Joe poked his head inside. He could hear voices, the rumble of the tug, and the occasional sound of items being moved or repositioned, but as he expected the back wall was a storage area, and directly in front of him lay nothing but dust-covered equipment and junk.
Pulling back, he worked a few more pieces loose and bent one chunk back and forth until he was able to fold it upward. “That’s as good as it’s going to get.”
It would be a tight fit, but Kurt figured they could squirm through.
“I’ll go first,” Pru said. “I’m the smallest.”
Kurt appreciated her dedication, but he figured Joe should do the honors.
Joe got down on the ground and crawled inside. “Once more into the breach,” he whispered, “…literally.”
Kurt followed, hunching his broad shoulders together and then crawling forward on his elbows until he was able to pull his legs through. Pru squirmed through behind him.
A six-foot stack of crates, buttressed by discarded equipment and other items, acted like a wall, shielding them off from the rest of the hangar. But the sound of a stern male voice echoed from the other side of the wall.
The first words they picked out were ominous: “…of course,” the voice announced in a mournful tone, “…the Americans will end up suffering thousands of dead and wounded.”
Chapter 55
A solid-looking man in his fifties wearing a green flight suit covered in squadron patches stood in front of a large whiteboard in the rear corner of the cavernous, dimly lit hangar. Sitting rigidly in front of him, as if at attention, were two rows of younger men in similar clothing.
The older man was addressed by this group as the flight leader. He was the ranking member of the Yellow Tigers, a faction that had sworn to defend Taiwan’s freedom to the end. They were considered a terrorist group within their own country, having been responsible for intimidation, sabotage, and assassinations of several politicians whom they considered complicit with the Chinese Communist Party. Despite their outlaw nature, they maintained a sort of mythical status among many of the island’s residents.Guardians of the flame. Warriors of the last hope.Some members of the government, the military, and even the civilian security forces were sympathetic to their organization. The flight leader himself had once been a colonel in the Taiwanese air force.
The men sitting in front of him had been selected from among hundreds of recruits. They were the most intense and loyal of the Yellow Tigers.
Two pilots sat in the front row. Each of them roughly around forty years of age. The flight leader had known these men during his time in the military and had recruited them personally. They were lifelong patriots and former captains in their own right.
The rest of the group was younger. Made up of brash, idealistic men in their twenties hardened by the desire to keep their island nation free, tortured by the constant insistence from China that this singular desire would soon be destroyed.
They marked their bodies with tattoos including various symbols of freedom. They saluted and took their name from an old flag, which sported a stylized yellow tiger prowling on a blue background, which represented the sea. The flag had been flown during the brief existence of the Republic of Formosa before it became Taiwan.
These choices were the equivalent of burning their ships as they reached the shore. If the Chinese ever did take the island, these markings and possessions would lead to imprisonment or execution. It made things simple for these men. They would prevail and keep their country free or die trying, but they would never surrender.
Until recently, the group had only limited weapons, ones that would be of little use in a major battle. But thanks to Ahab they now had something more. A chance to strike first, to strike hard, and—if everything worked out right—a way to bring the United States into the war, by making China strike back against them.
“Can we quantify the American losses?” one of the pilots asked in response to the flight leader’s ominous proclamation.
“The initial Chinese counter will almost certainly target the American aircraft carrier and its battle group that will begin sailing through the Taiwan Strait this morning. Chinese losses will be significant, but ultimately most of the American ships will be destroyed.”
It pained the flight leader to bring death and destruction on menand women he would have otherwise considered allies. But American resolve to defend Taiwan was faltering. It had waned considerably over the years and at this point there was no guarantee that America would commit its most valuable assets to the battle, nor risk a Third World War to defend a tiny island on the other side of the world.
But…if American lives were lost first…If an American aircraft carrier was destroyed by the Chinese…
“Are we sure the Americans will respond in force?” one of the men asked.
Anything could go wrong, the flight leader thought, but there was no nation on earth that responded to naked aggression the way America did. From the Alamo, to Pearl Harbor, to the events of September 11, the American reaction to a surprise attack had always been mass destruction to its enemies wherever they hid in the world. If the Yellow Tigers met with success, that fire would be stoked to a raging inferno and pointed directly at the mainland Chinese. “They will come with fire and brimstone,” he assured his men quietly. “But we must make the Chinese sting them first.”
The group nodded in unison. Though it was the first they were hearing of the audacious plan, which had been kept hidden for obvious reasons, they understood it implicitly.
Stepping back to the board, the flight leader flipped it over to reveal the battle plan. A chart depicted Taiwan, the coast of mainland China, and the narrow strait in between. Target areas had been marked with coordinates beside them.
“The United States began a series of training exercises over and around our island yesterday,” he began. “Those exercises will continue this morning and throughout the day. These war games are being handled in conjunction with our military and some units of the Japanese Self-Defense Force. In addition to the carrier battlegroup sailing through the Strait, there will be a hundred and twenty American aircraft in the sky. This collection of military force has obviously gained the attention of the Chinese, who are watching very closely. They will have their own aircraft flying and their own military on high alert. Into this powder keg we will toss a lit match.”
Turning to the whiteboard, he pointed to various markings. The first was a bright red line that went north from Siabat Island into the strait and then turned toward the Chinese coast.
“Ahab and Saber One will travel to this point,” he said, tapping a spot on the map. “At the first waypoint they will shoot down an American airborne tanker, take its place by using stolen transponder codes, and begin to create confusion. The changeover won’t be seamless, and before long, the Americans will send fighters to investigate. Saber One will eliminate the approaching jets selectively and then turn for China.
“Not all things can be accounted for,” he admitted, “but we have every reason to believe the Americans will scramble more aircraft in an attempt to intercept Saber One before it reaches Chinese airspace. The Chinese high command will be watching this on radar. To them it will appear as if Saber One is leading an American attack force directly for their shore. They will send up their own fighters to meet and intercept this approaching force. But the Chinese fighters will get no closer than the American jets did. Saber One will sweep them from the sky, an act that will only confirm to them that the Americans are attempting a massive airborne strike.
