EPTRead the updated part 1 here: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=391081
Read the updated part 2 here: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=391370
Read part 8 here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=393964
Captain Kang Zongqi gasped, strings of sticky, salty spit mixing with the warm sand under his right cheek. Two hours ago, Colonel Wu Taifu had ordered him to throw what food and water he could gather from the ejection pod into a waterproof bag, tie it to his leg, and swim for the island.
A muscle cramp rippled through his right leg. He'd gotten it sixty meters from the island; somehow, the current carried him onto a beach jutting from a flat shelf of rocks. From somewhere behind his left temple, a dull throb joined the pain in his leg. With a sense of trepidation, he closed his right eye, wincing as his vision blurred, a thick, dim halo shrouding his field of view. Retinal bleeding. Zongqi remembered the manuals now. If he didn't get treatment in another twenty hours, he'd lose his left eye. Even if he did, he knew it would be slim odds that he could ever fly again. And if he couldn't fly...
Tears rose. "Not now," Zongqi muttered. Tears would just make the pain worse, inflame the wound ticking underneath the left side of his world.
The radio chirped. "Captain Kang, sitrep request, over."
Kang lifted his head, shaking free the sand lodged in his close-cropped hair. "Colonel Wu, this is Captain Kang. Have reached main island. Retained thirty percent of original supplies."
"Your eyes?"
"Left eye deteriorating. Right eye fully functional."
A brief pause, then Colonel Wu said, "We're still working on a rescue plan. In the meantime, find some shelter and running water. Try to avoid drawing the attention of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Get me an inventory list in ten minutes."
Zongqi rolled over, unlatching his belt and flight harness, then untied the waterproof bag and removed his helmet. He sat up and laid the belt, harness, bag, and helmet on the sand beside him, like a panhandler spreading his wares atop one of Beijing's pedestrian overpasses.
The knife was easy to identify. Zongqi undid the clip that held it to his belt, then withdrew the black matte blade from a hard plastic sheath, testing the edge. Mindful of the salt air, he resheathed it, set it down on a nearby rock.
Next came the hard black plastic of a semi-automatic pistol, its barrel no wider than the dilated pupils of an alley cat. Zongqi looked up at the horizon, saw a pair of nine-thousand-ton Japanese destroyers making loops. He doubted the gun would be of much use against them, that is, if the seawater had not permanently corroded the action already.
The only other item of note attached to his belt was a palm-sized GPS tablet. Zongqi threw it aside--he wouldn't be making any long treks, and he doubted high command needed his exact coordinates on an island barely one-tenth the size of downtown Beijing.
On his flight harness, two magazines of 5.8x21mm rounds, a silvery autoinjector filled with penicillin, and a deep red one with eight doses of morphine--"the cyanide substitute", his wingman had called it. Banter that had seemed harmless now made his spine run cold. Zongqi checked the indicator strips for green, then gingerly set them on the rock beside the knife, careful not to break the thin plastic syringes inside.
The final two items from his harness were a thumb-sized butane lighter and a half-crumpled packet of Hongtashan filters. They smelled of a mix of ocean water and sweet tobacco that reminded Zongqi of a salted caramel from Dairy Queen. Zongqi placed them next to the bullets.
Finally came a four-pack of water and three brick-sized zein packages, each filled with a three thousand two hundred calories of food, laxatives, a pack of amphetamine-laced chewing gum, chlorazine tablets, and a flameless ration heater. The plastic water bottles felt rough in his hands; upon closer inspection, Zongqi found salt crusting the rims of the caps. He drank from one. The water, thankfully, was still potable.
Holding the bottle with both his hands, Zongqi turned his right eye to the island around him. Waves crashing on rocks. Goats. A forested mountain rose from the beach, forming a jagged, but lush, ridgeline against the blue sky. Were it not for the jet contrails and the pain behind my temple, I could fool myself into believing this was a vacation, Zongqi thought.
His helmet, slightly scorched from the explosive ejection bolts that had blasted the canopy open, stared at him from a rock. Zongqi stared back. Gritting his teeth, he gathered up his kit and set out into the trees.
Colonel Wu Taifu rubbed his temples. Hearing the words of the Japanese side from the innocent, bubbly voice of the press officer-cum-translator lent an air of absurdity to the conversation. But no matter how nice she sounded, the message was clear. The Japanese side would not budge.
"No. Please inform us of his emergency transponder frequency, and we will recover your pilot on your behalf."
The air in the conference room had grown stale. Taifu rose from his seat to push open a window, caught an intense stare from the video screen, thought the less of it.
The team had now grown to six. Immediately to the right of Taifu, hunched over a laptop, was the air division commander, General Liang. Two uniforms sat on the other side--one wrapped around the slim, angelic-looking press officer, curly black hair running down her shoulders, far past regulation length. She had a cute button nose, big brown eyes, and faint freckles. Her name read Ma Yuanwei, and her shoulderboards indicated an underage captain. At least she had a decent grasp of how things would look to the public, Taifu thought, which was not always his experience in the Chinese military. The other held an overfed, sour-looking, major general of political affairs, who had come on board as the ranking officer, but now found himself grossly overmatched by the power couple staring back from the Beijing end of the video link.
The video screen was split in two. One side was empty--five minutes before it had held a clean-shaven, crisp-looking staff colonel, who had spoken to the Nanjing team as if they were a group of lost out-of-town relatives.
The other side gave Taifu chills in his gut.
When Vice Premier Zhang Shenghan had first signed on, the screen had shown an avatar, a color photo against a white background likely taken when Shenghan had first joined the Party over twenty years ago. A slightly plump, friendly face had stared out on the Nanjing team, dispensing words clothed in a metallic, yet strangely soothing baritone.
Then the background and face came alive, and Zhang Shenghan aged twenty years before their eyes. Some features had not changed, like the sleek, blood-red tie hanging below a prominent Adam's apple, both of which bobbed as one unit when Shenghan took a sip from an ever-present teacup, or the carefully sculpted wave of jet-black hair above a prominent forehead. But his face had grown a mask of impassivity, and thinned from cherubic to Mephistopholean. And what scared Taifu the most were Shenghan's eyes, which looked dead, yet danced about as if they were alive of their own accord.
The baritone sounded again. "If the Japanese side is unwilling to allow Chinese rescue operations, tell him we'll push a story across all of our media assets that the Japanese side is attempting to use the death by starvation of Captain Kang Zongqi as a bargaining chip to force Chinese recognition of their territorial claims."
The press officer translated. Angry curses replied from the Japanese side, which the press officer dropped from her Chinese translation. "The Japanese side wishes to inform the Chinese side that any repeat of the managed rioting and property damage in 2012 and 2016 will be treated as a hostile act, and Japan will reserve the right to respond with financial and trade sanctions on Chinese exports to Japan."
Shenghan responded, a hint of ice drifting through his voice like cool menthol through a mint julep. "Inform the Japanese that 2016 was not managed rioting, but restrained rioting--or have they forgotten the policemen in Jinan who burned to death protecting a Japanese department store?" Shenghan paused, sipped tea. "If the Japanese side expects the Chinese side to ensure the safety of their overseas property and citizens, they should refrain from any official reaction to the spontaneous, legitimate, and wholly patriotic actions of Chinese citizens."
Again, the press angel translated Shenghan's voice. The Japanese minister on the other end dropped his voice low, almost to a growl. "The Japanese side reserves the right to take any and all measures to guarantee the safety of Japanese citizens, the sovereignty of the Chinese government over Chinese soil notwithstanding."
The hint of ice disappeared, replaced by the original, soothing baritone. "The Chinese side will treat any violation of its sovereignty as a formal casus belli, with no limit on retaliatory measures." A wry smile danced across Shenghan's face. "Inform the Japanese minister that this round of conversations was productive, but unfortunately now must come to an end."
Taifu clicked off the talkbox. At that moment, the staff colonel reappeared with a thick dossier. "I have the answer you requested, Vice-Premier. The General Staff can support your proposed course of action. It is the opinion of the General Staff that the China can--"
Shenghan spoke again. "Keep it to yourself for now. I'm just glad to know that if the Japanese do anything funny, we'll be ready. And--we're going to push the starvation story." Another sip of tea. "Colonel Wu, General Liang, how's the rescue plan coming?"
General Liang looked up. He had not noticed Shenghan's shift from an avatar to a live feed, and tried not to jump up in his seat. "Vice-Premier Zhang, we are basically finished. The destroyer Yinchuan will launch a special forces team from approximately 150km southeast of the disputed islands via two inflatable speedboats. Once the speedboats close within 50km of the islands, we will openly prep and scramble four regiments of fighter and strike aircraft at select Nanjing MR airbases. To the pilots, it will resemble a standard alert drill, except with live stand-off weapons loaded, and on a much larger scale. The Americans will likely see the planes taking off via SIGINT and ELINT, and prepare a response."
The staff colonel chimed in, voice eager. "Vice-Premier, four regiments is approximately one hundred and sixty aircraft."
Shenghan nodded. "If the Americans don't catch that, they're not worth their golden toilet seats. But--first, how does that help the rescue team, and second, what is the risk of accidental escalation?"
Taifu spoke. "The answer your second question--our pilots will be instructed to cruise north along the Chinese coast, then east for only two hundred kilometers or so, then back south--a slim triangle, entirely over the Chinese EEZ. However, as they cruise northward and then back home, they will put Japanese airbases from Okinawa to Kyushu at risk of being hit with stand-off weapons with less than twenty minutes' warning, which, in our estimation, will draw Japanese assets away from the islands, including the two destroyers currently patrolling there."
"Why would they pull them off?"
"Because if they don't get eyes on the strike grouping at a set distance from the Home Islands with whatever they already have in the water, they would have to put nearly all their AWACS and interceptors in the air across a broad swath of the Honshu, Kyushu, and Okinawa, and that would be painfully expensive, and prohibitively slow."
Shenghan nodded. "So be it. General Liang, when will we execute this plan?"
"At 0700 tomorrow."
"Good. I'm going to clear the story for publication in the next hour, and hold a press conference after that. We want the Japanese to think we don't have any intention of sneaking Captain Kang out, that we're only going to apply some economic pressure and saber-rattling. This rescue plan meshes neatly with that approach. Thank you all for your time."
Shenghan smiled. It was not a smile that made Colonel Wu Taifu comfortable. And with that, the face blended into the friendly, cherubic avatar from twenty-two years ago.
Read Part 10 here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=394514
