Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  After giving the orders, the Air Defense major in General Leung’s command staff had completed his role. All that was left was for the sequence of events to unfold, choreographed as much by the hopes of the allied planners at the CJOC in Katherine as by the ego and aggressiveness of Lieutenant-General Leung in the Command Post of the 42nd Group Army in Charters Towers, Queensland.

  From his vantage point five kilometers outside of town, on the extreme west flank of the security perimeter, the ambivalent young soldier from the Tarin Basin kicked his two sleeping comrades into startled alertness and passed on the general alert that had been radioed across the comm net to all units in the Cloncurry area. He did not mention the four-man team that he had seen a few minutes before.

  The three men watched the skies, two of them nervously, and one with aplomb. Wan felt by this point entirely detached from any personal stake in the outcome of the battle. He felt no particular stake in which way it went; only a strange, detached curiosity at the events unfolding around him. The other two men were terrified, as if the enemy would expend valuable missiles, bombs, or 50-calibre rounds against their fox-hole.

  Wan turned to the east and looked back at the small town. He could make out the few remaining infantry fighting vehicles and transport trucks rolling westward, out of town. It amazed him how many had passed through in just a 24-hour period. He had observed a half-dozen regiments, which he knew were from both the 163rd Division and his own 124th Division.

  Wan had seen the 370th Regiment leading the column westward towards Mount Isa. Obviously, even to Wan, the task for the 370th was to advance as recon in force. They must have reached Mount Isa by now, he thought, it’s only 120 kilometers from here, and they left what, eight hours ago?

  Wan was interrupted from his idle calculations when he saw men running around at a number of locations in town. He quickly realized that it was not the men of the two mechanized infantry divisions that were swarming to their equipment, but rather, the men of the Air Defense Regiment, removing covers from their batteries and bringing their SAM sites into full readiness. Here we go, he thought.

  In his WZ551 Command vehicle, the weapons system operator was highly confident that his battery would make a few kills. Not only were there so many juicy targets appearing on the western extreme of the long-range plot, pushed to his own system from the HT 233 passive array serving his battery, but the Air Defense Battery and PLA in general also had the advantage. The enemy air attack had been predicted, and was expected to be comprised of up to two squadrons variants of the Russian designed SU27’s and SU30’s of the Indian Air Force, and possibly a squadron of American built F/A 18 Super Hornets of the Royal Australian Air Force.

  The system operator had been provided with the full range of jamming frequencies, threat-detection wavelengths, electronic counter-measure signatures and other technical data to be loaded in the battery’s computers in preparation for the expected attack.

  As he watched the men of his battery remove the arming pins and dust covers from the self-propelled missile trailers that made up his SAM site, he was as confident as his superiors that the Air Defense Regiment would not only fend off at least 95% of the incoming missiles, but that the integrated, layered air defense canopy that they had assembled at Cloncurry would withstand subsequent waves of the air attack, culminating in the destruction of much, if not all, of the enemy’s offensive aircraft.

  As the first volley of missiles began to fly out of his SAM battery he looked at the display to follow their progress. His mind was focused on the display, doing mental gymnastics as he calculated closing velocities in his mind. So when he sensed that the floor of his command vehicle began to raise, along with half an acre of perfectly flat, well-graded parking area, his mind had just enough time to register an instant of surprise.

  There was not enough time for his synapses to communicate any complex analysis of the sensation, as his brain was instantly overwhelmed with the sensation of his body being smashed to pulp by the shock wave. He was dead; pulverized by the shock wave of the massive explosion before he had any conscious warning that he would die in a plume of rock and dust that had been thrown thirty meters into the air.

  A ton of buried high explosives, in the form of a massive improvised explosive devices comprised of a dozen artillery shells, some C4 and a hard-wired detonation circuit will do that to you. That is, if you happen to park your Air Defense Battalion assets right on top of the pre-positioned explosives.

  If he been in a position to look back on the sequence of events that had taken him to his end, the young technician might have traced it back to the “all clear” report that had been given by the sappers from the Engineering Battalion of the 124th Division, who had cleared away a few hastily implanted, easily discovered, Improvised Explosive Devices left by the enemy.

  Had he asked himself why such a small town as Cloncurry would have had so many nicely graded, abandoned parking lots distributed around the periphery of their small town, he might have doubted the conclusion made by others that they were simply parking areas for the ubiquitous cattle-trains and agricultural equipment that passed through the cross-roads town.

  But even if he had gotten that far, and suspected that the IEDs found by the engineers were simply diversions, he would never have expected that his own passing of the report of incoming waves of enemy aircraft, and Higher Headquarters’ eagerness to wipe out the Indian and Australian fighters, would have caused them to launch their precious few squadrons of SU-27s, SU-30s, and J-11 fighters from Charters Towers, Weipa, Cairns, and Townsville.

  “THREAT DETECTED!” commented the Electronic Support Measures warning system, as Squadron Leader Tanta closed to within two hundred and fifty nautical miles from the target area. Tanta read the emitter types, which matched with the data provided to him in the pre-mission intelligence briefing.

  The Indian Air Force’s fleet of Russian manufactured Sukhoi Su-30MKI Flanker long range fighters had the benefit if advanced avionics upgrades done by the Indian Air Force, making Squadron Leader Tanta’s aircraft the most advanced strike aircraft in the region.

  Tanta knew that the PLA Air Force had their own fleet of SU27s and SU30’s and had most likely hacked the Indian Air Force enough to take away much of the IAF’s technical advantages over their Chinese rivals.

  But the BrahMos supersonic Air Launched Cruise missiles his aircraft carried, along with the eleven carried by the remainder of the dozen Su30’s in the strike package, would be difficult for the enemy air defenders to shoot down. Tanta knew that with their high speed – four times that of the American made Tomahawk cruise missile – and with over thirty times as much kinetic energy, the 200 kilograms ALCM BrahMos was the most advanced weapon in the IAF’s arsenal.

  Too bad we have so few BrahMos left, he thought, as he watched the time-to-target numbers reduce rapidly on his Heads-Up-Display. Had they had even one single nuclear-tipped BrahMos left, the battle would have been over before it had begun. However, the IAF had not resolved the technical problems of mounting a nuclear warhead on the BrahMos when the war with China had begun, and was left with just a few dozen operational BrahMos missiles with conventional high explosive warheads after the devastation of the first few days of the war.

  As it was, the dozen assigned to the Cloncurry strike, and the half-dozen for the northerly strike package committed to Weipa as part of the Cairns strike package, would just about expend their irreplaceable stockpile of cruise missiles.

  Hope they take the bait, he thought, before giving the order.

  “All Lancer units, GOOGLY,” he said, invoking the code-word derived from the sport of cricket, giving the order for the Su-30’s to each fire their sole BrahMos missile at the designated target.

  The targets themselves had been automatically assigned to each aircraft by the computer program in Tanta’s aircraft, which was in communication with the other Lancers’ computers in the strike package. The LASER designated targets were to be illuminated by Allied
Special Forces personnel on the ground in the Cloncurry area. The targets were key elements of the very robust integrated air defense system which the PLA’s Air Defense Regiment had established at Cloncurry, and had to go.

  Despite his own Top Secret security clearance, Squadron Leader Tanta had no need to know the planning or intelligence that went into the target selection matrix. He had not been told that the Australian Special Forces and US Marines had come up with a carefully planned series of events which required a cruise missile strike against the enemy formation at Cloncurry.

  He did not know that the dozen targets assigned to his strike mission were not the SAM missiles around the periphery; he did not know that the planners at the CJOC has assigned other resources to those peripheral batteries.

  Despite the fact that Wan was looking directly at one of the air defense SAM batteries, he was startled when missiles began flying out of the rail launchers on the self-propelled vehicles. But no sooner had a half-dozen SAMs tore off westward towards the enemy aircraft that were closing in on Cloncurry, when suddenly a series of enormous explosions shook the earth below him and massive plumes of orange flame and grey smoke erupted one after another in the town.

  Wan did not dive to the ground like his terrified compatriots. He stared in astonishment as perhaps twenty massive explosions tore the town apart.

  The grey strange crackling smell and perfectly spaced pillars of smoke reminded him of videos he had seen of the carefully prepared blasts in the rock cuts of open pit mines, where massive chunks of hard rock are blasted into rubble for the mining trucks to haul away for processing.

  And that was exactly what he was witnessing. Only in this case, while it was true that the sites of the blasts were carefully chosen by mining engineers, and the blast detonating sticks and additional nitrogen-based explosive grains were carefully placed under the supervision of qualified mining engineers, in this case the objective was not to uncover valuable mineral ore.

  Rather, the mining engineers had actually covered the prepared blast sites with crushed rock, and then graded the areas to look like large, well-used parking areas. They had even gone so far as to park a few truck-trailers and vehicles on the sites to make them appear to be staging areas for the transport rigs and other vehicles that once plied the busy A6 highway from Charters Towers to Cloncurry, and beyond.

  The work had been completed nearly a week before the enemy had begun to pay close attention to the area, with air surveillance from manned and unmanned aircraft.

  Of course, the planners at General Leung’s command post in Charters Towers had suspected dirty tricks, and had tasked sappers from the Engineering Battalion of the 370th Regiment, 124th Division, to look for IEDs and other dangers. And the sappers had done their job, finding and destroying two dozen IEDs which the Australian Army had constructed from artillery shells, packets of C4 and other military munitions.

  However, the PLA’s sappers had not considered looking deeper, and had not detected the ten-centimeter diameter holes drilled into the bedrock under the nicely graded parking lots. They had not discovered that these drill-holes went down a good ten meters each. They had not discovered that they were packed with enough mining explosives to convert the bedrock into pop-corn sized gravel – and to convert the Air Defense Batteries which were so conveniently placed on these parking areas scattered around the periphery of the town into shards of shrapnel, scraps of flesh, and unrecognized bits of bone.

  Even with the hypervelocity of the BrahMos missiles and their 200 kilogram high explosive warheads, those air defense assets struck within the confines of Cloncurry by the Indian Air Force’s cruise missiles, demolished as they were, were at least recognizable as having once been vehicles of some sort. The air defense assets destroyed by the Australian mining engineers’ blasts, in contrast, had been utterly destroyed beyond all recognition.

  When word reached the CJOC in Katherine from several of the Allied Special Forces teams, there was jubilation.

  “Sir. We have another confirmation from Cloncurry. The cruise missiles cleaned up! All but two of the parking lots occupied by SAM sites went up on schedule. The two sites that failed were illuminated in time, and taken out by the BrahMos’s. We got all the core C4ISR and Air Defense assets within town!”

  The tone in the Command Post of the 42n Group Army was decidedly less cheerful.

  “General, we are getting conflicting reports out of Cloncurry,” said the Air Defense major, clearly distressed by what he was reading on his computer screens.

  “Out with it, Major!” demanded a senior staff officer, voicing the General’s thoughts at the major’s hesitation.

  “Sir, we have lost contact with the Air Defense Regiment.”

  “What do you mean? We lost their feed? Get a verbal report. How many enemy aircraft have they shot down?” demanded General Leung.

  “That’s just it, sir. They are entirely off the net. I don’t know what happened. One minute we were getting reports of missiles launched from our SAM batteries, the next, we lost all sources of data,” said the major, deeply distressed.

  “Er, General. I can explain,” said a Colonel from the 124th Division.

  “Go ahead, Chang,”

  “General. I’m getting reports from my Engineering Battalion – the one we held back to provide security to the logistics units – anyhow, they report that enemy missiles struck the town. It appears that ten or twelve missiles struck.”

  “Ten? But there were no more than that reported inbound! We should have been able to shoot down most of those. What went wrong, Major?”

  “I can’t explain it, General. Unless they upgraded the propulsion system with those hypersonic motors, but the Indians were still years away from accomplishing that according to the intelligence reports. Perhaps the Indians found a way to interfere with our detection systems,” the major offered.

  “Bullshit. How could they interfere with the passive systems?”

  “Sir. I have more coming in now,” interjected the Colonel from the 124th. “There are reports that many of the explosions, which took out the Air Defense units, preceded the incoming missiles by as much as five to ten seconds.”

  There was silence in the CP.

  “Are you telling me that they just blew up? Colonel, how could that happen?”

  This time it was the ground forces Colonel’s time to be uncomfortable and confused. “We may have missed something when we cleared those areas. Our sappers… They may have missed some IEDs,” he began, trying to piece together everything that he was seeing on his own secure chats and other data. “From what I am seeing here, many of the explosions were unusual in appearance, extremely large, throwing up enormous amounts of debris. That’s it, Sir!” he said, excitedly. “Drill rigs! I should have thought of this before. We had reports of some drill rigs having been left abandoned in the town. We assumed that they were just mining equipment for those big gold mines in the area. But they could have been used to set explosives deep under the town, beyond the depth that our sappers could detect,” the Colonel concluded, feeling as if he had dodged a bullet.

  “So you are telling me we have lost our Air Defense umbrella? All of it? And that the Australians used their mining technology to blow up the entire town? Is that what you are telling me, Colonel?”

  “No, Sir! Yes, Sir. Well, yes and no,” he finally settled his mind. “Yes, we have probably lost most if not all of the SAM batteries, but no, they did not blow up the entire town. They just blew up the areas where we located our SAM sites. The logistics supply areas, the fuel farms, the staging areas for the container-trucks, and the warehouses – those are all intact. We still hold the town. Even the bridge out of town is un-touched, so we are not cut off from the 163rd and the 124th Divisions. All we have lost is the Air Defense Regiment.

  Partly relieved, the General turned his attention to the updated plot of the Mount Isa sector.

  “So what’s happening there now? Give me the air picture first.”

&nbs
p; “Sir. Our fighters closed with the enemy aircraft, but the SU-30’s pulled back after they fired their cruise missiles. We did shoot down several aircraft. A handful of F/A 18s and a number of unidentified aircraft, perhaps thirty.”

  “Thirty? That’s good, right? But why ‘unidentified’?”

  “We did not have enough signature or ECM data to verify what they were before our medium-range missiles shot them down, other than the Super-Hornets. The other aircraft could have been anything. Most likely they were SU27’s that had stayed emissions-dark, and got caught with their pants down.”

  “Well, I hope you are right, that they are Su27’s. Better keep a solid CAP over the area until we sort out how few fighters they have left. And move as many air defense assets as you can from here in Charters Towers – get them on the road ASAP – we need air defense to replace what we have lost in Cloncurry.”

  “But sir…” the major began, only to shut up when he saw the look in Leung’s eyes. “Yes, Sir, we’ll have the two batteries rolling within the hour. It will take them about a day and a half to reach Mont Isa.”

  “Very well. Keep the tankers up, 24/7 if you have to, and keep as many aircraft over that sector as you can muster,” the General concluded and then turned his attention back to the Colonel. “Now, what’s going on on the ground?”

  “A bit of a disappointment, General. 2nd Batallion, 370th Regiment of the 124th entered Mount Isa unopposed. The Marines there pulled out across the bridge to the west side of the river. You can see where they entrenched,” he showed the General on a map. “-on this ridge line to the north west, here, where the highway climbs up out of town on the west side of the river.”

  “And the Australians?”

  “Very little resistance. Just enough to slow us down a bit coming into town. Looks like they were trying to buy time for the Marines to cut and run.”