The Shark Mutiny (39 page)

Wind speed for the airborne landings was around 15 knots, and there were heavy Chinese casualties because wounded men were being blown off course from the central area. The commander on the ground had set up his “hospital section” way upwind, and several troops became involved in bringing the wounded in for emergency treatment. Eventually they would be transported on for evacuation, to the airport, which was of course China’s immediate objective.

The opening assault force was late reaching the airport. It was broad daylight now, and due to a total failure of communications—as usual, Taiwan’s weakest link—the Chinese, by some miracle, achieved an element of surprise. They stormed the perimeter fence and swarmed onto the runways, capturing entire sections of the complex.

They moved 2,000 troops into the roads surrounding the airport, securing the area. They dug in and established their portable low-level air-defense weapons, principally the QW-1 surface-to-air missile. They blasted their way into the control tower and occupied it. They also secured the fuel farm, and commandeered a vast supply of gasoline and jet aviation fuel. They seized every airport vehicle and sent a task force back to the drop zone to evacuate the wounded paratroopers.

By midday Tainan Airport was in Chinese hands, their first major airhead on the island. Within a half hour, massive troop reinforcements and equipment began to fly in.
Almost two complete divisions were on the ground by 1400, and they were accompanied by 30 attack helicopters, checked, refueled and armed, ready for the assault, first on Tainan, and then on to the great Taiwanese port of Kaohsiung.

By this time, a division of Marines was attempting to land on the beaches at Luerhmen, and scores of landing craft, protected by warships from China’s East Sea Fleet, were driving forward into the shallows, only to be met by a strong, well-disciplined force of Taiwanese militia.

Again the Chinese commanders on the landing beach had little option but to fight, and the two forces met on the main road at Tucheng. The early advantage went to the home troops, and they mowed down the invaders, firing at will from rural positions more in tune with guerrilla warfare than a formal confrontation of twenty-first-century armies.

With hundreds more troops pouring onto the beaches, the Chinese began to crash forward in a major breakout early in the afternoon. They left more than 500 dead on the field, but the remnants of the Taiwanese militia, bombarded now by Chinese mortars and howitzers, were forced to retreat, and the newly landed Marines kept moving up, marching on toward the airport to join the massed divisions of the Army, which would surely now capture the southern part of the island.

Meanwhile, back in Beijing, Admiral Zhang Yushu stared in dismay at the reports coming in from the front. He could see there had been a long delay in the attack on the airport; he could read the reports of more heavy casualties, and what seemed like carnage both in the drop zone and on the Luerhmen beaches. He weighed all this against the crushing loss of the Sovremenny. And, with fury in his heart, he ordered a total abandonment of the new beachhead at Tainan and instructed his commanders to maximize the airhead at Tainan airport. He also demanded to know the precise position around the city of Taipei.

And from here, things almost went into slow motion. Again, on the outskirts of Tainan, the Taiwanese fought heroically. China’s huge army was stopped dead, just as it had been on the outskirts of Keelung. And again there was bitter fighting, block by block, street by street, as houses, shops and industrial buildings were systematically cleared. But there was a huge price to pay, both in manpower and a colossal expenditure of ammunition.

Simultaneously, in the north, the Chinese Army had reached the outskirts of Taipei, and they too ran into a fight that would drain their limited resources. Casualties were appalling. The Chinese lost more than 1,000 men in the first two hours.

The Chinese commander on the ground was in satellite contact with Beijing, and Admiral Zhang himself decided that if he had to knock down Taipei in order to subdue the island, then so be it. He ordered his senior battle commanders to take drastic measures, whatever it took to reduce the level of casualties. As things stood, the invading Chinese would need to capture and control the National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei, and certainly the Chengkung University Hospital in Tainan.

And so China began to send in an armada of Z-9W Dauphin attack helicopters, heavily armed with antitank missiles. These 140-knot monsters cruise at 15,000 feet, and with the airhead established at Tainan Airport, and the main airport outside Taipei now under Chinese control, they were free to clatter over the strait, land and refuel and await deployment.

That happened late in the afternoon. The Dauphins took off and swooped into the western approaches to Taipei. They came in low over the Tamsiu River, through sporadic antiaircraft fire, and slammed four missiles straight through the granite outer wall of the Presidential Building on the corner of the Paoching Road. They hit the Armed Forces Cultural Center, almost blew apart the Tower Record Building and for good measure banged a missile into the great Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.
That killed eight people but failed to put a dent in the giant white statue of the departed father of the Taiwanese nation.

This was the first attack on the city, and members of Taiwan’s ruling party were petrified, because from where they stood among the crushed masonry and collapsing ceilings in the Presidential Building, it seemed as if China had reluctantly decided to knock down the entire capital.

And things seemed even worse far to the south in Tainan, where again, the Chinese Navy’s Dauphin choppers came in hard and sudden, firing their big missiles at will. They slammed the biggest religious temple in east Asia, the Shengmu, flattened the police station, blew up the Department of Motor Vehicles. Knocked down an outside wall of the biggest department store in the city.

And right behind this apparently indiscriminate air attack, the Chinese sent in their hard-trained Marine and airborne forces. In both cities, they moved forward tactically, behind the air attack. The remainder of the Taiwanese forces began to melt away, some throwing down their weapons. Civilians fled the central areas by the thousands, women and children picking their way through the rubble, accompanied by local soldiers who had discarded their uniform jackets.

The Chinese Army kept coming, but there was a subtle change taking place. The massed soldiers and Marines of Admiral Zhang’s military had no stomach for killing civilians, especially Chinese civilians, which the Taiwanese still plainly were. And the commanders on the ground knew it. The Army marched on to the entrance to the Presidential Building near the Peace Park, and blew open the locked main doors with three hand grenades. The guards fled, and six minutes later the President of Taiwan, in company with eight of his senior ministers, sued for peace.

They came out with their hands high, and were greeted with immense respect by their conquerors. The
leaders of both sides went formally to the high cabinet room, and the national televison station was summoned to hear their government command the Army, Navy and Air Force of Taiwan to lay down their arms and surrender.

Communication lines were immediately opened up to Beijing, and Admiral Zhang, with his senior commanders, announced they would land at Chiang Kai-shek Airport at 1030 the following morning, to agree to the terms of surrender.

Thus, shortly before 6
P.M.
on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 5, 2007, the independent Republic of China, known internationally as Taiwan, returned to the rule of the “other China,” the Peoples’ Republic, the communist successors to Chairman Mao Zedong. It was the ultimate horror, the endless dread of the peace-loving, profit-worshiping populace of the defiant little island across the strait. And thanks to the guile of the smiling Admiral Zhang Yushu, Taiwan’s mighty friends in Washington had been powerless to raise a finger to save them.

Which left Admiral Morgan in his dressing gown, sitting in the book-lined study in Kathy’s house in Maryland at 6
A.M.
, watching the news, sipping black coffee, with buckshot, in a mood that hovered somewhere between disbelief and rank poison.

“Just so long as they don’t think for one moment they’re going to get away with this,” he growled. “They got the island. Needless to say they got the museum, which was why they went to war in the first place. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about any of it, short of going to war ourselves. But there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat, and we’re gonna make those little bastards regret the day they decided to fuck around with Uncle Sam.”

“Sorry, darling, lay that on me again, will you?” Kathy O’Brien had slipped into the study bearing orange juice and hot croissants with preserves.

The Admiral’s eyes were still glued to the screen, but he was hungry, having been there, on and off, all night. He said nothing but reached out absentmindedly for one of the croissants, and he let out a yell, it was so hot.

“Jesus Christ!” he cried, adopting one of his favorite mock-wounded expressions. “What the hell is that? A pastry grenade?”

Kathy was wearing a dark green silk robe, and she laughed as ever at the speed with which Arnold Morgan could coin original material.

He turned toward her, smiling in appreciation of the woman he loved. “I shouldn’t think this burn’s worse than second degree,” he said pompously, shaking both his head and his right hand. “I shall require ice, cold water, towels and the home number of my lawyer. You did keep your insurance premiums up? I do hope so.”

“You should of course have been on the stage rather than wasting your time trying to eliminate Red China,” said Kathy, expertly cleaving the croissant sideways with a serrated knife and spreading it with butter and strawberry jam. “Here, take this,” she added, offering the plate.

“Well, why the hell didn’t the damn thing burn you?” he demanded.

“Probably because I didn’t clamp my hand around the hottest part on top,” she replied. “Heat tends to rise, you know.”

Arnold then firmly informed her that as the former master of a large nuclear reactor on a U.S. Navy attack submarine, he was acquainted with the rudiments of physics, even if he had temporarily forgotten the heat-retentive properties of the common croissant.

She poured him some cold orange juice, and advised him to take the greatest care with the glass since he would probably get frostbite. But Arnold was no longer listening.

“Jesus, Kathy, will you look at that?”

She turned to the screen where the giant U.S. aircraft
carrier
John F. Kennedy
could be seen listing slightly to starboard and moving slowly through the water.

“The accident on board the
JFK
happened two weeks ago in Japanese waters,” the newscaster reported. “These dramatic pictures show her making under ten knots, limping toward the U.S. base at Okinawa. They were taken by our associate station in the western Pacific region, and according to our sources they caught the
JFK
forty-seven miles south of the American base.

“The U.S. Navy has denied our request to put a camera team on board for the final miles of the journey, and they have denied us all requests for an interview to explain precisely what happened. Last night the Navy was showing no signs of any intention to clear up the mystery of what happened out there west of the Ishigaki Islands on the night of May twenty-second.”

Admiral Morgan ate his croissant thoughtfully. Like the Navy, he was of course keenly aware of what had happened. Two Chinese torpedoes, fired from one single Kilo-Class submarine, had crippled the 88,000-tonner. Which made her the fifth Battle Group leader to become unavailable for the protection of Taiwan. Counting the
Ronald Reagan
Group, still in San Diego,
Big John
was actually the sixth.

“Maybe it was for the best,” offered Kathy. “Maybe Taiwan is ultimately better off as a part of mainland China. And maybe the carrier would have been drawn into a real shooting war if she’d been in her regular patrol area. And there might have been God knows how many dead, and we could have been sucked right into a long conflict.”

“Wrong,” replied Arnold, uncharmingly.

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’? You’re not always right about absolutely everything.”

“Wrong again,” replied Arnold, even more uncharmingly.

Kathy poured them both some more coffee and awaited the short, bludgeoning lecture she knew was on its way.

“Katherine,” he said, “a mighty navy, with nuclear weapons and a strike force of devastating guided missiles, has nothing to do with inflicting defeat and destruction upon another nation. It has to do with prevention. An all-powerful nation like ourselves has one useful purpose, and that’s to frighten the life out of anyone who might step out of line.

“That’s why this world is mostly at peace. By that I mean there has been no global conflict for years and years. It’s
Pax Americana
, as I have often explained. Peace on our terms. If the
JFK
had been on patrol, with its full air force operational at the north end of the Taiwan Strait, China would not have attacked. They would not have dared, because we have the capacity to eliminate their ships, their aircraft, their Army, their military bases, their Naval bases, their goddamned cities, if you like, anytime we feel like it.

“They attacked Taiwan because we were not there to scare ’em off. As we know, to our cost, they made damn sure we were not there. But it would not have happened if we had been.”

“Well, I suppose not. But I still have never understood why the carrier was so far out of its operational area, and how the Chinese were somehow lying in wait. I know that’s what you think. But I don’t really get it. It was almost as if they
lured
the
JFK
into that bay. That’s what the media should be trying to find out.”

“The media are probably going to find out that the carrier was hit. But I agree, it’s a real puzzle why the carrier was so far out of its area. I look forward to reading Admiral Holt’s preliminary report next week. So do a lot of other people.”