Fiction Week

By Malcom Reynolds

Undisclosed Location
Eastern Theater Command
3 March 2027
2125 local time 

“Comrade General, welcome,” said Colonel Pei Yuanqing as he saluted, then sat behind his desk. The general sat, and the meeting Yuanqing had restlessly awaited began.

For years Yuanqing planned this operation, ever since the Chairman revealed his private timeline for reunification with the defiant island to the east. Disguised as foreign students for insertion into the adversary’s homeland, Yuanqing’s teams had rehearsed every conceivable variation on the plan. They’d incorporated observations from Ukraine, Iran, and elsewhere. Their intelligence had penetrated the targets’ lax communication protocols and then simply watched and listened. They passed up myriad exploitation opportunities to retain their access and achieve the Chairman’s goal. The targets remained arrogantly unaware of their vulnerability throughout.

The Chairman had launched the last piece—the qīpiàn, the deception—three days ago. Public self-abasement, a pledge to deal, the humble request for a summit—all to get their targets out in the open. It was Yuanqing’s moment. Yet when he’d received the code word trigger, anxiety long buried within gripped his insides.

Yuanqing knew why. The actual landing aside, his operation was the most important ever undertaken by the People’s Liberation Army in its hundred years of history. Should it fail, severe punishment would fall on him and his…and thus he’d struck a deal with the general. Succeed or fail, Yuanqing would join the landing’s first wave. He and the general knew this was a death sentence. But death as punishment for failure, or death in the vanguard of the invasion whose success his team had assured, were quite different legacies. Following the final teleconference with his teams a few days ago, Yuanqing trusted that their performance would ensure his family received a posthumous 1 August Medal rather than join him in death. But the anxiety remained.

“I received word that all is ready,” said the general without preamble. “Has any intelligence suggested a change to the timeline?” Such an innocuous question, thought Yuanqing, about whether the millions of men and machines coiled to strike will win or lose depending on whether my plan succeeds or fails.

“None, Comrade General,” Yuanqing replied. “Only a few hours ago we intercepted further text exchanges confirming the targets’ timelines and locations. I’ll admit, I almost admire their stubbornness in continued use of their texting application despite years of publicized leaks. In some ways they mirror us, refusing to submit to the old order of things.” The general chuckled.

“In some ways, yes. But the old order kept us vulnerable; it kept them safe. They’ll pay the price for misunderstanding the distinction.”

“Indeed,” smiled Yuanqing. “And they seem quite convinced that—” Yuanqing hesitated.

“Go on, Comrade Colonel,” said the general. “Your thoughts match my own. I and the Chairman have full faith in your loyalty.”

“Their…tone. They’re certain we’ve acquiesced. That the Chairman has submitted to their incoherent demands. That we—” Yuanqing paused, tapped the screen of his mobile phone to bring up the precise text from the intelligence intercept—“that we’re the bitch we always knew they were.” He struggled to control his anger. “It is much to bear. Especially watching the Chairman’s public responses appear to confirm their arrogant assessment.” He fell silent, the general watching him closely. Then the general nodded, and something Yuanqing hadn’t even known was clenched inside of him relaxed.

“It is much to bear,” agreed the general. “But such appearances are necessary. They’re the fulcrum of our qīpiàn, to lull them enough to expose themselves. You and I, and the Chairman, know just how temporary our submission is. And if the Chairman can bear it, so can you.” Amusement flickered across the general’s face, though his eyes remained cold. “Your teams are our instrument for punishing that arrogance, and the arrogance of all the decades preceding it.” The general checked his watch. “My apologies, Comrade Colonel. You must head to the assembly area, and I’m delaying you.”

Both men stood, but as Yuanqing brought his arm up for a final salute, the general waved it away, extending his hand instead. “Comrade,” said the general simply. “Serve the people.”

Yuanqing’s voice caught in his throat. “Serve the people,” he whispered back.

The Base by the River
3 March 2027
0930 local time

Looks to be a beautiful day, thought Sergeant Zoë Alleyne as she strode to the hangar after FOD walk. This was one of those few northern Virginia mornings when humans could walk outside without immediately sweating or freezing. The river shimmered in sunlight, the sky was clear. Nothing to keep Marine Two from its quick visit.

Alleyne’s flight line shop had churned all week once rumors of the hasty summit were confirmed. Now all the birds were loaded and gone on C-17s. The Vice was coming to thank his fellow Marines for their hard work before flying back up the river to depart for the summit. The only other white top flying today had already gone up north to bring the CINC to Air Force One. For the moment, the day was beautiful, the air quiet.

A few seconds later, Alleyne heard the faint whop-whop of a helicopter in the distance.

____________________________________________

Wei eased the semi into the pull-off next to the base. He’d rehearsed this endlessly—sometimes going to one of the other three pull-outs, changing the time of day, varying how long he lingered before leaving again. Each time, the tension that this would be the one where his luck ran out gripped him a little tighter. He didn’t fear blowing the actual operation; for their rehearsals, the trailer’s contents were perfectly legitimate. Any inspection would reveal only reams of paper. But Wei was incredulous that he could park a truck carrying who-knew-what next to a military base, sit there, and no one would care. Yet for each rehearsal, he parked in a pull-out by the base, he sat, and then after a while he left again. No one came. No one cared.

He had a different trailer today. Today, they’d regret their indifference.

Wei checked his phone. His extraction driver, Xia, had already texted confirmation that she was staged in the the park just over the rise in the road. Yichen, their spotter, was on the far side of the river, ostensibly bird-watching should a nosey observer wonder why someone was pointing a pair of binoculars in the direction of the base. Everything was on timeline.

 He shut off the engine, then pulled the modified tablet from underneath his seat and woke it up. His phone silently thrummed on the seat, it was a short message from Yichen: five minutes out.

Hotel North of the Executive Mansion
3 March 2027
0938 local time

Ling pulled the phone from her pocket and glanced at it. “The others are in place,” she said, unslinging the heavy backpack. “It’s on us now not to fuck things up.” Bo grunted but kept his attention on pulling the contents from his heavy duffel bag. Theirs was the highest-value target and because of that, the narrowest window of opportunity to strike. And they were already 45 seconds late getting into position. Each second weighed on Ling like a millstone, spurring her hands to help Bo assemble their package.

The hundred-year-old hotel chosen as the launching point had an excellent view. There was clear line of sight to the landing zone on the executive mansion’s southern lawn. But the best efforts of their intelligence agencies hadn’t conjured an excuse for Ling and Bo to loiter on the premises. There were no job openings and no room vacancies. Under other circumstances, the intelligence offices could take direct actions to create those openings, but the Chairman himself quashed anything that might draw scrutiny to the hotel before the operation.

Thus their rehearsals had been conducted on mock-ups derived from secondhand sources along with pictures from a handful of dinners they’d reserved to scout the property. Ling and Bo were pretty sure their rehearsed route to the roof was accurate, but wouldn’t know until the day of execution.

Then there was the timing. Because they couldn’t loiter, they had to blend in with pedestrians while their observer, Zhou, did the same. Zhou was well south near the river, watching the normal route the helicopters took to the executive mansion. So Ling and Bo would walk around until Zhou signaled the helicopter was inbound, and then time their ascent for when they estimated the target would walk out on the southern lawn to board it. They’d studied enough news footage to calculate a rough average for how long after the helicopter landed that the target left the mansion to board it. But again, they wouldn’t know for sure that their target was in the open until they got to the roof.

They had one advantage—they didn’t have to worry about extraction.

But they were late, because after entering the rear of the hotel and starting their climb, they’d first come across a bellhop, and then a janitor, coming down the stairs on different floors. Ling left both to die quietly in pools of their own blood. But it cost time. Eventually someone would discover the bodies and raise the alarm. They had to complete the mission before that happened.

Bo watched the mansion through binoculars as Ling snapped the last rotor of the FPV drone into place. “Target’s in the open,” he said quietly. With a smooth motion Bo dropped the binoculars and slid the FPV headset down from the top of his head over his eyes. His hands activated the controller.

“Power up,” he said, and Ling armed the drone, then the payload. This, right here, was what mattered. She checked payload’s indicator light three times to be sure.

Police sirens wailed in the distance.

Touching Bo lightly on his left arm, she whispered: “Launch.”

The Base by the River

Wei’s phone buzzed with a message from Yichen: he’s taking a walk. That meant his target was in the open. Here we go.

His movements on the tablet were smooth and rehearsed. First he touched the icon that opened the hatches on top of the trailer, revealing the hidden space housing his flock of drones. Another tap and the repeater drone lofted upward to the altitude where it had line-of-sight to the airfield by the river. A third tap launched the swarm.

Wei’s screen filled with the first-person view from the lead drone. With most of the three miles between him and the airfield covered by forest, he wasn’t concerned about being intercepted en route. Their intelligence was confident the airfield lacked robust electronic countermeasures. The only thing that could stop him now was an inquisitive passerby along the road. But in all his rehearsals, no matter how long he’d loitered, no car had even slowed down. That pattern need only hold a couple minutes longer.

Gliding his fingers across the screen, Wei guided the lead drone along its flight path. The rest of the swarm followed in a loose formation. The drones quickly cleared the family housing area on the base’s perimeter and flew low over the forest treetops. After a couple of miles, Wei bumped the drones over the main base road and then turned them east just above the water of the tidal inlet that funneled to the airfield. Just before the water met the shore near the airfield road, Wei climbed the drones over the roofs of the aircraft hangars. As they cleared the hangars, the people clustered on the tarmac slid onto his screen, as perfectly centered as he could ask for.

Tapping the screen one last time, Wei pushed his drone into a dive. “Serve the people,” he whispered as the screen went blank.

Alleyne shook the Vice’s hand, then grinned as he pushed a challenge coin into it. The Vice’s formal remarks were brief, he’d quickly shifted to mingling with the Marines for handshakes. Alleyne gripped the coin tightly and made room for another Marine to receive the same gift. On the outskirts of the throng, she opened her hand to examine the coin more closely.

Buzzing caught her attention. Alleyne looked up to see a small shape diving toward her. She thought, that’s a weird-looking bird—

Then she tumbled, her skin burned, and screams filled the air.

Near the Executive Mansion

The sirens were close now.

Ling followed the drone through Bo’s binoculars. Their sole drone wasn’t large given that both it and its payload had to be carried on their backs. But the theory was that if they delivered it into the spinning helicopter, the explosion would generate enough dynamic pieces of death to do the job.

It was a short flight, but Bo’s challenge was flying the fiber-optic FPV high enough to keep the wires clear of street traffic and then dive it under the rotor arc into the aircraft before the wires drifted to the ground. They knew electronic countermeasures guarded the mansion, which was why they used a wire-guided FPV. It all came down to Bo’s finesse on the controls.

Bo caressed the controls gracefully. The drone cleared the street, cleared the fence, and then floated gently toward the lawn. Through the binoculars, the finale unfolded in slow motion. No one in the target zone raised any warning. The target himself walked toward the spinning helicopter, waving at a press gaggle behind him. The target was ten steps from the helicopter, then five. Bo plunged the drone into the fuselage just under the main rotor head.

Ling heard banging on the roof access door behind them, followed by shouts. No matter, we’re almost done.

A fireball obscured the helicopter’s fuselage. From the flames chunks of metal corkscrewed out, just as they’d planned. The main rotor blades flew in all directions, some gouging out chunks of turf as they pinwheeled along the lawn, one flying directly into the face of the executive mansion. The tail rotor’s torque ripped the tail boom away and flung it into the ballroom east of the landing zone. Fingers of burning jet fuel arched through the air, setting the lawn ablaze where they landed.

Ling locked the binoculars on the target area. What she saw through the flames made it clear that no living thing was left in, or near, the helicopter’s remains. She pulled out her phone to send a single message: done.

Bo flung his goggles away. The access door sounded like it was about to give way from the pounding. Ling and Bo briefly locked eyes as they removed their final pieces of equipment from duffel bag.

“Serve the people,” said Bo.

“Serve the people,” replied Ling. Together, they moved to the access door, each gripping a pistol in one hand and a blocky device in the other.

Ling unlocked it and pulled violently on the handle; a police officer fell forward and tumbled to the ground. Bo shot the man three times in the back. Ling slid into the doorway to find another officer staring in shock. Ling shot him in the face, then pulled back as a hail of bullets answered.

She and Bo hoped to make it to the ground floor before their own finale, but she knew now this would end on the roof. Ling barely felt the bullets passing through her as she emptied her magazine into the mass of uniforms. Next to her, Bo sighed softly and sank down, his knees shredded by bullets.

He looked up at her and nodded. Ling nodded back. Together, they released the dead man’s switches on the bombs they held.

The Base by the River

Alleyne lay on her back, head tilted toward the river. The screams had stopped. She heard flames crackle, smelled smoke and burning flesh, but couldn’t move her head to see if her squadron mates or the Vice were nearby. She felt cold.

Alleyne tried flexing her hand to see if the challenge coin was still there. She couldn’t move her hand either.

The world around her darkened, which was strange since the sun was still in her field of vision. She tried moving her head again. Nothing. The world got darker, and suddenly she felt very tired.

It was supposed to be a beautiful day…

In the Straits
Eastern Theater Command

Yuanqing leaned on the ship’s starboard railing, black water gurgling below as the vessel churned eastward. Klaxons would shortly call the embarked troops to their loading areas. He’d be on the first landing craft off the ship, in the first wave, just as he requested.

He’d learned of the operation’s success awaiting embarkation pier-side. The general personally delivered the news. The teams had destroyed both targets and left bloody, beautiful chaos behind them.

They’d broken the adversary’s chain of command. Embolisms of rage convulsed the adversary’s population. Half the country didn’t know who to blame and the other half…well, it blamed the first half. Yuanqing knew they’d figure it out eventually. But by then the landing would be over and their adversary left with few good options.

The distant adversary, Yuanqing reminded himself. The near adversary will soon feel the first raindrop that signals the typhoon.

An orange streak flamed through the sky, curving down to the eastern horizon. After a few seconds another followed, then another, and then the fiery streaks came so often that the water glowed orange from their reflection. The glow illuminated the other ships around him. The great fleet, amassed over decades for this moment, stretched as far as his eyes could see. The eastern horizon began to burn on its own. Soon Yuanqing couldn’t tell where the flames from the sky stopped and the flames on the horizon began. It was the gate of Armageddon, and his teams had opened it.

Klaxons blared. Yuanqing turned from the inferno. “Serve the people,” he whispered as he opened the hatch for the ladder to the well deck. The 1 August Medal bumped gently against his chest as he descended into darkness.

Malcolm Reynolds is a pen name for a former Marine officer.

Featured Image: Art created with Midjourney AI.