Saturday 10:13 a.m. Local Time, Beijing
A change of shift happened effectively in phases as first the supervision then the operators were replaced in small groups. Only the two people in their anonymous dark suits remained from the collective which had first watched events unfold in New York.
Men in stiff uniforms adorned with medals came and went, shooting cautious glances in the direction of the secretive pair. They had not been summoned or addressed, so the military men left the suits to their own devices.
The woman glanced to her left, seeing the telltale glow of a burning cigarette end showing in the darker shadows. Her gaze lingered for a moment, knowing that the older man would be able to make out her features as she was bathed in dull light from the screens, but was unable to see his. She wanted to ask if it was time, if the tension could be broken and they could unleash the incredible might of the People’s Republic on their western enemies, but to ask would be to show a weakness of character that she had fought for years to hide from everyone. She was every part the stone-cold operator that he was, but she was a generation younger and had plans to rise further than she already had. Not a single woman in the country outranked her. She was at the apex of her gender amongst 1.3 billion people, and still she intended to rise higher. Everywhere she went she could sense, almost taste, the shame of high-ranking officials having to obey her commands. Her country had conscripted female soldiers for generations, for millennia even, but today she felt that female soldiers were a gimmick and weren’t taken seriously. Her dedication and aptitude had smashed those molds, and her recruitment into the Ministry of State Security had been, for her, an inevitability.
She cast her eyes back at the screens, seeing mixed reports of empty streets shown alongside fires and looting.
“Now,” said the voice simply from the shadows next to her.
She said nothing, but straightened and smoothed down the dark skirt of her dark suit. She walked forward to stand on the raised dais behind the ranks of busily working analysts. After buttoning the jacket over her plain blouse, she lit another cigarette, and steadied herself. She was about to give the order, albeit by proxy, for the biggest military decision in modern history.
She took a long drag from her cigarette, held it, then let it out slowly. “Begin the operation,” she announced, adding only slightly more information than the head of State Security had given her. Everyone there knew their role, everyone was read in on the plans—those parts which they were cleared to know at least—but then again if they were in that room then they already knew what China had done to the United States, and more importantly what they were about to do.
Captain Wayne Grant, formerly of the United States Air Force, stood up and smoothed his own expensive suit in a control room thousands of miles away from Beijing. He was five decks below sea level on the newest vessel of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s fleet. The Type 002A carrier, only the second carrier not to have been bought from another country as a hand-me-down, was shiny and new. Although only two thirds the size of the floating cities the US had put to sea which Grant had spent much of his time aboard, this Chinese carrier boasted an efficient crew and a full complement of the J-15 Flying Sharks.
Although trusted, and only sometimes afforded a chaperone which he suspected was more of a bodyguard, Grant had the run of the place. He wore no uniform, and was exquisitely tailored at the expense of his new masters. It seemed to him that his lack of uniform in any military setting was a uniform in itself, and he found that even senior ranks were wary of his presence.
In the six years since he had been declared officially dead by his country after punching out from the cockpit of his F-22 Raptor, he had experienced a great many new things. The irony of it kicked him square in the gut. Despite his years of training and being at the controls of a cutting-edge weapon of destruction, he’d still ended up being shot down by a goat-herder using a shoulder-mounted weapon. A weapon that his own country had provided a generation before. After that, he had been beaten and imprisoned, but never once used as propaganda material despite being trained to expect the kind of internet home video that every citizen fears seeing a loved one appear on. Nobody cut off his head, nobody informed the United States government of his capture, and they had simply given up looking for him. Not that Grant had any family left back home to scour the internet for videos of his demise by beheading.
It took almost a year, during which time he had been questioned but otherwise mostly ignored, but he had found himself being transported long distances by car, boat, and aircraft until he found himself on a small island being treated by Chinese medical staff as though he were in some expensive rehab clinic for the wealthy and secretive one percenters. He tried to run, and they simply let him. He soon found that the island was small, so small that he ran from one side to the other fearing pursuit, and that there were no means by which he could transport himself off. With ocean on all sides as far as he could see, he walked back to the clinic and accepted the treatment on offer, along with a refreshing, cold beer.
His loyalty had been stretched, and apparently hadn’t been that firm to begin with, because he willingly accepted the offer to become a Chinese citizen and join the Ministry of State Security as an advisor to the People’s Army. He was treated like a general everywhere he went, and now he was officially advising the officers overseeing the air operations of the next phase of their plan. He had no need to give orders, as he found the Chinese beyond reproach when it came to the efficiency of their military operations. He was there to simply advise if the commanders needed their own home-grown American to ask what their opposition was thinking and doing.
In his heart, he knew he had been turned. He knew that the psychological pressure and careful treatment had led to him feeling aggrieved with the country of his birth and who he served, but if he was honest, he liked his new life. Fighter pilots by their very nature are showboats, and he never lacked for respect or admiration. And he certainly never lacked for attractive women around him, even if he was sure they were now paid to keep him company.
Knowing all this, he was still okay with it. Happy, in fact.
Hearing the commands given and feeling the familiar vibrations as the cargo lifts began their slow grind to bring aircraft to the flight deck, he listened to the orders given and heard the command to launch the H-9s.
That made him smile, despite the purpose of the order. The H-9 had been developed in secret, and Grant had even played some small part in the final design tweaks. It was a cutting edge, lightweight, long-range stealth bomber which the rest of the world hadn’t yet seen. It was small enough to take off and land from a carrier, carried an intense payload, and flew so high that the bombs would fall on their targets without the targets ever even knowing about it. The munitions were a next-generation hybrid of drone technology and old-school bomb drops. The pilot, and in Grant’s obvious view no machine could ever replace a real person at the controls of a plane, could fly so high as to never be at risk of attack and drop his payload somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of the target. The system was ingenious, and, he was told, actually inspired by a cult sci-fi film made in America.
The payload consisted of a single dart-like bomb no bigger than a football. That was guided by the co-pilot by drone feed on a screen to the desired target, and then the pilot would release the rest of the bombs. They only had to make one pass high overhead, drop their targeting ordnance, then effectively toss everything else out of the window because the bombs then flew themselves directly onto the target to the desired spread pattern, and would either delay detonation for maximum penetration or could airburst and deploy over the head of anywhere. He knew, as did the senior officers onboard and the pilots themselves, that each plane carried only two guidance systems and two pieces of ordnance each on their first bombing run. He also knew that what they carried similarly hadn’t been seen by the rest of the world before.