South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  * * *

  Within the closely guarded and vivid red-lacquered gates of Beijing’s Zhongnanhai, the government’s VIP compound, reaction was swift, with a message to Generals Wei and Wang to hold their positions at all costs, that “decisive” reinforcements were en route from Nanjing military district to the border. In fact, the Vietnamese supply line from Hanoi eighty miles to the south had been cut again, this time by PLA MiG-29 Fulcrums, so that Hanoi’s ability to resupply its troops south of Lang Son and Dong Dang was even further impaired, inviting a fresh Chinese attack, with Generals Wei and Wang eager to seize the moment and press farther south.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE ADVANCE PARTY of the Emergency Response Force, a mixture of 2,150 Marines and three squadrons of 216 British Special Air Service and 200 Delta Commandoes, left Britain and the United States by air ahead of Second Army. Meanwhile, General “George Scott” Douglas Freeman was busy in the cavernous interior of the lead L-100-30 Super Hercules.

  In addition to the 127 other combat troops in the first Hercules, another twenty of the aircraft would fly into Hanoi with the remainder of the advance party, which would chopper eighty-five miles north into the area around Lang Son. The advance units of Freeman’s Second Army and all its material were already on their way from Japan aboard the fast 20-knot vessels of the Military Sealift Command, including amphibious assault ships, helo- and Harrier-carrying ships from the 40,500-ton Wasp class, a 39,300-ton Tarawa, and an 18,000-ton helo-carrying Iwo Jima class. They were escorted by 30-knot Burke-class and Spruance-class destroyers, two Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruisers, and two combination SSBN/ SSN Sea Wolf submarines with cruise missiles and torpedoes.

  * * *

  Tokyo

  At 9:55 Chong moved away from the temple of Asakusa Kannon to the phone booth nearby and dialed Tazuko Komura’s contact number. When she answered, he knew she would be wearing white gloves. He asked for a Mrs. Yoshi. Tazuko Komura told him he must have the wrong number, there was no Yoshi living there. He rang off.

  Before Chong had made his phone call, six JDF intelligence officers had been milling in the crowd around the Asakusa Kannon — the minimum needed to follow anyone. All of them had seen Jae go into the phone booth and dial. Immediately, two of the closest agents made their way to the phone booth, one of them rudely stepping in front of a woman waiting her turn to enter the booth.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “but I am going to use the phone.” The agent said nothing. “I am going to use the phone,” the woman repeated.

  “No you’re not, mother.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Be quiet,” he said, “or I’ll arrest you.”

  “Arrest me?” she said, surprised. “And who are you, please?”

  The agent was losing it. Amid the murmur of the crowd around the shrine, their voices couldn’t be heard, but if the old woman kept on nagging at him…

  He would have to get the rare one, he thought, a woman who thought herself equal to men — the man they were watching, still in the booth, might hear them arguing as he came out.

  “And who are you, please?” the woman repeated.

  The agent had seen Jae dial four of the six numbers, but not the last two. It was something, but not enough. They’d have to feed it into the computer and have it print all the possible combinations of numbers.

  “And who are you, please?” she said once again.

  “Be quiet!” the agent hissed. He couldn’t hear what Jae was saying.

  The agent walked away as Jae hung up.

  “I thought you were in such a big hurry,” the woman called after him. “Did you hear him?” the elderly woman challenged the person lining up behind her. Jae came out of the booth. “And who is he? He’s a lout, that’s what he is. A shrimp brain!”

  The person she was addressing, another woman, but much younger and prettier, smiled weakly but obviously didn’t want to get into it.

  “Moyashiko,” bean sprout, the old woman said as she made her way into the phone booth.

  The agent joined his companion, and both of them sought out the American agent, Henry Wray, who was waiting in one of the surveillance cabs. The Japanese agent lowered his eyes in a sort of obeisance. “I only got four of the numbers,” he confessed.

  “Did you?” Wray said, but the American’s tone was more a hearty declaration than a question. “Well, we got the whole six!”

  The agent’s mouth was agape. “The truth?”

  “The same,” Wray said. “JDF boys had a bead on him the moment you saw him waiting. It’s a number in the north of the city, in Kita-Ku.”

  “Do we pick him up?” the agent asked eagerly.

  “No,” Wray said. “He’s just a messenger. We can get him anytime. What we want are the soldiers — who he calls — the action boys. Besides, we pick him up now, his friends soon know, the cell disbands, and then we’re back to square one.”

  “But we still tail him.”

  “Your boss and I think that’s the best way to proceed.”

  The agent nodded. Whether or not he agreed, it was impossible to tell. “Will we pick up the contact?”

  “We’ll do that,” Wray replied, indicating the other four agents in the car.

  * * *

  Tazuko Komura, after walking away from the public phone, made her way back to her apartment block, and in her tiny, boxlike kitchen, which smelled of pickled cabbage and fish, she sat down and turned on the news. The yen had risen again, worrying Japanese business about the resultant high price of her exports relevant to other countries. Tazuko was struck by the irony that the Japanese yen — because it was one of the strongest currencies in the world — was now giving Tokyo a headache with millions at stake in exports.

  She handled the TNT-based compound carefully but confidently, each malleable plastique piece of grayish-white C4 looking like a rectangular bar of putty except for its inverted-V-shaped bottom. Next Tazuko pushed in two aluminum blasting cap tubes, out of which came the detonating cord that would be started via a small, tubular, battery-operated electronic timer, its top resembling the rotary dial of a telephone except that instead of each hole moving ten spaces from operator to 1, the ten-holed rotary dial of the electronic timer was marked from one-quarter minute to forty-eight minutes. She would, of course, use the 48 setting, giving her ample time to walk away.

  Now on the news, the CNN feed was showing the massive sea lift of the U.S. Second Army from Japan, each of the two corps making up the army of 108,000 men. But for every man at the front, several were needed in support functions, so the actual number in combat would be no more than 27,000.

  Tazuko turned up the TV volume and heard that the American general in charge was someone called Freeman, but whether or not he was with the task force, they didn’t say.

  * * *

  An hour after Jae had made his call, U.S. CIA agent Henry Wray and his Japanese colleagues arrived at the phone he’d rung. It was another public booth.

  “Clever,” Wray said. “I thought it’d be a residence. Should have known better.”

  “Yes,” one of the Japanese agents said, but he quickly made it clear that this was not a slight against Wray, just an admission that they had all thought it would be residential.

  Wray looked about him up at the forest of apartment blocks and exhaled heavily. “Where?” he asked of no one in particular. If they couldn’t find the person who answered — and it didn’t look as if they would — then they were, as Wray had said, back to square one.

  The most senior of the Japanese agents spoke to the others, and just in case Wray’s Japanese was a little rusty, he explained in English, “We’ll dust the phone booth for prints. You never know.”

  Henry Wray nodded, his tone more one of resignation than expectation. “Might as well.”

  * * *

  Next morning, Tazuko made herself a picnic lunch of sushi, and also packed a small bottle of mineral water. Normally she preferred to eat from one of the side-street
stalls in Tokyo, but this day she didn’t want to go into any shop, because afterward they would be looking for anyone who had been carrying a shoulder bag large enough to transport the explosive. It was highly unlikely they would find her, she thought, but it was best to avoid any contact with anyone. It was a bright, sunny day and Tazuko took this as a good omen. And from a purely practical point of view, it meant she could wear her sunglasses, which of course gave her more cover.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Here!” the people’s Liberation Army bosun ordered, pointing brusquely to the portside entrance to the Jianghu frigate. On the bridge Mellin saw an officer immaculately dressed in white uniform and dark blue-banded white cap, a captain’s gold insignia on his collar tabs and shoulder boards, the red star in the middle of his cap. He was a small man but carried a quiet authority about him.

  “Why are you on this reef?” he asked Mellin.

  Mellin was astounded by the question, his earlier moments of reverie when he knew he would be rescued now supplanted by a perplexed mood. Why are you on this reef? Surely a child could see he’d been cast upon the reef. What did the Chinese think — that he was just passing by on a ship and suddenly decided, Oh, I’ll go and sit on a reef? Anyway, who in hell were they? Did they think they owned the damn reef?

  As he was to find out, that’s precisely what they did think— that they owned it and many more like it in the South China Sea among both the Spratly and Paracel islands, and it was not at all uncommon to have them station two PLA soldiers on a reef next to a lone four-to-six-foot-high marker claiming this or that particular reef was Chinese territory. If the published photographs of two hapless-looking PLA soldiers on duty atop a reef, unable to keep their feet dry, seemed humorous to others, they were deadly serious to the PLA. The two soldiers armed with AK-47s were ready to shoot anyone who tried to land.

  “Where is the marker?” the officer asked.

  Mellin looked from the officer to the bosun and back again. “What marker?”

  “There was a marker on the island, proclaiming it to be the property of the People’s Republic of China.”

  Mellin’s throat was so dry he found his tongue sticking to his palate, and his first attempt to answer was garbled. The Chinese officer, still looking disapprovingly at the American, said something to the bosun, who disappeared and reappeared with a worn enamel mug of water. Mellin nodded, gulped it down, handed the mug back to the bosun with a nod of thanks and told the officer, “I don’t know anything about a marker.”

  “There was a marker there,” the officer said angrily.

  “Look, I’m grateful for you picking me up, but I never saw any marker. Want to search me?”

  “Do not silly man,” snapped the officer, unaware of his grammatical mistake. Mellin, however, knew better than to show even the slightest amusement. This officer was not one for joking, the security of the marker amid competing claims for oil and minerals obviously his responsibility. Now Mellin understood what the Chinese who had taken him off the rock had so assiduously been looking for. Where had the marker gone?

  “There is no sign of it,” the officer said. “Did you use explosives?”

  “Listen, Captain—”

  “I am not the captain. I am second officer — Lieutenant Mung.”

  “All right, Lieutenant Mung. Look, I don’t know anything about a marker. And if it’s explosions you want to talk about, I have a few questions of my own. First of all—”

  “You speak too much in haste.”

  Mellin slowed down. “I was on—” Mellin stopped. Whoever had attacked the Chical hadn’t wanted to leave any witnesses alive. “I was on a fishing boat and it sank a few miles from your reef.”

  “This is Chinese territory,” Mung interrupted. “All the Spratlys are Chinese.”

  “But it’s hundreds of miles beyond your two-hundred-mile limit,” Mellin said.

  “Like your Hawaii,” Mung said. The bosun thought that this was very smart, and a smug smile took him captive.

  “Hawaii,” Mellin began, “has been U.S. territory for more than—”

  “So too with the Spratlys. Chinese were there long before anyone else.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Mellin said simply.

  Lieutenant Mung spoke rapidly to the bosun, who then told Mellin, “Come with me.”

  A guard joined them as the bosun quickly led Mellin down below and forward to the paint locker and told him he would be given food shortly. Then the bosun slammed the door and left. Suddenly, Mellin was in utter darkness. He began to hyperventilate in sheer terror, his claustrophobia so intense that he thought he would go mad, his panic heightened by the overwhelming, cloying smell of paint, which caused his sinuses to all but close down, making it difficult for him to breathe. Within minutes he was drenched in perspiration, his clothes sticking to him like Saran Wrap, and all the while his anxiety heightened by the unknown. What were they going to do with him? The brusque way they had treated him, it was as if China and the U.S. were at war.

  * * *

  The fingerprints they got from the public phone in the Kita-Ku district were not helpful. The prints were smudged, and it was the forensic technician’s guess that whoever had held the phone in response to the call from the Asakusa Kannon Temple had probably worn gloves. Besides, it had taken them an hour to get to the booth — many people could have used it by then — and so forensics was at a loss as to why they had been asked to take prints at all.

  The best they could do now, Wray thought, was to stake out the phone booth and run a security check on everyone who used it In lieu of this long, tedious surveillance, Wray and his Japanese colleagues were tempted to bring in Jae, but they held off for fear of making an arrest that would not stick. A crime had to happen before they could act on their suspicions that the Chongryun were up to no good. Meantime, there had been no letup in the coded radio messages from North Korea, and it was generally agreed among Western intelligence agencies that in Pyongyang the “great new leader,” Kim Jong Il, like his father, the “great leader” Kim Il Sung, was about to turn up the heat.

  They were wrong. Pyongyang had already sent its instructions for her mission to Tazuko Komura via Jae weeks before. The communication from Jae had been the final transmit.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  For most of the men with “George C. Scott,” Douglas Freeman, the first sighting of Vietnam from the lead Hercules, a line of deep green broken here and there by palm-shaded beaches, was not particularly memorable. Only Freeman and a few others were old enough to really remember the Vietnam War, let alone to have fought in it. For most it was one of many wars America had fought, and America’s defeat had not marked them as it had Freeman and others who could still recall Walter Cronkite entering their living rooms every evening to tell them the state of the war and, always, like a football score, the body count.

  In any case, the predominant emotion in the plane was fear — fear of the enemy and fear of showing it. These were not conscripts, but well-trained professionals, some who had seen action in the Iraqi War and some in the invasion of Haiti, and so knowledge of both desert and jungle warfare traveled with them. But most of the 127 in the EMREF spearhead had never been in battle, and they feared that unknown. Already in the vast interior of the plane, the smell of perspiration was heavy in the air.

  There was a flash!

  “What the hell—” Freeman began, seeing it was one of the two reporters he’d allowed to accompany the EMREF spearhead into action. He’d chosen a CNN reporter because he knew that way he’d get a story out if he needed it for strategic reasons. The other was a photojournalism a woman, Marte Price, from the little-known midwestern Des Moines Register. He disliked seeing all the big networks get all the scoops.

  “I’m sorry,” she began, blushing, “I didn’t—”

  But Freeman cut her short. “Ma’am, last thing we expect in an aircraft is a flash popping off — looks like a damn flash-bang grenade. Lucky someone didn’t shoot you.” />
  “I promise I won’t do it again, General.”

  Freeman nodded and mumbled something about how there were going to be enough surprises to contend with once the EMREF had reached Hanoi then headed north to do business with the “red dragon,” as he collectively called the Chinese.

  “Huh,” grunted Martinez, a Marine, formerly an auto mechanic, who hailed from Los Angeles. “That flash sure as hell frightened me. Damn near shit myself.”

  “You and fifty others, mate,” a Brit said, nodding, his cockney accent reminding Martinez of Mr. Doolittle, Eliza’s father in My Fair Lady. The short, stocky Englishman’s accent was a bit hard for Martinez to understand, but the man’s eyes and gestures told most of the story. Martinez felt comforted by Doolittle’s frank admission of fear, especially since the Britisher wore the simple but coveted beret of the Special Air Service, among the toughest of the tough. To be SAS was to be as handy with a parachute as with the Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine gun, to run miles with a heavy pack, to be able to live off the land from grass shoots to rats — raw, uncooked, for fear of the smell alerting the enemy — and then you had to pass the hostage exam.

  The SAS were so tough that the U.S. Delta Force based their training on the English elite, who had worldwide and enduring fame not from the wars they’d stopped and Communist infiltrators they’d killed, from Aden to Malaysia, but because of the stunning raid they had mounted in full view of the TV cameras on the Iranian Embassy in London in 1961. They had all worn black, including balaclavas, to protect their identity. And then they’d melted back incognito, some of them to the regular units they were assigned to, their absence usually covered by compassionate leave or some other such conventional excuse. The Delta Force and the Green Berets didn’t hop into a phone booth and do a “Clark Kent.”