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Previous chapter(s):
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=377133
Xiaotian stood up in his hatch, fumbling with the smoke grenade. A dull whump-whump from somewhere in the gray murk to his right, but he saw nothing. The cold humidity had an odd effect on the sound, diffusing it against the background of the artillery barrage, so that it was difficult to judge the exact azimuth of the aircraft's approach. All at once, just offset from Xiaotian's line of sight, a small helicopter emerged from the mist, a quick blur that swift grew larger and defined itself. He could tell that the pilot was an Uzbekistan veteran, by the way he came in fast and low despite the rain and reduced visibility. Xiaotian tossed the smoke canister so that the breeze would lead the choking pink fumes away from his vehicle.
The pilot never really powered down. His copilot leapt from the settling aircraft and raced through the drizzle, bareheaded. Xiaotian jumped from his track, clutching the rolled maps and laptop. Both were stained with blood and the spillage of ripped bodies, and he was anxious to be rid of them, holding them out to the aviator like a gristly bouquet.
"Anything else?" the copilot shouted.
Xiaotian barely heard him over the rotor wash; he shook his head.
The helicopter drove the residual pink smoke up in a pattern like a shredded carpet. The enemy would see it, too, and there was no time to waste. The copilot raced back, hurriedly tossing the captured materials through the opened passenger door behind his seat; the pilot began to lift off before the copilot had even sat down. The aircraft rose just enough to clear the trees, then shot off in a dogleg from its approach vector.
Xiaotian vaulted onto the deck of his vehicle, nearly losing his balance on the slippery metal. He dropped into the turret.
"Let's move. Back into the woods."
The engine whined to life, rocking out across the furrows of the field until it could turn and nose back into the forest trail. Xiaotian studied his map again, searching for a good route deeper into the enemy's rear. No obvious routes suggested themselves.
The driver continued to follow the muddy path forward; the trees thinned to their right, revealing a hollow that discharged a small stream flowing parallel to the trail. Xiaotian checked his map again, hoping that the creek and the trail, side by side, would allow him to orient himself. But he could not identify his location; the only possibilities on the map didn't make sense in terms of the distance he estimated they had traveled. He needed a clear landmark, or an open view. Xiaotian ordered the driver to climb a ridge to their left.
The forest ended. The vehicle lay fully exposed where Xiaotian ordered it to halt. Below them, there was a broad, forested valley, dappled with random dots of light and dark green trees. A gray smokestack with alternating red and white horizontal stripes reached out of the valley and touched the low gray sky. Xiaotian pushed up his glasses and reached down for his digital map again.
He neither saw nor heard the round that killed him. It tore into the hull of the vehicle below the turret, ripping off his lower legs and mincing his hands as it exploded. The on-board ammunition cooked off a tenth of a second later, shooting his torso up through the commander's hatch, shattering his spine, and decapitating him as his head clipped the hatch handle. The pressure then compressed what was left of his body through the circular opening and blew it into the sky like a bundle of rags.
"Could it be a deception?" Tengfei asked, more to himself than to his audience.
Xu Tengfei, commander of the 54th Group Army, usually wore a mask of steely determination, etched in lines that made him seem unusually old for a lieutenant general, even though he had been promoted two years early. Now, while his face belied nothing, his fingers did, nervously fiddling with a pistachio. Eating them was a habit he had picked up when his pregnant wife persuaded him to give up smoking. Often, he hardly tasted the nuts, but he found that peeling away the shells had a soothing influence on him, the same way worry beads worked for a Buddhist.
"The documents appear to be genuine," the army's deputy chief of operations said. "They were reportedly taken from a command post that was completely destroyed."
"Have you seen the documents? Has anyone here seen them?"
"Division staff is still scanning them. We only know what the chief of reconnaissance reported from his initial exploration. But it makes sense," the operations chief said, pointing at the map that was the only bit of color on the long gray wall of the command bunker. "It puts their corps boundary here, not far from where we had assessed it."
"Far enough, though," Tengfei said. "Forty kilometers. It makes a difference. We need to execute the option to shift 127th Division east, onto the same southern tactical axis as the 162nd. The combat power has to converge there; it's where we will make the breakthrough." He slipped the bared pistachio between his lips.
"Comrade Army Commander, that may slow the seizure of Kusong."
At the mention of Kusong, Tengfei's temper quickened. But his facial expression remained still. Inwardly, he still chafed at the thought of the Kusong operation. HQ staff hadn't allowed him to explain its purpose to anyone else; as far as his own staff knew, it was a serious undertaking with a military purpose. But it irritated Tengfei that none of them seemed to question it. To him, it was quite obviously a useless diversion of combat power, yet his officers accepted it without a murmur. He reached for another pistachio.
"If we rupture their corps boundary, we'll flank Kusong from the east at our convenience." His tone was as though he were lecturing cadets at one of the second-rate academies. "I'm going to split the Koreans and Americans apart, like a melon under a cleaver." He turned to his chief of staff. "Mao, order Ping and Li to execute the eastern option. Adjust the divisional boundaries accordingly." Suddenly, he stood up and walked to the map, unwilling to trust the staff to accomplish that task quickly and accurately enough. "Put the boundary here, just offset from route 71. Get Ping moving east. If he hasn't prepared for this eventuality, I'll relieve him on the spot." He turned back to the ops chief. "Has Li reported on the status of his crossing?"
"Comrade Army Commander, the divisional crossing operation is underway at this time."
Tengfei sensed that his operations officer didn't know any further details. He almost lashed out at the man but managed to control himself, fingernails working at yet another pistachio shell. "All right. Everyone get started. Mao, get me General Luo. If he's not available, I'll talk to his chief of staff. And get my helicopter ready. I'm going to Li's command post. Make sure my pilot has a good fix on the location. If Li isn't there, I'll take over his division myself."
Tengfei felt a familiar fury. He could not make them move at the pace he believed appropriate to the occassion, but he realized that if he drove them any harder now, they would only grow sloppy in their haste.
When he paused to reflect, he realized that his was a good staff, as staffs went. But the human animal was simply too slow, too inconsistent for him. You had to drive it with a lash, applying pain skillfully so that it spurred the animal onward but did not cause permanent injury. Occasionally an animal was too weak, and it failed and had to be destroyed; other animals would then learn to respond better. But the requirement for the lash never disappeared, although the form taken by the instrument might change.
Tengfei didn't believe modern war was for mere mortals. Not at the operational level. Now it was for computers. And until they had better computers--computers that could replace the weaker type of men--war belonged to those who were as much like computers as possible: exact, devoid of sentiment, and very, very fast.
CONTINUED IN THIS THREAD
 
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That first part, that was brutal, man.
And yay, some operational level story.
That's pretty much the best part in modern warfare, glad you took a shot at it. 
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fave lines:
On October 23 2012 03:04 Shady Sands wrote:
The pressure then compressed what was left of his body through the circular opening and blew it into the sky like a bundle of rags.
and
On October 23 2012 03:04 Shady Sands wrote:
He slipped the bared pistachio between his lips.
:D
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Captain Wu Yibing had never faced such a frustrating problem. As commander of the forward security element, it was his job to move fast, to locate the enemy and overrun him, if possible, or, otherwise, to fix the enemy until the advance guard came up, meanwhile searching for a bypass around the enemy position. Textbook stuff, and what his unit had done in peacetime exercises with near-perfection, year in, year out.
Yet here, along this stretch of deserted highway, the enemy had already pulled back. But his element was blocked--by nothing more than a booby-trapped road crater and an unknown number of mines in the surrounding meadows. And without his engineers, who had been separated in the confusion of the first enemy contact just south of the Yalu, he had no mine-clearing capability.
He had sent out a reconnaissance patrol, three tracks, but he hadn't heard from them in hours, and they didn't warn him about this situation at all. But confusion aside, he had not lost a single vehicle. The Koreans had pushed too far, too fast, in their rush to secure all the Yalu bridgeheads, and the division's initial drone and artillery strikes had struck the thin ROK line with such overwhelming force that all Yibing's unit had to do was drive past tank after burned out enemy tank on an empty road. He was only missing the wandering engineers--until the lead infantry fighting vehicle attempted to work around the road crater. A mine had torn out its belly and butchered the crew.
Now Yibing's element was static, his vehicles idling on the asphalt, clotting up his nose with exhaust, burning precious fuel for no gain. Thirteen infantry fighting vehicles, three tanks, a battery of four 152mm self-propelled artillery guns, two self-propelled anti-air systems, and over a dozen specialized vehicles with racks of attack drones and control equipment, artillery ranging equipment, long-range radio sets, and spare ammunition and fuel. It was a tough little combat package, well-suited to the mission and the terrain. But now, without engineers, it was helpless.
Yibing dismounted and walked swiftly forward along the bunched column. Before he reached its head, he saw one of his lieutenants flush all of the soldiers out of their fighting vehicle. The lieutenant got into the driver's compartment, and after a jerking start, edged slowly towards the ruined, burning hulk, guiding his track behind it and pushing the wreck out of the way.
Yibing was momentarily stunned. The boy was going to try and clear a path through the minefield with his own body, like one of those martyrs out of the Military History Museum on Chang'an Avenue. Yibing was suddenly ashamed of himself for doing nothing and letting them all back up on the road like perfect targets while he waited for inspiration. Then he began to shout at the dismounted infantry who were casually standing around, watching as if this were a training demonstration, ordering them back into their tracks and radioing the rear vehicles to back up into a more tactical posture.
The lieutenant pushed the vehicle in a rough arc, finally edging it out of the way with the crunching and grinding of metal. The mine-struck vehicle had peeled off a track, and the hulk curled to the left as its naked road wheels bit into the turf and sank.
Now clear to face the minefield head on, the lieutenant drove over the lip of the crater slowly, seeking a safe path to the roadway on the far side. He was a new officer. Yibing vaguely remembered the first night of the war, his only personal interaction with the boy, and how he had proudly passed a photograph of his fiance around the bivouac site, asking the other lieutenants to sign it for good luck. Yibing watched, fists clenched, as the vehicle neared the far side. Then he instinctively ducked as the left side of the track suddenly lifted into the air, atop an invisble pillar. When he looked up again, the lieutenant's vehicle was flipped sideways, a two-meter wide hole on the bottom of the hull spouting orange flames and thick, oily smoke.
Yibing slumped. But without him even giving any orders to do so, a young sergeant likewise ordered his soldiers out, following the lieutenant's traces until the prow of his track crunched against the flaming rear doors of the newly stricken vehicle. Then, a deep rumbling sounded out as the engine shifted a lower gear. The flaming wreck veered out of the way, tumbling down the crater as it did so; the sergeant passed the edge and began inching forward.
Yibing and the soldiers around him began to spontaneously jump in the air and shout encouragement. Behind him, another sergeant pulled his track out of the column and followed closely, in case another probe vehicle was needed. Yibing felt as though he could win the war with just a handful of men such as these. He was suddenly eager to get back on the move, to find the enemy.
Yibing finally heard from the missing combat reconnaissance patrol. They had run into enemy opposition and had slipped off further to the east of Route 71. That meant they had moved outside of the unit's assigned boundary. But the good news was that they had seized a crossroads in the mountains just north of Pukchin. The lieutenant ended his status report with a nervous question on the ETA of the rest of the company. Yibing hesitated, then threw out a vague guess of thirty minutes, if they could get the approval of the division.
The patrol reported that they had come up on a three-way junction at the head of a mountain pass that commanded the valley below. The intersection had been guarded only by a few American soldiers with small arms, and the patrol had surprised them. Now the platoon leader was crying out for support. Yibing suspected that, under the circumstances, division would order him to support the tiny patrol, despite the boundary problem.
The other lieutenant's sacrifice now lay several kilometers to the rear. Yibing tried to reach division on the radio, and when that failed, he attempted to reach the advance guard that was somewhere on the trail. He needed divisional staff to know about the violation of his unit boundary. But his element's route led through low ground now, and all he could hear was static and faint strains of Kpop. The data feed on his command computer was similarly dead. He was not sure whether his net was beeing jammed or if the frequencies had simply gotten mixed up on both sides; earlier, American voices had come up on his internal net, having a heated conversation that included liberal amounts of screamed curses.
Yibing tried both stations again. Nothing.
He halted his column, then called for his senior artillery officer and the forward air controller to meet him under the giant phased array radar of one of the air defense vehicles.
"Can either of you talk with your higher?"
The artillery captain shrugged. "I can listen all right. Haven't tried to talk."
"I have a link back to division main and army central," Captain Lin, the air force officer, matter-of-factly stated.
"Good. Listen," Yibing said, "I want you both to raise any stations you can. Give them my call sign and tell them my direct links aren't working. Then give them this message."
Yibing took out his tablet, trying to protect it as much as possible against the fine drizzle that refused to come to an end.
"We're changing our route of advance. We're going further east. To right there." He tapped at the intersection, then sent the coordinates to the other two captains. "The combat recon patrol has a road junction, but they won't be able to hold it for three minutes if they get hit."
The artillery captain looked at Yibing as though the element commander was crazy. "That's out of our sector. I won't be able to call up any fire support."
"That's what your battery's for. Look, our mission is to find a passage to the south. We've gotten this far, and it seems as if the enemy's right flank has come apart. But they could still solidify it on those mountains with ease--our hardest part will be getting across them. And now we have such a crossing." Yibing paused, coughed. "I'm not going to pass it up just because it's a few kilometers out of sector. But you have to call back and tell higher what we're doing."
"What you're doing," the artilleryman said. "You have no authorization to cross a sector boundary. That site may even be one of the targets of our neighbor's artillery or airstrikes."
Yibing tightened his lips for a second. The artillery captain had articulated his own deepest fear. He looked to Captain Lin, who was consciously staring down and avoiding an opinion. Then he thought of the lieutenant who had been so much braver and clearer-thinking than his own commander. Now there was another lieutenant waiting for help. Yibing looked at the artilleryman with a grimace, seeing something of himself and a hundred other officers he knew.
"Correct," Yibing said. "I'll take sole responsibility for the consequences. Now let's get moving."
CONTINUED IN THIS THREAD
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Blazinghand
United States25556 Posts
On October 23 2012 06:06 snively wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2012 03:04 Shady Sands wrote:
He slipped the bared pistachio between his lips.
:D
Toe-curlingly sensual.
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Enjoying this a lot, but also looking forward to you going back to narrating the gameplay. Keep it up :D
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Major Zhang Youwei leaned over the operator's shoulder, watching the scanning line circle the radar display.
"Does anyone respond to our queries?"
"Major," the specialist sergeant said, with weary exasperation in his voice, "our aircraft are responding. But it's all so cluttered that the radar signatures mingle before I can sort targets. Then the American jammer finds our frequencies and blinds us for twenty seconds, and I have to start over again."
Youwei encouraged the sergeant to keep trying. He felt like a unit political officer now; simply trying to keep spirits high in the control staff. He had begun the morning by shouting when things went wrong, but had soon lost his voice. Now he simply did what he could to keep the entire air-defense sector from collapsing into anarchy. He turned away from the boy at the console.
At the next two desks, his commissioned officers manning scopes and targeting systems were doing no better. Hundreds of Chinese and Western aircraft were shuffling back and forth along the same flight corridors as they struck each other's airbases. The big radar screen that dominated one wall of the command trailer had more sparkling dots than the Hong Kong skyline on a moonlit night. Youwei had no doubt that he was hitting. His unit alone had over ten reported kills in the space of a single day, but after synchronizing with a real-time feed of air traffic control data, the computer returned a 5-15% likelihood of friendly fire on each kill. Over the radio, some other majors had been asking higher-ups if their SAM batteries--designed for 60 and 100km engagement ranges--could switch to visual identification only. The answer had been no: as long as it was more likely that they were shooting down enemy planes, they were to keep loosing their arrows into the uncertain sky.
The trailer rumbled as yet another telephone-pole-sized missile ignited its launch motors.
"Afterburners now!"
Captain Kang Zongqi leaned forward in his throttle, testing the redline, feeling the engine under his seat vibrate with the stress. He hoped his wingman had heard the command.
"Fifty-eight, I'm still in the capture zone. I'm all lit up."
"Open up your throttle more, you're falling behind, fifty-nine." Zongqi turned around and saw the white trail of the rocket shoot up from the sea of low clouds below them, pass his wingman, then loop behind and under him. "It's below you and climbing again. Drop the chaff, bank hard right. I'll bank left."
Zongqi leaned on his stick with all of his weight. "Turning now. Go!" Fighting not to black out as his blood drained toward his feet, the captain turned his head slightly sideways and saw his wingman drop two bundles of chaff, then bank so hard, Zongqi knew he would be unconscious.
But it had worked. The SAM miraculously passed beside his wingman's aircraft and carried about three hundred meters before exploding. Zongqi's aircraft bucked like a wild horse at the blast.
When both of them had regained full consciousness, Zongqi spoke. "Steady now, keep her steady, fifty-nine."
The planes had come out two and two, but the trailing pair had been shot down before they even crossed the first set of mountains. Now, deep in the enemy's rear, the air defenses had thinned, but it was still nightmarish flying, not at all like Uzbekistan.
Flying in and out of Karshi air base had been bad enough, with the eternal haze, filthy dust on the hot wind clogging the jet turbines, and later, the horribly accurate man-portable heat-seeking missiles. But all of that was child's play compared to this.
"Fifty-eight, my nav system's out." His wingman's voice sounded hysterical.
Shit, Zongqi thought. "Just stay with me," he answered. "We'll be just fine." No response aside from muffled sobbing. It was their second combat mission of the day, and today was the junior pilot's first exposure to real combat. If Uzbekistan had been this bad, Zonqi thought, I might have quit flying.
"Stay with me, little brother. Talk to me."
The crying stopped. "I'm... I'm okay now, fifty-eight."
"Good boy." Zongqi glanced down at the soft blue glow of his liquid crystal display. "Target heading, thirty degrees to the left. Let's go to attack altitude."
"Roger." A smooth turn, then a dive through the clouds. The ground rushed up to greet them, and Zongqi pulled back hard on the stick. They leveled out at two hundred meters. Zongqi picked up the massive smokestacks of the power plant that marked the last waypoint before the target area.
"Keep those wings level now... final reference point in sight..."
"I have the reference point."
"Executing attack pattern purple."
"Correcting to follow your approach."
"Remember--you hit the apron. I've got the main runway." Zongqi's radar warning reciever went off--three beeps clustered together on repeat, meaning a short-range point-defense system. "Hold on, it's going to be hot. "
"Roger." The junior lieutenant's voice was steady now.
"Target, fifteen kilometers... steady... I have visual."
Zongqi saw the airfield ahead of them like a picnic site: three gray runways around a rough triangle of grass, hangars on the outside edges like brown loaves of bread, and enemy aircraft landing and taking off, like flies. The flak guns came to life in their path, drilling the sky with points of light.
"Twenty degrees left, align with the takeoff pattern." Zongqi led them right into the general flight paths of the enemy aircraft taking off, making it impossible for the air-defense guns to follow them.
"Let's do this clean... hold it... hold straight... straighten your wings damn it... now!"
"Wooooo!" The junior pilot shouted in childish elation as they lifted away from the enemy airfield. As they banked, Zongqi caught a glimpse of the heavy damage that had already been dealt to the base by previous sorties. Black burned patches and craters on the hardstand. Smoking ruins in the support area. Emergency vehicles raced through corridors of fire. At least two hangars were spewing black smoke from their collapsed entrances, like the gates to hell.
Then, two enormous orange starbursts, fifty meters above the ground. Zongqi felt a gentle wobble in his stick as the combined blast wave kissed his wings.
"Let's go home, little brother... heading zero two five."
A tailless enemy plane suddenly shot straight up in front of Zongqi, like a giant gray bat. As the stealth interceptor twisted into the sky, disappearing from view in the low clouds, Zongqi's mouth opened under his face mask.
After a long, long few seconds, he spoke. "Hostiles, fifty-nine... do what I do... do exactly what I do... understand?"
"Roger." Fear had crept back into the wingman's voice; he too, had seen the enemy fighter's acrobatic climb. Now they both wondered where the enemy aircraft had gone. Zongqi looked at his radar screen. It was a mess. Busy sky.
"Do as I do, fifty nine." And I hope I know what I'm doing.
END THIS PART
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EPT
