South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  Then again, it wasn’t clear whether Taiwan and Beijing might not subsume enough of their differences to team up, making a joint claim for the islands, so rumor had it, along a proposed fifty-one, forty-nine percent China-Taiwan split.

  And now the ex-Soviet republics were having a basement sale of everything from the upgraded MiG-29s to submarines, the PLA was modernizing, and part of the ex-Soviets’ sales ploy was throwing in pilot training for the MiG-29s to sweeten the deal. “Smart move,” Breem told his executives, noting that the Vietnamese navy was strictly brown water — coastal patrol — but since China had started purchasing more submarines from Russia to go blue water, so had Vietnam. With the forced withdrawal of U.S. naval forces from the Philippines, Breem said, “The whole region is a goddamn powder keg!” But he was sure he’d backed the right horse. China would win.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Stand up!”

  It was said with the same bullying tone as the first time Mellin had heard it years ago in the Hanoi Hilton, the POW camp during the time some Chinese-speaking Vietnamese had helped staff the jail.

  Mellin could hardly stand, his legs shaky from both dehydration and the continuing violence of the ship’s peculiar corkscrew motion in the heavy seas. The Chinese sailor stepped back sharply, almost tripping over a hawser. The smell of the paint locker combined with that of old rope, sweat, and vomit hit him with the force of a physical blow. The sailor yelled something at Mellin, to which Mellin, whey-faced and unsteady, nevertheless answered, “Well, how the hell d’you think I like it, you bastard?”

  The man struck him sideways with a closed fist, sending Mellin crashing through the doorway onto the deck, momentarily concussed, blood running from a scrape on his cheek. Suddenly, the foredeck and gun housing seemed to come alive with amplified sound as the officer on watch in the ship’s bridge harshly reprimanded the crewman who had just hit Mellin, telling the crewman to help the American up. The man made a motion to help Mellin, but the American pushed the offered hand aside. “I can get up myself, you bastard!”

  He saw the Chinese face flush with anger, and Mellin knew if it hadn’t been for the intervention of whoever it was up on the bridge, he most probably would have been sprawled out again on the deck. The man grunted and, motioning roughly for Mellin to follow him, walked off, his legs perfectly balancing against the yaw and crashing of the ship, Mellin barely able to stand, his legs still feeling rubbery. The next minute he was left staggering like a drunk against the remainder of a huge wave that had hit the ship hard amidships, heavy and billowing spray draining off the superstructure and running down the scuppers like a flash flood. But unexpectedly, Mellin felt much better for the bracing, drenching water. The combination of cold water and fresh salty air partially revived him, and though he still felt woozy, he could feel his whole body benefiting. For the first time in hours, the sinus-stuffing stench of paint and associated odors left him.

  Along with the rush of fresh air, he felt more confident, his determination returning, whereas in the stinking forward locker his seasickness had been so acute that all thoughts of the future, let alone hope for it, had vanished. He wasn’t proud of the fact, but then he’d never felt that ill before either. And it was a matter of conditioning. When he’d been a young man in Vietnam as part of the U.S. Special Forces, member of an elite team whose élan was the best possible, he was in top physical condition, and as the rigorous training had toughened his body, it also toughened his confidence.

  No matter how hard life had been in the oil business, from the deep freeze of an Oklahoma winter to the sweltering days high atop a deck in the South China Sea, life in the Special Forces had been tougher. And it was this that Mellin was harkening back to — imagining, if only momentarily, he was with his old team in the Delta and that they were watching him now.

  Inside the ship he was taken to a small cabin aft of the mess. The cabin was crammed with supplies — cardboard boxes of cans — leaving room for only four men, one wooden stool, and two plastic chairs. The first thing Mellin noticed was how much better the ship was riding amidships than in the gut-wrenching paint locker forward. Though the chairs and the two men in them, both junior officers, threatened to tilt every time the ship rose to meet a new onslaught, the two officers remained all but motionless, letting their feet and legs adapt to the roll and pitch of the ship. The fourth man stood at the door, legs well apart, arms folded, his face larger than most, fat lips tight together, eyes staring. His whole demeanor was a threat, all but daring Mellin to make a try at getting out, though where he could go if he did break out Mellin didn’t know.

  “Why,” began the older of the two junior officers, “were you on our reef?”

  “Your reef?” Mellin countered.

  “All reefs are ours,” said the younger officer, a thin, short, intense man, probably in his mid-twenties.

  “All the reefs in the world?” Mellin said.

  “In the South China Sea,” said the older, mid-fortyish, and stouter man, whose tone was not nearly as excited, but nevertheless more menacing in its carefully measured cadences, doing battle with the scream of the wind and crashing seas. “We have traditional rights to all the reefs. Chinese fishermen here long before anyone else.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know it’s the truth? Could have been any of a dozen nationalities.”

  “Chinese were here first,” the older man said.

  “So you believe?”

  “So we know.”

  “So you’ve been told.”

  The older man, without turning, said something in Chinese, but Mellin could tell it wasn’t meant for him. He understood the word “now”—they were always telling you “now” in the POW camp. When the older man finished speaking, the heavier man guarding the doorway came quickly to attention and left the cabin. The stout man took a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Mellin.

  “No thanks,” Mellin said. The younger, thinner one eyed the pack of cigarettes — Camels — and when he saw his fellow officer take one then put the pack back in his jacket, he took out his own, a red packet of Fight for the People! cigarettes, and sullenly lit one.

  “Who,” the older man asked, “discovered America?”

  “Christopher Columbus,” Mellin said, nonplussed.

  “Huh—” the older man said, blowing out the smoke at Mellin. “So you believe. It could have been any of a dozen nationalities.”

  Mellin said nothing.

  “Yes, yes,” the younger officer cut in, full of enthusiasm and victory. “Red Indians! Yes. Ah-ha! Yes, Red Indians!”

  The door opened and the guard reappeared with a coil of rope and stood behind Mellin. The older officer took another long drag on his cigarette and asked, “What were you doing on the reef?”

  “It looked a nice day for a swim. I was shipwrecked — as if you didn’t know.”

  “What ship?”

  They seemed so intent on knowing the details, Mellin intuitively felt that his refusal to give them answers might be his only chance of survival, remembering how easily the lives of those on the rig had been snuffed out. “Am I under some kind of arrest? If I am, you’d better—”

  “You,” the old man said suddenly, “were aboard the drill ship Chical.”

  “Was I?”

  “Yes,” the younger one chimed in. “On the drill ship Chical.”

  Had there been no other survivors? Mellin wondered.

  “The drill ship for Chical,” the older officer repeated. “You were working on her — yes?”

  Mellin said nothing, and the older officer sighed, nodding at the guard standing behind the American, who now tied Mellin securely to the chair. The guard’s right hand bunched into a fist, and he backhanded Mellin so hard the left-side legs of the chair came off the floor, the whack echoing in the small cabin.

  “Were you on the Chical?” the older officer pressed, his creased forehead making it evident that his impatience was
mounting. The guard struck again, the blow leaving Mellin with a ringing in his ears so loud that it smothered every other sound. In that moment the point of information as to whether or not Mellin had been on the Chical became academic, the quest for information now becoming a test of wills. The older officer looked tired, the guard watching him attentively, waiting for the order to hit the American again. But instead the older man rose, the younger one following suit, the guard bitterly disappointed.

  “Take him back,” the older man ordered, in a tone of finality.

  With the younger officer in tow, he left the cabin. The guard untied Mellin as roughly as he could, but left the American’s hands bound behind him and jabbed the prisoner up off the chair.

  “Follow me,” the guard ordered, and made his way forward out the door onto the well deck, his lean compensating for the sharp pitching of the ship, the fact that he allowed his prisoner to walk behind instead of in front emphasizing his contempt. The very thought of being taken back to the paint locker churned Mellin’s stomach, his anticipation of the heavy fume-laden locker enough to worsen the pounding of the headache he had from the guard’s blows to his head.

  At the door of the paint locker Mellin stopped and turned, waiting for the guard to untie him. The guard merely grinned and shoved Mellin forward, the sill tripping him, causing him to fall headlong into the semidarkness among half-used cans of paint, dirty cleaning rags, and vomit, the nose-plugging smell rising all about him, making it difficult for him to breathe. The dampness above his right eye, blood from a cut, now began to sting, and his body convulsed as he threw up from the nausea brought on by the overwhelming stench of the oil-based paint and urine. He was sure the guard was leaving him tied up contrary to the older officer’s intent but he could do nothing about it, or at least everything that had happened to him conspired to convince him nothing could be done.

  He had never felt so low — not even in ‘Nam. There, at least, he could fight back. But here in the rolling, pitching darkness of the tiny paint locker, he felt absolutely abandoned. Mellin thought of his sister, Angela, who had been posted all these years as MIA, wondering if her final moments had been like this — utterly alone — or had she had it worse than he? Was she perhaps still alive? A prisoner? Or was she dead? He clung to the idea she was still alive, as if somehow he had unfinished business, her unknown fate something to be settled, something to concentrate upon in his own abandonment, something to hold on to. Why? he asked himself as he lay sick on the cold, metal floor. Why were the Chinese so bent on finding out whether or not he’d been on the Chical? Had they been behind the attack? What made the Chinese authorities so interested in him?

  * * *

  The truth was, they weren’t interested in Danny Mellin. The ship’s officers’ Neanderthal interrogation of him was merely the result of them carrying out Beijing’s orders; orders which, in the seething bureaucratic maze of the Chinese capital, had now been forgotten in the sudden avalanche of paperwork occasioned by the war.

  The activation of China’s twenty Main Force divisions—300,000 men, nine hundred planes, over a thousand T-69 tanks, and fourteen hundred pieces of artillery, much of it self-propelled — required a massive bureaucratic effort. An army of clerks in the Great Hall of the People and beyond, who, from the ministerial level of arranging finance through Beijing’s holdings on the Hong Kong stock exchange, to the more than twenty clerks required for each soldier at the front, complained that there were not enough computers to help reduce the task.

  In fact, even Schwarzkopf’s HQ with all its computerization still required no less than thirty million phone calls for the bombing offensive against Iraq alone, and still needed three hundred Americans behind the lines for every American soldier at the front.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The moment the massive tires of the Hercules touched and screeched on the runway at the Gia Lam airfield southeast of Hanoi’s center, the plane came under sniper fire, several rounds penetrating the fuselage, a ricochet striking and zinging off an EMREF trooper’s helmet. “How rude!” Doolittle said.

  “Jesus Christ,” D’Lupo said, ducking. “Thought this friggin’ place was supposed to be secure.”

  “Settle down,” Freeman intoned coolly over the PA system, not showing his own surprise. “Bound to be a few Chinese insurgents — take a potshot in hopes of shaking us up, then trot off home to bed. Right?”

  “Fucking shakes me up,” D’Lupo told Martinez, the latter agreeing, gripping his rifle tightly. Doolittle meanwhile watched the photojournalism Marte Price, quickly jotting down notes, stopping for a moment to push away a wisp of hair beneath her helmet.

  “General,” she asked Freeman, “how about a shot of the EMREF spearhead just before they deplane?”

  Freeman nodded. “All right, boys, Ms. Price wants a photo of you heroes. Smile — and that’s an order.”

  Marte Price was annoyed. What she didn’t want was a photograph of 126 troops grinning from ear to ear. The flash seemed to illuminate the whole plane. One soldier asleep — the tension having already drained him — suddenly sat up. “What the—”

  It was good for a laugh, and Marte Price was satisfied. A startled soldier was a good pic for the next edition of the Des Moines Register. But already, even as the huge plane was coming to a standstill, she was feeling dishonest, somehow corrupted, knowing full well that the Register’s editor, unless told otherwise, would run the picture as one of a soldier in a moment of high combat stress. As such it would be taken off the wire by most major papers in America, particularly given the fact that apart from CNN, Freeman had excluded any major media network.

  Two of the aircraft’s crew stood by as the massive rear door/ramp was lowered and two Humvee “scouts,” each armed with a TOW missile launcher and.50 caliber machine gun, rolled off onto the tarmac. They were followed by the two lines of troops, none of whom were below the level of E-7 Sergeant First Class when they volunteered for EMREF duty. The sniping had stopped.

  “You figure this is worth fifty-five bucks a month?” D’Lupo said, referring to the Airborne’s hazardous duty pay.

  “No way,” Martinez responded.

  Freeman saw two Vietnamese, one a cadre — a political officer — coming toward him dressed in traditional black pajamas and lion-tamer hat, the other a senior military officer dressed in the camouflage green khaki of the new Vietnam uniform.

  “General Freeman,” the cadre said, smiling. “We welcome you and your troops to Vietnam.”

  “Cam on,” Freeman said, extending his hand first, though he didn’t like it, to the political officer and then to General Vinh.

  “What’d he say?” D’Lupo whispered. “ ‘C’mon!’?”

  “No, you fucking wop,” Martinez said. “It’s gook for ‘thank you.’ “

  “You speak it too?” a surprised D’Lupo pressed.

  “Yeah. Me and the general do our homework, see?”

  “Oh yeah,” D’Lupo challenged. “All right then, what’s ‘fuck off’ in Vietnamese?”

  “Easy,” Martinez said. “Chuc ngu ngon!”

  “All right, smartass, so you know gook.”

  In the penumbra of light about the ramp, D’Lupo saw a woman in Vietnamese uniform, then another carrying baskets toward the plane. D’Lupo couldn’t take his eyes off the woman. It seemed as if her whole leg was showing. She was walking toward Freeman, who was politely but firmly telling his Vietnamese host, through an interpreter now, that he was given ample assurances by Hanoi via the Pentagon that the Hanoi airfields were secure and that if there were sniping around Gia Lam Field, why the hell didn’t Hanoi tower divert the American Hercules thirteen miles north of the city proper to Noi Bai Airport?

  Through his interpreter the cadre assured the general that the Gia Lam Airport was secure. There had been only one sniper, an ex-NVA regular who, the cadre explained, was mentally unstable, so that when he saw an American plane, and a huge one at that, as big as one of the B-52 bombers that had attacke
d Hanoi in the Vietnam War, he had had a false memory — the cadre meant “flashback”—and shot at the big plane.

  “I believe,” the cadre added, “that you have similar problems with veterans in the United States?”

  “Yes,” Freeman replied, tempted to say that as he understood it, Marxist-Leninism would make a balanced personality impossible, but realizing the cadre’s explanation was an olive branch being extended. Freeman accepted it. “Yes, we shot up one another quite a bit, didn’t we?” After the interpreter had finished, the cadre smiled, shaking Freeman’s hand again.

  By now almost every one of Freeman’s 127-man spearhead had been given a lei of welcome by one of the female V.A. regulars, CNN already bouncing it off a satellite, beaming it back to the States, and Marte Price busily taking shots of the cadre and the two generals meeting, each handshake a polite but not overly warm gesture of willing cooperation. Once he realized the CNN camera was rolling, Freeman — the first note of anxiety present in his voice since he’d left Hawaii — called his aide over. “Bob, for God’s sake make sure CNN gets a shot of the British SAS boys. Emphasize that this is a U.S.-led U.N., I repeat U.N., action, and that other countries will be making their contributions to the U.N. force within a matter of days. And make sure those—” He stopped, unable to think of the right word for a second.

  “Gurkhas,” Cline said.

  “Exactly,” Freeman said, slapping him on the shoulder. “And mention the Aussies, New Zealanders, South Koreans…” He steered Cline away from the Vietnamese general and cadre and toward his heavily loaded troops, his voice subdued. “But Bob, for Chrissake don’t say anything about the Japanese support — not even logistical support. These jokers in Hanoi, like much of Asia, hate the Japanese — figure the Japs still haven’t made amends for atrocities.”

  “How about our My Lai?” Cline asked, reminding Freeman of the massacre of a whole Vietnamese village by U.S. troops.