Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 06 (4 page)

 
          
The
senior naval officer, like the other engineers and technicians in the cargo
bay, was dressed in a sub-Arctic snowsuit, layered over an oceangoing exposure
suit that was required to be worn anytime they were flying outside safe gliding
range of land. Sun also wore a fur-lined aviation helmet with an oxygen mask
and cold-weather anti-fog goggles. Sun marveled at some of the soldiers working
on the cargo inside the plane— they wore parkas and boots but no gloves, and
they took only occasional gulps of 100-percent oxygen from the masks dangling
down on the sides of their faces as they worked. These men, obviously born in
the punishing cold and high altitudes of
Xizang
and
Xinjiang
Provinces
of western
China
, were very accustomed to working in cold,
thin air.

 
          
Sun
Ji Guoming was one of a rare breed in the Peoples Liberation Army—a young,
intelligent officer with vision. At the age of only fifty- three, Admiral Sun,
known as the “Black Tiger” because of his noticeably darker, almost Indian-like
complexion, was by far the youngest full flag officer in the history of the
People’s Republic of
China
. He was at least fifteen years younger than
any other member of the Central Military Commission and thirty years younger
than his superior officer, General Chin Po Zihong, the chief of staff. Suns
family were high Party officials—his father, Sun Jian, was minister of the
State Science and Technology Commission, in charge of restructuring and
modernizing China’s vastly outdated telecommunications infrastructure.

 
          
But
Sun had not earned his post merely by his family’s powerful Party connections,
but by his utter devotion to the Party and to its leadership, first as
commander of the South China Sea Fleet, then as former hardline premier Li
Peng’s military advisor, then as chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army
Navy (PLAN), and now as first deputy chief of the general staff and certainly
its next chief, possibly even the next minister of defense. The Black Tiger was
truly one of the fiercest officers in the huge Chinese military.

 
          
As
deputy’ chief of staff. Suns main goal was to modernize the huge People s
Liberation Army, to drive it into the twenty-first century. He had been
executive officer several years earlier aboard
China
's most ambitious blue-water naval project,
code-named EF5, the destroyer
Hong Lung,
or Red Dragon. The
Hong Lung
was an
amazing warship, equal to any other warship owned by any nation on earth. The
ship had been the spearhead of an ambitious plan by the chief of staff. High
General Chin Po Zihong, to occupy several of the Philippine islands, and had
been destroyed in fierce attacks by the United States Air Force and Navy,
including bombardment from outer space. But until the final crushing blow, the
Hong Lung
had controlled the sea and
airspace in the southern
Philippines
for hundreds of miles.

 
          
That
was the kind of military power China needed to succeed in the twenty-first
century—and Admiral Sun Ti Guoming was going to make it his career to see to it
that China developed the technology to meet the challenges of the future.

 
          
“Sixty
seconds to release! Navigation data transfer in progress. Pilots. maintain
constant heading and airspeed and conform to prelaunch axis limits."

 
          
The
soldiers backed away from the cargo as the countdown neared an end. Sun did a
count of the men in the cargo bay—six had gone in, and he counted six. plus
himself. Accidents were easy and common in this kind of work, but it wnuld not
look good for an accident to occur with the deputy’ chief of staff aboard.

 
          
“Stand
by for release! All hands, prepare for cargo release! Five ... four ... three
... txvo ... one ... zero. Release!" Sun heard several loud
snap!
sounds and a slight burble through
the fuselage: then, slowly, the cargo began to roll backward through the cargo
bay and out through the open clamshell doors.

 
          
The
“cargo" w’-as a Chinese M-9 rocket, an intermediate-range ballistic
missile. Admiral Sun Ji Guoming. as chief of development for the People s
Liberation Army, was conducting yet another experiment on the possible future
deployment of the M-series tactical ballistic missiles on nonconventional
platforms. For years, other countries had experimented with alternative methods
for deploying missiles to make them less vulnerable to counterattack. The most
common w’as rail-garrison or road-mobile launchers, and
China
relied heavily on these. But although the
missiles were transportable, they still needed presurveyed launch points to
ensure an accurate position fix for their inertial guidance units, which meant
that the launch points could be known and attacked.

 
          
The
advent of satellite-based positioning and navigation greatly increased the
accuracy of military weapons—at any moment, even while moving in an aircraft,
it was possible to capture position, speed, and time from the satellites, dump
the information to a missile or rocket, and be assured of previously
unbelievable accuracy. If the weapon could get position updates from the
satellites while in flight—and the M-9 missile Sun had just launched could do
just that—the weapon’s accuracy could be improved even more. And if the missile
contained a TV camera with a datalink back to the launch aircraft so an
operator could lock onto a particular target and steer it right to impact,
pinpoint accuracy was possible.

 
          
Sun
stepped back through the cargo bay, waving away several soldiers who cautioned
him not to go back there, and walked right to within a few feet of the edge of
the open mouth of the cargo bay. What he saw was absolutely spectacular.

 
          
The
M-9 missile was suspended vertically below three sixty-foot parachutes, fitted
with strobe lights so he could see where they were in the darkness. He knew
that as the 14,000-pound missile fell, it was receiving yet another position
update from the American Global Positioning System satellite navigation
constellation, and gyros were compensating for winds and missile movement, and
were aligning the missile as vertically as possible. Suns cargo plane was about
two miles away now—the missile could just barely be seen under the three chutes—
when suddenly a long white tongue of fire and smoke appeared from under the
parachutes. The three chutes deflated as the weight was taken off the risers,
then they cut away completely as the M-9 rose up through the sky.

 
          
A
perfect launch! Sun had proven—again, for this was his seventh or eighth
successful air launch—that it was possible to launch a ballistic missile from a
cargo plane. No special aircraft was necessary. Any cargo plane—military or
civilian—could do it, with the right modifications. All of the avionics needed
to transfer satellite navigation data to the missile was in a “strap-down”
container that could be transported with ease and installed in less than an
hour.

           
Sun signaled that he was clear of
the opening and that it was safe to close the cargo doors, hurried forward, and
entered the air lock leading to the crew cabin. Ignoring the biting cold, he
stripped off his gloves and snowsuit as the air lock pressurized, then removed
his oxygen mask and helmet, opened the forward air lock door, and entered the
launch-control compartment. “Status!” he called out excitedly.

 
          
“M-9
is running hot and true,” the launch officer replied. “Altitude eighty thousand
feet, twenty-nine miles downrange. Datalink active.” The officer handed Sun a
messageform. “This came in for you while you were aft, sir. Message from
headquarters.”

 
          
Sun
took the messageform but did not bother to look at it—he was too excited about
the launch. He watched in childlike fascination as the tracking numbers
changed, moving his finger along a chart following its position as the missile
zoomed northeastward. It was running perfectly.

 
          
Minutes
later, the M-9 was approaching its target—Tung Ying Dao, what the rebel
Nationalist government on the Chinese island
province
of
Formosa
called Tungsha Tao. Tung Ying Dao was a
large archipelago of islands and reefs in the
South China Sea
, claimed by
Taiwan
, about midway between the southern tip of
Formosa
and
Hainan
Island
, almost two hundred miles east-southeast of
Hong Kong
. The rebel Taiwanese government had erected
several military sites on the largest island,
Pratas
Island
, including U.S.-made Hawk and
Taiwanese-made Tien-Kung antiaircraft and Hsiung Feng anti-ship missile sites.
The defenses on the island were a great threat to Chinese ships passing between
the mainland and the
South
China Sea
,
especially ships bound for the
Spratly
Islands
, the archipelago of islands, reefs, and
atolls claimed by many western Asian nations.

 
          
“M-9
reaching apogee,” the technicians reported. “Altitude one hundred fifteen
thousand feet, seventy-one miles downrange.”

 
          
Admiral
Sun touched the sensor control, and in a few seconds several white dots
appeared on a dark black and green background. This was an infrared image of
the scene below from the nose cone of the M-9 missile, beamed to the launch
aircraft via radio datalink. Sun magnified the image to maximum and could just
barely make out the outline of
Pratas
Island
. Several other large, hot targets, far more
intense on the heat-sensitive sensor than the island, showed as well—these were
target barges with large diesel heaters set up on them, arrayed around
Pratas
Island
to act as targets for the M-9 missile.

           
But Sun ignored the target barges.
Instead, he locked the targeting bug of the M-9 missile on the northwest
section of
Pratas
Island
, where he knew the missile installations
were located. The senior technician noted this at once: “Excuse me, Comrade
Admiral, but you have locked the missile on the landmass. ...”

 
          
“Yes,
I know,” Sun replied with a sly smile. “Continue the test.”

           
“Our telemetry systems won’t record
the impact if it strays more than twenty miles off course,” the tech reminded
him.

           
“How long will we have datalink
contact before impact?”

 
          
“It
should hold lock all the way to impact,” the tech replied, “although terrain or
cultural obstructions may block the signal within approximately eight seconds
to impact.”

 
          
“How
far will the missile drift off course in eight seconds?”

 
          
“If
it stays locked on, it will not drift off course,” the tech replied. “If it
breaks lock when we lose the datalink ... it will miss perhaps by not more than
a few dozen meters.”

 
          
“Then
I think we will get all the telemetry we need,” Sun said. “Continue the test.”

 
          
The
closer the M-9 got to its target, the more detail they could see. Through
occasional spats of static and one short nine-second datalink break as the
warhead separated from the booster section, Sun could start to make out large
buildings, then piers and wharves, then finally individual buildings. Through
long hours of study, Sun knew exactly what he was looking at, and as soon as
the system allowed him to do so, he locked the warhead on the main barracks
building, a two-story wooden frame structure just a few hundred meters from the
northwestern shoreline of Pratas Island. Sun knew that approximately a thousand
rebel Nationalist soldiers were stationed on
Pratas
Island
, manning and servicing the antiair and
-ship sites—and he knew that about one hundred Taiwanese soldiers would be
asleep right now in those barracks.