Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  General Ma intended to take that away from them. All he had to do was shift his forces around up and down the east coast, enjoying the freedom of movement that the coast roads offered him. Ultimately, he knew that he would have to provide some assistance to General Sheung’s Army Group South. Based on the 38th and 65th Group Armies, out of Beijing Military District, Sheung’s force was concentrated in Victoria and was expected to bear the brunt of an expected allied assault from the Adelaide sector when the Indian Army completed its cross-continent deployment from Perth to Swan Hill. But that assault was not expected to take place for at least another three to six months, so General Ma had delayed transferring any of his regiments to Sheung. When the time comes, I’ll probably have to transfer the 2nd and 3rd Brigades, 121st Regiment, 41st Group army over to Army Group South. They’re just sitting on their asses getting fat in Biloela and Gladstone anyhow, well behind the front lines. I’ll hold on to the 164th Marine Brigade for myself, when they get here from Indonesia, the General thought. Having the PLA’s most elite, highly trained 6000-man brigade of marines with him at his base on the coast in Rockhampton would give him a highly versatile, ready-reaction force to deal with any mischief that the US Marines might try to pull on him. It would be nice to throw our marines against the US Marines at some point, the General commanding Army Group North thought with satisfaction.

  In the Adelaide to Broken Hill sector, the Indian Army was having a great deal of trouble with the heavy snow and washed out bridges, and the PLAAF was interdicting their engineering units, making things even more difficult. The terrain from the border between Victoria and South Australia was littered with wrecked T-90’s and Arjun Main Battle Tanks, albeit at a heavy price paid by the PLAAF. In committing so many aircraft to taking out the first effort of the Indian Army to bring the fight to the Australian state of Victoria, the PLAAF had lost much of their fighter force. The sacrifice of the Air Force had been worth it, however, as it had stalled the allied offensive in its tracks and bought the Chinese forces perhaps eighteen months before a larger allied force, and more air power, could be brought over from India to replace losses experienced by the first Indian Expeditionary Force.

  The allies in the north had also suffered serious setbacks after their initial success when the Marines had led the Australians to victory in the Cloncurry campaign. Their troubles had started months later, when the Australians had tried to move east with their captured Chinese armor. They had moved first one, and then two full regiments made up of Australians outfitted with captured Chinese equipment, and had gotten as far as Longreach.

  At that point, Colonel Yip had given the appearance of withdrawing from the key crossroads town of Barcaldine, drawing in the advance formation of US Marines, who had been clearing the path for two advancing Australian Regiments.

  It had been a masterful stroke, General Ma had recalled, with Colonel Yip’s forces turning on a dime and tearing into the Marines from three sides, and a well-timed air attack by the PLAAF fighter bombers. The company of Marines had been obliterated, yielding almost two hundred prisoners and certainly giving the MAGTFA a bloody nose. True, the Marines had gotten even somewhat by their daring raid on Emerald, capturing Colonel Yip. General Ma had to give them that, But the heroics of a few Marines and Special Forces with help from the Australians does not make up for the ass-kicking we gave them at Barcaldine. Colonel Ng, while philosophically much softer than Yip, would certainly be able to get a grip on Colonel Yip’s regiment, restore their shattered confidence and keep the allied hounds at bay in the Emerald sector, thought General Ma. Besides, they’re really screwed up now, all that armor stuck in snow and abandoned like that. The Australians just do not have the capability to mount anything larger than a combat team or perhaps a brigade. They’re simply outclassed.

  The screw up that General Ma was thinking about was, according to the intelligence reports, a colossal screw up by the Australians. They had struggled for four months to build a road through the snow, over the harsh terrain east of Tambo. Why the Aussies had abandoned Highway A2, which should have been easy to clear of snow, was still not known. Most likely, they had been hoping to reach Mount Moffatt road on the east side of Carnarvon National Park. That was the only strategy that made sense, as it would have allowed the Australians to swing down onto the crossroads town of Roma from the north, and avoid the well-entrenched 364th Infantry Regiment of the 121st Motor Infantry Division, 41st Group Army at Charleville. With the 364th Regiment having a lock on Highway A2 from Morven to Charleville, and a battalion established as a buffer in the crossroads town of Augathella, eighty kilometers to the north, the allies could not make it very far by coming south on the A2. So if their strategy had been to travel cross-country around Charleville, it could have worked. The PLA, lacking any serviceable drones and with very limited air power now, had no more than a weekly reconnaissance sortie in the region. They had spotted the long columns of Australian-operated Chinese armor crawling cross-country, and had taken notice.

  And then the Allies had run out of gas. Literally and figuratively. They simply abandoned the armor, engineering support equipment and fuel bowsers. Most likely these were empty, General Ma had decided. The effort to do an end run around the 364th Regiment had been a complete blunder, at least a full regiment’s worth of armor and associated equipment had been abandoned in the snow.

  Just in case the Aussies ever came back with fuel and men to recover the equipment, General Ma had a weekly surveillance flight take pictures of the abandoned column. And for the last three months there had been absolutely no activity. Many of the tanks were now so completely covered with snow that they were indistinguishable from the snow-covered, hilly terrain. Even so, if the allies did come back, it would take them weeks to extricate themselves, and the equipment would most likely be in need of major servicing to even start up, let alone be put into action.

  What a shame for their commanders, Ma reflected, They had been only a few kilometers from reaching Mount Moffatt Road.

  It had been a gamble, and most of the battle staff had been against the idea. However, General Adams had convinced the Australian High Command that it was worth the risk. Once the operation had been approved, the Marines as well as the Australian MARSOC had signed on and generated Branch and Supporting Plans. Colonel Weir had been one of the few who was on General Adams’ side, and had been enthusiastic in coming up with a variety of ways that his Chinese spies and Australian Special Forces teams could support the operation.

  Now, six months after the operation had launched with the preliminary phases, things were heating up. To be more precise, warming up would be a better term.

  Within the Chinese community, Weir’s spies had been instructed to warm to their Chinese occupiers, providing them with cooperative, if not overly enthusiastic service in support of the Chinese invasion.

  With carefully crafted instructions delivered to the spies only when needed, there had been many months with apparently no activity, on the surface at least. If one were to stand back and re-read all of the intelligence intercepts, cross-check them with local news in the dozen or so communities that were ultimately involved in the Allied offensive, and with 20-20 hindsight, the pattern might look obvious. But at the time, General Ma, and all of the Intelligence directorate that supported him, had no idea what was coming.

  The trouble was, he did not have any kind of understanding of the Australian sport of rugby, known as “Aussie Rules Football”.

  But ‘footie’ was at the core in General Adams’ inspiration. The idea was simple, to lull the enemy into a false sense of security, and to distribute ‘players’ across the field. Just as in Aussie Rules, players can position themselves at any place in the field and can contact the ball with any part of their body. In General Adams’ plan, therefore, war-fighting resources were to be strewn across the operational theatre, to be thrown into combat in a variety of unique ways. This would be in stark contrast to the set-piece manoeuver warfare practiced by conventio
nal armies – which was much more like Rugby or American Football, with well-understood procedures for ‘making yardage’ and ‘moving the ball down the field’. Aussie rules, in contrast, was all about freedom of movement, and considerably more physical contact – and without protective equipment. Put simply, the action would be a desperate, personally dangerous, unconventional and fast-paced sprint for the goal line.

  And thanks to Colonel Weir’s application of psychological warfare, and deep-selection of enemy commanders through assassination and other means, the enemy would be in a vulnerable position at just the right time.

  The first moves in the campaign had already taken place a week before, with engineers and mechanics having surreptitiously returned to the snow-bound line of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, fuel bowsers and engineering support equipment that had been carefully put to bed under snow-white tarps in the Mount Moffat Road area.

  There had been a company of maintainers there throughout the four-month period, camping in snow caves and keeping themselves out of sight. So that the batteries of each and every vehicle were still fully charged, the engines had been run for fifteen minute periods on and off for several hours each night and were kept silent during the daylight hours so that any PLA drone or surveillance aircraft would not detect any smoke or other sign of activity.

  The newly arrived engineers and technicians were needed to prepare the engineering support, earth-moving and other special equipment at the front of the column – and to operate it.

  Over the next 24 hours, as the excavators, bull-dozers and other equipment resumed the road-building operation, others came in after them to stretch out snow-cover camouflage so that every day, for the next week, any PLA surveillance would not notice that the column was being prepared to move forward.

  When the time came, eight days later, the road had been extended not just the five kilometers to Mount Moffat Road, but rather, fully thirty kilometers in an entirely other direction, to the north-east, and right into the hilly terrain of ridgeline between Expedition National Park and Carnarvon National Park. The first ten kilometers of this improvised road was through what should have been impassible terrain, and for that reason had been eliminated from the range of possibilities considered by the PLA analysts who had studied the potential lines of advance that the Australians might have been considering six months earlier. They had concluded that the Australians had intended to continue to the south-east, onto Mount Moffatt Road, which would carry them southward towards Roma.

  But with the help of local guides, former park rangers and others who knew the area very well, the Australian Army followed a path through the terrain and into the flatland of Nuga Nuga National Park, on the far side of the impassable ridge.

  Once in the Nuga - Nuga, road-building amounted to no more shoving the snow cover aside with a bull-dozer without stopping, with follow-on crews filling any low areas with hard-packed mix of snow and gravel. After that, water was sprayed to provide additional strength. One of the engineers commented that the operation reminded him of the ice-road construction done in the Canadian Arctic, building seasonal roads to service remote native communities and diamond mines.

  This Australian “ice road” would support the advancing Australian 3rd Armored Infantry Division’s Chinese pattern armor very well, as long as the temperature stayed cold, which it was, with frigid temperatures expected to continue for years to come.

  A battalion of Marines from the MAGTFA had the honor of leading the advance, at least to the end of the improvised road through the Nuga Nuga. They did not encounter a soul, which was perfectly fine with them. But when they reached the A7 highway, the Marines split off on their follow-on task directly to the north, for unfinished business with the 42nd Group Army in Emerald, one hundred and fifty kilometers to the north.

  The Australians, advancing at breakneck speed once they reached the tantalizingly clear pavement of Highway 60, moved in on the unsuspecting PLA garrison at Moura. Just as they arrived, Australian Special Forces and Green Panda agents sprang up out of the woodwork and interfered with the PLA battalion billeted there.

  And just like in Aussie Rules Footie, the ball moved swiftly onward towards the coast, not pausing or delaying, and brushed right through Moura and on to Biloela, within one hundred and twenty kilometers of the Port of Gladstone – the goal line – and the east coast.

  Colonel Weir’s contribution to the ensuing battle at Biloela had been immense. He had sent in two spies, with devastating effect. One man, a veterinarian, had been pressed into the service of the PLA, taking care of the livestock which the Chinese intended to use as seed-stock for a rapid expansion of the herds when the nuclear winter was over. The rest, over 90% of the livestock in the region, had been slaughtered and prepared for long-term food storage by the local population, under the control of the Occupation Authority. The Chinese relied heavily on the locals, who, for some reason, were far less troublesome than the locals down in Victoria and New South Wales.

  The veterinarian’s task during the Australian offensive had been simple. He did something he had done a thousand times before, only on a much larger scale, and with a different population in mind.

  In the past, before the war, one of his routine duties had been to attend to abattoirs and small slaughter houses where a particularly unruly species of long-horned cattle or other beasts had been acting up. The simple solution was to add a carefully calculated dose of Acepromazine, ACE. Normally used as a sedative to quiet and calm domesticated livestock, it was once used as an antipsychotic drug on humans. Normally administered by IV or intramuscular, it can also be given orally.

  The challenge was how to deliver it to the PLA soldiers? Depending on how much wound up in a soldier’s bloodstream, there could be acute side effects, such as phenothiazine-induced seizures. That was a risk that had to be taken, and even if the PLA medical community detected the ACE in the bloodstream of any of their personnel, the information would come too late. The soldiers will have been sedated in time to coincide with the Aussie Rules offensive.

  It was all about timing. With just a four-hour effect, he had to time the delivery just right. As a result, the vet had been given specific instructions as to timing. He had been told to watch for a signal, a small plume of smoke rising exactly due west of his home, which would give him 12 hours advance notice.

  The smoke signal had been coordinated with the Australian 3rd Division to coincide with their advance eastward out of the Nuga - Nuga. After that, the vet had eight hours to dump the 200 kilograms of powdered ACE he had prepared into the water-tank that served the town of Bilolea. With a brigade of PLA soldiers from the 371st Regiment all drawing their drinking water from the town’s water system there was a good chance that when the alarm is raised a good proportion of the soldiers would draw water for their canteens, drink a few liters, and begin to be affected by the ACE just in time for the fast-moving assault of the Australians.

  That a large number of local citizens of Biloela would also be affected could not be helped, as giving them any sort of warning risked tipping them off to the coming assault. The best the vet could do was to study up on what types of medications could counteract the effects of Acepromazine, particularly for anybody who went into a seizure. He intended to help mitigate the effects of what he had done, if I live to the end of the day, he thought.

  The other man dispatched by Colonel Weir to support the assault on Biloela was one of the Red Pandas who had been turned. The man was not entirely trusted; however he did seem to have the best interests of his former colleagues in the PLA in mind. Without giving him any details, Colonel Weir had sent the man onward to the Biloela lines with the Australian 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division. His orders had not been conveyed to him until the battle was about to begin. At that point he was given a motor-cycle and a radio tuned to the frequency being used by the PLA Brigade stationed in Biloela.

  His assignment was to ride out ahead of the advancing column of Australians, get close to the
PLA security forces there, and to transmit in Chinese his personal account of how he had been treated after being captured by the Marines during the battle for Mount Isa.

  The man proved to be loyal, both to the allies, who had given him a chance to save lives on both sides, and to his PLA countrymen whom he truly wanted to encourage to surrender.

  Just as the Chinese T-99A2 Main Battle tanks, Type 4 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, modeled after the Russian MBP-3, and armored personnel carriers of the Australian 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division rumbled into range of the men of the 2nd Brigade, 121st Regiment, 41st Group Army, the soldier-turned POW – turned agent, Wan Shanyu, began to transmit on the UHF radio.

  His message was simple: “Brothers, you do not want to fight. We have been lied to by the Generals. This invasion of Australia was a mistake. It was not about China. This is not something we Chinese want. It is madness, and China is being destroyed because of this. The allies are our friends, just as they were before the war. We just have to restore peace and all will be forgiven for China. Except for the Generals. They are the ones to blame. I call upon you to surrender, just as my unit did at Mount Isa. We were treated well, just as the Geneva Convention requires. And after the war we will be allowed to stay here and become citizens, or we will be given safe transport to China, to help with reconstruction. I am going home. I want to see my mama and my wife and my daughter. I want to help China put this madness behind us. Are you with me? Surrender now. Turn your weapons on your officers, or just lay them down. Do not fight. Brothers, you do not want to fight...” Wan continued the prepared text, transmitting continuously for the next thirty minutes, until the battle was over.

  And it ended as swiftly as it began. About a third of the 2nd Brigade’s men had imbibed enough of the ACE-laced water to feel the effects. These men were particularly susceptible to the idea of not lifting a finger. They also found no particular reason to take any action against their own officers, however. They just sat there, docile, like sleepy cattle.