it starts getting rough we’ll pop below where it’s nice and calm.” It was the one great consolation of being a submariner.
He kept the sub on an easterly heading, not using his active sonar for fear of giving away his position but merely going slowly and watching what, if anything, was coming in on the green screen out of the passive sonar array. All the sonar operator could hear was a frying, sizzling sound, the noise of millions of shrimp mating — either that or a very good imitation of it put out by an enemy sub. The lookouts were attentive to their tasks as the fresh, bracing sea air awoke them from the kind of torpor that overtakes submariners short of oxygen and with their lungs full of hydrocarbons from the diesel fumes.
The starboard lookout shouted that he saw something. When the captain fixed his binoculars on the horizon he saw only another scud of cumulus, and the lookout had to concede if there had been anything there it had disappeared. The captain shook his head as much in amusement as disappointment. Being a lookout was no easy business. Most people, in the way they saw faces or forms in the clouds, tended to see what they wanted, or expected, to see if you left them there long enough. The trick was to give as many men a rum as possible as lookout. In any case, everyone getting a turn in the fresh air did wonders for morale.
The Sea Wolf sub USS
Aboard his Intruder aircraft-laden carrier, Admiral Lin Kuang was handed the decoded message flashed to him by the ROC — Republic of China — agents who, like him, had remained determined to one day bring down the Communists:
American invasion fleet heading south for possible beach landing off Fukien.
“Possible beach landing off Fukien,” the taciturn admiral repeated. “Where else could it be? Where else do we have big guns like those we have on Amoy and Quemoy islands to give us cover on the beaches?”
It became not a matter of prudence or of the inclement weather building up, but rather it came down to an old-fashioned, bone-deep matter of pride. Kuang was determined that the first soldiers that should land on the Communist mainland from the sea must be Chinese troops — his troops. To all his ships and aircraft he flashed, “Summer Palace.” The invasion of mainland China from the sea was under way, as the war within China, inside her northern borders, raged along the bends and hills of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front.
Admiral Kuang was suspicious the moment he received the message from his forward AWACs — Air Warning and Control Aircraft — that there was unusually heavy sea traffic up and down the Formosa Strait. Junks were reported strung out from as far away as Fuchow to the north, south past Xiamen to the other Communist special- economic-zone port of Shantou 240 miles across the strait from Taiwan.
Kuang’s fleet of one attack helicopter carrier, an A-6 Intruder bomber carrier, and fourteen armed troop- carrying ships, together with over fourteen destroyers and frigates, under the umbrella of thirty-five ROC F-18s, was put on special alert. The AWAC estimated there were over a hundred junks plying the strait between the South China and East China seas. Admiral Kuang was surprised — he had expected opposition much earlier.
The other thing that surprised him was the reports from his underground operatives that thousands of members of the June Fourth Movement had seized the opportunity to strike against Beijing’s forces already. They had exceeded the admiral’s most optimistic expectations, having attacked and cut the rail junction 120 miles inland at Zhangping in the Guangzhou military district, thwarting any hope of the PLA quickly reinforcing its sixty-eight thousand members of Thirty-first and Forty-third Army Corps stationed on the coast around Xiamen.
Admiral Lin Kuang had also expected the PLA’s East China Fleet and planes out of Fuzhou to attack him before he was halfway across the strait. Again he had proved too cautious, for his own air force commanders in Ching Chuan Kang in Taiwan had confidently predicted that the low-level, radar-confounding, predawn strike by their F-15 Eagles, each carrying a twenty-three-thousand-pound bomb load, would all but obliterate the Communists’ opposition, destroying most of the PLA Shenyang F-7s on the ground at Fuzhou.
In any event, the few Shenyangs that did get airborne carried a maximum of only one ton of bombs, as opposed to the American-made Eagles’ ten tons, and were 345 kilometers slower than the Eagles. And the American-made planes were piloted by American-trained Taiwanese who had always, correctly it appeared, regarded the PLA pilots as brave third-raters in fourth-rate machines.
But if the Taiwanese Air Force was cocky as it continued to patrol the skies above Lin Kuang’s invasion fleet, the admiral himself never underestimated the mainland’s enemy forces. He told his captains to ignore the boasting of the air force and to keep their eyes peeled for the fast Haunan Hai Kou and the hydrofoil Huch’uan attack boats that formed the bulk of the PLA’s coastal “Great Wall of Iron,” not all of which had been destroyed either at dockside or by the air force’s attacks against the giant Shantou Base.
Many of the attack boats — it was estimated over forty— had not been accounted for, along with one of the Communist Chinese navy’s three old nuclear submarines armed with modern missiles. Reconnaissance showed that most of the PLA’s elite naval forces had in fact been deployed in the north off Manchuria rather than in China’s southern military regions that bordered on Laos, Burma, Vietnam, and India.
No doubt some of the naval forces would turn south to meet the Taiwanese threat and, if they saw it on their radar, the American Marine Expeditionary Force, but they had over a thousand miles to come down from the Yellow Sea where the bulk of the best boats had been patrolling from the mainland bases at Luda, Lushan, and Quingdao. Also Lin Kuang knew that the bulk of the guided-missile destroyers, the PLA navy disdaining bigger ships because of its commitment to its primary role as a coastal defense, were also deployed in the north. And so even if elements of the PLA’s Northern Fleet did leave Korean waters, heading south, the PLA’s fastest vessels, the heavily armed patrol boats, would not reach the Taiwan Strait for at least thirty hours. By then Lin Kuang hoped to have his invasion force of over a hundred and twenty thousand crack assault troops firmly established on the beachhead.
Everything was going so well in fact that Taiwan’s joint chiefs of staff believed that with Taiwan’s two tank divisions, eighteen motorized infantry divisions, one parachute division, and tactical air army-in all, over a quarter million highly trained, superbly American-equipped men— Taiwan might well defeat the three-million-strong, but much more poorly equipped, People’s Liberation Army— or, as many after Tiananmen called it, “the People’s Liquidation Army.”
Even so, Lin Kuang would not be swayed into taking shortcuts. He had always prided himself on being a realist, and because of that he was sticking to the original plan: to establish a beachhead and, with aerial superiority, press inland in a fan-shaped advance along the 120-mile Shantou-Xiamen axis. Such an advance was not only capable of being under a constant ROC air umbrella but could be constantly reinforced by ships coming in stream from Taiwan, less than twelve hours across the strait. Then and only then, Kuang believed, would his invasion prove a rallying point for the millions of disaffected Chinese civilians of the post-Tiananmen generations who, with the minorities, had been biding their time, waiting their chance to strike and overthrow the oppressive Beijing regime.
Lin Kuang’s strategy was further based on the fact that not only were the PLA’s two hundred divisions not nearly as well trained as the smaller, better-equipped Taiwanese divisions, but the two hundred divisions that the PLA boasted were spread all over the Chinese vastness — from Vietnam in the far south to Siberia in the north.
Fifty miles from the mainland, Lin Kuang felt the excitement mounting, some of the PLA’s shore batteries already exchanging fire with the big Nationalist guns on Quemoy, others firing beyond the line of junks on Kuang’s advancing Nationalist patrol boats, Kuang’s destroyers opening up on the lines of what they were sure were Communist patrol boats disguised as junks. From the junks, over twenty percent of which were hit by the first salvos of Lin Kuang’s destroyer escorts, bright orange flames erupted skyward, and behind the dense white clouds of smoke that could be seen pouring forth from them, creating a screen, squadrons of the two-hundred-ton
