Returning to the radar room, John opened the door to find a woman holding a gun to the Air Traffic Manager’s head. As his eyes scanned the room, he saw that all of the women visitors had pistols drawn and some of them were arming the men in uniform, as well. “If I could please have everyone’s attention,” the uniformed Chinese officer was saying in a loud voice. “You are now open under new management. I require nothing more from you than to continue to do your jobs. Please know that the men and women around you are experienced air traffic controllers, who know your procedures. Anyone who tries to give out warnings over the radio will be shot. Anyone that doesn’t do what they’re told, will be shot. Please just continue to do your job, like you normally would and you will all be released unharmed at the end of your shift. I give you my word on...”
He stopped suddenly he saw the open door and John standing in the doorway. Reacting instantly with combat-trained reflexes, John dove back out of the door and started running up the corridor. He heard the door slam open behind him as someone came after him in pursuit.
John ran around the corner and stopped at the bathroom. He had never understood why it needed a cipher lock, since they were already behind cipher-locked doors (was someone worried about him taking a classified bowel movement?), but he thought that he could use it to his advantage. He quickly worked the combination and slipped inside; unfortunately, a Chinese woman came around the corner as he was shutting the door.
He knew he’d been seen and that he didn’t have much time. He pulled out his phone and turned it on. The phone’s boot-up seemed to take forever as the woman began beating on the door. As the phone finally reached the “ready” screen, it became ominously quiet outside. As he dialed his friend’s number, a hole appeared in the lock mechanism and he heard a bullet ricochet past him. “Damn,” he thought, “they must have silencers.” He had hoped for gunshots, in order to attract the attention of the guard downstairs. Fuck; no luck there.
A second and third hole appeared as the phone finally dialed. There was a pause from outside the door as the line connected, followed by a slam as the woman kicked the door for all she was worth. John could tell that the door wouldn’t take more than one or two more blows before it gave. Finally, he heard “Hello?” It was the best word he’d ever heard in his life.
“Ryan,” he said, “it’s John.” The door slammed again and then gave the rest of the way. She was through. The way she moved and the ease with which she had defeated the door told him the woman was a professional. “We need your help. The Chinese are at the facility and we’ve been taken over…” Anything else he might have said would remain unspoken, except for a brief grunt, as the woman fired three shots, two to his chest and one to his forehead.
She picked up the phone. “Honey,” she said in a voice she knew would be heard on the other end, “you’re drunk. Quit fooling around and come back to bed.” She purred. “That’s better…”
She ended the call before the person on the other end could ask any questions. Placing it on the floor, she focused for a second before using her best Bak Mei martial arts stomp kick to smash it into hundreds of tiny, and very inoperable, pieces.
Pier D, Naval Base Kitsap, WA, 1345 Pacific Daylight Time
The party was in full swing in the Officer’s Mess onboard the PLAN amphibious assault ship Long. The Mess was a large dining room where the ship’s officers normally ate their meals; for the evening’s festivities, all of the tables had been moved to the perimeter or removed to create enough space for all of the attendees.
All of the American guests had arrived between 1300 and 1315, as requested, except for Governor Shelby and his wife. Typical American politician, thought Admiral Zhao Na; the governor had to be late, just to show he could. This delay had been planned for though, and even expected based on the admiral’s experience with American politicians, so everything was well within tolerances when the governor showed up at 1330. In attendance were the staff of Navy Region, Northwest, the Commanding Officer of Naval Base Kitsap, Senator George Shelby, Representative Matt Bennett and all of their spouses. The only person who didn’t make it was the Executive Officer of Naval Base Kitsap, who had a fever of 102 degrees and had stayed home in bed.
Admiral Zhao tapped a spoon to his glass to get everyone’s attention. A large man, both tall and stout, he also had a loud voice that he used to get everyone’s attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Dragon, which is what the Long means in our language. Thank you very much for coming to our party. My officers and I are very happy that you were able to make it here this afternoon. As many of you know, the Long is the newest ship in our Navy and one that we are very proud of. I’m sure that there has been a lot of discussion in the United States about what the capabilities of this ship truly are; in fact, I’ve had many people ask me this evening about different aspects of its ability to project power ashore. Well, I’m happy to tell you that our senior military council has authorized me to give you a demonstration of some of this ship’s capabilities.” Admiral Barnaby looked at his Intelligence Officer, Captain Jim Spence, raising his eyebrows in anticipation. Admiral Zhao continued, “If you will all follow me topside, I think you will find this demonstration very exciting.”
He walked out of the Mess and led all of the guests up the three flights of steps to the back end of the flight deck. On the forward half of the flight deck, there were four Z-10 attack helicopters and two Z-8 heavy transport helicopters with their rotors already spinning. As the guests watched, 70 troops with full combat gear and rifles came running out of the ship’s superstructure and sprinted to the waiting Z-8 helicopters, which lifted off and flew away to the north. Seconds later, the four Z-10 helicopters also lifted off, headed toward the northwest. As the noise of the rotors faded into the distance, the guests could hear a new noise of motors coming from the aft end of the ship. Walking to the back end of the flight deck, the guests were surprised to look down and see that the stern of the ship had been lowered, but not as surprised as when four landing craft, each loaded with a tank, came shooting out of the well deck. The landing craft were followed by six additional Type 63A tanks that came swimming out of the well deck. Three of them turned to the left while the other three turned to the right.
Coming ashore near Wycoff Way, the three tanks that went to the left turned around and pointed their guns at the submarines that were nested together to the east of Pier B. The three that went right also came ashore near Wycoff Way and turned and pointed their guns at the aircraft carriers tied up to the piers.
As the tanks were coming to a halt, armed men began spilling down the gangway toward the pier, while more armed men began issuing forth from the ship’s superstructure and running toward the group at the stern of the ship.
“This is all very impressive,” said Admiral Barnaby, “but where are those helicopters going?”
Admiral Zhao smiled. “They are going to capture the nuclear weapons storage facility at Bangor and sink all of the submarines there. After all of the planning and practice they’ve put into this, it should be quite exciting for them to actually get to do it for real.”
“You’re joking!” Admiral Barnaby gasped, “You can’t be serious! That is an act of war!
“Of course it is an act of war,” said Admiral Zhao, looking at his watch. “It is now 1410 and we have been at war for 10 minutes already.” He looked around at the soldiers surrounding the Americans, with weapons drawn and laughed. “It would seem that, so far, you are losing quite badly.”
He addressed the Lieutenant leading the troops. “I believe our guests have had enough fresh air for now. Take them below to their new quarters.” He looked back to Admiral Barnaby. “These men have been ordered to shoot you the first time you look like you are going to do something stupid. You don’t even have to do it; you just have to look like you’re contemplating it. Don’t test them. Just go where they direct you, relax, and you will live to see your families again. If you do otherwise, you will die.”
/> Terminal 91, Port of Seattle, Seattle, WA, 1350 Pacific Daylight Time
Major Chin Haung stood at the side rail of the China Navigation Company’s M.V. Erawan bulk freighter and looked down the length of the pier at Terminal 91. The pier was crowded, with both the freighter Erawan and the car carrier Xin Qing Dao on the west side of the pier, while the Holland Cruise Line ship M.V. Oosterdam waited to leave from the east side of the pier. Neither of the two Chinese ships had cleared Customs yet. The massive car carrier Xin Qing Dao had pulled in first and hadn’t had any problems getting tied up, but had been having problems ever since trying to get the gangway mounted and secured to allow the Customs inspector aboard. Major Chin could see the Customs agent on the pier with a briefcase (full of the interminable Americans’ forms, no doubt), looking more and more annoyed all the time.
Appearing to give up on the Xin Qing Dao, he started walking down the pier to the Erawan, frowning slightly as he looked up and saw the rotors on the helicopter at the front of the ship start to turn. Waving his hands as he started running toward the gangway onto the Erawan, he started yelling, “You can’t do that! You haven’t cleared Customs yet!”
Major Chin moved to intercept him at the end of the gangway and, as the Customs agent ran aboard, still yelling, he grabbed him by the front of his shirt and jerked him out of sight and slammed him into a wall, stunning him. Moving forward, he shoved his QSZ-92 service pistol under the Customs agent’s chin. “What were you saying we couldn’t do?” he asked.
The agent’s eyes grew large in shock and fear. “I…um…you can’t…um…not cleared Customs…” he mumbled.
Major Chin waved the five Special Forces soldiers forward that had been standing out of sight. “Go!” he said. Dressed in merchant marine sailors’ clothes, they walked off the ship as if they had every right to be doing so. They did not appear to be armed and they weren’t…aside from the knives they had in scabbards up their sleeves.
“Take this man and put him in the brig,” the Major said to the soldiers that were waiting there for that purpose. Having turned the Customs agent over to the soldiers, Major Chin immediately forgot about him and went back to the rail to watch the progress of his troops. As planned, they fanned out and proceeded down the pier, stopping in the vicinity of the five security guards at the end of the pier. When they were all in position, he gave them a simple command of “Go” over the radio, which they heard through their ear buds. Within seconds, all five members of the port security were down, with the soldiers assuming their positions.
Looking at the men assembled behind him, he said, “We have bowed before the Americans for too long. Now is our time for revenge. Attack!” The wave of men rushed forward.
Softball Fields, Everett Naval Station, WA, 1355 Pacific Daylight Time
“This is almost too much fun,” Commander Gao Qiang said to his operations officer as he watched the softball game on the western field. The Executive Officer of Kunming had just returned from the other game and knew that both of his teams were winning their games with only another couple of innings to play.
“Yes, sir,” replied Lieutenant Commander Wong Chao, the operations officer. “I will almost be sorry to have to leave and miss the ending.”
On the eastern of the two fields, the Chinese “B” team was easily handling the team from the USS Ford, and was ahead 17-5. He didn’t expect the score would get any closer, as several members of the Ford team were visibly intoxicated. On the western field, though, the game was very much in doubt, with the Chinese only ahead by a run, with the score 8-7. The two college baseball players on the USS Shoup team continued to make a difference; their leadership and the instructions they were giving their teammates were both paying dividends. With two more innings to play, the Americans might very well come back and win, as both of their marquis players had already hit home runs in the game and would be coming up to bat again at least one more time.
LT Espinosa had actually hit four balls over the fence, but two of them had been just foul (including another ball that hit the façade of the barracks, although it missed the windows, this time). In an effort to reduce his effectiveness, the Kunming’s pitcher had started throwing LT Espinosa pitches that were on the very outside portion of the plate so that he couldn’t pull them. LT Espinosa had retaliated by switching sides of the plate after two pitches in his last at bat. The pitcher, who had never seen this done before, was caught unaware and threw the same pitch (which was now an inside pitch) to LT Espinosa, who crushed it into the play yard of the day care center on the other side of the right field fence. The line drive was going so fast that it would surely have killed a young child if it had hit one; fortunately, it was Sunday afternoon and there were no children in the yard.
As he watched the game on the western field, Commander Gao silently agreed with his operations officer; it would have been nice to watch the last couple of innings of the “A” game. Looking at his watch as his cell phone buzzed, though, he saw that time had run out. It was nice that Everett was over 15 miles away from downtown Seattle, he thought, so that they could still use cell phones on the base. And, Commander Gao thought, although they might very well have been bugged, it was nice of the Americans to give the phones to the Chinese to coordinate their attack plans. The phone call was from his commanding officer, who had gone back to the ship 30 minutes previously. The captain said, “We need you back at the ship,” giving him the code phrase. “I’m on my way,” he replied. As he looked at the field, he saw that the teams were changing sides. Commander Gao waved to the Chinese stands. “Let’s go get a beer while they change sides,” he said in English.
About 40 men joined him in walking over to the U-Haul, which was turned so that no one could see the men removing the fake wall in the interior that hid the racks of Chinese assault rifles.
Naval Station Bangor, WA, 1358 Pacific Daylight Time
The four Z-10 Fierce Thunderbolt attack helicopters swept in on the unsuspecting submarine base from the south. Each of the helicopters mounted a 25mm M242 Bushmaster chain gun that the Chinese had reverse-engineered and adapted for helicopter use. Developed to defeat the frontal armor of Western tanks, the auto-cannons on the helicopters chewed into the submarines that were in port as they flew up the coast, stopping at every pier to destroy the submarine tied up there. They spent extra time on the submarine in the dry dock at the Delta Pier, as it would be the easiest to repair since it was out of the water. Not only did they shred it with their chain guns, they also fired two HJ-10 anti-tank missiles at it that exploded and left immense holes in its side. Similar to the U.S. AGM-114 Hellfire missile, these missiles were equipped with high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) warheads to defeat modern tank armor; they were equally effective on the hull of a submarine. The helicopters swept past, leaving the shredded submarines behind them.
Having completed the easiest part of their mission, they now turned back to the south toward a building standing by itself in the middle of a huge pock-marked field. Just as Fort Knox was once the repository for America’s gold reserves, Bangor was the repository for nearly one-quarter of America's nearly 10,000 nuclear weapons and the pockmarks in the field each represented a storage silo for a nuclear weapon. This made it the largest nuclear weapons storehouse in the United States, and possibly the world. Over 2,300 nuclear warheads were housed at Bangor for the Trident ballistic missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles carried by its submarines. While the overwhelming majority of these were the 100 kiloton yield W76 warheads for the Trident II missiles in use on the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, there were also 264 W88 warheads at the facility. The W88 was the most sophisticated weapon in the U.S. nuclear stockpile, with a yield of about 475 kilotons, nearly thirty times greater than the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.
As the Z-10 helicopters came to a hover around the building, the two Z-8 helicopters approached from the south. They landed close by and began to spill out troops on both sides. Rather than go with finesse, the lead helicopter
positioned itself in front of the building’s door. The troops stayed back as the Bushmaster on its nose started to spin and then fired 20 rounds through the door, ripping it from its hinges and killing two sailors stationed behind it. “We’re in,” said the leader of the ground forces over his tactical radio, as the troops began to pour into the building.
Beijing, China, 0459 China Standard Time (1359 Pacific Daylight Time)
Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Huang Mong cracked his knuckles and grinned in anticipation. LTC Huang was the Brigade Commander for the 1st Hacker’s Brigade, a clandestine arm of the People’s Liberation Army, which was tasked with probing and penetrating enemies’ computer networks during peacetime, in preparation for assaulting them during war. A veteran of over 20 years of computer hacking, he was looking forward to the crowning achievement of his life—the complete shutdown of the internet and the paralyzation of the United States of America.
He and the men and women under him had been probing the cyber defenses of the United States for many years and had established a presence in a huge number of computers throughout the U.S., both military and civilian. It was laughable how lax their computer security was, he thought. By simply typing in a wife’s name or child’s birthday (both of which were easily accessible on Facebook or other social media sites), you could easily break many peoples’ passwords and, once into one system, you were then able to breach many other systems connected to them, as well.
That was how he had gained access into the power distribution giant Entergy and had shut down the lights during Super Bowl XLVII. He had originally planned to turn off the lights of the Louisiana Superdome right at the start of the game, but somebody had noticed his original backdoor into the system and had closed it on him the day prior. Nearly 24 hours of constant work by his team had gotten them close at the start of the game, but it wasn’t until just after halftime that they had finally achieved access back into the system. Even then, once they had started turning off the power to the Superdome, someone had quickly noticed their attack and had knocked them back out of the system, so they had only been able to turn off half of the power to the stadium. Huang appreciated the efforts of that unknown anti-hacker that had kicked his team back out of the system (even if he was chastised for allowing it to happen) and had made a copy of what had happened that he had used to prepare for today’s attack.
Red Tide: The Chinese Invasion of Seattle (Occupied Seattle Book 1) Page 9
