South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  Both the U.S. and British phrase “Special Forces” covered all three — Delta Force, Green Berets, and SAS — in this operation, as Freeman thought equally highly of all of them. He’d fought with all of them before at different times and had admired all three, but as the Hercules crossed the coast heading for Hanoi, the ETA less than ten minutes, he had something else to tell them — not because of the common bond they shared with one another, but because they would soon be fighting against a common enemy, China’s People’s Liberation Army, an army which Freeman’s and his men’s forebears had fought back in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

  “What I want you boys and ladies—” He smiled at Marte Price. “—to remember is that it isn’t so strange to be asked to fight on the same side as the Vietnamese. A lot of your grandfathers fought with the South Vietnamese, and besides, two hundred years or so ago your ancestors and mine were fighting one another in the War of Independence, and we, the United States, lost more men in the fight between the Union and the Confederacy than we did in both world wars. So you see, as times change, old enemies become comrades in arms. It is the position of the United States of America and Great Britain that this Chinese attack on Vietnam threatens a hell of a lot more than Vietnam. It threatens, if it goes unchecked, the whole of Asia. And we’ve learned from history, if we’ve learned anything, that if you don’t stand up to bullies in the first instances, you only encourage the sons of bitches to take more and more.”

  ETA Hanoi was another five minutes. Douglas Freeman saw Marte Price tucking strands of her short-cropped red hair into her helmet, but not even her camouflage fatigues could totally hide her figure. Freeman told her that once the plane landed in Hanoi the only pictures allowed would be “sans flash.”

  “I’m not that stupid, General,” Marte said.

  “Didn’t say you were, ma’am. It’s just that along with the truth, I don’t want you to be our first casualty.”

  “In that case, thanks.” She paused. “This is my big chance. To…”

  She left the sentence hanging in the air. Freeman finished it for her. ‘To break free from the pack — be your own—” He paused, “—person.”

  “Yes.”

  “General, ETA seven minutes,” Bob Cline told him.

  “It was ETA five minutes — three minutes ago!”

  “Yes, sir, but we’ve had to swing south before turning north. Captain’s afraid the Hanoi triple A might let fly, mistaking us on radar for Chinese swinging west after hitting Haiphong harbor.”

  “Very well,” Freeman said, then, turning to Marte, said, “Ms. Price?’

  “Call me Marte, General.”

  “I prefer Price.”

  She looked surprised. He hadn’t struck her as the formal type.

  “Ms. Price,” he began again, “don’t take any photos till you establish where you are vis-à-vis headquarters.”

  “Where will that be?” she asked, nonplussed.

  “Me,” he said. “Stick with me, and whatever story you write, don’t put anything about anybody saying ‘over and out,’ ‘cause that’s a contradiction in terms. Only those movie jokers in L.A. who rarely get out of bed write that guff.”

  “ETA four minutes,” came the pilot’s voice in the cavernous interior, the sound of the Hercules more thunderous than before, shaking more, but everything seemed to be going all right. As soon as they landed they would be met by the French charge d’affaires, whose staff would direct them to camouflaged trucks already painted with the outline of a black triangle signifying a U.N. truck. Likewise, all the men’s uniforms — both British and American — also sported the U.N. symbol on helmets and both shoulder patches.

  “Man,” Martinez’s friend Johnny D’Lupo confided, “I hope those fuckers see it!”

  “Balls,” Martinez said. “You don’t want ‘em to see it. If they can see it they can shoot it.”

  “Bloody right,” enjoined Doolittle, whom the others had dubbed “Doctor.” “I hope they don’t see me but I see them.”

  “Sir,” Martinez called out to the general, his élan with a superior officer easy not only because he was American, but because he was one of the elite whose forebears’ battle honors went back to the Halls of Montezuma. “Sir, how long you think we’ll be goin’ in the trucks?”

  “Twenty-five miles from Hanoi to Thuong,” Freeman said. He meant Phu Lang Thuong. “Roads are pretty bad and we’re coming in on the leading edge of the rainy season. I guess about forty-five minutes to an hour. No time to dip your—” He fell silent, and this was greeted with an assortment of catcalls, whistles, and cheers.

  “What were you going to say, General?” Marte inquired.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said, mumbling something about conferring with the captain.

  Marte asked Martinez what the general was about to say.

  “It’s kinda crude, miss.”

  “C’mon,” she pressed, her notebook out, camera slung over her shoulder and her moving awkwardly in the seat belt H harness.

  “No time to dip your wick,” D’Lupo put in. “No leave.”

  “Oh,” she said, and smiled. Farther down the row, D’Lupo turned to Dr. Doolittle, his voice hardly audible above the roar of the engines. “I’m in love with her, Doc!”

  “You and everybody else, mate,” Doolittle responded. “I’ve had a hard-on ever since we left the States.”

  “Yes,” D’Lupo said.

  “Well, don’t worry, old son. Sooner we clean this lot up at Thuong, sooner we’ll ‘ave time to spend wiv young Marte.”

  They both knew it was bull, Martinez, like everybody else aboard except maybe Freeman, scared about going in. Only a few had seen sustained combat in Iraq — and hell, that was in the desert. In any kind of jungle, they knew, you couldn’t see an arm’s length in front of you.

  “Well hell,” D’Lupo said, “we won’t be going in till the rest of the EMREF arrive.”

  Doolittle didn’t know whether this was supposed to mean they’d have more time to ogle Marte Price or have more time to collectively steel their nerves. But then Doolittle and every other man aboard the Hercules was discovering once again that the company of your fellows could only go so far in comforting you — ultimately you were alone.

  * * *

  In the U.S. battle group, with the carrier USS Enterprise at center, steaming into the South China Sea, an echo was picked up by one of the Sea Kings’ dipping sonar and relayed to the sub Santa Fe by advanced warning aircraft. The commander of the Santa Fe prepared to dive the boat.

  “Officer of the deck — last man down — hatch secured,” came the seaman’s report.

  The executive officer moved to his position as officer of the deck and in turn reported to the captain, “Last man down. Hatch secured, aye. Captain, the ship is rigged for dive, current depth one two fathoms. Checks with the chart. Request permission to submerge the ship.”

  “Very well, officer of the deck,” the captain responded. “Submerge the ship.”

  “Submerge the ship, aye, sir. Dive — two blasts on the dive alarm. Dive, dive.”

  The alarm wheezed twice sufficiently loud that every crewman aboard could hear, but not so loud as to resonate through the hull. A seaman saw to the vents and reported, “All vents shut.”

  “Vents shut, aye.”

  For any visitor to a sub, the obsessive litany of the dive seemed to be unnecessarily repetitive — almost comical — but there would be nothing comical about it if a single order was botched and the ship were to dive too deep too fast. Within seconds it could be below its crush depth around three thousand feet, and the next minute would be hurtling down unable to reverse its course, the quickly mounting pressure of thousands of tons per square inch driving it in excess of a hundred miles per hour to hit the bottom like a bomb imploding, its giant frame no more than flat-pressed metal scrap.

  A seaman was reading off the depth. “Sixty-two… sixty-four…” and a chief of the boat reported, “Officer of the deck, c
onditions normal on the dive.”

  “Very well, diving officer,” acknowledged the OOD, who in turn reported, “Captain, at one forty feet trim satisfactory.”

  “Very well,” the captain said. “Steer five hundred feet ahead standard.”

  The OOD instructed the helmsman. “Helm all ahead standard. Diving officer, make the depth for five hundred feet.”

  The captain glanced over at the ethereal blue of the sonar room and its half-dozen green video screens of yellow lines, each line in the “waterfall” a sound source from the ocean, a world not of silence but a cacophony of noise, from the frying sound of schools of shrimp to the steady deep beat of a submarine’s cooling pump.

  “Anything interesting, Sonar?”

  “Negative.”

  “Maybe it’s a diesel they heard. No pump.”

  “Could be, sir.”

  The captain knew he could go active, but then his own position would be betrayed. “We’ll wait.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  * * *

  The Chinese frigate was now in rough water, and Mellin, alone in the fume-laden darkness, was violently ill. He had experienced seasickness twice before — once in a friend’s sailboat off the California coast near Big Sur, the other time during a ride up from the Mekong Delta aboard one of the U.S. riverine patrol boats. It was the most terrible sickness he could imagine, and he’d seen hardened combat troops humbled by the ordeal. And whereas normally the eyes became adjusted to darkness, the darkness of the paint locker was so absolute that he could not make out anything but the hard bulkhead as once more the ship’s bow rose hard astarboard, shook as if it were coming apart, then fell through a gut-emptying space, colliding with the sea.

  He heard a noise and prayed it was someone coming to let him out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  High up in the Hong Kong tower that he owned by special agreement with the People’s Administrative Committee of Hong Kong, Jonas Breem of Caloil surveyed Victoria harbor and the clustering of high-rise apartments and business offices, and imagined what it might be like ten years hence. Breem, gesturing with his large scotch and ice to his concubine, Mi Yin, said, “Beijing will make a mint.”

  “Maybe not,” proffered Mi Yin, a diminutive five feet, the sheen of her black hair catching a reflection from Breem’s opulent bar.

  Breem didn’t turn his head, but kept looking out the enormous tinted plate-glass window, swirling the ice in his drink. “And what the shit would you know about it?” he said. “You’re paid to fuck, not forecast.”

  She shrugged, apparently not bothered by his vulgar outburst. “I was just thinking,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Well don’t,” he cautioned. “Get your ass over here.”

  She got up from the couch, the midnight blue qi pao she was wearing amply split at the thigh, revealing a brown slash of flesh that Breem always found enticing. His drink in his right hand, he steered her in front of him with his left, unzipped the qi pao and slid his hand around, following the line of her bra, cupping her breasts, squeezing them tightly.

  “You like that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she lied, and wondered how it was that such a man had risen to the top of the heap in his cutthroat business yet was so stupid about women as to think a woman liked having her breasts squeezed tightly. Maybe he knew very well they didn’t like it, but he kept doing it anyhow, control of any situation being his nirvana.

  Breem called her just one of his Hong Kong “fringe benefits,” though he knew she was highly intelligent as well as beautiful, her sense of irony as subtle as her perfume, her timing deft as a lover of long experience. He was also sure Mi Yin was an operative of the Gong An Bu, the Chinese secret police — sent to keep tabs on him — her “accidental” meeting with him no doubt carefully arranged by Beijing. Well, he’d screw her on behalf of the people, he resolved, and she wouldn’t get any more out of him than he wanted to give. He was convinced that after she’d taken off the sexy, thigh-split qi pao and made love, and he lay back snoring, she’d be quickly checking his briefcase for the seismic and drill reports he received daily by fax from the various drill sites scattered throughout the countries of Southeast Asia. In one of those quirky war situations not known to the general public, the Chinese had taken over all the drill sites, moving all the American experts to a concentration camp, yet the daily drill reports from the skeleton-staffed Chinese drill site crews were still faxed to Breem in Hong Kong as the head of Chical Enterprises and Caloil.

  “Why, I wonder?” Mi Yin had asked. “I mean with America and China fighting—”

  “For Chrissake, you can’t—” He began unclipping her bra and peeling, sliding the qi pao down over her shoulders and buttocks. “—be that stupid.”

  “What d’you mean?” she asked like a petulant schoolgirl.

  “China’s one of the biggest goddamn investors on the Hong Kong exchange. That’s one reason why they don’t want this war to drag on. They’re looking for a knockout punch early in the game to show the Vietnamese who owns what.” He slid his hand down inside her magenta pink panties. “It’s one reason they don’t want to upset the agreement between Caloil and Beijing. C’mon, let’s get into the sack.”

  “How about all the Americans from the drill ships?” she asked. “The ones taken prisoner.”

  “Hey, what the fuck is this — an interrogation? Since when do you give a shit who’s taken prisoner? Anyway, the guys that came out to work the Caloil sites knew what the fuck they were doing. They got extra money.”

  “You don’t care about them.”

  “Much as I care about you, sweetheart,” which Mi Yin knew was not at all. “C’mon,” he commanded. “Take off your drawers.”

  “Close the drapes,” she said.

  “Why? I want the whole of Hong Kong to see us fuck.”

  He was bluffing and she knew it. As chief executive officer of Caloil, he had to obey, at least publicly, the social mores of Hong Kong. He had to toe the line a bit more regarding sex. But even that didn’t faze him because in the end, when the party’s political purists, the cadres, had their say about good socialistic behavior, it would be the same old story — all a question of money, in this case Hong Kong dollars.

  “C’mon,” he said, “go down on me!” She sat on the huge water bed, its surface undulating like a small sea as she pulled her hair back and reached across his hairy body for a condom on the bedside table, her breasts brushing his face. He bit at her nipple.

  “Ow—”

  “C’mon, you beauty — you love it, right? Or would you like to be having it off with all these saps?”

  She cocked her head prettily, like some rare and beautiful bird of paradise. “Saps? What does it mean?”

  “You serious?”

  “Yes,” she said unapologetically. “I don’t know what ‘saps’ means.”

  “Losers,” he said. “All the losers the Chinese are putting in that camp.”

  “You really don’t care about them,” she said again, looking puzzled — or was she just putting on a Miss Goody Two-Shoes act? he wondered.

  “No, I don’t care,” he answered. “Why should I? They’re all over twenty-one, sugar. They don’t know what makes the world go around by now, it’s tough tit for them — right?”

  She shrugged noncommittally.

  “What do you think of that?” he asked, looking down at his erection. “That’s what makes my world go round. That and money. Right? You don’t do it for free, do you?”

  Mi Yin didn’t answer.

  “You love me?” he asked. His laugh was hard and scornful. “You’re a hooker, Mi Yin — an expensive one, but you’re a hooker, right? But listen,” he said, propping himself up on an elbow, grabbing her wrist, “just remember you’re my hooker. Bought and paid for. Right?”

  She nodded.

  He fell back on the water bed, causing a wild wave in the water bed, which shivered before it started settling down. “But man, are you built.” He g
rabbed her ponytail down over the front of her head and pulled her down on him. Her mouth was too dry. He reached out and poured from his drink.

  “Now—” He laughed, struck by what he thought was a terrific pun. “—have a scotch on the cock!”

  The things she did for Beijing — the safety of her parents in the balance.

  So let her go through his briefcase, he thought, checking the seismic and drill reports he received daily by fax from the drill ships, making sure that he wasn’t pulling a fast one — drilling, finding gas or oil, but giving Beijing a different seismic profile from somewhere else in the South China Sea, where there was little if any promise of gas or oil. The trick was to give them a seismic profile made in the same depth as where you’d found good promise of oil, and to return to the true position of the find later on, until ownership of all claims in the South China Sea islands had been settled either by the international court in The Hague or by what busy law professors were calling a “prevailing military presence”—which meant, CEO Breem had told his EOs, “which army in the area has the biggest fucking guns.”

  Those that might be involved besides the Vietnamese and the People’s Liberation Army were Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, all of whom claimed part of the islands and reefs scattered over the 35-million-square-kilometer South China Sea, nearly four times bigger than the United States, including Alaska. Breem dismissed Malaysia and the Philippines. The Malaysians didn’t have the balls to start anything with Beijing, not with thirty-six percent of Malaysia’s population being Chinese.

  Then there were the Philippines, but Breem thought they had enough trouble at home trying to handle their terminally ill economy. Besides, they’d kicked out the Americans from the big base at Subic Bay and the American jets from Clark Field. “Stupid!” Breem had told his executives. No, the fight, if there was to be any, would be between the big military muscle in the region: China and such traditional rivals and enemies as the Vietnamese and the Taiwanese, with North Korea always a wild card.