South China Sea wi-8 Read online

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ellman told everyone in the Oval Office that the last thing they needed was indecision based on a lack of coherent foreign policy “which we inherited from the previous administration. We have to avoid giving mixed signals, a foreign policy that’s cut from the cloth of the moment, an ad hoc way of proceeding which will make the U.S. look indecisive and weak — visionless. This would have adverse effects for us all over the world — trade deals suddenly put on hold, et cetera. And an overseas lack of confidence would have a direct effect on the dollar and so on, so that pretty soon we’d see a domestic downturn in the economy, the direct result of those overseas having lost confidence in a firm American position. You can bet your life that all the major oil companies and the subsidiaries which form their infrastructure, et cetera, are watching what we do over these attacks in the South China Sea.”

  Noyer cut in. “Ellman is absolutely correct. Whoever started this row wouldn’t have dared to stir up trouble were it not for our hitherto wishy-washy foreign policy. The Chinese saw what we didn’t do in Yugoslavia — not what little we did in Haiti — and why shouldn’t they risk it? They can always pull back, though I don’t think they will unless forced to — loss of face, you see.”

  “Yet,” the President said, “can you imagine the response if I were to go on TV and announce that we are unilaterally going in to support the Vietnamese — the Communist Vietnamese?”

  “You could limit the support, Mr. President,” Ellman charged, “by providing what the Vietnamese need most — air support. Limit our action to sending in a carrier battle group to operate from the South China Sea.”

  “And the Chinese air force?” the President asked.

  “Minimum threat to our battle group,” Reese said. “I’m not saying it’d be plain sailing, and the Chinese do have some squadrons of Fulcrums. MiG-29s. We’d lose some of our aircraft, but we’d beat them — no question.”

  The President was looking intently at the CNO as if he wanted more. “What about their submarines?”

  “A bit dicey,” Reese replied. “They don’t have anything like our capacity, but some of their seventy-four diesels — whose props are superanticavitation-treated due to that bastard Walker selling us out — could sit still and it’d be hard to find them.”

  “Yes, but they’d have to come up sooner or later, Admiral.”

  “Yes, sir, but almost certainly at night.” The admiral could see the lines of consternation on the President’s face. “I don’t think there’d be any problem in the end, Mr. President,” he added. “I just want you to know that the opposition might have a trick or two up their sleeve that we don’t know about, that’s all.”

  “So,” the President said, leaning forward over the blotter, doodling and summarizing, “you all agree our policy should be as coherent in the South China Sea as it is in the Mideast. If you invade a neighbor, you’ll risk having the eagle swoop.”

  “Especially,” Ellman added, “if you risk fouling up the sea routes and oil supply — in this case through the South China Sea.”

  “Trust me,” the President assured them. “I won’t dodge the oil issue and dress it up as anything else — I’ll say unequivocally that the Western democracies need it, especially Japan and the U.S., and if the flow turns to a trickle, the eagle will more than swoop. At the same time, however, our intervention can’t be purely economic. We are, as the leading and most powerful democracy, going to put it on record that we are against the Communist invasion of one country by another. We’ve got to stabilize the region, goddamn it! We want a new world order, not more disorder.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it,” Ellman commented, “that since the Berlin Wall came down, we end up having more wars around the world than ever before. I’m not saying we should go back to the bad old days of the cold war, but at least you knew the rules — this is our side, that’s your side, and don’t walk on the grass. Can you imagine that butchery in Rwanda in ‘ninety-four and ‘ninety-five happening if the Soviet Union had still been strong enough to exert its influence?” Ellman paused. “Still, if we put ourselves on record now as opposing the invasion of one country by another, we’ll be accused of assuming the role of the world’s policeman.”

  “So be it,” the President said. “Besides, as you suggested, we don’t have to commit troops. Air and naval interdiction— cruise missiles included — would pack a sufficiently large wallop to disincline any would-be bullies on the block.”

  “We’ll be called the bully,” Admiral Reese commented.

  “Nevertheless,” the President said, “tonight I go on record by saying that we will not stand for any more Yugoslavias or Rwandas, and we can set up air and naval blockades. In any case, we won’t be impotent in the face of challenges to world peace.”

  “A Pax Americana,” Noyer said. He, like Reese, wanted to know how far the President would be prepared to go.

  “If you want to call it that — yes,” the President conceded. “Well, we sure as hell can’t leave it up to the Russians. And I don’t mean to exclude anyone who wishes to help, Lord knows. Canadian peacekeepers, British troops from Brunei, Australians perhaps, because of their interest in Southeast Asia.”

  “I agree. The more the better,” Noyer said.

  “And,” the President said, “if we can’t beat China’s veto on the Security Council, we could still rally a force of friends in the General Assembly so we’re not seen as acting just on our own convictions.”

  “Where will Taiwan stand in this?” Admiral Reese asked. “It’s tended to favor a Beijing-Taipei fifty-one, forty-nine percent split on any oil and gas find in the South China Sea.”

  “Taiwan’s a wild card in my view,” Ellman said. “It could go with us, but God help us if it goes with Beijing.”

  The President was noticeably struck by the danger of this possibility. “Good God, we’ve equipped the Taiwanese.”

  “We have,” Reese confirmed. “Ever since Truman and Cash My Check.”

  Suddenly it seemed as if all the steam had gone out of the President’s stance of no exceptions to his idea of the rule of geopolitical stability. That is, if the Taiwanese joined China in the island dispute, it might very well bring the United States in against one of its oldest and staunchest allies. The President’s hands were clasped tightly, his skin blotching. “This is a decision, gentlemen, that Taipei’ll have to make. Is its potential oil split of fifty-one, forty-nine with Mainland China worth wiping out all its good relations with the U.S.?”

  “But Mr. President,” Ellman began, “that’s a risk I wonder—”

  “Yes, yes, I know, Bruce. It is something you would like to have an idea about first. All right, we’ll sound out the Taipei representative here right now. But the point I’m making is that my job and my intention is to lead this country, not to prevaricate, trying to court every single congressman over to our side. I want their support. I’ll ask for it, but in general terms. I’ll not plod through this one hoof at a time. If you do that you end up with a mishmash of conflicting policy statements.” He paused. “Look — over sixty-five American citizens have been murdered. Murdered! If we sit back and talk this one to death, how safe will any American feel anywhere around the world? No, I’ll go on TV tonight and tell the country I’m moving the Seventh Fleet into the South China Sea for possible interdiction pending the withdrawal of Chinese troops.”

  Noyer waited till everyone else but he and the President had left the Oval Office. Then he said, “Mr. President, wouldn’t it be much easier for your just-stated policy if China didn’t come to the Security Council meeting you’ll be calling for in the speech? I mean, they’re sure to veto any criticism of themselves, let alone any action that might be taken against them.”

  “Of course it would be better not having them there, but that’s highly unlikely.”

  Noyer nodded. “Yes, it is. You’ve asked the Secretary General to call a meeting for nine a.m. tomorrow.”

  “Yes — what are you sugge
sting? I change it?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  The President sat back, surprised. “Earlier or later?”

  “Later. Around four o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “What on earth will that do to help us?”

  “Probably nothing,” the CIA director conceded.

  “Why four?” the President asked, intrigued.

  “Four is a very unlucky number in Chinese. Nine is a very lucky one. Besides, four tomorrow afternoon instead of nine a.m. will give us more time—” Noyer paused. “—to prepare.”

  The President eyed Noyer for a few moments before he spoke. “Ah… I don’t think you and I should say any more, do you?”

  Noyer agreed and made for the door. “Good luck with your speech, Mr. President.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Coughing relentlessly on his raft — or rather, the jagged-edged wood planking that had been part of the oil rig’s crew’s quarters — Danny Mellin was thanking God for the temperate water of the South China Sea. Perhaps if the plan of attack from the junk had a weak point, he thought, it was that the attackers had chosen dusk to make their move, which meant that if anyone else had survived the attack and the blast, then darkness might have prevented them from being picked off by the junk’s crew. Then again, darkness provided the junk with cover also, which was probably why they had decided on a dusk attack in the first place.

  He had no doubt that the explosion would have been picked up by one of the microphones in the U.S. underwater sonar system. Hopefully, U.S. ships and/or subs of the Seventh Pacific Fleet had already been dispatched as fast as possible to investigate the massive explosion. Mellin could still see the smoky column that was, or rather had been, the joint Chical venture. But now it appeared to him not as a roaring inferno shooting hundreds of feet into the air like the Kuwaiti oil fires, but the size of a candle flame, the currents having moved him away from the coast and any immediate assistance.

  After a while, in a wash of moonlight, Danny Mellin saw something in the water that he hoped he’d mistaken for the dorsal fin of a dolphin. Its ominous circling of his ever-weakening raft, however, suggested otherwise. Soon he saw a wave breaking on something that didn’t seem to move, and he guessed he was near a reef or one of the lonely islands that rose only a few feet out of the water and began to paddle toward it, the fin keeping up.

  The rock was Louisa Reef, known in Chinese as Nantong Jiao. It was all of three feet above the sea. He felt the raft being taken away by the current, and once more paddled hard, until he thought his arms would break. He remembered, as if it was a dream, reading in “The Story of San Michele” by Dr. Alex Munthe, how Guy de Maupassant pressed Munthe to tell him what was the most terrible form of death at sea, and Munthe had replied — to be at sea with a life belt to keep you alive during the hell of dehydration. The next morning de Maupassant threw all his life belts overboard.

  His hands bleeding from the coral and barnacles clinging to the rock, Mellin hauled himself and his small, broken plank raft up on the reef and hoped it was already high tide. Exhausted, he could do nothing but pray that by morning someone would find him.

  It began to rain. He lay on his back, his legs dangling over the edge of the rock, opening his mouth to let the rainwater revive him. He looked around for the fin, suddenly lifting his foot as he did so, but now he could see nothing but the turbulent gray sea all about him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The President of the United States began his address to the nation about the situation in the South China Sea by calling for a meeting of the U.N. Security Council at four p.m. He pointed out that regardless of claims over ownership of ocean resources, the United States of America would tolerate neither attacks against Americans nor any closure of or other interference with the vital sea lanes through which Mideast oil traveled to the United States and Japan. And for this reason he had ordered the U.S. Seventh Fleet into the South China Sea.

  The violence of the long dispute, he pointed out, had spilled over into border clashes before the current invasion of Vietnam by China. China must recover her troops, he said. Failure to do this within seventy-six hours would leave the United States no alternative but to support the position of the People’s Republic of Vietnam, which had once again, without warning — and here he referred to the 1979 and 1982 Chinese incursions — been invaded by its neighbor to the north.

  “It is not only in our own economic interest to take this action,” the President added, “but in the interest of world peace.” It was time to extinguish the spark before, “fanned by the winds of old hatreds and intolerance,” it ended up with a brushfire which could engulf all of Southeast and Northeast Asia. By Northeast Asia he meant a possible clash between North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and China, and the Japanese-Russian dispute over the Northern Territories islands.

  After the speech, taking off his throat mike, he confided to his wife, “I liked that bit about ‘the winds of—’ “

  “Excuse me, Mr. President…”

  “Yes?”

  It was an aide, very tense, armed with a fax just in from the National Security Agency. NSA had SIGINT — Signal Intelligence — of transmissions along the Kampuchean border that showed incursions by Khmer Rouge Communists on Vietnam’s western flank. The President handed the fax to Ellman.

  “Bastards!” Ellman said, then apologized in front of the First Lady, adding, “Beijing is obviously behind this. They’ve supported the Khmer Rouge for years.”

  “Whether or not Beijing’s behind them,” the President commented, “an air strike or two over the area should cause them to think again. The Khmer Rouge…” He paused. “You know, Ellman, if someone has to test the mettle of our foreign policy, it might as well be the Khmer Rouge. They’re as bad as the Nazis. The genocide they’ve committed is unspeakable. I’ve ‘never forgotten those shots of the pyramids of skulls they made… and to start the world over, dating their calendar the year One. They’re psychopaths. Suck up to the Chinese because of Beijing’s support. Beijing sees it as an extra army on the Vietnamese flank. I can’t think of a better target than the Khmer Rouge. And remember what the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese fought about after the Vietnam War with us.”

  “What? Islands?”

  “Islands in the Gulf of Thailand. I tell you, these damned offshore islands have caused no end of trouble.”

  “It would have to be a carrier strike, Mr. President-against the Khmer Rouge.”

  “Why not B-52s?”

  “Too big, given our lack of runways, and because of our allies, like Japan, who fear upsetting the Chinese. No one’ll give us landing or refueling rights in Southeast Asia. They’re all scared stiff of the Chinese, not only in China proper, but within their own populations. Singapore has seventy-six percent Chinese. Brunei is too small to take the heat. Malaysia has thirty percent Chinese. Indonesia won’t help us. So without airfields, we’d have to use shorter-range fighter-bombers off a carrier.”

  “How about the airstrips at Okinawa?”

  “No. Essentially it’d be the same as launching from the Japanese mainland. Tokyo won’t give us the go-ahead. They’re probably right, strategically speaking. Beijing would go ape, and like North Korea, Beijing can scud Japan.” Ellman paused. “I suppose we could launch Tomahawk cruise missiles from one of our subs.”

  “Yes,” the President responded, “but I’d favor the carrier aircraft option over that. And I don’t mean an attack by stealth, I’d want this on CNN. If we’re going to stop a full-scale war started by the Khmer Rouge or China before it gets out of hand, I want the world to see American foreign policy straight and simple in action. No hide-and-seek on this one, and like I said, if it comes to kicking ass, I can’t think of a better target than those Khmer sons of bitches.”

  “If air strikes don’t do it?” Admiral Reese asked.

  Ellman interjected. “We could alert Second Army’s Emergency Response Force at Fort Bragg, Mr. President. Do you want me to write up the—”
/>   “Christ, no!” the President cut in. “For God’s sake don’t anyone notify that—” The name escaped the President for the moment.

  “Douglas Freeman,” Ellman put in. “He’s a good man, sir. In my opinion our best for—”

  “I agree,” the Present said. “But damn it, if he gets the bit between his teeth before we’re ready to move, it could be a media relations disaster. Haven’t met the man, but State tells me you put a microphone anywhere near him, it explodes into controversy. I don’t doubt he’s one of the most brilliant commanders we have — possibly the most brilliant — but they say he’s another Patton. Can’t keep his mouth shut.”

  “Yes,” Reese said. “He even looks like George C. Scott.”

  “Anyway,” the President continued, “we want to try to contain this with naval and naval air action alone.”

  * * *

  At the urging of the United States, the U.N. Secretary General called the special meeting of the Security Council. Problem was, as Ellman reminded everyone, the Chinese, like the other four permanent members — Britain, the U.S., the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States, and France — had the power of veto over any Security Council resolution.

  “We didn’t have it in the case of Korea,” Ellman pointed out.

  “Then how did you manage to get a U.S.-led U.N. force in there?” Ellman’s aide asked. The aide, Ellman realized, would not have been born when the Korean War of the early fifties broke out.

  “Well,” Ellman explained, “the Soviet representative at the time had stormed out in protest over the failure of the U.N. to grant Communist China a seat and left town in a huff. So when North Korea invaded the South and the emergency meeting of the Security Council was called, the Soviet rep was unable to make the meeting and the remainder of the Security Council voted unanimously to send in a U.S.-led police action. That’s how we got to get our troops in to throw back the Communists.”