The Pacific Rim Collection

by Don Brown

  “God, please bring rain. But not too much wind.”

  Gunner closed his eyes. Trying to sleep. Up … Down … Up … Down …

  Swish … swish …

  Phat …

  Phat …

  Phat-Phat-Phat … Phat … Phat-Phat-Phat …

  The sound of a thousand driving rain pellets pounded the roof of the tent.

  Gunner opened his eyes. He reached up and started unzipping the flap. Rainwater poured through the crack and started flooding the canvas floor inside the raft.

  Gunner raised his face to the sky, soaking in the cool of the glorious rain. He opened his mouth, and cool raindrops splashed on his parched lips and tongue. He swallowed them, as best as he could, as small as they were, soothing his dried-out throat.

  He looked down. About an eighth-inch of water was covering the bottom of the raft.

  Like a dog about to lap his parched tongue into a fresh stream, Gunner bent over, touched the canvas deck, and drew a stream of fresh rainwater into his mouth. He sloshed the water around his tongue for a few wonderful seconds. Then he swallowed.

  Liquid manna from heaven! Praise God!

  “Woohoo! Keep raining! Keep raining!”

  The Lincoln Bedroom the White House

  5:00 a.m. local time

  Knock … knock … knock …

  “Mr. President?”

  Douglas Surber glanced at the digital clock beside his bed: 05:00.

  “Be right there, Arnie.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The president swung his legs out of bed, grabbed his bathrobe, slipped it on, and walked over to open the door.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Wish I could, sir.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Sorry to bother you so early, sir,” the pinstripe-suited Brubaker said, “but both the secretary of defense and the secretary of state have requested an emergency meeting of the National Security Council. The council is convening right now in the Situation Room.”

  “At this hour? What’s going on?”

  “Taiwan and China, sir. We’ve got a report back from the Shemnong. It needs your immediate attention.”

  “Okay, Arnie. Be right out.”

  Five minutes later, the president, accompanied by his chief of staff and two armed black-suited Secret Service agents, stepped into the 5,000-square-foot White House Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing.

  Everyone in the room rose to their feet.

  “Sit down. Please.”

  Not all the members of the NSC had arrived, but the main power players were present: Vice President William O. “Rock” Morgan, the Chairman of the Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff Admiral Roscoe Jones, National Security Adviser Cynthia Hewitt, Secretary of Defense Irwin Lopez, and Secretary of State Robert Mauney.

  “Okay. What’s the justification for dragging me out of bed thirty minutes early?” He glanced at his secretary of state and then at his secretary of defense. “Who wants to start?”

  Mauney and Lopez looked at each other.

  “It’s early, gentlemen,” the president snapped. “Let’s get moving here.”

  “I’ll start,” the secretary of defense said. “Sir, two things. Earlier this morning you authorized dispatch of a Navy doctor, via a Navy chopper, to the Chinese freighter Shemnong, which had been commandeered by Taiwanese Marines.”

  “Yes, at my two a.m. wakeup call,” he snorted.

  “Well, there are two items for immediate attention. One, our doctor on the Shemnong has requested an emergency medevac of some of the Chinese crew members. The other involves evidence that our doctor gathered on this crimes-against-humanity issue.”

  “Sounds like a fine way to start the day, Mister Secretary. Why don’t you start with the emergency request first.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lopez said. “Six members of the Chinese crew were shot up pretty bad and are critical, sir. Our doctor says they need blood transfusions or they’ll die. Problem is the nearest facility for treatment is on board USS Carl Vinson, and the doctor is requesting these men be airlifted to the Vinson for emergency blood transfusions, which is the only means of saving their lives.”

  “Let me get this straight. The doctor is asking for helicopter transport of six civilian Chinese sailors, who’ve been shot up by the Taiwanese, to a US Navy ship for emergency treatment?”

  “That’s correct, sir,” Lopez responded.

  Secretary of State Robert Mauney said, “Mister President, I don’t think the doctor is thinking about the diplomatic ramifications of his request. He’s just thinking about saving lives.”

  The president poured himself a cup of black coffee from one of the heated pitchers that had been set out for every attendee prior to the meeting. “Okay, Bobby.” He eyed his old friend. “You’re my secretary of state. You’ve never held back your thoughts, even when you used to clean my clock on the tennis courts at Providence Country Club. So let’s hear your thoughts.”

  Mauney screwed the cap back on the bottled water he was drinking. “Sir, the phrase ‘political hot button’ hits the nail on the head. We do have a longstanding history of using our military to help render humanitarian aid whenever possible. But if we medevac these guys, the Chinese might find out that we’ve got a US officer on board a Chinese civilian freighter that has been attacked by and is now under the control of the Taiwanese. Their enemy.”

  Brief silence.

  Mauney continued, “This could be spun against us a dozen different ways. A Navy doctor becomes an American military adviser to Taiwanese Marines—or an intelligence officer rendering assistance to the enemy.”

  “Bobby, you’re right,” the president said. “This thing could blow up. But if I do nothing, these men will die. We could always grant the medevac request and tell the Chinese the truth, that we responded to a humanitarian request from the Taiwanese to save Chinese sailors, their own citizens.”

  “We admit that,” Mauney said, “and we admit that we’ve been in contact with Taiwan during this shooting war. You know how paranoid the Chinese are. I mean, we’re sending the Seventh Fleet to try to quell this whole thing, to keep the two Chinas from going to war against each other. If we lose even the appearance of impartiality, we lose whatever influence we have to keep this thing from blowing up. This thing blows up, we’ve got both a military and an economic disaster.”

  “So we just let these guys die?” the president said. “Let’s face it. Eventually, the Chinese will find out anyway. There will be crew members of that ship who will have seen our doc and talk about it.”

  Another pause.

  Vice President Rock Morgan said, “Mister President.”

  “Mister Vice President.”

  “Sir, you may wish to consider the evidence for the second issue on the table—the issue of crimes against humanity—before you make a decision on the medevac request. You may decide that your decisions are linked.”

  The president took a deep breath. “Thank you, Mister Vice President. Okay, who wants to address this one?”

  The secretaries of defense and state again exchanged glances.

  The president waited, then said, “Let me make this easy. Secretary Lopez, let’s hear it.”

  The secretary of defense looked up. “Mister President, our Navy medical officer on board the freighter, Lieutenant Commander Fred Jeter, has investigated this claim. There’s a large refrigerated cargo bay on that ship. In the cargo bay, Dr. Jeter discovered dead babies. Perhaps up to a thousand.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right, Mister President. Ranging from late-term fetuses to … the doc estimates up to two years old. Maybe a little older. All the children so far are girls. What’s more, every one that he has examined appears to have been murdered. He’s opened only a few of the containers, so these are estimates.”

  “Am I hearing this right?” The president struggled for words. “Little girls? Murdered? I don’t understand. How?”

  “We’ve got photos. Th
ey are horrible, sir. Some have had their skulls crushed. These appear to have been killed during late-term abortions. The older ones, the doc notes, were killed in other ways—ice pick to the brain, slit throat.”

  The president tried to process what he had just heard. “And you say we’ve got photos of this?”

  “We have some photos right here, Mr. President,” Lopez said. “And, sir, as a reminder, these shots are graphic.”

  “Give ‘em here, Irwin.” Douglas held his hand out to the defense secretary. As he took the yellow envelope, Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Roscoe Jones grimaced. National Security Adviser Cynthia Hewitt looked down at her feet. Vice President Rock Morgan tightened his lips. “You’ve all seen these?”

  “Yes, sir,” the vice president said. “We have. And the secretary of defense is correct.” Surber glanced over at Lopez, then back at Morgan. “Except frankly, the word used by Irwin, that these are ‘graphic,’ is an understatement.”

  The president reached into the large manila envelope and felt a stack of eight-by-ten photos. Carefully, he slid them out.

  The top one was a close-up shot of two small infants that froze him in his seat. He could not pry his eyes from the sickening photograph.

  “Dear God. How did this happen?”

  “There are a lot more, Mister President,” someone said.

  One by one, he studied them all. More of the same. All girls. The Navy doctor had documented the gruesome evidence abundantly. Close-up shots of puncture wounds to the temple. In some cases, a slit to the throat. Some of the very smallest ones had crushed skulls.

  How? How could this be? He thought of Stephanie, of how much she had meant to him and to Hope-Caroline over the years. Of how much he loved his only daughter with all his heart.

  He and Hope-Caroline once had a son.

  Even before he was born, they had already started loving him, and seeing him active on the ultra-sound, they could even sense his personality. They knew that he would be an athlete. Hope-Caroline played classical music close to her abdomen. He enjoyed Beethoven and would slow down and not kick so much when she played Beethoven’s Ninth. But when the music ended, he would wake up and start kicking again.

  The boy was very active in his mother’s womb up until three days before he was born.

  Then he stopped moving. The baby arrived stillborn.

  They named him Alexander Manning Surber. They gave him a Christian funeral, then buried him in a casket the size of a shoebox. Three people had gone to the grave that sunny afternoon—his father, his mother, and the minister.

  Douglas Surber could think of nothing else that had ever ripped his heart in such a cruel coldness. Hope-Caroline cried every day for a solid month. Finally, he sent her to Palm Springs for a week to try to recuperate in the warm desert sunshine.

  Though they’d never seen their son in life, they loved him even in death. On the day of his burial, they’d joined hands and prayed to be reunited with him in heaven someday. But still, only Stephanie’s birth the next year stopped the awful grieving.

  As he stared at the photos, the old knife, once again, jabbed pain straight through his heart. He had hoped never again to feel that pain. But the photos triggered flashbacks of Hope-Caroline’s uncontrolled sobbing during the long days alone after Alexander’s burial.

  “Does no one value the gift of life anymore?” he asked. “Is there no innate sense of decency? Wasn’t there enough shock from photos of Nazi death camps liberated by our troops?” No one answered. “And now this. How could someone be so callous to human life? Just to kill little babies in such a brutal and cold way. And to kill because they are girls.”

  He held the final photo, studied it, and then laid them all facedown on the conference table.

  “Okay, someone tell me. I want to know who did this. Because if I find out, it’s not going to be pretty.”

  The secretary of defense said, “Mister President, we’ve retrieved copies of the ship’s log. She was in transit from Qinzhou, China, to Bangkok, Thailand, with an interim stop at Itu Aba, in the Spratlys, to drop off military equipment.”

  “All right.” The president could not contain the anger in his voice. “Will someone please explain this to me. What were they going to do with these little girls?”

  “To sell them, sir,” Secretary Lopez said.

  “Sell them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why? Who would buy them?”

  Lopez looked at Mauney. “I’ll defer to the secretary of state.”

  President Surber looked at Bobby Mauney. “Bobby, what’s this about?”

  “Well, sir, the ship’s manifest lists them as medical supplies.”

  “Medical supplies?” Surber slammed his fist on the table. “These are babies! They are not medical supplies!”

  “Of course, Mister President. This is a situation the State Department’s human rights section has been following. I’m talking about the sale of the corpses of Chinese babies on the black market. There is a shortage of baby corpses for medical research and for other purposes, and baby corpses and parts command a high price on the international black market.”

  “Medical research,” the president parroted Mauney. “What other purposes?”

  “We hear they’re for some sick cultish type of sacrifices and rituals in India and Southeast Asia.”

  The president wanted to vomit. “And so someone is murdering babies to feed this black market?”

  “We’ve heard this is the case. But we haven’t had solid proof”—Mauney looked down at the photographs, then met the president’s eyes—”until now, sir.”

  Douglas pounded his fist on the table. “Who did this? How could this happen?”

  “Sir, who did it remains to be seen. But how it happened … it happened, I’m sure, because of China’s one-child sterilization policy.”

  “Wait a minute,” Douglas said. “I knew Mao had instituted this forced-sterilization policy. But this goes way beyond forced sterilizations.”

  “Correct, Mister President. We’ve heard that the Communists’ forced sterilization exceeds forced sterilization—that babies born beyond the first child have been killed, sold on the black market, and that the Communists have targeted little girls because they complain about having an overpopulation of girls in China.”

  Douglas leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “How widespread is this problem?”

  “Well, sir, put it this way. Our Asian human rights officials in the State Department have monitored the situation, along with other situations in Asia like slave-trafficking and sexual exploitation of minors.

  “Part of the problem is that we’ve had a lot of hearsay on all these matters. Back in March of 2010, the Economist magazine ran an article entitled, as I recall, ‘The Worldwide War on Baby Girls.’ At that time the Economist, which is one of the world’s most respected international periodicals, estimated that over 100 million baby girls had been murdered by or with the assent of governments aimed at curbing perceived overpopulation of women. The magazine reported that the largest percentage of those took place in China.”

  “One hundred million killed.” The president was trying to control his emotions. He’d gone from shock, to anger, to sorrow, back to anger, and now to shock again.

  “It’s a good thing I wasn’t born in China,” Cynthia Hewitt said, breaking the stunned silence. Hewitt had been President Mack Williams’ longtime national security adviser when Williams’ term had expired two months ago and had been asked to stay on by President Surber.

  “Bobby, you seem to be up to speed on this issue.”

  “Yes, sir,” the secretary of state responded. “There’s a huge market out there for the sale of baby cadaver parts. This, plus an innate disdain for girls in certain parts of the world, has resulted in this sort of thing.”

  “So they either abort or kill the babies and then sell the babies for profit,” the president said.

  “That’s one way of putting it, sir. It’s
a regular profit mill.”

  President Surber shook his head. “How long have we known about this, Bobby?”

  Mauney leaned back, exhaled, and crossed his arms. “Well, Mister President, the State Department has monitored this situation ever since the first Bush administration. But the problem, as I’ve mentioned, is that it’s been largely hearsay, based on word-of-mouth reports. Because of that, it’s hard to monitor.”

  “We’ve had abortions going on in this country legally since 1973,”

  Cynthia Hewitt said. “And we’ve known for some time that there’s a big market for the sale of those baby parts.”

  “I understand your feelings, Cyndi,” Mauney said. “And maybe there’s no distinction between killing a baby in the womb versus after birth. But whether we like it or not, abortion is allowed under the law in this country. But it’s against the law to kill a baby after birth.” Mauney’s eyes shifted from the national security adviser to the president. “In this case, it looks like we finally have evidence of someone killing babies after birth just because they’re girls.”

  The president looked over at the secretary of state. “Bobby, why haven’t you brought this to my attention earlier?”

  “As I said, Mr. President, we’ve never seen solid physical evidence of mass murder of babies. It’s all been hearsay.” The secretary of state picked up his packet of photographs and waved them in the air. “Until now.” He set the horrible images back down on the table. “Now … now we’ve got the smoking gun.”

  That statement resonated throughout the room, as if the secretary of state had proclaimed the advent of a significant historical moment.

  The president nodded. “Okay, so now on this ship, in the middle of this warlike atmosphere between the two Chinas that we’re trying to stop, because our country’s economy depends on it, now … suddenly … we’ve got smoking-gun evidence that the State Department has been searching for. So tell me. What do I do about it?”

  Secretaries Mauney and Lopez exchanged contorted glances.