The Shark Mutiny (2001) Page 29

  But he rose above it, more or less effortlessly, and continued on: “Sir, this attack on Taiwan has been very carefully planned. And we thus find ourselves watching a rather ungainly giant swatting and whacking his way to victory. But he is well prepared, he’s in his own waters, he doesn’t give a damn about the attrition of ships, aircraft or people and he wants the prize of Taiwan more than any Chinaman has ever wanted anything.

  “We cannot intervene, mainly because we don’t have anything to intervene with. And even if we did, I’d be inclined to advise against. Because we would find ourselves in a very serious sea battle, and the upshot might be that we could lose three or four major ships, and a couple of thousand American crewmen. They on the other hand might lose twenty ships and ten thousand crewmen. The difference being that they wouldn’t care a fuck, and would just go on fighting. We, on the other hand, could not put up with that.

  “We’d have riot conditions at home, you’d be swept from office along with the rest of us and we’d all be accused of deliberately starting a new Vietnam on account of some goddamned no-account Chinese island, which is about a mile and a half from Shanghai anyway. That’s how the public and the press would react.

  “It’s all very well our patrolling the waters, as we’ve been doing for years, and frightening everyone to death whenever we had to. But it’s quite another to be prepared to go to war, to send our young men to fight and die, thousands of miles from home. Sir, if we took this country into armed conflict with China over a bunch of fucking pottery makers in this goddamned island right off their coast, you could wind up with another civil war in this country, and I’m not joking.”

  “But we always were able to drive the Chinese off before….”

  “Yeah, but they were only goofing around then. This is entirely different. This is a nation on a war footing, perfectly happy to fight and die for their belief that Taiwan is a part of China, an offshore province that needs to be brought back into the motherland. On the other hand, we are really prepared only to posture over Taiwan. No president of the USA is going into a real shooting war with China over their goddamned island.

  “We’d fight ’em over Middle Eastern oil, if we had to, because that’s in our national interest and the public would understand that. But they would not understand American sailors being blown to pieces over the territorial claim of one Chinaman over another.”

  “I guess you can understand the Chinese wanting this offshore island back,” said the President. “Same as they wanted Hong Kong, which was even farther inside their own backyard. I just never understand this obsession. Never understand what they really want.”

  “What they really want, sir,” replied Admiral Morgan, “is the National Palace Museum of Taipei.”

  “The museum?”

  “Correct. Because it contains the most priceless collection of Chinese art and history. It is without question the greatest museum in the world, the greatest museum there has ever been.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That, sir, is right.”

  “Well I thought the Chinese regime hated culture. Didn’t Chairman Mao and his wife try to destroy every vestige of their country’s culture, burning books, destroying university libraries and all that?”

  “They sure did. And that was a big part of it. The entire heart of China, every ancient book, manuscript, tapestry, sculpture, painting, porcelain, silver, jade, gold, whatever, dating right back to the ancient Shang Kingdom, thousands of years ago, was contained in one collection. About ten thousand cases of it. Held for five hundred years in the Forbidden City in Beijing.”

  “Well, how did it get to Taiwan?”

  “Basically Chiang Kai-shek took it.”

  “Christ! All of it?”

  “Nearly. It was just about the last major act he undertook before he and the Kuomintang were exiled to Formosa. He just felt that Mr. and Mrs. Mao might destroy the entire thing, so he packed it all up and somehow shipped fourteen trainloads of Chinese tradition across the water to his new home.”

  “Did anyone care? I mean back on the mainland?”

  “Not for a while. But then Formosa had its name changed to Taiwan, and its capital, Taipei, became a world financial power. So Chiang Kai-shek decided to build this fabulous museum in a park to the north of the city…kinda showcase to display this colossal record of the cultural history of China.”

  “Don’t tell me, Arnie. Right then the Chinks wanted it all back?”

  “That’s right. The museum opened sometime in the mid-sixties, and the Chinese Communists almost immediately started to lay claim to the entire collection, ranting on about the cultural tapestry of China being displayed in this offshore island that somehow claimed to have nothing to do with the mainland.”

  “And what did Chiang Kai-shek say to that?”

  “Plenty, sir. He said plenty. He told them that in his view they were nothing more than a murderous communist rabble who would probably have burned the history of China and never given it another thought. He told them he, Chiang, was the rightful ruler of China, that Taiwan was the rightful cradle of the Chinese nation, and that one day he and his armies would return and reclaim the mainland, and he’d see ’em all in hell before he’d submit to their barbarism.”

  “And the collection of Chinese history?”

  “That was even easier to deal with. Old Chiang Kai-shek told ’em to go fuck themselves.”

  “And the stuff’s been there in the museum ever since?”

  “Right. They even called it the National Palace Museum, after the original in the Forbidden City.”

  “And did the stuff survive all this turmoil?”

  “By some miracle, not one piece was ever broken. Which, in the opinion of the Taiwanese people, proves that the collection is precisely where it’s supposed to be. And they do have the unanswerable argument that Mao and his wife would most certainly have destroyed it.”

  “And what does the modern Chinese regime have to say about that?”

  “Nothing. Except to stamp their feet and shout, WANT TREASURES BACK! WANT TREASURES BACK!”

  Everyone in the room chuckled. They would have laughed out loud if the situation had not been quite so serious.

  “Jeez. There must be literally thousands of pieces,” said Bob MacPherson.

  “I think there’re more than seven hundred thousand,” said Admiral Morgan. “I went to see it once a few years back. But they can only display fifteen thousand pieces at a time. They rotate every three months. So if you lived in Taiwan and went there four times in a year, you’d still only see sixty thousand pieces, which is less than ten percent of the collection. It’d take twelve years to see everything.”

  “But where do they keep all the stuff that’s not on display?”

  “No one really knows,” Arnold continued. “But it’s supposed to be hidden in some vast network of vaults in the mountains behind the museum. They say it’s all connected by tunnels.”

  “You’d think with all that stuff they could do some kind of a deal, wouldn’t you? Display half of it in Beijing or something.” The President slipped automatically into the politician’s instinct for compromise.

  “The Chinese mind-set does not work like that,” said Arnold. “Mainland China wants this irritating little rebel island to hand over the culture of China, which, they say, Chiang Kai-shek stole from the people.”

  “And the Taiwanese are still telling ’em to go fuck themselves?”

  “Exactly,” said Admiral Morgan. “And before we’re a lot older, I’d say there’s going to be a ferocious battle over that museum. And you can bet the Taiwanese have put in some very thorough security systems. Even if Taiwan falls, as it plainly must, there’s no guarantee that collection will not be wiped out. The Taiwanese may even use it as a bargaining card.”

  “You mean, ‘If we can’t have it, nobody’s having it’?”

  “Possibly. But more likely, ‘We have the power to destroy it, at the touch of a button…if you go
and guarantee to leave us alone forever, you can take it with you. Failing that, no one shall have it.’”

  “Meanwhile, gentlemen, what are we going to do about the situation militarily? I ask this in the full knowledge that my National Security Adviser has already spelled out the plain and obvious truths of the matter. There’s no possibility that the United States of America is going to all-out war with China over Taiwan. The most we would ever have done would have been to place a lot of very heavy muscle in the area and dare anyone to take us on.

  “Today, however, that is not an option. China is, as Arnie has said, already on a war footing, prepared to fight and die for her cause, which she is already doing. We’re not going near the place.”

  “And how do we answer Taiwan’s cry for help?” asked Harcourt Travis.

  “We offer to negotiate for them,” said the President. “We threaten to make China into a pariah in world trade. We threaten to withdraw all trade with anyone who trades with China. We rescind their most-favored-nation status. We ban their exports. Call in their debts. All that and more. But we’re not trading missiles, shells and bullets with ’em.”

  “Nor torpedoes,” said Arnold Morgan.

  “You mean, really, we just sit back and let the battle play out?” asked Bob MacPherson.

  “’Fraid so,” said Arnold Morgan. “But I am working on a plan to make them pay a very high price for what they have done. And I think we can confine their future activities to the China seas.”

  “Sounds like a particularly ambitious plan,” said Harcourt Travis, “since we’re dealing with a nation that has just stood the world on its head, and apparently has no qualms about wrecking economies and then going to war.”

  “It is an ambitious plan,” said Admiral Morgan. “And it’s a plan that I like a lot for two reasons. First of all, because it involves a large amount of dynamite, and second of all because it will create a multitude of hugely pissed off Chinamen.”

  “I like it, too,” said the President. “Don’t know what it is, but I like it.”

  The meeting continued for the rest of the morning, and still made no headway with regard to military discouragement of China. It was agreed the State Department would send the most strongly worded communiqué to the Beijing government “deploring in the extreme the vicious military action undertaken this week by China against their peace-loving neighbors, an independent state now recognized by the United Nations.”

  Harcourt Travis pointed out that no civilized single country had undertaken any such unprovoked action in the past quarter of a century, save for Serbia, and earlier Argentina against the Falkland Islands. In Harcourt’s opinion the Chinese would do well to take note of the fate that befell the leaders of those countries, and would be advised to cease and desist in this totally unwarranted bullying of a small island neighbor.

  He did not anticipate a reply, nor did he get one.

  Travis had been reluctant to put American threats of any kind into writing, and that afternoon Admiral Morgan had the Chinese ambassador brought in to answer some hard, searching questions. But the ambassador merely stalled and said that China was simply answering a request from the Taiwan government “to stabilize the situation in their country, with a view to normalizing relations with the mainland, which would be in everyone’s interest.”

  Arnold Morgan, who by now had pictures of the burning Naval base in the Penghu Islands, produced them and asked if that was China’s way of “stabilizing the situation.”

  Somewhat uncharacteristically, Ling Guofeng produced two pictures from his own briefcase and offered them to Arnold, who stared in amazement at the 500-foot-high inferno that was still blazing from the oil refinery in the Strait of Hormuz.

  “And might I assume this is your way also?” asked the ambassador.

  “You may assume anything that makes you happy,” growled Admiral Morgan. “And I’ll accept, if you like, that persons unknown blew up a few barrels of your oil. But that’s a whole hell of a lot different from going to war with another, much smaller country, killing the civilian population, hitting them with bombs, cruise missiles and your entire Navy. That’s not even comparable. And I want you to express to your government our horror at your actions and to warn them in the strongest possible terms that there will be consequences, which none of you will much enjoy. That’s all.”

  Ambassador Ling considered himself lucky not to have been expelled from the United States forthwith, and he wished the National Security Adviser good-bye and hurried from the West Wing of the White House.

  All week long such meetings would take place as the USA argued, cajoled and threatened the Republic of China in any way it could. It recruited support from every one of its allies, from Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Canada, Australia and Japan. Canceled China’s most-favored-nation status, banned imports from China, and had its allies do the same.

  Meanwhile, on the seas beneath the endless air battles, the Chinese Navy continued to deploy its warships, running them down from the Northern Fleet to form a silent blockade of the great port of Keelung, home of Taiwan’s Third Naval District and the northern patrol squadron. The Taiwan Air Force, its airfields and runways severely damaged, half its pilots now dead or missing, spent the nights licking its wounds, repairing airstrips and fueling fighter aircraft ready to face the Dragon again tomorrow.

  And all the while, the Chinese warships moved into control positions, dominating the strait, establishing safe lines of communication and supply. Overhead, to the north of the island, Special Forces were packed into aircraft dropping behind Taiwan’s beaches to the west of Keelung, the remote area chosen by Admiral Zhang and his senior commanders for the opening beachhead of the conflict.

  This Chinese strategic planning had taken many months to finalize, but ultimately the tactics had evolved almost of their own accord. The vast majority of the Taiwanese people live on the coastal plains on the western side of the island, principally in the north around Taipei, and in the major population centers in the south around Tainan and Kaohsiung.

  Inland, the country is mountainous and forbidding, and the east coast is guarded by towering cliffs rising up from the sea. Any attempt to attack from the east would have been absurd, and the prospect of serious operations in the mountains would have been daunting to any invader. And China’s objectives were clear: to bring about the total surrender of the island without having to fight for every inch of territory or for the outlying islands.

  Plainly the objective had to be secured in the shortest possible time, at any cost, to avoid unnecessary collateral damage. The Chinese military had no wish to destroy what they wanted before they even laid hands on it. There was also a determination to avoid excessive casualties on both sides, and an unspoken need to avoid damaging China’s world political standing any more than was absolutely necessary.

  Nonetheless, they had to get troops in there, and all through the week they landed Special Forces under the cover of darkness by parachute and from the sea. They were delivered by submarine, small merchant vessels, and fishing boats, dropped into the shallows along Taiwan’s 1,000 miles of coastline on suitably lonely beaches—made even more lonely by the near-total destruction of the island’s military communications systems.

  Shortly before midnight on Saturday, May 26, the land attack began. An armada of massive transport aircraft protected by squadrons of jet fighters began roaring over the Taiwan Strait, slightly north of the island itself.

  An entire divison of China’s 15th Airborne Army rumbled eastward, packed into recently acquired Russian-built IL-76MD/CANDIDs, specially configured for airborne operations. Flying right astern of them, low over the ocean, was a fleet of Y-8X/CUB transporters, likewise packed with troops, the entire fleet under the control of their Airborne Command, a gray-painted A-501 Mainstay.

  Taiwan’s air defenses were all but useless now, and the massed ground forces of the Army, which had been swept to the south in the false panic over the Penghu Islands, was now unable
to get back because of the wrecked roads, bridges and railroads. Which effectively allowed China’s first landing force to hit the beaches from out of the night, unchallenged. One by one, the huge low-flying aircraft climbed to an altitude of 1,000 feet and disgorged their live loads into two separate dropping zones seven miles apart, two miles behind the glorious white sands of Chinsan Beach.

  This spectacular tourist area is situated 13 miles west of Keelung on the north coast of Taipei County. And tonight hundreds and hundreds of paratroopers came thumping into the soft sand behind the wide shoreline, several miles from the nearest urban districts.

  By 0230 there were 3,000 to 4,000 on each landing beach, and the Chinese commanders were rallying the Division quickly and efficiently, ordering the airborne troops to move off as soon as they were formed, heading inland away from the sea, forward of the landing area, for almost a mile.

  And here the Chinese began to dig in, establishing, well forward of the beachhead, two crescent-shaped screens, which would become the first line of defense Taiwanese troops would encounter should they attempt to attack the forthcoming amphibious force from the mainland.