Hsiaohsuehshan Radar Station, Taiwan
MASTER SERGEANT WU CHI-MING was the first to identify the intruders. Four days had passed since the typhoon that had temporarily blinded his country’s mountaintop early-warning station where he worked. Four days in which he and his team had worked double shifts, responding to constant alerts and incursions as ever larger contingents of PLA aircraft crossed the median line between Taiwan and mainland China, probing and testing his country’s defences and reaction times.
But at 2.37 p.m. local time, it wasn’t fighter jets, transport or refuelling planes that entered Taiwan’s airspace. It was Chinese spy balloons, four of them, drifting at an altitude of two thousand metres. They were close to the strategic Ching Chuan Kang airbase at Taichung. Home to Taiwan’s 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing, it also housed the country’s airborne and Special Operations Command, which made it of particular interest to anyone wishing to gather intelligence on Taiwan’s readiness to repel an invasion.
Master Sergeant Chi-ming duly logged the intrusion and passed the information to National Air Defence. Chinese surveillance balloons had crossed the island before and Taipei had always gone along with the diplomatic pretence that they were simply weather balloons that had somehow blown off-course.
Not this time. Master Sergeant Chi-ming was on his third cup of High Mountain oolong tea when he saw the signal from Air Force Defence Headquarters at Zhongshan. The Air Force was being ordered to engage. The spy balloons, and all their sensitive equipment, were to be shot out of the sky, irrespective of the fury this act would generate in Beijing.