The sixty planes also weren’t flying at a rate to conserve fuel. With afterburners kicked in, they were flying at over Mach 2, fifteen hundred miles an hour so that they would arrive at Hawaii just as their fuel tanks ran empty.
Behind the planes the shield came back on and the carriers headed toward Hawaii.
Archaeological evidence indicates that humans have inhabited Taiwan for as long as ten thousand years. There were also signs that Japanese forces occupied part of the island in the twelfth century. The first Europeans to visit the island were the Portuguese in 1590, calling the island Formosa, which meant “beautiful” in their language. The Spanish attempted some settlements but were kicked off the island by the Dutch, who occupied it and neighboring islands in 1622. In 1644 the defeated followers of the Ming dynasty retreated to Taiwan and expelled the Dutch, establishing a Ming enclave and also the precedent of the island being a refuge for those out of favor with the ruling force on the mainland.
After the British victory over China in the Opium Wars, the Treaty of Tientsin in 1860 opened two ports on Taiwan’s west coast to foreign ships. Missionaries, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, weren’t far behind.
At the end of the first Sino-Japanese War, China was required to cede Taiwan to Japan. Given their tenuous ties with the mainland, the inhabitants refused to be trade bait and rose against the occupying Japanese. This rebellion and the brutal attempts by the occupying forces to “Japanize” the inhabitants went on for over fifty years until the end of World War II and the defeat of Japan. Taiwan was returned to mainland control, but that was viewed by the inhabitants as negatively as the Japanese occupation had been. Once more they rebelled, and once more they were brutally handled, this time by their own countrymen.
However, on the mainland, things were not going well for the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) forces led by Chiang Kai-shek. Like those of the Ming dynasty before, the KMT retreated from the Communist forces to Taiwan. The Communists planned to invade the island, but these plans were put aside when American naval forces were sent to the strait between the mainland and the island. Subsequent to that, America poured over four billion dollars of aid into the country, viewing it as a bastion of “freedom” in a dangerous part of the world, and turning a blind eye to Chiang Kai-shek’s and the KMT’s depredations.
Gradually, rule on Taiwan shifted toward real democracy, just as the United States was shifting its focus from the island to the mainland. When Nixon visited Beijing in 1972, those on the island saw the handwriting on the wall.
Formal ties between the US and Taiwan were broken in 1979 and in 1980 the formal defense treaty between the two countries lapsed and was not renewed.
The flagship of the Chinese Eastern Fleet was the destroyer Qingdao. It had engines made in Ukraine, a British combat control computer to aim its weapons, French helicopters, and weapon systems purchased from a half dozen other countries. The crew, however, was one hundred percent Chinese.
The Qingdao was in the Straits of Taiwan, a hundred-mile-wide stretch of water that separated mainland China from what it considered a wayward province in Taiwan. The strait had seen decades of posturing and bluffing between the navies of the two countries but all that changed as the targeting radar on the flagship located a Taiwanese frigate thirteen miles off its port bow.
The word had come from Beijing just ten minutes earlier. No choice was offered for Taiwan. The bitter blood between mainland China and the small island nation off its coast allowed for no resolution other than annihilation. Accordingly, the Qingdao launched a half dozen antiship missiles toward the Taiwanese ship. Two struck, causing massive damage and killing many sailors.
On both sides of the strait, the respective militaries geared up for all-out warfare.
Lisa Duncan slowly opened her eyes. Her head felt heavy and she knew she’d been drugged. She was lying on her back, a pillow under her head, a white sheet covering her body. Looking up, all she could see was a steel ceiling with numerous pipes running across it. She swallowed and her ears popped, equalizing pressure. She could feel something around her arm and several leads taped against other parts of her body.
She heard a noise to her left and turned her head. A white-coated figure walked in. The man was tall and distinguished-looking, with silver hair and a short white beard. He pulled a stool out from a desk and slid it next to the table she was on.
“How are you doing?” he asked as he checked the readout on a medical monitor next to the bed.
Duncan’s throat was dry and she tried to talk but only a croak came out. The man went over to a sink and returned with a small paper cup of water, which he carefully pressed against her lips. Duncan drank the entire cup, and then he pulled it away and retook his seat.
“Who are you?” she managed to get out.
“Dr. Garlin. The more interesting question is who are you?” “Where am I?”
“The new Area 51.”
“And you’re the new Majestic.” Duncan swung her legs over the edge of the table and sat up, holding the sheet tight around her body. The pounding in her head was fading rapidly. Looking down, she could see that the various leads attached to her body went to the monitor and there was a band around her arm with an IV pressed through it.
“Yes. That was a good guess.”
“No guess,” Duncan said. “It makes sense.” She was looking about. “What kind of doctor are you?”
“An MD. Specialization — cellular structure.” “You want to find out what happened to me.” “Yes.”
She nodded slowly, her head pounding with pain. “So what happened to me?”
“We have some ideas, but some of the data is still being processed.”
“What’s the charter of the new Majestic?” she asked. She was shaking her head back and forth, trying to work out the lingering effects of whatever drug she’d been given.
“The same as the old one,” Garlin said.
“The old one didn’t work too well.”
“It worked well enough for almost fifty years,” Garlin noted. “Where are the others? Turcotte? Quinn? Yakov?”
“We don’t know. We had to”—he paused, as if searching for the right words— “shut down the old Area 51.”
“Why?”
“When Major Quinn had the CIA do a check on you, we were copied on the results, as we’ve been copied on everything going into Area 51. And you ask why we shut down Area 51?” He held up his hand as he ticked off reasons. “You’ve got Professor Mualama, who turns out to be a former Watcher — or is he former?
“Yakov. A Russian. Section IV was destroyed — all except him. Pretty convenient. And he came back from Moscow with a bug planted on him.
“Che Lu. Chinese. A country that now appears to be siding with Artad and preparing for war against both South Korea and Taiwan. And she just happened to be the first person to enter Qian-Ling in many centuries. How did she get permission from Beijing to do that when every other request was immediately turned down?
“Major Mike Turcotte. Involved in a questionable incident while working counterterrorism in Europe. He was then recruited by you to spy on Majestic; which bring us to you. You didn’t even really know who you are, did you? And now you don’t know what you are.”
When Duncan tried to stand, he politely but firmly pushed her back onto the table. “Not yet. You need to know what’s going on, so you understand what is at stake.”