The reflections of flames danced madly in the blister-shaped cockpit of the Brunei army’s BO-105 helicopter as it sped out like a dragonfly across a flickering orange sea in response to the U.S. Seventh Fleet’s request. It sped toward the enormous flame shooting high above the drill ship’s rig, one man in the chopper safely harnessed and ready to extend his reach down after steadying himself on the starboard strut to extract the videocassette from the high stanchion above the well deck mast by lifting a bamboo hoop attached to the camera unit.
While maintaining forward flight, the pilot lowered his lever, using the stick and pressing his rudder pedal to hover over a spot he’d selected below, on the well deck’s forward hatch, the fuselage rotating slowly about the main hub’s axis. The bamboo hoop, video camera, and cassette in their all-weather plastic sheath had sensibly been painted phosphorescent red, and showed up clearly in the frenetic shadows cast by the fire whose roar was now so loud that the pilot and his observer in the harness could hear it above the near-deafening sound of the four-bladed rotor engine. Now the cockpit bucked violently and the pilot could feel the increasing torque as he fought to keep the helo steady in the waves of superheated air which, above the sea’s cooler, denser air, created savage and short-lived convection currents and wind shears that buffeted the helo.
The Bruneian pilot wrestled for control. Five times the helo rose and fell abreast of the stanchion, each time getting a little closer, until the Bruneian in harness could reach out and grab the “hula hoop” and yank the attached video camera assembly out of its weather-protected cradle.
A sudden gust blew the helo toward the stanchion, and the pilot immediately moved to counteract it. But he was a split second too late, one of the rotors striking the stanchion, the helo dropping like a stone toward an enormous shadow of itself on the ship’s deck, sliding the full length of the stanchion and crashing into the well deck. One of the rotor’s spars cartwheeled and sparked across the well deck and then into the derrick that was red hot from the roaring flame. The spilled gasoline from the helo instantly became a river of fire that quickly raced back to the helo’s fuselage, engulfing the shattered cockpit and the two men. There was an explosion which sounded like no more than a pop beneath the steady roar of the gas fire still flaming unabated hundreds of feet up into the night sky.
Though at a state dinner for the British ambassador, His Royal Highness the Sultan of Brunei was informed immediately of the situation. He was the richest man in the world, and every Bruneian citizen had one of the highest living standards in the world — all because of Brunei’s oil, from offshore as well as onshore. His Royal Highness immediately put his tiny but superbly equipped 4,657-man armed forces on high alert, ordering Brunei’s three Waspada-class fast patrol boats to sea with two surface-to-surface Exocet missiles per boat, but with express orders from the sultan to search, rescue where possible, and identify but not to engage unless attacked.
Within ten minutes the three Bruneian patrol boats had six radar blips on their screens, indicating anything from four junks to other commercial shipping, including what looked like an empty supertanker off the coast of the Brunei coastline heading south from the Malay state of Sabah in Northern Borneo and past the stricken drill ship’s position.
No survivors were found in the surrounding waters, but the patrol boat nearest the drill ship was close enough to see, in the spill, of light created by the fire of escaping oil and gas, bodies, some of them blackened, strewn about the well deck and the stern near the galley. Aboard the patrol boat a British army observer, Captain Owen, from one of the thousand-man Gurkha infantry battalions — one of three British battalions stationed in Brunei to help protect British petroleum interests— volunteered to go aboard the drill ship. He and two of the patrol boat’s crew were shortly on the well deck, but the heat was so intense that they could feel it through their Vibram soles, paint on the well deck already blistering and flaking.
“We’ll have to go back!” Owen shouted. “Hose it down first!”
For the next ten minutes, while the two other boats headed farther out to sea, the patrol vessel with Owen aboard used its fire hose to drench that part of the well deck immediately beyond the drill ship’s ladder, the paint blisters now washing off like great gobs of wet newspaper, revealing spots of the red antirust primer below.
“Why do you wish to go aboard?” asked the boat’s skipper, a spruce young Bruneian in his late twenties. “There’s not much to see. I mean, nothing more than you can see from here.”
“I’d still like a closer look,” Owen said. “Five minutes is all I ask.”
“Very good,” the boat’s captain said in impeccable English. “We’ll keep the hose spraying the well deck.”
“Right you are,” Owen responded.
Once on the deck, however, he could still feel the heat through his boots. He looked about quickly but could see no weaponry, only the casings of expended 5 .45mm and 7.2mm rounds. Owen also saw that to get near the bodies of the dead Americans and others, let alone remove them, was impractical at the moment, many of them so badly burned their flesh had melted into the deck. So he left the drill ship none the wiser.
“Until that cools down, we can’t do much here,” he told the patrol boat captain.
“Who’s going to shut it down?”
Owen shrugged. “One of the companies who stopped the fires in Kuwait, I expect”
“But they weren’t at sea.”
“No,” Owen agreed, “no, they weren’t.” His expression in the raging firelight was one of mounting anxiety. Even if the fire was extinguished, if they couldn’t cap it, it would be the biggest oil spill the world had ever seen — a spill that would make that of the Exxon Valdez and Penchara River look tiny, a spill that would spread out and surround all the joint ventures spread over the South China Sea and beyond.
In the cylindrical dry-deck housing riding piggyback on the SSN Santa Fe, the swimmer delivery vehicle Mark XV was being checked over by two Navy SEALs. The combat swimmers were making sure that all systems were go aboard the flat SDV, which measured twenty feet long by seven wide. With its horizontal stern stabilizer and two vertical control fins, the Mark XV resembled a big Formula One racing car shell, minus the wheels, mat had been squashed into a long rectangular shape. In its nose, a blunted triangular housing, was a state-of-the-art obstacle avoidance sonar.
The SDV was also equipped with a computerized doppler Inertial Navigation Subsystem — which would take it to the Chical via its silent-running, nickel/cadmium-battery-powered motor. Its normal external component of two fourteen-hundred-pound torpedoes, a 331-pound warhead on each, that once launched from the SDV could run at twenty knots plus, was removed so as to raise the normal five-knot speed to ten knots.
The two SEALs chosen for the look-see mission were ready to flood the piggyback housing to equalize the inside and outside pressure in preparation for launching their craft. They could have disengaged from Santa Fe a half hour before, but they were waiting to take advantage of promised bad weather. Via infrared cameras, satellites had picked up a bank of anvil-shaped thunderhead clouds stretching from Sabah, past Brunei, to Sarawak, a sure sign of thunderstorms building on the west coast of Borneo. And so the SEALs who would man the Mark XV waited, the Santa Fe meanwhile trailing her long VLF, or very low frequency, aerial, receiving burst message updates on the weather.
In the Santa Fe’s combat information center the captain ordered silent running. Among other measures, sandwiches would be prepared in the galley so as not to run the risk of any noise from the big food mixers that might send out telltale vibrations, no matter how small. Even so, unlike a diesel electric boat, a nuclear sub like the Santa Fe could not be absolutely silent, as the pump needed to keep the reactor cool could not be stopped. But the Santa Fe’s captain was confident that the sound of his boat would not be detected by any potential “hostile,” given the noises of other South China Sea mercantile traffic. Also, once the weather worsened and thunderstorms began, the surface hiss of the torrential downpour would help hide the sound of Santa Fe’s water pump, and the heavy, cooling rain would also allow the SEALs to more comfortably board the hot drill ship.
When the torrential rain began, the SDV was only a half mile from the Chical, and within forty-five minutes the two SEALs had left the SDV and were climbing up the ladder aft of the drill ship’s galley housing. The flames still roared high, but the downpour was now so heavy that the decks, if not cool, were only moderately warm. The derrick’s steel, still hot, was turning the rain instantly to steam. In their rubber suits and front-mounted Draeger rebreather systems, the two SEALs moved cautiously through the hot fog as if through a giant sauna, which covered the ship in a ghostly pink light.
One SEAL carefully, and mostly by feel, made his way down the aft galley ladder to the engine room. There, with the help of his waterproof flashlight, which cut the steam in a sharply defined roiling beam, he saw the first body. The dead man’s white boiler suit had blended so well in the hot steam now pervading the ship that the SEAL didn’t see it until he was almost upon it. He found a half-dozen more bodies strewn about in the engine room and, as he had with the first, carefully searched the dead men’s clothing, wrists, ears, mouths, and chest areas.
Up on the forward well deck the other SEAL also found bodies, difficult to locate in the shroud that now covered the ship, though the flame from the fire was still vomiting skyward As he got closer to the well deck’s forward hatch, he found over twenty corpses in and around the paint locker and, like his colleague, searched every one as carefully as time would allow.
The heavy rain-peppered swells looked like great ominous walls closing in until they passed beneath the anchored drill ship, the strain on the four anchors obvious from the crack and splitting sounds of chain and cable.
Once back aboard their SDV, docked aft of the drill ship, the SEALs compared notes. In all, they had searched forty-one bodies, the remainder of the drill ship crew either shot while in the water or, like the two bodies found wedged and floating by the prop, most likely killed from concussion after jumping overboard in panic and striking their heads on some part of the ship during midroll.
The two SEALs immediately sent their findings to the Santa Fe via their VLF transmitter:
BROOD ONE TO MOTHER STOP DRILL SHIP’S WELLHEAD AFIRE STOP ALL BODIES EXCEPT THOSE IN WATER DEVOID OF VALUABLES STOP AM RETURNING STOP MESSAGE ENDS
This transmission was quickly relayed through the chain of command up from the Seventh Fleet’s Blue Ridge to CINCPAC to the Pentagon, and finally to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The implication of the message was clear: everyone aboard Chical had been robbed. Only those wedged near the prop, which was difficult to get to, had retained wedding bands, wallets, necklaces, watches, and the like. As with the boat people years before, anyone with gold fillings or gold bridges had had them ruthlessly removed by pliers or whatever else would do the job.
“So you were right,” the President told his assistant, Ellman. “It was nothing more than a damn pirate raid.”
Ellman nodded. “Set the wellhead aflame to occupy us — to cover their real intent.”
“Vicious bastards,” the President said. The thought of having gold fillings ripped from your mouth, even if a body was dead, was so barbaric it made his gut turn. Still, better a gang of pirates than a clash of nations, one country’s sovereignty breached by another. Ellman’s press assistant suggested it could have been both, but Ellman shook his head. “No. I think it’s clear that this is the act of a bunch of cutthroats, plain and simple.”
That possibility was to become a certainty on Chical 7, another joint Chinese-U.S. venture platform already in production in the Paracel Islands, five hundred miles southeast of China’s big island of Hainan. The Paracels, lying east of the Gulf of Tonkin, were claimed by both China and Vietnam. The rig was afire and deserted except for the dead bodies picked out by a carrier plane’s reconnaissance infrared-sensitive cameras. Again the message originated from the Seventh Fleet — the overflight made by F-18s aboard the U.S. carrier Enterprise— and was relayed through Blue Ridge up the chain of command to the White House.
“Jesus Christ!” the President blurted. “Would someone tell me what in hell is going on?” His angry surprise became outright alarm when he was told that while Chical 7 was southeast of Hainan, it was also effectively in the Gulf of Tonkin, two hundred miles off Vietnam.
“Vietnam” and “Tonkin Gulf were the two places in the world that no U.S. President wanted to hear about ever again, but by now over sixty-five Americans working in the Paracels and Spratlys had been murdered. And CNN — nobody knew how they’d found out so quickly — wanted to know why, and what the President was going to do about it. Already the White House phones were jammed with calls.
“This was a leak!” the President thundered, his clenched fist banging the desk. “A goddamned leak somewhere along the chain of command. And I want to know who—”
He was interrupted by Ellman, who seemed in shock. “Mr. President.”
“Yes?”
“Sir, we’ve just heard via CIA’s Hong Kong station that China’s moving an additional three PLA divisions — over forty thousand men — to the China-Vietnam border.”
“Where on the border?”
“Ah—” Ellman looked quickly at his notes. “—within striking distance of a Vietnamese place called Lang Son.”
“Has Beijing made any statement?”
“Yes, sir. Apparently the move is to signal Beijing’s displeasure toward, and I quote, ‘the warmongering Vietnamese imperialists who are blatantly attacking Chinese possessions in the South China Sea.’ “
“Call the Joint Chiefs and whoever has the China desk at State.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ellman gave the task to his junior while he himself called the Secretary of the Navy. “Mr. Secretary? Bruce Ellman, White House. Sir, we’re in damage-control mode re this business in the Spratlys and Paracels, and the media are clamoring. Are you up for the ‘Larry King Show’?”
“No.”
“It has to be this week, sir. Otherwise it’ll look like we don’t know what’s going on.”
“Do we?”
“No, but we’re trying to—”
“No.”
Ellman knew he was on his own.