South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  “All right,” Freeman said, more fiercely than before, and in an uncharacteristic non sequitur that would become part of Second Army lore, he added, “Don’t blame me if you get killed! Goddamn it!”

  “I won’t,” she said quietly, smiling, her features more distinct now as the predawn light stole upon the clearing in the black jungle by the road.

  “I’ll rub mud in my armpits,” she said.

  As Freeman turned to walk over to the Vietnamese guides, he confided to Major Cline, “By God, I hope the Chinese aren’t as tough as her. We’ll get our clock stopped.”

  “PLA use women in combat, General.”

  “We’re not the PLA. We’re Americans.”

  “With some Brits and Aussies to come, plus the British Gurkhas—”

  “Yes, yes, I know — we’re a United Nations force.”

  According to lore, it was similar to what George Patton had said, Cline thought, when he complained about Eisenhower being an ally and not an American. The general liked everything his own way, and after Freeman’s spirited exchange with Marte Price, Cline had a sneaking suspicion that his intent to carry out a recon in force and return within four days was being done not just to better deploy Second Army, now arriving in Hanoi, but for some other reason, which no one, including the Pentagon, knew about. “Letting her come along with us, General, will win you a lot of kudos back home — and ‘round the world via CNN.”

  “I’m not interested in kudos from the femisphere, Major. Far as I’m concerned, those rampant feminists—”

  “I meant from the Pentagon, General. There’s been a big push for equal rights.”

  “Damn it, Bob, the army’s not a democracy. Even the Chinese know that. After years of that comrade crap, they’ve now reinstituted rank—’different pay scales.’ “

  “Maybe so, General, but my guess is having a woman reporter at the front’ll do you more good than harm back home.”

  Freeman turned to Cline. “You make it sound like I’m running for office.”

  “General Eisenhower did.”

  “I’m not a political animal.”

  “Maybe not, General, but I still say your decision to have Marte Price will raise your profile — promotionwise.”

  “I didn’t decide. She did.”

  “Even if she did, I don’t think you’ll regret it. It’s politically correct.”

  “I don’t give a dog’s turd about political correctness and you know it.”

  Cline knew it, but the general had an ego as big as an M-1 tank, and it enjoyed being refueled every now and then with a headline or a TV sound bite that would keep the legend alive.

  The general pulled down his IR goggles to take another look at the topographic map between Bac Ninh and Lang Son near the Vietnamese-Chinese border, about thirty miles of it across part of the lush Red River delta and then into the hilly jungle country of the border range. First he’d send out one patrol along the sides of the road for five miles. There was no point “hoofing” it, as he put it, if he could use the trucks for another few miles or so. He was confirmed in this tactical decision after one of the Vietnamese guides got off the radio with Hanoi to say it had been reported that Chinese units were pulling back from the delta ten miles or so up the road toward Kep, only nine miles from Lang Son.

  Freeman’s smile was a wry one, the kind he used when a colleague played chess with him and thought he’d baited a trap. Besides, part of the Freeman legend was “speed.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Bob. We’re going slowly up that road in cloverleaf. If the Chinese have pulled back that quickly, then it’s for one of two reasons. It’s because their attack into Vietnam has been so successful that they’ve outrun their supply line, or it’s a trap.”

  “Think we should stay put awhile, General?”

  “No, you don’t win wars by sitting on your butt. Either way, we’ll have to find out what’s going on. The thing is to be ready for whatever happens. But before we do send out a patrol, I want our flyboys in that Enterprise battle group to be ready for some TACAIR if we need it. We’re not going to get arty,” he meant artillery, “for a few days, until the self-propelled guns can get up here from Hanoi.”

  “General!” Cline said in amazement.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. That Marte Price woman undid her blouse and stuck some dirt under her arm.”

  “For Chrissake,” Freeman said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Aboard the Chinese frigate there was a rising sense of panic. The lookout had seen the wake of the American torpedo through his binoculars and given the captain a three-minute warning. With the torpedo coming midships, the frigate quickly began a standard “shake off’ procedure, turning hard astarboard to run parallel with the torpedo’s wake and then, as the latter changed direction, hard astarboard again. Next the captain ordered a fan pattern of depth charges off the stern’s starboard side.

  The turbulence of the resulting semicircle of explosions bothered the torpedo’s advanced seeker head’s computer, but only for a second or two. And then, like a hound suddenly recovering the scent, the Mark 48 locked onto its prey. As the frigate made its last attempt to run parallel, its helicopter lifted off from the stem pad only seconds before the Santa Fe’s torpedo exploded starboard midships, lifting the bow high and dumping it, the ship’s back broken, fire already raging about the stern, orange-black flames leaping wildly, the sea about the stricken ship literally boiling white from the intense heat of the explosions and fires.

  “Abandon ship!” the Chinese captain called, and within seconds a good quarter of the 195-man crew were jumping overboard, some of them accompanied by the white plastic drums of the Beaufort self-inflating rafts.

  As the paint locker’s door opened, two crew were almost stuck in the opening, such was their rush to reach the life jackets stowed in the locker. Neither one, nor the crew members who followed, snatching life vests and running out again, gave a thought to Danny Mellin. Stunned by the concussion of the explosion, he wandered around, bumping into and pushed aside by the panicky sailors.

  Eventually, blinded by the daylight, Mellin felt his way to the forward starboard railing by letting his hands follow the line of the bulkhead. His vision cleared enough for him to see the sea afire off the starboard side. He turned, made his way over to the port side, and jumped, hearing the screams of several men who either in their haste or panic had dived into the boiling caldron. The portside water was hot, but as Mellin used his hands to paddle himself away from the sinking ship, the water cooled rapidly. He kept pushing himself to get farther away from the frigate so as not to be dragged under when she plunged. All around he could hear men shouting frantically as an oil fire, having spilled through the gaping hole that had been the midships, began to spread.

  * * *

  The moment he’d taken off from its stern, the frigate’s helicopter pilot knew his landing pad on the Jianghu was gone. He now had one of two choices. He had fuel enough to go east and make the PLA navy’s base at Yulin on the southern coastof the big island of Hainan, or he could head south, following what was now a pale but nevertheless quite clear wake left by the super-fast American torpedo. He turned south along the wake, only meters above the sea with two of the latest homing Yenchow ASW depth charges. Their shadows skimmed over the water like two dragonflies, the torpedo’s wake broken here and there by different salinity patches racing up at the pilot in an endless blur on the wider blur of the cobalt-colored sea.

  Now four hundred feet below the surface, the watch crew of the Santa Fe could hear the Chinese ship going down, her bulkheads popping as she sank farther and farther down to her sunless grave. There had been a second or two of celebration — the Santa Fe having done her job. But now all was silent in the control room save the sounds of the dying ship crackling and moaning over the sub’s PA. The captain turned it off. He could only imagine what was happening to the Chinese crew. He had taken his boat down fast after the expl
osion fifteen miles away, because some of the Chinese ships, like all surface navies, sometimes carried a Recon/ASW helo. Depth alone wouldn’t help him, but speed might, and now Santa Fe, without any discernible noise or tremor, had gone from 15 to 30 knots in an evasive zigzag and S-shaped pattern.

  When the helo neared the end of the wake, or where the wake had been dissipated by the motion of the sea, the pilot didn’t drop magnetic homing mines, for he was aware that the Hunter/Killer sub would now be well away from its firing position. Normally following such a wake was risky business, for it was believed that the American and British SSN sensors now had the capability to pick up chopper noises if they were near the surface, where sound would travel up to five times faster in water than air, and that in this case the enemy could launch a surface-to-air missile either by torpedo tube or vertical launch tubes forward of the sail. But the pilot dismissed this from his thoughts, for he knew that the sub’s sensors, no matter how sensitive, would be overwhelmed and smothered by the sounds of the frigate breaking up.

  The chopper pilot was now radioing his position to Zhanjiang, the headquarters of China’s Southern Fleet, and at the same time, while hovering a hundred feet above the sea’s surface, feeding out his dual magnetometer to sense any magnetic anomaly such as that caused by a ship’s metal and/or microphones. All he got on the dipping mike was the hissing of the sunken frigate’s oil fire still raging amid a slurry of flotsam and debris. The magnetometer showed a fairly consistent reading of seabed magnetics for the area. He reeled in the dual magnetometer/mike unit, which looked like a three-foot piece of pipe suspended from the end of the cable.

  As the helo darted forward to continue its dipping, it looked for all the world like a dragonfly hovering one minute then skimming, hovering over another spot, the pilot receiving radio confirmation that two PLA air force Ilyushin-H5 light ASW torpedo bombers with an intensive torpedo/bomb load of 2,205 pounds were approaching the area, escorted by two Shenyang J8s, versions of the Mach 2, MiG-21 upgraded by the purchase of U.S. avionics. The Shenyangs were armed with three NR 30 30mm cannon and air-to-air missiles on wing hard points. They would not save the helo, as for every new dip the helo pilot made trying to locate the Hunter/Killer, the lower he was getting on fuel.

  The best he might hope for would be to ditch after giving his last position and maybe get picked up by a PLA navy patrol ship. But unlike the extraordinary lengths that the Americans and British would go to to save a downed pilot, the PLA — navy, air force, or army — would do so only if it constituted no more than a minor alteration in course.

  The Enterprise’s forward air combat patrol was notified by the Enterprise group E-2 Hawkeye advanced warning aircraft of all radio traffic between China’s Southern Fleet HQ at Zhanjiang and of the dot on the AWAC’s radar screen, which could only be a helo. Computer translation took fifteen seconds longer than usual, but it was quite clear that the Chinese ASW bombers were coming out from Yulin to search for the Santa Fe, and the Enterprise’s team of two F-18s were now put on an intercept vector to first meet the two Shenyang fighters.

  * * *

  The sharks of the South China Sea were no different from any other of their breed — they would not attack unless they were hungry. But blood in the water was an attraction they could not ignore, and Mellin, exhausted from hauling himself onto one of the rubber rafts, saw that the predators were now among the survivors of the Chinese frigate, ripping and gulping, turning the roiling waters crimson.

  Mellin and the two oilers in the raft with him lay exhausted. One of the men’s breathing was so strained from his lungs being covered in oil, Mellin could hear the rasping sound he made above the cries of terror as crewman after crewman thrashed in sheer panic, in frantic efforts to reach a raft, anything that would hold them. Mellin could see dozens of dorsal fins cruising about amid the material and human flotsam. Now and then a dorsal fin would suddenly move much faster as another shark in the school made its sudden attack. Not far from the raft he was on, Mellin could see one of the Chinese crewmen in a Mae West, his right arm unable to move because of burns, trying to make for the raft. Mellin reached out to him, but the current and turbulence of the water kept widening the distance between them.

  “Oars!” Mellin yelled to the two others in the raft. “Where are the damn oars?” The two Chinese looked at him in bewilderment. There were no paddles. “C’mon,” Mellin yelled, using his right hand to paddle, his head indicating the man in the water. “Paddle! Paddle with your hands! C’mon!”

  One of the Chinese unenthusiastically joined Mellin. The other, covered with oil and still wheezing, did nothing. The man in the water — the sailor who had beaten Mellin aboard the ship — kept drifting away toward the frenzied, scream-filled cauldron that was the shark attack. Mellin took off his life jacket and slipped over the oil-greased side of the raft, striking out in a breaststroke toward the badly burned crewman. He grabbed the collar of the man’s Mae West and, turning about, struck out for the raft. When he reached the raft he told the two crewmen aboard it to help him. They didn’t understand English but they knew what he wanted. The one covered in oil did nothing. The other man started to panic, yelling and shaking his head. It was clear that he thought if Mellin tried to drag the burned crewman aboard, the raft would capsize.

  “Grab his arms!” Mellin yelled, near exhaustion himself. “Now!”

  The man aboard the raft was terrified, shaking his head. “No, no!”

  In utter exasperation, Mellin heaved the burned man up against the raft’s gunwale, the man’s weight already tipping the raft as he slid back into the water. Out of the corner of his eye Mellin could see several fins coming his way. With a last Herculean effort he pushed the burned crewman up against the raft. The able-bodied crewman in the raft, out of sheer fright that if he didn’t help, the raft would capsize, hauled the burned crewman as Mellin, still in the water, pushed. Next Mellin tried to haul himself aboard. But he was out of breath, his strength momentarily drained until he felt something pass him and touch a leg. The next thing he knew he was aboard the raft, water pouring off him, the rescued man flat on the bottom of the small craft, his reluctant co-rescuer screaming hysterically at Mellin at the near capsize. Mellin couldn’t have cared less. All he cared about was the next breath.

  When he recovered a few moments later, he looked at the guard who was stretched out beside him and moaning in pain. “Should’ve let you sink, you bastard!” The man covered in oil was dead, the remaining Chinese talking excitedly, pointing skyward where he could see two H-5 Ilyushin bombers, and high above them, the glint of two fighters, the jabbering crewman in a reverie of anticipation for now they were sure to be rescued. Several men in other rafts, floating among the limbless dead, were also cheering.

  * * *

  The frigate’s helo had skimmed a few miles west and dipped the magnetometer/sonar, registering a magnetic anomaly. It could be unusually strong metallic deposits on the seabed, or it could be a submarine. The pilot dropped two depth charges, went higher, waited for the sea to erupt into two mushroomed columns of greenish-brown water, didn’t see any signs of a hit and so dropped two floating orange marker flares for the Ilyushin bombers to see. He then headed off toward Yulin, the PLA’s naval base in southern Hainan, dropping a purple parachute flare over the thirty or so crewmen from the sunken ship, some of them waving to him as he glanced anxiously at his fuel gauge.

  Sitting up now in the raft, Mellin could see the thin spirals of orange smoke marking the spot where the helo pilot had dropped the depth charges, and he said a prayer for the sub that the Chinese were now searching for. Despite the sub nearly having killed him, it had told Mellin that there was war with China, and now at least he knew where he stood.

  * * *

  The dogfight between the two Shenyangs and the two F-18s of Enterprise’s air combat patrol was short and stunningly unequal.

  “Tally Two! Tally Two! Afterburners!” came the first American pilot’s voice, indicating he coul
d see both Shenyang fighters. “Five miles. Select Fox Two. Four miles… three miles… lock ‘im up… lock him… shoot Fox Two Fox Two.”

  The Sidewinder missile took off from the American plane, streaking out toward one of the enemy, the other American plane also firing a Sidewinder. Within seconds of one another each missile found its target. There were two orange flashes, one many times the size of the other, as the second Shenyang’s fuel tanks went up.

  “Splash one!” came the excited voice of the first American pilot, “Splash two!” following only seconds later.

  Aboard the carrier’s combat information center there were shouts of jubilation. “Good kill! Good kill!” the air boss said, echoing one of the pilots’ exultations. “Outstanding!” The pilot of the lead F-18 acknowledged the congratulations from the carrier. The other pilot said nothing, part of him exhilarated by the kill, the other half feeling sorry for the downed Chinese pilots, only one having a chance to eject. In a way, attacking the two Shenyangs, whose maximum speed was 957 mph, with two F-18s at 1,190 mph, was a little like Mario Andretti’s Formula One chasing a pickup. Unless the Chinese fighters happened upon F-18s with complete surprise — highly unlikely, given the F-18s’ multimode air-to-air and air-to-surface tracking radar — the Shenyangs didn’t stand a chance, despite their having jettisoned “hot spots”—magnesium flares — to decoy the U.S. missiles.

  But if the two American pilots from the Enterprise had good reason to be supremely confident of their aircraft’s ability, they gave the Chinese pilots top marks for courage. Neither Shenyang pilot had run from the fight, but had kept coming head-to-head to do battle. Both American pilots and those back in the Enterprise’s CIC knew how different the outcome might have been had the Chinese sent out their MiG-29s — the Fulcrums — now being purchased at bargain basement prices by China from Russia and other republics within the CIS.