The truck carrying Danny Mellin, the Australian Murphy, and a dozen or so other POWs, including several Vietnamese and Caucasian women, abruptly stopped, the prisoners told to get out by the two AK-47-toting guards.
Once down on the crushed coral road, the prisoners, despite some of them limping and showing other signs of wear and tear, were ordered to start marching down the whitish road toward a clump of trees from which the noise of construction issued forth, along with Chinese shouts. The stubby trees were more like tall brush, and soon through gaps in the trees the prisoners, most of them Vietnamese with two Australians and three Americans, could see a long line of men in black pajamas, about fifty or so, passing what looked like variegated stones on a fire-dousing line.
As Mellin and Murphy got closer to the gaps in the scrub, they could see that cement powder was being passed as well, and was being used to build hut walls about ten feet high.
Up to this point Mellin, like most of the other POWs, thought he was somewhere on the southern coast of China. But then, rounding a bend in the road, Mellin, Murphy, and the others were astonished to see an endless expanse of ocean.
“Jesus,” Murphy said. “We’re on a friggin’ island.”
“Up shut!” shouted one of the PLA guards, jabbing the Australian in the ribs with the Kalashnikov.
“Okay, mate,” the Australian said with a conciliatory smile. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar.”
The guard smashed him in the back with the rifle butt, sprawling the Australian on the crushed coral road, his arms lacerated and bleeding. Mellin bent down and, despite the fierce headache he was suffering from his earlier altercation with the same guard, helped the Australian back to his feet. “Be quiet,” he whispered to Murphy. “They’ll kill you.”
The next second there was what sounded like an enormous underground explosion, the crushed coral road beneath them trembling momentarily, and now the sound of the detonation hit them in a series of gut-punching waves. The guard who had hit them, and who would soon be known to the POWs as “Upshut,” was laughing, calling out to the other guard at the head of the line and pointing to the stunned disarray of the prisoners.
Mellin and Murphy, like the rest of the POWs who had been landed by the destroyer, would find out the next day, after spending a very uncomfortable night in the open, that the explosions, which were underwater and offshore, were part of the PLA’s plan to use the blown-up coral to add height to what was essentially a reef island, one of the many in the Nansha or Spratly Islands, which at high tide was covered with several inches of water, large parts of it becoming visible only at ebb tide.
But building up the island reef and maintaining it with a company of over a hundred PLA marines was only part of the PLA’s plan to occupy all islands in the Spratly and Paracel islands. A more pressing purpose was at hand, but it was one neither Danny Mellin nor Mike Murphy would discover until the sun rose on another perfect tropical day. It would be a day that would turn into a nightmare for all those taken prisoner by the PLA’s invasion and occupation of rigs and islands scattered throughout the two strategic groups of South China Sea islands, cays, and atolls.
For Mellin it was like being back in ‘Nam, and as he lay there beneath a bloodred moon, caused by the pollution of rig fires, he became disgusted with himself, for his hands were trembling and he feared that the guard’s brutality had not yet reached its peak. It was the only thing he was sure of; everything else — why they were here, for instance — was an open question and laden with anxiety. He’d given up smoking years ago, but right now he craved a cigarette, the stronger the better, to calm his nerves. Incredibly, next to him Mike Murphy was fast asleep and snoring, “to beat the band,” as the Aussie would have said, but then the Australian hadn’t been in a war before, and as yet hadn’t suffered the soul-breaking loneliness of the POW in solitary. Perhaps the PLA wouldn’t separate them — and perhaps when you’d finished doing whatever they wanted you to do, they’d shoot you in the neck. He heard a prisoner urinating and the never-ending crashing of the sea on the reef.
After Jae Chong’s escape — during which he had killed two JDF agents and Wray of the CIA — the ambulances raced through the city to help those injured by flying glass during the melee. In the JDF’s HQ there was special consternation among the staff. How was it that the American, Wray, was permitted into the room while he was still armed, a direct contravention of internal JDF regulations? Someone was going to get it in the neck for that violation, and never mind about the possibility of the families of the deceased suing, even though the JDF officially had no office of Intelligence.
In all the confusion of how to word the official report of the shootings that would have to go to the minister, it was a junior clerk who found what looked like a phone number written on a piece of paper that had been lying, blood-soaked, in the interrogation room. He gave it to his section chief, who immediately punched out the number on his computer, waiting for the number/address correlation listings. It came up on the screen as a local number for Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“Very amusing,” the section chief said, decidedly unamused.
The headquarters staff got the distinct impression that the chief was more interested in recapturing Chong for ridiculing him than for killing the two agents and the American. To be on the safe side, the chief ordered a stakeout of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. It wasn’t beyond the range of possibility, he told his staff, that the gaijin Chong had written down an actual contact number — that some other gaijin working for the KFC outlet was in fact a spy.
For a few days, however, the chief’s loss of face could be measured in the number of chicken and cock-a-doodle-doo jokes doing the rounds of the Japanese Defense Forces HQ. That is, until the funeral of the two agents and the return of Wray’s body to the United States, reminding everyone that Jae Chong, the uncooperative comedian, was also a killer, and a killer who now had nothing to lose as one of the biggest manhunts in Japanese history got under way.