Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  But surviving the nuclear winter was only one aspect of the war. Conquest of the Australian continent was still the overall strategic goal, and one which the PLA had a fair chance of succeeding at.

  In the first few years of the war, as the environmental conditions worsened and starvation became a problem, the Allies had put an enormous effort into relocating displaced civilians from the east coast, distributing them in an organized manner to the hamlets and towns in Western Australia, as far as possible from the frigid interior and from the combat areas to the east.

  At the same time, they had begun their insurgency campaign against the invaders, doing everything they could to slow them down and interfere with their operations. This was intended to buy time until they could force generate enough organically Australian-produced divisions, and partly to buy time for larger formations of the Indian Army to be deployed, first arriving in Perth and then being transported across the frozen wasteland of the Nullarbor to Adelaide and then on to the front lines closer to where Melbourne had been.

  And it was in this context that Colonel Weir had struggled to have the Australian High Command understand the long view. Not only was it essential to use Special Forces on the tactical and operational level to help win the skirmishes and battles of the war, but there was a more important ultimate objective of ultimately defeating the enemy. The way Colonel Weir had put it to General Adams and the others in the High Command: “We can win as many battles as you like and still lose the war, if we do not defeat the enemy’s strategic center of gravity – their sheer numbers. At best, we will soon have six operational divisions, even counting the militia. That’s no more than two hundred thousand men. And we face a technologically advanced, well-equipped and well trained Field Army Group, over twenty divisions, a stronger Air Force than we have even with the help of the Indians, over a million enemy soldiers now landed in Australia, and perhaps two hundred thousand Chinese Australians actively supporting them. They are destined to win this war. That is, unless they lose the will to fight; unless they come to the conclusion that they have lost.”

  “And how do we give them that perspective?” asked an Admiral, who had come to the opposite conclusion. From his point of view, the Chinese would win by attrition alone, even if it took them ten years.

  “We need to work on specific individuals. We need to take the time to get to know them – build up detailed profiles and dossiers on their leaders here in Australia, from lowly Major on up all the way to General Ma. Then we need to deep-select the ones with certain attributes, the men who can ultimately be worn down, shaped by what they hear and see, ultimately rendered fatigued by their own consciences,” Weir said.

  “Fatigued? Those men are soul-less zealots. They thrive on suffering, murder, and destruction,” Adams interjected. “Just how do you propose we tire them out? By dying for them?”

  “That’s just it. What I meant by ‘deep select’, we identify the most dangerous types, the General Bing zealots, the sort of men who will never stop. Men with no conscience. Those men, we will assassinate. They will be replaced by others, and with care, we can wind up having the right sort of men in the right place at the right time, and have them grapple with internal demons, morality, perhaps even nostalgic homesickness. In each case a carefully tailored series of pressures and inputs could be orchestrated. And for their men as well, in addition to using their fear of spiders, snakes, crocodiles and other uniquely venomous nasties to make them less effective soldiers – as we have been doing – we have to work on their personal understanding of what lies beyond the war, what their lives will be like if China wins, and how much better it could be for them if China actually loses and peace is achieved. And if we can combine the effects on the soldiers with the effects on their leaders we could put entire divisions into existential crisis at some critical juncture.”

  The moment of comprehension had been stark, but en masse the Australian High Command had finally understood Colonel Weir’s strategic vision.

  “So you are saying that you want to become the career manager for the PLA? Expend large resources to study them. Eliminate certain men. Move other men along into key positions. How? – by protecting them? Putting them on a ‘no sniping list’? and then to go to work on their heads, have them conclude that the war, or their participation in it at any rate, is pointless?” asked the Admiral.

  “Yes, Sir, that’s about the size of it. At some critical moment, not now, but down the road when the stakes are at their highest, we render them combat ineffective.”

  “Colonel Weir, I gather you have read a little too much Sun Tsu,” started General Adams, “And I am all for defeating the enemy with psychological warfare, but do you have any idea how much of an effort that would take? Not only on the analysis side, but in terms of field work, espionage, and the development of human intelligence resources?”

  “Yes, General, as a matter of fact, I do have some idea,” Colonel Weir began, his mood lifted now that he had the Australian High Command in a more receptive mood, “Here is what I have in mind…”

  That had been three years ago, just six months into the war. Since then, the High Command had given him free reign to build up the required organizations, with increasing enthusiasm as they came to see that the cultivation of a deep understanding of the enemy, down to the sexual appetites, philosophical leanings, biases, habits of individual officers and the mountains of good intelligence that came as a by-product of Weir’s massive project paid enormous dividends to the war effort at large.

  Colonel Weir never told them that his inspiration had been the day back at Ranger Training Brigade, when his Commanding Officer had shown him the dossier that the Chinese spy had been building up on himself and other key staff at Ranger Training Brigade. He had no doubt that the PLA had a very thick file on him now, and that all of the attention he had paid to counter intelligence and loyalty-testing had more than likely kept him alive. There’s someone like me out there in the PLA, working on the time and place of my death.

  19

  UNMISTAKEN IDENTITY

  Even after so many positive interactions with Australians, and what he had to acknowledge as fair treatment by the Australian military despite the fact that the enemy was Chinese, he still felt hatred from Occidentals in general. It made him tense. He only truly relaxed when in the company of other Asians, despite the high risk nature of his work.

  Thankfully, the military powers-that-be had given him assignments deep within the Australian-Chinese community, where he was basically autonomous, doing whatever he considered necessary as he moved around a particular community of interest.

  By now he was very experienced in such missions, so it did not take him long to figure out who the players were in any given community. He had taken to looking at them in terms of several categories, only the last of which was of any great interest. He was not all that interested in the vast majority of Chinese-Australians, the so-called ‘Brown Pandas’, who were attempting in one way or another to stay out of the conflict. These were largely second and third generation Chinese-Australians, born and raised in Australia and for one reason or another they were unwilling to take up arms against the Chinese invaders. They would contribute to the war effort as required by the military, but not enthusiastically. They did everything they could to keep a low profile, hoping to come out of the war without having done anything that the ultimate victors would come after them for. It was the closest a Chinese could come to being neutral.

  Then there were the Chinese nationals caught up in the war simply by virtue of having been in Australia – in the wrong place at the wrong time – when the war started. These ‘Orange Pandas’ were unfortunate souls who bore the brunt of the hostile anti-China response which the Chinese-Australians were largely exempt from by virtue of their Australian accents, citizenship, and the protection and safety of the extremely close-knit local Chinese communities. As it was, Orange Pandas, who had been mostly visiting students from mainland China, had already bee
n a largely distrusted, perhaps even despised, group of outsiders even before the war started. These Chinese stood out like a sore thumb, with their heavy Chinese accents and lack of roots or contacts in Australia. Many simply turned up dead, or were locked up as suspected enemy agents in the many internment camps set up to isolate alien Chinese in the free-Australia side.

  The spy knew that most of these unfortunates were simply students or tourists who were not part of the war; their ordeals a terrible consequence of the retributive justice the world at large sought to deliver against the Chinese state. Therefore, simply by virtue of their passports, any Chinese nationals found in the Free Australian territory had an extraordinarily rough ride. They got no support from the Brown Pandas, the ethnically Chinese Australians who may have spoken Chinese in their day-to-day lives, but did so with an Australian twang.

  Of course, he knew that on the flip-side the Chinese nationals found things much easier within the Chinese-occupied sector, where they were quickly caught-up in the Chinese military administration of the occupied territories – sometimes with great enthusiasm. Not surprising, considering that they stood to gain great personal advantage by being of service to whichever Group Army controlled a particular sector.

  These Chinese nationals within the occupied areas occasionally turned up dead, having been assassinated by ‘Green Pandas’ or other loyal Australians, as they were universally despised by those loyal to Australia. So they were of little interest to the spy.

  Also of no interest were the ‘Red Pandas’, the Chinese Agents who had been sent ahead of the air-assaulters and follow-on waves of People’s Liberation Army units several weeks before the war had started.

  Originally termed ‘Little Dragons’ during the early phases of the operation, their role after the invasion had morphed into attempts at penetrating the Chinese community on the Free Australia side of the front, often by trying to pass themselves off as Australian-Chinese evacuees who had fled the Chinese sector.

  If any of these were caught by the Allies they were invariably tortured for operational information – if they failed to clamp down on their strychnine-tooth before the suicide-tooth was removed.

  And then there were the ‘Green Pandas’, the Chinese Australians who were actively loyal to Australia. These could be Australian-born, immigrant, or even Chinese nationals who were willing to fight side-by side with the Allies in the attempt to liberate Australia from the occupying Chinese forces.

  These Chinese faced the ever-present oversight of counter-espionage experts coordinated by the notorious Colonel Weir, the American Army Ranger who had been so effective in advising the Australian Army’s 2 Cdo Reg’t in developing a series of loyalty tests, screening techniques and counter-surveillance routines to discover Red Pandas posing as Green Pandas.

  Now operating as a full bull Colonel within the Australian Defense Force, not merely as a Liaison Officer from the US Army as he had been before the war started, Colonel Weir, RAA, had been put under the command of General McCullough, Commander of the rapidly-expanding Australian 1st SAS Regiment, Perth. The minute General McCullough got his hands on the then Lieutenant Colonel Weir, he had field-promoted him immediately to full Colonel in the Australian Army, in an unprecedented form of ‘Acting While So Employed’ designation – with the full concurrence of the US Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, who had only agreed to the General’s demands with the understanding that they could have Weir back, at his former rank, when the war was over. Colonel Weir’s new status, as an Australian, was considered to be the last favor that the US military could grant the Australians, with so much to deal with at home in the United States. So in a sense, the Australians had used up the last of the good will available from the United States, and would soon be expected to ante-up some meaningful contribution in the larger allied effort against General Bing’s forces worldwide.

  Wasting no time after he had been given a wide range of authority over both 1 Cdo and 2 Cdo assaulter training and their ultimate force employment in eastern Australia, and with his role as deputy commander of 2 SAS itself, Colonel Weir had developed dozens of Chinese speaking deep-penetration agents who operated within the Chinese-Australian communities. These agents would be gathering intelligence on the Red Pandas and Little Dragons who were subtly pulling the strings in the Chinese communities, or who continued to command ever-expanding networks of Dragonflies – Chinese loyal to the occupying forces. Hunting down the enemy agents, therefore, was essentially Colonel Weir’s war. He considered his agents, and the elimination of Chinese agents, to be crucial.

  These were the men the spy hunted, as the long term plan for Australia required the successful conversion of Australian-Chinese into the begrudging service, but service nonetheless, of the Chinese forces. And Colonel Weir’s adept use of his own highly successful Chinese agents had been taking a toll on Major Fang’s fellow Red Pandas – so he was always on the look-out for Weir’s agents, who were extraordinarily difficult to identify.

  They could be the old woman working in the Chinese restaurant, the young boy toiling as a laborer in the underground hydroponics farm; or the young woman performing as domestic help, doing laundry and other chores in the many barracks and other military facilities set up in every crappy little town within the Chinese Occupied sector.

  In fact, Fang thought with disgust, they could even be among those Australian whores we use as sex-surrogates - like that blond-tinted bitch we captured, raped, interrogated and then sliced to ribbons back in Broken Hill, before we withdrew to the east. Fang’s momentary pleasure at the memory of her screams was soon replaced by the reality of how poorly things were going on the south-western front.

  Fucking Indians and their Arjun Main Battle Tanks and upgraded T-90s. If we don’t get more air power in New South Wales, they’ll push us all the way back to the coast, he thought, grimacing at the pounding the 41St Group Army had been taking ever since the Indian Army’s 75th Armored Regiment and 10th Mechanized Infantry Division had broken through the Chinese lines north of where Melbourne had once been.

  For a moment he succumbed to pessimism, thinking of the debacle at Cloncurry, where the Marines and Australians had wiped out two entire divisions. The bulk of the 42nd Group Army and more than half of the north-east sector’s strike aircraft had been destroyed, putting the entire invasion into jeopardy. What made it even more catastrophic was that the enemy had stood up at least four new mechanized infantry regiments, thanks to the war booty captured at Cloncurry. Even now, three years later, the PLA had barely been able to hold the line at Charters Towers. The presence of so much armor in the hands of the Australians, the constant threat of smash-and-run attacks by the Marines, the constant threat of sniping of officers by the Australian Special Forces, and the occasional assassination of pro-Chinese leaders in the civilian communities had begun to take their toll.

  Now, with so few PLAAF SU-27s and SU30’s still operational to hold off the Indian Air Force’s more advanced and upgraded SU-27s and SU30’s, and the seemingly unending supply of fresh Indian troops having crossed all the way from Perth in the west to the front lines in New South Wales, it seemed to Major Fang that the Indians were willing to pay a heavy price to defeat the Chinese in Australia. If only we had a few nukes left, we could have taken out their Sea-Port of disembarkation in Perth, he thought wistfully. If only my stepmother had been my grandmother, he chided himself, with the Chinese version of ‘would-have-could-have-should-have.’

  Fang thought about the difficulties that the PLA had run into after the initial success of the invasion. Within months the Chinese expansion towards Darwin in the north and Adelaide in the south had been halted in its tracks, what with the surprisingly effective operations that the US Marines out of Darwin had thrown at the 42nd Group Army back at Camooweal, just at the border between Queensland and Northern Territories. After the catastrophic failure of the 42nd Group Army’s first attempt to drive through Queensland, the PLA adjusted their tactics in favor of smaller, more defend
able gains in an attempt to reduce risk. This put off any talk of complete victory, and seemed to be a turning point in the campaign. It also emboldened the enemy, who then adjusted their tactics in favor of ambushes and guerilla tactics while Australia focused on large scale mobilization and force generation.

  Here in the south, Fang knew that the newly formed 14th Brigade that had been thrown together by the Australians in Adelaide, South Australia, was preparing for an offensive. With Chinese forces now facing a two-front campaign in Australia, Major Fang had long since come to the conclusion that the subjugation of Australia would probably take five or more years to accomplish – far longer than the twelve month’s called for by General Bing’s original timetable.

  It was, to Fang, similar to what the Germans faced with OPERATION BARBAROSSA, the Nazi invasion of Russia. The similarities were significant: Germany had succeeded in launching the massive operation with complete surprise, and had achieved extraordinarily great success in the late summer and fall of 1941; then the extremely cold winter had set in. With the supply lines of communication having been extended so far into Russia, shortages of food, fuel and critical spares began to affect operations. The enemy had begun to recover from the shock of their early defeats and were mounting stronger defenses. So far, Fang reflected, the Chinese invasion of Australia had gone very much the same. The difference, he thought with pride, is that we have done a far better job of organizing ourselves for a long, cold winter.

  And he felt personal satisfaction at having played a considerable role in it, what with his counter-counter intelligence work in New South Wales. He had personally eliminated a dozen otherwise highly effective enemy agents and had identified several good prospects, what the enemy called “Orange Pandas”, Chinese Australians who helped convert the angry and uncooperative civilians into productive labourers in support of the Chinese forces.