Chapter 95: Northward Expansion, Southward Defense Strategy (2)

Privately, Li Fengyi gave Ye Liusun and Xu Zibiao a thorough commendation. This time the United Front Department had performed admirably, correctly analyzing the military, the government, and the survivors’ psychological states, and, in coordination with the Propaganda Department, carrying out a deliberate campaign of division and disintegration.

Ye Liusun modestly said that what he had done was still far from enough. In truth, he felt that this time it had mainly been the Propaganda Department that had stolen the spotlight; if he did not stage some lone-hero exploit or other, it would be an insult to the schemes filling his breast.

He also proposed that the Special Committee could build armored trains, or heavy armored vehicles and similar equipment, to punch through the transportation arteries near bases along the railway lines, rallying the survivor bases across the country, and, where convenient, sending manpower and material support.

The Special Committee considered his suggestion very important. Commander Liu said it was the same old tactic used in those years by armed work teams operating behind enemy lines, and that the specific method would need further discussion.

Xu Zibiao was delighted inwardly. Before the apocalypse, hadn’t every songwriter and film producer made a point of revealing the stories behind the scenes, writing a song out of some moving tale, or shooting a film in response to it? The reason the mountain convoy had stopped at that girl’s place was simply that the barricade had not yet been moved. Humming “He Is a Pirate,” Xu Zibiao floated out of Li Fengyi’s office in high spirits.

Only Sun Xiaoshan’s case was an exception. No one had expected Long Zhanhai to try to strike at a weak point, only to kick a steel plate instead.

In truth, they had not intended to arrange much at all. Since everyone was a survivor cast adrift at the ends of the earth, it would be enough to sit down and talk properly. The survivors of the Special Committee would not mind sharing a slice of the cake with them.

In fact, the resentment of the Special Committee’s survivors was even stronger than that of the mountain survivors. They were trapped deep inside a metropolis encircled by twenty million zombies, with no one coming to save them. Their despair and fear were far beyond what the mountain survivors, who had managed to break through the encirclement, could ever compare with.

Being able to make the army and the government suffer was enough to make them wild with delight. We survived the sea of zombies by the skin of our teeth, risking our lives to carve out this vast foundation, and now you want to come down the mountain and pluck the peaches?

Under the banner of the Army Day celebrations on August 1, the Special Committee had already called on the remnants of garrison forces stationed throughout the country to carry out relief work for disaster victims in their respective regions. Where conditions allowed, they were to launch counterattacks and begin post-disaster production and reconstruction. Thanks to the News Broadcast, this was exactly how every major catastrophe had been publicized before the apocalypse.

The Chinese nation had truly suffered far too much. It had already worked out a complete set of procedures for great disasters and calamities.

The Propaganda Department was deeply sorry that Li Fengyi could not go into each disaster zone to guide reconstruction in person; that would have made him seem even more imposing.

The Industry Department had located several arms production lines, mostly outdated, discarded equipment and experimental prototypes in laboratories. Together with the Science and Technology Department, they were carrying out modifications to make them suitable for the ergonomics of the apocalypse.

Raw materials for weapons were easy to find. With the population nearly extinguished in the apocalypse, most of the remaining supplies, aside from those essential to survivors, had already been taken over by the former Civil Affairs Department, now by various companies, which were sorting, recycling, and putting them to use.

Gasoline, diesel, lubricants, and other oil products were strictly controlled. They could not be produced at present, yet when zombie hordes came surging forward and only motor vehicles could save one’s life, these things became indispensable talismans of survival.

Even without opening mines, what they had would be enough to last them several years in this region. But considering the country’s vast territory and the enormous numbers of zombies, it was still far from sufficient.

The various units were moving to the front in stages according to their assigned defense sectors, and the reconnaissance battalion had already pushed ahead along Zombie Escape Route G101 National Highway to scout.

At the time, the mountain troops had merely hidden far off to either side of the road and watched them go by. This had drawn a good deal of contempt from the provisional army, and the mountain officers who had been incorporated into the provisional forces became even more modest and cautious.

On the banks of the Ziya River in Tianjin, the joint command center of the Fifth Army and Sixth Army, responsible for operations in the Tianjin sector, was set up on the Yongding New River Bridge of the Beijing-Tianjin-Tanggu Expressway, with Li Qiang in command.

This operation was experimental in nature, meant to test the elimination of zombies through modern weaponry. The Special Committee intended to try different tactics and explore effective and reasonable methods for wiping out the undead.

The Civil Affairs Department had already dispatched the Basic Labor Brigade in advance to salvage as much material as possible from this combat zone. The dangerous areas were not handed over to those companies. Sun Manfei very much wanted to take the contract, but his price was too high. The Special Committee felt it would be more economical to have the criminals and layabouts of the Basic Labor Brigade shoulder the burden.

The staff of the joint command formed by the Fifth and Sixth Armies drew up a detailed plan and submitted it to the Ministry of Armed Forces for approval on August 2.

“How did this get done so fast?” Li Fengyi was astonished. He did not know the precise method by which such a plan was drawn up, but the thick stack of documents in his hands told him it could not have been put together in a day or two.

In fact, the military bases in Huairou and Mentougou had long had plans to retake the cities, but conditions in every respect were still immature. They lacked the necessary supplies, transport, intelligence, and so on, and there was also some internal disorder, so the plan had never been implemented. This version was built upon that foundation and made the fullest possible use of the conditions now at hand. Even so, some details would still need further refinement during the preparation stage.

This was to be a fully conventional-firearms operation, and from it they would calculate the amount of supplies needed to eliminate the zombies, test whether the Special Committee’s present levels of production, transport, and overall organization were sufficient for the task, and determine how they should be strengthened and improved. Tianjin had been chosen as the experimental base because it was the nearest major city to Beijing, and because Tianjin itself was also one of the country’s super-large cities. If Tianjin could be secured, then the difficulty of reclaiming each medium and small city could be estimated from it.

Beijing was a special case. It had been retaken in the Special Committee’s earliest, still-immature days. If every city took several months, then reclaiming the entire country alone would take hundreds of years. That was why Tianjin had been chosen: to lure them in on a massive scale and annihilate them in one stroke.

Everyone in the Special Committee was mobilized to run about for the operation, and every supply within the Special Committee’s territory was put to work in support of it.

A total of two frontline armies, six divisions in all, were committed to the fighting. Each division was a main-force formation of twenty thousand men. Based on the characteristics of the zombie hordes, some trial improvements were made, heavy firepower was reinforced, and chain mail was issued to all sectors under the initial impact zones and in all dangerous positions.

From the rear to the front, there were four belts in sequence: the rear-frontline supply base, the heavy artillery positions, the heavy machine-gun positions, and the infantry-armor coordination positions. Each belt was further divided into different layers according to its own conditions, with the aim of making the weapons’ power converge in successive waves and ensuring that supply, transport, and personnel movement remained unobstructed.

The positions were defended mainly with firearms, while the final battlefield cleanup would be carried out by chain-mail troops armed with cold weapons. At that point, there would be no need to waste ammunition.

All weapons and vehicles were fitted with corresponding operation limiters to prevent damage through human error. The required quantity was far too great, so in addition to mass production by the Industry Department, the method was also circulated throughout the army, encouraging all units with the means to refit equipment themselves. Technical personnel were then dispatched everywhere to inspect matters and prevent problems at critical moments.