461: Chapter 461 Infrared Lock-On, Silent Hunt

The sixty J-10B fighters were already forty kilometers away, having locked onto Hasni's F/A-18D using their infrared search and track systems. By using infrared—without emitting radar waves—the F/A-18D's warning system never went off from start to finish.

While Hasni was still staring at his tactical screen, his fighter jet suddenly shook violently. The active radar seeker of the PL-15 medium-range missile activated in the final second, at a distance of less than eight kilometers. For an air-to-air missile traveling at Mach 4, this distance—was not enough time.

The PL-15 punched in one meter behind the right engine intake. The continuous-rod warhead detonated on the turbine disk, shattering the blades into fragments. The fragments pierced through the fuselage bulkhead and severed the main spar of the right wing. The F/A-18D snapped in two in mid-air.

Hasni ejected. As the ejection seat threw him out of the cockpit, he saw the wreckage of his wingman pass by him—that F/A-18D had exploded four seconds earlier than his. The wingman was sitting in the ejection seat, his parachute still unopened, but he was already motionless—a piece of the canopy was embedded in his chest.

Two minutes later, the third and fourth F/A-18Ds were shot down. All four of the Malaysian Air Force's only modern fighter jets crashed in the mountains of Perak State, their wreckage scattered in the primeval forest. The flames made the treetops flicker in light and shadow.

The duty officer in the Butterworth base control tower stared at the radar screen—the four blips representing their own fighters disappeared one after another. He picked up the microphone and shouted directly into the public channel: "Blue Arrow Squadron! Blue Arrow! Report status!"

On the public channel, only the emergency beacon on Lieutenant Hasni's ejection seat was beeping. The communications soldier tuned another radio to that frequency and heard intermittent breathing and a garbled Malay phrase:

"They are not drones... They are not drones..."

10:04:23 PM.

From the moment the first warhead landed until now—forty-five seconds.

Ninety-six M1A3 tanks crossed the Thai-Malaysian border simultaneously. The tank treads crushed the barbed wire and uprooted the concrete border markers. Every tank commander stood on the turret, watching the front through night-vision goggles.

The Malaysian Border Guard's 8th Regiment did not open fire. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad, was on the rooftop of the bombed-out command building, filming the burning sky, and had not yet managed to issue an order. By the time he remembered to give the order, the ninety-six M1A3s had already crossed the barbed wire, and the vanguard was less than two kilometers from the regimental headquarters.

The first tank's 120mm main gun opened fire. A high-explosive shell smashed directly into the 8th Regiment's ammunition depot. The second tank strafed the garage with its coaxial machine gun, turning three armored personnel carriers into sieves.

Lieutenant Colonel Ahmad ran down from the rooftop. The radar screens in the command room were already black. A communications soldier was lying on the ground using a hand-crank generator to power the wired communications, but after the fiber optic cable was cut, the hand-crank generator was only powering the short-circuit current at the broken end. The needles on the dashboard swung wildly, swung twice, and then returned to zero.

He took out his phone and recorded a video—the light from the explosions outside the headquarters reflected on the window, and the communications soldier was crouching in the corner using a lighter to burn the rubber coating off a spare fiber optic cable, attempting to splice it on the spot. He said one sentence to the video: "The 8th Regiment has been wiped out." Then he put the phone into a waterproof bag, tied it to the neck of the yellow dog guarding the headquarters gate, patted the dog on the rump, and told it to run south.

The yellow dog ran off. Zhao Yuxun saw a heat source signal dart out of the command building through his night-vision goggles; he raised his hand—the roof machine gunner took his finger off the trigger.

"A dog," Zhao Yuxun said.

At the entrance of the Kuantan base ammunition depot. Sergeant Farid was squatting under an explosion-proof light, having counted the inventory list for the third time. Army Commander Jamaluddin's order required loading to be completed six hours before the countdown hit zero, and now there was less than twelve hours left in the countdown—the number of javelin missiles he had counted for the third time was 394, which was six fewer than the 400 on the list. The supervising officer walked past him twice, but he didn't even look up.

He knew someone was watching. He also knew that the longer he delayed, the further the tanks in the north would crush forward. He started counting again from the first row of crates.

11:17 PM. Johor Strait Bridge. Night Owl's Shadow Blade 3rd Squad had been crawling in the pipe shafts of the bridgehead for three hours. The squad leader had identified the positions of all the defenders at the bridgehead: twenty-three men, three general-purpose machine guns, and two officers playing cards on the second floor. The smell of coffee drifting down from the second floor changed from instant to burnt—the electric kettle had boiled dry.

Night Owl counted to three on the channel. Group B simultaneously activated silent cutters at the 12th-floor communication relay station, slicing through the remaining aluminum gratings in one go. Group C activated the signal interceptor installed on the third basement level of the building, intercepting the last encrypted communication signal from the Malaysian Johor defenders—a distress telegram to Kuala Lumpur, with the encryption level downgraded from "Urgent" to "Request to confirm communication link status."

The telegram hadn't been sent yet. Vega initiated full-spectrum jamming, cutting off all wireless signals within a two-kilometer radius of the Sultan Iskandar Building in Johor and its surrounding area. The Malaysian defenders' radios were left with only white noise, and their mobile phone screens displayed "No Service."

11:21 PM. The Myanmar Marine Corps' 1st Brigade hovercraft landing craft charged out of the night fog from the direction of Woodlands, with three LCACs docking simultaneously. Before the ramp of the first landing craft was fully lowered, the amphibious assault vehicles had already charged onto the shore, their treads grinding two white marks into the concrete embankment.

The Malaysian defenders at the bridgehead only reacted when they heard the sound of treads grinding on concrete. Their radar had had all echo signals cut off by Vega an hour ago, and their infrared detectors had been injected with false heat sources of rain clouds. Night Owl's Group A launched an attack simultaneously from the other end of the bridge; the Shadow Dancer optical camouflage system made the fourteen team members completely invisible in the night fog.

The two officers on the second floor were still waiting for the water in the electric kettle to boil again. The machine gunner downstairs heard the engine roar of the amphibious assault vehicles and, thinking it was reinforcements sent from Johor, got up to look out the window—the moment he pulled back the curtain, what he saw was the transparent human silhouette cut out in the night fog by the Shadow Dancer-3. He wanted to shout, but a three-round burst from a suppressed submachine gun had already pierced the shoulder seam of his bulletproof vest.

The first amphibious assault vehicle charged up the bridgehead slope, and its 30mm autocannon fired four high-explosive rounds at the second-floor window. The window shattered, and glass shards and instant Nescafé packaging flew out together. The second Shadow Blade team member climbed onto the second floor from the pipe shaft—the two officers were still sitting next to their poker cards, holding two Aces and a King of Spades in their hands. Their pistols were on the table, with the safeties not even disengaged.

11:24 PM. The Johor Strait Bridge was completely controlled by the Myanmar Marine Corps. Of the twenty-three defenders, eighteen were captured and five were killed in action. The electric kettle had boiled dry, the bottom of the kettle had burned through, and steam mixed with the smell of gunpowder smoke drifted out from the second-floor window.

Night Owl reported on the channel, his tone no different from usual: "The bridge has been taken. The second floor of the bridgehead is a bit messy—an electric kettle burned dry. I suggest an engineering team come up to check the electrical wiring."