Thunder rolled across the beaches of China and flame rained from the skies. The Nationalists had carried the multiple rocket-launcher batteries of their artillery regiments on the weather decks of their landing ships. Now those batteries were in action, raining an intermittent barrage of high explosives and white phosphorus in on the Communist beach defenses.
Under these conditions, absolute precision and accuracy were impossible. Given, though, that each launcher could shred an area larger than a city block with each salvo, precision and accuracy were also irrelevant.
Tears of rage and frustration streaked the face of Colonel Yuan Kai of the People’s Liberation Army. Peering through the observation slits of his command bunker, one-half mile back from the beach line, he watched a personal nightmare become reality.
He had warned them. He had warned them all that the running dogs of the Kuomintang were still the true greatest enemy. They had not listened to him. The generals had become too focused on their fight with that bandit rabble in the south. They had drained the coastal commands of manpower and equipment, leaving nothing but the dregs behind to protect the sea frontiers. And the Nationalists had been watching, and waiting.
The running dogs had turned to leap at China’s throat once more.
“Lieutenant!” Kai snarled over his shoulder. “Have you gotten me a line through to Regional Defense Headquarters yet?”
“No, Comrade Colonel. The telephone links appear to be down, sir.”
Kai’s aide, a tall and stoic young officer in field combat gear, stood across the room, close beside the two signalman specialists manning the radio set and switchboard.
“Then what about the radio?”
“Heavy jamming, sir. All channels are blocked.”
“Damnation! Keep trying! Get me through!”
Hissing an epithet under his breath, Kai turned back to the observation slit. Lifting his night glasses once more, he swept them across his regiment’s defense sector, trying to get a firmer grasp on the extent of the developing catastrophe.
There had been no warning of an attack, just the cruise missiles that had killed his radar and the antiaircraft emplacements, kicking the door open for the strike aircraft that had followed.
As his men had poured out of their barracks bunkers to dash to the fighting emplacements along the beach, they had been mowed down by cluster bombs and incinerated by napalm. The scattered handfuls that had reached the dubious protection of the blockhouses now cowered under the merciless hammering of the naval bombardment. There were other forces at work in the night as well.
The ground shuddered. Parallel to and just beyond the low surf line, a row of towering water plumes lifted into the air. Each plume had marked one of the beach obstacles. The row of concrete-and-steel blocks intended to deter the approach of landing craft had just been destroyed, no doubt by demolition charges laid by skin divers or ROVs.
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.