Han checked his watch. It was two hours since the siren had summoned the men to their aircraft. In another four, backup aircrews would relieve them all. In hopes of a nap, Han closed his eyes.
A sharp, jagged horizon in the ocean, Taipei was a human beehive. ‘Taipei 101’—a graceful skyscraper shaped like a bamboo frond — punctuated the city’s skyline. Taiwan’s capital since being so declared in 1949 by the leader of the Chinese Nationalists, Chang Kai Shek, Taipei was an effervescent city of festivals, towers, shopping districts, and dazzling light. It was also contrasted by shadows, with narrow alleys where smoke and grease, sucked from sizzling woks, discharged around laundry flapping on poles. Arcades jutted from colonial and Chinese style storefronts, and sheltered pedestrians from the hard rain as they strolled along the red tile sidewalks and beside endless rows of parked motorbikes. Taipei, kissed by warm sea breezes and the hot sun, and with, nearly seven million people crammed in, it comprised the economic, cultural, industrial, and political heart of the Taiwanese nation.
Taipei’s metropolitan area sat at the northern tip of the island, blooming on the Danshui River between the Keelung and Xindian river valleys. Land was scarce, so every inch of the cityscape had been utilized, with neighborhoods that sprawled in a jumble of lanes and backstreets. Crisscrossed by high-speed rail and highways, the city was served by an international airport — Taoyuan/Chiang Kai Shek — as well as one that handled domestic and trans-Strait traffic: Taipei Songshan. Southeast of downtown and across the Danshui River sprawled the Jhongjheng District, the capital’s civic soul. Surrounding the city, scattered among its fields and on its hilltops, a ring of air defense sites stood guard. A road climbed a hill on the eastern side of Taipei. It switched back and forth through a dense and steep stand of trees, and then emerged at the gate and electrical fencing of Songshan-East Air Defense Site #2.
This air defense site, known as ‘Hill 112’ for its altitude in meters, guarded Songshan Airport and the eastern part of the capital from aerial attack. Hill 112 comprised a cruciform reinforced concrete platform and a massive bunker built into the hill. Atop the platform stood a rotating radar antenna, three anti-aircraft guns, and a single surface-to-air missile battery. A parking lot doubled as a helicopter landing pad, and camouflage netting draped over an observation tower precariously perched on the hill’s slope. Two airmen occupied a machinegun position guarding the main gate. In command of Hill 112 was Republic of China Air Force Senior Master Sergeant Li Rong Kai.
Senior Master Sergeant Li left the command bunker to get some fresh air. He was young, tall, and thin, but with hard, intelligent eyes. He took a deep draw of the wet, warm summer air. It would be a beautiful day if not for the unfolding events, a day when he and his family might have driven to a mountain park for a picnic. Li drew the delicate fragrance of plum blossoms into his nose and tasted its sweetness on his tongue. He brought binoculars up to his face and focused on the cityscape.
The usual buzz of the capital — its heartbeat — was clearly subdued. People had skipped work to hoard supplies and huddle around televisions. Li panned away from the hazy view of skyscrapers and fixed his magnified gaze on the building where he lived with his wife, young daughter, and mother. Li hoped his family had left by now for their farm on the eastern side of the island. Traffic had clogged the highways for hours to days, so the journey was sure to be long. Li prayed it would end with them safe. Although he had left them just yesterday, it felt like days. Buses roamed the city to collect Taiwan’s airmen, marines, sailors, and soldiers. They packed into the sweltering coaches that drove them to marshaling areas and waiting trains. Li’s bus had met another that then dropped him at a junior high school parking lot where a Humvee and driver waited. During the short drive to Hill 112, they passed one of Li’s favorite restaurants, an Italian eatery where he and the wife would steal away for a romantic dinner. Li wondered if he would ever dine there again. He continued his stroll around Hill 112.
A lone Chinese J-15 Flying Shark banked over the golden Bohai Sea. Off the warplane’s right wing menaced the massive Chinese mainland, and, to its right was the Korean Peninsula. A menacing twin-engine heavy fighter, the Flying Shark sported dark-blue tiger stripes across its grey skin, and a distinctive drooped nose, large forward canards, and a candy-striped tailhook tucked under its pointed tail, Chinese naval aviator Senior Lieutenant Peng Jingwei at the stick. One of China’s best pilots, Senior Lieutenant Peng was counted among the few qualified to land an airplane on the corkscrewing deck of an aircraft carrier. Peng turned the jet over Liaodong Bay and toward the coastal city of Huludao.
In the distance, just outside Huludao’s urban expanse, and among neatly rowed crops, a long, single runway stretched. Beside the strip sat a squat, concrete building shaped like an aircraft carrier hull. Topped by a steel flight deck and superstructure, it served as China’s carrier flight school, known simply to the rank and file as ‘91-065 Troop.’ The faux ship hull housed student pilots and the Russian and Ukrainian advisors who trained them on flight simulators and in classrooms. On the ‘dry ships’ flight deck, sailors worked with mock-ups of aircraft and helicopters, practicing arming, fueling, moving, and repairing these aircraft. After Peng had been transferred from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force to the Army Navy Air Force, this school was where Peng learned carrier operations, and graduated to lead China’s first naval aviation squadron known as ‘The Garpikes.’ Peng lined up his Flying Shark with the runway, deploying flaps and dropping the landing gear.
People’s Liberation Army Navy Captain Kun Guan served the Party from deep beneath the sea. Despite a natural aptitude for nuclear propulsion and subsurface tactics, Captain Kun had never felt comfortable in submarines. ‘Unnatural contraptions,’ he called them, and he cringed with every creak from the metal constructs. Despite hailing from China’s political class, Kun’s rapid rise through the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army Navy was self-accomplished. When the Party sought to expand Chinese subsurface power, Kun — in command of a destroyer at the time, and a surface warfare man at heart — had been shunted to submarine school at Qingdao Naval Base.
Kun’s new career track under the sea began on a Romeo-class boat. He was chief officer on the obsolete Soviet diesel-electric that occasionally flared a nasty habit of choking the crew with engine fumes. After several patrols and some high-profile encounters with the American navy, Kun, promoted took command of Changzheng 6, one of China’s new Shang-class nuclear attack submarines. This one is better, Kun thought of Changzheng 6, although he still did not like being hatched into the steel tube.
Kun leaned against the cold steel of Changzheng 6’s attack center bulkhead. Kun’s was the sixth hull of the brand-new Shangs, all of which were named ‘Changzheng’ after the year-long 8,000 mile Long March of the Red Army retreat from Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalists. Designed and constructed with Russian assistance, Shang-class nuclear attack submarines compared roughly to early flights of 1970s American Los Angeles- or Russian Victor III-classes. They were generally quiet and heavily armed with tube-launched torpedoes and missiles. Captain Kun stood straight again and tugged the wrinkles from his uniform. Used to old analog dials and gauges, Kun admired the colorful glow of the attack center’s new-fangled digital screens. With a well-padded roundish frame, Kun seemed built for the confines of a submarine. It was his brain, however, that revolted