Winter Kill 2 - China Invades Australia

by Gene Skellig

  The hatches were all closed, save for the main mid-ships fore and aft hatches, near each of which a few of the ship’s crew stood on the deck waving at the Indonesian men in a friendly, compliant and decidedly non-threatening manner.

  As trained, Nielson waited until crewmen from Sibarau had thrown grappling lines over the Turtle’s rails, and were pulling the two ships close together.

  It looked to Mike as though there were twenty or more men, all standing on the decks of the Indonesian ship, watching them with hungry intent.

  Looking at them carefully, Mike made a few observations that confirmed his assessment of them as hostiles.

  That made what he was about to do that much easier.

  “PUFF,” Mike commanded.

  On the word of command the two men and one woman at the after mid-ships hatch literally dove through the hole, landing in a heap on the sail-bags and cushions that had been placed to soften their landing. At the foredeck, Mike was the last to disappear into the Tortoise, rolling over to look up in time to see Clay pull shut and dog the sturdy overhead hatch.

  With their attention transfixed on the disappearing quarry on the deck of the small vessel, the Indonesians did not at first notice the odour, nor the fine spray that was emanating from the small boat.

  In a few moments the spray had increased to a mist, and then a veritable cloud of vapour.

  Then they noticed. Shit! Many of the men thought, when they realized what was going on.

  The Sibarau’s crew suddenly began to look about in horror, unsure of what to do, but the danger was clear.

  With a cloud of droplets now wafting across their ship, the mist drifting over from the mast and other parts of the smaller vessel. The Indonesian men had become wet, and the air was filled with the unmistakable smells of diesel fuel and gasoline.

  A few men chose to run towards the nearest portal, hoping to get a door between themselves and the fuel-air mixture.

  A few other men stared at the cigarettes in their hands, and threw them into the air with horror.

  The act was useless, of course, as a few errant cigarettes was not enough of a source of flame to ignite the cloud of fuel vapour that had engulfed Sibarau.

  However, the sudden firing of maritime distress signal flares, with their incandescent and super-hot magnesium charges burning brightly as they flew from portals at the fore and aft of the Tortoise directly into the cloud and then smashing into the superstructure of the warship in a massive flurry of sparks, was more than enough to ignite the cloud.

  The fuel-air explosion was visible from over eighty kilometres away. Its concussion cracked the deck of the Tortoise in several places, and tilted the two ships away from each other, snapping the heavy ropes that the Indonesian sailors had just completed making fast to the grommets on the Sibarau’s deck.

  Those men who had been caught in the open, with fuel-air in their lungs and their coveralls soaked in diesel, were burned alive – inside and out – in the massive fireball.

  By the time the fireball plume had generated its own rising column of air, making the distinctive mushroom-cloud as it expended its fury and rose towards the sky, fifteen Indonesians were already dead.

  It took several seconds for those inside to die, as the fire raced through the interior of the warship like so many angry dragons scouring the corridors and interior spaces of the ship in search of prey.

  After the initial explosion waned, a new wave of explosions began within the ship as the fuel, oil and other combustible materials of the small warship went off in secondary explosions.

  None survived more than a few minutes.

  In the aftermath, as the two ships drifted apart and the all-clear was given, the crew of the Tortoise emerged from safety, opening the hatches and climbed up onto the blackened deck.

  In the distance, the Indonesian warship was still ablaze, with the occasional pop and crack as various explosive and flammable materials cooked off.

  Reading the strained expressions on the faces of his crew, Mike understood. It was one thing to kill in self defense, as a fast-boat of pirates closes in. It’s altogether a different story when you pretend to be friendly and then suddenly burn everybody alive on the other ship.

  “Mike. How do we know if we did the right thing?” asked Brenda, clearly troubled.

  “You’re alive, aren’t you!” said Clay, with a tinge of anger in his voice. It was not that he was upset at the young naval officer, bur rather, that he was still feeling the effects of the adrenalin and fury that accompanied battle, and had not calmed down yet.

  “I understand your concern, Barb. But did you see the rank of the officer with the loud-hailer?” Mike asked.

  “Yes. He was a Lieutenant-Commander.”

  “And what rank would normally command such a vessel?”

  “Well, certainly not higher than a Lieutenant-Commander, but it could just as well be a senior Naval-Lieutenant. A ship like that would probably have no more than three officers, perhaps twenty men.”

  “My thoughts exactly. And what rank was the man standing on the foredeck, portside?”

  “You mean the guy who kept waiving at us?”

  “Yeah, the short guy.”

  “Come to think of it, he was also a Lieutenant-Commander.”

  “Exactly. And how did his uniform fit?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “It fit like a burlap sack. It was all ruffled up on his sneakers,” said Roary, dismissively.

  “I didn’t see that. You sure he had sneakers on?” asked Barbara, starting to see where Colonel Latimer was going.

  “And when you commanded your MCVD, if you were conducting a boarding, would you be at the loud-hailer, or in the bridge?”

  “I’d be in the CIC, of course – on the bridge. OK, Sir, I get it. There’s no way that was a professional naval crew. It was something else, something ad-hoc.”

  “Exactly. And we were well outside of Indonesian waters. Besides, from what I’ve heard on the UHF, Indonesia is completely under Chinese control now, so their navy would not be operating as if it was Indonesian. These guys were pirates. They must have been out here looking for prey. Who knows how many victims there have been. We are not in the business of being victims. So we had no choice. We did the right thing.”

  Sighing, Barbara was not completely ready to accept that burning them all alive like that had been the right thing to do.

  “OK, Sir, I accept that we did what we had to. We had no other way to get out of that. But it still bothers me. I mean, just how far would you go to survive?”

  “Just watch me,” Mike said, stonily, before getting moving on to inspect the damage to his ship.

  The crew of the Grumpy Tortoise had ultimately reached Adelaide, after giving the Chinese-occupied east coast of Australia a wide berth. Once in Adelaide, they had enjoyed a few weeks of R&R at a busy naval facility in the inner harbor. But soon Colonel Latimer had gathered everybody together, and informed them of their new mission. It was really the same as the one they had set out from Osaka with – to sail around the world to reach North America, and home. Only now they had an additional purpose, and two new passengers. Partly to make room, and partly for his own reasons, Clay had elected to stay in Australia. He wanted to link up with an old buddy, a former Special Forces instructor he had met in a joint training exercise at the Ranger Training Brigade a few years before the war had started. And in a meaningful coincidence, his old buddy Peter Weir, now Colonel Weir, had been the one who had given Colonel Latimer the new mission – that of transporting a captured Chinese Colonel to America.

  The man could have been held in Australia until the war ended, however the Americans wanted to have someone from as high as possible in the PLA chain of command who they could interrogate and, ultimately, hold accountable.

  Colonel Yip had been one of the PLA commanders on Colonel Weir’s “Kill or capture” list. The man personally responsible for the atrocities in Charters Towers, Yip was one of General B
ing’s most zealous men in Australia; he had been instrumental in inflicting heavy losses on the Marines of the MAGTFA. After the defeat of the 42nd Group Army in the Cloncurry sector, Colonel Yip had been one of the few officers from the 42nd to survive General Leung’s purge of his officers. He had been given command of a Special Purpose Regiment tasked with harassing the Marines in western Queensland with Special Forces tactics. He had outsmarted the Marines on a couple of occasions, setting them up with planted intel and deceptive movement of his own forces in the Barcaldine-to-Longreach sector, drawing the Marines into a brutal ambush. Over eighty men out of a strike force of three hundred had been killed or captured by Colonel Yip’s men. Of these, many had been tortured while others had been executed in a very open and brutal manner – as if to try to terrorize the Marines. Of course, it had the opposite effect. The Marines have a long memory, and do not forgive such inhumane treatment of their men.

  Within two weeks of their defeat at the battle of Barcaldine, the Marines of MAGTFA had recovered. Hell bent on vengeance, they had sent a company deep inside PLA territory, travelling overland across the soggy, often snow-covered terrain of the Narrien Range, avoiding detection and engagement with Colonel Yip’s patrols all the way to the outskirts of Emerald. The once sleepy outback town now housed Colonel Yip and the CP for 1st Brigade, 372nd Regiment, 42nd Group Army.

  Supported with excellent intel from Australian Special Forces and a few local Chinese-Australians who had infiltrated Yip’s headquarters as ‘locally employed persons”, Marine Corps Captain Scott and Top Sergeant Rideout had proven that Marines are indeed Special Forces in their own right. With just twenty six men they had taken out the sentries and penetrated Colonel Yip’s compound, set up near the Botanic Gardens, moved into the house occupied by Colonel Yip and his staff, and quickly secured the dwelling. Using silencers and knives, they were nearly silent. Colonel Yip had been deep in sleep after a long day of planning for a raid on the Marines’ encampment north of Longreach, when he had been rudely awaken by a Marine shining a flashlight into his face to confirm his identity.

  “That’s him. Bag him and tag him.” Capt Scott said. All the while, as the take down had been carried out and during the exfiltration, Scott kept a close eye on Rideout. He was concerned that the Top Sergeant would let his personal feelings interfere with the mission, and take it out on the man responsible for Master Gunnery Sergeant Gannon’s death at the battle of Barcaldine. But the Top Sergeant did not stray from the mission plan. Rideout seemed to have taken his warrior skills up a notch, as though the seriousness and focus of his deceased comrade had rubbed off on him, altogether replacing his once cavalier manner.

  Moments after his identity had been visually confirmed, Colonel Yip was unceremoniously rendered unconscious and then carried out like a sack of potatoes over Top Sergeant Rideout’s powerful shoulder.

  The team’s exfiltration from Emerald had been difficult, as the alarm had been raised before they had reached the Zodiacs and Lieutenant Lion, waiting for them at Lake Maraboon. But with a well-timed series of explosions in town, some sniping and other diversions arranged by Captain Scott and some Australians, the Marines were able to get away with their prisoner.

  Months later, once Colonel Yip had been transported all the way to Adelaide and the Allied high command, it had been quite a political battle between the Australians and the Americans. The Australians wanted to execute Yip for the war crimes he was responsible for at Charters Towers, and the Marines wanted to kill him for what he had done to Marines at Barcaldine. In the end the Americans had won out, and were about to convene Colonel Yips trial – likely leading to his execution – when orders had arrived from the United States that Yip was to be transported to the United States.

  Despite the anger and rage that this order generated, the Marines had been forced to pass off their prized prisoner, and transfer him to the Australians from 1 Commando Regiment, who were to arrange the transfer of the prisoner. Colonel Weir himself, still seen as an American despite his new role with the Australian Army, had done his best to find an aircraft or other suitable means to transport Yip to the east coast of the United States. However, there simply was no reliable way to get the man from Australia to America. But when the Canadian Colonel Latimer had shown up in Adelaide with the unusual vessel bound for Ontario, and word had gotten out of how well they had performed in the at-sea skirmishes they had faced along the way, Colonel Weir decided to have the Canadians take the prisoner with them to North America.

  Along with Colonel Yip, Weir decided to send along a Chinese-speaking Marine as the sole American member of Colonel Latimer’s crew, both as translator to help with the supervision of the prisoner and to be something of a guarantee that Yip would ultimately reach the authorities in the US – or be killed if that proved to be impossible. He was Weir’s ace in the hole.

  Over the weeks since their departure from Adelaide, the Chinese speaking Marine had fit in very well with Latimer’s crew, and had begun the long process of getting inside Colonel Yip’s head. He was confident that by the time they reached America, he would have Yip ready to sing like a bird, perhaps even to reveal the location of General Bing’s underground bunker in China, perhaps the most important bit of intelligence that the Allies were working on solving.

  Sitting back on the vinyl of the afterdeck bench, watching the black-and white display of their navigation display change to an all-color display that suddenly showed all of the topographical features of the sea floor under and around their position to a radius of 100 nautical miles, Sarah Latimer smiled with pride in her husband’s genius.

  “We’ve got tie-in!” she said, with satisfaction.

  Mike said nothing in reply, as he had picked up one of his well-worn old novels, and was engrossed in his book.

  Watching her Air Force Colonel of a husband looking quite at home as Captain of his vessel, Sarah recalled the first time Mike had told her his plans.

  They had been staying at Yumiko’s apartment in the Kansai plain, on a weekend away from their post in Tokyo.

  “So what’s the big surprise, Mike?” Sarah had asked that Saturday morning, after taking a few sips of the chai that Mike had brewed for her, their morning ritual.

  “We’re going to visit a friend, and buy a boat!”

  “What for? After all your talk about getting the hell out of Japan if things get much worse? Why would we buy a boat? And what, here in Osaka? That’ll tie us down.”

  “Wait till you see her. She’s a very unique little pig.” Mike said, with a wry smile.

  “A pig? What are you talking about, Mike?”

  It was not until after taking the train to the dockyards on the south-east side of Osaka, and entering the small shipbuilding company’s works that she understood why Mike had described the boat as a pig.

  She was the ugliest boat Sarah had ever seen.

  At first glance, Sarah had thought the twenty metre long vessel looked like any other mid-sized ketch-type of sailboat, but something looked wrong.

  “It’s aluminum?” Sarah was surprised to see the shiny silver, where the aluminum welds had been grinded smooth. But what really stood out was the ship’s beam. She seemed incredibly fat.

  It was not until they had been led up a gantry to a position high above the nearly completed hull that she really understood the shape of the vessel. She was not the long, sleek type of sailboat like the one they had used while posted at North Bay, where the couple had enjoyed free access to a friend’s yawl, and honed their skills sailing the occasionally rough waters of Lake Nipissing.

  “Why is she so fat?” Sarah asked, as she looked down into the open compartments of the ship, the deck not yet installed over the networks of aluminum bulkheads and interior walls.

  The construction seemed overly heavy.

  She tried to come to terms with what she was looking at.

  “What the hell is this, a tug boat?”

  “Nope. A sailboat. A sailboat designed with a purpose.”
Mike replied with excitement.

  Sarah looked at her husband, turning to face him in full. “Mike, what sort of Mosquito Coast madness are you into now? This is not a sail-boat. She’s so fat, and built like a brick-shithouse. She won’t be able to move. And what is that, a swimming pool or something?” Sarah asked, looking at the large oval structure near the aft of the ship, about the size of a large hot-tub. There were other cylindrical shapes in other parts of the ship, and a great deal of complicated looking plumbing interconnecting the cylinders.

  “Don’t’ jump to judgement so fast. Let me tell you about her, ok?” Mike asked, with that look that told Sarah that he had a great deal of emotional investment in the strange vessel.

  “Ok, tell me about this pig.”

  “Yes, she does look like a pig, but we’ll have to come up with a better name. Let me introduce you to her. She’s a custom-made vessel, originally designed as a pleasure-craft for the Northern Passage, up in the arctic. You remember Tatsuo Yamamoto? That guy with the tall wife who looked like Olive Oyl?” Mike asked, referring to a wealthy Japanese he had gotten to know in the course of his duties as Canada’s military attaché to Japan.

  Colonel Mike Latimer had been tasked with assisting the man in negotiating with the Canadian government, territorial governments and other stakeholders in Canada for Mr. Yamamoto to obtain permits to build a network of resorts across Canada’s arctic.

  With the Northwest Passage having become ice-free for over two months each summer, there had been a flurry of international attention on shipping and tourism opportunities, and the Canadian Prime Minister had directed that all levels of government lean forward to help speed investment in the region, to help with the struggling economy.

  The task had fallen to the Military Attaché to assist with the negotiations, as the Prime Minister’s office had identified several former radar stations and other defunct military properties in the arctic as potentially suitable for the Japanese investor’s ambitions. Using federal property, moreover, could allow the project to be advanced more swiftly, as it bypassed many of the local and territorial red-tape.