The battle group steamed twenty-two miles north-northwest before Kuang, after being joined by one hundred invasion craft that were waiting under camouflage nets off the mouth of the River Hsilo midway up the Taiwanese coast, would steam due west past the Pescadores twenty-nine miles off the coast.
If all went well, this course would take the task force toward the mainland where the landings would take place on the peninsula north of Xiamen Dao (or Amoy Island). The invasion would be supported by other ROC regiments already dug in on Quemoy Island, which had long been part of the Republic of China, and which lay less than ten miles from the Chinese mainland and which Chiang Kai-shek had festooned with high-explosive cannon. The ROC cannon on Quemoy would lay down heavy artillery barrages on mainland China’s near shore islands less than two miles to the west of Quemoy.
For so long, Kuang mused, so many people in the world had seen Taiwan as the permanent home of the Kuomintang, after they had been pushed out by the forces of Mao Zedong in ‘49. But through the mist of the hundred-mile-wide Formosa Strait, Chiang Kai-shek had fled the mainland to Taiwan to carry on the fight. It was here that the next Asian “miracle” occurred when Taiwan joined Japan and South Korea as the three most prosperous countries in all of Asia. Admiral Lin Kuang, a one-time captain of a guided-missile frigate, did not remember this time of the economic miracle so much as the stories told by his great-grandfather — stories of how Taiwan was not to be viewed as home — never could be — but was an island garrison that, through the blessings of Matsu, the sea goddess, had been given to the Kuomintang on the condition that one day they would return, leaving the indigenous Taiwanese, who resented them so much, behind and reclaim their beloved homeland.
It was not enough, Kuang’s father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather told him, to be content with the luxuries the Kuomintang had wrought from their industry and the labor of the indigenous Taiwanese, and the wealth the millions of Chinese émigrés had produced. Nor was it sufficient to dwell on the fabulous wealth of the treasures they had brought with them—”plundered,” the Red Chinese said — from Beijing’s Forbidden City. Such treasures must one day return to China, or else how could the spirits of their ancestors who had borne such travail ever rest in peace?
Lin Kuang remembered how his great-grandfather recalled the humiliation of having been driven into the sea by Mao’s forces and of everyone in the world sounding the death knell of the Kuomintang as the beleaguered refugees clambered ashore on Taiwan. Even the Americans who had given them so much aid finally did not believe they would ever see the Kuomintang on mainland China again.
But then when the North Koreans had invaded the South, the American response to the invasion resulted in Beijing suddenly having to shift its military away from Taiwan in order to meet the threat of the Americans in Korea, and quite suddenly made the old Kuomintang dream realizable. Not only were the descendants of the Kuomintang keen to act, but all those who suddenly saw the vast prize of China before them. And to carry out the promise, the superbly equipped Republic of China forces were ever ready, and now poised to attack the Communists’ eastern flank across the straits. With Freeman in the west and the ROC in the east, Cheng would find himself in a two-front war — a three-front war if you counted the stalemate along the Amur to the north.
The Communist Chinese navy was primarily a coastal defense force and did not have big ordnance or the superior training of the American-tutored Taiwanese navy. Nor could the Communists’ Shenyang F-6s — updated versions of the old MiG-19s — pose any real threat.
“Hawkeye radar report, sir. Unidentified vessel. Bearing two seven zero. Range seven zero miles. Proceeding south.”
“Any others?” Admiral Kuang asked the officer of the watch.
“Nothing yet, sir.”
“When we rendezvous with our landing craft off Hsilo River we will know. Meanwhile, tell me if the unidentified turns.”
“Possible hostile,” the operator said, receiving the Hawk-eye feed. “… Hostile confirmed.”
“Type?” Kuang asked.
“Huangfen. Missile attack boat — two hundred tons. Speed, twenty knots. Four HY2 surface-to-surface. Two twin 30mms — one forward, one aft.”
“Radar capability?” Kuang asked. “It cannot be more than twenty miles.”
“Less than six, sir, and there’s a haze. He won’t have us on passive sonar either. Unless he stops. His three diesels are twelve thousand horsepower each. That would wash out any of our sound.”
The admiral nodded. “Quite so.”
If all went well, he knew they would be off the mainland peninsula an hour before dawn. Then it would be no longer possible to conceal themselves — unless the goddess Matsu was still with them and kept the curtain of mist wrapped about them. Kuang prayed fervently. He held fast to his vision — his private vision — of him personally on behalf of the ROC accepting the Red Chinese surrender at the war’s end. He would go to the beautiful city of Hangchow, the home of his ancestors, his dream to be consummated the moment his limousine drove through the garden-surrounded gates of Mao’s villa on the West Lake, whereupon he would alight in triumph to personally remove the stain of Mao’s house from the earth.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The first sign was a hazing over of the sun so that only a dull, purplish corona of it showed through the mounting turbulence. It was one of the great Gobi storms without rain, one of the terrible gritty and blinding storms borne westward in the desert, this time of year, April, being the worst month, and added to by the sand-pregnant winds out of the Tien Shan Mountains in China’s westernmost province of Sinkiang, where the line of the mustard sky could be seen eating up the blue before the banshee howling and the pebble-hailing assault enveloped all.
Cheng was pleased. He had prepared without the hope of a storm though he knew it was the time of the year for them, but now he could see the massive storm gathering he welcomed it; it would make his trap so much more terrible for the Americans. Oh, the Americans had done well in the desert in Iraq, Cheng told his subordinates, and the incompetent Hussein helped them by being such a fool of a tactician. Besides, Cheng reminded his commanders, the PLA had had time — months, years — to prepare for any invasion from the north down the corridor between the great sandy desert to the west and the harder semidesert to the east — the corridor Freeman was heading for about ten miles in width and twenty-three in depth.
“You must understand, comrades,” Cheng reassured his HQ staff, “that the Vietnamese defeated the Americans because they realized the falseness of an American adage — that the jungle was neutral, that it was equally difficult for the Americans and North Vietnamese alike. This, of course, was an incorrect assumption because the Vietnamese used the jungle as their friend. As we will use the desert. Remember we are on home soil and have had more time to prepare than Iraq.” He paused. “Is everyone in position?” His commanders assured him that they were.
“If anyone breaks camouflage he is to be shot immediately. Understood?”
They did, each platoon officer having been supplied with a noise suppressor on his revolver so that such a shot would not be heard.
Driving south, Freeman planned to take the path of least resistance between the great sand dunes around Qagan Nur or Qagan Lake and the salt lakes south of it, the corridor extending from the dunes on his left or eastern flank to the railhead of Erenhot on the Chinese-Mongolian border. Freeman’s objective was the capture of the rail spur line that stuck twenty-three miles out northward from the east-west main line and which stopped at the small settlement of Qagan Lake, even though me town was actually ninety-five miles south of the lake it was named after.