by Chuck DeVore
At the east end of the runway towards a couple of bridges over the Keelung Ho river, Alexander saw a green star cluster arc up and lazily separate into several green balls of fire. His scouts had just sent the signal that an enemy force was crossing the river some two kilometers from his tank. Alexander couldn’t see anything moving on Sun Yat-Sen Freeway bridge to the east. They must be coming down Pingchiang Street bridge, he thought, at six kilometers per hour I should see them in ten minutes. Dan didn’t know why he expected the Chinese to move at the doctrinal rate of march for movement in the enemy rear, but, without a lot of information, he had to make some basic assumptions. As he sat thinking about the enemy’s sophisticated used of reconnaissance drones and what exactly the downed drone may have seen and transmitted back to its controllers before being shot down, another green star cluster rose up, this time unexpectedly from the north. A two-pronged attack from the north and east. He slouched a little lower in the turret. Alexander keyed the tank’s intercom, “Keep your eyes peeled for more aircraft Jones,” he reminded his nervous young loader. Machine gun fire erupted from rooftops to the tank’s front (east) and left (north). Alexander caught movement out of the corner of his eye—one of his scout Humvees zipped onto the runway from behind the low-lying hangar buildings to the north and sped towards Traveller. Dan wished he had some working radios, but, only the sets in the tank appeared to work, and those only marginally (his crew confirmed that both of the tank’s two radios could talk to each other, but further experiments were overtaken by other, more important activities, such as boresighting the tank and digging in).
Given the pace of the scout Humvee Alexander figured there must be something in hot pursuit. He grabbed the TC’s turret yoke and slued the turret to the left. A vehicle appeared between two buildings. From the front it looked like any one of a thousand different armored personnel carriers (APCs) with a sloped front, a small turret and wheels. It was only 300 meters away.
“Jones, get below and button up. You may have work to do in a second.”
The private first class vanished and shut the hatch behind him like a prairie dog diving for cover from a hawk. Alexander was alone up top. He visually inspected his .50 caliber machine gun, then swung it around to face the nearby intruder.
He saw muzzle flashes on the turret of the APC then heard the unmistakable whooshing sound of small arms fire clearing his head by a few feet. Alexander ducked below the line of the turret and fairly screamed into his CVC mike, “Gunner! Sabot! APC! Fire!” Heavy machine gun slugs splatted against and ricocheted off the turret.
Staff Sergeant Peña had already laid the gun and lased the target (at 300 meters you had to try to miss).
As the colonel finished yelling “fire” Peña barked, “On the way!” the tank rocked slightly, the breach of the 105mm gun slammed back and ejected a large, steaming brass shell casing. The shell casing slammed against the ammo blast door with a clang. Some 300 meters away, at the same instant the casing struck the door, the enemy APC was struck by a two-foot long dart of depleted uranium traveling a mile a second. The dart easily penetrated the APC’s armor (Alexander could have killed the APC with his machine gun, but hindsight is 20-20). The super dense dart pushed aside 14 millimeters of rolled steel, vaporizing the metal in close proximity to it as well as a small amount of metal from its tip. Once the incandescent steel and uranium hit the open air of the crew compartment it oxidized, combusting everything in the APC at a temperature not too much cooler than the surface of the Sun. This inferno only lasted for the briefest of instants as the pressure in the vehicle surged, then plummeted as the sabot round traveled about 15 feet to the back of the APC and exited, creating a tremendous vacuum in its wake that sucked out much of the carbonized members of the crew. All that remained of the crew was three sets of charred boots if anyone cared to look inside after the burning hull cooled down. As the sound of the exploding APC reached the tank the shell casing hit the floor of the turret and clanged around noisily, ending up next to Peña and almost burning his left arm.
Peña pushed the shell away from his arm and glared at Jones, yelling above the din without using his CVC mike, “Aye! Jones, get that chingadera down you fricken idiot!” Peña jerked his left thumb over his shoulder.
Red-faced at forgetting to deploy the heavy cloth backstop that absorbed the initial energy of an ejecting round and kept it from bouncing around the inside of the tank, Jones moved to untie it.
Alexander would have preferred engaging the APC with a HEAT (High Explosive, Anti-Tank) round but common practice was to always have a more powerful armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot-tracer (sabot, for short) round in the breach and ready to go. Using a depleted uranium “Staballoy” sabot round against an APC was a waste and if the round hit a non-vulnerable spot, it might have passed harmlessly through the vehicle.
Jones tugged at one of the backstop’s straps when Alexander saw movement to the right. He swung the turret to the right and lined up the gun with the target. This time he yelled with a little less urgency and a little more professionalism, “Gunner! HEAT! APC!”
This APC was almost a mile away at the end of the runway to the east. Peña lased the target with the AN/GVS-5 laser rangefinder. The tank’s computer took the information from the laser and calculated the distance to the target. Other information was automatically fed into the computer and calculated as well: wind speed, direction and air density, the type of round and its trajectory, and the droop of the gun barrel due to repeated firings and or temperature. The tank did all this for its crew in less than a second, adjusting the barrel’s elevation so that the round would impact within a few inches of where Sergeant Peña put the reticle.
Jones stopped what he was doing and smashed his right knee against the ammo compartment blast door knee switch. The door slid open, revealing almost half of the 50 rounds that were stored in the back of the M1’s turret. Jones selected a HEAT round. He grabbed it by its base with his left hand, pulled it out, and flipped it over in one smooth motion, ramming the 40 pound round home up the breech and fluidly following through to avoid being caught by the quickly closing breechblock. Jones yelled, “Up!” and his knee came off of the knee switch, causing the door to slide shut in a second. It sounded like a vault door closing. It would easily sever a careless finger or hand left in its path.
Alexander was already scanning for his next target when he said, “Fire!”
Peña said, “On the way!”
The HEAT round burst out of the gun tube and arced towards its target (HEAT rounds are much slower and heavier than sabot rounds). The HEAT round’s spike and switch assembly (about a six inch long probe) struck the APC’s sloped hull. This initiated an explosion in the conically shaped main charge. The explosion heated and compressed the charge’s metal liner, forming a jet of metal moving at about 24 times the speed of sound. This round too was overkill for an APC’s modest armor. The three crew members and anything else capable of being oxidized began to burn violently in less than a blink of an eye.
The 105mm shell casing bounced crazily around the crew compartment. Peña roared at Jones, “Shithead, I’m going to kill you!”
Jones reached for the dampener and finally untied it. It rolled down like a scroll and hung limp, ready to receive and temper the next blow from an ejecting shell casing.
Alexander again saw movement, this time to the left. As his chest was exposed to the battlefield (nametag defilade as tankers call it), he slammed the hatch down over his head just as he saw the backblast of an anti-tank guided missile taking off, no doubt headed for Traveller.
The operator of the wire guided missile with a large HEAT warhead barely had time to stabilize the missile’s flight path and guide it to the target. The missile flew high and detonated against the wall of the terminal building 500 meters to the tank’s rear.
Feeling calmer and more confident, Alexander decided to personally engage the thin-skinned APC that had just fired upon him and his crew. He telescope
d the commander’s hatch up a few inches to the “open protected” position and peered out of the crack. He lined his .50 caliber machine gun up to the target using one hand to spin the .50 cal around from the safety of inside the tank. Using a hand dial, he lowered the machine gun’s elevation and pulled the dial. The heavy machine gun rewarded him with a steady beat of four rounds per second. He fired low and to the right. One slight adjustment and his rounds hit home. Many of the half-inch thick rounds penetrated the armor, wounding the driver and killing the TC. The incendiary rounds soon set the APC smoldering. Flames soon began to shoot out of the vehicle, resting not ten feet from its still burning cousin. Alexander clenched his jaw, there, that made up for the wasted sabot round.
He looked around for another target. He looked into his tank’s thermal imaging system (TIS) tube picture tube and started scanning at three-power. There, what’s that, just to the left of the burning APC at the end of the runway just beneath the lip of the apron? Alexander flipped the TIS to ten-power and looked again. The smooth arc of a turret top, its outline broken by its heavy machine gun mount, revealed itself as white hot against a cooler black background in the super heat sensitive scope. The TIS’ incessantly chattering cooling system coursed liquid nitrogen through its veins to cool its sensors and optics. It could detect temperature differences of less than one degree Fahrenheit. Just as he was confirming his suspicions about an enemy tank trying to creep up to a hull down position (a position from which the tank’s hull is protected, usually by terrain, and only its turret shows—making for a very small target), Alexander saw the heat signatures of two more tanks roll up to the right. “Gunner, sabot, three tanks, left tank first!” the colonel called.
Jones clicked open the blast door, grabbed one round and slammed it home. He clicked his mike on and said, “Up!” The blast door closed.
Alexander said, “Fire!”
Peña lased, called, “On the way!” and squeezed the trigger.
Knowing there were other tanks out there, as soon as Peña fired, Jones opened the blast door and reloaded, saying, “Up!”
The crew was calming down and moving towards a deadly efficiency. Training and adrenaline began to grip the four men. After 90 seconds of combat, the American tankers had fired their main gun eight times and used the .50 caliber once. Three Chinese tanks and five APCs lay burning as testimony to the Americans’ speed and accuracy. Other than some scratched paint from a few machine gun rounds, the M1 was untouched.
* * *
The mood in the Situation Room was somber. CNN had just broadcast to the world images of an American tank utterly destroying several Chinese armored vehicles. The speed and violence of the action was overwhelming. The room was silent. When the phone rang, several people, including the President, jumped. Someone handed the phone to Lindley, whispering in the key advisor’s ear as he did so.
“Mr. President, it’s Han Wudi, the President of China on the line. He has an interpreter.” The President nodded to Lindley and pointed at the speaker box.
Someone turned down the TV. CNN had lost the live signal from Taiwan and was now playing the recent military footage over again.
An angry Chinese voice came over the speaker box. Donna listened carefully, understanding every word. The Chairman of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China was talking down to the leader of the free world. This is not a good sign, Donna thought.
The translator began, “I demand that American forces illegally on sovereign Chinese soil immediately surrender. Anything less is unacceptable. Do you understand?”
The President was silent. His gaze shifted from the speaker box to the war scenes on TV. The M1, Old Glory snapping in the breeze above the tank, dispatched another enemy tank in the third repeat of the 90-second segment.
More angry words spat forth from the box. Donna’s eyebrows arched. Chairman Han was in a rage. The translator enthusiastically intoned, “China demands the immediate unconditional surrender of American forces illegally interfering in our domestic affairs. You will pay a stiff price for continued resistance!”
The President heard his Chinese counterpart. As the savvy leader of a democratic republic, he knew that he faced a far greater menace than an incensed Chinese dictator: the American public. Were he to order a surrender now after the images on CNN of the American tank victoriously destroying Chinese armor, he’d be run out of office and his hand-picked successor defeated at the polls in half a year. “Mr. President,” he said slowly to the Chinese leader, “Let me get back to you on that.” And very deliberately, he hung up the phone.
Bob Lindley’s eyes were as round as saucers.
Donna smiled approvingly from behind her clasped hands.
Ten minutes later the first focus group results came in followed quickly by the White House polling unit’s InstaPoll numbers: the American people strongly supported military action against China by 73% to 19% with 8% undecided. Donna shook her head. I wonder what the numbers would have been if the American tank was destroyed on the first shot?
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Dan Alexander did a quick 360-degree scan using the TIS on three-power. He scanned again using his eyes from under the safety of the commander’s hatch. Nothing was visible except the burning hulks of his enemy. “Jones, cross-level some ammo ASAP! I’m going to have a quick look around.”
Alexander pulled his hatch down to the locking position then swung it open on its thick hinge.
The loader immediately got to work taking rounds from the ammo compartment behind the gunner (where they were very hard to get to in combat) and transferring them to the compartment he just took the six rounds from a couple of minutes before.
Alexander hopped off the tank and swept his gaze from building to building, looking for any of his Task Force Grizzly soldiers. He saw the news reporter’s small satellite communications unit with its stubby omnidirectional antenna still on the ground near his tank. The tanker saw a patch of color next to a Boeing 737 landing gear assembly—there they are. He walked towards a small jet aircraft that was parked on the taxiway about 50 meters away. “You guys all right?”
Edward Wong stepped out from behind the jet’s landing gear, “Yes. I believe we are. Is it safe?”
Alexander seemed strangely calmed by the recent action, “No, I expect we just destroyed their forward security element. In a few minutes I would expect many, many more—and artillery. You should find overhead cover right now. You won’t last two seconds out here when the artillery starts falling.”
“Thank you. We will seek shelter. What will you do?”
“Keep fighting, stay alive. I have nowhere else to go. Any help or evacuation will come through this airport.” Alexander paused, “Are you still filming?”
“Yes, we are remoting our signal to the commo box. My cameraman says we just reestablished our connection, although I still can’t hear CNN headquarters.” The reporter, realizing he had fallen out of character during the fighting straightened himself and said, “This is Edward Wong with CNN. You have just seen an amazing sight as the American Army here in Taiwan destroyed about ten enemy tanks in less than two minutes. You can see the tanks burning brightly in the background.”
Seeing the reporter had recovered enough of his senses to function, Alexander waved and said, “God bless America! I love you honey!” He turned and walked back to Traveller. He wished he could have known for sure that the signal was getting out. He constantly scanned the north and east sides of the airport. Alexander knew his troops were probably safe. He told everyone except the scouts to stay inside and cover the tank’s rear, keeping any infantry off the more vulnerable backside of the tank. He heard one of his Humvees rev up. A second later it appeared from under an overhang next to the passenger terminal and sped up to him. “Everyone okay?” Alexander yelled.
“Hoo-Wah!” First Lieutenant Robby Mundell, the scout platoon leader, grunted cheerfully. He was a recent addition to the California Army National Guard from the great s
tate of Texas. He worked for the federal government as a DEA agent when he wasn’t practicing being a soldier on the weekends (his job transferred him out to California half a year ago). “Sir, you done opened up a Texas-sized can of whoop-ass on the enemy bastards!”
Alexander laughed, then smacked the young officer playfully on the side of his helmet.
“Hey, sir, look what someone gave us in the terminal.” The lieutenant held up a pair of small brightly colored plastic two-way radios, “They’re a pair of those little Motorola radios like we used during AT (Annual Training). They work fine. I bet we could communicate a mile or two away with these!”
Alexander smiled and shook his head approvingly at the scout platoon leader, “Looks like you’re in business again, trooper.” He reached out and took one of the radios. “Mundell, take your skinny ass out there and check on your other vehicle, I saw them pop a star cluster at first contact. Once you find them, go reestablish contact with the enemy and report back. Don’t be a hero—we aren’t getting any replacements anytime soon. Take some of the MPs with you. I expect that we’ll see about a company of tanks and a battalion of ‘mech’ backed up by some self-propelled artillery in about five to ten minutes. I hope that will be all the enemy brings with them. We don’t have any more ammo other than what we have on board. If more come and we run dry, I want you to take charge of the advance party and move out to Yangminshan Park as we previously planned.”
Mundell was suddenly serious, “Yes sir. That was really good shootin’ you did.” He turned to his driver, “Let’s go!”
Alexander watched the three scouts roar off in their Humvee—the lieutenant, his driver, and the .50 caliber machine gunner suspended from a webbed seat of nylon secured to the roll cage.
* * *
Back at the White House the Situation Room was filled with silent men and one woman. Most had conflicting emotions. On one hand, the Americans did very well against the Chinese on national, no international television—on the other hand, the Americans did well against the Chinese. This presented the White House with a huge problem. The Chinese wanted the Americans out of the way. They wanted free reign in Taiwan.
