by Don Brown
“Who’s in charge of the medical treatment?” Fred’s question brought looks from every man on the bridge, followed by a rapid-fire translation into Mandarin by Lieutenant Ho.
The man adjusting the IV spoke in Mandarin.
“He says he has been in charge,” Ho said.
“Tell him that I am a United States Navy doctor. Tell him now I am in charge.”
Translation followed. First Ho. Then the medic’s response. “He says he will obey your instructions, Doctor.”
Petty Officer Randall arrived on the bridge, accompanied by two more Taiwanese Marines carrying the surgical bags that they brought from the Vicksburg.
“What’s the condition of these men?”
Response in Chinese. Translation. “All shot by bullets from helicopter. Some in stomach. Some in arms and legs. We have some antibiotics, but short on everything else. We have no blood. This man bleeding badly. Shot in stomach. Will die with no blood.” The medic pointed at the man he was standing beside. “They all die with no blood.”
“Is he the most serious?” Fred asked.
“All serious. He the most.”
Fred walked over to the man. His face was pale, his breathing slow, his mental state delirious. The bandages around his abdomen were soaked with fresh blood. Fred looked back at his corpsman. “Christian, come over here, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stay with this man. Keep pressure on wounds to try to reduce the blood loss. That’s the only thing that might save him.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fred walked to the next cot. The patient looked up at him, grimacing. The bullet hole was high in the front of the right leg, just below his pelvic region. The blood-soaked makeshift tourniquet, which consisted of a ripped sheet, was tied above the wound, and a second bandage held down gauze on the wound.
“Help me!” the man cried in a raspy voice in Chinese-accented English.
“Lieutenant Ho, bring me that medical bag right beside you.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Fred kneeled on the deck and zipped open the bag. Removing a syringe, he drew a small dose of morphine into it.
“Somebody cut this man’s sleeve off.”
A quick translation. Then, one of the Chinese medics cut the sleeve with a pair of scissors. Fred reached back into the bag for a cotton ball, soaked it in alcohol, and then swabbed an area high up on the man’s upper arm.
“Hang tight for me, my friend.” He slid the hypodermic needle into the man’s arm and depressed the plunger. “This will make you feel better.” He removed the needle and put it back in the bag. Fred noted that the man’s leg would need amputation.
He started a brief examination of the four other men on cots around the bridge.
“Who is in command of this ship?”
The man in the center of the bridge turned around. “I am Chan. The First Officer. I am in command.” The man spoke in better English than Ho. “Subject, of course, to the orders at the moment of the armed occupiers we have on board.”
“Well, Mr. Chan,” Fred said, “your medics have done a good job considering what little they have to work with. But without blood transfusion—and soon—your men will die.”
“We have no blood on board, Doctor.”
“I understand,” Fred said. “That’s why they must be medevaced off the ship immediately. I recommend that they be airlifted to the USS Carl Vinson, an American aircraft carrier. The Vinson is en route to the South China Sea. She has surgical facilities and enough blood to save their lives if we can get them there in time.”
“Very well, Doctor,” the Chinese seaman said. “Do what you must to save them.”
“Lieutenant. Radio the Kee Lung. Relay message to USS Vicksburg. Request emergency transport of six men, critically wounded, to USS Carl Vinson for blood transfusions and treatment.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Lieutenant Ho said. He barked orders in Chinese to another Marine, who nodded and saluted. “My assistant will relay request for emergency air transport to USS Carl Vinson of six PRC nationals for emergency treatment and blood transfusions.”
“Excellent,” Fred said. “I believe you had something else you wanted to show me?”
Lieutenant Ho’s eyes locked with the first officer’s. It was a tense and mutual stare down.
“Mr. Chan here showed this evidence to me. He claims no foreknowledge of this cargo.”
“What do you mean by evidence?” Fred asked.
“You must see for yourself, Doctor. No discussion. Mr. Chan will escort us to the cargo bay.”
“Is that necessary, Lieutenant?” Chan asked.
“Necessary for you to come? Yes! You are to look again, Mr. Chan. You are carrying this … this disgusting cargo for money!”
“I told you I knew nothing about it!”
“Yes,” Ho snapped. “So you have said. You better pray that the evidence supports your claim.”
“Okay, gentlemen,” Fred said, “I’m not staying on board this freighter all day while the two of you argue. Whatever it is, let’s get to it. I have a job to do on my own ship.”
“Let’s go, Mr. Chan.” Ho opened the door. “After you.”
They fell in behind the Chinese first officer. Two ROC Marines followed them. When they reached the main deck and stepped out into the sunshine, Fred decided at that moment that he was done smoking. He pulled the pack from his pocket and tossed it overboard.
“This way,” Chan said.
They stepped through another door and were back inside the ship. They descended another ladder and at the bottom, just down the passageway, was another double door.
“This is the cargo bay,” Chan said.
“Open it,” Ho said.
Chan opened the doors, and a rush of cold air hit them.
“Feels like an icebox,” Fred said.
“The cargo bay is refrigerated,” Chan said.
“Let’s go, Mr. Chan,” Ho snapped. “Get it over with.”
Chan stepped in. Fred followed him. Lieutenant Ho and the two Taiwanese Marines followed Fred.
Fluorescent lights illuminated the long, narrow passageway that stretched back away from the entrance perhaps twenty yards. Plywood-crated boxes were stacked up along the bulkheads on each side, from the deck to the overhead.
Ho just stood there, saying nothing. Doing nothing. It was as if both Ho and Chan had been stopped in their tracks by some magnetic force.
Fred broke the silence. “What’s in these crates?”
The question stirred Ho from his trance. “Mr. Chan, unscrew the plywood from the center crate. Sergeant, Corporal. Unscrew a plywood side on the crates to the left and the right.
The three men walked over to a wall-mounted toolbox, grabbed three power screwdrivers, and began to remove the plywood.
The center plywood sheet, the one Chan had unscrewed earlier, fell to the floor. Chan turned away, bent over, and started heaving.
Fred walked over to examine the large glass container that was inside the crate. The container resembled a large aquarium.
“Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” He squinted his eyes to get a better look. “Oh, my God. Please, no,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Just then the sergeant and the corporal both removed the plywood from their containers and slid them onto the deck. They too turned away as if suddenly sick.
Fred stepped back. Even the strong stomach of steel that all doctors have to possess, the callous resistance to the grotesque, a product of his medical training, had been weakened.
Fred looked around the cargo bay, from one side to the other and to both ends of the long passageway. No one was looking at what was in the glass-covered containers. Not Lieutenant Ho. Not Mr. Chan. Not the tough rifle-bearing Marines. Over in a corner, Chan was puking.
Fred knew he had to take control. He was the doctor. Whatever had to be done was up to him.
He turned back to the large aquarium-like glass tank in front of him. Miniature hands were p
lastered up against the glass. The faces and eyes stared out at him in a frozen look of terror, the agony of a painful death, screaming in silence for help that never came.
Others had no faces. For one, the skull had been crushed. Another’s face was unrecognizable, like an obscure picture on a folded napkin. Locks of black hair floated like a halo in the clear liquid in which they were entombed. Some had no hair.
They were infants. Some were late-term fetuses, fully formed, their umbilical cords dangling in the liquid.
Fred stepped closer. Between the three tanks that were now uncovered, perhaps eighteen to twenty dead babies and small children floated in clear liquid—probably formaldehyde. Some were turned away from him—only their backs and buttocks visible.
From the ones he could see—and he checked all three tanks to make sure—all were girls.
Fred stood there in the cold floating dungeon, in a secret world kept hidden—until now.
Then, as his eyes moved to the temple of one little girl, the shock that had initially gripped his body morphed into rage. How had he not noticed this before? He looked again at her temple, just under the lock of black hair.
A puncture wound. Perhaps the result of an ice pick through the brain. Or a long nail or narrow spike.
The baby packed just under her had no hair, and so the mortal puncture wound to her head was visible and easy to see.
The infant jammed just under the bald girl had black curly hair and no puncture wound to her head. Instead, her neck had been slit. Fred stepped back.
That’s when he saw them all: puncture wounds to temples, slit throats, crushed skulls. He walked over to the other two tanks. All the same.
Fred turned around. “Lieutenant Ho. Mr. Chan. What’s going on here? Why are these babies in these tanks? Where are you taking them? Why?”
Silence.
“I want an answer!”
“Tell him, Chan!” Ho said.
“They were sold to a medical company in Bangkok,” Chan said.
“A medical company.” Fred shook his head. “Okay. First, I want all the plywood removed from these crates.” He thought about that for a second. “No, belay that.” He glanced at his watch. “We don’t have enough time. Just remove the rest of the plywood from these three tanks. Then set out three or four big tables in here. Stretch the tables out in a line, end to end.
“Take these babies out of the tanks and lay them on the tables. I want to examine them. We’ll need gloves.”
Fred looked at Ho. Ho nodded and looked at the sergeant and corporal. “You men, do as the doctor said. Take the plywood off. Sergeant Lu, you are in charge of the setup.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Mister Chan,” Ho said.
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Get tables from the ship’s galley. Have them brought in here to serve as examination tables.”
“Yes,” Chan said. “In the galley. In the lounge. We have tables.”
“Very well,” Lieutenant Ho said. “We will all go topside. I will assign a couple of my Marines to accompany you and some of your crew members to bring tables back down here and set them up.”
“Yes, of course.” Chan’s voice sounded both defeated and dejected.
“Doctor, do you have any other instructions before we go topside?” Ho asked.
Fred felt his shirt pocket for a cigarette. Then he remembered he had thrown his only pack overboard.
“Yes. We’ll need plastic sheets to cover the tables. Lay the babies out on the plastic. I will also need digital cameras along with a pen and a legal pad … some paper. This will need to be documented photographically. You got that, Mr. Chan?”
“Yes,” Chan said. “We have all that. I knew nothing of this, Doctor. Please tell your superiors that I knew nothing of this.”
Fred looked Chan in the eye. Usually he knew when a patient was lying to him. Shifting, nervous eyes marked a liar. Sincere eyes, slow to blink, slow to glance left and right or up and down, these eyes marked a truth-teller.
Usually.
Chan’s eyes neither danced with deception nor reflected the peaceful gaze of sincerity. In Chan, Fred saw only fear. Probably fear of execution by firing squad. Perhaps worse.
Still, somehow, Fred believed Chan. The spontaneous puking all over the deck could not have been contrived.
Or could it?
“Tell you what, Mr. Chan. When we get back up on deck, if you can spare a cigarette and a light, I just might have something in my medical bag that can soothe that stomach of yours.”
“Thank you, Doctor. I have many cigarettes. I be happy to share.”
“Lead the way, Mr. Chan,” Ho said.
Chan pushed open the door, and Fred was grateful to step from that dungeon, that refrigerated tomb.
They headed back up the ladder and stepped back out onto the deck—back into the light of the late-afternoon sun, now nearing the horizon.
Fred stopped and just looked out to sea. He closed his eyes, his face soothed in the warm caress of sunshine. This was better medicine than he could prescribe on even his finest day as a doctor.
“How about that cigarette, Mr. Chan?”
“I have it here, Doctor. Here is cigarette and a lighter.”
Fred lit the cancer stick. And then, in desperate need of a nicotine fix after what he had just seen, he inhaled as deeply as he ever had. He exhaled, then flipped the cigarette overboard.
“Thank you, Mr. Chan. I just quit smoking. Now let’s get to work.”
USS Emory S. Land
South China Sea
late afternoon
The wind whipped out of the northeast, and with it, the steady footing at the forward watch station had given way to alternating thirty-second intervals of up … and then down … as the Emory S. Land plowed into the five-foot swells that were still building.
The stream of sunshine that had baked the mid-afternoon temperatures into a hot inferno had yielded to recurrent shadows from high-forming rain clouds sweeping the seascape, blocking the sun for longer periods, bringing cooler breezes mixed with the warm weather.
Off in the distance, boiling clouds rose into the heavens. Under them, black vertical streaks connected the clouds and the water.
Although Stephanie was a young, green ensign, she had already learned the summer weather patterns in the tropics. Showers, often thunder boomers, rolled in during the late afternoons.
The seascape was graying, and she worried that the weather would threaten visibility. In a rainstorm, they could steam within a hundred yards of that downed chopper and never see a thing.
The first raindrop splattered on the steel deck a few feet from where she stood.
Then another off to her right.
Then three more fell at her feet.
Out in the water in front of the ship, maybe three hundred yards out, a hundred thousand angry raindrops pelted the cresting waves, beating down the foam of the whitecaps. This great shower wall rolled inbound, like a giant wall stretching for miles from left to right, its furious path marked by the splashing line. “You’ll need this if you stay out here.”
She turned around at the sound of his voice. He had already donned a black rain poncho, one with the silver oak leaves of a Navy commander on his shoulders. In his hand he held out another black rain poncho for her.
She took it from him. “Thank you, sir.” She smiled at the thought of him thinking about her. As he helped her slip it over her shoulders, the ship collided with the rain wall.
She pulled the hood over her head, just seconds before her hair would have been drenched.
“You know, Stephanie, there’s no point in staying out here right now,” he said in that rugged South Carolina accent of his, raising his voice just enough to be heard above the sound of thousands of drops of rain pelting the steel deck around them. “You’ve got no visibility.”
“Thank you, sir. But if it’s okay, I’d rather stay here. This weather will clear. And when it does, I’d like to
be here to make sure that our visibility is maximized at the moment it clears. If there’s even a slight window to find these guys, I don’t want to be anywhere other than right here.”
He looked at her. The rain intensified. His face turned serious. “There’s something you should know.”
“Yes, sir?”
He looked off into the stormy horizon. “Seventh Fleet has pulled off the helicopter conducting the aerial search.”
“I don’t understand. Is it the weather?”
“No. Not the weather.” He looked back at her. “This China-Taiwan war is heating up. Taiwan requested assistance from one of our Navy choppers. The request was approved.”
“I’m stunned,” she said.
“Even worse,” the XO continued, “Seventh Fleet has ordered us to end our search at sundown.”
She struggled for words. “So who … who would pick up the search after that?”
The XO shook his head. He looked at his watch. Hard rain splattered off the glass face.
“Stephanie, we’ve got an hour and a half.” He looked at her. “Maybe two hours at most. Even less than that when you consider that our visibility is zero because of this rainstorm.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Silence. Except for the steady drumming of the rain. Her emotions almost took over, but she steeled herself.
“All the more reason to stay at my post, sir. With your permission, I’ll stick this out until the end.” With that, she pulled herself to sharp attention and snapped a sharp Navy salute to her superior.
He returned the salute and disappeared into the rain.
US Navy life raft
South China Sea
somewhere between USS Vicksburg and USS Emory S. Land
The whipping late-afternoon wind lit into the waves, and the small orange raft rolled up and down along the elongated swells that had come to life in the sea.
Gunner poked his head out the entrance of the waterproof orange tent. The sky had turned a menacing gray. A few sunbeams still broke through the clouds out on the horizon, but for the most part, the sun had surrendered to darkening clouds. Off in the distance, black vertical streaks fell from the clouds.
He ducked back into the raft and zipped up the door of the tent. He lay down on the floor of the raft and looked up at the orange ceiling, now dimly translucent with a faint orangish color, but fading darker with the heavy cloud cover and setting sun.