Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  In the CJOC in Katherine, over two thousand kilometers away, Colonel Ferebee and General Davis and the rest of the Ops Centre could hear gunfire, then some shouts in Chinese, then the transmission from the Cairns sector abruptly ended.

  Another Alamo, Ferebee sighed grimly to himself.

  12

  MASSACRE AT CHARTERS TOWERS

  She knew that Sunny was in trouble, ever since Sunny’s father had translated an intercept for the Americans before they had abandoned Pine Creek and moved the CJOC down to Katherine. The news had been particularly devastating for Sunny’s father, Stanley Yao, who could not even speak. He had just sat there, staring at his notes at the workstation, in shock.

  Agness had been there with her boyfriend’s father when he had finally made contact with a School of the Air station in the right area. Recognizing that something was wrong, she pressed Stanley for the information. Stanley struggled to speak, but eventually took of his head-phones and spoke five words:“Charters Towers has been over-run”.

  Everybody knew what that meant. Stanley’s son was either dead or a captive of the 124th Division, which had been driving inland from Cairns and Townsville. Ever since, there had been no further news out of that sector and Stanley had become, to put it in her father’s military jargon, combat ineffective.

  And with the rumors of Chinese atrocities running rampant, there was good reason to fear the worst. But Agness Blakely was in love, and could not sit still and wait for the dreaded news. She had to know. She had to try to do something to save her Sunshine, as she thought of Sunny Yao.

  For the first time since she had arrived in Australia only four months before, Agness Blakely was glad that she was part of the home-school program in Darwin, or at least, had been, while school was still being delivered through the School of the Air network. She had originally been opposed to her parents’ decision to keep her out of the local Australian public school system and to register her for what she thought of as a supremely boring form of home schooling. Perhaps intuiting that the technology could give her some additional ways to contact her lover at his dormitory at a boarding school in Charters Towers, Agness applied herself to learning the technology and radio protocols and to ingratiating herself with the regional School of the Air administration in Darwin.

  So it was Agness who solved the mystery of what was going on in Charters Towers. She had been persistent in her efforts to contact someone in the area, anyone who could report on what was happening in Charter Towers. But in order to do so, she had had to be a little bit sneaky about it.

  The School of the Air radio network had become militarized, and was being used by the Australians to coordinate their militia and self-defense forces to piece together which communities had scraped together enough men and weapons to put up a fight and to coordinate the evacuation of civilians to more defensible communities.

  As a result, it was next to impossible for Agness to get any help from the radio operators, who had shooed her away from their consoles whenever she had tried to get them to help her call stations in the Charters Towers area. So she had taken another approach, and began to make herself useful to the radio operators in other ways.

  And she had help.

  When her father noticed how she was always hanging around the console, listening for reports and pestering the radio operators, he had taken the CJOC’s J6 Communications Officer aside and explained the situation. Once the man understood that the Major’s daughter was worried about her young man, who was among the missing children that the J6’s own daughter was counted among, the officer had agreed to Major Blakely’s request to find her a role in the listening watch. He did not have to tell the man that Agness would also be trying to keep tabs on her father, who was headed east on a mission deep into enemy territory.

  At first, Agness had been employed as a scribe, taking notes and messages for the radio operators. But when they got to know her better and found how responsible and mature she was, they gave her more and more responsibilities. Within a week she had been given her own two-hour shift, albeit in the overnight watch when radio traffic was at a minimum.

  But that was all she needed. Once she was established and had mastered her duties, cycling through her radio calls, the station-identity and duress verifications, and sending out the seemingly endless list of messages in the order that they were provided to her, she found that there was always a good ten to twenty minutes before the end of her shift when, as long as her work was done, nobody objected to her project of going through the list of cattle-stations and other call-signs in the area around Charter Towers seeking any remote family farm, hamlet or other radio station that could help in her search.

  Her efforts at first had seemed futile, as she soon learned that most of the families west of Charters Towers – in the Free Sector – had long since evacuated farther west, fleeing as fast and as far as they could from the advancing Chinese forces.

  But once in a while she got word from the occasional farmer who passed on bits of rumor or observations that helped build up the picture of what was going on in Charters Towers.

  She recorded the information and passed it on to the intelligence section, who closely monitored the information produced through the School of the Air network, plotting the reported enemy units on their tactical maps.

  It had become clear that the Chinese had seized Charters Towers. It was an operational center of gravity, where five major roads intersected. By controlling the town they controlled the crossroads and could send out patrols and reconnaissance in force throughout the region, and deny the same flexibility to the Australians and Americans. However it appeared that the Chinese forces in Charters Towers were still too few in number to send their patrols out much farther than a few dozen kilometers in any direction. It seemed that they were holding fast until larger forces arrived to reinforce them before expanding farther to the west.

  This fact gave Agness some hope. If the Chinese forces at Charters Towers were weak enough, perhaps the Australians or the Marines could organize a raid, or maybe even liberate the town. Or maybe the town could rise up and overwhelm the invaders, as was taking place with mixed success throughout the Chinese-controlled areas up and down the Gold Coast and in other areas that she had heard about in the course of her duties.

  But when she finally got in contact with a cattle station just a few kilometers southwest of Charters Towers she was shocked by what she heard. She hoped that she had misunderstood, and called for an Australian to come over and listen, to translate the outback slang into more a more comprehensible form of Australian – English.

  “Cattle Station Blackjack - Four, this is CJOC North, please repeat your last, Over,” the Australian officer transmitted, Agness having given up her seat at the console for him.

  “What are you, a cut lunch commando? I told your lady friend clear as daylight, so why do you keep on me with your earbashing?”

  “Roger, Blackjack. Relax, Mate. We just needed to verify that we had gotten you right. I’ll read back your last.” The Lieutenant referred to the notes that Agness had made in the communications log, and read out: “Brigade Group of 124th Division Red Pandas has moved in and are applying force indiscriminately and without quarter’, over”

  “You’ve got it, Mate. Get some help here, fast. I’ve got to shut down now, some sort of disturbance taking place on my property. Blackjack – Four, out.”

  Agness still did not understand what it all meant, but by the ashen face on the RAAF intelligence officer who had taken over the radios, she knew that the news was terrible.

  Almost two weeks earlier, when the war first began, Sunny and his two mates had been arguing about whether to go out to find out what was happening, or to hunker down in their dorm rooms at Lord Byng Academy until they had a better understanding of what was going on outside. They had been woken up in the middle of the night by a series of popping sounds.

  “Fireworks?” asked Jeff.

  “Get real,” answered Sunny, as he
peered out the window, “Those are all kinds of small arms being fired.”

  “Guns? Maybe it’s terrorists,” David offered. “A few terrorists going nuts on the north side of town?”

  “Or just gun nuts,” Jeff added.

  The three had developed a close friendship in their time at the Academy. Sunny had lucked in with these two fellows. David was a senior from Sydney, one of the first boys to have befriended the new student from America. He soon became Sunny’s ‘best mate’, the son of a British mining engineer working in one of the gold exploration companies in the region.

  Jeff was the third in the group; a boy from a rich family in Sydney, he had endured Sunny and David’s teasing about being a “rich folks’ kid” with his easy charm and warmed his way into their friendship. In a short time, most of the other kids at the school knew that you did not pick a fight with any one of these boys, or you’d also have his other two friends to contend with, too.

  It did not take them long to realize that the popping sounds were actually gunfire. It was coming from the north, near the airport, it sounded like there was a battle going on. But it did not sound right. There were lots of gunshots, and a few small explosions, but none of the louder noises you would expect to hear; there were no sounds from tanks, artillery or bombs.

  “Sounds like a gangsta rumble,” David said, hoping that was all it would amount to. “They’ve got access to unreal types of guns, I reckon.”

  Sunny snapped his head around and faced David. “What gangsters would be crazy enough to take on an airport?”

  “Plenty,” Jeff said. “Maybe they’ve got a real big drug shipment they’re protecting.”

  Sunny turned back to scan the horizon. “You’ve been watching too many bad movies.”

  “Bad movies, oh get out…” Jeff sniffed at Sunny.

  “Quiet!” Sunny snapped back, as a plea for silence. As they listened, and peered over the rooftops to look at the occasional plume of smoke, they continued their endless argument.

  The gunfire thinned out. “It’s getting quiet. Maybe it’s over.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Screw you.”

  Then the gunfire started up again in earnest.

  “No, screw you.”

  When the sounds of the running gun-battle started coming closer to their location, and were accompanied by sirens and the occasional screams piercing the normally silent night air of the little town, they became increasingly afraid.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see for shit.”

  “Well, let’s not just sit here like a bunch of stunned asses. Let’s get a better look. Come on.”

  The three boys decided to head outside to try to get a look at the airport from the grasslands on the north west side of town, which overlooked the runway from a safe distance, and was not that far from Lord Byng Academy. They headed out on foot, intermittently running and walking, north on Dalrymple Road. They quickly turned back when they saw what happened to a motorist who had screamed past them, heading out of town on Dalrymple. The sporty Mazda screeched to a halt, near where Dalrymple intersected with Read Road, which came in from the north side of the Airport. The red tail lights of the vehicle illuminated as the driver stopped. The white reversing lights then came on as he tried to back away from whatever he had encountered. Suddenly the small car exploded in a ball of orange flame and a surprisingly large plume of black smoke.

  “Holy shit! Let’s get back to the Academy!” said one of the boys.

  They three of them ran back towards the center of town.

  Just before they reached Hackett Terrace they saw a couple of pick-up trucks whizzing by, with Asian-looking soldiers kneeling in the vehicles’ boxes, their weapons aimed out to the sides, firing periodically as if to herd people back into their homes.

  Unsure of what to do and afraid to cross Hackett Terrace, which was being patrolled by the Asian soldiers, they took cover in the tree-line and bushes in Centenary Park. It gave them a good view of Hackett Terrace, Gordon Street, and the main intersection at Bridge Street.

  “Let’s cross. The Academy is just two more blocks from here,” said David

  “Hold on. Let’s just sit and watch for a few minutes,” said Jeff. “Shh! Listen!” he added, hearing the sound of an accelerating vehicle.

  Moments later, they saw an interceptor from Queensland Police Service. The vehicle’s lights were flashing; however, the siren was off. The boys realized that they were in great danger when they saw that the QLD Police Services cruiser was running away, with two of those ‘technical’ pick-up trucks in hot pursuit. One of the soldiers firing at the police car must have hit one of the wheels, as the interceptor suddenly swerved and lost control, flipping over and then rolling end-over-end down Hackett terrace right in front of the boys.

  They watched in horror as the two trucks pulled up, spilling out a handful of soldiers. The men fanned out, establishing a secure perimeter while others pulled the two police officers out of their inverted vehicle.

  Clearly alive, albeit stunned and bloodied from the crash, the cops were no threat to anybody. Yet one of the soldiers walked up, aimed a pistol at each officer in turn, and put a bullet into each man’s brain.

  Of the three young men hiding in the bushes a hundred meters away, Sunny Yao was the most frightened. The other two were terrified, to be sure, but it was Sunny Yao who had the deep, personal, stomach-turning fear that one has when they know that they are personally in peril. They’re speaking Chinese. Shit, Sunny thought to himself.

  He watched the soldiers strutting confidently around, and tried to piece it all together. He’d remembered the talk back home, about who would want to put America – and Australia – down and out. Yet as he watched the soldiers, it was in disbelief that he tried to discount all the alternatives one by one – Japanese? Vietnamese? Commie guerrillas? Terrorists? – until he came to the one obvious, unavoidable answer – China. That must be the Chinese Army, the People’s Liberation Army, Sunny realized. I am completely fucked!

  The boys did not say a word to each other. They just waited in silence until the soldiers dragged the cops’ bodies to the side of the road, rifled through their pockets to retrieve their wallets, and removed their weapons. Others cleaned out the wrecked police car, removing a shot-gun from the cab and some duffle-bags from the boot of the car.

  After a few minutes, with the sound of the soldier’s vehicles having completely receded, the boys darted across the road and hopped over the picket fence of one of the well-landscaped old houses on the other side, cutting through a series of other yards until they reached Lissner Park. Darting from tree to tree until they got to the south end of the park, they did not stop, nor talk, until they reached Lord Byng Academy.

  Once inside, they found other students gathered together in the main floor hallway of LBA, talking in hushed voices about what they had seen in their own forays out into town. Others had seen the bodies of civilians lying here and there on the roads, and in some cases had witnessed Chinese soldiers killing civilians indiscriminately. The others had turned off the lights and hoped that the soldiers would not have any reason to enter the LBA.

  Some of the children, who ranged in age from thirteen to eighteen, continued to try to raise their parents on cellular phones; others tried to tune in a television station or radio station, or to get on to the internet, but nothing seemed to work. What the boys did not know was that the local internet, phone, and cable service in Charters Towers was based on land-line cables, and that the entire network was operated by one single company. In military terms, it was a ‘single point of failure’, the lines having been cut by a team of Dragonflies who had been assigned to cut off all communications into and out of the sleepy little town at the precise moment that the first air-land assaulters touched down at Charters Towers Regional Airport.

  With no news coming in from the outside world, the kids were on their own, at least for the time being.
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br />   They all agreed that it was too dangerous to head outside again, for the moment at least, but argued about what it all meant and what they should do about it. So they hid in their dorm rooms and in other places within the boarding school, in small groups. In some cases their grouping was based on shared point of view about what to do next, or simply a circle of friends out of the diverse group of students who had been dumped in the boarding school by their wealthy, expatriate parents. Already strangers in a strange land, and without parents or other family to turn to, they turned to each other for support. But they did not see themselves as the terrified children that they truly were.

  A range of their young voices could be heard throughout LB A, expressing different feelings: “Oh, God. We’re all going to die.”… “Maybe we should just surrender.” … “They wouldn’t shoot us if we had our hands up, would they?” …“Let’s go out there and kick some ass!” …“With what, fuckhead? Your football?”

  In David’s room at the far end of the second floor, the same three boys had stuck together, not wanting to go along with the daring talk of other groups who were working up the courage to go out and ‘get into the fight’.

  “Sunny, we can’t go back out there, we’ll get killed,” said David

  “But David, if we can just get out of town, we’ll be free and clear. Things are happening so fast and if we don’t get out of here soon we may end up prisoners of war,” said Sunny, unsure of how to bring up what he really feared.

  “We won’t be prisoners of war. Come off it. We’re not soldiers. We’ll just be captives, or detainees, or whatever they call it when a whole town is occupied. We could be forced to work, like the French and other Europeans were made to work by the Germans in World War Two, but at least we’ll be safe.”