Freeman had kept his word. With Cheng having violated the cease-fire the American general had unflinchingly struck back. Now it was Kuang’s moment. Turpan had been destroyed, and late the next day the Taiwanese admiral gave the order.
At 0100 hours, the moonless night wreathed in mist, Admiral Kuang’s ROC — Republic of China — task force, on radio silence, set out from Kuang’s home port of Kaohsiung on the far southwest coast of Taiwan. Steering a course on a northern tack into the Formosa Strait, as if the battle group of one helicopter carrier, two cruisers, two destroyers, and four frigates were following routine maneuvers up the 240-mile-long west coast of Taiwan, the task force proceeded under the electronic umbrella of two Grumman E-2Cs early-warning patrol planes.
The battle group steamed twenty-two miles north-northwest before Kuang, after being joined by one hundred invasion craft that were waiting under camouflage nets off the mouth of the River Hsilo midway up the Taiwanese coast, would steam due west past the Pescadores twenty-nine miles off the coast.
If all went well, this course would take the task force toward the mainland where the landings would take place on the peninsula north of Xiamen Dao (or Amoy Island). The invasion would be supported by other ROC regiments already dug in on Quemoy Island, which had long been part of the Republic of China, and which lay less than ten miles from the Chinese mainland and which Chiang Kai-shek had festooned with high-explosive cannon. The ROC cannon on Quemoy would lay down heavy artillery barrages on mainland China’s near shore islands less than two miles to the west of Quemoy.
For so long, Kuang mused, so many people in the world had seen Taiwan as the permanent home of the Kuomintang, after they had been pushed out by the forces of Mao Zedong in ‘49. But through the mist of the hundred-mile-wide Formosa Strait, Chiang Kai-shek had fled the mainland to Taiwan to carry on the fight. It was here that the next Asian “miracle” occurred when Taiwan joined Japan and South Korea as the three most prosperous countries in all of Asia. Admiral Lin Kuang, a one-time captain of a guided-missile frigate, did not remember this time of the economic miracle so much as the stories told by his great-grandfather — stories of how Taiwan was not to be viewed as home — never could be — but was an island garrison that, through the blessings of Matsu, the sea goddess, had been given to the Kuomintang on the condition that one day they would return, leaving the indigenous Taiwanese, who resented them so much, behind and reclaim their beloved homeland.
It was not enough, Kuang’s father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather told him, to be content with the luxuries the Kuomintang had wrought from their industry and the labor of the indigenous Taiwanese, and the wealth the millions of Chinese émigrés had produced. Nor was it sufficient to dwell on the fabulous wealth of the treasures they had brought with them—”plundered,” the Red Chinese said — from Beijing’s Forbidden City. Such treasures must one day return to China, or else how could the spirits of their ancestors who had borne such travail ever rest in peace?
Lin Kuang remembered how his great-grandfather recalled the humiliation of having been driven into the sea by Mao’s forces and of everyone in the world sounding the death knell of the Kuomintang as the beleaguered refugees clambered ashore on Taiwan. Even the Americans who had given them so much aid finally did not believe they would ever see the Kuomintang on mainland China again.
But then when the North Koreans had invaded the South, the American response to the invasion resulted in Beijing suddenly having to shift its military away from Taiwan in order to meet the threat of the Americans in Korea, and quite suddenly made the old Kuomintang dream realizable. Not only were the descendants of the Kuomintang keen to act, but all those who suddenly saw the vast prize of China before them. And to carry out the promise, the superbly equipped Republic of China forces were ever ready, and now poised to attack the Communists’ eastern flank across the straits. With Freeman in the west and the ROC in the east, Cheng would find himself in a two-front war — a three-front war if you counted the stalemate along the Amur to the north.
The Communist Chinese navy was primarily a coastal defense force and did not have big ordnance or the superior training of the American-tutored Taiwanese navy. Nor could the Communists’ Shenyang F-6s — updated versions of the old MiG-19s — pose any real threat.
“Hawkeye radar report, sir. Unidentified vessel. Bearing two seven zero. Range seven zero miles. Proceeding south.”
“Any others?” Admiral Kuang asked the officer of the watch.
“Nothing yet, sir.”
“When we rendezvous with our landing craft off Hsilo River we will know. Meanwhile, tell me if the unidentified turns.”
“Possible hostile,” the operator said, receiving the Hawk-eye feed. “… Hostile confirmed.”
“Type?” Kuang asked.
“Huangfen. Missile attack boat — two hundred tons. Speed, twenty knots. Four HY2 surface-to-surface. Two twin 30mms — one forward, one aft.”
“Radar capability?” Kuang asked. “It cannot be more than twenty miles.”
“Less than six, sir, and there’s a haze. He won’t have us on passive sonar either. Unless he stops. His three diesels are twelve thousand horsepower each. That would wash out any of our sound.”
The admiral nodded. “Quite so.”
If all went well, he knew they would be off the mainland peninsula an hour before dawn. Then it would be no longer possible to conceal themselves — unless the goddess Matsu was still with them and kept the curtain of mist wrapped about them. Kuang prayed fervently. He held fast to his vision — his private vision — of him personally on behalf of the ROC accepting the Red Chinese surrender at the war’s end. He would go to the beautiful city of Hangchow, the home of his ancestors, his dream to be consummated the moment his limousine drove through the garden-surrounded gates of Mao’s villa on the West Lake, whereupon he would alight in triumph to personally remove the stain of Mao’s house from the earth.