South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  “Another thing, Captain Boyd.”

  “Sir?”

  “I want you to find a few good stories about the flagrant Chinese violation of the environment laws — in particular the violation of the law prohibiting the killing and or transport of wild animals. You know the sort of thing I mean. Believe eating crushed-up tiger’s balls’ll give ‘em a dick big as a tiger’s.”

  Boyd blinked. “Ah… I mean, sir — you sure about that?”

  “ ‘Course I’m sure. Anyway, you can flesh out the details. Make sure it gets on CNN. Get the bastards working for me for a change — instead of all those damn fairies and Commie fellow travelers in State.”

  “Ah, General, the Vietnamese are Commie—”

  Freeman waved the objection aside. “Not like the Chinese they aren’t. You get that story out, hear me? I want those animal rights people raising shit, with Greenpeace moaning about the damn fish our supply line ships are supposedly traumatizing. Take the heat off us.” He winked at Boyd. “Can you handle them?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  The general smiled. “Do so, Captain — or I’ll fire you. And Boyd?”

  “Sir?”

  “I want that report in an hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Tokyo

  Henry Wray wouldn’t have beaten the North Korean prisoner — at least not as badly — but the man had said “Migook!”—American — and spat at him. With his overtime robbing him of sleep, and contrary to all the rules and practices for self-control he’d learned at Langley, Wray snapped and punched the Korean off his haunches, the man falling over, crashing into the two-foot-high wall of cardboard that had formed the “disciplinary square” about him. At this, the Japanese interrogator went wild, kicking the man in the head twice before Wray, his hands trembling with the strain of the war between the anger and common sense raging inside of him, yelled, “That’s enough!” at his JDF colleague. But the North Korean spat again and Wray lost it. Besides, what was it that detective used to say on “NYPD Blue”? he thought afterward. At some point in the interrogation room you take off your belt and leave the Constitution outside.

  Wray and the JDF agent had gotten each other going, and once or twice their blows coincided, they were so frantic to give it to him. Little bastard was probably holding the key to an attack on the Second Army convoy, which was now out over the Macclesfield Bank, 350 miles east-southeast of the PLA’s Yulin naval base on Hainan Island.

  “Who did you contact?” Wray yelled. “Who did you call?”

  The North Korean either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk.

  That night, Wray signed out and faxed Langley that he was ill and would have to be relieved from — in effect taken off— Songbird.

  He went home and opened a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, an expensive escape in Japan, and drank long into the night, occasionally flipping channels but mostly watching CNN for up-to-date news of the war. He saw a raging argument going on among demonstrators of various political stripes in the front of the White House, then a zoom shot showing the state of play between a Greenpeacer and an animal rights advocate. The animal rights lady, who looked remarkably like a cat — where did CNN get this stuff, he wondered, from some casting agent? — was complaining loudly about the barbaric practices of the Chinese, their crimes against animals, and the Greenpeacer was arguing just as loudly about how Greenpeace was for animal rights too, but that the animal rights issue was a red herring put out by the fascist administration in Washington to divert all attention away from the real war — against the environment.

  “If this was a fascist administration—” said the woman.

  “It is,” the Greenpeacer charged.

  “If it was,” the woman replied, “the police would be dragging you away right now.”

  “They’ll be here. You wait.”

  Another demonstrator, an unkempt redhead, shoving her way into the fray proclaimed, “It’s not the Chinese who started this — it’s the Vietnamese. They’re the real aggressors.”

  “Bullshit!” someone called out.

  “Yeah — piss off, lady!”

  Wray didn’t know which lady was being referred to — the animal rights one or the redhead. Now there was a special news bulletin reporting that there had apparently been some “naval activity” in the South China Sea. Wray grunted in drunken disgust. It was about as helpful as saying there was a weather disturbance somewhere in Texas. The nonspecific nature of this newscast upset Wray much more than it normally would have. He was a perfectionist, and vagueness about anything irritated and at times disturbed him, especially when he’d been drinking heavily. On top of this, there had been the day’s dismal failure of not getting anything out of the Korean, and on top of that, of losing his cool and the unspoken, maniacal encouragement he’d given the JDF man. Which made him, Henry Wray of the CIA, no better than the North Koreans, he told himself. Worse.

  He finished his scotch and walked over to a map of southern Japan, surprised there had not yet been any kind of attack on U.S. and Japanese shipping by North Korea. Maybe the Korean had made contact about something else? But not knowing what it was, even what it might be, filled Wray with a despair, despite all his years with the firm, made infinitely worse by the booze — a plunging feeling deep in his gut, his conscience telling him that he had stood far too long at the edge of the abyss, and now it was staring back at him — that he was out of control. He reached inside his jacket, took out the 9mm Beretta automatic, and fingered it like a blind man for a few minutes, as if it was something he’d lost touch with, as if he was reacquainting himself with an old friend. Then he put it atop the TV.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Dalat, Central Highlands

  It was near dusk when a policeman pulled up to the American visitor by an alley off Duy Tan Street and asked for identification and the special permit to be in Lam Dong province. Though the American lifting of an embargo against trading with Vietnam had meant better relations for several years, old habits died hard among some of the highlanders who, as young men, had fought the Americans in the Vietnam War. The American, Captain Raymond Baker from the U.S. legation in Ho Chi Minh City, was dressed in civilian clothes. He presented his passport with three ten-thousand-dong notes — about three U.S. dollars — sandwiched in the middle. The policeman moved back a few paces into the alley, said nothing, took the money, handed back the passport and began walking eastward down Duy Tan Street. Baker slipped the passport into the waistband money belt he wore and called out to the policeman, “Which way to Lang Bian Mountain? They tell me the views are—”

  “Bac,” the policeman answered. North. His thumb jerked back over his shoulder. “Twelve kilometers. You must hire a guide.”

  Baker didn’t know whether this was official policy or simply well-meant advice. In any event he decided he would hire a guide. The policeman had already seen that he was a cultural attaché at the U.S. legation and might therefore already suspect him of spying around Dalat, though now with the U.S. and Vietnamese allies against the Chinese, it was difficult for Baker to imagine what military mission the Vietnamese policeman might think he was on. Unless the policeman had guessed that he was up here possibly searching for MIAs. The discovery of an MIA would be highly embarrassing at the moment, not only for the Vietnamese, but for their American allies as well. A hitherto MIA suddenly turning up would prove extraordinarily damaging to the U.S. public’s support for U.S. assistance against the Chinese invasion, rekindling memories of the interrogation and treatment of U.S. POWs during the Vietnam War.

  It was too dark now to start out on the twelve-kilometer journey to the five volcanic peaks of Lang Bian Mountain that rose to over six thousand feet above lush countryside, and Baker went instead to the nearest mid-range hotel, booked a room for the night, and asked if he could hire a guide from there to go to his ultimate destination of Lat village near Lang Bian.

  “Co, phai—yes,” the desk clerk replie
d, “but first you must buy permit.”

  “Who from?”

  “Dalat police.”

  Baker wondered why the policeman who had stopped him hadn’t told him about the permit. “How much?” he asked.

  “One hundred thousand dong. Ten dollars U.S.”

  Baker nodded and started up to his room when the clerk called after him, telling him that he had to leave his passport at the desk for security. Baker brought out an expired but unpunched passport that he kept specifically for such purposes. It wasn’t his first time looking for an MIA. He knew they wouldn’t bother looking at the date, so long as it had a lot of the right-looking stamps.

  Tiredly — it was unusually warm for the central highlands— Baker made his way up to the second floor of the People’s Palace and spread out a local tourist map of Dalat on the mattress atop the old, creaky French-colonial style, wrought-iron bedstead. The map was poor in quality and seemed to have no scale, but he did discover that Lat village was in fact not a single entity, but consisted of a half dozen or so hamlets. Which hamlet had the old man on the sampan meant? Perhaps Lat village had been the only description the old man had been given. Most of the villages were inhabited by the Laks, the others by Kohos, Mas, and Chills, and so now he saw more sense in the hotel clerk’s advice about a guide. And given what were bound to be the different dialects of the villagers, he might need more than one guide.

  Already his mission to ask about any possible MIAs in the village was becoming complex, and there was no early bus from Dalat to Lat, so he would be obliged to hire a car. He suddenly wished he’d stayed in Ho Chi Minh City. His colleagues at the legation there were probably right — the MIA tip was probably a waste of time and Baker knew he wouldn’t get any encouragement from Washington now that the Americans and Vietnamese were allies against China. A live MIA still being kept as a POW would be embarrassing all around. On the other hand, Washington had enough on its mind with the war that MIA search policy had more or less been forgotten about.

  Baker estimated he’d need at least a week to visit the hamlets alone, for though he spoke Vietnamese, he wasn’t familiar with the dialects of the central highlands. He reflected momentarily on the only hard evidence he’d ever unearthed about an MIA — two sets of dog tags and a pile of bones which the U.S. Army forensic lab had determined were human. But he still remembered the phone calls, then the letters, of the two GIs’ parents.

  And while more and more the question of MIAs—2,392 of them — from the old Vietnam War was receding and being shunted aside, Baker knew that if a young soldier of about twenty had been taken and was still being held, he would now be in his late forties or early fifties, and that the pain of his loved ones, like that of the parents of any missing child, would still be there.

  He unpacked his suitcase, took out a glass jar of boric acid, and like someone marking a tennis court, tapped out a line of the white powder until the rectangle he made about the bed was complete.

  Around midnight he thought he heard someone outside his door — or was it someone in one of the next rooms? He sat up and listened. The noise ceased and all he could hear in the background was the faint tinkle of a radio — probably from one of the rice stalls in the street below.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Susan D. Basehart was an American who had tired of having most of her money invested in small-yield blue chip stocks. Diagnosed as having inoperable cancer of the bowels, her life expectancy at most a year, she had decided — along with other American and Asian investors — to gamble most of her money on a new stock in ASAM Industries, a firm sold on the promising research carried out on the feasibility of highspeed maglev: magnetically levitated train travel on commuter routes. With tests of banked speeds up to 250 mph and 1,000 mph on straightways, the commuter run from Penn Station in New York to Union Station in Washington, D.C., averaging 300 mph, would take less time than it took to take a limo from Manhattan to La Guardia. And you could move hundreds of passengers at a time, no matter what the weather. ASAM shares jumped from ten dollars to $86.50 within a month of being issued. At a hundred dollars, fourteen percent of the shareholders sold, but Susan Basehart held on, sure it would very soon climb to over a hundred dollars.

  As the Tokyo-Niigata express raced through the countryside at over a hundred miles per hour, Tazuko Komura took care not to look in the foreground that was receding in a dizzying green blur of fields and supporting trestles of the fast-line track. Instead she looked beyond at the steadier scene of long, variegated rectangular sheets of newly dyed kimono linen stretched out on the green fields to dry. They looked like strips of exotic flags. The train was now on the flats going in excess of 100 mph. She pressed the button.

  The flash of the explosion could be seen for miles, the sound of it now rolling thunderously across the countryside, like thunder, the forward section of the train split in half as if struck by some enormous cleaver, bodies incinerated, the rear sections of the bullet train telescoping into one another in excess of 100 mph, then shooting off the elevated rail ten meters above a field into mangled tubular heaps of smoking metal and upholstery that were giving off columns of toxic smoke. There were no survivors, body parts strewn across the field and among the trees of a small wood outside Sanjo.

  NHK, Japan’s national network, got to the story first, then CNN. Within forty-five minutes of the crash Susan Basehart’s stock in ASAM industries tumbled. She lost over $350,000 and was effectively wiped out.

  Subsequent media investigations pointed out that sabotage had almost certainly been the cause of the catastrophe in which all 372 passengers and crew were killed, and that bullet-train railway technology was markedly different from that used in maglev vehicles. But these reports had little or no effect on the stock markets of the world — confidence in supertrains had crashed with the Tokyo-Niigata express. As Susan Basehart’s health grew worse, exacerbated by the shock of her near financial rain, she was told that due to medical bills, only some of which were covered by her health plan, she would spend her last days in a public ward at Bellevue.

  * * *

  The effect of the bullet train disaster in Japan was to produce a chilling recognition among the Japanese public, and in particular in the Japanese Defense Force, of just how vulnerable rapid transit movement of supplies and people was to terrorism. In the interrogation room of Tokyo’s JDF offices, the North Korean agent Jae Chong was shown a video of the train wreck and given a single sheet of paper by one of the JDF agents, who told him that if he didn’t start writing down contact names and numbers, he would be beaten again.

  “It’s no good protecting the bastard that blew it up,” the JDF agent told Jae Chong, acting on a hunch that because of stringent security on the bullet trains, and with no package being allowed to stand unattended, it had probably been a suicide bomber.

  Jae Chong sat there immobile, only the muscles in his face and the blinking of his eyes giving any indication of his nervousness. He slowly took up the ballpoint pen and then just as slowly put it down.

  “Bastard!” the JDF agent yelled, and punched him in the temple, knocking him off the stool. A call came through for the JDF agent from CIA agent Henry Wray.

  “What’s the story?” Wray asked. He sounded drunk.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “I just saw the Shinkansen wreck on the TV.”

  The JDF agent waited — was he supposed to say something?

  “Well,” Wray said, “has our songbird started to sing?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll come down.”

  “I will send a car for you,” the JDF man said.

  “No — I’ll be all right. Grab the chikatetsu.” The JDF man thought quickly — that’s all he needed, the American half pissed on the subway, turning up downtown. Reporters had already staked out Tokyo police HQ, pressing for news about the Shinkansen wreck. “Please let me send a car, Wray-san.”

  “All right,” Wray said. “You’re paying for it.”

  * * *
/>
  Wray took the Beretta off the top of the TV. Now that so many people had been killed on the bullet train, he felt justified in having told the JDF to smack the North Korean around. “Hell!” he said, talking to himself in the tiny hallway’s mirror and grabbing his hat from the rack on the second tray. “Should’ve beaten the prick earlier — fuck the cardboard box!” It only gave a suspect more time to think — to weasel their way out of it. Well, Henry Wray was going to put the 9mm’s barrel right against the son of a bitch’s head, and he’d better start talking.

  * * *

  “Over three hundred people,” Wray said, hands in his pockets. “Almost four hundred — men, women, and kids — were killed on that Shinkansen, you little prick — so you’d better start writing, Chong. Understand?”

  The JDF agent could see that Wray had the Beretta in his shoulder holster so that Chong would get the message.

  “Understand?” Wray repeated.

  “Hai,” Chong answered, nodding.

  “Good.”

  Chong bent over the small table in front of the stool. His shoulders slumped, then with a sigh of defeat he began writing down a phone number. “I don’t know the name,” he said. “I just call the number — somebody answers and I leave a message.”

  “If you don’t have a name,” Wray said, “what happens if you misdial — get a wrong number?” The JDF agent was impressed. For someone half hungover, the CIA man was on the ball.

  “Whoever answers,” Chong said, using his sleeve to wipe off a trickle of blood running down his chin, “says the number. Then I leave my message.”

  “Huh!” Wray grunted, leaning forward to pick up the paper. Chong’s left hand hit him in the face, Chong’s right hand pulling out the Beretta. He fired once before it cleared the holster, the shot hitting Wray’s heart at point-blank range, the second shot lodging in the JDF agent’s stomach — again at point-blank range — throwing the agent back against the wall, streaking it with blood. The Japanese’s legs buckling, he slid down to the floor, blood spurting out from the gut wound. The interrogation door swung open and Chong fired again, dropping another JDF agent, others scattering in all directions.