters, Langley Virginia.

  The facility was built around an ECHELON system of Cold War origins. ECHELON was part of the SIGINT efforts of the “Five Eyes” signatory nations to the UKUSA Security Agreement: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States of America. Capable of intercepting land-lines, satellite transmission, computer networks, internet traffic, microwave and other forms of information transmission, the ECHELON system has been operating with impunity since the Congressional Oversight Committee and House Committee on Information Security were shut down in the later years of the Obama administration.

  With so much information now wide open to the American and “Five Eyes” SIGINT operators at Pine Gap, one might assume that the analysts had their finger on the pulse for all of the South Asian AOR. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however, as the 500 or so American and allied analysts and support personnel were simply inundated with information flow. As such, the facility at Pine Gap was going through yet another expansion; gently but persistently pushing the Australians into giving the Americans more and more space that was entirely under American control; habituating the Australians to accept that there were more and more spaces within the facility that the Australians simply could not go into and were not to ask about. It was the closest thing yet to sovereign territory of the United States within Australia, like the US Embassy, in Canberra.

  This meant that the ‘special’ loads could be inspected or accessed by the Americans without observation by the host nation, Australia. Some of the contents were not to be shared with the Australians, so they could not be stored in any facility not completely controlled by Americans – which left Pine Gap as the only suitable destination, despite the 1500 km distance from Darwin.

  It also fit with some of the contingency plans, many of which called for the Americans to take the lead for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Surveillance and Intelligence, C4ISR, in support of an allied effort which, ultimately, would see American military forces dwarfing their Australian allies. However in peace-time, the US had to be subtle in gradually expanding the footprint of the NSA, CIA and other intelligence gathering entities that became ensconced in the American-controlled facility at Pine Gap.

  It also looked good on the map. It was right in the center of the massive Australian landmass, with Highway A87, known as Stuart Highway, bisecting the Australian continent from Darwin in the extreme north, through Alice Springs and Ayers Rock in the barren center, and on to the sleepy city of Adelaide and the wine producing regions in South Australia.

  Major Blakely knew that Major Bantry was right about the likelihood that some of the material would have be brought all the way back to Darwin or redirected to some of the smaller dispersal sites in the smaller communities, once the dust had settled. If it ever would, he thought, but security now is worth the inconvenience later.

  While Major Bantry and Major Blakely worked out the big picture, Lieutenant Lion was responsible for the nuts and bolts of the logistics coordination. After getting word that Bantry was getting things moving, he wrapped up the latest batch of paperwork for the air movements team at RAAF Tindal before getting started with re-jigging the convoy load planning, to fit the now accelerated pace that Bantry and Blakely were hastening.

  In comparison to the mess of sea-cans, vehicles and other stockpiles, the day-to-day aviation related spares he dealt with were much simpler, going straight to the sprawling gravel parking area by the old hangar on the military side of Darwin International Airport, which the Aussies had provided to Marine Aviation Logistics Squa
dron 24, MALS24, ‘The Warriors’.

  Lieutenant Lion’s counterpart there, the sexy red-haired Captain Allison Falkner, was having no problem keeping up with the hand-off from Lion, of the arriving stream of spares for the helicopters of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing. David Lion envied her in a way, as she still had a few months before the two CH53E Super Stallion heavy-lift helicopters and their crews would arrive on a C-17. All she had to do was herd kittens to support the eight Twin Huey’s, two C-12’s – basically the same as a Beechcraft Super King Air 200 - and the twice-weekly arrival of C-130 Hercules transport runs from Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, on Okinawa, Japan.

  For the really big APOD activities, such as C-17 and C-141 flights, personnel and freight were to be offloaded at the RAAF base at Tindal, about 200 miles south of Darwin, where the Marines occasionally rotated a squadron of FA-18 hornets and the occasional F35 for trials with the RAAF. There had already been a few sea containers Lion had sent on to Tindal, with heavy items such as engines, wheels and other spares for the Air Force, and, of course, the constant two-way stream of Marines rotating into and out of the Australian AOR.

  From a logistical point of view, the rest came by sea. The heavy equipment, Light Armored Vehicles and variety of special-purpose engineering equipment trundled off Military Sealift Command’s Large Medium Speed Roll-on / Roll-off ship, USNS Soderman, at the docks in Darwin. The Ro-Ro had finally arrived at Port in Darwin. With so little room to work with at the navy pier across from the Darwin Convention Centre, Lieutenant Lion had to keep things moving.

  As it was, the influx of military equipment had turned Kitchener Drive into a veritable parking lot. It infuriated Lion and the rest of the logistics staff standing up the MAGTFA that the geniuses at 3rd Marine Regimental HQ considered the Vehicle & Equipment Prepositioning Ship to have arrived ‘in time’ for the Joint Combined Exercise that was scheduled to start on June first. But the two weeks the Logistics Company had had to offload, trans-ship and deliver the equipment to the boys in 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines was just too tight. The equipment still had to be inspected, serviced, and staged before it could be used in the upcoming ‘Exercise Rope-A-Dope’ with the Australian Army.

  The Marines themselves had arrived weeks before and the Top Sergeant had put them through some sort of orientation in the Australian outback. When they came back to Robertson Barracks they expected that their Light Armored Vehicles, Humvees and other vehicles had arrived, been serviced, fuelled and were sitting ready to go in an assembly area. Despite the challenges and unrealistic deadlines the loggies faced, they accomplished the task. Their late nights and considerable personal initiative, as always, were invisible to the rest of the Marines, who only noticed their logistics support personnel when something went wrong.

  As much as he felt that he was single-handedly bringing order to the chaos involved in standing up an entire Marine Air Ground Task Force, Lieutenant David Lion was not the only person working furiously under tight timelines, grappling with the minutest of details of the locations of military and civilian strategic stockpiles, critical infrastructure, industrial installations and the intricacies of how Australian military units functioned.

  After his direct flight from Hong Kong, ostensibly to study Agriculture at the University of Newcastle, Zhao Yingting had felt like a hero. He had been on dangerous missions before, including a daring insertion into Sudan before the civil war, to control a Sudanese warlord who played a role in removing opposition to the Chinese acquisition of foreign oil companies in Sudan’s oil producing areas. Were it simply a corporate matter, officials with China’s state-controlled commodities investment firms would have simply used US currency to secure the assets by bribing corrupt officials. But in Sudan, as in many troubled third world countries, China had recently taken to deploying ruthless and very talented spies with vast sums of money to secure the more active local influence of the dominant warlords, so that China’s future access to the area’s commodities would not be interfered with. And with the old US currency having become about as useful as toilet paper, the currency of influence and promises required a more intimate touch. This often required agents such as Zhao to be inserted into the equation, in support of sophisticated operations to remove or install the right sort of warlord – one who could be managed effectively in pursuit of China’s strategic interests. But Sudan had been a walk in the park compared to his current mission.

  Here in Australia he would be alone, without the direct supervision of more experienced agents as he had enjoyed in Sudan; none of his embassy’s support team to back him up if things got out of hand.

  On the way to Australia, he had been excited at the prospect of showing his superiors what he was capable of doing. But as the plane approached the airport, he started to get scared. He sweated and his hands began to tremble; this was Captain Zhao who, through what he believed was his great talent and obvious destiny, had believed himself to be the perfect man for the job.

  Originally a product of a fortress garrison in Jinan Military District, Captain Zhao Yingting showed great promise as he rose through the ranks. When he led a team of eight special forces operatives of the People’s Liberation Army Ground Forces in an international military skills competition held in Slovakia in 2009, the then junior sergeant’s team had gathered in an impressive eight first-place finishes and four second place finished in the fifteen-event competition. Soon after, he had been deep-selected into the PLA Officer Corps as a rising star, and ultimately honed as an agent in the External Intelligence Branch of the PLA’s 42nd Group Army, based in Guangzhou Military Region, along the extreme south-coast of China.

  With Hong Kong and Macau within the Guangzhou region, the 42nd Group Army had been given additional resources to identify, recruit, and cultivate skilled agents to be sent abroad – ostensibly as simple students out of China’s most open, westernized cities.

  Through several years of study abroad, Captain Zhao Yingting had worked hard to improved his stilted English, but had plateaued below the ‘working proficiency’ level. He simply was not linguistically gifted. On the other hand, he had been fairly successful when he had been tried out as an external spy, influence peddling in Sudan, and more recently infiltrating expatriate Chinese communities in England. Periodically he had been brought back to China for advanced training and attempts to develop him into more meaningful competencies. He had excelled at studies in computer science, showing promise as a hacker, but was not quite good enough for the elite hacking units of the PLA. The problem was his lack of social skills. He blundered his way through relations with teachers, peers and superiors.

  Upon closer examination, his psychological profile proved him to be too insecure and emotional, ultimately unsuitable as a cyber-warrior. Extremely tall, he was a gangling young man who stood out in a crowd, as he towered over everyone around him. While stumbling and bumping into things wherever he went, he somehow had prowess on the basketball court. That is, until his run-in with the Georgetown team. On one hand, he could be aggressive and even vicious; on the other hand, it was noted by his superiors, Zhao had a harsh streak that could show itself at inopportune times, raising his profile when it was least desired. Zhao might not be quite the person for a very important mission, they had determined.

  Yet in the frenzied shuffle and secrecy in assigning agents ruthless enough for OPERATION WINTER SNAKE, somehow he had slipped past the checks and balances and been selected as a Little Dragon. It takes a bureaucracy as big as the PLA’s, or any other large military for that matter, to fit such a square peg into a round hole.

  Zhao had just returned to China after a particularly dangerous, ‘no-notice’ mission, assassinating an Iranian official in London - to great praise from his Commanding Officer back in Guangzhou City. The hasty execution of the Iranian diplomat had led to collateral damage that other Chinese agents had been forced to quickly clean up. This had made his continued presence in Great Britain too risky for the Chinese state, so Zhao had been concerned about
whether there would be consequences for his mixed performance. But with Australia now higher on the Chinese agenda, Captain Zhao intuited that he might wind up down under, or some other place he could continue to develop his English language skills. But as the weeks wore on without a new assignment, he had begun to worry.

  He had been sitting idle at a military university up in Jinan province for several months, and had begun to feel that his career had come to a grinding halt. But then he had been summoned to the Headquarters of Jinan Military District for a briefing that was so secret even his commanding officer did not know that he had been called in. After he had been briefed-in and given his mission orders, he had not even been allowed to return to the Jinan Military Academy, where he had been treading water.

  He had been moved around for a variety of specialized training sessions, where his ability with a range of communications and computer systems were brought up to speed, with a particular emphasis on systems operated by the Australian military. Strangely, he had also been given a winter survival course, up in the mountains of Mingyon Glacier, Yunnan Province. It had seemed ludicrous to him to focus on winter survival skills and alpine conditioning. He chalked it up to the occasional inefficiency of the training systems in the People’s Liberation Army. What use will I have for winter survival skills in Australia? he had thought.

  Yingting Zhao had been ordered not to discuss, or even think about the mission itself, not even to his closest compatriots in Special Ops Battalion, Guangzhou. He had also been ordered to relocate his wife and son to a remote village outside of Nanning, where they were required to stay until called for.

  Zhao did not really know much about his mission, other than the highly motivational and philosophical material that he had been spoon-fed in the in-brief. Oblivious to what he was getting himself into, Zhao had eagerly soaked up what a more reflective thinker would have recognized as nationalistic propaganda dressed up in purposely distorted Chinese mythology.