Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  By the desperation and haste with which General Sheung’s men threw themselves into any seaworthy ship or serviceable aircraft in a panicked exodus to Chinese New Zealand, the Australians, Indians and Marines realized that victory was in their grasp, and were spurred on mop up the isolated and poorly coordinated units that remained – those who were too slow to flee Australia in time.

  It was as if the Chinese were preparing for a last stand in New Zealand, or perhaps they believe that they could hold out indefinitely, what with New Zealand having everything needed to support over 200,000 Chinese soldiers, perhaps another 300,000 ethnic Chinese civilians, and another million or less Kiwis that had survived the privations of the nuclear winter and the horrendous treatment at the hands of the occupying Chinese forces.

  In the two months after his return to Australia, Colonel Weir took care in the delivery of the two shocks he had to disclose to his wife, Cheryl. To do it in the right way, and in case he never saw her again after what he was about to do, he did the one thing that he had not done for her in over eight years – he took her on a vacation.

  It had not been difficult to negotiate with the High Command in Adelaide, as he had continued to operate as the one and only US Army Ranger in Australia - still operating as an autonomous, free agent, providing leadership, training and advice to the Australian Special Forces. So he did not have to go through as many hoops as his USMC colleagues in the MAGTF. All he had to do was say that he needed two weeks leave, and that he would report for the assigned duty, ready to engage, when his personal time had been completed. He did not even have to bring up the troubles he had been having with his health ever since his sternum had been impaled by Major Fang’s throwing knife.

  Always thinking several moves ahead, Peter Weir had selected a secluded, Five Star resort, the Thistle & Clarke Vineyard Hotel in the Barossa Valley, just a few hours drive north of Adelaide.

  Cheryl had been through so much over her time in Australia – not just the loss of their only child, Jacob, at the hands of that evil Chinese agent, but also the unending years of toil and sacrifice of a military wife during wartime, the constant dread that she would hear that she had lost her soul-mate, and would be all alone in this strange land.

  After a week enjoying the fine cuisine and extraordinarily good wines at the Thistle & Clarke Wineries, Peter had been working up the courage to break the news to her, and undoubtedly to break her, once again. But she beat him to it.

  “I know that look in your face, Pete. I can see your ears wiggling. You’re having one of those internal conversations with yourself, aren’t you?”

  He simply stared at her, unable to put words together.

  “Come on, out with it. It must be a big one, this time,” she said, and then burst out in tears when she saw the expression on his face drop.

  “You’re going away again, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, simply.

  “To New Zealand, right?”

  “You know I can’t say where,” he began, and then dropped the ‘Top Secret’ bullshit. “Yes, I’m leading a special task force of Aussies, going in to link up with a Maori unit. You know, Major Collins and the boys from 1 Commando and other SOCOMD units, and much of the MAGTFA. We’ll be the first to go in.”

  “You’ll be with Top Sergeant Rideout? Well, that’s a bit of a relief, that man always seems to have your back. I suppose Wendy will be staying behind, with the twins – at least I’ll have her to pester for information on the campaign,” she said, showing the strength and loyalty that Peter always appreciated, but never took for granted. Maybe now is not the time to tell her, he thought.

  “What else? You’re holding back something very bad, aren’t you? Another mission, I can take, even you’re going up against what everybody around here says is an impregnable Chinese force in New Zealand, I know you’ll do your sneaky-squirrel stuff and slip in and do whatever terrible things you do to make everybody so impressed with your ruthlessness, but to me you’re such a baby. Don’t be afraid that I’ll cry or something, just give it to me like a man,” she said, becoming increasingly pissed off at whatever bad news was about to come.

  But in her hostile tone, Peter saw that she was at the end of her rope, and would be devastated.

  “We are not going home,” he said.

  In the silence that ensued, while Cheryl’s face worked itself into a knot of confusion, Peter waited for her to fall apart, as he was certain that she would.

  “We? Do you mean you and the men? Not coming home from New Zealand? What, are you on a suicide mission or something?” she finally asked, her voice shaky at the thought of her husband going on a certain death. The thought terrified her, as she always saw Peter as some kind of military superman, always aware of – and mitigating – every conceivable danger. That was what had made him so effective in guiding the Australians as insurgents, screwing with the minds of Chinese commanders so effectively that in many cases the mere report that Colonel Weir was active in their sector would make them pull back and turtle until he moved on to another sector to harass – or murder – some other poor bastard Red Panda.

  “No. You and I. We’re not going home, I turned down a place for us on a grain ship leaving for the US.”

  “Home? You mean Darwin?....Or do you mean the smoking hole that was Lewis McChord? Or do you mean 75th Ranger Training Brigade?” she said, getting angry rather than afraid. “Cause from where I stand, Colonel, we have no home other than our latest PCS. And as far as I’m concerned, Australia is it. This is our last PCS – whether you come home on your feet or in a box – ‘cause we buried my baby here. I’m not leaving Jacob, and he’s buried up there near Ayers Rock. He died trying to be like you, Peter. He wanted to please you, to have you spend more time with him as a soldier than you ever did with him as a child,” she began to rant at him, throwing up years and years of missed baseball games, school performances, birthdays and late nights when Jacob’s asthma had Cheryl afraid she would lose her little boy.

  The reality of her son’s death the price she had paid for encouraging her husband’s career ambitions, was now making her regret ever thinking of aspiring to be general’s wife.

  Peter held her in his arms as her shouting became sobbing, the two grief-stricken parents brought back down into the black hole of their staggering loss.

  Parents should not outlive their children, and she’s right, I was never there for Jake. It’s my fault he tried to become a soldier, he just wanted to be closer to me, and now I’ve lost him. It’s all my fault, Peter began to cry as well, for the first time in decades, he cried with the deep roar that one is only capable of when fully opening up to the pain and letting out a primordial scream of agony.

  His cries were so deep and loud that Cheryl began to fear for his sanity, and could only hold him until it passed. It terrified her to see him this way, as though something awful had been released in him. She imagined that whatever it was that made him so ruthless when hunting and killing Chinese officers, his specialty, came from some dark place that now, for the first time in her experience, she was seeing a glimpse of. Only now, in his grief at having squandered his time with his son, he had turned his inner monster on himself. It was truly terrifying.

  Eventually the monster crept back into its cave deep inside him, and he became silent, spent, and wrecked.

  “There, there, Pete. I’m here. Jacob will always be with us, and we will always be with him. We are not leaving this place, Australia. Jacob has made this our home,” she said.

  “Cher, I’m not sure what just happened to me. Maybe I need to see a shrink,” Peter said, chagrined from the magnitude of his emotional outburst, and afraid for his own sanity. I should have killed Fang, the fucker, Weir thought, grasping for something other than Jake to focus on.

  “No, my love, you need to go to New Zealand and kill. Kill, and kill. Kill until there’s no more monster left in you, and you can no longer kill. Then come home to me, and we’ll visit Jacob, and then we�
�ll do what he would have wanted to do if he had lived through this insane war, we’ll leave the military and become farmers. Jacob would have liked that.”

  Feeling slightly stronger, and at peace, with the image of his young son riding a horse back at the stables in Sudden Valley, near JBLM, Colonel Peter Weir was beginning to feel that he was himself again, ready for the grim task of finding new and terrifying ways to hunt down and kill the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army. His stony expression told Cheryl that he would once again channel that inner monster to a terrible, but necessary purpose, and she wondered if this time he might not go too far over the line, and no longer be the man she knew when he returned - or if he would return at all. But then, a few simple words came out of Peter’s mouth that were enough to give her hope that her man would return intact, ready to give up killing, and ready to embrace the pastoral life that could have been, for Jake.

  “Yes, Cher, he would have. Yes, he would.”

  Down at the dedicated grain berth pier in Adelaide’s inner harbour, the USA bound dry bulk carrier that Colonel Weir had been offered a berth on was in the final stages of buttoning up the massive hatches, sealing up over fifty thousand deadweight tons of Durum Wheat, the first Supramax-sized grain shipment to leave Adelaide in over eight years.

  But that was not the only cargo on MV Thor Insuvi. A one-time Singaporean operated bulk dry cargo ship, manufactured at Tsuneishi Heavy Industries in the Philippines, had been idle ever since it had been liberated from Chinese control by the Australian navy, its former cargo offloaded back into the very grain terminal from which it had been loaded just weeks before the war broke out – providing much needed food to South Australia during the long, cold, nuclear winter.

  With food production having risen above the sustenance level, and grain silos from Perth to Adelaide now brimming full, Australia was back in the commodities export game.

  In large part as a thank you to the contribution made to the defense and liberation of Australia by the Marine Air Ground Task Force Australia, the Australian government had offered the first grain shipment as a gift to the still struggling United States. With the American agricultural sector still struggling to produce meaningful quantities, what with the contamination of so much of the Midwest and the much more persistent continental snow-cover in the United States, food was still scarce. It would still be another year or longer before the US grain production could begin to meet the needs of the thirty million survivors in the United States.

  With a crew of twenty five and additional quarters for a dozen or more passengers, the ship provided a rare opportunity for transport across the enormity of the Pacific Ocean. There had been over a hundred worthy applicants for passage, so the ship’s crew agreed to improvise additional berths in suitable spaces throughout the ship, and to double-up most of the larger quarters, generating fifty additional spaces. More than that would have interfered with the safe management of the ship, which took priority over the opportunity to transport people to the United States.

  Of the applicants, the majority were expatriate Americans or Europeans who had been displaced in Australia or Asia when the war had begun, and were looking for a way to get home. There were a few diplomats and businessmen, and two dozen military personnel and their dependants. Of these, three were Marines from MAGTFA – two who were convalescing, recovering from serious wounds, one a double-amputee and the other having lost an eye. The two combat veterans were the only Marines willing to leave the Australian AOR. They had agreed to return to America, having accepted that their ability to contribute to the cause had come to an end, but they were not happy to be leaving. There was still work to be done, for the Marines, and nobody wanted to leave their brothers – their bonds were stronger than ever after the long campaign to defeat China in Australia.

  The Marines, once of the 3rd Marines, were now more strongly connected with Australia than with Okinawa or Hawaii. Many had taken Australian wives; all having buried countless friends in Australian soil. So when OPERATION WHUCKEREWREWA had been announced, to a man the Marines had clamoured for the opportunity to be part of the first wave to go ashore, to finish what they had begun in Darwin. And, somehow, the infusion of Australian soldiers into their ranks – as replacements into the original Brigade Group that constituted the MAGTFA when the war had begun, and later as additional battalions of Australians that were stood up as ‘Australian Marines’ to bring the MAGTFA to Divisional strength – had infected the once purely American unit with an unusual blend of Marine Corps pride and ANZAC traditions. So it was natural for Combined Joint Task Force New Zealand to see the liberation of the “NZ” portion of the “Australia and New Zealand Army Corps” tradition to be unfinished business that was profoundly important to the original MAGTFA Marines as it was to the native Australians and New Zealanders who were force-generated for the operation.

  The operation had been named “Whuckerewarewa” in honour of the men, women, and children who had been massacred by the Chinese forces when their community of Rotarua, on New Zealand’s North Island, had been wiped out by the PLA in reprisal for their having given material support to the Maori “terrorists” who had been so effective at conducting guerrilla warfare against their Chinese occupiers.

  And then there was one very unhappy Marine, along with his wife, who had been ordered to return to the United States. Despite the loss of international telecommunications, satellites, and other means of communicating, the USMC had not forgotten about Major Robert Blakely. They had been forced by the doctrine of personnel administration to hold him back, and not promote him to Lieutenant Colonel, and with good reason. Due to the nature of his PCS to Darwin as a Liaison officer, and his lack of the conventional Professional Development credits that he would have chipped away at if he were back in garrison in the US, he was not technically eligible for promotion. To do so would have required reassigning him out of his LnO function, and throughout the campaign in Australia Major Robert Blakely had proven himself invaluable as the conduit for all military coordination between the Australian military and the MAGTFA.

  His deep understanding of Special Operations, along with his study of the Chinese order of battle before the war had even begun, had been instrumental in the successful cooperation between the normally self-contained Marine Air Task Force construct and the Australian Army.

  The very survival of the Australian Army as a fighting force, reeling from the devastation of the opening months of the war, when fully 80% of Australia’s fighting force had been obliterated, was due to the heavy load that the Marines took over from the Australians, and the shocking setbacks that they inflicted on the PLA. This had given Australia time to reconstitute a viable force, which by the end of the eight-year campaign had swelled to a half million fighting men and women, fully two Group Armies comprised of 7 Divisions.

  And throughout the campaign, Joe Blakely had provided subject matter expertise to the Australians, on everything from accelerated training, based in large part on what he had learned as a young Captain while training USMC recruits at Paris Island. And teaching them the structure, tactics, and the very mindset of the enemy.

  His expertise on the Chinese military had only grown, as he mastered Cantonese so as to be more effective when debriefing Brown Pandas, when extracting information from Red Panda deserters, and when examining captured documents from over-run Chinese command posts.

  And this was what had been of greatest interest to the USMC. They had identified Blakely as the most competent expert the Marines had on the Chinese military, and the USMC – the United States in fact – had pressing need for his expertise. Their intent was to extract Blakely from the Australian AOR, debrief him and then shape him into a policy wonk, an “S5 Planner”, to plan and then to deploy so as to help adjust the plan in execution, for “OPERATION MARINE SEOUL HAILSTORM” – OPERATION MASH.

  The audacious plan was to send Combined Joint Task Force Korea to the unforgiving, mountainous terrain of Chinese-occupied Korea, landing
at a half-dozen locations along Korea’s east coast, in places like Gangneung, Yangyan and Donghae, and then piercing through the Chinese units along Highway-50, to liberate Seoul. If all went well, the concept of ops was to then repeat what had been accomplished by the allied force in the 1950’s, the British, Australian, Canadian armies, supported by the US Navy warships and aircraft, by US Air Force Bombers, and, leading the charge at places like Chosin Reservoir, the United States Marine Corps. Korea – where the Chinese had swarmed over the border like so many cockroaches, more numerous than the allies had bullets. The place where the world had come so close to nuclear war, and where the US Marine Corps had first come into combat against the Chinese 42nd Group Army. Known then as the42nd PVA, it was the very unit that spearheaded the Chinese invasion of Australia; the unit whose commander, General Leung, had escaped to New Zealand. And the Marines had decided, he would be dealt with soon, by OPERATION WHUCKEREWREWA, where the Marines would finally close the history books on the 42nd Group Army.

  As for bringing the fight all the way to the enemy’s doorstep, to bring the Winter Kill War to an unequivocal end, Korea must also be liberated before China would ultimately be forced to submit to the final reckoning. But for OPEARTION MASH to be mounted swiftly, and with the best chances for success, Major Blakely’s expertise was needed back home.

  He had no choice.