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.