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  South China Sea

  ( WW III - 8 )

  Ian Slater

  On the South China Sea an oil rig erupts in flames — as AK-47 tracer rounds stitch the night and men die in pools of blood. The SOSUS underwater network catapults news of the attack to Washington-while ChiCom troops mass on the Vietnamese border.

  Ten divisions of Chinese shock troops blast their way south, overrunning the U.S.-U.N-led Emergency Response Force. But the West's best warriors fight back. U.S. Special Forces, British SAS, and the legendary Gurkhas, their Kukri knives drawn, go toe-to-toe with the invaders. Tomcats and F-18s pulverize the jungle. And the Military Sealift Command hurls Aegis cruisers and Wasp-Iwo Jima, and Spruance-class attack ships — spearheaded by Sea Wolf subs-into the South China Sea.

  From Japan to Malaysia, the Pacific Rim is ablaze — in a hell called… WORLD WAR III

  Ian Slater

  SOUTH CHINA SEA

  PROLOGUE

  North Carolina

  At the Emergency Response Force training area at Fort Bragg, one of the recruits was puzzled when told in no uncertain terms that he had to take his dog tags off — put one around his neck, the other in his boot.

  “Why my boot?’

  “Because,” the sergeant said, “if we ever go into combat, you might get decapitated. Then we wouldn’t know who you are — correction, were.”

  “That’s nice. Thank God we ain’t at war.”

  “Sonny,” the sergeant said in his southern drawl, shaking his head, “we could be at war anytime. The new world order is disorder. Since the Berlin Wall came down, since Russia’s shake-up, we got more flashpoints poppin’ up than you can shake a stick at.”

  * * *

  Thousands of miles to the east, in the Pacific, west of the Marianas, the USS Enterprise was in its prelaunch mode. High up in the carrier’s island in Primary Flight Control, the yellow-jerseyed air boss issued the command for all hands on deck for an FOD, or foreign object damage, walkdown. A dropped pencil or, in the case of the female sailors aboard, something as outwardly insignificant as a bobby pin, could be sucked in and destroy a jet engine or take out the eye of a deck or air crew member.

  The FOD walkdown, usually a tedious business with a string of sailors stretched from side to side on the flight deck, heads all down, was fast becoming a more popular duty — with females to walk with and bump into. The air boss didn’t like the new Pentagon order assigning women aboard all naval vessels except submarines. Quite frankly, he was afraid a male sailor’s downward gaze would soon shift from a deck to a bosom and miss something.

  “What are you doing tonight?” a gunner’s mate, Stevens, A., head down, asked Able-Bodied Sailor Elizabeth Franks, who was a “grape,” a purple jacket, a refueler. They couldn’t help but brush up against one another, the line was so tight.

  “I think I’ll watch a movie,” she replied. “You?”

  “Ah…” said Stevens, a man she’d never seen before. “Think I’ll watch a movie too.”

  “You know what’s on?”

  “Don’t care what’s on,” he said, shooting her a knowing glance.

  “How come?” she asked.

  “Oh,” he said, “I come pretty much the same as any other guy. Only better.”

  “Sheesh! Can’t you guys ever get your mind out of your shorts?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re married,” she said, seeing his wedding band.

  “So?”

  “Hey, you two!” hollered a bosun. “Less talk, more walk!”

  Stevens complained under his breath, “This is gonna be one hell of a cruise. See you later.”

  Stevens would see her later — in the South China Sea— and it would be one hell of a cruise, but for reasons none of the five thousand aboard the mighty carrier could possibly imagine.

  * * *

  Amid the white and gold elegance of the White House’s East Room, the President of the United States sat in the center front row, listening to a string quartet playing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” The music of fall passed into the bleakness of winter, and in that moment he felt the full weight of his office. Politically, the change from the cold war to the new world order had, ironically, meant more disorder than ever before, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, America alone was the superpower.

  But superpower or not, it could not be the world’s policeman. It could not be everywhere at the same time. Hard decisions had to be made. Involvement in the Balkans and what used to be Yugoslavia — no; Somalia — yes; Haiti, yes. And every time the President made such a decision, it involved American lives — the world now so volatile in the absence of the Soviet-U.S. balance that trouble could and did start anywhere. Sometimes a place the President had never heard of before suddenly erupted in violence and was emblazoned across the world’s headlines via the vast electronic net of CNN.

  In the music there were the stirrings of spring, but winter still held sway, and while the President of the United States listened to promises of spring, thousands of miles west of the East Room, Danny Mellin was still deep in an American winter….

  CHAPTER ONE

  Oklahoma

  One glance southward and Danny Mellin knew he was in trouble, the advance winds of the twister coming his way having already dropped the temperature to minus thirty. But he wouldn’t stop drilling — couldn’t stop. Besides, they’d reached 3,600 feet, and at $11.50 a foot and already in the hole with the bank, Mellin figured he didn’t have much choice. His sturdy five-foot-nine-inch frame stood out against the oil rig as he watched the derrick hand fifty feet up the hundred-foot-high rig swing out and help bully a new sixty-foot stand of pipe into position over a massive block, snow-dusted and black around its eye, looking like some enormous predatory head bent on battering the rig to pieces. Beyond, everywhere Mellin looked, the scene was an endless expanse of snow.

  Danny, forty-five but looking older, was stamping his feet by the lazy bench, the relief crew warming up in the tin doghouse whose loose roof panel kept flapping in the wind. The bit was going through the Oklahoma rock beneath the barren, snow-flat landscape at just over three feet a minute, and Danny started arguing with himself — the logical, reasonable half of him telling him to pull ‘er out and wrap it up, not to tempt the storm, before they got to the four-thousand-foot level. The seismic maps told him he’d probably have another two hundred feet to go before he could hope for a good enough layer that might yield production—if there was any oil there at all.

  Everyone who wasn’t a roughneck, even some of the “worms”—the apprentice roughnecks — thought that all an independent like Danny did was stand around the doghouse worrying the hole, and that when he wasn’t at the hole he must be wheeling and dealing in the taverns — that it was all booze and pussy talk. But Danny had spent most of the week on the phone calming down a landowner who said that the mud and drainage pit Danny had drilled last summer hadn’t dried properly before being “dozed” over.

  Then there was the lease on the equipment. With the Mideast situation as dicey as ever, everyone who had a truck and rusty pipe was trying to make a buck Stateside, sending the rentals cost sky-high. Price of crude had shot right through the roof, and it meant drilling for wells in country that would have been ignored a year before because of cheaper oil. And it had brought out cowboys, along with the roughnecks, guys who were dreaming of a repeat of the big boom of the early eighties and who didn’t think about the bust that could follow. Already half a dozen guys, all of them over fifty — most repatriated from the Clinton cutbacks in the armed services after the Iraqi War — had lost a hand or a finger in the quick chain wrap as they’d tried to put on another thirty-foot pipe.

  This hole was Rummer Number 6, Rummer being t
he name of the landowner. The first five holes had been dusters, as dry as an Oakie’s throat, so the crew had dubbed this one “Bummer Number Six.”

  “What’s the mud doctor say?” the foreman shouted in the rising wind.

  “Same dose as yesterday,” Danny answered. The truth was, he hadn’t had the rock fragments from yesterday analyzed by a geologist for the best cooling mud, figuring from his own observation that the rock layer they were going through was the same as yesterday’s. He could be wrong, but the geologist had been held up by the snow and Danny wasn’t going to wait. Every hour with a payroll of fourteen put him further in the damn hole. Besides, you never knew when the next sucker could be your opener for a million-barrel well; then it’d be Hawaii and cold cans of Coors from daylight to dark.

  “The shit it would be,” his foreman said. “You’d start drilling Waikiki, Danny.”

  “Yeah, I reckon,” Danny admitted. He cupped his hands and shouted across the ice-crusted platform, “What are we now?”

  “Thirty-six twenty,” the foreman shouted back.

  “When we get to ‘fifty, better start doing a drill stem.” Glancing at his watch, then at the vast, bruised sky, Danny added, “Wiley said he’d be here ‘round ten.”

  The foreman raised his thumb to show he’d heard. Wiley was a “kiosk” geologist with a fold-down, fold-up portable lab, but analysts aside, Danny believed it was as much a matter of sheer luck. You had to be in the right place — a few feet either way and you could miss the pocket, rock reservoirs of oil formed in the waves of sedimentary layers.

  Danny wasn’t looking for hundred-foot jets of black gold shooting up in the air — that was all Clark Gable and Gary Cooper crap. All he wanted was enough pressure to tap the sucker. And Rummer was no dummy dirt farmer. With his computer, he knew the market almost as quickly as the hustlers on Wall Street, and had insisted on one in six barrels before he’d signed to give Danny drilling rights. Everybody was upping the ante. And some of the cowboys, the Johnny-come-latelies, were rushing in to make their fortune, urged by the government with new tax breaks to drill fast and deep. In Kansas they were even unzipping some of the “stripper” holes— marginal wells of 110 barrels a day that they’d previously plugged. Danny had been in the game for twenty years after ‘Nam, and claimed he could smell oil-impregnated rock even before it was separated from the coolant. Anyway, the cowboys’d be sorted out in the first month or so. When they didn’t hear anyone yelling “Eureka!” they’d fold with the overdraft. That’s when you had to have balls, Danny told himself. In hard times you dig deeper. All the easy oil was gone. Didn’t mean there wasn’t a million-barrel field around, but you had to hang tough.

  There was a hoarse-throated roar from the diesel engine, coughing dirty, coal-brown smoke into the virginal white of wind-driven snow, and everything started to rattle and shake, tiny ice splinters falling down and hitting his hard hat like rock candy as the crew began hauling up pipe for the drill-stem test. Danny put another stick of gum in his mouth, the gum so stiff with the cold it broke like a board. It would be hours before the test results came in. “For cryin’ out loud,” he said, rolling the gum’s silver foil wrapper between his grease-stained gloves, his eyes squinting in the direction of a battered Cherokee pickup, snow blowing off the back of it like icing sugar. It was Rummer, the farmer who owned the land. He had every right to “visit” under the terms of the contract, but in Danny’s twenty years, a well had never come in whenever the landowner showed up. They were plain bad luck.

  “Danny!” the foreman called out

  “Yeah?”

  “Mud bags are frozen up.”

  Danny was already holding Rummer responsible for the lack of oil. “Well, unfreeze the fuckers!” he yelled back at the foreman, adding that if Rummer 6 didn’t come in today, he’d pack it in, the whole shebang.

  “Listen,” the foreman said encouragingly. “Maybe old Rummer’s different from the rest. Maybe he’ll bring us luck, Danny.”

  Danny walked down from the platform, smacked his boots together, knocking off sticky mud-colored snow, and asked the drill tester, “What’s it look like?”

  The tester made a face like his mother had just died.

  “Shit,” Danny mumbled, then seeing Rummer walking over from the pickup, the wind and freezing rain sounding stronger by the minute, he put out his hand, smiling broadly. “Hi, Mr. Rummer. How ya doin’?”

  “Fine. Yourself?”

  “Terrific,” Danny lied. “We could need hulls here any time.” He meant the sacks of cotton wool used to soak up the oil if it came up and slopped out over the derrick’s deck. One of the roughnecks, warming his hands in the doghouse, shook his head, looking over at one of the two “worms” on the crew. “We could have fuck-all here, that’s what we could have.”

  Danny had lost a worm once when a tornado, screaming out of Missouri, had hit one of the derricks, sucking the sixty-foot pipe stands up high, as if they were straw. He’d told the kid’s parents their boy’d been killed while changing pipe. Danny had found that when you told parents that their son had died on a rig, they didn’t feel as bad if they heard he was actually working at the time rather than just standing around. Having been a Special Forces type in ‘Nam, Danny knew how he, his parents, and his wife Maureen had felt when the Army told him that Angela, one of his two sisters in ‘Nam, a nurse, was missing. The other sister had been killed off duty in a Medevac unit by so-called “friendly fire.” Danny wished they’d lied and said the Viet Cong had killed both. “Missing” meant a ninety-nine percent certainty that Angela was dead, but there was always that one percent that made some nights hell for him and his family.

  * * *

  There was nothing unusual about the hurricane. It came in as most do, off Cuba, northwest up through the gulf, laden with evaporated seawater, slamming into the Texas coast then pivoting halfway between Corpus Christi and Galveston, gusting at over two hundred miles per hour. It immediately lost some speed and heat energy — enough to generate Houston’s electric supply for years — and though it hit the mainland, there was still enough fury left for the Midwest.

  As the hurricane tore into the southeastern corner of Oklahoma, gusting to 140-plus miles per hour, long, bruised spirals of tornadoes peeled off from the hurricane’s eye wall, a darker vortex already swirling purplish-black with rain and dust and debris about the calm core. The spiral heading toward the rig was one of a dozen stalks of tornadoes formed in the same way, howling with the bloodcurdling wail that mixed with the thunder and the rattle of an express train roaring out of control. Swirling tunnels of wind and rain preceded it, smashing into the tin-roofed doghouse, tearing it apart, sending the roof spinning high into the vortex and casting it down again, a section of roof whirling faster now, slicing off one of the roughnecks’ arms, the bloodied limb sucked up and lost in the maelstrom into which several sixty-foot-high barrels from the pipe stand had also vanished — to come down a quarter hour later, strewn over southwestern Arkansas.

  The roughneck bled to death. Most of the other dead the tornado left in its wake — fourteen — died when the hurricane’s surge, a towering wall of water over twenty-one feet in height, slammed into the Texas coast east of Corpus Christi. Danny Mellin and the rest of his remaining five-man rig crew barely escaped with their lives.

  It was the closest he’d come to losing his life since his days in Vietnam, where he was taken prisoner and spent a year in the “Hanoi Hilton.” So right then and there, throwing up as he saw the mangled body of what had been one of his workers writhing in the snow, Danny Mellin decided he’d had enough of Oklahoma. He’d work for someone else for a change, somewhere he’d be paid a lot for his experience, somewhere someone else had the responsibility for the crew, somewhere he wouldn’t have to worry about a crew or making payroll, or freezing in the bone-chilling winds of a midwestern winter.

  He decided he’d work for one of the joint U.S.-Chinese oil exploration companies operating in the Spratly Islands.
Big pay and warmth. His wife wasn’t happy, but he promised her he’d stick with it for only a year.

  And so it was, that like the American in the 1930s who had decided to escape a depression-racked America for a more simple, peaceful life on a South Sea island called Guadalcanal, Danny Mellin chose to work in the tropics on a drill ship in the South China Sea. No heavy gear to wear over there. “Hell,” he told friends, “all you’d need is your hard hat, a pair of swim shorts, and suntan lotion. Paradise.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  South China Sea

  Beneath a tropical copper sky, day was ending, a current of heavy swells coming down south from Palawan Island in the southern Philippines, curving westward through the Spratly Islands and on over 1,800 kilometers across the South China Sea, toward the lush green coast of Vietnam.

  The drill ship, a half-Chinese, half-Californian oil venture, the MV Chical 1, known to its crew as simply Chical, rose and fell with the swells. Her antiroll tanks minimized the pitch and yaw of the ship so that her drill rig would remain as perpendicular to the sea’s surface as possible, the drill column going straight down through the moon pool where the Chical’s interior midships was open to the sea like a huge, bright, floodlit swimming pool.

  Down below there was the mystery of the coral reef and sedimentary layers as yet unexplored by the drill. They might hold treasure, if the profile gained by seismic shots was promising. Explosions of sound sent down to penetrate the subsurface layers reverberated back from folds or fault lines along which oil may have pooled or natural gas been enclosed. If the drill ship, as opposed to a drill platform, didn’t find oil over one reef, it could sail on to the next site amid the archipelago’s more than two hundred reefs, cays, and tiny islands. What the Chical lost in the stability of a fixed platform, it gained in more seabed covered.