Fourth Crisis: The Battle for Taiwan (3 page)

Jade and Richard bumped along in the subway train and stared
out through blackened windows.
 
Richard’s
inverted triangle of a face was lit intermittently by passing tunnel lamps, and
his dark brown eyes reflected in the safety glass.

Walking from Foggy Bottom/GWU station, Jade and Richard
strolled along the cobblestones of Olive Street toward their place, the
townhouse they had shared for several weeks now.
 
Jade grabbed Richard’s ass, making him smile
again.
 
They paused in the yellow of a
streetlamp and shared a long kiss.
 
Walking again, their step quickened.
 
Jade giggled with anticipation.
 
Once through the apartment door, they began to strip each other.
 
Richard was slow to indulge at first,
seemingly preoccupied with his discouraging encounter.
 
However, when Jade guided his hand to her
moistness, he soon forgot all.

Panting heavily, Jade slid off Richard and collapsed beside
him.
 
Now at the outer edges of sleep from
the powerful, shared orgasm, Richard flashed into a dream: The world was on
fire.

“I’m hungry,” Jade declared, startling Richard awake.
 
“You men,” she laughed.
 
“If I were a spider, I’d sting and kill you
now.”
 
She donned a robe and went to the
kitchen.
 
Richard stirred from his cocoon
of sheets, and clicked on the bedroom television with the remote.
 
Breaking news from Taiwan came on.
 
Richard squinted against the glare and sat
up.

“Hon,’ come here.
 
You
need to see this,” he exclaimed with urgency.
 
Jade ambled back into the bedroom cupping a bowl of chocolate
syrup-covered ice cream.

“What is it?” she asked, as she fell into her favorite
overstuffed chair.
 
She shoveled some ice
cream into her mouth.

“Look…”
 
Richard turned
up the volume.

A reporter explained that Taiwan had launched ballistic
missiles at Communist China, killing thousands of innocent civilians in a
blatant act of war.
 
Taiwan, in turn,
claimed the attack was unauthorized—the act of a rogue missile captain—and
offered profuse apologies while warning China against escalation.
 
Beijing promised retaliation for the act of
terror, and to solve the Taiwan question, ‘once and for all.’
 
The United States had called for calm on both
sides.
 
As a prudent precaution, the
American president ordered the nuclear supercarriers
George Washington
,
John C.
Stennis
, and
Ronald Reagan
to the
area.
 
The journalist then concluded her
report with, “Ladies and gentleman, the events of the last few hours are
undeniable—the Fourth Taiwan Crisis has begun.”

Jade swore in Chinese, and Richard dropped the f-bomb in
English.
 
They both looked at each other
with mouths agape.
 
Richard’s cell phone
began to ring.
 
He glanced at the
flashing, vibrating thing, and then back to the news.

“There goes the weekend,” he sighed.
 
Richard stood and walked to the nightstand.
 
Wanting privacy to take the call, he carried
the phone into the kitchen.

◊◊◊◊

On the San Diego embarcadero, near the Spanish colonial
revival Santa Fe Depot, and past the tall masts of the Maritime Museum’s full-rigged
sailing ship,
Star of India
, a white
pickup truck pulled up outside a tall glass hotel.
 
Wearing US Navy dress white, Lieutenant
Cynthia Pelletier hopped out of the pickup and blew a last kiss to its driver,
her dad.
 
He smiled widely and told her
to be safe, and that he was very proud of her.

The hotel’s bellhop took Lieutenant Pelletier’s sea-bag from
the truck and nearly collapsed under its weight.
 
He shuffled off, groaning, maneuvering the
unwieldy canvas sausage to a luggage cart.
 
Out of breath, he directed Pelletier to the front desk.
 
She entered the air-conditioned lobby and
tucked her short blond hair behind a smallish ear.
 
Her long bare legs carried her quickly past
the gawking concierge who slammed his open jaw shut.
 
Pelletier placed her plain handbag on the
cold marble check-in counter, and pulled a reservation confirmation from the bag’s
side pocket.
 
When her green eyes locked
on the manager, he flushed for the first time in years.
 
She’s
too pretty to be a sailor
, he thought.

Pelletier had grown up surrounded by Colorado’s saw-toothed
and snow-peaked mountains.
 
At a young
age, she had traded a love of horses for that of airplanes.
 
While others her age swooned for Tom Cruise,
she instead was seduced by the movie’s other star: the big swing-wing F-14
Tomcat fleet defense fighter.
 
Cindy
would sit on her pink bike at the end of her driveway and pretend the asphalt
was the steel deck of an aircraft carrier.
 
Cindy’s best friend would stand beside her and salute.
 
This signaled Cindy to start pedaling.
 
She would pump the pedals as hard as her
skinny legs could manage, and got the bike up to speed.
 
Trailing sparkly streamers from the
handlebars, Cindy’s bike would hit a makeshift plywood ramp and go
airborne.
 
These were her first imaginary
carrier take-offs.
 
She cherished those
few weightless moments before the bicycle hit the ground again.
 
Often sent tumbling through the brambles, she
always had a righteous laugh, and did it all again and again.

Years later, she had found her teenage sweetheart, and fell
harder than those bicycle wipeouts.
 
He had
proposed on the dance floor at their senior prom.
 
She turned him down and left him in the
flicker of the disco ball, with the thump of music and a broken heart filling
his chest.
 
Although she was handed true
love, Cindy wanted more from life: Cindy wanted wings.
 
With a bit of help from her father, she put
herself through college and earned a degree in aeronautics.
 
With diploma in hand, Cindy went right to the
navy recruiter.
 
He immediately showed
her where to sign.

United States Naval Officer Candidate Cynthia Pelletier had
then gone on to Officer Candidate School at Naval Station Newport, Rhode
Island.
 
There she had endured the Marine
Corps’ ‘House of Pain,’ and earned a healthy fear of drill instructors, and a
place at Primary Flight Training.
 
Now a
distinguished naval aviator, Lieutenant Pelletier accepted her hotel card
key.
 
She headed upstairs for room
service and a few hours of sleep.

Early the next morning, Lieutenant Pelletier trailed another
bellhop.
 
He lugged her sea-bag, as she
strolled through the hotel’s lobby doors and out into the cool pre-dawn dark.
 
Pelletier breathed in the moist salty air and
looked at the seagulls that were already awake and complaining as they wheeled
above.
 
Attracted more by Cindy’s
splendor than by the bellhop’s wave, a taxi screeched to a stop beside her, and
the driver emerged to open the car’s door.
 
He was unkempt and reeked of old cologne.
 
Pelletier stated her destination: “North
Island Naval Air Station,” and took a deep breath before shuffling into the
car.
 
She quickly lowered the windows to
aerate the interior, and, in the side mirror, watched the driver cram her sea-bag
into the taxi’s trunk.

They passed the venerable aircraft carrier
Midway
on Harbor Drive, and then the
Marina and Gaslamp districts of Old San Diego.
 
The taxi turned onto Highway 75 and crossed the elegant blue ribbon of
viaduct that linked Coronado Island to the city.
 
The sun began to rise, tinting the morning
sky deep purple.
 
In the distance,
Pelletier spotted the white-barreled towers and red witch hat-shaped roofs of
the beachside Hotel Del Coronado.
 
The
taxi passed Coronado Island’s Tidelands Park and turned onto 4
^th
Street.
 
Pelletier thought about her ship: USS
Ronald Reagan
.
 
This would be the first time she was to serve
aboard the nuclear supercarrier, and she would be doing it in the navy’s newest
airplane.
 
With fifth generation aircraft
trickling into the fleet, Pelletier was one of the first to learn and fly the
new jets.
 
One of the stealthy machines
awaited her on North Island’s flight line.
 
She would fly it out to meet the carrier.

Nudged by tugs,
Ronald
Reagan
had already put to sea beneath the twinkling stars, and departed San
Diego Harbor early that morning.
 
With her
decks bare and cavernous hangar empty, ‘The Gipper,’ as
Ronald Reagan
was affectionately called, would meet her air wing
and escorts south of San Clemente Island.
 
Once formed-up in southern California waters, the
Ronald Reagan
carrier strike group was to head west toward the
continental shelf.

Pelletier’s taxi arrived at the outer gate of North Island
Naval Air Station.
 
Her identification
checked by the sailor on duty, she handed in her sea-bag.
 
The cabbie, who clutched his lower back as he
mumbled, fell back into his car.
 
Pelletier strolled a promenade where a gauntlet of palm trees rustled, and
headed for one of the naval station’s old buildings.
 
She returned salutes from those she passed
and smiled all the while.

Squeezing into her flight suit, Pelletier checked her flight
plan and strode out to North Island’s ramp and the warplane that awaited
her.
 
She went about her pre-flight
routine and watched two fat carrier cargo aircraft take off from the base’s main
runway.
 
Propeller-driven and heavy with
spare parts, mail, supplies, and Pelletier’s sea-bag, the cargo planes required
the most time to catch up with
Ronald
Reagan
, and were, therefore, first to depart.
 
As she watched them struggle into the air,
Pelletier began her own airplane’s start up sequence.

◊◊◊◊

The American nuclear supercarrier
George Washington
was engaged in an exercise with the Royal
Australian Navy south of Palau.
 
She was
the closest to Taiwan, so her strike group got orders to steam northwest at full
speed, and entered an area of the Philippine Sea called the ‘Dragon’s Triangle.’
 
George
Washington
was super in all respects.
 
She towered some 20 stories over the water and reached four more beneath
it.
 
The 1,096-foot hull—as long as the
Chrysler Building was tall—got pushed at over 30 knots by twin nuclear reactors
that powered four giant bronze propellers.
 
With a four-and-a-half acre flight deck and an air wing larger than most
national air forces,
George Washington
was twice the weight of
Titanic
, and some
97,000 tons of American diplomacy.

Plying the waves off
George
Washington
’s port bow was the guided-missile cruiser
Lake Champlain,
a sleek vessel and, at about half the size of the
carrier, the largest of
George Washington
’s
escorts.
 
Although five-inch deck guns were
her only apparent armament,
Lake
Champlain
hid anti-air, anti-ship, and land-attack missiles below her
spray-soaked decks.
 
At the ship’s prow,
snapping in the headwind proudly flew a red-striped flag with a yellow snake that
menacingly declared ‘Don’t Tread on Me.’
 
A single black anchor hung beneath it, and, below the waterline, a
bulbous sonar stem protruded.
 
With
helicopters and torpedoes,
Lake Champlain
was an enemy submariner’s worst nightmare.
 
On the cruiser’s superstructure, below the bridge’s band of windows,
hexagonal radar arrays scanned the sky for threats.
 
Arrayed around the ship were dishes, domes,
and antenna masts that talked to satellites.
 
They also linked
Lake Champlain
to the group’s other ships, and to command at Pearl Harbor.
 
With sensors and weapons controlled by a
sophisticated computerized combat system,
Lake
Champlain
projected a protective bubble high into space and deep below the
sea.
 
All by her lonesome,
Lake Champlain
constituted an armada.

On
Lake Champlain
’s
bridge, US Navy Captain Anthony Ferlatto stood between the quartermaster and
lookout, his legs spread wide to brace against the roll of the ship.
 
With squinted beady black eyes, Captain
Ferlatto studied digital charts and chewed an unlit cigar.
 
“If I ain’t chewing on this, I’ll be chewing
on you,” he told those who questioned the nasty habit.
 
The soaked cheroot occupied his mouth, and his
sharp hooked nose whistled as he breathed.
 
Ferlatto scanned the ship’s helm console and looked to the
officer-of-the-deck, who gave a curt nod.
 
The OOD knew the captain hated minced words—what he called ‘noise’—especially
when a simple gesture would suffice.
 
Ferlatto walked forward and rested a hand on the ship’s steel wall.
 
He determined from its vibration that the
cruiser’s gas turbines were at the correct power setting, and running good and
healthy.
 
He grunted with
satisfaction.
 
Ferlatto was always happy
at sea.
 
He squinted through the armored,
tinted windows and looked to the other ships spread around the supercarrier.