South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  “Friend, Bac Baker. Friend of Americans. Okay?”

  True, the kid had indirectly got him the info about a couple of MIAs, but how about the woman and the lemon? Baker confronted the boy: Wasn’t that just a dead end to allow whoever was paying him time to ransack his hotel room?

  The boy didn’t understand “ransack,” but thought he understood after Baker had given him another dollar.

  “I don’t know who did this,” he said.

  To believe him or not? Baker wondered. He asked the boy who had hired him this morning, or did he just happen to rum up at the bus stop at that particular time? The boy was astounded by the question. Whether something had been lost in the translation or not, Baker didn’t understand. But in any event the boy said, “Same man yesterday, today. Same man, Bac Baker.”

  “Yeah, all right, but who?”

  The boy shook his head. “I tell you that, no more money. Bad for me. Okay? You understand, Bac Baker?”

  “Yeah, yeah. So are you going to tell me why you’re here at the market, right now?”

  The boy spat a long, crimson stream at a bug crawling on the sidewalk, missed, and told Baker, “He say to tell you Salt and Pepper be back.”

  Baker felt a surge of exhilaration with an overlay of panic. “Salt and Pepper will be back?”

  “No, be back.”

  “You mean they are back.”

  “Yeah, sure, that’s what I tell you. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Baker said. He suspected the warning as well as the initial contact made with the note came from the villager’s son, “Saigon.”

  “Tell whoever hired you, thanks.”

  “Sure, okay.” Baker gave him another ten thousand dong. The boy snapped the bill and smiled, showing his brown-stained teeth.

  As Baker walked across the pedestrian overpass from the Mai Building on a deliberate roundabout route to his hotel, he told himself to calm right down, as his mom used to tell him. “Just calm right down — don’t get so excited, all worked up.” Yes, it looked like the first solid info on MIAs he’d had in years, but it might be bullshit too. People everywhere wanted to make a buck and would tell you anything, right? But then how about the hotel room all messed up, and the damn snake in the village? All right, buddy boy, calm down. Call Saigon— not the guy, Ho Chi Minh City — tell them what you have, the people you’ve seen and so on.

  He dialed 01-8, then moved his body so that Ha Ha, the good friend of the police permit department, on shift again behind the counter, couldn’t tell the number he was dialing in old Saigon.

  “United States Legation. How may I help you?”

  “Jean, it’s Ray Baker here. Got some info on MIAs.”

  “Shoot!”

  “I hope not,” he joked, aware of the .45 in his coat pocket.

  “What?” Jean asked.

  “Nothing. Listen, I might be a bit soft-spoken and oblique here, but try to follow me. All right?”

  “Roger.”

  “Two MIAs. No evidence, only verbal, but a bit of monkey business with yours truly.”

  “A lot of business, Ray?”

  “Not so far, but definitely business.”

  “You want us to extend your personal liability coverage?”

  “Let me see. Hmm… could you do that by tonight?”

  “Might be difficult, Ray. We’re sort of busy up north.”

  “Yeah, of course. Ah, don’t worry about it. I’ve got enough coverage for tonight.”

  “You sure? I could always try our Hanoi rep.”

  “Nah, I’ll be fine. I might even grab a flight down tonight.”

  “I can tell you now they’re full — a lot of civil officials transferring south.”

  “Okay. I’ll book tomorrow. I’ll be fine. Friends coming around anyway.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive. One more thing, Jean. There’s been a complaint. Same two MIAs ran with the opposition. Now info is they’re guides for that movie The Killing Fields. They’re apparently doing a remake.”

  “In their own studio?” Jean asked, right on the ball.

  “Nah,” Baker replied. “Apparently they want to use the opposition’s.”

  “Oh. So is that all?”

  “No. They’re known as Salt and Pepper.”

  “Oh?”

  “One black, one white. That’s all for now. See you tomorrow night.”

  “You sure about the extra liability coverage?”

  “Yeah. ‘Bye.”

  Yeah, sure he was sure about extra liability coverage. Like hell he was, but what did it sound like to Jean — scaredy-cat! Look, the .45 was in his pocket. What the hell anyway? There’d be enough damn beetles on the floor, you’d hear anyone tiptoeing in. Besides, he’d crush up newspapers and throw them about — they’d make a hell of a rustle if someone tried to sneak in. And he’d use the dead bolt, sit with the .45 in his lap — on the toilet too. No way he’d take a shower or bath.

  After he walked up and put the key in the door, he took a couple of steps to the side so he was braced against the wall and pushed the door open with his toe. A few dead roaches, a couple of them live but stumbling. Everything looked normal. He did a check on the chest of drawers, having put a hair where the second drawer closed on the first before he’d gone to the village. The hair was still there.

  He went into the bathroom and washed his face, surprised by how dark the bags under his eyes were. He put a finger under each eye and pulled out to the sides. It took at least ten years off him. Was he vain enough to get a face-lift? He had always wondered why people bothered, but now, in his early fifties, he had a different perspective on it. He was starting to go bald — not a lot, but he could tell the difference. Jean was going bald too, and right now she was his best chance for a relationship.

  After a shave, a meal of cha ca—charcoal-broiled fish fillets with roasted nuts — salad, noodles, and fish sauce washed down by a bottle of Tsing Tao beer — the Chinese were being a real pain in the ass, but they sure as hell could make beer — he felt a lot better. The dangers he’d imagined during the day now seemed grossly overblown, and he contemplated the difference a good meal could make to one’s disposition.

  He ordered coffee and started worrying about how much he’d already gotten through to Jean in his semiplain language code. He decided to book out on the earliest flight available— the next day at noon.

  In his room, coat off, in his undershirt and trousers, Baker sat up on the bed as if on a desert island, ready to indulge one of his sins, and lit up a Camel no-filter, sucking the smoke in so he could feel it deep in his chest and see it flowing lethargically out in curlicue patterns, then watching it slowly dissipate above the land of the roaches. And if any creeps came through the door or from the side veranda, he would pump the bastards “so full of lead” that, in the words of James Cagney, when they fell they’d write!

  Later, the night clerk said that the beer had probably made him sleepy. Whatever it was that put him temporarily off guard, by the time Ray Baker got off one shot, his throat was cut, blood bubbling from the carotid artery, his attacker having slid up from behind, coming out from under the bed. He was dead inside a minute.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The mash unit had to be especially cautious when attending to Freeman’s wounds, not because he was a general, but because his Medic Alert disk showed he was allergic to certain antibiotics. When they got his wound cleansed and his hand bandaged up, they put his arm in a sling, which he immediately dispensed with. He walked back to the armored personnel carrier he was using as a mobile HQ, which, along with an armored cavalry unit, had made its way north along the Phu Lang Thuong road, then been airlifted into the west-east valley between Ban Re and Loc Binh.

  Freeman was worried about the fading light. Soon it would be dark, and the Chinese still in the tunnels would be able to exit within the USVUN area and create havoc. Freeman and Vinh knew that if this occurred, there were bound to be many more blue on blue incidents. But to
withdraw from the hillside would simply mean giving up the territory, the high ground, that the USVUN had fought so hard for all afternoon, and going back to the fields from which they’d started.

  Freeman, like Patton, said he never liked “paying for the same real estate twice,” and elected to hold the high ground. Vinh, however, cautioned that it was possible the Chinese might simply elect to retreat through the tunnel system on this side of the southern slope of the ridge to the ridge’s northern side. Freeman readily acknowledged the possibility. At least if the Chinese did slip out of the battle, he wouldn’t have to worry so much about blue on blue, but he would be faced with the prospect of more than five thousand PLA troops slipping north across the border, troops which — like those who slipped across the Yalu River in Korea — could not be pursued by his Airborne cav units because of the political decision in Washington and Hanoi that USVUN forces could not cross the Vietnamese-Chinese border, which was only a mile and a half north of the ridge.

  Vinh suggested through the interpreter that perhaps there might be a way of the USVUN “having cakes and consuming them.” He meant “having your cake and eating it.” Vinh said that if TACAIR attacks from the carrier USS Enterprise could keep up a steady bombing of the northern side of the ridge, bottling Chinese up in the vast underground tunnel system that traversed the ridge, then at least they couldn’t exit.

  “So they can’t crawl out and head north?” Freeman asked.

  “Yes,” Vinh said. “Then tomorrow we smoke out the tunnels through the camouflaged entrances and exits we found on the southern side today.”

  Now Freeman saw the extent of the Vietnamese general’s strategy: bottle their northern escape route overnight by ceaselessly bombing the northern side of the ridge, and in daylight man all entrances and exits you could find and smoke them out — with “white phosphorus” if necessary.

  Freeman ruled out white phosphorus, but not purely on humanitarian grounds. After all, the USVUN forces and the Chinese were already using white phosphorus grenades. But a regular grenade was one thing, a phosphorus grenade was something else. You couldn’t pump white phosphorus down into a tunnel system when you weren’t sure where the hell it was going to come up. If it got on your own men’s skin, you might kill more USVUN troops than those of the enemy.

  “Very well,” Vinh concluded, “we will use purple smoke. Blow that down, and wherever it comes up we’ll seal unless they agree to surrender.”

  “What if they decide to backtrack?” Freeman asked. “I mean what if Wang decides to come back through the tunnels to the fields behind us?”

  “Why go back to old ground you have lost?”

  “To try and escape south,” Freeman answered. “We don’t know how far south the tunnels go, do we? Besides, they have two battalions at least from their Fourteenth Chengdu Army down there in Disney World. Around a thousand men— infantry and some engineers.”

  “Why engineers?” Cline put in.

  “Because the bastards know how to dig, damn it! General Vinh here’ll tell you. Hell, his boys had over two hundred miles of tunnels in the Chu Chi system down south during ‘Nam. And despite all our technology, we couldn’t rout them.”

  “What makes you think we can do it here, General?”

  “Because—” Freeman hesitated. He was proud of his Second Army and he was loath to take anything away from them. “Because, Major, the Vietnamese have been at it a hell of a lot longer than we have, and in the tunnels, they’re better than we are.” He held up his bandaged hand. “Capiche?”

  Cline nodded. “All right, but meanwhile where’s General Wei?”

  Vinh pointed at the map. “Last intelligence reports say he is still proceeding down the Lang Son-Lang Ro road three miles to the west of us. But our — I mean, the USVUN heavy artillery is lined up along Lang Son-Ban Re railroad and are pounding shits out of them.”

  Freeman roared with laughter at the interpreter’s phrasing, adding, “By God, General, I hope you’re right. We don’t want our left flank penetrated.”

  “No.”

  That night the ridge became known as Disney Hill, not only to the men of Freeman’s Second Army and the USVUN forces, but by the pilots of the fighters and bombers preparing to take off from the Enterprise, even now before the sun went down. The great carrier was at the center of the battle group, along with other ships — submarines and combat air patrols included — pledged to the protection of the carrier as she turned slowly into the wind of the Gulf of Tonkin, her catapults already bleeding steam. She was ready to thrust her warplanes aloft, the aircraft a careful mix of A-6E Intruders, F-14 Tomcats, and F-18 Hornet fighter-bombers, loaded with everything from two-thousand-pound bombs and Sparrow air-to-air missiles to fuel air explosive bombs.

  There were no laser-guided bombs on this mission, for while the north side, and not the south side, of Disney Hill was to be hit, it would not be pinpoint bombing that was required to either kill or trap the Chinese in the southside tunnels, it would be power bombing — brute poundage. This was to be excavation by high explosive.

  Already in Primary Flight Control, the “handler,” PRI-FLY’s second in command, whose job was so complicated and many-faceted that it often could not be computerized, watched his models of the aircraft on his grid-crossed table. Nowhere is war as complicated as on the flight deck of a carrier when men and machines move in a rough ballet of hand signals amid a forest of constantly moving, different-colored jerseys.

  Two of these, gunner’s mates, Albright Stevens and Elizabeth Franks, a “grape” who in her purple jacket was helping to fuel one of the F-18 Hornets with JP-5 gasoline, had been lovers ever since he’d taken her to the movie at the beginning of the voyage. Both of them had since found time together in some of the hundreds of nooks and crannies aboard the huge ship, which, as well as launching planes in any weather, had to feed and minister to over five thousand crew members.

  “Lucky we ain’t on a sub,” Albright had told her.

  “You’d find a way,” she’d said.

  “Believe I would.”

  But that was then, and now they were in the Gulf of Tonkin, not a happy place in the annals of American history, and around them they knew the PLA navy was determined to somehow penetrate the carrier’s protective shield.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Hopes by General Jorgensen’s Hanoi HQ that relief might come to Freeman’s USVUN troops through sabotage by proxy — by having Taiwan-run saboteurs hit China’s southern supply route on the Ningming-Dong Dang railway — began to fade as night fell upon the battle zone.

  The vote in Taiwan’s Li-fa Yuan was close, with several nonpartisan or independent members swinging the slim majority to the side of the Democratic Progressive party against the “old ones,” the second-generation right-wing remnants of the old Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek.

  In one of the strangest ironies of politics, the Kuomintang on the far right agreed with the Communist party on the far left that Taiwan was still a province of China. But here the agreement between left and right ended, for while the Kuomintang supported the USVUN presence against the Beijing regime, the Communist party was vehemently opposed. The majority of votes swung to the left, crucial independents afraid that any Taiwanese support for the USVUN would not only infuriate Beijing but be the end of the “understanding” between Beijing and Taipei. The understanding was a promise from Beijing that in return for Taipei’s support for China’s South China Sea claims, Beijing would split certain oil concessions in the northern part of the South China Sea, with fifty-one per-rent de facto control for Beijing, forty-nine percent for Taiwan.

  * * *

  “We can’t wait,” Douglas Freeman said, “for the Taiwanese Chinese to make up their minds.” His HQ staff were looking it the red pins that stood for PLA positions on and around Disney Hill.

  “But our State Department boys might be able to swing a few of the independents over to our side,” Cline remarked. Then maybe the Taiwanese’ll authorize
some of their agents in China to blow the Ningming-Dong Dang rail line.”

  “Huh!” Freeman grunted dismissively, his right fist punching the map of the southern China-Vietnamese border area. Too many maybes, mights, and what-ifs for my liking. By the time those fairies in State get off their butts, Chinese reinforcements’ll be trundling down from the Ningming railhead — in their goddamn thousands.”

  “Sir,” his nervous press aide interjected, “it’s not, ah, politically correct to refer to people as fairies. And if you mean gays, I’d advise you to modify—”

  “Modify!. To hell with political correctness. Wasn’t talking about gays anyway — long as they keep off one another and keep shooting at the enemy, they’re as good as any other soldier. The fairies in State I’m talking about are those dithering old farts who can’t make a decision. One desk jockey talks to another, and that’s all they do—talk—until it’s too late to do anything!” He slammed his fist against the map again, the Ningming-Dong Dang road shuddering violently.

  Freeman paused, but only to get air. “All right, look, here’s what we do. We send in a Special Forces squad to blow the shit out of the Ningming-Dong Dang line, and I don’t mean just in one place, I mean at least three breaks west of Ningming proper. Then again at Xiash and Pingxiang. They’ll nave to mend the line in so many friggin’ places it’ll give ‘em a nervous breakdown!” Freeman turned to Vinh. “You concur, General?”

  Vinh nodded and said something to his interpreter. “The general says this is a good idea but that Chinese nerves are very good. In 1979 they lost more than twenty-five thousand in just three weeks, and still reinforcements came through this area.”

  “Well, maybe so,” Freeman answered. “I don’t underestimate them for a second, but chopping up their rail line’ll slow them down — give us a chance to secure the border here.”