South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  “I wouldn’t go in there,” Chong said. “Drunk’s been sick all over.”

  The kid, frowning in consternation, nodded and backed off, not quite sure what to do. Chong disappeared back into the theater. The damn cornfields were back again, but he didn’t mind; the light helped him find a seat in an empty back row, where he slipped off his trousers, put on the old man’s trousers and jacket, and walked out. It was only now that he felt the bump in the jacket’s left inside pocket. He took it out and saw it was thick with hundred-yen notes, a small fortune to a worker like Chong. The irony was that there were no coins for a phone. He’d have to break one of the yen notes.

  * * *

  Colonel Melbaine still had Alpha Company on the top half of Disney Hill’s ridgeline waiting for the TACAIR bombardment to stop before they could sweep forward and force the remaining dug-in Chinese to come out or die in the tunnels.

  “I ain’t in no hurry,” D’Lupo told Martinez.

  “Neither am I,” Doolittle added. “We’ve got a ringside seat, mate. Besides, far as I’m concerned, they can bomb till hell freezes over.” Just then they heard sporadic firing behind and below them.

  “That’s a friggin’ AK down there,” D’Lupo opined, turning his head to look a hundred yards or so down the slope. Now, added to the explosions of the TACAIR bombs, they could hear the distinctive popping of USVUN M-16s, followed by the boomp boomp boomp of mortar rounds taking off, then the sound of a bugle.

  “Fucking hell!” Martinez said, swinging his rifle from the top of the ridge, pointing it downhill instead.

  “What the fuck’s that, man?” a greenhorn called from the next group of foxholes on their left flank.

  “It’s a fucking Chinese bugle, man,” D’Lupo informed him. “That way they don’t have to use no radio.”

  “They ain’t got no fucking radio,” Martinez said.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” came another voice.

  Then, whether or not it was a wild guess or whether he’d seen the outline of a PLA soldier illuminated by the burst of his Kalashnikov, Doolittle yelled, “Chinese!”

  “Where the hell they come from, man?” a black soldier asked.

  “From the fucking tunnels, you dork.”

  “Must’ve crept down past us, man.”

  D’Lupo had already switched off his safety. “Past us, crap, man. They’re coming out of the tunnels at the base of the hill, so’s they come right up in the middle of the fucking battalion, man, and behind us.” A figure came running at them from the direction of the bottom of the hill. D’Lupo fired and brought him down with the first shot.

  “No — no — no!” came a frantic, screaming voice. “Americans! Amer—”

  “Flares!” a platoon lieutenant from Bravo yelled, coming up on D’Lupo’s right. He didn’t want to illuminate his own troops, but with one blue on blue already, he had to chance it, yelling out “Flare!” again so that all those in Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie companies at the hill’s base could get their heads down and/or freeze to deny the Chinese any sign of movement. D’Lupo saw at least four or five PLA within a hundred feet of his nine-man section. Added to the noise of the air bombs there was now a cacophony of machine-gun bursts, purple and white flashes of exploding grenades, the firing of rifles, and amid them the crash of 82mm mortars, falling trees, and bushes blown sky-high, the fresh-smelling dirt from their roots coming down with other debris of stone and shattered wood on the helmets of the USVUN troops, most of whom were the Americans from Melbaine’s battalion.

  In the dying and flickering gray of flare light, Martinez cut down two PLA rushing his foxhole from the cover of low shrub while the American that D’Lupo had shot was being dragged by his buddy toward the foxholes of D’Lupo’s Alpha Company squad.

  “What the fuck you doing, man?” the buddy yelled at D’Lupo. “Oh, man!” The soldier was crying with rage. “You dumb bastards! You killed my buddy! You—”

  “Shut up, man!” the black soldier said, reaching out toward the downed man’s body. The soldier released his buddy and let fly with a left that missed the black soldier, causing the puncher to overbalance and fall. The black soldier grabbed the man’s collar. “Listen to me, man. Your buddy ain’t dead. Still a pulse, man! Get a grip on yourself. Now git down and shut the fuck up! Medic!” he yelled. “Man down—”

  Abruptly, he stopped shouting. One of the shots crackling overhead had hit the wounded man’s head, exploding his brain over other members of the squad. By the time the medic made it through the whistling shrapnel of a mortar round, the crying soldier’s buddy was dead, Martinez dragging the two bodies in front of him for extra cover. Martinez saw a Chinese fifteen feet away coming at him with a Kalashnikov look-alike, a T-56, on full automatic, its bayonet catching flare light. Martinez and Doolittle opened up, an M-60 tearing the air to the right of them, and they saw the Chinese soldier’s body stop, torso and legs lurching, an arm separating, the T-56 crashing to earth. Martinez, exhilarated by the kill, heart thumping in fear, cast a sideways glance at D’Lupo. “You all right, Lupe?”

  D’Lupo was throwing up. Martinez put his hand on his buddy’s shoulder. “Fucking accident, man. We all thought it was Charlie.”

  “Yeah,” Doolittle chimed in. “What’re we s’posed to do when the fuckers are amongst us? Ask for fucking ID? Son of a bitch shoulda yelled at us ‘fore he started running.”

  “That’s right,” Martinez said. “Gotta put it behind ya, Lupe.” But Martinez knew that D’Lupo would never be able to put it behind him.

  “Wish to Christ it was me,” D’Lupo said, his voice taut with anxiety.

  “Aw, rats,” Martinez said. “Listen, I’ll tell the captain.”

  Doolittle saw a shadow in flare light. Was it a tree or a well-camouflaged gook or one of his own? He fidgeted with his rifle, holding his fire. “We don’t have to tell anyone, Marty.”

  “Yeah, we do,” Martinez said.

  “Yeah,” D’Lupo said, his voice barely audible in the bedlam erupting all around them. “Yeah — we do.”

  D’Lupo was right, not just about having to report his blue on blue, but in having quickly assessed what had gone terribly wrong amid the USVUN units on the long southern slope of Disney Hill. The Chinese, instead of fleeing north of the ridge atop the hill or lying low until the TACAIR bombardment ceased, had come back, streaming through the tunnels like so many ants erupting out of exit-cum-entrances at the base of the southern slope and in the middle of the Americans. There were more U.S. infantry killed by friendly fire in the predawn darkness than all those accidentally shot in the Vietnam War.

  The Chinese showed no fear and no mercy, taking full advantage of the fact that, having burst forth from the tunnels— sometimes only yards from an American position — they were immune from the American artillery some miles south of the hill because of the well-known American and USVUN refusal to shell their own troops.

  With dawn approaching and the end of the Enterprise’s bombing runs just north of Disney Hill, Freeman’s forces were in sudden danger of catastrophe if the Chinese came out of their tunnels on the northern side and counterattacked. The Americans and other USVUN troops would then be caught in a “crush” movement between the Chinese who’d poured out of the southern sections of the tunnels and those who might still be alive under the bombed northern section.

  Major Cline opined that he didn’t see how anything could have survived the bombing on the north side. Freeman, who had been in an optimistic mood after having seen off the Special Forces, which were heading west on the mission to the Laotian-Vietnamese border, was now a man who knew Second Army and his career were a step this side of a military disaster if the Chinese counterattacked from the northern side. It was already a highly dangerous situation, with God only knew how many PLA already among his troops.

  He had to do something — quickly.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  From what he liked to call his eagle’s nest, Jonas Breem, in his wine-red velour robe
, gazed down on the blue early-morning reaches of Victoria harbor, pouring coffee from the sterling silver pot and pontificating on the stupidity of the Russian inventor, Kalashnikov, who had designed the most popular assault rifle in history, with millions now sold around the world, without Kalashnikov receiving a single royalty.

  “Now, if the doddering old fool had done business with me,” he told Mi Yin, who was just waking up, “he would have been one of Moscow’s millionaires. But no, with the mind of a peasant and true revolutionary, he gave the patent to the party, and some other old fool laughed his way to the bank.”

  Kalashnikovs were on Breem’s mind this morning because he had just brokered yet another delivery of five thousand K-74s between Moscow and Beijing for the PLA, and was reveling in his latest profit in excess of a hundred thousand dollars.

  Ironically, not all of the shipment had come from corrupted Russian factory managers, but from U.S. sellers who had seen the end of the U.S. market for the assault weapon following a congressional ban on the Kalashnikovs and others of their ilk. Breem was highly amused by the certainty that many of the rifles sold to him at bargain basement prices in the U.S. were now killing Americans, or “army suckers,” as he referred to them.

  “You want to be a loser, Mi Yin? Join the army. All the racking same, babe. Nowheresville. Know what I mean?”

  Mi Yin murmured something, but Breem, turning from the enormous grand-view window of his skyscraper, could tell she hadn’t heard, and when Jonas Breem spoke, everyone was supposed to sit up and listen. He picked up a tulip glass, still half full of champagne, and taking a step toward the huge, king-size bed, threw the silk sheets aside and emptied the contents on her crotch. “Hey, that woke you, eh?”

  Her mouth open in shock, Mi Yin shot up in the bed, quickly clasping a pillow protectively against her.

  “Oh, spare me the modest virgin bit,” Breem said, walking back to the table. “You’ve been gone through more times than — hey, what are you doing?”

  “Going to the bathroom,” she said petulantly. “Do you mind?”

  “Yeah,” Breem said. “Come here.” Tossing her hair back, the pillow still in front of her, she looked to see if he was serious. He was — he nearly always was.

  “C’mon. Come here.”

  She walked toward him, around the bed, trying to affect a nonchalant air of self-assurance, but she was still clutching the pillow.

  “Put that fucking thing down.”

  “I–I have to have a shower.”

  “You have it with a pillow? For Chrissake—” He snatched it away from her and tossed it on the bed. “You stink like a wino. You know that?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so.” Holding a cup of coffee with one hand, he gestured toward the bed with the other. “Go on, spread out. I feel like a dawn breaker.”

  “Can’t I shower first?”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” He smiled maliciously.

  She understood him all right. She was supposed to lie flat on her back and let him lick her.

  He undid the robe and flung it away from him, pressed a remote on the bed stand and the drapes opened wider. He liked to imagine everyone was looking up at him performing cunnilingus, “pissing themselves with envy,” as he put it.

  “Know what I’m gonna do to you?” He waited. “You know, babe?”

  “No,” she had to answer, even though she knew very well what they were going to do. They’d done it enough.

  “I’m gonna lick your cunt till it’s dry.”

  “No,” she said.

  He knelt over her. Suddenly his hand flashed out, slapped her hard on the cheek. Her face flushed with the pain and humiliation. “What?” he said indignantly. “What’d you say?”

  “No,” she repeated.

  “You little bitch!” He hit her again, so hard she began to cry.

  “Hey, hey!” He suddenly became solicitous of her well-being, kissing her. “You’re all right, babe — it’s all right.” The next instant, he slid back down her breasts, her body, and buried his head between her legs, his tongue darting hungrily like a lizard’s inside her, his hands bunching the sheets up beneath her to get her higher. Now he began licking her, his slurping noises like a cow with a salt lick. He stopped his breathing short, excited. “You like that, babe?”

  She knew yes was the answer he wanted, but he liked her to pause a moment as if teasing him.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Don’t stop.”

  “Love — you, babe — I—” He couldn’t say all the words, he was so aroused. Panting, he raised himself onto his elbows, his head sinking beneath her shoulders like a wildebeest at water. “Know what — I’m gonna do now?”

  “Yes,” she said. Oh God, she’d made a mistake, but before she could recant, he was raging at her. “You stupid bitch! What do I pay you for, eh? What—”

  “No,” she said quickly. “No, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what I pay you for?”

  “No, no,” she said frantically. “I mean I don’t know what you’re going to do to me.”

  “Ah…” He was on his feet, his tumescence already subsiding. She’d fucked up the script. It had to be perfect— goddamn it.

  “You stupid bitch — go on, get! Into the fucking shower, you — incompetent whore!”

  Mi Yin let the shower cascade over her, cleansing her, out of his grip for a few precious moments. The things she did for Beijing. She’d had enough. If she didn’t find out whether he was faking the well surveys, she’d tell Beijing he was anyway. The risk was they might want to see an original forged chart from which he’d made copies and on which potentially rich oil finds were hidden. It was a risk either way, but better be in the bad books with the party than stay any longer with this pig.

  She could see him naked through the curved, bubbled, and transparent glass wall of the shower. She saw his hand on the handle, and so she quickly turned off the shower. “Turn it back on!” he commanded her. With the water falling on both of them, he pushed her against the glass-bubbled wall, and she stiffened as she felt him rubbing the bar of soap between her buttocks. He was hard again, pushing into her rectum.

  “You like this, babe?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want it deep?”

  She hesitated.

  “You want it deep?”

  “To split me,” she said.

  “Atta girl.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Chong rode the subway for the next two hours. Perhaps he could send the message to Pyongyang immediately on his own recognizance, assuming the rumor to be true. But his training told him otherwise. Like a good newspaper reporter, he had always operated by confirming such a rumor on the basis of two independent sources. And so, as he sat in the subways, his face covered by the pages of the Asahi Shinbun, the subterranean reflections flashing past him like memories of another life, he waited until eleven-thirty before he called the two agents.

  One, an English speaker, was watching CNN’s transworld service. The other had already unrolled his bed mat when the phone rang. But both told him the rumor was correct, that Freeman had had large numbers of American soldiers, stationed in Japan, called to give blood for the USVUN hospital ship USS Tampa heading for the Gulf of Tonkin. This was normal in such war situations, but the Tampa had taken unusually large amounts of Rh-negative blood aboard. Chong again called the first agent, and worked the phrase “inclement weather” into his dialogue, an instruction to the agent to forward the information immediately to Pyongyang. In turn, Pyongyang sent a most secret, class one, number-for-word, onetime pad message to its embassy in Beijing.

  There is no Rh-negative blood in China. If the American general was storing it up aboard Tampa, it could mean only one thing: he was prepared to strike deep into China proper.

  North Korea secretly but immediately pledged troops to help China if this eventuality arose, knowing that China already had enough, with a professional army of over
two million. The gesture from Pyongyang, however, would be greatly appreciated and might well secure what North Korea, after her forced agreements with the U.S., needed, or rather wanted, most: to have China share as much as possible nuclear technology and/or weapons with North Korea.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  A mile south of Ningming, the barbed-wire enclosure Mellin and the other POWs had landed near was about two hundred yards long by one hundred yards wide. Rolls of German concertina razor wire formed another, inner perimeter five feet in from the outer rectangle. There were no buildings or tents, only ten-foot-high hills of cement bricks beneath blue plastic covers about a hundred feet apart, and between them a dozen or so pallets of bamboo either lashed or nailed together — it was difficult to tell from a distance — to look like long, fifty-by-twenty-foot rafts.

  “Don’t like the look of this,” Murphy said. “No bloody cover. What if it starts pissing rain?”

  “You’ll get wet,” Shirley answered.

  “Yeah,” Murphy responded. “So will you, luv.”

  “Don’t call me luv.”

  “Sorry, Shirl.”

  “And don’t—” She stopped. Upshut was looking their way. Danny Mellin noticed that the big barbed-wire enclosure to which they were being directed had been erected on higher ground above the marsh, and he commented to no one in particular among his fellow POWs that “we’re going to have to build our own accommodation. Sooner we do, sooner we’ll get cover.”