Huangfen attack boats maneuvered adroitly against the oncoming fleet.
As streams of thirty-millimeter fire raced out from the high, thimble-shaped gun housings of the Huangfen boats, HY2 surface-to-surface missiles could be seen streaking from the two angled-box housings on each side of the patrol boats. Admiral Kuang’s observers also saw the wakes of several long twenty-one-inch-wide torpedoes just visible through the confusion of spray and smoke that was being penetrated by others in the flotilla of PLA attack boats, including at least a dozen Huch’uan hydrofoils speeding in zigzag patterns, bows high, closing and traversing in excess of forty knots.
In the ensuing chaos, the air filling with the thump, thump, thump of heavy-caliber machine gun fire and the churning noise of the fast patrol boats that occasionally ran into “friendly fire,” the hydrofoils tore open the sea, their wakes crisscrossing those of Lin Kuang’s destroyers, the latter trying frantically to avoid being hit by the torpedoes while throwing everything they had at the Communist boats.
Though not yet at the edge of the smoke cover themselves, a handful of officers on the bridge of one of Lin Kuang’s forward picket frigates noticed through their binoculars that the crews of the fast patrol boats were not only wearing goggles against the spray but what appeared to be gas masks. Minutes later, Lin Kuang’s advance screen of destroyers, entering the smoke proper, experienced the most debilitating attack of all, the destroyers’ crews blinded by the gas. Then it was frigates floundering as a flotilla of eight fast-moving Huch’uan hydrofoils closed on the frigates, the latter wallowing and most of their officers dead.
Next one of Kuang’s frigates was hit by three torpedoes, two of them striking it forward, the other immediately aft of midships, causing the ship’s stern to lift clear out of the water. With its back broken in two, its aft section slid out of sight amid a boiling sea, the frigate’s forward section following soon after. All 195 crew were lost, either sucked down by the vortex or already dead or dying from the poisonous gas.
But Admiral Lin Kuang had been planning this invasion all his life and was as prepared as any commander could be for such a contingency. While not about to launch his chemical-biological shells, his restraint moved not by any humanitarian concern but because the wind was coming from the shore to the sea, favoring the Communists, he ordered all ships sealed.
Within minutes automatic “flush pumps” were in action all over the ships, spraying down the contaminated decks, the ships’ chemical-biological warfare filters kicking in while every combatant of the hundred-and-twenty- thousand-man-strong invasion force in the transports donned CB masks.
Some filter systems in the hermetically sealed, air-conditioned ships failed, and these vessels had to be pulled out of the line. Among them was one of the heavy transports carrying over two thousand soldiers. In the close conditions ‘tween decks, the troops were victims of greater concentrations of the highly persistent gas, which even over the sea failed to dissipate quickly and which, being a derivative of Sarin nerve gas, killed its victims with a massive attack on the central nervous system within three minutes, creating involuntary defecation, vomiting, and acute seizures.
The admiral saw the wind shifting to the north, a gap opening two miles off his port quarter. He ordered the fleet to it at full speed, all the while calmly giving muffled and nasal-sounding instructions through his mask in the large, armor-plated and insulated combat control center aboard the carrier. So calm was he that it was difficult for some officers, were it not for the heavy thumps of the guns on Quemoy and the brisk movement of the fleet’s model ships on their own ship’s magnetized operations board, to realize that a decisive battle for China was in progress.
More Communist Shenyang fighters appeared, but their attempt to intercede, though brave, was as ineffective as their attempts earlier that morning — the American-trained Taiwanese pilots enjoying a kill ratio of five to one. For those who bailed out, on either side, there was no mercy, most of them raked by machine gun fire, a few obliterated by concentrated triple A before they, or what was left of them, hit the churning waters of the strait. A dozen or so pilots, Nationalist as well as PLA, did escape the withering fire and whistling shrapnel of the naval battle only to die horrible deaths in the gas cloud that clung low above the sea in a vast, suffocating sheet, despite the wind shift.
Once through the gap to the north, Lin Kuang’s destroyers, much lighter and faster than the troop ships, began to lay down salvo after salvo on the Chinese shore, adding to the bombardment from the big Nationalist guns on Amoy, pulverizing the PLA’s bunkers in preparation for the landings. And as the green “go” flares burst skyward through the gas-streaked and shell-rent air, there was a cacophony of noise that terrified even the hardiest of the best-trained assault troops who, as the big transports moved in closer, began boarding the LSTs that would roll down the stern slipways of the troop ships for the final run to shore.
It was then that Lin Kuang saw the first troop ship quite literally blow up, bodies spit through the massive explosion like tiny charcoal toys, and he realized that he was on the verge of disaster. Though floating mines had been cleared by his preinvasion ROK SEAL team, the junks, in the last forty-eight hours, must have sown the offshore waters with hundreds, if not thousands, of the heavy, Russian-made plastic anechoic — that is, antisonar coated — pressure mines. Dropped overboard, attached to weights and nonmetallic cables, often nylon rope, the mines lay hidden well beneath the sea’s surface, set to explode only when ships of a certain tonnage — in this case the ten-thousand-plus troop ships — passed over them.
Another troop ship, carrying two thousand assault troops with all their supporting amphibious landing craft and M-1 tanks, erupted in a huge, flame-slashed V, going to the bottom in less than four minutes. It was only a mile or so from shore, the Communists having chosen the area well, for here the wrecks would effectively form a barrier to the oncoming ships. From the bridge of his chopper/Intruder carrier, Admiral Lin Kuang saw PLA patrol boats coming in, machine-gunning anyone still alive in the water.
Also at that moment he realized that the ubiquitous mine, so easily manufactured on mass assembly lines — the cheapest naval deterrent any poor nation could hope for, and which, most importantly, such nations could easily make for themselves — had suddenly proved as devastating as its proponents in the PLA said it would be when they, like “traditionalists” elsewhere, had argued against the devotees of high tech. The latter had ignored the promise of the humble mine, not because it was ineffective, but because it wasn’t sexy — a mere slug in the flash crackerjack world of air-to-air, fly-by-wire and laser-designated targeting. The fact that the mine had been so successful both for the Arabs in the Persian Gulf during the eighties and for the U.S. blockade of Nicaragua had taught them nothing.
“Admiral, what do we do?” the captain of the carrier asked, having already rung the telegraph for “full astern” and ordered the entire fleet to maintain position. It was a turning point, and they all knew it. Except Admiral Lin Kuang.
The vision of burning down Mao’s villa, of bringing down the Communist god, was too powerful to give way so quickly. Without turning to the carrier’s captain, he ordered, “All ships re-form. Behind me. We are attacking. Air arm to strike with HE bombs ahead of the carrier.” Their explosions, he explained, would create the pressure required to detonate the mines.
“Quickly!” he ordered.
Then, having already anticipated that few of the fighters would be “bomb racked,” most of their armament load being made up of cannon ammunition, he ordered a flight of twenty A-6E Intruder bombers from the carrier, each carrying 18,000 pounds of ordnance on five external hard points, to “blast out” a corridor, two hundred yards wide, a mile into shore.
As Kuang’s F-15 Eagles flew cover for the Intruders, which rose from the carrier at the rate of one every fifteen seconds — except for the four lost to AA missile fire from the patrol boats—240,000 pounds of high explosive were dropped over the next twelve minutes, turning the sea into a boiling cauldron. Even so, Lin Kuang knew the odds were that not all of the pressure mines had been detonated. He ordered the sixteen Intruders and his choppers back to Taiwan, then told the carrier captain to proceed “slow ahead.”
There were seventeen more explosions directly under and around the carrier, and she was going down, the shore less man a half mile away. “Full ahead,” he ordered, also ordering all hoses to be played on the magazine, thus enabling the carrier to cover as much of the gap as possible before it would start to go under.
Soon the big ship was listing at more than twenty degrees to starboard as Kuang, on being informed the hoses couldn’t keep the temperature of the magazine from rising, ordered all her cocks opened. If the magazine went while the ship was even partially afloat, the concussion alone from the carrier would be enough to kill many of the men in the LSTs that were now coming down the ramps of the troop ships only two to three hundred yards behind. If the carrier could be scuttled earlier, then Lin Kuang knew any explosion from the magazine would be minimized.
