Fulcrum of the citadel, p.5
Fulcrum of the Citadel, page 5
“I will not abandon the soldiers of my company,” I said more resolutely.
That finally stopped McCormick. He turned and said, “That’s a sentiment I understand. You have to watch out for your people. But you have to ask yourself—are you going to be more useful with us or as one more company commander in Pinglin?”
After a moment, he began walking again. Without explicitly answering McCormick’s question, I filed in next to the survivors of the Lafayette Initiative.
* * *
As we walked, I took in the terrain. Thickly-wooded forest dominated the mountains, but tea plantations dotted the area as well, with neatly-terraced rows of short plants and picturesque Taiwanese farmhouses. We avoided the open fields of tea plants assiduously, keeping strictly to the woods that would help us evade Chinese drones and satellites.
Within minutes of leaving Farmers’ Ridge, the three former Lafayette Initiative members had unslung their weapons and stopped any extraneous conversation. Our pace slowed noticeably, and the Russian Volodya Ivanov moved about fifteen yards ahead to carefully examine the path ahead.
McCormick intermittently spoke quietly into a radio microphone, asking someone in Taiwanese high command for intelligence. Presumably, the Taiwanese had satellite and drone support overhead and were telling McCormick about the location of PLA forces. After forty minutes of walking, we came across a narrow, one-lane road winding its way down the far side of the mountain from Farmers’ Ridge. On either side of the road was a steep forest, and a few hundred yards down the road, we could see a single stone building built into the side of the mountain.
Calling Ivanov to join me and Dietrich, McCormick said, “This road leads down to the river Pinglin is perched on. Taiwanese high command thinks there’s a PLA advance company making its way over the mountains here, and they’ll be here in about twenty minutes. We’re going to wipe them out.”
I glanced at Dietrich and Ivanov, and they showed no surprise, as if they thought McCormick was serious. McCormick began to describe his plan, but I felt the need to interrupt. “The four of us are going to take on a hundred-plus PLA infantry?”
McCormick looked annoyed. “No, we’re going to wipe them out with our kindness and good-spirits. What the fuck do you think we’re going to do?”
Angrily, I said, “It only took about 150 PLA to push three companies of the 101st Airborne to the breaking point. Three hundred American soldiers. And you think the four of us can take on a hundred?”
McCormick eyed me skeptically. “You look old enough. Did you ever do a tour in Iraq?”
Ignoring the age portion of the comment, I answered, “Yes.”
“Ever see the Iraqi Army fight?”
“No.”
McCormick recounted, “I’ve seen thirty ISIS fighters break a battalion of the Iraqi Army—a thousand soldiers. I’ve seen two ISIS snipers ambush and force the surrender of forty Iraqi soldiers.”
“That was the Iraqi Army, not hardened PLA veterans,” I objected.
McCormick answered, “Iraqis aren’t cowards. I’ve worked with brave Iraqis. The ones who surrendered had seen fighting before. But they were mostly Shiites caught by surprise in hostile Sunni territory. ISIS hit them hard and fast and scared them into running.”
Working up a steam, McCormick paced in front of me. “Put fear in their hearts and the battle is over. Scare the PLA and they’ll run. I’ve seen it happen. The Knights could have held the American Institute in Taipei until hell froze over against the PLA because they were scared of us. They had expected to walk into a peaceful, nerdy country with a conventional army and found hardened killers instead. We surprised them at every turn and spilled their blood until the thought of trying again to beat us was more terrifying than the thought of failing in their mission.”
McCormick stopped his pacing and pointed right at me. “That’s how three unconventional fighters can succeed where three-hundred soldiers failed.”
This is crazy, the rational part of my mind told me. But another part remembered the fear of Farmers’ Ridge, the sense that there was nothing I could do against a better-trained, better-equipped foe. I wanted the PLA company commander to experience what I had felt.
“Make it four.”
* * *
I waited for the PLA advance, my face and arms covered in mud to make my thermal signature a little less obvious. It didn’t seem likely that the Chinese would be using infrared at high noon, but a light rain had begun to fall, and if the storm got worse, visibility might have reduced to the point that only infrared would be useful.
Limited visibility made me feel much more comfortable about my role in the plan. I was covered in leaves in the middle of a thick stand of trees just off the southern edge of a tea field.
The field itself was on the slope of the last mountain before Pinglin. The downward slope of the mountain south of me led through 150 yards of dense forest to a farm house and barn that marked the beginning of the one-lane road running down to the river. The road exited out to the river just west of Pinglin, a perfect route to bypass and cut-off the American garrison of the town.
As the minutes crept by, I considered the men with whom I’d be fighting the coming battle. I’d heard of Sergeant McCormick, of course. In those videos the Knights and the Lafayette Initiative had posted on YouTube, McCormick was passionate. In person, his dedication to his cause was fanatical, almost scary. Dietrich and Volodya were both older than the American sergeant, but they deferred to him, trusted his judgment. That trust was clearly borne of experience, but what might happen when McCormick’s fanaticism pushed him to do something crazy, I wondered.
Crazier than four men destroying a company? I smiled, but didn’t laugh.
Twenty minutes ticked by, feeling like a year. Finally, I heard Volodya’s voice whisper in my ear. “Here they come. They just entered the tea field.”
I slowed my breathing, and my chest began to hurt from the effort of partially holding my breath. Calm down. I took a deeper breath, trying to normalize my breathing by the time the PLA infantry walked past my position.
Then I saw them. Heavily armed. Adorned in body armor. Walking forward carefully, their eyes scanning the area. Steady.
They were deployed in a loose column about fifty yards wide, plenty of space between each soldier. The clear intention was to present a relatively narrow front to minimize the risk of detection while keeping enough distance between soldiers to minimize the risk of multiple casualties from a single explosion.
Most of the soldiers were focused forward and didn’t see me off to one side in the field. But one soldier was more curious than the others. He approached the periphery of the tea field with his Ak-2000 rifle at his shoulder and aimed away to my left. Then he turned and looked right at me.
My heart stopped. I almost brought my rifle out from underneath my body by reflex. “Sit tight,” Volodya said on the radio. I don’t know if he could see what was happening or if it was just a particularly well-timed random admonition.
The PLA soldier’s head swiveled and he continued his patrol to the south. The rest of his company followed behind him, their weapons in their hands.
I didn’t bother to whisper that the Chinese had passed me. My professional reason was that Volodya would already know where the Chinese were. The real reason was that I was so scared that I didn’t trust myself to speak without my voice cracking.
The Chinese infantry continued their steady march into the woods. A little over two minutes passed, and though my immediate danger was lessened, I felt my stomach tighten with apprehension. The battle would be upon us shortly.
“Initiate phase one,” McCormick whispered over the radio.
The distinctive crack of a Taiwanese T97 rifle sounded up the mountain to the left of the Chinese advance. A PLA infantryman was hit in the face, no time to scream. Before his body hit the ground, another shot rang out. Another hit, this time in the neck.
Explosions erupted in the woods. Old Claymore mines, little changed from 50 years earlier, detonated, spraying ball bearings ricocheting against trees, rocks, and Chinese soldiers.
By now, there was a cacophony on the mountainside. Two grenades detonated, sending more shrapnel among the PLA soldiers. All the while, intermittent gunfire continued pouring down on the PLA company from somewhere in the deep woods on the side of the mountain.
Though the ambush had killed or wounded about ten of their number, these PLA soldiers were too experienced to panic. They had fought their way through Taipei, and were not about to let a few explosives and a little gunfire break them. In good order, one platoon lay down covering fire on the side of the mountain while the other two platoons ran to the farmhouses to take cover.
About sixty PLA infantry broke for the farmhouses, sprinting to get out of the line of fire. They didn’t bother to stack up outside either house, focusing instead on getting to a place of safety quickly.
“Initiate phase two,” McCormick said.
Though Volodya was nearly invisible in the deep woods, I knew he was now running as nimbly and quickly as he could, circling around behind the Chinese almost to my position.
Given more time, the PLA infantry might have noticed that the explosions had slackened momentarily, and the gunfire from the mountainside died down as well. But the platoon on the ground knew that their comrades’ lives were in their hands, so they continued pouring heavy fire onto the mountainside, creating an illusion of frenetic battle.
Meanwhile, the two platoons that had run for the farmhouse had entered the two buildings and immediately posted men to the windows to search for the attackers that had fallen upon their advance.
“Initiate phase three.”
Large explosions ripped through the ground floors of the twin farmhouses, tearing asunder the once idyllic homes and massacring the Chinese soldiers within.
The battle was about twenty-five seconds old now, and the situation had suddenly jumped outside the experience of the PLA company commander. McCormick and his team gave him no time to get his bearings.
McCormick came storming down from the second floor of one of the farmhouses. The PLA within were still stunned by the explosion, and barely knew he was there for several seconds. During that time, he shot several and tossed another grenade into the mess.
At the same time, Dietrich did the same thing in the other farmhouse. Of the sixty men who had run to the farmhouses at the outset of the battle, nine managed to scramble back to the tree line to the north.
Covered in blood and nearly all suffering from minor or major wounds, they screamed to the remaining platoon in Mandarin. It wasn’t hard to figure out the meaning—fall back, fall back!
McCormick and Dietrich paused to reload, then began firing into the retreating PLA in the woods. They hit a few, but more important than the casualties inflicted by the American and the German was the noise, the fear that they kept hounding at the remaining forty or so Chinese soldiers.
The Chinese ran. While the survivors of the two platoons who had come to the farmhouses might have been totally shattered, the platoon that had stayed in the woods was merely on the edge of panic. They still had a semblance of order. They ran north, and I spotted an officer shouting orders into a chest-mounted radio.
My own radio buzzed in my ear. “Initiate phase four. Finish the bastards off,” McCormick said coldly.
I took aim at the officer. In a frozen moment, I saw the fear on his face, the determination to save his men, the strength of character to remain calm in a crisis. Then I fired, and saw pain and death overtake him as three bullets crashed into his chest.
Volodya had circled around the Chinese to a position on the other corner of the tea field, and now he too opened fire. The Chinese were caught in a crossfire, with McCormick and Dietrich keeping up steady fire from the south and Volodya and I cutting them down from the north.
It was slaughter. Though the Chinese still had more than eight times as many soldiers as we, they broke. The rational ones fell to the ground and covered their heads. Others, crazed by fear or pain, kept running toward me and Volodya.
We kept our fire up, cutting down more and more as McCormick and Dietrich pushed from the south, darting for cover from one tree to the next.
The remaining living Chinese were either wounded early in the battle or were lying prone on the ground, screaming something indecipherable.
They were trying to surrender, I realized. “I think they’re giving up,” I said into my radio.
Angrily, McCormick snapped back, “Keep the fire up, don’t let them get a second wind.”
I thought back to the phrase book I had looked at briefly on the flight from the United States. Into the staccato of automatic rifle fire, I shouted, “Toe-zhang yi-sue!” Having never studied Mandarin, I didn’t know if my accent was correct, or if my call for surrender was even understandable.
“Shut the fuck up, captain!” Volodya shouted into the radio.
But the Chinese evidently understood what I was saying. Over the din of rifle fire, I heard a voice shout back. Around the field, PLA soldiers threw their rifles as far as they could and reached their hands to their heads.
The gunfire stopped. McCormick, Volodya, Dietrich, and I converged on the Chinese lying on the ground near the edge of the tea field. The cries of wounded Chinese to the south suggested perhaps a dozen more wounded PLA in addition to the eight before us now.
McCormick took a swig of water from a canteen. Wiping his mouth, he gestured to the battlefield and said, “That is how you destroy a company.”
* * *
“I don’t suppose you actually speak Mandarin,” McCormick said to me.
I shook my head. “No, just read a few phrases on the plane ride over.”
McCormick rolled his eyes. He turned to the Chinese and asked slowly, “Do any of you speak English?”
One of the prisoners responded shakily, “Yes, I studied at Georgia Tech.”
The American sergeant snorted in amusement. “Alright, what’s your name?”
“Corporal Xi Peng, 22nd Infantry Division.”
“Tell your men to lie still, we’re going to search them for weapons. Tell them we’ll kill them if they move.” McCormick said icily.
“Y-yes, I will,” Corporal Peng stammered.
McCormick turned to his men. “Let’s frisk ’em.” I moved to join the Lafayette Initiative members to help search the prisoners, and McCormick put up a hand. “Not you, captain. You keep an eye on the situation and let us know if any of these bastards moves.”
I thought that McCormick just didn’t trust me to competently frisk a prisoner, but I didn’t make an issue of it. I watched as the three took a few minutes to thoroughly check each of the prisoners.
Once the searches were done, McCormick said, “Corporal Peng, get your men into a single file line, two steps between each man.”
I was surprised. “I thought you said you didn’t want to interact with the 101st?”
McCormick grimaced. “I didn’t, but now that you’ve forced these guests on us, we have to dump them off somewhere, and it’s either Pinglin or Yilan, twenty miles away. How long do you think it would take to bring eight prisoners twenty miles with no food or water?”
Corporal Peng interrupted, calling over, “Pardon me, sir, I have a request.”
McCormick reflexively yelled back with the standard joke of sergeants everywhere. “Don’t call me ‘sir,’ I work for a living. What do you want?”
Peng wasn’t fazed. “Please allow me to examine our wounded comrades. Several might be carried away to safety.”
I could see indecision on McCormick’s face. Finally, he answered, “You have five minutes to check them out. Captain Concitor will go with you.”
“I will need to take another of my soldiers. There are too many to check in so short a time.”
McCormick took two steps toward Peng and said neutrally. “We are not allowing time for more PLA to get here. You, and just you, have four minutes and fifty-five seconds. Get to it.”
Peng walked off at a brisk clip, obviously trying to go as quickly as possible without making it look like he was running away. I hurried along behind.
Dozens of PLA infantry lay on the ground, bleeding red patches onto the verdant forest floor. Some were obviously dead, and Peng didn’t even bother to take their dogtags. He didn’t have time for the dead—only the living.
About thirty-five of the wounded PLA in the vicinity were at some level of consciousness. Peng appeared to have very little medical training to speak of, but did his best to make quick judgments.
One man was missing both legs and crying softly in pain. He was rapidly bleeding to death. Peng must have known the man. He exchanged a few impassioned words, and the man pressed a letter into Peng’s hand. Peng blinked back tears and moved on.
