South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

Mellin nodded. As far as he could remember, Chical 3 was a rig — or at least what had been a rig — off Livock Reef about a hundred miles northeast of the island they were now on, one of the more than 220 island reefs, cays, and shoals that made up the Spratly, or, as the Chinese called them, the Nanshan, island group.

  “What’s your name?” Murphy asked in a low tone, looking not at her but rather at the two guards she’d warned them about.

  “Fortescue,” she answered. “Shirley Fortescue.”

  “Well, Shirl,” Murphy responded. “Thanks for the tip.”

  Danny Mellin could see the woman, in her mid-thirties, didn’t like the Australian’s easy familiarity with her name. “Shirley,” she corrected Murphy.

  “Righto, luv,” Murphy said, smiling. “No problem.”

  Mellin watched the Australian eyeing her more closely now, taking note of an hourglass figure which even the drab black POW pajamas couldn’t hide. “Things could be worse,” he told Danny with a wink. There was a growling sound nearby — one of the other prisoners’ stomachs complaining of hunger.

  “Hey, Shirl,” Murphy whispered. “How ‘bout using a bit of the old Mandarin and asking Upshut when we get a feed? We’re all bloody starving.”

  “No,” Danny said quickly. “Don’t let them know we’ve got someone who can understand their lingo. We might find out what—”

  Upshut swung about. “Who talks?” he shouted. No one said anything, and for a moment there was silence between the sounds of the dredge claw bringing up more dislodged coral, water, and kelp streaming from it, and dumping it. One of the prisoners, a Vietnamese, got up and, holding his hand up like a child in class, asked, in what Shirley Fortescue could tell was a border dialect of Cantonese — the Chinese spoken in the south — when they would be getting some food and drink.

  Upshut’s cohort gave a long, loud answer, after which the Vietnamese who had asked the question sat down desultorily, shrugging his shoulders.

  “What’d he say?” Murphy asked.

  “I think,” Shirley Fortescue said softly, “that the guard said we’ll get some water but no food until we finish our work.”

  “Work?” Murphy said. “What fucking work? Ah, sorry, Shirl, but I’m not working for these assholes.”

  Upshut was coming straight at him, clicking the fold-out butt of the Kalashnikov to use the AK-47 as a club.

  “Sorry!” Murphy said, quickly raising his hands. “Sorry.”

  The Australian’s raised arms stopped Upshut, who made a show of folding the butt, shortening the weapon, and grunting, pleased by the Australian’s surrender, nodding his head as if to say, That’s better, now you know who’s boss.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Generals Wei and Wang were pleased by their armies’ southward offensive but were by no means complacent. The Vietnamese Army had given them a bloody nose in ‘79, no matter what Beijing told the Chinese people. And neither general wanted a repeat of that performance — when the supply line had simply not been able to keep up with their own advance units, so entire battalions went without water for several days and were as much in danger from dehydration as from the Vietnamese.

  Another factor that the PLA generals had to take into consideration was that what had begun with a four-mile-wide front spearheaded by the Fourth Division of the Nanning army had now spread out to a ten-mile front. The two PLA generals were concerned that if Vinh’s Vietnamese divisions managed to launch a concerted counterattack, they would be able to punch a gap in the PLA line and do a “breaststroke.” That is, the Vietnamese spearhead would first punch a hole in the PLA front, then divide into two arms, both swinging back southward like the arms of a swimmer doing the breaststroke, first cutting off elements of the PLA’s Fourth Division, then encircling segments of the advance Chinese troops in a “scissors handle” maneuver. They would isolate the PLA troops for piecemeal destruction and rush more Vietnamese north from the Hanoi military region.

  Despite this risk, elements of Wei’s army heading south on the eastern flank of the ten-mile front knew they must push forward down the valley beyond Lang Ro to capture and/or render the airstrip at Kep inoperable, then swing eastward to Haiphong, the port for Hanoi in the Red River delta. But here lay another possible bone of contention between the PLA’s military commander and their political officers. Generals Wei and Wang had their political officers, equal in rank to the generals, and both political and military officers had to come to an agreement about strategy — right down to the tactical level— before the troops could be given specific orders. The Vietnamese Army under Vinh, as Freeman had discovered, was run in much the same way.

  At first sight Westerners were unimpressed by the system, so cumbersome, so different from their own. Or was it? Freeman asked his staff as they prepared the plans for the deployment of Second Army, whose supplies were now being unloaded at Haiphong.

  Freeman, to the consternation of his aide, Major Cline, answered his own question about the similarity of the PLA command structure and that of the West. Typically, he overstated the position by pointing out how General, later President, Eisenhower had ordered General George Patton to halt what Freeman called Patton’s “magnificent end run” into Eastern Europe in 1944, and how Dee had not wanted the Americans, British, and Canadians to beat the Russians to Berlin, so that “the goddamned Russians’ noses wouldn’t be out of joint.”

  “That, gentlemen,” Freeman said, “was nothing less than a political decision by Ike. Another thing — it was Harry Truman who tied Doug MacArthur’s hands behind his back when the general wanted to cross the Yalu in Korea and hit the red bases inside China — another political decision. Don’t look so stunned, gentlemen. I just want you to know that we have our own commissars in the West. We just put ‘em in the State Department and call ‘em experts!”

  Cline and Boyd had been equally startled by the general’s analogy.

  “Jesus!” Cline told Boyd. “If a reporter ever heard him say that, the shit’d really hit the fan.”

  * * *

  It hit the fan anyway, but for a different reason. Someone, somehow, had gotten hold of what the general had said to Cline and Boyd immediately after the press conference. A highly profitable and thoroughly disreputable tabloid in the United States used its morning edition to scream via a four-inch block headline, in capital letters:

  USVUN FORCE IN DISARRAY

  ‘WE GOT THE S-T KICKED OUT OF US!’—GEN. FREEMAN

  Soon the general’s remark had been carried via cable network news to every country in the world. Anti-American sentiment was buoyed by the U.S. embarrassment, which caused red faces from the Pentagon to the White House, whose “spokespersons” were pressed by a media frenzy to explain why the advance elements of the over two and a half thousand U.S.-led U.N. emergency response team had bungled their first engagement in Vietnam. Were they exhibiting the same deficiencies that had afflicted an earlier generation of Americans in Vietnam?

  It was like a spark to a powder keg of emotion as American Veterans of Vietnam and others, from as far away as the Korean and Australian contingents that had fought alongside the Americans in Vietnam, rallied to the defense of their younger compatriots, most of whom, outside Freeman’s emergency response team, had just arrived in Vietnam and had not yet engaged the “Great Wall of Iron,” alias the PLA.

  Freeman was furious with both Boyd and Cline, reminding them that they were the only ones to whom he had made the remark that was now drawing fire from “every son of a bitch liberal in the country!” Both men assured the general they’d had nothing to do with it — hadn’t said a word. Cline was brave enough to draw the general’s attention to the unpalatable fact that the cries back home for firing the general were not confined to “every son of a bitch liberal,” but in many instances were coming from the right wing because of his admission that the U.S.-led force had met with failure the first time at bat and that he had already, before this remark, personally taken responsibility for the action in which Ameri
cans were killed by “so-called friendly fire.” Also, several large evangelical groups loudly objected to the general’s use of “scatological references” in his speeches.

  Within twenty minutes of the political storm breaking about him on CNN and the U.S. networks and their affiliates around the world, a phone call came into the U.N.-EMREF HQ now at Phu Lang Thuong, twenty-eight miles north of Hanoi on the Hanoi-Lang Son road. Captain Boyd’s face looked pale as he said, “Yes sir, yes sir, Mr. President,” and handed the receiver to Freeman.

  “General.”

  “Mr. President.”

  “You know why I’m calling. I can’t have my military commander making public comments of this kind. Now, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job in the field, but I must remind you that I can’t very well support you being C in C of the USVUN forces when you go around — albeit unintentionally — undermining the American public’s confidence in the American army.”

  Nothing had hurt Freeman in years as much as the President’s last comment.

  “Mr. President, I apologize. I’d never willingly bad-mouth my men. That’s not what I meant sir. I was merely giving an off-the-cuff assessment, a military man’s assessment, of the Chinese breakthrough at Lang Son. S’matter of fact I was referring to General Vinh’s forces more than I was ours. Why, our men haven’t really closed with the enemy to any—” Freeman stopped. What was it the French said? “Lui qui s’excuse, s’accuse.” He that excuses himself accuses himself! “I’m sorry, Mr. President.”

  “Well, I’m going to accept that, General, but I have to tell you that I’m under one hell of a lot of pressure here to fire you.” There was silence. “I wouldn’t want to do that, General, but I might have to. You must understand my position.”

  “I do, sir.”

  The President tried to end it on a note of levity. “Trouble is, General, you’re one heck of a good field commander, but I have people here from Defense as well as State telling me you’re another Georgie Patton — just great when it comes to getting the job done in the field, but you’re a bit, ah, bullish in a china shop when it comes to political nuances. Am I being fair?”

  “I’m bullish on America, Mr. President.” It wasn’t meant to be a joke, but the President liked it anyway.

  * * *

  The next morning, under increasing political pressure, the President fired Freeman from his position as C in C Vietnam USVUN forces, relegating him to command U.S. Second Army on the ground but putting the U.N. task force under the command of U.S. General Dean Jorgensen, en route from Washington to Hanoi.

  “By God,” Freeman said in conference with General Vinh when he received the news. “They’re sending me a commissar.”

  General Vinh, with barely any emotion, said, “Welcome to the club.”

  Major Robert Cline knew if he didn’t say what was on his mind to Douglas Freeman right now, he’d never have the guts to say it again. The major begged General Vinh’s pardon and asked Freeman if he could speak to him privately for a moment. Freeman, frowning — which almost destroyed Cline’s resolution — excused himself from Vinh and his party. “Yes, what is it, Bob?”

  “Sir, can I be utterly frank with you?”

  “Yes.”

  Cline inhaled deeply and said, “General, you’ve got to be more — I don’t know — politically sensitive.”

  “Politically correct you mean!” Freeman responded, glowering at the major, the general telling Cline that, “goddamn it,” he had been the first U.S. general in history to use women as chopper pilots.

  “No, sir! I don’t mean ‘politically correct,’ I mean politically sensitive. General, that crack you just made about Washington sending you a commissar, and yesterday your remarks to the staff about there being commissars in the State Department — and we don’t know how that remark you made to Boyd about the Chinese kicking the shit out of us first time to bat got out — but if your comments about ‘commissars in the State Department’ leaked to the press—” Cline paused for breath, his shoulders tight with tension. “—you’d be ruined, sir. They’d fire you as field commander as well.”

  Freeman was still glowering, his cheek muscles bunched up, his jaw set in a look of ferocious determination. “Are you finished, Major?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  For what seemed like an eternity to Cline the general stood there in the tent. Freeman’s head was nodding, the rest of him immobile. “All right, Bob, you’ve made your point. Oh, hell — I agree I’m not politically—sensitive—that the word you used?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, you’re right, damn it! I’ll try to be more—” He exhaled heavily, “—’sensitive.’ “

  Cline smiled with relief. Boyd entered the HQ clutching a sheaf of faxes. Freeman turned to him. “What’ve you got there, Captain? More bad news?”

  “And some good news,” Boyd replied.

  “Give me the bad first.”

  “Beijing radio is using your, ah, demot — ah—”

  “Demotion.”

  “Yes, sir. They’re using it as a sign that Americans will fail against the PLA the same as we did in Vietnam earlier — in the Vietnam War….” Boyd hesitated.

  “Go on!” Freeman ordered.

  “Sir, they said we’ll be crushed like beetles.”

  “Did they?” Freeman said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well,” Freeman said, turning to Cline, “they’re being very insensitive about beetles, Major. You think we should make a protest on behalf of the beetles of the world?”

  Cline shrugged and smiled. “They’ve probably got a beetle lobby on Capitol Hill, General.”

  “By God!” Freeman riposted. “You’re probably right.” He turned to Boyd. “So what else are they going to do to us American beetles?”

  “I don’t know, General.”

  Freeman pointed at the pile of faxes Boyd was holding. “Well, what else do you have for me, son?”

  “Messages, sir, from various veterans’ associations all around the country. Basically they’re all saying—” He looked down at one. “—It says, ‘Tell it like it is, General. Give ‘em hell!’ “

  “Huh!” Freeman laughed. “Who? The PLA or Wash—” The word died on his lips, his right hand giving the stop signal. He smiled at Cline, then turned to Boyd. “Thank them on my behalf, Captain. Much appreciated.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Freeman glanced over at Cline. “Is this century crazy or what? I’ve just been demoted for being politically insensitive — for telling the truth — and now Vietnam vets from our most unpopular war in history are telling me to hang tough and help the Vietnamese.”

  “It’s the new world order, General.”

  “Huh — in some ways I prefer the old. Least you knew what was what.” Freeman made his way back to the operations table, where Vinh’s staff were obviously impressed with the 3-D computer graphics of the terrain up north from the Red River valley and the high country about Lang Son, showing the last known disposition of Vinh’s army. But Freeman observed the graphics with a jaded edge. He knew how pretty it all looked, but he also knew that the computers were only as good as the information going into them, and right now the information had to be highly suspect, as Vinh’s forces and the advance elements of the U.S.-led U.N. force were fighting desperately to form a defensive line to somehow stop, or at the very least slow down, the PLA’s advance. And tactical air support from the carrier group was not yet possible because of heavy overcast curdling in from the Tonkin Gulf.

  Even if the weather changed immediately, TAC support would have to be guided in to bomb pinpoint positions at night via infrared sighting, and at the moment all Vinh and Freeman knew was that their respective forces were in retreat. Until the situation stabilized, his airborne infantry and artillery now being deployed from Haiphong to Hanoi couldn’t be used effectively.

  Most of Freeman’s staff, including Major Cline and Captain Boyd, were amazed by the general
’s stoicism in view of what they, like many others, saw as a humiliating demotion, overall command being given to Jorgensen. But if Freeman appeared sanguine about his fate, it was in large part because he believed in destiny and knew that now he would be freer to do what he knew he was best at — fighting — directing and leading his men at the front. For Douglas Freeman, his demotion was to be seized upon as opportunity, and he thanked God for it.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “ ‘Ello.” It was said with a distinct French accent followed by an offer of French champagne and two tulip-shaped glasses.

  Marte Price had just finished using a gravity shower that a helpful Marine had erected outside her tent, and she was now drying off as the French reporter LaSalle poked his head farther into her tent. “Anyone ‘ome?”

  Startled, not yet having dried herself, Marte stood draped in Army khaki towels. “What do you want?”

  “Some company — yes?”

  “No. Get out!”

  LaSalle gave a shrug worthy of Maurice Chevalier. “But I cannot. The champagne, she is opened — how do you say? Ah yes, opened for business.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Marte retorted. The Frenchman was handsome, no question about that, the archetype of the kind that women fell for — tall, lean, very physical in his movements, but with eyes sensitive to the slightest nuance. And he could see that she had seen the outline of his erection as he gazed at her sleek, long thighs before they got lost in towels.

  “Very well,” he said accommodatingly. “I will leave the champagne for you and no offense. Okay?”

  He reminded her of Hawkeye in the “M*A*S*H” TV show. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Maybe another time?”

  It struck her that LaSalle could give her some general background for her stories — after all, it had been French Indochina till 1954.

  LaSalle shrugged, smiling. “ ‘Ow about in ten minutes? The champagne will ‘ave lost some of its bubbles perhaps, but—”