Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  “Not just that, mate. Their logistics and air defense units are way out of proportion, as are all those fuel farms. We assess this as being sufficient to put a Corps sized formation up the road all the way to Darwin, provided they don’t peel off more than a regiment or two in the Cloncurry-to-Mount Isa sector. More likely they’ll begin to move up another division into reserves, once they finish emptying the first two Divisions out of Charters Towers.

  “Look here, Major,” the Australian Warrant Officer brought up a new schematic on his computer. “This is the ORBAT you had prepared as of yesterday.” The image showed a broad red arrow sweeping west from Charters Towers, with a diamond shaped box around the number 42, with a large “XX” under the diamond, indicating Enemy unit of Division size. Beside the diamond was “163rd”, representing the 163rd Armored Regiment of the 42nd Group Army, People’s Liberation Army. A similar division, the 124th, was shown at Charters Towers. Farther to the east, along the gold coast, were four or five other divisions, of the 42nd, 41st, and 38th Group Armies, along with a variety of other units ranging in size from Regiment to Battalion, distributed across the occupied zone.

  “Yes, that’s what we had before your latest inputs. Based on what we now have out of Charters Towers, go on, Warrant.”

  After a couple of clicks, the sweeping black arrows thickened, and an additional number, 124th stacked on top of the 163rd, along with a symbol for air defenses, and another for command and control.

  “Major, I think we agree, this is now a more accurate representation of the ORBAT of the enemy forces deploying towards Mount Isa. We have the full weight of the 42nd Group Army, two divisions, and they are augmented with an Air Defense Brigade, robust Engineering attachments and a follow-on force comprised of the 20th Division from the 41st Group Army. Therefore we upgrade this to an Armored Corps,” he said, clicking the computer and making “XXX” under the “42” diamond. It went without saying that the “XXX” would be upgraded to “XXXX” if the 20th Division were moved farther to the west, as that would make the enemy formation a full “Army” size designation, with well over 120,000 soldiers.

  It also went without saying that the massive, reckless commitment the enemy was making at Cloncurry, and the speed with which they were moving their logistics and Anti-Air defenses forward, the enemy advance was unfolding pretty much exactly as Colonel Ferebee had briefed the operational planners of the CJOC. It had been left to Major Becker and the Australian Special Forces teams to collect the intelligence necessary to confirm the accuracy of Ferebee’s forecast.

  “So it’s all over, then. Phase Three, I mean. They’ll be closing with our defenders at Cloncurry by what, 0600 hrs?”

  “Actually, it appears that lead elements of their 370th Regiment will be moving into line by 0200hrs. But nothing we can’t shove back when they make first contact. The real trick will be the timing with Thornie’s team inside the town and your lot at the billabong near Julia Creek.”

  “Too right,” said Major Blakely, in his best imitation of the Australian slang. “OK. Give Captain Thornie the revised timings and mission go-code, and I’ll activate the team at the Billabong. Colonel O’Neil, just west of Cloncurry has already been cleared weapons hot by Colonel Ferebee in the CJOC. O’Neil’s battalion will engage the enemy upon first contact at his discretion.”

  “Well, seem to engage them, anyhow,” said the Warrant Officer, sharing a conspiratorial smile with Major Becker.

  Wan Shanyu had a dark, dirty secret that he had to keep from his fellow soldiers in 4th Battalion, 370th Regiment, 124th Division, 42nd Group Army. At the bottom of the food chain, the simple infantry soldier knew that he was among the least well supported soldier in the campaign. Wan was a conscript, and as an infanteer he knew that he was highly expendable. He always had been, even when he was a simple farm boy. Wan was originally from the remote village of Hanwuyi, in what had once been rich grasslands of the Tarin Basin in the western-most part of the region his people called Shinjang. The Chinese called it Xinjiang.

  It had been six years since he abandoned the fantasy of restoring any productivity out of the small patch of land that his forefathers had worked for generations. By abandoning his homeland he was in good company, as many of his ancestors had been among the 200,000 people of Yueshi, or ‘yue-shi’ –‘Moon Clan’ - origins. In ancient times the Moon Clan had had been pushed out of their homeland by the expanding Qin state, who would ultimately go on to become the founders of the Chinese Empire.

  One aspect of his secret was that he was Muslim – but that was not the worst of it. As a Yuezhi, part of an ethnic group that was more Indo-European than it was Chinese, he was dually cursed. Of course Wan had suppressed these facts, first from his employers in the wild west of the Xinjiang oilfields, and more recently from his fellow soldiers in the lowly 4th infantry Battalion.

  Being a Chinese Muslim was the least of his worries. He knew that there was an unspoken degree of tolerance for spiritual views as long as they were not expressed openly or promoted. Besides, with his homeland sharing borders with the Islamist state of Pakistan, and just about as far as one could get from the vast majority of China’s population in the east of China, people from his region truly were foreigners in their own country.

  But for Wan, his religion was not the issue. The true terror in his heart and worry constantly on his mind came from the new wave of ethnic purism among the ‘real Chinese’.

  He had barely even heard of the issue before, but in the last few months there had been something of a hysteria working its way through the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army, with everybody seemingly trying to prove that they were direct descendants of “Beijing Man”, once termed “Peking Man.”

  Wan did not understand much of the debate, something about there being archeological evidence that proved that while the Yangshao culture had reached western China from Indo-European origins, there was an older, indigenous Chinese culture that had already arisen in Eastern China ages before. Contrary to western beliefs of the origins of the Chinese, the new theory was that these Lonshan Chinese diffused east to west.

  That fit with Wan’s simple understanding that his people had been all but pushed out of China to the west, by the more dominant and ancient Chinese culture. But what was new to the long-established story was the notion that these Chinese, the ‘real Chinese’ according to the current wave of cultural nationalism, had evolved from Homo erectus in China. That they did not evolve from Homo sapiens who spread out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, as western archeologists have determined that the rest of the world’s population had originated from.

  What this meant was that those whose blood went all the way back to the Homo erectus Beijing Man, the 750,000 year old fossil unearthed near Beijing in the 20th Century, were essentially a different race from everybody else in the world.

  Soldiers wanting to fit in to this new hysteria, and not to be seen as sub-humans in contrast to the more ancient people that the real Chinese had evolved from, went so far as to sharpen their back teeth, apply make-up to their cheeks and even to constantly hold their facial expressions in such a way as to emphasize the broad check bones and facial structure of the Chinese Homo erectus pekinensis ancestor – and to distance themselves from the ‘lesser breed’, the African-originated Homo sapiens.

  The importance of demonstrating that one was from the Homo erectus branch of the Human genus was particularly important in the military operation in Australia, of course, as the theory also supported the view that because Australian aborigines shared a great many of the traits of Homo erectus, along with the Chinese. Therefore the Chinese invasion of Australia was more of a home-coming than an invasion by a foreign culture.

  What’s more important, and what had caused Wan some long, sweaty nights, was the rumor that once the conquest of Australia was complete, and perhaps of the world at large, only Chinese of erectus origins would have any rights at all. Everybody else, the conquered peoples of the world, those of u
ncertain or mixed origins, and even loyal soldiers of the PLA who lacked enough of the distinctive erectus traits would be treated as sub-human.

  To Wan, it brought to mind images of the ethnic nationalism, eugenics and extermination camps of the Nazi era, and chilled the large-headed man with the thin-walled cranium. He was sure that his sapiens ancestry stood out like a giraffe amongst a herd of zebras.

  As for the herd itself, Wan knew that the majority of soldiers stayed out of the debate. Men like Colonel Pan and other senior officers had spoken out against such nonsense. These men had given Wan hope that it would all go away like so many other fads. But the number of men who were actively promoting the idea, while still relatively few, seemed to be gaining traction. Like the brown-shirts of the 1930’s, these zealous supporters of the Beijing Man ideology were so aggressive and ruthless that their impact was gaining a life of its own within the PLA.

  He did not know it at the time, but it must have been working on him at a sub-conscious level as he waited in his trench for the battle to begin. He sat alone thinking as the two other men assigned to his Observation Post were catching a few minutes of sleep after a long night of digging into the hard terrain.

  The internal stresses battling within him must have come to some determination because the moment that Wan heard the air-raid alarm, and saw the men and women of the air defense regiment rushing to activate their weapons systems, his decision had bridged the gap from subconscious to conscious.

  I’m on the wrong side! Wan thought as he looked westward, expecting to see the SU-30 Mark I, Flanker-H long-range fighters of his Indian cousins approaching.

  The aircraft of the Indian Air Force were well beyond Wan’s visual range. When they were detected by the HT-233 passive threat detection system they were still over five hundred nautical miles away. There he was, sitting in his fox-hole in the hills above ‘Chinaman Creek’ Dam, on the west side of the Cloncurry River. He knew that the other side was on its way. And he knew that he was supposed to be alert, scanning the area assigned to his Observation Post. But he was not himself any more…

  The OP was a good three kilometers from the safety of the town. A town that was now thick with military vehicles and men getting ready for the push to the west. Exposed on the west flank, overlooking the town’s fresh-water reservoir with a name that was surely offensive to any Chinese, Wan knew that until the lead elements of the 370th Regiment began to push out towards Mount Isa, some 120 kilometers farther to the west, his and the dozen other OPs scattered across the west side of the Cloncurry river represented the front lines.

  He was at the point in time and space where the Allies could crash into the PLA, in the perfect spot to bear witness to the war. A war that had finally come to Wan Shanyu, after so many months of training and secrecy. After a complex series of train, sea, truck and foot travels that took him and so many other bewildered soldiers from China to the most remote place he had ever seen.

  All fear had somehow left him. He felt himself in a surreal situation. No longer having any personal connection to the outcome of the battle. He would either wind up dead, an enemy POW, or be doomed to the ultimate fate of suffering and pain that sub-humans like himself will ultimately receive if the General Bing and his pure Chinese race come to rule the world. Wan felt that he was merely an observer of the historical clash between two ancient human races. He would not lift a finger to help decide the battle in either direction, he knew.

  So when a small group of men moved past his arc of fire, darting from one gully to another just below the railway bridge between Chinaman Creek Dam and his OP, he did not fire. Nor did he take any action to wake up the two others in his OP. He simply watched to see what the small group of men would do next.

  The enemy must not have seen that the dark spot between two boulders hid the sharp eyes of Wan Shanyu, nestled into position as he was for his thirty minute watch.

  Had Wan taken a shot at them, or raised the alarm, perhaps the four-man team made up of two Marines and two Australian Special Forces personnel would not have been able to set themselves up on the hill opposite town. They would not have had such a clear view of the Chinese units marshaling in the town of Cloncurry. Had the Marines and Australians been taken out, certainly other such teams would have tried to pick up the slack. But they would not have been in as good a position as this particular team had been in, able to activate their LASER target designator at the appointed time; able to illuminate their primary target.

  The laser-guided missiles were all for show, in fact. The two dozen medium- range missiles would be fired just over two hundred kilometers from Cloncurry. They were supersonic cruise missiles, which accelerated to Mach 2.8 as they closed with initial target coordinates before picking up the pre-programmed signature of the LASER-illuminated targets.

  But the real devastation about to be inflicted on the Chinese was not going to come exclusively from the 200kg warheads of the cruise missiles. Those would be just the opening move in complex game that Major Becker and Captain Thorne had conceived of several weeks before; one that relied heavily on the predicted behavior of the Chinese commander, Lieutenant-General Leung back in his Command Post in Charters Towers.

  In that regard, the expensive and impossible-to-replace missiles fired from the dozen SU-30s would have been almost as effective had they been assigned in to strike warehouses or random targets in the crowded staging area that Cloncurry had become. The effect would have been the same.

  “Incoming aircraft! Range: three hundred twenty kilometers!” reported the weapons system operator reported from his cramped console in the WZ551 Armored Command Vehicle. Calling out the data displayed on his console, from the array of passive and active threat-detection systems of the Air Defense Battalion protecting the two fully divisions assembled at Cloncurry for the coming battle.

  In General Leung’s Command Post, the report of inbound enemy aircraft was soon reinforced by the tactical plot which had been relayed from the Air Defense Regiment’s central command and control trailer in Cloncurry, which gathered the data from the WZ551’s and other air defense detection systems and missile batteries.

  The batteries were autonomous, able to operate independently. However, the onward transmission of data to higher headquarters first passed through the C4I trailer, for integration and encryption. The few seconds lost to processing were insignificant in the big picture, because when General Leung saw the rapidly increasing number of icons, each signifying an air-breathing threat confirmed through electronic sensory measures as having the emitter characteristics of enemy SU30 and SU27 fighter-bomber aircraft, he was thrilled.

  “Just as expected, the enemy is making their last stand in the Cloncurry to Mount Isa sector. Send the CAP from Charters Towers to reinforce the Cloncurry sector,” he ordered.

  “But Sir, if we send the Combat Air Patrol away, we’ll be vulnerable here. We’ve stripped out our own air defenses to throw everything up the road. We have no eyes to the north or east,” replied the Air Defense subject matter expert.

  “We have long-range passive and active detection towards the west and south, do we not?” demanded Leung.

  “Yes, sir, fully operational.”

  “And if an attack came from the west, it would have to pass the Cloncurry sector first. If from the south-west, out of Adelaide, we would pick them up in plenty of time to re-task assets back to cover, is that not correct, Major?” Without waiting for a reply, General Leung went on. “And do we not have total control of Indonesia to the north, and Cairns to the east?”

  Looking exceedingly uncomfortable, the Air Weapons expert knew that it was pointless. “Yes, Sir. We can adjust. However I still believe that sending the CAP away leaves us vulnerable.”

  “Noted, Major. Now send the CAP along with all available interceptors from Weipa and Cairns,” the General added.

  This time the major did not bother to raise his objections that deploying strike aircraft from the dry-bones base at Weipa, and the main base f
or the PLA Air Force in Cairns, would strip the entire north-east sector of strike aircraft. But he also understood what the General was thinking. It was an audacious gamble, to concentrate all of both patrols and strike aircraft, perhaps thirty fighters in all, with everything committed to responding to the inbound Indian Air Force jets.

  He passed on the orders and watched as the Interceptor Squadron in Weipa and the Air Wing in Cairns acknowledged the orders, and announced the estimated launch times.

  “Good. But that ETA puts them on top of Cloncurry about 15 minutes after the enemy attack begins. Tell them to go full-throttle, after-burners, to get there as fast as possible.”

  “Sir! You are aware that they will be bingo fuel when they arrive? They would not have sufficient reserves to make it back to base.”

  “That’s your problem, Major, not mine. Get a couple of IL76’s up to tank them on the way back, or divert them to land wherever you have to – in Longreach, Hughendon, Winton or on a stretch of highway for all I care. We have this one opportunity to smash the enemy’s few remaining strike aircraft – and take them out of this war altogether,” General Leung said, excitedly.

  In his mind, the Air Defense expert went over the risk management equations, calculating that the probability of enemy air attack on the soon-to-be undefended areas was “remote”; that the impact of such a strike would be “severe”; and concluded with an operational risk assessment of “medium”. It fell well within the Lieutenant General’s level of operational risk management authority. For anything higher, of course, it would have required a command risk assessment from General Bing himself – with all of the personal risk associated with attempting to pin such a dangerous gamble on the supreme military commander. Having satisfied himself that the risk management decision had been taken at the appropriate level, and that he was not personally responsible for the outcome, he then set himself to the task.