Lieyu Island, Kinmen County, Taiwan
LIEYU ISLAND DOES not feature prominently on many maps. Google it, zoom in, and even then it comes up as just a tiny pinprick off the south-east coast of China. But Lieyu Island, also known as ‘Little Kinmen’, does not answer to Beijing. Instead, it is part of Taiwan’s outlying island archipelago, the Kinmen Islands, situated little more than a kilometre offshore from the haze-shrouded skyscrapers of Xiamen city on the mainland. So close, in fact, that Taiwanese tourists even fly there from Taipei to photograph themselves with those city skyscrapers just visible behind them. For years there has been an annual swimming race from Little Kinmen to the Chinese mainland. Covid put the brakes on that in 2020 but then it resumed three years later.
Yet it’s more than a hundred and fifty kilometres distant across the choppy waters of the Taiwan Strait from the Taiwanese capital, Taipei. And it was precisely because of this distance from the Taiwanese coast, and its closeness to mainland China, that Lieyu Island was specially selected by the Central Military Commission in Beijing. Economically unimportant, militarily indefensible, Lieyu, it was decided, was the perfect testing ground for the next phase of the CCP’s multi-stage plan for Taiwan.
Shortly before dusk, in the deeper waters offshore and to the east of the Kinmen Islands, the Shang-II-class submarine broke the surface of the waves, leaving a glittering trail of phosphorescence in the gathering gloom. Onboard the 7000-tonne nuclear-powered attack submarine, armed with an arsenal of thermal torpedoes, rocket mines and a single, supersonic cruise missile, two men exchanged silent glances. One was the Captain, a career officer in the PLAN, the People’s Liberation Army Navy. The other was the zhengwei, the political commissar assigned by the Communist Party of China to ensure the crew’s political adhesion to the Party. On both men’s shoulders their dark blue epaulettes bore three gold stars between two parallel lines, denoting the rank of captain. The commissar had almost no military experience to speak of, yet this was a dual command: the one could not issue an order without authorization from the other. And tonight their mission was one of critical national importance, authorized and directed from the very top of the Central Committee of the Party and guarded with the utmost secrecy.
To say there was trust between these two men of similar age, both in their forties, would be an exaggeration. It was more of a mutual understanding, a relationship of convenience. The submarine’s captain knew he was being watched, all of the time, and that the slightest hint of disloyalty to the Party would see him relieved of his command the moment they returned to shore, followed by a lengthy and unpleasant investigation. The political commissar barely knew his way around the boat – his safety was in the hands of its crew and its captain – but as Beijing’s representative onboard he carried all the authority he needed to feel he was the one really in charge. Even the lowest-ranking sailor on that submarine knew that to cross the commissar was to commit career suicide.
‘Is everything ready?’ he asked.
The Captain nodded deferentially and gestured towards the ladder that climbed up the submarine’s protruding black fin. The zhengwei had insisted on being the first up through the hatch now that they had broken the surface. It was something he intended to include in his report, demonstrating his dedication and, yes, even his bravery. A naval rating still had to race up the ladder ahead of him and wrestle the hatch open from the inside, then shin down again before giving him ‘the honour’.
A warm and humid breeze ruffled his hair as he breathed in the fresh, salty air and his eyes adjusted to the dark. A hundred kilometres to the east, close to the median line between Taiwan and the coast of mainland China, he knew there was high tension after some ‘intrusion’ by Western warships resulting in a warning shot being fired. The zhengwei knew this because he had received a classified cable informing him of the incident, sent from Yulin naval base on Hainan Island. But he put this to one side as he focused on the mission in hand. Now he watched from the top of the fin as, faintly visible below him, more hatches opened and men raced across the deck. Four minutes later, according to his watch, the inflatables were ready for launch and those who had prepared them stood stiffly to attention, the breeze fanning their overalls as they waited for orders. The command rang out on the boat’s Tannoy and the sailors stood back, making way for a second squad that now rushed to take up their positions next to the inflatables. They were the frogmen from the Jiaolong Commando, the Sea Dragons, big, broad-shouldered men, larger than the sailors who stood behind them. Dressed entirely in black, they each carried a QBS06 underwater assault rifle fitted with a twenty-six-round plastic magazine. Each round was capable of firing a long, needle-like projectile for a short distance underwater, as well as having a lethal effect at close range on dry land.
Twenty-two-year-old Private First Class Jian Zhang stood next to the first of the inflatables, his boots nudging the curved rubber edges in the dark. Outwardly calm, Zhang was willing his heart rate to remain steady. Because he knew that the microchip embedded between his shoulder blades was already beaming back a constant flow of medical data to a team of scientists monitoring him from the naval base at Sanya, all the way south on China’s Leizhou peninsula.
Zhang was a product of Project 49, the ultra-secret programme to develop ongoing generations of genetically enhanced servicemen and -women. Until 2016 China had happily published its data on genetic modification, sharing some of its research with the world’s leading medical peer groups. And then, abruptly, it went dark. Whatever China’s scientists were up to behind closed doors, the Pentagon suspected, was from then on a closely guarded military secret.
To the naked eye, Zhang looked just like any of his countrymen, only rather better built. But beneath his skin, his body was a living experiment in the fusion of cutting-edge technology with human tissue, honed for military purpose. Through his veins coursed not just human blood but also injected respirocytes: artificial red blood cells that mimic the function of the respiratory system, allowing the host, in theory at least, to hold their breath underwater for up to four hours. Following successful surgery, Zhang, like other members of Project 49, was also one of a growing number of enhanced troops endowed with electro-chemical vision: eyesight that gave him something approaching both infrared and night vision. This was not science fiction, this was molecular nanotechnology in action. This was real. And Zhang had been a willing volunteer, only too happy to submit to the changes being wrought on his body, all in the service of his homeland and the ruling CCP. There were drawbacks and side-effects, of course, as with almost any experimental programme still in its infancy. The pain behind the eyes that sometimes wouldn’t go away for days, the numbness that sometimes crept over his extremities, or the all-too-visual images that danced before his eyes, even when they were closed. These he shouldered with equanimity. For Zhang, these were small and worthwhile sacrifices for a greater cause.
When the submarine descended once more beneath the waves of the South China Sea the three black inflatables were left floating on the surface. The target was just over two kilometres away, close enough for an outboard engine to be detected. And so, in near silence, the three crews paddled hard. The wind was picking up now, forcing them to contend with a swell and chop for the last five hundred metres, their powerful, rubber-clad shoulders bulging as their muscles strained to pull hard on the paddles. Zhang blinked several times. When he wasn’t looking down at the paddle between his hands, or the inky blackness of the sea, he lifted his gaze towards the outline of the island he could see materializing in the distance. He could only catch glimpses as the inflatable craft rose and fell with the swell but it matched the photographs they had been shown in the briefing back on base.
At three hundred metres out Zhang saw the Master Sergeant in front check the luminous gadget he held in his hand. Seconds later he raised his right arm. It was the signal. One by one they somersaulted backwards over the side of the black inflatables, vanishing into the ocean, leaving just a skeleton crew to man the boats on the surface. They swam in formation, their powerful legs kicking out and propelling them through the water at a depth of just two metres, until they reached an obstacle: the wire perimeter netting. This was unexpected, there had been nothing in the briefing about it, yet they had the tools to deal with it. Wielding the cutters it took only three minutes to cut a gap big enough for all twelve to squeeze through.
Lieyu Island was indefensible, a fact all too obvious to Taiwan’s Defence Ministry planners whose sole job it was to make their country as hard a target as possible. This was known as ‘the porcupine strategy’: put enough spines and quills around you and your enemy will think twice about attacking you. But Beijing had now given Lieyu Island a great deal of thought and had reached the conclusion, based on all the available intelligence gathered from its satellites in space, from its human informants on the ground, and from countless cyber intercepts, that Lieyu’s pathetically few porcupine spines could indeed be plucked.
Powering his way through the warm coastal waters alongside the rest of his raiding party, Zhang rehearsed the briefing they’d been given earlier. Lieyu’s garrison of Taiwanese border guards, they were told, numbered less than twenty men and women, of whom fewer than a dozen were believed to be combat-trained. And their defences were geared to a surface invasion, said the briefing team, with Lieyu’s guns pointing across the water to face an imaginary armada of landing craft and assault ships coming from the Chinese mainland to the west. Not a covert night-time assault by commandos surfacing from a submarine.
But there was another reason why Lieyu had been chosen for this operation. Unlike Russia’s flawed ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine in 2022, when President Putin’s army had attempted to seize the entire country from the outset, Lieyu was just a tiny foothold on Taiwanese territory. Anyone looking at a map of the South China Sea would surely assume it belonged to China as it was so close to the mainland, so far from Taiwan. The conclusion was reached in Beijing that if the People’s Liberation Army landed on Lieyu, there would be a short-lived flurry of diplomatic outrage, then the world would shrug its shoulders and move on. Energy prices, food-supply chains, climate change and the cost of living would soon eclipse any interest in a tiny islet on the other side of the world that almost no one had ever heard of.
Such matters were above and beyond the concern of Zhang as he rhythmically kicked out his legs, propelling himself ever closer to the dark outline of Lieyu Island ahead. He was focused 100 per cent on the task. He was about to earn his place in history.