R&R in one of the stranger aspects of that long-ago conflict. The weather in Dalat was always good. At the coldest, it would rarely fall below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and at its hottest, wouldn’t rise to much more than 73 degrees. A place of gardens, of tranquility, it would be pleasant to visit if for no other reason.
“What about Dalat?” Baker pressed.
“To show you I am a man of the truth.”
Baker, nonplussed, waited impatiently. It had become cooler, a waist-high mist covering the canal, creeping toward the congestion of sampans and other river craft.
“In Dalat there is an MIA.”
Baker felt his heart thumping. “Where in Dalat?”
“I will tell you if you will tell your government what I have told you.”
“Yes,” Baker said, “I’ll send in a report.”
“The MIA is in a village near Lang Bian Mountain,” the old man said. “North of Dalat The people of Lat village will help if you give them this.” He took a small scrimshawed shark’s tooth pendant from around his neck. “When will you leave?”
Baker gave the old man twenty dollars, to be shared with the go-between. “In the morning.”
Afterward, Baker sent a message to the Pentagon about what the old man had told him concerning the attacks on the oil rigs, but he cautioned that it was only one old man’s story amid so many.
When morning came, Baker did nothing about the MIA— there was nothing he could do until he got special permission from the Vietnamese. Lam Dong province, in which Dalat was situated in the central highlands over 225 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City, had been closed again to United States citizens, who were still being charged by the Vietnamese with covertly supporting the FULRO — Front Unifie de Lutte des Races Opprimes — United Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races — guerrillas in the highlands. The CIA had long denied any continuation of funneling arms, but now and then FULRO rebels would stage another ambush or shoot up one of the supposedly secret Vietnamese reeducation camps, which, rumor had it, were still run for some U.S. POWs and MIAs.
In the evening, Baker went down to the canal to talk again to the old man, to get more details, but he was gone. Baker found him near midnight in a sampan that was bumping among the bridge pilings, his throat cut. He guessed the old man had been killed for what he’d known either about Dalat or about the pirates’ attacks in the Paracels and Spratlys.
What Baker hadn’t banked on was the Vietnamese response to the very first attack in the Spratlys, but then again, the Vietnamese had had dealings for a thousand years with the Chinese, and they decided to react immediately rather than let their traditional enemy think he’d gotten a toehold in Vietnamese waters. Hanoi headquarters ordered the Haiphong base to attack, and within the hour, with an efficiency that, after the Vietnam War — or what the Vietnamese had called the Second Indochina War — was among the best response times of any Asian coastal navy, two Soviet-made Osa-class missile craft armed with four surface-to-surface N-2 missiles raced out into the Gulf of Tonkin, ready to attack anything Chinese.
The flag behind each of the missile boats, that of Vietnam, fluttered furiously as the Osas’ bows lifted and the brown water boiled in urgency, the Vietnam missile boats picking up speed, heading southeast to the Chinese- occupied islands in the Paracels. The boats’ crews, however, were under no illusion, for they knew that they were heading toward the People’s Liberation Army’s new navy, which Beijing had boasted was nothing less than “a great wall of iron.”
Ten miles from the nearest Chinese-claimed island in the Paracels, one of the Vietnamese boats’ radar picked up two blips advancing from the east at thirty knots plus: two Chinese Huch’uan-class fast-attack hydrofoil boats. A Vietnamese Osa fired its starboard forward SS-N-2 missile, the Chinese hydrofoil immediately going into a defensive “weave” pattern.
Closer now. the Vietnamese Osa fired a second missile, its backblast on the stern immediately raising the Osa’s sharp bow so that she gained a knot or two. The Vietnamese captain saw one of the Huch’uan-class hydrofoils leap into the air and crash down again, its portside foil shattered along with the midships and cockpit — now a crushed pile of smoking metal.
The Chinese hydrofoil had turned hard astarboard as the orders were given by its skipper to abandon ship. The second Chinese hydrofoil fired its starboard twenty-one-inch-diameter torpedo from its large, corrugated housing, and now its 12.7mm machine-gun stations opened up against the fast-turning Vietnamese boats which, suddenly slowing near the site of the injured and sinking Huch’uan hydrofoil, machine-gunned all those Chinese in the water.
“Great wall of iron!” snorted one of the Vietnamese skippers, motioning toward the detritus of wreckage and bodies. The second Chinese hydrofoil had already fired its torpedoes, but they were easily avoided by simply opening the throttle, allowing the Vietnamese Osas to skid in wide thirty-five-plus-knot semicircles. There was some stray machine-gun fire from the Chinese—12.7mm tracer playing about the Osas, hitting the Monkey Island, or clear-weather bridge, on one of the Vietnamese boats, but doing no more damage than that.
Hanoi now broadcast to the world via an accommodating CNN that Vietnam had “punished Chinese aggressors” in Vietnamese waters.
In reply, the Chinese vehemently denied that they had violated Vietnamese waters, but stated that “the peace-loving People’s Liberation Navy” had been patrolling, as was its right, within two hundred miles of its coastline, which included the big island of Hainan, and from Hainan it had every right to patrol another two hundred miles, as Hainan was indisputably Chinese territory. Beijing immediately requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions and other disciplinary measures against the “imperialist aggressions of the Republic of Vietnam bandits.”
Vietnam followed suit and asked for U.N. sanctions against China. The fear on both sides of the dispute — and well-founded fear — was that the issue would be ponderously delayed while no action would be taken. In the meantime, both Beijing and Hanoi were accusing each other of violating the other’s zone of ownership. It was a very capitalist argument, as seen by the
In New York today, a U.N. meeting of Southeast Asian and East Asian nations called to decide who owns what in the oil-rich archipelagos of the South China Sea ended in uproar as the Chinese and Vietnamese representatives came to blows over ownership of the disputed islands.
As well as being rich in oil and natural gas deposits, the islands, the Paracels to the northwest and the Spratlys in the southeast, are also strategically vital to naval and mercantile routes to and from Japan and the United States.
The U.S. State Department is closely monitoring the talks, which it hopes will resume on Monday. Moscow and Tokyo are also watching the talks closely, as the outcome could have serious and wide-ranging geopolitical implications for all island disputes, particularly the so-called “Northern Territories” islands in contention between Russia and Japan.
CHAPTER SIX
It was 11:55 p.m. — 2355 hours on the clock at the Japanese Intelligence headquarters in Tokyo — and Henry Wray of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency sat quietly enjoying a cigarette, something he couldn’t do in Langley, Virginia, because of the strict no-smoking laws. His two Japanese hosts lit up as well. At 11:57 he watched his Japanese counterpart turn up the volume of the Sanyo shortwave receiver. At 11:58 two officers of the JDF, Japanese Defense Force, entered the cork-lined room, bowed to the civilians — four in all — from Japanese intelligence, and took their seats, the red light of the tape machine signaling it had already begun. At precisely twelve midnight the transmission from somewhere in North Korea began — four-digit numbers until 0020, when the code abruptly finished.
“All we need now,” Wray said, “is their onetime pad.”
“If that’s what they are using,” his Japanese host replied.
“Hmm… it’s what I’d use,” Wray told them. “You people are so far ahead in computers, I wouldn’t run a
