I started with a ship full of max-level veterans, and I'm just a complete noob.

The wind was stronger than I expected.

When Jiang Ming jumped off the freight car, a gust of wind carrying yellow sand rushed towards him. The sand felt like needles pricking his face. He shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted to make out his surroundings.

The command post of Aksai Air Defense Base is a semi-underground adobe building with a corrugated iron roof. The wind has lifted one corner of the corrugated iron, and every few seconds it hits the roof beam, producing a dull metallic sound.

Two military canvas trucks were parked in the open space in front of the gate. The canvas billowed into a ball shape in the wind, and the ropes were taut and about to break.

Old Sun and Fang Xudong had already entered the command post. The crew-cut officer walked beside Jiang Ming, one hand on his hat and the other on his waist.

Jiang Ming pushed open the wooden door of the command post, and sand rushed in through the crack. He slipped in and used his shoulder to push the door back into place.

The room was dimly lit, with only a kerosene lamp and two candles on the table.

A person was standing in front of the map table, bending over and marking something on the map with red and blue pencils.

Hearing the door open, the person looked up.

The woman was wearing an old, faded military uniform with white edges worn on the cuffs. She had a grayish-white scarf tied around her neck, and her hair was pulled back and held in place with a pencil.

His face was cracked from the wind and sand, his lips were peeling, and his eyes were bloodshot, but his gaze became extremely focused the moment he saw the person coming in at the door.

Chen Zhiyuan walked around from behind the table, quickly walked up to Jiang Ming, grabbed his hand tightly, squeezed it twice, and then let go.

"It's good that you've arrived, it's good that you've arrived." Chen Zhiyuan's voice was a little hoarse, as if he hadn't drunk much water for several days. "This is Comrade Lu Qinghe from the No. 3 Direction Finding Station. You've been exchanging telegrams for two months."

Lu Qinghe walked out from behind the map table.

She was thinner than Jiang Ming had imagined; her military uniform belt was fastened to the last hole, and the outline of her wrist bones could be seen when her forearm peeked out from the sleeve.

She extended her right hand.

Jiang Ming grasped it, his palms covered in dry calluses.

It wasn't the hand of an administrative staff member.

"Engineer Jiang," Lu Qinghe's voice was hoarse but each word was enunciated clearly, "after two months of discussion in the telegram, we've finally met him in person."

"The data in the report is more important than meeting in person." Jiang Mingsong let go of his hand, turned around, put the canvas bag hanging on his shoulder on the table, unbuckled the strap, and took out three bound documents and a metal box wrapped in tin foil. "The test report of Yuanlei-1, the parameter sheet of the high-power pulse modulator, and the prototype of the dual-balanced mixer preamp."

The sound of tin foil being torn was loud in the quiet room.

Lu Qinghe's gaze lingered on the metal box for a second before she quickly picked up the test report and turned to the first page.

She read the report extremely quickly, her index finger sliding along the data table from left to right, pausing every few rows, her lips moving slightly as if she were silently reciting the numbers.

"Frequency 2.952 GHz, drift less than five parts per million, peak power 1.25 kilowatts." She looked up at Jiang Ming. "Continuously operating for more than forty hours?"

"It stopped after more than forty hours, not because of a malfunction, but because it needed to be disassembled, packed, and transported over."

"What is the repeat frequency of the pulse modulator?"

"One kilohertz, pulse width of two microseconds, peak voltage of twelve thousand volts."

Lu Qinghe closed the report and put it aside. He took two steps back to the map table and placed his finger on the location of the northern foot of the Altun Mountains.

"Come and take a look."

Jiang Ming walked to her side and saw that the map was covered with red pencil markings.

The frequency range of the sweep curve has expanded from 5.2 to 5.4 MHz as mentioned in the telegram two weeks ago to 4.8 to 5.6 MHz. The power estimate has been changed from 1 kilowatt to 3 kilowatts and marked with a question mark. There is also a set of time marks next to it, recording the change in interference intensity every four hours over the past seventy-two hours.

"The pattern is here." Lu Qinghe's fingertip traced the set of time markers from left to right. "Every day from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m., the interference power will decrease by about 30 percent, lasting for about 90 minutes, and then recover."

"Generator shift change," Jiang Ming blurted out.

"Yes." Lu Qinghe nodded. "That's my judgment too. The fact that multiple generators are taking turns supplying power and the total power drops when shifts change indicates that it's not a single machine."

"How many?"

"Based on the power fluctuations, there are at least three units." Lu Qinghe picked up a hand-drawn spectrum diagram from the table. "Each unit covers a bandwidth of about 250 kilohertz, and the three units together cover the 4.8 to 5.6 MHz range, with some overlap in between."

Fang Xudong walked over and glanced at the spectrum graph, pointing his finger at the overlapping area of ​​the three frequency bands.

"The superposition of energy in the overlapping area will form a local peak, and the front end of the front-end receiver will be overloaded at that location."

"It got a bit better after we replaced the front-end with the DBM you sent," Lu Qinghe said. "But the local oscillator power is only eight milliwatts, and it drops at low temperatures. The common-mode residual suppression is insufficient, and the net signal-to-noise ratio at 5.3 MHz is only eighteen decibels. We can barely hear the call, but we can't demodulate the complete content."

"The Source Thunder No. 1 we brought this time is not for use on the receiving end." Jiang Ming drew a circle on the map at the location of Mine No. 04. "It is a fixed-frequency pulse radiation source used to hit the direction of the enemy's antenna. The purpose is to burn through their receiving protection circuit, causing their feedback loop to lose lock, and the sweep frequency transmitter will lose frequency control."

Lu Qinghe stared at the circle for three seconds.

"You're going to use a 1-kilowatt power source to build a 3-kilowatt station?"

"It's not about comparing power, it's about who goes blind first," Jiang Ming said. "Their sweep transmitter needs a local oscillator signal as a frequency reference, and that reference signal has very low power, maybe only tens of milliwatts. When the pulse peak of Yuanlei-1 hits, as soon as it enters their local oscillator coupling port, the tens of milliwatts of reference signal will be overwhelmed, the transmitter frequency will start to drift, and the sweep control will collapse."

Lu Qinghe put down the spectrum diagram and looked into Jiang Ming's eyes.

"This solution requires precise knowledge of the other party's antenna's main lobe direction and local oscillator frequency. Do you have that information?"

"The antenna direction was deduced from your direction-finding data, and the local oscillator frequency was deduced from the parameters of the mixer board of the captured magnetron." Jiang Ming patted the canvas bag. "It's all in here."

Chen Zhiyuan stood to the side, his hands in his pockets, his lips twitching but no sound coming out.

He listened for five minutes without getting a single word in.

Lu Qinghe had already grabbed a cotton hat from the table and put it on, then tightened the sand-proof scarf again.

"Come on, I'll take you to the direction finding workshop to see the actual equipment configuration."

She opened the door.

The wind outside the door subsided for a moment, as if suppressed by something from afar. Then, the sky in the northwest suddenly darkened, and a wall of reddish-brown sand rolled along the Gobi Desert.

A sharp air raid whistle suddenly sounded from the direction of the outpost in the northeast corner of the base, three short and one long whistle in succession, but it was torn apart by the sound of the wind halfway through.

The ground beneath my feet suddenly trembled.

Lu Qinghe's hand stopped on the doorknob, and her center of gravity instantly dropped two inches.

Chen Zhiyuan's expression changed, and he rushed out from behind the table and ran towards the door.

A second vibration followed immediately, even stronger than the first.