The ground rushed toward him. He quickly bent his knees slightly and prepared to tuck and roll. Before he knew it, his body was reacting just as it had been trained to do. Once on the ground, he quickly detached his parachute and rolled it up. His eyes scanned the area for any immediate threats. Others in his platoon were doing the same and like him, they didn’t seem to have spotted any signs of danger. Once they’d rolled up their chutes, they quickly collected them and then ran to a central point where they all dumped them together, so they wouldn’t be in the way of their fellow sky soldiers that would arrive in the follow-on waves.
With his parachute taken care of, Sergeant Dayan called out to his squad of soldiers, “Secure the remaining gear and weapons and rally on me!”
Once they had formed up, he explained, “We’re going to head out on foot to a road junction three kilometers west of the drop zone and set up a roadblock. Our orders are to prevent any vehicular traffic from heading in the direction of the drop zone and the port facilities nearby.”
His men grunted and did as they were told. Five minutes later, the 48 soldiers of Second Platoon had formed up with their captain in a loose formation and had set out with two single-file columns on either side of the road as they made their way to their objective.
Walking along the road felt surreal. Sergeant Dayan looked to his left and right at the rows of apartment buildings, many of them fifteen to twenty floors in height; there were thousands of people represented by those buildings, and yet no one was out walking around the streets at all. It was like a ghost town. As they continued to march through the area at a fairly brisk pace, he did spot some people peering out their windows, looking down at the sight of his paratroopers walking through their neighborhood. It was almost like they were on some sort of movie set.
As they continued their forward progress, Dayan thought to himself that the faces looking down at them from their homes were the faces of Chinese citizens who, up to that point, had not seen the realities of war apart from the occasional bombing or cruise missile attack.
It took the paratroopers thirty-five minutes to reach their objective. Once they did, they realized this thoroughfare was going to be a lot tougher to defend than they had thought. The road junction was six lanes wide, three lanes going in either direction with on and off ramps on either side. The sun at this point was now cresting above the horizon, and the morning traffic, while still light, was starting to increase. At first, people didn’t know what to make of the Anglo-looking soldiers with strange uniforms and oddly-shaped helmets. Most people had never before seen a mitznefet, which looked like a cross between a night cap and a chef’s hat.
The Israeli soldiers flagged down the drivers, motioning for them to head toward the exits. One truck driver decided he didn’t want to get off the highway. Despite the soldiers waving their weapons in the air, he gunned the engine toward them.
“Shoot his engine out!” shouted Staff Sergeant Dayan to his light machine gunner.
The young soldier leveled the weapon at the truck and fired a short burst of rounds into the engine block of the truck, which instantly veered off course and slammed into the center divider of the highway with a screech. At that point, several other drivers slammed on their brakes as they realized these strange-looking soldiers were not Chinese and weren’t going to let them pass. Once the vehicles came to a halt, the paratroopers moved forward with their weapons leveled at the drivers, yelling at them, “Get out of the vehicle!”
While nearly none of the Israeli soldiers could speak Chinese, having their weapons leveled at the drivers was a pretty universal symbol the Chinese people seemed to understand without a problem. The drivers exited their cars with their hands held high as the Israeli soldiers herded them off to the side of the road. Several of the soldiers jumped into the cars and positioned the vehicles to act as a better barricade. Other soldiers used road flares and their weapons to signal and guide motorists off the highway. Then they set up a spot for another squad to direct traffic back in the direction it had come from, down the frontage road.
It took them nearly a half hour to get the roadblock up and running and to finish creating a path for the vehicles to turn around. With the roadblock operational, the platoon went to work on improving their defensive positions in case they needed to repel an attack.
The Merlin gently lifted off from the deck of the HMS Albion, like the pilot had just laid his son or daughter down in the crib and was quietly slipping out of the nursery to finish that glass of red wine in the family room. Then the helicopter shifted to the right. It continued to gain altitude and speed, forming up with the dozens upon dozens of other choppers as fighter planes flew overhead.
The Royal Marines of 3 Commando Brigade held on to the troop straps dangling from the roof, shifting side to side with the momentum of the helicopter. Forty-five men hunkered down in their kits and body armor with extra magazines and hand grenades strapped to various spots on their vest. They were ready for war. The Marines were primed for this heliborne assault after having missed out on most of the major ground combat action in Europe. This would be their brigades time to shine as they moved in to rapidly secure one of the largest deepwater island ports in the world.
When the Merlin banked to the left and headed toward their target, Sergeant Neil Evans could not believe the sight below them. It was both awe-inspiring and terrifying to think of the sheer military power that was floating in the hundreds of warships, transports and container ships below. It was like those images of the Normandy landing he had seen on the telly as a child.
“This is it, lads, our time to go kill us some Chinamen!” Evans bellowed in his best Marine voice to be heard over the noise of the engine and the swirling of the air inside the cabin.
The Marines around him with faces painted in multicam just grinned and snickered. A few howled like wild animals, waiting to be released from their leash. They’d been pent up on a ship and then in various holding stations for far too long. They wanted to be turned loose on the enemy.
With the sight of the fleet below them gone, they found themselves alone, the lead helicopter of this massive aerial assault. Looking out in the distance through the cockpit between the pilot and copilot, Evans could see the first glimpse of land just as the pilot dipped the nose of their airborne chariot down to the water. Evans grabbed for something to stabilize himself as the helicopter dropped altitude like a rock, picking up speed as it went. The sight of the water below them raced up quickly, filling the window of the cockpit before the pilot deftly pulled hard on the stick, leveling them out near the wave tops. The whitecaps and the choppiness of the water racing just meters below them were evidence of why they were doing a heliborne assault instead of an amphibious landing.
The copilot sensed Evans hovering nearby and turned. “Five minutes out, Sergeant. Be ready to get the hell off our bird, because we aren’t sticking around long.” He had a serious look in his eyes — he meant every word of it.
Evans turned back to his Marines and walked down the center aisle, pushing and shoving his way toward the rear ramp. He yelled out, “We are five minutes away! Be ready!”
Having positioned himself near the ramp, he saw small fishing boats whip past them at a dizzying speed as the tail gunner swiveled his heavy weapon toward each boat, ready to return fire should it be necessary. A few breaths later, they were over land. Below them were hundreds of cargo containers waiting in large yards to be loaded onto ships to be sent abroad, and railcars prepared to be brought to the mainland.