Training Units, now dropped eighteen triple-drogue-chuted mobile howitzers. Each gun was capable of firing flat or high trajectory rounds while on the move at 34 mph, and was also equipped with upgraded infrared night vision and a 7.62mm machine gun.
Initially, the eighteen mobile howitzers caused alarm at Kinmen Nationalist HQ, the ChiCom howitzers unleashing a deadly fire on the line of Nationalist bunkers and trenches at will. Then dots began appearing on Kinmen’s east coast radar screens. They were the ROC’s own fighters, American-made F-18s, screaming westward high above the Taiwan Strait, the 127-mile distance between Taiwan’s Ching Chuan Kang air force base on Taiwan’s central west coast and Kinmen closing fast, the estimated time to enemy contact three minutes.
A swarm of fifty ChiCom Nanchang fighter-bombers and sixty H-6s — ChiCom versions of Russia’s glazed- nosed Tupolev TU-16 medium bombers — were now pounding Kinmen’s defenses with six-hundred-pound cluster bombs, their aerial onslaught met with dozens of ROC surface-to-air missiles. From a distance on the big screens of
Then the ROC’s F-18s, engines screaming at Mach 1.2, joined battle, coming in from the sun at three o’clock low. They unleashed their air-to-air missiles with such precision and accuracy that the five ChiCom H-6s were hit and downed in the first twenty-two seconds of battle. It sent the entire ChiCom bomber swarms, 253 planes in all, retreating to the mainland’s coastal air space, which, even for the farthest ChiCom bomber and fighter escorts, was mere seconds away, and thick with SAM batteries that till now had remained silent for fear of hitting their own aircraft. Once the bulk of the returning Chinese bombers and escorts crossed the coast, however, the scores of ChiCom surface-to-air missiles opened up, the ROC’s F-18s in hot pursuit, popping orange “sucker” flares. Descending slowly, like fairy dust that belied their serious intent, the flares drew off the ChiComs’ heat-seeking missiles, whose infrared-seeking heads had mistaken the sucker flares’ intensive heat for that of the F-18s’ exhaust.
“They’re running!” announced a young ROC pilot.
“For now,” his wing commander replied. “But for how long?” The ROC air commander, a pilot of long experience, knew that what he was seeing was Mao’s famed hit-and-run guerrilla land tactics being ably applied to aerial combat. And he was aware, as he knew his ChiCom enemies must be, that the overriding problem for the Taiwanese fighters was that they couldn’t loiter as long as the ChiCom planes, which were much closer to their bases, only a few miles away on the Chinese mainland.
When the Taiwanese fighter pilots heard their low fuel alarm and turned back to Taiwan to refuel and rearm, there would have to be other Nationalist squadrons to relieve them, thus stretching their resources in what was quickly becoming a war of attrition. As if to underscore his concern, the Taiwanese wing commander caught sight of a dozen or so smoking plane wrecks scattered around the base of Mount Taiwu. He had no way of knowing whether they were ChiCom or ROC fighters that had risen up from Kinmen’s two southern airfields before the airstrips were cratered, save for one clearly evident “red star” tail, visible in thick green foliage.
Unless hostilities were either called off by Beijing, or some kind of diplomatic cease-fire came into effect under U.S. guarantee, this coastal war situation could quickly escalate to a catastrophic ICBM exchange between Kinmen and Taiwan, the stand-ins, as it were, for Beijing and Taipei. Realizing this, the Taiwanese wing commander knew he must emphasize to Taipei that if Kinmen was not to fall — on one hand a human disaster, an enormous strategic and military defeat on the other — the ROC must keep fighters aloft over Kinmen. To lose this aerial battle would only encourage Beijing to go further.
As thirty Chinese Communist J-11 fighter interceptors — in reality Russian-made Sukhoi-27s — rose from their Fukien airstrip to meet Taiwan’s squadrons of Mirage 2000s, the ChiCom pilots of the PLA air force were confident of victory. The two Lyulka afterburning turbofans on each of their J-11s could deliver more than twice the thrust of the Taiwanese Mirage’s, rocketing the Communist fighters to Mach 2.35 versus the Mirage’s 2.2. Plus the Russian Lyulka engines could take the ChiCom J-11s, with their A-10 Alamo and AA Archer missiles to a service ceiling of 59,000-plus feet, over four thousand feet higher than the Taiwanese Mirage, though both planes’ climb rates were comparable at around 59,000 feet per minute.
When ChiCom ground control alerted their J-11 pilots of a new development — a squadron of Taiwanese F- 16s scrambling from Taiwan’s Ching Chuan Kang Air Base — the Communist pilots remained unfazed. The ChiComs’ Sukhoi-27s would still outnumber the Taiwanese challengers by two to one. Indeed, the ChiCom fighter pilots welcomed the news, knowing that their Russian-made aircraft outmatched both the ROC’s Mirage 2000s and their American-made F-16s in both power thrust and service ceiling. Even the highly touted American F-18s, which the Taiwanese were holding back in hard-shell revetments for Taiwan’s last line of defense, were not as fast as the J- 11s. And studies at the China-French Friendship Polytechnic at Harbin had shown that the J-11s would defeat the American-made plane more than fifty percent of the time in tight-turning, dogfight engagements.
But as any driver knows, a vehicle is ultimately only as good as its operator, and unlike their mainland enemies, the Taiwanese, because of their buoyant economy, had been able to give their pilots all the air time they could log. They had also been able to purchase the expensive high-tech simulators needed to train a cutting-edge air force; though, in a strange irony, even the best aviators, it was noticed, often became violently airsick in simulators — a condition most of them had never experienced in actual flight. In addition, the best ROC pilots had spent time in the United States by means of a politically hush-hush U.S.-ROC pilot exchange program at Fallon’s top gun school in Nevada. There, high above, and sometimes precariously low, over the Nevada desert, the best Taiwanese pilots from the ROC Air Force Academy flew daily against America’s elite aviators, many of whom had seen active service in both Gulf wars and in Afghanistan. And though relatively few of the Americans there had been in actual dogfights — that is, in one-on-one aerial combat — many had experienced the real-life, gut-wrenching, adrenaline-surging terror of surface-to-air missile attacks as they fought up to nine G’s in the life-or-death drama of evasive maneuvers where they used all the skills taught to them at Fallon.
From high above the blue of the Taiwan Strait, the ROC F-16 pilots could see both the line to the west, where the deep blue of the ocean met the brown effluent of the Chinese mainland, and the dirty, greenish-brown haze of the combat-polluted zone above and around Kinmen, whose eastern sector was smothered by artillery-laid white smoke. The usual westerlies, however, were blowing the smoke quickly back over Kinmen’s western side, effectively hiding the ChiComs’ howitzer and mortar positions, but simultaneously shrouding the positions of the four Taiwanese infantry battalions who were now moving up and away from the island’s northern and eastern shore and the very positions they had so assiduously practiced to defend. They were moving toward the ChiCom paratroopers who had come in the back door and now occupied the island’s high ground. But with neither army on the island’s western side able to see one another through the man-made fog, the usual confusion of war was exacerbated into utter mayhem.
Both the ChiCom and ROC infantry, normally well-conditioned, began firing at anything that moved in the smoke. The situation was further confused by the close similarity of both sides’ khaki/green field uniforms, which the PLA and ROC had begun copying from the Americans in the late 1990s, and which were markedly unlike the plain PLA green still used by the Chinese armies now routing the Muslim fundamentalists in Kazakhstan. While the new camouflage clothing used by both armies on Kinmen was admirably suited to the brownish green foliage of Taiwan, the ChiCom coast, and offshore islands, the all-but-identical uniforms escalated the usual danger of “friendly fire” to pandemic proportions in the battle.
With both sides continuing to lay smoke during a lull in the westerly winds, the entire island was shrouded in a pungent, bruise-colored smoke reeking of cordite and gasoline exhaust from armored personnel carriers, mobile artillery haulers, and tanks. Vehicles moving through tinder-dry scrub began a series of fires, whose growing ferocity was due to the panic-born thoughtlessness of an ROC infantry platoon moving up toward Mount Taiwu to dislodge a dug-in section of ChiCom machine gunners. The ROC platoon, having been already badly mauled by sniper fire and now down to about twenty men, found their way blocked by a wide rush of splotchy-leafed and highly toxic
