Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (7 page)

           
Admiral Yin cut him off. “These people
aren’t worth the aggravation of an explanation. Have you forgotten that I’m in
charge of this area? It is my responsibility to protect our territory.” Yin
shook his head angrily. “The brazenness of this is what’s so astounding to me.
Don’t they remember history? Hasn’t there been enough of their blood shed over
these islands? Have they gone senile? Well, let’s remind them of the full power
of this force.” Yin turned to Lubu. “Captain, relay to Captain Han on
Wenshan:
‘You are ordered to move within
one thousand meters of the platform so as to provide sufficient lighting and
covering fire from your deck guns, then dispatch a boarding crew to take the
captain, officers, and other personnel on board the derrick into custody. After
the crew is removed from the barge,
you
will destroy the entire facility with heavy gunfire.
’To
Xingyi:
have them move closer and be
ready to assist. To the rest of this task group: ‘go to general quarters.’
Relay the messages and execute.”

           
“Number-one launch is manned and
ready, sir,” the officer of the deck reported. “The chief reports davits for
launch number three are fouled; he recommends switching to launch four.”

           
“So ordered. I want that launch
freed up as soon as possible. Have other launches checked and report status to
me immediately.” Han wasn’t going to say why—he was afraid they might need the
damned launches for
themselves.
A few
minutes later, with the
Wenshan
barely maintaining a close and comfortable position away from
Phu
Qui
Island
, the motor launches were lowered overboard.
Each wooden launch, forty feet long and eight feet wide, carried a crew of
three and eight sailors armed with AK-47 look-alike Type 56 rifles and
sidearms.

           
The launches were only a few dozen
meters away from the
Wenshan
when the
world seemed to explode for Admiral Yin, Captain Han, Captain Lubu, and the
rest of the task force.

           
The engines on the
Wenshan
had been racing back and forth
in response to the helmsman’s attempts to hold the ship’s position steady. Han
had been watching the number- four motor launch moving away from the ship and
did not hear his crewman’s warning: “Shoal water! Depth three meters ... depth
two meters . .. depth under the keel decreasing.”

           
From the barges on
Phu
Qui
Island
, bullets began pelting the starboard side of
the
Wenshan
as the crewman aboard the
oil-derrick barges fired on the approaching launches and at the
Wenshan
itself.

           
Captain Han had not heard the
shoal-water warning. He ran back into the bridge. “Radio to
Hong Lung,
we are under fire from the
oil barges ...”

           
“Captain, depth under the keel . . .
!”

           
Suddenly the
Wenshan
was pushed laterally toward the island and struck a coral
outcropping surrounding
Phu
Qui
Island
. The patrol boat heeled sharply to
starboard, the sudden, crunching stop flinging every crewman on the bridge off
his feet. The gusting winds only served to push the
Wenshan
harder against the coral, and although the brittle calcium
formations gave way immediately under the four-hundred-ton ship, the sound of
straining steel combined with the howling winds and the cries of the surprised
crewmen made it seem like the end of the world was at hand.

           
The officer of the deck had raised
his headset microphone to his lips and shouted, “Comm, bridge, relay to
Hong Lung,
we are under fire, we are
under fire . . .” Then amid the tearing and crunching sounds: “We have hit the
reef, we have hit the reef.” But the message transmitted to the rest of the
task force group by the startled and terrified radioman was,
“Wenshan
to
Hong Lung,
we are under fire . .. we have been hit.”

Aboard the flagship HONG LUNG

           
When the warning from the
Wenshan
pierced the air in the bridge of
the
Hong Lung,
Admiral Yin spun on
his heels to Captain Lubu and shouted, “Order
Wenshan
and
Xingyi
to
open fire, full missile and gun salvo.”

           
Lubu wasn’t going to question this
order—he had been fearing just such an occurrence. He quickly relayed the
command to his officer of the deck.

           
Seconds later the stormy night sky
erupted with flashes of light and streaks of fire off in the distance. Using
their sophisticated Round Ball fire-control radar, the fast attack craft
Xingyi
had maintained a continuous
attack solution on the barges with their Fei Lung-7 surface-to-surface
missiles. As soon as the warning cry had been issued by Captain Han on
Wenshan,
Captain Miliyan on
Xingyi
had ordered all missiles and guns
made ready for action. When he received the message from Admiral Yin, the Fei
Lung guided missiles were in the air.

           
The Flying Dragon missiles received
initial course guidance from the Round Ball targeting radar, and a small
booster engine ignited that punched the twenty-two-hundred-pound missile out of
its storage canister. After flying a hundred yards away from the ship, the big
second-stage sustainer motor kicked on, accelerating the missile to Mach one. A
radar altimeter kept the missile precisely at one hundred feet above the choppy
waters until it hit the easternmost barge and exploded six seconds after
launch.

           
The pointed titanium armor-piercing
warhead section thruster cap of the Fei Lung missile allowed the missile to
drive through the thin steel hull of the outermost barge before detonating the
warhead. The four-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead created a massive
firestorm all across the Philippine oil platform, spraying red-hot chunks of
metal and propellant for hundreds of yards in every direction. A wall of fire
caused by a wave of burning petroleum washed across
Phu
Qui
Island
, swirling into an inverted tornado that
defied the late summer rains and stabbed skyward.

           
Captain Han watched the spectacular
firestorm that was once a Philippine oil derrick for several moments until he
realized that the
Wenshan
had
returned to an even keel and that the forward 76-millimeter gun had opened fire
on the platform, pounding the mountain of flames with twenty kilogram
radar-guided shells. “Cease fire!” Han shouted at his officer of the deck, who
was staring in rapt fascination out the forward windshield at the maelstrom.
“Cease fire!” he repeated before the forward 76 was silent. “Helm! Move us out
to two kilometers from the island. Signal the motor launches and the
Hong Lung
that we are maneuvering out of
shoal water.”

           
As
Wenshan
eased away from the huge fires still raging on the
Philippine oil barges,
Xingyi
launched two more missiles at the barge until Admiral Yin on the
Hong Lung
ordered him to stop. One Fei
Lung missile was quite enough to suppress any hostile fire from the small oil
facility, and two missiles would have completely destroyed it—four missiles,
half the
Xingyi
’s load, could
devastate an aircraft carrier.

           
Admiral Yin’s intent was clear—he
wanted no one alive on that platform.

           
“Seven, this is the Dragon,” the
radio message began. “Recover your boarding parties and rejoin the group.
Over.”

           
Captain Han picked up the radio
microphone himself. “I copy, Dragon,” Han replied. “I recommend that one of my
motor launches search for survivors. Over.”

           
“Request denied, Seven,” came the
reply. “Dragon Leader orders all Dragon units to withdraw.”

           
One hour later, all traces of the
Philippine oil derrick and barges were swept away in the rising tide of the
windswept
South
China Sea
currents. Except for a few pieces of pipe
^-
and half-burned bodies,
the oil platform had ceased to exist.

Malacanang
Palace
,
Manila
,
the
Philippines

Thursday, 9 June 1994, 0602
hours local

           
Since the Marcos years, the official
residence of the Philippine President,
Malacanang
Palace
, had undergone a major transformation.
Concerned for his security, Marcos had transformed the graceful
eighteenth-century Spanish colonial mansion into an ugly fortress—he had
blocked most of the windows and replaced stained glass and crystal with steel
or reinforced bulletproof glass. Wishing to distance her government from the
dictatorial excesses of the Marcos regime, Corazon Aquino had chosen to live in
the less pretentious Guest House and had turned the palace into a museum of
shame, where citizens and tourists could gape in wonder at Marcos’ underground
bunker—some called it his “torture chambers”—and Imelda’s cavernous bedroom,
stratospheric canopy bed; her infamous shoe closets and her bulletproof
brassiere.

           
The new President of the
Philippines
, seventy-year-old Arturo Mikaso, changed
the
Malacanang
Palace
back into a historical landmark that his
people could be proud of, as well as a livable residence for himself and a
workable office complex for his Cabinet. The style and grace of the precolonial
Philippines
were restored, the heavy security barriers
were removed, and, like the American White House, large portions of
Malacanang
Palace
were now open for tours when they were not
in use by the President. In time the palace again became a symbol for the city
of
Manila
itself.

           
But now, in the growing summer dawn,
the palace was the scene of a hastily arranged meeting of the President’s
Cabinet. In Mikaso’s residential office, where the President could see the
Pasig
River
that wound through northern
Manila
, President Mikaso sipped a cup of tea.
Mikaso was the elder statesman, a white-haired man who was taller and more
powerful-looking than most Filipinos, a wealthy landowner and ex-senator who
was immensely popular with most of his people. Mikaso had been elected as
President of the nation when Corazon Aquino’s second four-year term came to an
end. He won the election only after forming an alliance with the National
Democratic Front, the main political organ of the Communist Party of the
Philippines
; and the Moro National Liberation Front, a
pro-Islamic political group that represented the thousands of citizens of the
Islamic faith in the south
Philippines
.

           
“How many were killed, General?”
Mikaso asked.

           
“Thirty men, all civilians,” the
Chief of Staff of the New Philippine Army, General Roberto La Loma Santos,
replied somberly. “Their barge came under full attack by a Red Chinese patrol.
No orders to surrender, no quarter given, no attempts to offer assistance or
rescue after the attack. The bastards attacked, then slinked away like cowardly
dogs.” A tall, dark-haired man, standing alone near the great stone fireplace,
turned toward General Santos. “You have still not explained to us, General,”
Second Vice President Jose Trujillo Samar said in a deep voice, “what that
barge was doing in the neutral zone, anchored to
Pagasa
Island
...” .

           
“And what are you implying,
Samar
?” First Vice President Daniel Teguina, who
was seated near the President’s desk, challenged. Teguina was politically an
ally of
Samar
but ideologically a complete opposite. Part
of the coalition formed during the 1994 elections was the appointment of
forty-one-year-old Daniel Teguina. Much younger than Mikaso, Teguina was not
only a vice president, but also the leader of the Philippine House of
Representatives, an exmilitary officer, newspaper publisher, and leader of the
National Democratic Front, a leftist political organization. With General Jose
Trujillo Samar—who besides being the second vice president was also governor of
the newly formed Commonwealth of Mindanao, which had won the right to form its
own autonomous commonwealth in 1990—these three men formed a fiery coalition
that, although successful in continuing the important post-Marcos rebuilding
process in the Philippines, was stormy and divisive. “Those were innocent
Filipino workers on the barge . . .” said Teguina.