South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  The Fulcrum, with a maximum speed of 1,518 mph, was faster than the F-18s by 328 miles per hour and was considered by many, particularly by the modern German Luftwaffe pilots, as the world’s preeminent fighter. Without the Shenyangs as cover, the two H-5 bombers were embarrassingly easy for the two F-18s to shoot down, one exploding in air, the other afire and in an uncontrollable spin, one crewman ejecting, his white chute blossoming against the blue expanse of sea and sky. For some reason the spiraling H-5’s two 23mm nose cannons kept firing, their aimless bullets striking the sea like errant pebbles scattered over the water.

  “All right!” Danny Mellin said as the H-5 smashed into sun-glinting pieces as it struck the sea in excess of 500 miles per hour. The Chinese crewman who had refused to help Mellin rescue the guard, who was only now coming around, looked at Mellin with an expression of sheer hatred for the American. He said something to Mellin, but despite Mellin’s basic knowledge of Chinese from his POW days in ‘Nam, he couldn’t understand, though he guessed it was some kind of insult. The Chinese crewman repeated himself, this time jabbing his finger at Mellin. Danny, his eyes squinting in the harsh glare of the sun on water, nodded as if he understood. “Yeah, well fuck you too, Sheng.”

  “Sheng,” the first thing that came into Mellin’s head, means one liter, and the Chinese crewman was utterly perplexed.

  “Sheng?”

  “Oh Sheng fuck!” Mellin said, not feeling as cavalier as his tone suggested. He knew for sure that once he fell asleep, the crewman would push him off the raft. He had to stay awake, and so a deadly waiting game began. The guard, alternately coughing and moaning, still lay in the fetal position on the undulating floor of the raft.

  “Sheng?” the crewman said.

  “That’s right,” Mellin replied, both men watching each other as intently as two cats with territory in dispute. The raft should have had several liters of water as part of its supplies, but the only thing attached to the gunwales was an ancient packet of hard crackers and salt tablets. Mellin looked about for other rafts to hail, but the half dozen or so he could see were too dispersed, several bodies — or rather, what was left of them— floating up and over the swells, which were growing in intensity and height.

  * * *

  A Chinese container ship, the Wang Chow from Shanghai, en route to San Francisco via Honolulu when hostilities broke out, had been turned back by a U.S. Navy destroyer northeast of Maui. The destroyer escorted the Wang Chow back to Honolulu, where its cargo, mainly cheaply made cotton clothing destined for the American market, was impounded and its crew of thirty-two interned.

  That evening produced one of the Hawaiian Islands’ legendary sunsets, an incandescent orange turning to a crimson, the streaked high cirrus clouds giving the promise of another splendid day in paradise as the USS Madison, a combination Hunter/Killer/Ballistic submarine of the Sea Wolf III series, egressed out of Pearl Harbor past degaussing ships — the magnetic signature of the ship “wiped,” lest an enemy pick up the signature and file it in its threat library.

  Had the Madison been in any foreign port, no matter how urgently she was wanted elsewhere, her departure would have been delayed until four divers — it used to be three — had “swept” her acoustic-tiled hull and declared her “clean.” But given it was in COMSUBPAC’s home port, and the urgency of the situation in the South China Sea, the USS Madison set off promptly.

  Once having cleared the safety nets in Pearl, she headed up the channel, her sleek shape, more like a cigar than a teardrop, slicing through the water as easily as any behemoth of the deep. The explosion took place at 1109 hours as she was preparing to dive, shattering the hull underneath and forward of the fairweather or sail, ripping out the torpedo room, water tank, forward trim tank, and Tomahawk vertical launch system. It also ruptured two of the three forward starboard-side ballast tanks, whose implosion doused some of the forward sub’s fires, but not all of them.

  Within a minute firefighting teams had donned their white asbestos-hooded Nomex fire suits, some strapping on the emergency air breathing apparatus hose, others the more portable OBX, oxygen breathing apparatus. Temperatures were already 52 degrees Celsius and climbing, fire control crewmen trying desperately to make their way through choking, dense smoke with their infrared thermal imagers. Had it not been for the quick action of a Charles F. Adam-class destroyer nearby, with her fire hoses and her bravery in coming alongside despite the acute danger of the torpedoes in the Madison blowing, the whole sub and its crew might have been lost instead of the sub being badly damaged with thirty-three of her 132 crewmen reported killed.

  It had been a torpedo attack right off the mouth of Pearl Harbor, or more precisely, it had been a mine, a U.S. acoustic Mark 6 °Captor mine — in effect a long, tubular sheath housing a Mark 46 torpedo, its computer control programmed to lie in wait for certain classes of sub with their telltale cavitation. Upon sensing this, the torpedo would be let loose from its housing.

  From now on, as directed by the CNO, all U.S. submarines, including all deep-diving submergence rescue vehicles, had to be swept, along with egress lanes, whether in a home or foreign port.

  The extent of Madison’s damage would keep the boat in dry dock for at least three months, as well as necessitating an undersea and an evaluation center test. The Chinese ship Wang Chow was soon swarmed by SEALs and other underwater demolition teams, and they’d found brackets for a half-dozen Mark 6 °Captor mines underneath, set into her hull.

  “Thank God they didn’t sink it altogether,” a petty officer said. He meant the Madison.

  “Might as well have,” an ensign said. “It’s going to slow down one hell of a lot egressing out of Pearl — sub or surface vessel. Damn Chinese might just as well have sunk her.” Two of his best buddies had died during the mines’ attack. COMSUBPAC’s naval intelligence confirmed from serial numbers on remaining U.S.-made Mark 6 °Captor mines that they had been among those purchased and then resold in East Asia prior to hostilities by a South Asia Industries owned and operated by a Mr. Jonas E. Breem.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  While Tazuko Komura was packing some food and juice in her kitchen, she thought about a man in the phone booth she’d seen the night before below for what seemed an unusually long time. Through the small telescope in her tiny, three-room apartment she’d been able to see that the man wasn’t using the phone, but was dusting it with a small brush. It both frightened and reassured her — frightened her, because it meant police or JDF agents were closing in, altogether too close, but reassured her because they were dusting for prints. Obviously they didn’t know who had used the public phone. And what would they have heard when they tapped it? A man’s voice asking for a Mrs. Yoshio, and a woman’s voice, hers, answering that there was no Yoshio “living here.” And anyway, the police who were following up the call couldn’t possibly know it was the signal for her to act, to do what her cell of three had spent months planning.

  Even so, Tazuko knew she would be in grave danger the moment she stepped out on the street. If anyone searched her shopping bag, they might find the explosive. Or would the way she had camouflaged it fool them? As she finished her coffee she noticed her right hand was trembling, half from fear, half in excitement. She knew she must control it, and in order to do that she first had to lose control. She was wound up tighter than a spring.

  Tazuko lay down on the carpeted floor, placed a pillow beneath her head with her left hand and slid her right hand under her skirt and taut, white nylon panties. Very soon she was moaning softly, moving ever so slowly at first but then increasing the pressure until she was rolling back and forth in her mounting ecstasy. Suddenly her back arched, and it was as if she was suspended in time, her free hand clutching the air.

  When she woke fifteen minutes later, she felt drained of all tension, her nerves calmed for the task ahead.

  * * *

  In the South China Sea, approximately halfway between the Spratly and Paracel island groups, the helo from the now
sunken Chinese frigate ran out of gas and dropped like a stone into the sea.

  * * *

  Naked in his recliner, belching after draining another scotch on the rocks, Breem farted, told Mi Yin to “get the fuck outta the way” of the TV, and switched from the local Hong Kong station to CNN, where they were showing more shots of the PLA herding prisoners they’d taken from various “liberated” oil and gas rigs into a makeshift POW camp “somewhere” in China.

  “More fucking losers,” Breem proclaimed, taking a handful of beer nuts, trying to pop them in his mouth one at a time and missing now and then, some of them rolling down into his crotch. “Fetch them, baby. Go on, fetch!” This was followed by laughter that rippled through his belly. “Hey hey hey!” he said, abruptly sitting up. An ABC “scoop” window was superimposed on the lower right corner of CNN pictures of the Chinese destroyer picking up “victims” of a “warmongering attack” in the South China Sea by what was believed to be an American submarine. Breem zoomed in on the superimposed ABC window, the New York anchor reporting that a “Sea Wolf SSN/SBN had been sunk off the Hawaiian island of Oahu by what naval sources were “unofficially” describing as an American-made Captor 60 mine or mines. It was suspected that the mine or mines that had gutted the U.S. sub had apparently been laid by a Chinese merchantman, the Wang Chow, en route to the U.S. West Coast when hostilities broke out between China and the United States. Now ABC’s “Nightline” was reporting over forty crew aboard the 132-man submarine had been killed, due largely to a subsequent fire-created explosion in the forward torpedo room.

  “More fucking losers!” Breem proclaimed, his mouth half full of beer nuts. “Oh well, more yuan for B.I.” He was talking about Breem Industrials, listed on the Hong Kong exchange as one of the South Asia Industries group.

  “How come?” Mi Yin asked.

  “Come any way you like.” Breem thought this bon mot hilarious and laughed so hard, scotch and beer nuts sprayed the carpet. He tossed Mi Yin the empty glass. “Ice, my little juicy fruit. More yuan for me, my lovely, because who is the biggest seller of marine munitions — among other things — in the Near East?”

  “You are,” Mi Yin said, handing him a glass of crushed ice turned golden with Johnnie Walker.

  “ ‘Course,” he added, “manufacturers of Captors, et cetera, don’t know I’ve cornered the market. They only sell through ‘legitimate’ firms. Saps!” Breem knew he was drunk and that he was talking too much. “But hey, Juicy Fruit. What fuckin’ good is success if you can’t share it, right?” He meant “flaunt” it.

  “Yes.”

  “Right!” he bellowed.

  “Right.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Danny Mellin couldn’t walk properly. Conditions on the PLA navy destroyer that had picked him, Sheng, and the guard from the raft along with other survivors of the torpedo attack against the Jianghu frigate had been so crowded that his right leg had gone to sleep. As he walked, or rather limped, down the gangplank toward the waiting POW trucks, he had little sensation in his right leg. He didn’t know where he was except that it was a Chinese naval port, given the number of destroyer frigates and fast-attack patrol boats moored there. As they parted company, Sheng said something to him, laughing at him, dismissing him with the contempt of a man who had been down a little while before but who was now clearly on the winning side.

  “You prick!” Mellin said. “Should’ve let the sharks—” The next instant he was down on the dockside, his head numbed by the blow, blood oozing from the left side of his face. A PLA soldier clubbed him again with the AK-47’s stock, this time in the stomach.

  Somebody, an Australian by his accent, helped Danny up. “Easy does it, mate. These jokers ‘ave no bloody sense of humor at all.” The same guard pushed the Australian in the small of the back. Both Danny and the Australian kept quiet, half climbing, half pushed up the tailgate of one of the three-ton trucks loaded with an assortment of captured rig workers. Two PLA navy guards, including the one who’d just struck him, rode at the end of the two benches of about ten POWs each, the AK-47s unslung, ready to fire. As the truck took off with a jerk that jarred everybody aboard, the Australian held up his hand. “Hey, Thumper,” he called out to the guard who’d just clubbed Mellin. “You got any water? Me mate here,” he indicated Mellin, “looks pretty badly dehydrated.”

  “Up shut!” yelled the other guard. “You up shut!”

  “All right,” the Aussie said. “Piss on you too.”

  Mellin could see the guard starting to move toward the Australian, but the ride was so rough the guard stayed where he was, glaring at them, holding on to one of the truck’s two high roll bars. The Australian waited till the truck was climbing a hill, its engine in a high scream, the guards glancing at some peasant women walking along the roadside.

  “Name’s Mike Murphy. What’s yours?”

  “Mellin, Danny.”

  “You a rigger?” Murphy asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I tease Chinese.”

  “Yeah, well, be careful.”

  “Not to worry.”

  “You been—” Mellin’s mouth was so dry he could barely talk. “—interrogated yet?”

  “No,” Murphy said, and for the first time a shadow of alarm crossed the Aussie’s face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tokyo

  CIA Langley’s fax to its Tokyo field agent, Henry Wray, was to the point: EXPEDITE SONGBIRD IMMEDIATE STOP MESSAGE ENDS.

  Wray asked his JDF colleagues to bring in the Korean prisoner, Jae Chong, “and put him in the paper box.” It was three feet square, two feet high, and made of slotted cardboard that could be dismantled and reassembled in seconds. The suspect or prisoner had to squat in the middle of the square, and God help him if he moved.

  “We may have to wait a long time till he talks,” one of the JDF agents said.

  “We can’t wait too long,” Wray countered. He thought of the danger that one person, one mishap, could have on the complicated and vital logistics tail of Second Army that would stretch from Japan to Hanoi. “Give him an hour on his haunches,” Wray suggested. “If he hasn’t talked by then, beat the shit out of him. No bruises.”

  “Hai,” agreed the youngest of the two JDF agents. He didn’t like gaijin—foreigners — including Americans, but he especially disliked Koreans, particularly those from the north.

  That afternoon at a quarter to three they picked up Chong from his job as a janitor for an apartment complex not far from the Ginza strip. The timing was important for Chong, who knew that sooner or later they would get him. But had they arrested him an hour earlier, he probably would not have withstood the beating until the 2:38 departure of the Joetsu Shinkansen, bullet train, from Tokyo’s Ueno Station to Niigata on Honshu’s west coast, over two hundred miles away. As it was, by the time the beating started, the 2:38 to Niigata was well on its way across the Kanto Plain north of Tokyo, speeding toward the fourteen-mile Daishimizu tunnel, which would take Tazuko Komura from Japan’s “front” or the omote Nihon, to ura Nihon, the “inner Japan” beyond the alps.

  Before she had moved to the frenetic glitter of Japan’s east coast, the west coast around Niigata had been Tazuko’s home. In its own way, Niigata was as flashy and as fast as Tokyo, but not far from Niigata you were in the small villages of Japan, hundreds of years old. It was a Japan in which having a life of yutakasa—of great value — was not measured in yen or worldly possessions, but in the spirit of harmony one experienced with the rhythm of the seasons and the wisdom of traditions passed down from one craftsman to another.

  For Tazuko, it had still been a land in which she was one of the gaijin, but its affinity for things rural and old captivated her. Her nostalgia, however, was a fantasy, at odds with the often harsh reality of modern industrial Japan, with the kind of industrial wealth Pyongyang wanted to emulate. But Tazuko felt no such contradiction, and knew if she was to give her life to help thrust North Korea onto the stage of major worl
d powers, then she would give that life. And should anyone doubt her courage, then they would soon doubt no longer.

  At first she hadn’t planned anything even remotely heroic, but heroism, if it meant self-sacrifice, had more or less been forced upon her by the stringent security carried out by the automatic rail “scout” machines that constantly monitored the tracks of the bullet trains. Had anyone wanted to put the sausage-shaped explosive on the rail tracks or supporting structures, they would have had to do it in darkness, for the moment they used a light, their position would have been immediately identified by the infrared track cameras. Besides, the way to inflict the most damage on the Japanese psyche was not to blow up part of the track, but to stop the train itself, to puncture their much vaunted and worldwide reputation for speed, safety, and quality. Also, if they expected an attack, it would be on the southward Tokyo-Hakata line, where U.S. and JDF troops would most likely travel as part of the buildup of force in Vietnam.

  * * *

  “Tell him,” Wray said, lighting another cigarette, “that if he doesn’t tell us the name and whereabouts of his contact, he’s going to have an accident — a fatal one.”

  “I’ve already told him,” the JDF agent replied.

  “Maybe he thinks we’re bluffing.”

  “No,” the JDF agent assured Wray. “He knows.” The other JDF agent indicated to the American that they should go outside.

  In the hallway they talked about how far they really wanted to go. Wray said he didn’t want to kill the son of a bitch, but with the segmented air/sea Second Army supply line stretching from Japan to Hanoi over 2,200 miles away, any sabotage would be disastrous for what the U.N. hoped would be Freeman’s counterattack against the Chinese. The JDF agent said he didn’t mind beating the crap out of the North Korean — it would be a message to the Gong An Bu, Chinese Intelligence, that if they insisted on using gaijin to do their dirty work in Japan, this is what would happen to their agents.