South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

“Bad as it was, Bob, it doesn’t start to compare with the widespread rape and pillage perpetrated by the sons of Nippon — sons of bitches traumatized the whole of Southeast Asia. And Bob…?”

  “Sir?”

  Freeman’s voice was friendly enough as he smiled back at the Vietnamese general and cadre before saying quietly to his aide, “Bob, coming down the ramp I heard some joker use the word ‘gook.’” Now Freeman was smiling broadly. “You tell ‘em if I hear any disparaging remarks about our U.N. allies, I will personally cut the offender’s prick off. You got that?”

  “Yes, General.”

  General Vinh asked in heavily accented English how long Freeman wanted to rest his troops before moving up to the snake — the name given by the Vietnamese Army to the winding front line that snaked its way up, down, and at times around the base of the hills north of Hanoi.

  “Rest?” Freeman responded. “General, we didn’t come here to rest. Vietnamese people are being attacked by China, the U.N. sent us to help, and that means now. We can move out the moment my boys finish relieving themselves. Main body of Second Army in—” He almost said Japan. “—is already assembling for airlift. First planeload’ll be here in a matter of days.”

  General Vinh understood most of it, except for the part about “relieving” themselves.

  “Gia ve sinh,” the interpreter explained.

  “Yes,” Freeman cut in. “Gia ve sinh,” adding, “Thunder box!”

  When this was explained to General Vinh, he uttered an “Ah…” of recognition, smiling broadly. “Toi—Come,” he said, motioning to a line of ten three-ton trucks — all American made — looking the worse for wear, their engines spitting and coughing in two lines beyond four portable toilets that had been rolled into the apron of light about the Hercules.

  As the trucks, their “blackout” headlights mere slits of light in the enormous darkness, rolled north from the Gia Lam airfield, Freeman’s spearhead troops, whose main function now was to carry out a recon in force for the benefit of Second Army, heard the sound of clapping in the darkness. Through their infrared goggles, against a soupy green background, they could see lines of Vietnamese civilians clapping here and there and waving tiny U.S. and U.N. flags.

  “Ain’t that somethin’?” D’Lupo said, taking his infrareds off, as he, like others, was prone to severe headache from the goggles if he left them on too long. “Gooks welcoming U.S. soldiers. I’m gonna tell my grandchildren ‘bout this one.”

  “You’ll tell nobody, D’Lupo,” a Delta first lieutenant said, “if you keep callin’ ‘em gooks. Remember what the general said — he’ll cut your prick off!”

  “All right,” D’Lupo riposted. “I’ll call ‘em ‘Charlie.’ “

  “Shit,” Martinez cut in. “You tryin’ to sound like a vet?”

  “Listen, dick brain, I figure in a coupla hours we’ll start being vets.”

  “If you last that long,” Martinez said.

  “Thanks a lot, Marty,” D’Lupo charged. “You’re all laughs, you know that?”

  Dave Rhin, a black man from Chicago, flicked up his IR goggles. “Man, there are thousands of ‘em lined up. See ‘em plain as day.”

  “Yeah,” D’Lupo said in the rough camaraderie of soldiers. “Well, they’re gonna find it hard to see you, Rhin.”

  “I told you,” Martinez chimed in, “to use that fuckin’ sunscreen, Rhin!”

  “Hey, dick brain,” Rhin retorted, “they gonna see you honkies all right. They don’t need no IRs to see you, man.”

  “Oh,” Doolittle said to his fellow SAS troopers in the truck, “isn’t this nice? We’re on our way to a punch-up wiv Charlie an’ these blokes start a fuckin’ race riot. Lovely, i’n’it?”

  “Can’t understand a fuckin’ word you say, limey,” Rhin said.

  “No matter,” Martinez joshed, flicking up his IRs. “Brits are full of shit anyway.”

  “You’ll get yours, mite!”

  “All right,” the first lieutenant said on the cellular. “Pipe down. We’ll be in enemy country before you know it. General wants you all quiet as of now.”

  The silence was deafening. Freeman had permitted them to let off steam on the way in from the Gia Lam Field. But now that they were past the Ho Tay — West Lake — approaching the Song Hong, or Red River, and Thang Long Bridge, a prime target for U.S. bombers during the Vietnam War, every one of the 127 men, including Freeman, was alone with his fear.

  Marte Price had wanted to stay in Hanoi to cover the war, but the CNN crew of three had decided to go to the front, and being the only woman reporter, she felt she would lose face not only for herself but for all the women in the armed services if she didn’t go with Freeman’s spearhead recon group. Someone had joked she’d decided to go “all the way,” but there were no laughs.

  Sitting in the second armed Humvee behind the vehicle carrying Freeman, Cline, and the two Vietnamese, Marte Price was sick with fear. She found, to her astonishment, that one’s teeth really do chatter in the face of a danger so overwhelming that she felt a shortness of breath — a rapidly rising surge of panic that momentarily convinced her she was having a heart attack.

  * * *

  Southwest of Hanoi, in the Vietnamese People’s Army indoctrination center at Xuan Mai, Vietnamese militia and reservists were being told once again that it was not the American people in the sixties and early seventies who had declared war on the freedom-loving peoples of Vietnam but the “imperialist criminals” Kennedy, Johnson, and McNamara. The fact that the U.S. had never actually declared war, attested to by the Pentagon’s insistence on still writing about the war with a lowercase w, was not mentioned.

  The American people, continued the cadre, had had their own civil war and a war of independence against the British imperialists. Very few of those listening were paying much attention to the cadre’s harangue. All they cared about was that in Vietnam’s never-ending struggle — the first Indochina War, the second Indochina War, and the wars against the Chinese— war had been the way of life. Peace was the abnormal condition.

  This time it was again China, which had had its eyes on the lush Red River Delta since two hundred years before Christ. The Vietnamese soldiers didn’t need a cadre to tell them the obvious: their country was again under attack by the Chinese. No one bothered raising the theoretical contradiction of one Communist state waging war on another Communist state, for everyone understood that this was a war not of ideology but for territory, the rich deposits of oil beneath the hundreds of offshore islands from the Gulf of Tonkin to Borneo. In any case, the Americans had helped the Vietnamese once before, giving them arms and money to fight the Japanese in Vietnam. War was the way of life.

  The militia and reservists were told that should it become necessary, they might have to fight side by side with the Americans to plug any gaps the Chinese attack might open. Most of the subdued talk among the young militia and reservists, many of them women, was of how anxious they were to fight with the Americans. Most of them were too young to have fought in America’s undeclared war against North Vietnam, and the same would be true for many, though not all, of the Americans. Besides, it was a well-known fact that Americans had everything, and there was a collective craving among the Vietnamese militia and reservists for American cigarettes. Not only were they the best cigarettes in the world, but in many transactions throughout Southeast Asia they had become the currency of exchange, a prime cargo for the South China Sea pirates.

  The indoctrination session ended with several militiamen dozing off, the general belief being that there would be no further Chinese breakthrough, that their Vietnamese regular army would soon counterattack and with the help of American bombers force the Chinese back from the Lang Son line across the border.

  * * *

  The arrival of the EMREF recon spearhead was known to Beijing within half an hour of the Hercules landing, CNN having beaten the transmissions of Chinese Vietnamese agents who radioed the news to the Chinese capital. But CNN, as pa
rt of its “deal” with Freeman, hadn’t disclosed it was only one Hercules, and had it not been for the agents’ transmissions, Beijing would have been under the impression that the total EMREF force of several thousand had already arrived in Hanoi.

  In any event, the news jolted Beijing, and within minutes the HQs of the Chengdu and Guangzhou military regions had been notified that the gains made so far by Generals Wei and Wang must be consolidated as soon as possible on both flanks of the Lang Son front—before the American genius for logistical buildup could be exercised.

  “It is like,” General Wei’s cadres explained to his troops, “attacking a loaded bullock cart — kill the bullock driver first before he can unload his weapons and ammunition.” In this instance, Wei explained to his HQ personnel, the carts — the U.S. air supply line — might not be stopped by the Chinese air force, but the lead driver, Freeman, was already here and could be killed.

  The Chinese general announced that any PLA unit wiping out Freeman’s advance spearhead would receive a “thousand commendations from the people.” This phrase was officialese for the fact that any unit that wiped out Freeman’s spearhead force would receive a monetary reward — one thousand dollars U.S. It was a small fortune, and on the black market it would buy many American cigarettes. Some senior cadres objected that this was unworthy of the people’s army ideology and was a “capitalist corruption” of the troops, to which Generals Wei and Wang responded that they were responsible for the military tactics and that the cadres, with all due respect, should keep out of it — it was a military not a political matter. A senior cadre continued to object, and Wei told him in very unpolitical terms to perform a sexual act on himself with a pointed stick.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A thousand feet below the surface of the South China Sea aboard Santa Fe, a sonar analysis confirmed the earlier Sea King’s contact as a “Sierra Four,” or probable enemy surface vessel.

  “Possible hostile by nature of sound, bearing one four six! Range eighteen miles!”

  “Very well,” the captain said calmly, already at the control room’s attack island. “Man battle stations.”

  “Man battle stations, aye, sir,” a seaman of the watch repeated, pushing the “yellow” button that sent a pulsing F sharp slurring to G throughout the ship.

  The captain turned to the D.O. “Diving officer, periscope depth.”

  “Periscope depth, aye, sir.”

  The captain quickly, quietly, took the PA mike from its cradle. “This is the captain. I have the con. Commander Rogers retains the deck. Up search scope.”

  “Ahead two-thirds.”

  “Scope’s breaking,” reported one of the watchmen. “Scope’s clear.”

  The captain and the search scope’s column became one, moving about, looking for a dot on the flat metallic-colored sea.

  Now the sub’s sonar had picked up the cavitation, or sound of water bubbles caused by the turning propeller of the unknown ship. At first it was suspected that it might be one of the destroyers of the carrier battle group, but within seconds the noise, having passed through the acoustic spectrum analyzer, suggested the craft was either a fast 32-knot Luda-class destroyer or a Jianghu-class frigate. In any case, her speed was now 23 knots, the details on the computer screen quickly giving the two classes’ dimensions and armament, both equipped with antisubmarine depth charges, surface-to-surface HY2 missiles and mines. The ship was now on a heading not for the Santa Fe, whose presence she had probably not detected, but in the direction of the Enterprise carrier battle group, an enemy mission that clearly fell under the Santa Fe rules of engagement and within the parameters of the sub’s mission orders to protect the CVBG.

  “Make the tube ready in all respects,” the captain ordered.

  “Make the tube ready in all respects, aye, sir.”

  The Luda class had now increased her speed to 25 knots.

  The sub’s captain stopped moving the scope. “Bearing. Mark!”

  “Range. Mark! Down scope!” He heard the soft whine of the retracting M-18 search scope equipped with infrared. “I hold one visual contact. Range?”

  “Seventeen point two miles.” On the green “waterfall” of the display screen the target’s sound was represented by a vertical white line. Forward in the torpedo room, 650 pounds of explosive in the nose of a Mark 48 advanced-capability torpedo, equipped with twenty miles of control wire — capable of 67 knots and a range of twenty-five-plus miles, and known by Santa Fe’s crew as “heavy freight”—was loaded and ready in number 7 tube on the port side.

  “Range?” asked the captain.

  “Seventeen miles — decreasing.” Every man on the boat went about his business with a deft, quiet approach to everything, including the placing of the compacted garbage container into a freezer. Any ejection of it could immediately have signaled the sub’s position to the enemy, and the captain did not know if the Chinese ship was alone. There could be another one lying silent, its cavitation not yet picked up by Santa Fe’s passive sonar.

  “Torpedo in port tube one, sir.”

  “Very well. Angle on the bow,” the captain said. “Port, three point five.”

  “Check,” came the confirmation.

  “Range?” the captain asked.

  “Sixteen point seven miles.”

  “Sixteen point seven miles,” the captain repeated. “Firing point procedures. Master four five. Tube one.”

  “Firing point procedures, aye, sir. Master four five. Tube one, aye.. solution ready… weapon ready… ship ready…”

  “Match bearings and shoot.”

  The Mark 48’s ram jet shot the torpedo into the sea. At 65 knots, given the varying salinity of the water and the relative speed of the two ships, it would take the torpedo plus or minus fifteen minutes to reach the target.

  * * *

  Now, in the predawn darkness, the Vietnamese welcome seemed as if it had never happened. Gone were the lines of villagers, whether sent out by the Hanoi government or not, and in their stead there were only the flitting images of the night, a constant stream of misbegotten shapes that, with a little fear and imagination, could be anything and everything, from a Chinese T-59 tank to a squad of PLA moving up ready to fire. But except for the noises of the aging trucks, it was a quiet ride for the EMREF spearhead for whom the only indication of battle was the occasional thump of distant artillery from the direction of Lang Son.

  “This is far enough,” Vinh’s interpreter told Freeman, who quickly alighted from his Humvee, the first two vehicles in the following ten-truck convoy also slowing to a stop. Tail boards were lowered rather than dropped, as quietly as possible, and now what was called the “great humping” began, as each soldier prepared to “saddle up” for the reconnaissance patrol to probe the Lang Son line.

  General Vinh’s intelligence reports, as good as they might be, hadn’t provided Freeman with enough information for any confident and immediate deployment of Second Army once it arrived. And as Freeman told Robert Cline, he couldn’t afford a mistake because of something lost in what the interpreter might or might not say. He had to find out for himself, and so eighteen miles northeast of Hanoi, just before the town of Ba Ninh, the 127-member spearhead of the EMREF task force company split into four platoons of thirty men each. Freeman’s intention was to proceed toward the Lang Son front in clover-leaf pattern, seven-man patrols from each company constantly moving out on the flanks, circling to prevent ambush as the whole company of four platoons, one behind the other, moved forward. A five-man radio and rifle squad remained with the trucks already helping the Vietnamese drivers and guards to camouflage the vehicles, mainly against the possibility of Chinese recon planes from the border area seventy-eight miles away, beyond Lang Son.

  Vinh introduced Freeman to a group of five Vietnamese guides before he shook hands with Freeman and stepped into a Long March staff car to take him back to Hanoi, from whence he’d rejoin the battle on the western front.

  In one of the strangest
verbal exchanges in his career, General Freeman was engaged in a whispered “shouting” match with Marte Price of the Des Moines Register. “General, give me one good reason for me not going — a reason you can give that CNN cameraman and that CNN reporter.”

  “Ms. Price, I don’t have to give reasons to the press. You stay with the trucks. You should have gone back with Vinh, goddamn it! I’ll have you disbarred from the press pool.”

  “There is no pool, General.”

  “Goddamn it, you could get shot!”

  “I know the risks.”

  “You certainly do not.”

  “General, when you said, ‘Stay by the headquarters group,’ I assumed that was all the way up to the front.”

  “Well, you assumed wrong, goddamn it.”

  “Give me one good reason, General, and I’ll stay behind.”

  “You’re a woman, goddamn it!”

  “You’ve used women chopper pilots before, and I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that.”

  “Well, you are a woman — aren’t you?”

  “I mean saying ‘damn it’ all the time.”

  “All right,” Freeman said. Major Robert Cline thought the general was about to give in, but Freeman took a breath and said, “You smell!”

  “I what?’

  “The Vietnamese guides,” he said, nodding in their direction, “have complained that you’re a hazard to the operation, and I agree. They told me they could smell your perfume before the first truck rounded that curve a hundred yards back. Chinese regulars’d sniff us coming from a hundred yards away.”

  For a moment Marte Price was lost for words, but then suddenly she knew she had a counterattack. “General, I can smell cigarette smoke, and none of your troops are smoking now. Ever walk into a motel room where there’s been a smoker? You can smell it right away.”

  “I’m not in the habit of going to motels,” he replied grumpily. But she had him and he knew it. Despite all their instructions in training Special Forces like the Delta Force and SAS about not using deodorant and so on, a smoker carried the stale smell of cigarette or cigar smoke wherever he went.