Black Star

CHAPTER 15 — INGRESS

Sitting in the aft cabin, Maxwell could feel the vibration of the big turbine engines through his hard metal seat. The whopping noise of the twin rotor blades filled the cabin as the CH-47 “Super D” Chinook lifted from the tarmac at Chingchuankang.

Seated along either bulkhead and in rows to the front and back were thirty black-clad, black-faced troops of Colonel Chiu’s special forces brigade.

Chiu sat next to him, on the side row of seats. He was peering at Maxwell’s holstered pistol. “What is that thing?”

Maxwell pulled the weapon out of the holster. “Colt .45, model 1911.”

“Why would anyone carry a relic like that?” Chiu said. “It belongs in a museum.”

“Family tradition. My father wore it in Vietnam. I’ve had it with me on every combat mission.”

“What for? To drive tent stakes?”

In the darkness of the cabin he couldn’t tell if Chiu was making a joke or being sarcastic. With Chiu, you couldn’t tell. He shrugged and replaced the heavy pistol.

Through the round cabin window of the Chinook he saw only the blackness of the tarmac, the faint silhouette of the high terrain surrounding Chingchuankang. Somewhere behind and in front of them were the other three “Super D” Chinooks carrying sixty more special ops commandos, led by their escort of four AH-1W Super Cobra gunships.

With fewer than a hundred troops, we’re invading China.

It was a joke.

The throb of the rotors deepened further. Maxwell felt the big chopper tilt forward and accelerate. Like all fighter pilots, he held a deep-rooted mistrust of rotary-wing aircraft. There was something unnatural about helicopters, all those whirling parts, gears gnashing together like metallic demons.

He could tell that Catfish Bass felt the same way. The Air Force pilot looked like a man waiting for a hemorrhoidectomy. Bass sat with his arms folded tightly over his chest, his face frozen in a glum expression. Like the rest of the raiding party, he wore ninja-like black utilities and a Kevlar helmet with night vision goggles attached. His face was smeared with greasepaint. He wore a satchel over his shoulder containing a PRC-112 handheld communications unit and a flight helmet fitted with oxygen mask and PLA-standard connectors. In a shoulder holster he carried a 9 mm Beretta.

“Helicopters suck,” said Bass.

“It beats swimming.”

“Swimming sucks too.”

“That’s what I like about Air Force guys. You’re so cheerful.”

Bass nodded toward the front of the Chinook. “What about them? Do they have a clue what they’re doing?”

Maxwell looked up at the darkened cockpit. He had been wondering the same thing. Sneaking four troop-carrying helicopters and four noisy gunships across the Taiwan Strait into the most heavily defended air base in China was a trick of incredible audacity. What would happen when they triggered the alarm in the PLA’s elaborate sensor net? What would happen when the air defense ring around the Chouzhou perimeter detected their unwelcome presence? The big twin-rotored Chinooks were the furthest thing imaginable from stealth aircraft.

He remembered Chiu’s response when the question was raised in the final briefing. “Privileged information,” was all he would say. “We have assets to deal with the base defenses. We will enter the Chouzhou perimeter without interference.”

Assets? Maxwell decided not to press him. He assumed it meant they had operatives on the ground at Chouzhou. What kind of operatives? It made sense not to disclose details, in the event they were captured.

But what about the sensor net? How did they plan to suppress the surveillance radar that constantly probed the sky over the Taiwan Strait?

Did the Chinook pilots know what they were doing?

“It doesn’t matter now,” Maxwell said. “We’re along for the ride until we get to Chouzhou and find the Black Star.”

Bass nodded. His face became gloomier.

By the hum of the airframe Maxwell guessed that the Chinook was up to speed, something around a hundred-forty knots. An occasional wink of light passed by the blackened cabin window. A hut in the mountains? A boat at sea? No way to tell.

They were in the second of the four Chinooks. Leading the column were the Super Cobras. If they ran into trouble, the rocket-firing gunships would be the first to engage.

He caught Mai-ling’s eyes on him. She looked oddly subdued, dressed in the ninja costume, her face blackened. Gone, at least for the moment, was the defiant attitude, the look of confidence in the almond eyes.

For a moment Maxwell let himself remember. He could still sense the warm touch of her skin.

She seemed to be reading his thoughts. She nodded and gave him a tentative smile.Chiu noticed. He looked at Mai-ling, then switched his gaze back to Maxwell, his eyes narrow and penetrating.

Chiu was a snoop, Maxwell thought. He had already learned from his sentries about the walk on the darkened ramp last night. So what? To hell with Chiu.

Chiu abruptly rose and went to the forward cabin. Along the way he stopped to clap several of his commandos on the shoulder, rapping his knuckles on their helmets, giving words of encouragement. Maxwell noticed how each of the young special forces soldiers looked at Chiu with reverence.

For all his personality deficiencies, Chiu had the total loyalty of his men. His troops would follow him into hell.

Is that where we’re headed? With that question in his mind, Maxwell reached for his holster, checking that the clip was shoved all the way into the grip of the .45.

Chiu was carrying on an animated conversation with the two pilots on the elevated cockpit deck. Their heads were nodding, and they pointed to a display on the panel.

After several minutes Chiu returned to the cabin. He huddled for a moment with one of his platoon leaders, clapped him on the shoulder, then he came back to where Maxwell and Bass were seated.

Chiu glanced at his watch. “Half-way across the strait,” he said to Maxwell. “Thirty-five minutes from Chouzhou.”

Maxwell nodded. He glanced out the round window again. Nothing but blackness. He knew they were skimming the surface of the ocean, probably no higher than fifty feet. Again he felt the impotence of a fighter pilot trapped in a clattering, low-flying helicopter.

Bass was right. Helicopters suck.

It was eerily quiet in the bunker. Sitting at his desk inside his cubicle, Franklin Huang heard no explosions from the complex outside, no sirens, no clamor of fire trucks and ambulances. The war seemed to have entered a lull.

Huang considered again the faxed brief on his desk. Glaring at him from the black-and-white sheet was the visage of Colonel Chiu Yusheng. The colonel looked grim and unsmiling in the photo. His hard features glared at the camera as if he ready for hand-to-hand combat.

So this was the legendary Chiu. Huang had heard of him.

According to the classified brief sheet, Chiu had participated in over a dozen clandestine operations inside mainland China. He had been inserted by raft, submarine, helicopter, and on one occasion, an ultra-light aircraft. The sheet only alluded to Chiu’s objectives, which Huang inferred to be intelligence gathering, rescue and retrieval of operatives, and a certain amount of discreet sabotage.

Huang nodded appreciatively. Colonel Chiu was a man of diverse talents.

Next to the briefing paper on Chiu was a report from the chief of the southern sector air traffic control center. Two nights ago, a U.S. Navy C-2 had been cleared into Taiwanese airspace. The American airplane had arrived at a low altitude from the southwest — the sector where the USS Ronald Reagan and its strike group were known to be stationed. The turbo-prop aircraft had landed at Chingchuankang base, then departed forty-five minutes later. Nothing more had been reported.

Huang stared at the report. What was the purpose of the visit? To drop off the two Americans? If so, it could mean that two U.S. Navy personnel were participating in a mission commanded by Colonel Chiu.

What mission? To where?

One more clue lay on Huang’s desk. A series of reports that Taiwanese jets were being felled by some invisible weapon. Pilots were speculating that the Chinese possessed a phantom fighter that could attack without being detected. Even more oddly, one of the F-16s lost was flown by some over-zealous U.S. Air Force pilot, an advisor to the Taiwanese Air Force.

Huang tilted back and considered the information. A picture was emerging, like the pieces of an intricate mosaic.

A commando raid against an unspecified target, presumably on the mainland.

An invisible Chinese fighter.

Involvement of Americans, probably pilots from an aircraft carrier.

As Huang’s imagination ranged through the possibilities, he kept coming back to the same hypothesis. It was farfetched, but after all that had occurred in the last three days, nothing surprised him. Madame Soong had already demonstrated that she was willing to take insane risks.

Yes, this was something she would do.

He didn’t have all the pieces yet, but he was close. It was time to issue a warning. He reached again for the satellite phone.

Sirens. Why?

Col. Zhang set his tea cup down on the rosewood desk in his office. He stared for a moment at the blacked out window. Why were the air defense sirens wailing again?

He thought again about the strange telephone call from PLA headquarters in Beijing. General Tsin had received a vague warning from a highly placed source in Taipei that some kind of commando raid was in progress. The target was unknown. It was unlikely that the rebels would be brazen enough to attack Chouzhou, but—

He snatched up the direct phone to the sector air defense command post.

“It seems to be another missile attack, Colonel,” answered the air defense commander. “Two, perhaps three cruise missiles were reported inbound, but they appear to be targeting the troop bivouac at Nanpo, not the Chouzhou air base.”

“You’re sure that is all? Missiles? No aircraft?”

“Nothing has been detected by the air defense net.”

Zhang acknowledged and hung up the phone. As commander of the PLA air force’s most precious commodity — the Dong-jin project — he lived in constant worry that the secret of Chouzhou had been discovered.

No, he decided. They wouldn’t come to Chouzhou. Even if they somehow knew about the Dong-jin, they couldn’t possibly breach the net of air defenses.

Based at Chouzhou were two squadrons of SU-27 fighter-interceptors and another squadron of F-7 attack aircraft. For close-in base defense, Chouzhou had a dedicated battery of SA-10 Grumble surface-to-air missiles, recently acquired from Russia and still maintained by Russian technicians. The presence of the deadly SA-10s had discouraged any ROC attempt to attack the base with F-16s. Their feeble cruise missiles, which were nothing but crudely re-engineered anti-ship missiles, had caused some minor damage, pot-holing one of the runways and taking out two elderly F-7 fighters. A pinprick, nothing more.

If Chouzhou were in danger, it was not from exterior forces. Col. Zhang knew that the greatest danger lay within.

The damned dissidents. They were a cancer in the PLA’s flesh. They betrayed secrets, sabotaged infrastructure, destroyed the morale of the People’s Liberation Army. Zhang hated them even more than he hated the decadent United States and its clients. He had built his career on ridding the PLA of these vermin.

Zhang finished his tea, then glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes before briefing. Another pre-dawn sortie with the two flyable Dong-jins. Already they had established nearly total air superiority over the strait. Zhang himself had destroyed eleven F-16s, as well as one E-2C radome-equipped warning and control aircraft and an S-2 anti-submarine plane. It was like shooting geese from an invisible blind.

He removed his slippers and tugged on the high-topped flying boots. He was still lacing the left boot when the lights went out.

The power grid.

Capt. Hu, the SA-10 battery commander, rushed outside the command shack. What was going on? Something had happened to the electrical power supply at Chouzhou. The base was plunged into total darkness.

He yelled inside to the technician seated at the control console. “Switch to batteries and generator. Quickly!”

“I’m doing it, Captain. It will take a minute to reset the systems.”

Hu cursed the darkness. He had ordered the generators shut down and the power supply switched back to normal when the air raid alert had ended. It was routine, whenever a threat was detected, to transfer the SAM battery’s power from the normal power supply to the backup system, which was independent of Chouzhou’s power grid. Even if the base’s large power grid were shut down, the air defense battery would continue to function.

Now it would take several minutes to restart the generators and reset the power supply to the standby system. Several minutes of vulnerability. Capt. Hu didn’t want to think of the repercussions when his superiors learned that he was responsible for crippling the air defense battery.

“Hurry! I want the generators on line.”

“They’re cranking now, Captain.”

His eyes were still adjusting to the darkness outside. What happened to the power plant? Something strange was going on, and he was getting a bad feeling about it.

An eerie stillness had fallen over the base. In the far distance he heard the muffled sound of explosions. Missile strikes on the troop bivouac at Nanpo. Better them than us.

Hu turned to go back inside the command shack — then stopped. He cocked his head, listening. Something… a different sound… nearer than the distant explosions…

It was clearer now, more distinct. A pulsing, whopping noise, coming this way.

Helicopters.

Captain Hu was frozen, paralyzed with an unfathomable thought. Helicopters approaching Chouzhou!

Who?

There was only one explanation, and it had to be connected with the failure of the power grid.

“Standby power is coming back on line, Captain.”

“Hurry, damn it!”

“Half a minute.”

“Ready the target acquisition units. Prepare for an immediate launch as soon as you have power.”

“Yes, sir.”

The 3-D continuous-wave pulse Doppler acquisition radar was mounted on its own trailer thirty meters from the launch complex. Next to it was the I-band engagement radar on its own trailer. Both had powered down when the lights went out.

Hu couldn’t bring himself to go back inside the command post. He stood transfixed, studying the silhouette of the northern ridgeline. The whopping noise was intensifying.

What is it?

In the next moment he knew. The first helicopter broke over the ridge, clattering out of the darkness like an apparition. Hu could see only the ghostly shape, but he knew without doubt what it had to be.

A second helicopter appeared over the ridge. Close behind, a third. The staccato beat of the rotor blades split the silence at Chouzhou. Even as Hu whirled to dash back inside the command shack, he knew it was too late. The helicopters — they had to be gunships — were flying a direct course for the SAM battery.

A pair of orange flashes strobed from each side of the lead helicopter. Stunned, Hu saw the fiery trail of missiles sizzling down toward the battery. A surge of adrenaline strong enough to jolt an ox shot through his body. He reversed direction and launched himself in a hell bent sprint for the drainage ditch a hundred meters away.

The first explosion caught him still running. Hu felt himself propelled through the air, over the ditch, tumbling end over end across the graveled surface. A second explosion split the air. He sensed the concussion of more blasts, one after the other. The SA-10s were exploding on their launchers.

Hu tried to roll into a ball, shielding himself from the rain of blazing debris. As in a dream, he watched each of his six tractor-trailer launchers erupt in a cascade of fire.

One of the gunships was circling to fire again on the SAM complex. As Hu watched in morbid fascination, the acquisition radar unit took a direct hit. The battery command post Hu had just abandoned was a blazing inferno.

A deafening explosion nearly broke Hu’s eardrums. He guessed that it was the cache of hundred-kilogram high explosive warheads, stored a hundred meters away from the complex. Secondary explosions shook the earth beneath Hu.

Through a fog of disbelief, he tried to make sense of what was happening. Somehow they had shut down the power grid at Chouzhou. Was it the work of someone inside the base? Dissidents?

It had to be. If so, the timing was exquisite. The ROC helicopters had arrived to attack his SAM battery during the few minutes that he was unable to fire missiles. It was a coordinated assault on Chouzhou.

Why? he wondered, watching the flames leap from his destroyed missile battery. What were they after?