defend Taiwan from outside aggression, while on the other they threw a bone to the People’s Republic by inserting careful language into the treaty upon its ratification: “It is the understanding of the Senate that nothing in the treaty shall be construed as affecting or modifying the legal status or sovereignty of the territories to which it applies.”
It suited the US for decades to favor both Japan and Taiwan with promises of military aid and support in exchange for bases and allied states that would help America contain the great Dragon of the East. But now the Chinese had finally gone to sea, building a navy that would allow them to project real power there.
Tonight that navy was also moving. Amphibious ships were slipping away from their quays and piers, escorted by fast new frigates, China’s new destroyers formed up in flotillas in the vanguard of these task forces, and a host of silent submarines crept out from the long coastline. They were all bound for the contested choke points and routes of approach to the region, the first trip wire that any intruder would have to face.
Back on the mainland hundreds of aircraft were queuing up at the military airfields, ready for takeoff, some sleek and stealthy, already climbing into the night with missiles hidden within their sculpted bellies, others more conventional, with their wings heavy with bombs and other ordinance. At locations all over the mainland coastline thousands of mobile ballistic missile launchers emerged from hidden caves, bunkers, and tunnels and their blood red noses lifted slowly toward the silver moon. A cold “East Wind” was about to blow as the deadly Dong Feng missiles prepared for launching. There were over 1100 DF-11 and DF-15 missiles available for land based targets and a another thousand older tactical missiles. With these were up to 200 of the deadly DF-21 ship killers like those that had hit a bull’s eye and ravaged the Japanese helicopter carrier DDH Hyuga in the recent hot engagement over the Senkaku / Diaoyutai Islands.
Lt. Commander Reed had explained it as a game of darts and arrows to the White House Chief of Staff Leyman, but it was about to become a very real nightmare. Signals intelligence and satellites were watching it all with tense alertness while a great debate raged in the White House Situation Room: should the United states preemptively attack and destroy China’s intelligence and GPS satellite network?
While they were talking about it 2nd Lieutenant Matt Eden at US NAVINTEL saw something very interesting on his own spy satellite monitoring station at Hawaii. Satellite NROL-50 picked up the obvious back flash of three missiles being launched from Shuangchengzi Space and Missile Center and Eden quickly reached for his alert phone.
“Deep Black Ten reporting. Red One, Red One, Red One,” he said three times quickly. “I have back flash on three Red Arrows out of Sierra-Mike-Charlie, confidence high. Do you copy?”
“Roger that Deep Black Ten, Red One, three times. Will confirm.”
Hot damn I hope they move on this one in a hurry, he thought, because one of those bad boys could be coming up after my NROL-50. NORAD, STRATCOM, and J-SOC, the Joint Space Operations Center, would be all over this as well. They surely picked up that back flash on infrared and know what’s coming. If he was going to have to move his bird he need confirming radar and SIGINT on the missiles, and a clear line on their presumed orbital entry point and threat vector. Satellites were killed by simply putting an infrared seeking warhead into orbit for what would end up looking like a collision of two particles in an accelerator. The warhead would take an orbital path retrograde to that of the target satellite and come flashing in to collide with it at over 18,000 miles per hour.
So while the West discussed the matter and debated the relative merits of this and that, the East acted. All that came before in the Senkaku Island group was just an overture. The three missiles Eden had spotted were now the opening salvo of a war that might indeed be the one to end all others, but they would be the last he would see.
Far below, in the rugged mountains of Xinjiang province, two well camouflaged concrete doors slowly opened and a ‘device’ resembling a massive searchlight slowly emerged from a deep hidden cave bunker and rolled out on two thin rails. It rotated, angling its massive circular shape to the sky