They would be coming very soon now.
“Lieutenant! Have you gotten through to anyone yet?”
“No, sir,” the aide replied calmly. “All communications are still down.”
“Then send a runner! Have him take the headquarters’ company truck, if it’s still intact. Have him take a message to Regional Defense Headquarters. Inform them that we have a major landing under way in zone twelve. We need assistance immediately! The situation is critical!”
His aide gave an acknowledging nod. Going to the mouth of the bunker, he passed a hastily scribbled note and a quiet order to the two sentries stationed there. In moments, the soldiers were dashing away down the communications trench. Suddenly, the generalized scream and roar of the rocket barrage abated. The abrupt silence was as disconcerting in its own way as had been the uproar of the bombardment. Kai refocused his attention into the night. They were coming now. Low, angular forms were moving in from the sea. Like a pack of crocodiles, a flotilla of troop carrying amphibious tractors was steadily churning closer to the beach. From one of the surviving blockhouses, a machine gun chattered a feeble challenge. The savage crack-wham of a powerful naval rifle answered. Another, larger shadow was moving closer to the beach as well, a guardian frigate of the Nationalist Navy. If the ballistic rocket barrage had been a shotgun, the warship’s flat-shooting five-inch guns were sniper’s rifles, primed to take out the last vestiges of beachside resistance The devil take the PLA high command. Where was the air cover he had been promised in the case of a landing? Where was the artillery? Where were the torpedo boats?
The first rank of landing tracks was holding just off the surf line. Rocket launchers flared on their broad, armored backs and projectiles arced up and across the beach, each trailing a heavy line behind it. Kai recognized the technology at work. Those lines were hoses. Hoses that were even now pressurizing and filling with a liquid high-explosive. When fired, the hoses would burn through the beach minefield, the concussion triggering sympathetic detonations amid the mines buried there, clearing a path. The Nationalist combat engineers keyed their firing switches. Blue-white chain lightning laced the beach, each bolt flanked by lesser, sandy explosions. Thin though it might have been, the last barrier was down. The lead Nationalist Amtrac, a massive, American-built LVTP-7, heaved out of the surf. Transitioning from its propellers to tank treads, it gingerly began to pick its way up one of the blast-cleared channels.
Kai prayed that he would see the flash of one of his own missile launchers, that the tractor would stumble to a halt spewing flame.
It did not, and a second followed it up out of the sea, and a third.
The Nationalist frigate was firing over the Amtracs now — deliberate hammering bursts from its main turret, each carefully targeted at the beach fortifications.
Kai bitterly considered how the one good thing about his dearth of troops was that he was able to disperse what he did have out among a large number of fortifications. Chiang’s bastard sons would be expending a lot of their time and ammunition demolishing empty bunkers.
Then, abruptly, Kai realized something, something that made the cold hand of a corpse close around his heart.
The Nationalist frigate was keeping to a very deliberate firecontrol template. Probably operating under GPU guidance, it was systematically picking off a series of the beach defense emplacements. And it was targeting only those emplacements that had men assigned to them.
“Treason!” he whispered.
The Nationalists must have gained such knowledge of his troop deployments from within his own headquarters company.
“Treason!” he choked.
“Sir?”
Kai pounded his fist against the frame of the observation slit. “The damned Nationalists have infiltrated us, Lieutenant! That’s how they know our defense deployments so well! Some filthy traitor inside our own regiment has sold us out!”
“No, sir,” his aide replied quietly. “There are no traitors here.”
“By all that is sacred, there are! They knew that this was a weak point on the coast! They knew the positioning of our beach obstacles. They even know our troop deployments. There is a traitor, Lieutenant, and if we get out of this alive, I will see him hunted down and hanged!”
There was no answer, except for the sound of a rifle bolt being drawn back.
Kai started to turn away from the observation slit, his hand instinctively going for the pistol holstered at his belt. Before he could complete either move, however, something smashed him down from the concrete observation step. Colonel Yuan Kai had only time enough to acknowledge an instant of pain and a momentary chaotic image of his aide standing in the bunker doorway, raking the room with gunfire.
As Kai fell, the aide pivoted, his short-barreled Type 56 assault rifle still clamped to his hip and hammering terror. The two signals specialists tried to get to their feet, one clawing for his own weapon, the other attempting to lift his hands in surrender. The lieutenant slashed his fire stream across them, sending them both to the floor. Lifting his aim, the aide used the last few 7.62mm rounds in the clip to destroy the bunker’s communications console.
Ejecting the empty magazine, he swiftly reloaded, watching the bunker doorway for anyone investigating the gunfire. No one came. The chaos out in the night had blanketed this little pocket of killing. The aide took a single deep, deliberate breath.
“No, my colonel,” he said almost apologetically to the blood-streaked room. “There are no traitors here tonight. Only patriots.”
Ducking out through the low doorway of the bunker, the aide headed down the communications trench. His work here was finished. However, the regimental Political Officer and the Chief of Staff still had to be dealt with down at the auxiliary command post.
3
Commander Amanda Lee Garrett peered over the shoulder of her chief engineer, watching the blocks of red and yellow play across the schematics on the computer flatscreens. Each told a tale of catastrophic damage and systems failure. The enemy missile strike had hurt the USS Cunningham — badly.
“Mr. Mckelsie? Stealth systems status?”
“Everything’s off line except for the chaff launchers. The hit’s taken out both the transformers and the envelope processor stack.”
The Duke’s lean and acerbic stealth systems officer had his khaki shirt unbuttoned in the heat. They’d lost air conditioning early on in the engagement and the ventilators had been dogged down to seal out the smoke that was rapidly saturating the ship’s internal spaces. The temperature in the Combat Information Center was skyrocketing as a result.
Uniform protocols had been abandoned. He ran a hand back through his damp, thinning red hair and continued the litany of disaster.
“We’ve also taken skin damage, and these fires are going to start cooking the RAM off the hull in pretty short order. As of right now, we are bare-ass naked.”
“Damn, damn, damn! Dix, tac situation?”
Lieutenant Dixon Lovejoy Beltrain, the Duke’s tactical action officer, leaned in over his console, stripped to the waist, his quarterback’s torso slick with sweat.
“Hostile strike flight has disengaged,” he reported. “All other incoming rounds have been foxed or intercepted. Board is clearing.”
Miraculously, the great SPY-2 A arrays of the destroyer’s Aegis radar system were still functional and feeding their images onto the Large Screen Display that dominated the forward bulkhead of the Combat Information Center.
“That’s something, anyway,” Amanda muttered. They were being granted a little time. Maybe enough to make repairs and escape.