South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  Chong ran out firing two shots at random, clerks and other agents diving for cover behind desks as Chong reached the elevator. It wasn’t open. Immediately he ran for the stairwell, where, taking a terrorized woman hostage, pressing the gun’s barrel against her neck, he made his way out into the street. It was now dark and raining, the Ginza strip’s neons coming to life as he walked down the street. Suddenly releasing her, he made a dash down an alley and disappeared into the nighttime crowds of shoppers, the wail of police and ambulance klaxons filling the air.

  Chong’s escape and the three men he left dead in the JDF building provided a field day for the press and a nightmare scenario for those officials responsible for the Japanese end of the logistical supply trains that were to provide the American Second Army in Vietnam with vitally needed supplies. The JDF now knew that as a hunted man, Jae Chong had nothing to lose. There was no doubt that he would be recaptured, but the question was where he and/or other North Korean agents would strike next.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  North of Hanoi along the road to Lang Son, General “George C. Scott” Freeman, to his acute embarrassment, found it necessary to halt his advance recon cloverleaf patrol because of lack of information about where General Vinh’s forces were.

  To make matters worse, the Chinese Fourth Division had penetrated the Vietnamese Army positions along the fifteen-mile Lang Son-Loc Binh front, pushing Vinh’s regulars back along the Lang Son-Ban Re railway, creating the possibility of widespread confusion between the EMREF’s advancing reconnaissance patrol and the retreating Vietnamese.

  For now, Freeman and Vinh decided to have the EMREF recon force withdraw sixty miles south to Phu Lang Thuong along the hundred mile Lang Son-Hanoi road so as to avoid any further blue on blue incidents. One of the deciding factors in the U.S./U.N. Vietnamese decision to have the American and U.N.-led force pull back was the lack of good radio communication between dispersed Vietnamese positions, creating the ever-present danger of a unit of withdrawing Vietnamese running into allied or their own units in the thick jungle.

  Freeman could have easily rationalized his forces’ pullback, as press officer Boyd advised, by pointing out the inferior Vietnamese communications ability, which posed the greatest danger of a blue on blue. Instead, Freeman, in a CNN interview that night, explained the pullback as a joint tactical decision made by him and General Vinh. It was a face-saving gesture for the Vietnamese which General Vinh would not forget. Freeman’s pullback of his EMREF spearhead, however, received less than fair treatment in most of the world press. It became an opportunity for all those who either disliked and/or were jealous of Freeman’s reputation as one of the most, if not the most, aggressive U.S. field commanders since George Patton.

  “Will you be withdrawing any farther south, General?” a British news pool reporter asked. With Vinh looking on, Freeman hedged his bets. “We may find it necessary to regroup to Bac Ninh, ten miles farther south, but—” He turned to General Vinh. “—I don’t expect anything more than that.”

  General Vinh nodded his agreement immediately, which told Freeman the Vietnamese general knew more English than his interpreters had led the U.S.-U.N. team to believe. Freeman held up his right hand to signal that the press conference was over. “Cam on rat nhieu.”

  Press officer Boyd, surprised, looked at Major Cline. “I didn’t know the old man could speak Vietnamese.”

  Cline smiled. “There’s a lot you don’t know about the old man. He does his homework.”

  “Well, do you know what he said?”

  “Some form of thank-you, I think. But he sure didn’t like that limey’s question about maybe pulling back farther. Apart from Skovorodino, it’s the only time I’ve seen him pull back. It’s against his religion.”

  “Which is?”

  “His creed is Frederick the Great’s. ‘L’audace, l’audace— toujours l’audace!’ Audacity, audacity, always audacity!”

  “Maybe,” Boyd said, “but he didn’t get off to much of a start.”

  “Stick around,” Cline advised. “He’ll surprise you.”

  “For instance?” Boyd challenged.

  Robert Cline thought for a moment. “Freeman was in a winter battle once, leading U.S.-U.N. forces. One of the many wars that’ve erupted since the Berlin Wall came down and we got the ‘new world order.’ Anyway, Freeman gave the order to withdraw his armored corps of M-1 tanks — retreating from Russian-made T-72s. Everybody thought he was nuts— cracking up.” Major Cline paused to light a cigarette.

  “And?” Boyd pressed.

  “And,” Cline continued, “as the temperature kept dropping — minus fifty degrees, minus sixty — Freeman kept pulling the M-1s back. Until it got minus seventy with windchill factor — then he suddenly orders all the M-1s to stop and attack the T-72s.” Cline took a deep drag on the cigarette. He liked this part, wanted to tease it out a little, show how the Freeman legend had grown, that it wasn’t all bullshit like some of the Johnny-come-latelies thought it was.

  “So?” Boyd said, anxiously awaiting the outcome. “What happened?”

  “M-1s slaughtered the T-72s. Knocked out over ninety percent of them.”

  “I don’t understand,” Boyd said.

  By now Marte Price had come in on the fringe of the conversation. “I remember,” she said. “The oil in the Russian tanks froze at minus sixty-nine degrees, right? And the waxes separated out in the hydraulic oil lines — clogged the lines like lumps of fat in an artery. Russian tanks couldn’t move. Seized up, and Freeman’s tanks knocked them out.”

  Major Cline blew out a long stream of smoke. “Thanks for ruining my story, Ms. Price.”

  “Call me Marte.”

  “All right. Thanks for ruining my story, Marte.”

  “You’re welcome, Major,” she answered impishly. “You’re not the only one who knows Freeman’s a stickler for detail.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The truck carrying Danny Mellin, the Australian Murphy, and a dozen or so other POWs, including several Vietnamese and Caucasian women, abruptly stopped, the prisoners told to get out by the two AK-47-toting guards.

  Once down on the crushed coral road, the prisoners, despite some of them limping and showing other signs of wear and tear, were ordered to start marching down the whitish road toward a clump of trees from which the noise of construction issued forth, along with Chinese shouts. The stubby trees were more like tall brush, and soon through gaps in the trees the prisoners, most of them Vietnamese with two Australians and three Americans, could see a long line of men in black pajamas, about fifty or so, passing what looked like variegated stones on a fire-dousing line.

  As Mellin and Murphy got closer to the gaps in the scrub, they could see that cement powder was being passed as well, and was being used to build hut walls about ten feet high.

  Up to this point Mellin, like most of the other POWs, thought he was somewhere on the southern coast of China. But then, rounding a bend in the road, Mellin, Murphy, and the others were astonished to see an endless expanse of ocean.

  “Jesus,” Murphy said. “We’re on a friggin’ island.”

  “Up shut!” shouted one of the PLA guards, jabbing the Australian in the ribs with the Kalashnikov.

  “Okay, mate,” the Australian said with a conciliatory smile. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar.”

  The guard smashed him in the back with the rifle butt, sprawling the Australian on the crushed coral road, his arms lacerated and bleeding. Mellin bent down and, despite the fierce headache he was suffering from his earlier altercation with the same guard, helped the Australian back to his feet. “Be quiet,” he whispered to Murphy. “They’ll kill you.”

  The next second there was what sounded like an enormous underground explosion, the crushed coral road beneath them trembling momentarily, and now the sound of the detonation hit them in a series of gut-punching waves. The guard who had hit them, and who would soon be known to the POWs as “Upshut,” was laughing, ca
lling out to the other guard at the head of the line and pointing to the stunned disarray of the prisoners.

  Mellin and Murphy, like the rest of the POWs who had been landed by the destroyer, would find out the next day, after spending a very uncomfortable night in the open, that the explosions, which were underwater and offshore, were part of the PLA’s plan to use the blown-up coral to add height to what was essentially a reef island, one of the many in the Nansha or Spratly Islands, which at high tide was covered with several inches of water, large parts of it becoming visible only at ebb tide.

  But building up the island reef and maintaining it with a company of over a hundred PLA marines was only part of the PLA’s plan to occupy all islands in the Spratly and Paracel islands. A more pressing purpose was at hand, but it was one neither Danny Mellin nor Mike Murphy would discover until the sun rose on another perfect tropical day. It would be a day that would turn into a nightmare for all those taken prisoner by the PLA’s invasion and occupation of rigs and islands scattered throughout the two strategic groups of South China Sea islands, cays, and atolls.

  For Mellin it was like being back in ‘Nam, and as he lay there beneath a bloodred moon, caused by the pollution of rig fires, he became disgusted with himself, for his hands were trembling and he feared that the guard’s brutality had not yet reached its peak. It was the only thing he was sure of; everything else — why they were here, for instance — was an open question and laden with anxiety. He’d given up smoking years ago, but right now he craved a cigarette, the stronger the better, to calm his nerves. Incredibly, next to him Mike Murphy was fast asleep and snoring, “to beat the band,” as the Aussie would have said, but then the Australian hadn’t been in a war before, and as yet hadn’t suffered the soul-breaking loneliness of the POW in solitary. Perhaps the PLA wouldn’t separate them — and perhaps when you’d finished doing whatever they wanted you to do, they’d shoot you in the neck. He heard a prisoner urinating and the never-ending crashing of the sea on the reef.

  * * *

  After Jae Chong’s escape — during which he had killed two JDF agents and Wray of the CIA — the ambulances raced through the city to help those injured by flying glass during the melee. In the JDF’s HQ there was special consternation among the staff. How was it that the American, Wray, was permitted into the room while he was still armed, a direct contravention of internal JDF regulations? Someone was going to get it in the neck for that violation, and never mind about the possibility of the families of the deceased suing, even though the JDF officially had no office of Intelligence.

  In all the confusion of how to word the official report of the shootings that would have to go to the minister, it was a junior clerk who found what looked like a phone number written on a piece of paper that had been lying, blood-soaked, in the interrogation room. He gave it to his section chief, who immediately punched out the number on his computer, waiting for the number/address correlation listings. It came up on the screen as a local number for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  “Very amusing,” the section chief said, decidedly unamused.

  The headquarters staff got the distinct impression that the chief was more interested in recapturing Chong for ridiculing him than for killing the two agents and the American. To be on the safe side, the chief ordered a stakeout of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. It wasn’t beyond the range of possibility, he told his staff, that the gaijin Chong had written down an actual contact number — that some other gaijin working for the KFC outlet was in fact a spy.

  For a few days, however, the chief’s loss of face could be measured in the number of chicken and cock-a-doodle-doo jokes doing the rounds of the Japanese Defense Forces HQ. That is, until the funeral of the two agents and the return of Wray’s body to the United States, reminding everyone that Jae Chong, the uncooperative comedian, was also a killer, and a killer who now had nothing to lose as one of the biggest manhunts in Japanese history got under way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Taipei

  “You turd!”

  “You’ve been looking in your mirror, you asshole!”

  This edifying exchange was not unusual. It merely signified that yet another day of “debate” had begun in the democratic life of the Li-fa Yuan, Taiwan’s legislature, between the Nationalist and Democratic Progressive parties. The subject of discussion was whether or not Taipei would contribute any of its well-equipped and superbly trained armed services to the U.N. force under the command of General Douglas Freeman. Taiwan, as the congressman, Shen, from Kaohsiung in the south put it, was caught between a “rock and a hard place” about what to do in the conflict between the U.N. — in effect, the United States — and China. If Taiwan did not contribute to the joint U.N. force, Congressman Shen pointed out, then Washington would be angry, but if Taiwan did furnish troops and materiel to the U.N. force, then Beijing would be furious. Indeed, Beijing had already cautioned Taiwan about getting involved on the American side. “Remember,” the Communist Chinese had warned them, “after the war you’ll still be there and we’ll still be here — only a hundred and sixty kilometers away. We can wait. Fen-shen-suei-ku—we will break your bones.”

  A member of the Nationalist opposition party rose and suggested that if the government was too “gutless” to throw Taiwan’s hand in with the Americans, who, during the hard times of the fifties, had contributed enormous amounts of aid as well as putting the U.S. Seventh Fleet between Taiwan and mainland China to thwart a Communist invasion, then the very least Taiwan could do was contribute money to the U.N. cause.

  “Like Japan!” a Nationalist party member charged, springing to his feet. “As gutless as Japan in the Iraqi War. War by checkbook!”

  “You talk of war by checkbook! You, the ardent followers of Chiang Kai-shek!”

  The joke was a pun on the English phrase “Cash My Check,” the name Harry Truman had given to Chiang Kai-shek. That such an aside could be made in the Li-fa Yuan, no matter that several legislators wanted to punch Mr. Shen in the nose for making it, was a measure of just how far — or, for the Nationalists, just how low — Taiwan had come in its surge to a multiparty democratic system.

  “We’ll break your bones!” shouted another legislator in warning that there was a dire risk of war with the mainland should Taiwan assist the U.S. or the U.N. In any case, another warned, the Americans wouldn’t want a war on two fronts— Vietnam and Taiwan.

  “On three fronts,” another legislator said. “Don’t forget the Spratlys — Beijing certainly hasn’t.”

  In addition to risking war with the mainland, Taipei had another serious matter on its mind, namely the fact that because Taipei had prohibited direct offshore investment in the mainland economy, which would constitute a de facto recognition of Beijing, the only way in which Taipei businessmen could do business with the burgeoning entrepreneurs of the mainland was to either become petty smugglers or, if they were big investors, to funnel their money through middlemen in Hong Kong, such as Jonas Breem, within his South Asia Industries Group.

  * * *

  When the Taiwanese noninterventionist decision reached the White House, there was disappointment on the part of the President, but not surprise. Americans had not had to live under the guns of the PLA for almost half a century. However, among the Joint Chiefs of Staff there was resentment in view of the fact that U.S. forces and billions in foreign aid had helped Taiwan develop into one of the powerhouses of Asia with one of the highest levels, if not the highest level, of personal income per year. CIA chief David Noyer helped put the situation in perspective when he advised those present at the morning intelligence briefing that despite Taiwan’s official refusal to become involved in the U.N. stand against the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China could still be helpful in maintaining and, where possible, activating its covert network on the mainland and in the South China Sea.

  “Submarines?” the President inquired. “They only have four, and none of them are nuclear.”

  Th
e Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Reese, was impressed by the President’s recall of Taiwan’s status in the military balance of power.

  “No, not subs,” Noyer said, “though I’ve no doubt they could prove useful in helping us with guarding our Japan-Vietnam convoys, and Beijing’d have no physical proof of their intervention. But what I mean, Mr. President, is their clandestine operations on the mainland — saboteurs. If they could help sabotage the Ningming-Lang Son railway in the south, we could sever the head of their logistics line.”

  “For how long?” Ellman asked.

  “Depends on what kind of job the Taiwanese agents can do. However long it is, it’ll help Freeman’s force.”

  “Fine,” the President said. “But what if the Taiwanese are captured and talk?”

  Noyer shrugged. “Beijing’s hardly going to go to war with Taiwan over that. Besides which, Taiwan’s agents on the mainland are mostly mainland Chinese. For most of them it’s not a matter of ideology — it’s just another way of making money.”

  “Like the smuggling,” the President said, “that goes on between Fujian province on the mainland and Taiwan.”

  Ellman suppressed a grin. The President was showing off. Fair enough — it wasn’t a bad idea now and then to let the Joint Chiefs and Noyer know that he knew more than he told them in his briefing papers. “And besides,” the President continued, “there’s already a tremendous amount of jealousy in China between the north and the more prosperous south. The northerners are seen as snobs in power, while the south is prone to much more capitalistic-type economic drives. And there’s one hell of a lot of resentment by the minority groups and the non-Mandarin-speaking groups against the north.”