Chapter 432: The Roar of the Tomb
Chapter 432: Chapter 391: The Roar of the Tomb
Chapter 391: The Roar of the Tomb
September 2, 1979
Shanghai • The Flooded Plains of Anhui • Jilantai Missile Base (Inner Mongolia) • Subterranean Command Bunker Four, Beijing
By the second of September, 1979, the body count of the Second Chinese Civil War had long since passed the capacity of any surviving ministry to record, because the ministries themselves were in ashes and the clerks who once kept the census registers had been eaten by the earth.
Twelve months earlier, in the blistering, cholera-choked August of 1978—after the intentional dynamiting of the Yangtze levees south of Nanjing had drowned four million souls in a week and the 7.8-magnitude Hebei earthquake had dropped the concrete skeleton of northern China onto the heads of its inhabitants—foreign intelligence agencies in Washington, Moscow, and New Delhi had placed the cumulative toll at somewhere between fifteen and twenty-two million dead.
Then had come the winter of 1978–1979.
It had been the coldest winter on the North China Plain in forty years, arriving across a continent without window glass, without coal trains, without antibiotics, and without a single functioning state granary between the Yellow River and the Pearl. Across Henan, Shandong, Anhui, and Jiangsu, where the recedes of the summer floodwaters had left three million acres of prime agricultural soil encrusted in toxic grey river silt and the calcified bones of drowned livestock, the winter had not merely killed the sick and the elderly; it had erased entire county populations down to the last dog and the last strip of elm bark. By the time the humid, fly-blown heat of late August 1979 settled once more over the ruins, satellite thermal surveys and demographic projections compiled by R&AW and the CIA placed the true number of the dead across the thirty-five months since October 6, 1976, at between twenty-nine and thirty-four million human beings.
A nation had not merely fractured. It had rotted on its feet while still clutching its rifles.
And it was into this vast, stinking, cratered charnel house—on the morning of Sunday, September 2nd, 1979—that the shortwave radio signals from Moscow, New Delhi, and New York arrived, announcing to the remnants of China that the western third of their map had just been wiped off the board between sunrise and sunset.
0830 Hours, September 2, 1979 — Sub-Surface Command Complex “Red Bastion,” Beneath the Former Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Building, The Bund, Shanghai
Forty feet below the shattered granite columns and sandbagged machine-gun embrasures of the Bund, the diesel generators of the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee coughed and surged with a rhythmic, asthmatic shudder.
Every fourth minute, as the fuel pumps sucked a pocket of water or sludge from the bottom of the subterranean storage tanks—filled three days ago with low-grade marine diesel smuggled upriver from Macau by Cantonese triad syndicates in exchange for forty crates of Song and Ming porcelain from the Shanghai Museum—the crystal chandeliers hanging from the vaulted concrete ceiling of Madame Jiang Qing’s reception hall dimmed from yellow to a bruised, flickering orange.
Above the concrete roof lay a city of ghosts. The population of Shanghai, which had stood at eleven million in the autumn of 1976, had shrunken through battle, starvation, typhus, and forced rural conscription sweeps to barely four and a half million hollow-eyed survivors. Along the Huangpu River waterfront, the rusted, burned-out hulks of three East Sea Fleet destroyers sat half-sunk in the brown mud where Northern Air Force bombers had caught them in 1977. In the Yangpu and Zhabei industrial districts, forty thousand emaciated prisoners and elderly townspeople were currently chained by the ankle to ammunition presses, stamping out 7.62mm brass cartridge cases with recycled copper stripped from the city’s telephone exchanges.
Inside the subterranean hall, however, the carpets were thick red wool, the air was heavy with French perfume and the sour smell of damp concrete, and twelve fourteen-year-old girls of the 1st Youth Vanguard (“The Blood Guards”) stood at rigid, unblinking attention along the silk-draped walls, their small fingers resting inside the trigger guards of loaded Type-64 silenced submachine guns.
At the centre of the room, around a long mahogany table piled with tactical maps of the Zhejiang and Anhui front lines, stood Wang Hongwen, Xu Jingxian, and the surviving commanders of the Shanghai People’s Militia.
Wang Hongwen was forty-four years old, though in the flickering orange light of the chandelier he looked sixty. His once-smooth, handsome face was grey and puffy from two years of living underground on canned pork, amphetamines, and imported cognac; a nervous tic pulled constantly at the left corner of his mouth.
In his trembling right hand, he held three sheets of coarse grey teleprinter paper torn from the bunker’s external monitoring room twenty minutes earlier: the full transcripts of Andrei Gromyko’s Moscow statement, Prime Minister Y. B. Chavan and Karan Shergill’s Vigyan Bhavan press conference in New Delhi, and President Jimmy Carter’s nine o’clock White House broadcast recognizing the “Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim.”
The double doors at the far end of the hall swung open.
Jiang Qing walked in.
At sixty-five, the widow of Mao Zedong wore a tailored dark-grey military tunic of her own design, buttoned to the throat, her hair dyed a harsh, lacquer black that contrasted grotesquely with the sunken, parchment pallor of her cheeks. Her eyes behind her thick-framed spectacles were wide, luminous, and completely unmoored from the physical dimensions of the world outside her bunker.
“Read it to me again, Hongwen,” Jiang Qing commanded, her voice shrill and trembling with a fury so intense that the two twelve-year-old Blood Guards flanking her chair stiffened like iron rods. “Read what the Indian billionaire and the Russian traitors said!”
Wang Hongwen swallowed hard, wiping the sweat from his upper lip with the back of his sleeve.
“Comrade Jiang Qing,” Wang began, his voice hoarse, “at dawn yesterday, five divisions of the Soviet Turkestan Military District crossed the border into Dzungaria and occupied Ürümqi and the Karamay oilfields, proclaiming a ‘People’s Republic of North Turkestan.’ Simultaneously, three armoured and air-mobile columns of the Indian Army crossed the Kunlun Mountains from Ladakh and occupied Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan, Aksu, and Korla, proclaiming a ‘Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim’ under an Indian military protectorate. Both armies halted along the two-thousand-six-hundred-metre line of the Tian Shan mountains. And last night in Washington, Jimmy Carter formally recognized the Indian puppet regime in Kashgar and announced that an American Embassy and American oil corporations are flying into Southern Xinjiang next week.”
Jiang Qing did not sit down. She grabbed a porcelain teacup from the edge of the mahogany table and hurled it with all her strength against the silk-draped concrete wall.
The cup shattered into a hundred white shards, splashing brown tea across a portrait of Chairman Mao.
“Traitors! Social-imperialist jackals! Bourgeois vultures!” Jiang Qing shrieked, her hands clawing the air as she paced up and down the red carpet. “Do you see the grand design now, Hongwen?! Do you see what I warned the Chairman about in 1974?!
“This was never about border skirmishes! Moscow, Washington, and New Delhi are a single, three-headed capitalist-revisionist monster! Brezhnev—that fat Red Tsar in the Kremlin—saw that the pure proletarian revolution of the Chairman still burned unconquered here in Shanghai! And that arrogant Indian viceroy in Lucknow—Karan Shergill, sitting on his mountains of stolen gold and British-style monopolies—was terrified that once we crushed the northern warlords and reunified China under the banner of Continuous Revolution, seven hundred million Chinese workers and peasants would march across Asia and sweep his capitalist factories into the sea!
“So they conspired in the dark!” she ranted, her spectacles flashing yellow in the dimming generator light. “The Russian revisionists stole the north! The Indian reactionaries stole the south! And the American imperialists rushed in behind them with their bankers to divide the oil and the uranium of the Chinese people!”
She spun around and slammed both palms onto the tactical map table, glaring at Xu Jingxian and the militia generals.
“What are our western divisions doing?!” Jiang Qing demanded. “Order the Lanzhou and Chengdu revolutionary committees to mobilize immediately! We must march west through the Gansu Corridor and strike both the Soviet revisionists and the Indian imperialists in the flank!”
Around the mahogany table, a suffocating, terrified silence fell.
The three militia generals looked down at their boots. None of them dared to be the man who reminded the Empress of Shanghai where their front lines actually stood on the second of September, 1979.
Finally, Xu Jingxian—the fifty-six-year-old chief administrator who actually had to count the rice sacks, the diesel drums, and the rifle cartridges every night—cleared his throat and spoke in a flat, careful voice.
“Comrade Jiang Qing,” Xu said softly, placing his finger on the map of the Yangtze Delta in front of them, “our westernmost outpost is at Anqing, one hundred and eighty kilometres west of Nanjing.
“Beyond Anqing lies four hundred miles of flooded, cholera-infested no-man’s-land in Hubei and Henan where nobody rules except roving bands of cannibals and deserters. Beyond that sits General Chen Xilian’s armed neutral zone in Wuhan, which shoots anyone who approaches the Yangtze bridges. Beyond Wuhan sits two thousand miles of shattered mountains, broken railway tunnels, and General Zhao’s northern armies before you even reach the edge of the Gobi Desert.”
Xu looked up at her steadily.
“Comrade Jiang Qing, Ürümqi and Kashgar are three thousand five hundred kilometres away from this bunker. We do not have a single railway locomotive that can run further west than Wuxi. We do not have a single transport aircraft left with the range to cross Henan, let alone reach Xinjiang. And if we put a single coastal patrol boat ten miles outside the mouth of the Yangtze, the Kuomintang destroyers in the Taiwan Strait—or the Indian carrier planes sitting at Singapore—will sink it in five minutes.”
Wang Hongwen leaned heavily on the edge of the table, his face grey as he pointed to the southern sector of the Zhejiang map.
“More than that, Comrade Jiang Qing,” Wang said quietly, “we have zero ammunition to spare for gestures. In six days, on September 8th, we have to launch our autumn grain-foraging offensive across the (Qiantang) River into central Zhejiang against the Kuomintang’s National Salvation Front and the northern 60th Corps.
“If we do not capture the autumn rice harvest in the Jinhua basin before October, the rations for the Blood Guards and the munitions workers in Shanghai will drop below six hundred calories a day by November. The Macau triad brokers delivered only four million rounds of 7.62mm ammunition on Thursday—barely enough for nine days of fighting in Zhejiang.”
Jiang Qing stood frozen beside the table, her chest heaving beneath her grey tunic.
For five seconds, the reality of her shrinkage—that she was no longer the ruler of eight hundred million people, but the queen of a starving, besieged concrete warren at the mouth of a poisoned river, three thousand miles away from the mountains where real superpowers were redrawing the map of the world—pressed in against her eyes.
And then, as it always did in the bunker, her mind violently rejected the physical world and retreated into the one weapon she still possessed in unlimited supply: words.
“Then we will destroy them with the truth of the Revolution!” Jiang Qing hissed, straightening her spine and pointing a trembling finger at Yao Wenyuan’s propaganda deputy standing by the door.
“Why was Xinjiang lost without a shot?!” she cried, her voice rising in triumphant discovery as she found the ideological angle that turned external catastrophe into domestic weapon. “Because of General Zhao and the northern fascist junta in Beijing!
“In November 1977, that one-eyed butcher Zhao murdered Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying claiming that only his ‘Iron Blood’ generals could defend the motherland! And what have the northern generals done?! While they turned their tanks and their poison gas southward against the revolutionary workers of Shanghai, they left the western gates of the motherland wide open and sold Xinjiang and Tibet to the Russian Bear and the Indian Viceroy!”
She strode toward the radio broadcasting booth at the side of the bunker.
“Draft the Supreme Decree of the Provisional Central Committee in Shanghai immediately!” Jiang Qing ordered, her voice echoing down the concrete corridor.
“First: The Revolutionary Government of the People’s Republic of China in Shanghai categorically refuses to recognize the illegal partition of Xinjiang or the puppet regimes in Ürümqi and Kashgar! We condemn the Soviet revisionist social-imperialists under the Red Tsar Brezhnev and the Indian monopoly-capitalist imperialists under the New British Viceroy Karan Shergill! We swear a blood-oath that when the proletarian revolution triumphs, the Red Flag will be planted once more on the peaks of the Tian Shan and the Karakoram!
“Second: Put every transmitter of Radio Shanghai on maximum power tonight! Broadcast to the soldiers of the northern armies in Hebei and Shandong that their commander, General Zhao, is a traitor and a foreign agent who has handed half of China to the Russians and the Indians while forcing Chinese soldiers to kill Chinese workers! Print five million leaflets tonight—show the Soviet Bear and the Indian Elephant carving up the map of China while General Zhao holds the knife—and drop them from artillery shells and balloons across the northern trenches in Anhui and Jiangsu!”
“It will be on the presses within the hour, Comrade Jiang Qing,” Xu Jingxian said, bowing his head.
When the doors closed behind her, Xu Jingxian and Wang Hongwen stood alone over the map of Zhejiang.
Neither man mentioned Xinjiang again.
Forty-eight hours later, when half a million freshly printed propaganda leaflets depicting the Indian Elephant and the Soviet Bear carving up Western China rained down out of mortar shells onto the mud-choked trenches and flooded refugee camps along the Huai River in Anhui, the starving peasants and shivering soldiers did not read a single line of the text. Dry paper was more precious than gold in the wet September marshes. They gathered the leaflets in handfuls, stuffed them under rusted tin cans, and lit them to boil muddy, cholera-tainted ditch water for their evening gruel.
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Twelve hundred kilometres northwest of Shanghai, across the inland sea of the flooded central plains and the earthquake-shattered rail yards of Hebei, lay the domain of the men Jiang Qing had just accused of selling the frontier: the Northern Military Junta (“The Iron Blood Command”).
As the news of the September 1st partition of Xinjiang and the seizure of Base 21 at Lop Nor spread through the diplomatic listening posts of the world on the morning of September 2nd, one question above all others occupied every newspaper editorial board from London to Tokyo:
Why had China’s nuclear arsenal remained completely silent?
For thirty-five months, the People’s Republic of China—a nation that had detonated its first atomic device in October 1964, its first three-megaton thermonuclear hydrogen bomb in June 1967, and had built over a hundred intermediate- and medium-range ballistic missiles under the command of the Second Artillery Corps—had torn itself apart in the bloodiest civil war in human history. Thirty million people had died by bullet, shell, flood, and famine. Tibet had been severed by India in 1977. Aksai Chin had been taken in forty-eight hours. And now, on the first of September, 1979, the Soviet Union and the Republic of India had marched into Xinjiang and divided six hundred thousand square miles of territory while confiscating the vaults of Lop Nor.
Yet not a single Chinese nuclear warhead had ever left a railcar, and not a single ballistic missile had ever risen from a silo.
To lay observers in the West, accustomed to the hair-trigger, solid-fuel Minuteman and SS-18 arsenals of Washington and Moscow—where a president’s briefcase or a general secretary’s code could send five hundred warheads into the stratosphere in four minutes—the silence of the Chinese nuclear force seemed like a miracle.
To the men who actually sat inside the blast-proof subterranean caves of the Second Artillery Corps in the mountains of Shaanxi, Qinghai, Jilantai, and western Henan, there was nothing miraculous about it at all. It was the cold, immutable result of five interlocking physical, logistical, and geopolitical locks that no warlord’s screaming rage could break.
The First Lock was the Physical Separation of the Sword and the Blade.
From the day Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai had established the Second Artillery in 1966, the Chinese Communist Party had been far more terrified of a domestic military coup by a rogue general with a nuclear bomb than of an unannounced bolt from the blue by a foreign power. Consequently, unlike the United States or the Soviet Union, China had never mated a single nuclear warhead to a ballistic missile in peacetime.
Across the remote mountain bases of the Second Artillery—at Base 51 in Shenyang, Base 52 in Anhui, Base 54 in Luoyang, Base 55 in Huaihua, and the desert silos of Jilantai and Delingha—what sat inside the caves and concrete launch tubes were nothing more than empty aluminum-and-steel airframes: liquid-fueled DF-2 (CSS-1), DF-3 (CSS-2), and early DF-4 (CSS-3) rockets with hollow nosecones filled with lead ballast weights for training drills.
The actual nuclear warhead pits—the precision-machined spheres of Uranium-235, Plutonium-239, and Lithium-6 Deuteride—were stored hundreds, and in most cases over a thousand, kilometres away inside heavily fortified central mountain vaults controlled not by the Second Artillery, but by a completely separate directorate of the Central Military Commission’s General Staff: primarily at Facility 414 in Malan (Lop Nor) in the far west, and at Base 22 (the Qinling Mountain tunnels) in southern Shaanxi.
To fire a single nuclear missile required a special armoured warhead train or a fleet of heavy transport aircraft to carry a live fissile core across three provinces, accompanied by three independent cryptographic custodian teams holding three separate mechanical keys, followed by thirty-six hours of delicate crane-mating and electrical fusing at the launch pad. When the civil war shattered China’s rail network in October 1976 and the regional military districts turned their guns on each other, the missiles were stranded in one province and the warheads were locked in another—separated by five hundred miles of blown bridges, warring tank divisions, and murdered couriers. And on the morning of September 1st, 1979, the largest warhead vault of them all—Facility 414 at Malan, where the Lanzhou and Jiuquan reserves had been evacuated—had just been emptied into Indian and Soviet transport planes in thirty-six hours.
The Second Lock was the Chemistry of the Fuel and the Physics of the Arc.
Even if a rogue commander had somehow possessed a mated warhead, a 1970s Chinese DF-2 or DF-3 ballistic missile was not a push-button weapon. It burned liquid hypergolic propellants: unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) fuel and AK-27 red fuming nitric acid / nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer.
The oxidizer was a fuming, orange-red poison so violently corrosive that it ate through rubber seals and brass valves in forty-eight hours, and boiled into lethal clouds of nitrogen dioxide gas on contact with the air. A missile could not be kept fueled. To prepare a single DF-3 for launch required rolling a convoy of twenty-eight specialized chemical tanker trucks, air-compressor trailers, and umbilical gantry cranes out into the open for four to six hours under clear skies.
And once fueled, the ruthless laws of ballistic trajectories took over. A strategic intermediate-range missile like the DF-3 had a minimum ballistic range of one thousand two hundred kilometres. It could not be depressed to hit a target three hundred miles away; its rocket motor had to burn to completion before warhead separation, meaning that a DF-3 launched from Hebei or Shanxi could not physically hit Shanghai or Nanjing—it would arc high into the exosphere and come down in the Philippine Sea or Soviet Siberia. The missiles had been built to hit Moscow, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Tokyo, or New Delhi—never the streets of China.
The Third and Fourth Locks were the Conscience of the Technicians and the Arithmetic of Ashes.
Unlike the fanatic teenage infantry conscripts in the trenches, the officers and engineers of the Second Artillery were the most educated, mathematically rigorous cohort in the Chinese military—men trained in physics at Tsinghua and Harbin. For twenty years, every line of their doctrine had taught them that they were the ultimate shield against a foreign invader, never an instrument of civil fratricide. Not a single base commander—like Colonel Shen Weifang at the Jilantai silos in Inner Mongolia—was willing to go down in five thousand years of Chinese history as the monster who vaporized a Chinese city and poisoned the Yellow River with radioactive strontium for ten generations.
Even at the height of their desperation, neither Hua Guofeng, nor Ye Jianying, nor Wang Hongwen had ever wanted to inherit a radioactive glass crater where the factories of Shanghai or the coal mines of Shanxi once stood. You cannot tax ashes, and you cannot rule ghosts.
And the Fifth Lock—the heaviest lock of all—hung two hundred miles overhead in the cold vacuum of space.
Every Chinese nuclear officer knew what sat on the other side of the northern and southern horizons.
Along the Siberian border from Lake Baikal to Semipalatinsk stood the massive Dnepr and Daryal early-warning phased-array radars of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, linked directly to three hundred SS-18 Satan and SS-20 multiple-warhead thermonuclear missiles kept on two-minute solid-fuel hair-trigger alert. Overhead passed the American KH-11 and Indian Rohini-Khagol reconnaissance satellites.
Since the 1969 border clashes on the Ussuri River, the Soviet General Staff had maintained a permanent, pre-programmed nuclear target package—Plan Baikal-Strike—designed to obliterate every Chinese missile silo, enrichment plant, and command bunker with two hundred megatons of thermonuclear fire within eighteen minutes of detecting a single unauthorized Chinese missile fueling sequence.
To roll twenty-eight red-fuming-nitric-acid fuel trucks out to a DF-3 pad in full view of Soviet, American, and Indian satellites was not an act of war.
It was a suicide note for the entire northern hemisphere of China.
—————————————————————————————————–
1400 Hours, September 2, 1979 — Subterranean Command Bunker Four, The Western Hills (Xishan), Outside Beijing
Inside the deep granite bowels of the Western Hills command complex twenty kilometres northwest of the ruined centre of Beijing, the fifth lock was about to be tested against a man who had no sanity left to lose.
General Zhao stood alone at the head of the steel map table in the very room where, twenty-two months earlier on the freezing night of November 18, 1977, he had blown the blast doors off their hinges and put a bullet through the back of Premier Hua Guofeng’s head and twenty rounds through the chest of eighty-year-old Marshal Ye Jianying.
Looked at in the harsh, shadowless glare of the overhead fluorescent tubes, the forty-year-old dictator of Northern China looked like a corpse kept walking by galvanic current.
His frame inside his heavy olive-drab tunic was gaunt to the point of emaciation; the melted, purple-white scar tissue from the 1977 Shenyang incendiary strike pulled the left side of his mouth and cheek into a permanent, grotesque rictus, leaving his blind, milky-white left eye staring permanently at the ceiling while his right eye—bloodshot, sunken, and ringed with black insomnia bruises—darted constantly across the faces of his subordinates.
Spread across the steel table before him were the radio transcripts from Moscow, New Delhi, and Shanghai.
Worse than Gromyko’s cold announcement, worse even than Karan Shergill’s declaration at Vigyan Bhavan that the Tarim Basin was lost to Beijing forever, was the transcript of Radio Shanghai’s noon broadcast—which General Zhao’s own frontline divisions in Shandong and Henan had been picking up on their field radios for the past four hours:
*”Soldiers of the Northern Armies! Look at the fruit of General Zhao’s treason! He murdered Premier Hua Guofeng and Marshal Ye Jianying claiming he would avenge Tibet! Instead, while he forces you to die in the mud fighting your own Chinese brothers, he has handed the entire western half of the motherland—six hundred thousand square miles of Xinjiang, won with the blood of General Zuo Zongtang a century ago, along with the sacred nuclear arsenal at Lop Nor—to the Russian Tsars and the Indian capitalists without firing a single bullet!”*
General Zhao’s right hand, resting on the steel edge of the map table, shook so violently that his fingernail clicked against the metal like a beetle’s wing.
Six men stood lined up at attention ten feet back from the table, the sweat soaking through the armpits of their uniforms despite the sixteen-degree chill of the subterranean rock:
Major General Kang, Chief of Staff of the Iron Blood Command; Major General Lu, Director of Military Intelligence; Colonel Chen, Chief Signals Officer; and three senior officers wearing the dark-green collar tabs of the Second Artillery Corps Headquarters Detachment: Major General Fang, Colonel Sun, and thirty-four-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Huo, the chief trajectories and propulsion engineer.
For three full minutes, General Zhao did not speak. He stared down at the map of China.
In 1976, that map had stretched five thousand kilometres from the Pamir Knot and the Tian Shan mountains to the East China Sea.
Now, Tibet was gone—locked behind Indian surface-to-air missile batteries and S-35 squadrons under the Treaty of Dharamsala. Aksai Chin was gone. And as of yesterday morning, the entire western wing of the map—Dzungaria in the north, the Tarim Basin in the south, and Base 21 at Lop Nor—had been amputated cleanly along the Gansu corridor. What remained under General Zhao’s actual military control on the second of September, 1979, was a shattered, earthquake-cracked rump of five northern provinces where bridges lay collapsed in dry riverbeds, locomotives sat cold for lack of coal, and starving regiments boiled horsehide for soup.
“Malan,” General Zhao whispered, his scorched vocal cords producing a low, rasping hiss that made every man in the room flinch. “Base Twenty-One. Tunnel Four-One-Four.”
He lifted his head slowly, fixing his single burning right eye on Colonel Chen, the Chief Signals Officer.
“You told me on Friday,” Zhao rasped, “that Colonel Deng and the Base 21 Security Regiment held Tunnel Four-One-Four with fourteen hundred men and twelve tonnes of TNT wired to the vaults. Have you raised Colonel Deng on the high-frequency crystal link?”
Colonel Chen’s Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively.
“General… Supreme Commander,” Chen stammered, his voice trembling, “the high-frequency carrier wave from Malan and the Peak 1840 radar station went dead at zero-four-sixteen our time yesterday morning. Since then—nothing. Not a single Morse group. And two hours ago, our listening post in Lanzhou intercepted unencrypted Russian and English air-traffic control transmissions coming Directly from the Malan airfield tower. Heavy four-engine Indian and Soviet transport aircraft have been landing and taking off from the Malan runway every two hours since yesterday afternoon.”
“And the silos in the Lop Desert?” Zhao hissed. “The four DF-3 launch pads at Base 21?”
Major General Lu, the Intelligence Director, stepped forward half a pace, his face the colour of tallow.
“Supreme Commander,” Lu said, his voice barely above a whisper, “one of our long-range reconnaissance patrols on the Gansu border intercepted a fleeing desert truck carrying three surviving radar technicians from Korla at dawn today.
“The silo crews at Lop Nor had not received a grain convoy from Lanzhou since May. Half the enlisted men had scurried into the desert weeks ago. When the Soviet 105th Airborne Division dropped onto the northern pads yesterday morning with truckloads of canned beef and wheat flour, the surviving outer pad crews didn’t fire a shot—they handed their launch keys over to the Russian paratroopers in exchange for rations. And at Tunnel Four-One-Four, black-armoured Indian commandos landed by helicopter on the southern cliff face, cut the demolition cables in ninety seconds, and killed Colonel Deng inside the firing room. The vaults are in Indian and Russian hands.”
A terrible, strangled sound came out of General Zhao’s throat.
He lunged forward across the steel table, sweeping both arms across the surface and sending brass map weights, tea mugs, and telephone handsets crashing to the concrete floor.
“Traitors!” Zhao screamed, his scarred face twisting into a mask of foaming, psychotic frenzy as spittle flew from his lips. “Cowards! Dogs! They sold the nuclear sword of the motherland for cans of Russian meat! And in New Delhi, that bastard Karan Shergill stands in front of cameras and tells the world that China is dead and that Kashgar belongs to India!”
Zhao spun on his heel and marched straight up to the three officers of the Second Artillery Corps—Major General Fang, Colonel Sun, and Lieutenant Colonel Huo—stopping six inches from Major General Fang’s face, his hand dropping to the holster of his Type-54 pistol.
“Base Fifty-Four at Luoyang!” Zhao roared into Fang’s face. “And Base Fifty-One at Jilantai in Inner Mongolia! How many DF-3 and DF-4 intermediate-range missiles do we have in the mountain caves at Jilantai and Luoyang?!”
Major General Fang, a fifty-eight-year-old veteran artilleryman who had helped build the missile force under Marshal Nie Rongzhen in the 1960s, stood rigid at attention, looking straight ahead past Zhao’s scarred cheek.
“At Jilantai, Supreme Commander, there are eight DF-3 airframes and two long-range DF-4 airframes in the rock tunnels,” Fang answered evenly. “At Luoyang, there are twelve DF-3 airframes.”
“Twenty-two missiles!” Zhao’s single eye blazed with manic triumph. He grabbed Fang by the front of his uniform tunic with his left hand while drawing his pistol with his right.
“Transmit the Supreme Launch Order to Jilantai and Luoyang right now!” Zhao screamed, pressing the barrel of the pistol against the breastbone of Fang’s tunic. “Order them to roll the missiles out of the tunnels! Program three DF-3s for Alma-Ata and Tashkent! Program three for Ürümqi! And program the two long-range DF-4s and four DF-3s for Leh, Kashgar, and New Delhi!
“They think China is a corpse they can carve up at their leisure?! Let four megatons of thermonuclear fire fall on New Delhi and Tashkent before sunrise tomorrow! Let the world burn with us! Give the order!”
In the back of the bunker, the guards and staff officers froze, holding their breath.
Major General Fang did not reach for his code book. And behind him, Colonel Sun and thirty-four-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Huo did not move a muscle toward the communications console.
For five seconds, the three Second Artillery officers stood in absolute, stone-faced silence—looking at their Supreme Commander not with fear, and not even with anger, but with the profound, exhausted pity with which sane men look at a raving lunatic in a cell.
“Well?!” Zhao shrieked, his thumb cocking back the hammer of the 7.62mm pistol against Fang’s chest. “Why aren’t you moving?! Are you deaf, General?!”
“Shoot me if you wish, General Zhao,” Major General Fang said quietly, his voice calm, steady, and completely devoid of theatrical fear. “And then shoot Colonel Sun, and then shoot Lieutenant Colonel Huo. And when all three of us are lying dead on this concrete floor, those twenty-two missiles at Jilantai and Luoyang will still be sitting cold and empty in their caves tomorrow morning.”
Zhao’s finger trembled on the trigger, his single eye bulging. “Are you mutinying against me, Fang?!”
“I am not mutinying against you, Supreme Commander,” thirty-four-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Huo spoke up from behind Fang, stepping half a pace forward so that he stood directly in Zhao’s line of sight.
Huo was a rocket propulsion physicist who had graduated at the top of his class from Tsinghua University in 1965. He had not eaten a full meal in three weeks, his uniform hung loose on his thin shoulders, and he had long since passed the point where a pistol barrel could frighten him more than the daily madness of this bunker.
“General Fang is stating elementary physical fact, Supreme Commander,” Lt. Col. Huo said in the clear, patient tone of a university lecturer explaining arithmetic to a child. “Even if Colonel Shen Weifang at Jilantai were mad enough to obey an unauthenticated radio order from this bunker—which he is not, because under the standing Three-Key Statute of 1968, no base commander may open a silo door without the joint countersignatures of the Chairman of the Party, the Premier of the State Council, and the Chief of the General Staff, two of whom you shot in this very room—there is nothing inside the nosecones of those missiles to explode.”
Zhao stared at the young physicist, his chest heaving. “What are you talking about?! We have warheads at Base 22 in the Qinling Mountains!”
“Base 22 in southern Shaanxi is four hundred and eighty kilometres southwest of Luoyang and nine hundred kilometres south of Jilantai,” Lt. Col. Huo said flatly. “Between the warhead vaults at Base 22 and the missile caves at Luoyang and Jilantai lie the collapsed Yellow River railway bridge at Zhengzhou, six blown mountain tunnels on the Longhai line that were destroyed during the July offensive, and forty miles of fissured rail bed from last August’s earthquake!
“We do not have a single functioning armoured environmental-control train capable of moving a levitated plutonium pit out of Shaanxi! And even if you carried a warhead on the back of a mule for three weeks across the mountains to Jilantai—”
Huo pointed a thin finger at the technical status chart on the wall.
“—do you know what happened to the AK-27 red fuming nitric acid oxidizer tanks at Jilantai and Luoyang six months ago? Without replacement teflon gaskets and refrigeration power from the chemical plants in Taiyuan—which burned down in 1977—the nitric acid corroded right through the storage tank liners in March! Half the propellant had to be dumped into neutralization trenches in the desert so it wouldn’t poison the base crews in their sleep!
“And even if Colonel Shen had one load of fuel and one live warhead left at Jilantai,” Major General Fang added, his deep voice cutting in beside his young engineer, “the moment he opened the tunnel blast doors and rolled twenty-eight fueling trucks out onto the concrete pad for the five hours it takes to pump fuel into a DF-3—what do you think would happen, General Zhao?”
Fang pointed straight up at the concrete ceiling of the bunker.
“Before our fueling hoses were ten percent full, the Soviet phased-array radars at Irkutsk and Lake Balkhash, and the Indian satellites passing overhead every ninety minutes, would lock onto the thermal plume of the compressor trucks!
“Moscow and New Delhi would not wait five hours to see where that missile was aimed! Within fifteen minutes of the tunnel door opening at Jilantai, thirty Soviet SS-18 and SS-20 thermonuclear warheads and twenty Indian Agni warheads would vaporize Jilantai, Luoyang, Base 22, and this mountain above our heads into radioactive dust!”
The silence that slammed down over Subterranean Command Bunker Four was total.
Every staff officer in the room—Major General Kang, Major General Lu, Colonel Chen, the guards by the door—knew that every single word the two Second Artillery officers had just spoken was the unvarnished, inescapable truth.
General Zhao stood frozen for ten full seconds, the cocked pistol still pressed against Major General Fang’s chest.
In his mind, the last illusion of superpower might—the belief that even as his armies starved in the mud and his provinces fell away, he still held the atomic thunderbolt of Mao Zedong in his fist—crumbled into gray, impotent ash.
He could not launch a missile. He could not send a single tank across three thousand kilometres of desert to Xinjiang. He could not even send a diesel train sixty miles outside Beijing without the tracks ending in an earthquake chasm.
Slowly, Zhao took his pistol off Major General Fang’s chest.
He did not uncock it, and he did not put it back in his holster.
For a madman who has murdered his superiors to seize a throne and then watched half his empire vanish while his hands are tied, the impossibility of striking the foreign enemy leaves only one possible outlet for the rage burning inside his skull:
Someone inside the room must be to blame.
Zhao turned slowly away from the Second Artillery officers and looked down the length of the steel table toward the intelligence and signals bench—where Colonel Liu, the fifty-two-year-old Deputy Director of Foreign Military Intelligence, and Major Zhou, the senior South Asian desk analyst, stood beside their folders.
Zhao’s single bloodshot eye fixed on Colonel Liu.
“Colonel Liu,” Zhao whispered, his voice dropping to a terrifying, purring rasp as he walked slowly around the corner of the table. “Where did you study between 1956 and 1959?”
Colonel Liu blinked, the blood draining from his cheeks as he saw the cocked Type-54 pistol swinging loosely at General Zhao’s thigh.
“At… at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, Supreme Commander,” Colonel Liu stammered. “With the official PLA exchange cohort—”
“In Moscow,” Zhao repeated softly. He took another step forward and looked at Major Zhou beside him. “And you, Major Zhou. What was your posting between 1970 and 1973?”
Major Zhou began to tremble visibly from head to foot. “Assistant… Assistant Military Attaché at the Embassy in New Delhi, Supreme Commander, before I was recalled—”
“Frunze in Moscow. And New Delhi,” General Zhao hissed, his scarred cheek twitching violently as the paranoid delusion clicked into place inside his broken mind with absolute, psychotic certainty.
“And for five weeks,” Zhao’s voice rose from a whisper to a shrieking roar that echoed off the low concrete ceiling, “while five Russian divisions massed at Alma-Ata and forty thousand Indian soldiers massed at Leh and Aksai Chin, your Foreign Intelligence Directorate told me that the Indians were only conducting ‘routine winter stocking exercises’ and the Russians were only ‘rotating border regiments’!”
“Supreme Commander, our satellite receivers were destroyed in the earthquake, we had no agents left in Ladakh—” Colonel Liu cried out, throwing both hands up in terror as he backed against the concrete wall.
“Liar!” Zhao screamed. “Fifth columnist! Spy! How did the Indian commandos know the exact layout of the ventilation shafts at Tunnel Four-One-Four?! How did the Russians and the Indians march at the exact same minute of the exact same morning without a traitor inside Beijing selling them our codes?!”
“General Zhao, I swear on my life—”
BANG! BANG!
The deafening roar of the 7.62mm pistol in the confined concrete bunker made every officer flinch. Colonel Liu took both bullets through the sternum, crashing backward over a steel filing cabinet and sliding down onto the floor in a widening pool of dark blood.
Before Major Zhou could even turn to run for the blast door, Zhao swung the smoking barrel six inches to the right and fired three times at point-blank range—hitting the young analyst in the shoulder, the neck, and the temple, dropping him dead across Liu’s legs.
Zhao stood over the two twitching bodies with the smoking pistol in his hand, his chest heaving, his single eye wild and rolling as he glared around the silent, petrified bunker at his remaining generals.
“Guards!” Zhao barked at the black-uniformed security squad by the door.
“Yes, Supreme Commander!” the captain of the guard shouted, snapping to attention over the smell of cordite and blood.
“Take the personnel rosters of the General Staff, the Foreign Ministry, and the Second Artillery!” Zhao commanded, his voice cracking with fanatic hysteria. “Arrest every single officer, clerk, translator, and technician in Beijing who ever studied a single day at a Soviet military academy before 1960, or who ever served a single day at a diplomatic post in India, Burma, or Tibet! Every single one of them! Interrogate them tonight, and shoot the traitors at dawn! We will purge the Soviet and Indian fifth column from the bloodstream of the northern armies in iron and blood!”
He turned back to Colonel Chen, the trembling Chief Signals Officer, and pointed the warm barrel of the pistol straight at the radio transmission booth.
“Put me on the master military shortwave transmitter at Baoding and Shijiazhuang—all frequencies, open broadcast, maximum kilowatt power!” Zhao roared. “Let Moscow, New Delhi, Washington, and the traitors in Shanghai hear the voice of the Supreme Military Command of the People’s Republic of China!”
Ten minutes later, at 1445 hours Beijing Time on Sunday, September 2nd, 1979, the high-powered military shortwave transmitter at Shijiazhuang—powered by three requisitioned locomotive diesel engines linked in series because the provincial electrical grid had collapsed four months earlier—keyed its carrier wave across the 7, 11, and 15 megahertz bands.
In Moscow, in New Delhi, in Tokyo, and in Washington, monitoring technicians put on their headsets and recorded fourteen minutes of the most extraordinary, unhinged broadcast of the twentieth century.
Speaking in a rasping, scorched, screaming voice punctuated by the hiss of atmospheric static, General Zhao, Supreme Commander of the Northern Military Junta in Beijing, read out Supreme War Decree Number One:
*”To the revisionist social-imperialist bandit clique in the Kremlin, and to the reactionary capitalist-imperialist expansionists in New Delhi and Lucknow!* By your cowardly, treacherous invasion and partition of the sacred Chinese territory of Xinjiang and the nuclear base at Lop Nor on the first of September, 1979, following the illegal occupation of Tibet and Aksai Chin, you have committed an unforgivable crime of blood against eight hundred million Chinese people! The Supreme Military Command of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing hereby declares that as of fourteen-hundred hours on the second of September, 1979, a state of total, uncompromising war exists between the People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India!* *We recognize no border on the Tian Shan! We recognize no puppet regime in Ürümqi or Kashgar! Every square inch of Dzungaria, the Tarim Basin, Aksai Chin, and Tibet will be washed clean in the blood of the Russian and Indian invaders! The People’s Liberation Army is mobilizing ten million soldiers to march west and annihilate the aggressors! Death to the Russian Tsars! Death to the Indian imperialists!
———————————————————————————————————–
When the fourteen-minute broadcast ended and the carrier wave from Shijiazhuang dropped back into static, two hundred miles west of Beijing along the shattered tracks of the Datong–Taiyuan railway in Shanxi, a starving platoon of the Northern 65th Army’s railway guard sat around a small fire of creosote-soaked wooden railway ties inside a collapsed brick signal house.
They had listened to General Zhao’s declaration of total war against the Soviet Union and the Republic of India on a battered transistor radio held together with electrical tape.
Outside the broken window of the signal house, a rusted steam locomotive sat derailed on its side in a dry ditch where it had lain since the earthquake of August 1978, its iron boiler perforated by rust and weeds growing up through the grate of its firebox. To the west, toward Shaanxi, Gansu, and the three-thousand-kilometre road to Xinjiang, the steel rails had been unbolted by local villagers months ago to forge hoes and cooking pots, leaving only an endless line of empty gravel ballast and rotting wooden sleepers stretching away into the yellow dust haze.
The platoon sergeant—a twenty-nine-year-old veteran of the Shenyang tank battles who had lost three toes to frostbite the previous winter and was currently boiling a pot of wild field-grass and Sorghum husks over the creosote fire—reached out with a blackened thumb and clicked the transistor radio off to save the last drop of current in the battery.
Nobody in the signal house spoke for a full minute.
“Ten million soldiers marching west to Xinjiang and India,” a seventeen-year-old private sitting by the doorway muttered hollowly, looking down at his bare, calloused feet wrapped in strips of canvas tire-casing because the quartermaster depot in Baoding had not issued a pair of leather boots since November. “How far is it to Xinjiang, Sergeant?”
The sergeant stirred the boiling grass in the tin pot with a wooden stick, not looking up.
“Three thousand kilometres across the desert, boy,” the sergeant said quietly. “And the last train stopped running at the next county line ten months ago. Eat your grass before it gets cold. Tomorrow we have to dig trenches against the 38th Corps.”
And two thousand five hundred kilometres west of that broken signal house, at Twenty-Four Hundred Metres elevation on the southern approach to the Bedel Pass in the Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim, Brigadier Devinder Singh stood on the turret deck of his command M-73 Lion [Arjuna] Main Battle Tank, looking through his binoculars up at the snow-dusted granite wall of the Tian Shan.
In the clear, crisp September mountain air, the freshly painted white stone cairns of the 2,600-metre demarcation line gleamed brightly in the afternoon sun. Behind him, along the paved Kashgar–Aksu highway, a convoy of forty heavy Shergill Motors ten-tonne logistics trucks and six mobile medical clinics of the Indian Army Medical Corps rolled past the irrigated poplar groves and cotton fields, while in the town square of Uch-Turfan three miles down the slope, Uyghur farmers and merchants were already queuing outside a newly opened branch of the State Bank of India to exchange their worthless bundles of Beijing paper yuan for crisp silver-and-green Indian Rupee notes at a guaranteed humanitarian conversion floor.
Brigadier Devinder Singh’s signals captain climbed up onto the hull deck of the Arjuna and handed him a decoded message slip from 14th Corps Headquarters at Kashgar.
“For your information, Sir,” the captain said, struggling to keep a straight face. “All India Radio’s monitoring station in Delhi just picked up a broadcast from General Zhao in Beijing. He has officially declared war on both the Republic of India and the Soviet Union, and says he is marching ten million men across the Gobi Desert to throw us out of Kashgar.”
Brigadier Devinder Singh read the slip, looked up at the two S-35 Starlighters [Tejas] streaking across the deep blue sky at thirty thousand feet, and folded the paper neatly into his breast pocket.
“How terrifying,” the Brigadier said dryly. “Tell the mess havildar to put an extra pot of tea on the stove, Captain—and tell the engineers at the Uch-Turfan uranium site that they can start unloading the core drills.”
End of Chapter 391