Quangang District, Fujian Province, China
QUANGANG WAS A rural district of pastel-green farmland, stands of bamboo and densely packed pine forest interspersed with traditional stone cottages and soulless modern housing projects. It also happened to be opposite the west coast of Taiwan, less than 150 kilometres away across the Taiwan Strait. For Beijing’s military Eastern Theatre Command, Quangang held a special strategic importance. More than once, it had been from here in Fujian Province, with its rolling, wooded hills, that the PLA had sent volleys of ballistic missiles into the sky and over the island of Taiwan in a furious response to what Beijing saw as unacceptably close contact between Taiwan’s elected rulers and senior US officials.
‘Such provocations are incompatible with the One China policy,’ the state-run China People’s Daily had thundered in protest. ‘We call upon the US to desist from such ill-advised actions, which can only end in abject failure.’
It was at one of Quangang’s secluded beaches, a former beauty spot now sealed off from public access with a high electrified fence and numerous warning signs, that the black-uniformed men of the Jiaolong Commando, the Sea Dragons, were engaged in high-intensity training. This beach had been selected for a special reason. It was an exact mock-up of one of the fourteen Taiwanese beaches deemed suitable for an amphibious landing, and the difficulties the exercise planners had placed in their way were ingeniously realistic. The beach bristled with obstacles: sharp, angular steel spikes, dense coils of razor wire and necklaces of hidden explosive charges buried beneath the sand.
The military jeep that had collected Private First Class Jian Zhang from his brief period of recovery in hospital had delivered him straight back to his unit. Already his body was back to full strength. His muscles tense, his veins pumping with respirocytes, he crouched, with the rest of his team, in one of several black rubber inflatables, its engine idling and out of sight from the beach behind a wooded headland as they waited for the signal. That signal, when it came, was no blast on a whistle, no command over the radio, but it was something they were all poised to expect. It began as a low, distant patter, rising in pitch and volume to a great clattering roar as, from over the brow of the nearest hill, a formation of black Z-10 attack helicopters swept into view. Similar to the French Tiger but arguably more advanced, this was China’s first domestically produced assault helicopter and each aircraft carried a powerful arsenal comprising eight air-to-ground missiles and two thirty-two-barrel multiple rocket launchers.
As the helicopters passed over the waiting men in the inflatables they unleashed a devastating torrent of fire and flame. Needle-like rockets streaked through the air and struck the beach and its defences with shattering force. Blasted and twisted fragments of the tank traps flew through the air and further explosions rippled through the sand as the rockets set off the necklaces of buried land mines, clearing a safe path through them. Moving as one, the Jiaolong commandos accelerated forward in their inflatable RIBs, bouncing over the waves, spray lashing their faces. They hit the beach at speed, barely slowing so that their craft slithered several metres onto the sand and they used the momentum to carry themselves forward, quickly fanning out to take up firing positions behind whatever cover they could find.
The weapons gripped in their gloved hands were unrecognizable as successors to the crude and basic Chinese version of the old AK-47 assault rifle of Cold War days. The modern QTS-11 rifles they carried were more than just a weapon: they were a complete integrated system, the quintessential example of how the modern-day infantry soldier is becoming ever more enmeshed with tech. In addition to the thirty-round magazine of 5.8mm bullets, it was fitted with a grenade launcher capable of detonating an airburst grenade just above and behind an enemy soldier. What made it different from conventional weapons was the electronic optics linked to each man’s eyepiece, which was attached to his helmet with an integrated rangefinder. In practical terms, this allowed each of the Jiaolong to fire around corners or over the top of a trench without exposing their own bodies to incoming fire.
And incoming fire was exactly what PFC Zhang was experiencing right now. As he and his team moved further inland up the beach, using fire and manoeuvre, a deafening crackle of high-velocity rounds zipped overhead, splitting the air as they broke through the sound barrier. They were coming from an unmanned machine-gun post ahead where the weapon was locked in position to fire over their heads and remotely controlled from a nearby bunker.
And now they were in among the trenches at the point where the beach merged with the woods, screaming in mock fury as they assaulted through the ‘enemy’ positions, bayoneting and shooting the 3D puppets of defending Taiwanese troops, which all wore either the hated red and blue Taiwanese flag or else the equally despised Stars and Stripes.
The exercise was over almost as soon as it had begun. It had taken precisely twenty-seven minutes, from the moment the assault helicopters opened fire to when the glorious red flag of the People’s Republic was raised above the block house on the beach. Zhang checked his weapon and looked down at his individual monitor. Twenty-one rounds expended, no injuries, heart rate normal. And he wasn’t even breaking a sweat.