Xi’an Satellite Control Centre, Xi’an, China
THEY WORKED LONG SHIFTS at the Xi’an Satellite Control Centre, the teams who monitored the incoming data beaming down from China’s galaxy of satellites, the eyes and ears of the People’s Republic looking down on Earth from up in space. Reporting to the PLA’s Strategic Support Force, their secretive workplace was also known to those in the military as simply ‘Base 26’.
Thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence and quantum computers, those who worked there were able to download, analyse and disseminate nearly all the raw data coming in from outer space at speeds that would have been unthinkable just five years earlier.
And what was coming in that morning was triggering a flurry of urgent radio messages to the Central Military Commission in Beijing and to the PLA Navy’s Eastern Theatre Command at Ningbo, 1280 kilometres to the east of Xi’an and just down the coast from Shanghai. Chinese military satellites had picked up the movement southwards from the East China Sea of two US Navy warships, heading for the Taiwan Strait. Digital magnification and detailed analysis revealed them to be two Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers: the USS Chancellorsville and the USS Antietam, both part of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet based out of Yokosuka in Japan.
On the ground at Base 26, beneath the bristling array of radio masts and antennae, the analysts noted that this would not be the first time that the meddling and neo-imperialist United States had sent these two warships through the Taiwan Strait on one of their FONOPs – freedom of navigation operations. Beijing had complained before about what it called ‘this unnecessary and provocative act that threatened the peace and security of the western Pacific region’, but this time appeared to be different. Rather than transiting through the Strait and on into the South China Sea, the two US warships appeared to be stationing themselves at the northern entrance to the Taiwan Strait, bolstering the already unwelcome presence of those three AUKUS warships from the US, the UK and Australia.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy had extensive files on every single aspect of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet. It knew, for example, the names and home addresses of each vessel’s commanding officer. Its analysts had done extensive research on the combat capabilities, strengths and weaknesses of every single warship in their opponent’s fleet. It knew that these two guided missile cruisers were first deployed over three decades ago, yet they were armed with sophisticated weaponry including Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles and medium-range surface-to-air missiles capable of taking out any aircraft flying across the Strait.
Within hours of this development reaching the Central Military Committee an executive order was issued. Land-based missile units of the PLA’s Eastern Theatre Command should draw up contingency plans for the targeting of both US warships with a series of hypersonic missiles in the event that the geopolitical situation deteriorated further. Such an intrusion by a hostile and malevolent power so close to the coast of the motherland could not be tolerated, it was concluded, and therefore the use of force must not be ruled out.