Lieyu Island, Kinmen County, Taiwan
BOULDERS. SLIPPERY WITH slime and seaweed. Encrusted with jagged barnacles that cut through his black neoprene gloves. These were the things that Zhang and his unit of Sea Dragon frogmen encountered as they slithered ashore that night, using the rusting steel tank traps as cover while they scanned the darkened shoreline with their multifunctional night-vision goggles. Their unit had recently been equipped with the latest variant of these and they did more than allow the wearer to see in the dark. They were hardwired into each man’s integrated combat system, their ICS, a digital piece of kit that not only allowed Zhang and his team to identify enemy forces from friendly troops simply by looking at them but also beamed back video in real-time to their base on the Leizhou peninsula. This in turn allowed their commanders to see exactly what they were seeing, while geo-locating the position of every human in the area. The People’s Liberation Army, once a backwater of Mao-era weapons and tactics, had come a very long way in a short time.
Too small to be picked up by Taiwan’s coastal radar, Zhang’s unit had landed unobserved and unopposed on the gently sloping beach next to the Dong Lin Seashore Park. Turning east, they passed a darkened cemetery and an empty guard post. It was when they were nearing their objective that the silence of the night was broken by the sudden frantic barking of a dog, quickly followed by a shouted challenge. Peering through his night-vision goggles, Zhang could see three border guards, seventy metres away according to the luminous display on his headset. All were carrying weapons and, with them, a Belgian Shepherd was barking and straining at the leash.
For Private First Class Jian Zhang and the men on either side of him, the moment when they opened fire was the culmination of so many months of intensive training. Actions and reflexes were instinctive, forged in the furnace heat of exercise scenarios so dangerously realistic they would never be permitted in a NATO army. Two of the Taiwanese border guards went down in that first blistering fusillade of 5.66mm steel darts. But the third was able to roll to the side and squeeze off two rounds before he, too, succumbed to the overwhelming incoming fire.
Zhang took the shot in his pectoral muscle, the bullet slamming into his chest and narrowly missing the brachial artery. If they had reached Lieyu Island by another means, and not by swimming covertly to their target, he might have been wearing ceramic body armour. Without it, his torso shuddered with the impact and his brain registered pain as he dropped to his knees. As the respirocytes, the injected artificial red blood cells, coursed through his veins, Zhang’s body was already working overtime to control the damage. He called once, not in panic, or even in alarm, just loud enough to let his team know he was wounded and down. Hands and arms quickly came to his aid, laying him down in a resting position while the squad medic rushed up to attend to his injury. But Zhang was conscious and talking, his body long since enhanced to a point well beyond the bounds of normal human endurance. He knew, even in that moment, that it would not be long after surgery that he would be fit to resume his duties.
Zhang missed the rest of the raid. While the combat medic was tending to him in the lee of a sand dune the rest of his squad surged forward unopposed. Picking up the pace, they quickly covered the ground to their objective: the 23 August Artillery Battle Victory Monument, a relic from China’s bombardment of the island in the 1950s. Their drill had been rehearsed many times back on the mainland and now it was carried out in seconds. The two men assigned to the task raced to the flagpole and tore down the red, blue and white Taiwanese flag, replacing it immediately with the yellow stars on the red background of the People’s Republic of China. A powerful torch had been brought ashore for this very moment and now photographs and video were taken as evidence and transmitted to the vast Orwellian building known as ‘1 August’, the headquarters of China’s Central Military Commission on Fuxing Road in west Beijing. And all before anyone in Taipei, or indeed anywhere in the world, had the slightest idea of what had just taken place.
Chinese troops had their boots on the ground on Taiwanese territory while half the world was still asleep.