another line of black pajamas to one main heap a few hundred yards inland, amid the scrubby and stunted bushes.
“How big d’you reckon?” Mellin asked. “The island?”
Mike Murphy shrugged and a guard saw it. “ ‘Bout half a mile long, maybe less, five hundred yards wide.”
“Up shut!” shouted the soldier.
Murphy saluted the guard. “Sorry, shithead.”
“Jesus,” Mellin murmured, looking away from the guards. “For Chrissake, shut up, Mike.” But Upshut seemed impressed by Murphy’s elaborate show of obedience and the snappy salute.
Now Mellin could see several pairs of the black pajama figures leaning, straining forward like beasts of burden, pulling cement rollers behind them over the coral that had been spread out over the tidal pools.
Upshut and his cohort were looking away from Mellin, Murphy, and the dozen or so other prisoners in their charge when Mellin heard a soft and distinctly British woman’s voice — one of the other rig prisoners — whispering to them to be careful, that Upshut understood more English than the American or Australian realized.
Mellin checked out the guards. They were talking to one another at about a hundred decibels, pointing at the fish dinner provided by the latest explosion. It was the Englishwoman doing the translating.
“You know a lot of Chinese?” Mellin asked the woman.
“I speak Mandarin, a little Cantonese,” she said. “I was radio operator on
Mellin nodded. As far as he could remember,
“What’s your name?” Murphy asked in a low tone, looking not at her but rather at the two guards she’d warned them about.
“Fortescue,” she answered. “Shirley Fortescue.”
“Well, Shirl,” Murphy responded. “Thanks for the tip.”
Danny Mellin could see the woman, in her mid-thirties, didn’t like the Australian’s easy familiarity with her name. “Shirley,” she corrected Murphy.
“Righto, luv,” Murphy said, smiling. “No problem.”
Mellin watched the Australian eyeing her more closely now, taking note of an hourglass figure which even the drab black POW pajamas couldn’t hide. “Things could be worse,” he told Danny with a wink. There was a growling sound nearby — one of the other prisoners’ stomachs complaining of hunger.
“Hey, Shirl,” Murphy whispered. “How ‘bout using a bit of the old Mandarin and asking Upshut when we get a feed? We’re all bloody starving.”
“No,” Danny said quickly. “Don’t let them know we’ve got someone who can understand their lingo. We might find out what—”
Upshut swung about. “Who talks?” he shouted. No one said anything, and for a moment there was silence between the sounds of the dredge claw bringing up more dislodged coral, water, and kelp streaming from it, and dumping it. One of the prisoners, a Vietnamese, got up and, holding his hand up like a child in class, asked, in what Shirley Fortescue could tell was a border dialect of Cantonese — the Chinese spoken in the south — when they would be getting some food and drink.
Upshut’s cohort gave a long, loud answer, after which the Vietnamese who had asked the question sat down desultorily, shrugging his shoulders.
“What’d he say?” Murphy asked.
“I think,” Shirley Fortescue said softly, “that the guard said we’ll get some water but no food until we finish our work.”
“Work?” Murphy said. “What fucking work? Ah, sorry, Shirl, but I’m not working for these assholes.”
Upshut was coming straight at him, clicking the fold-out butt of the Kalashnikov to use the AK-47 as a club.
“Sorry!” Murphy said, quickly raising his hands. “Sorry.”
The Australian’s raised arms stopped Upshut, who made a show of folding the butt, shortening the weapon, and grunting, pleased by the Australian’s surrender, nodding his head as if to say, That’s better, now you know who’s boss.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Generals Wei and Wang were pleased by their armies’ southward offensive but were by no means complacent. The Vietnamese Army had given them a bloody nose in ‘79, no matter what Beijing told the Chinese people. And neither general wanted a repeat of that performance — when the supply line had simply not been able to keep up with their own advance units, so entire battalions went without water for several days and were as much in danger from dehydration as from the Vietnamese.
Another factor that the PLA generals had to take into consideration was that what had begun with a four- mile-wide front spearheaded by the Fourth Division of the Nanning army had now spread out to a ten-mile front. The two PLA generals were concerned that if Vinh’s Vietnamese divisions managed to launch a concerted counterattack, they would be able to punch a gap in the PLA line and do a “breaststroke.” That is, the Vietnamese spearhead would first punch a hole in the PLA front, then divide into two arms, both swinging back southward like the arms of a swimmer doing the breaststroke, first cutting off elements of the PLA’s Fourth Division, then encircling segments of the advance Chinese troops in a “scissors handle” maneuver. They would isolate the PLA troops for piecemeal destruction and rush more Vietnamese north from the Hanoi military region.
Despite this risk, elements of Wei’s army heading south on the eastern flank of the ten-mile front knew they must push forward down the valley beyond Lang Ro to capture and/or render the airstrip at Kep inoperable, then swing eastward to Haiphong, the port for Hanoi in the Red River delta. But here lay another possible bone of contention between the PLA’s military commander and their political officers. Generals Wei and Wang had their political officers, equal in rank to the generals, and both political and military officers had to come to an agreement about strategy — right down to the tactical level— before the troops could be given specific orders. The Vietnamese Army under Vinh, as Freeman had discovered, was run in much the same way.
At first sight Westerners were unimpressed by the system, so cumbersome, so different from their own. Or was it? Freeman asked his staff as they prepared the plans for the deployment of Second Army, whose supplies were now being unloaded at Haiphong.
Freeman, to the consternation of his aide, Major Cline, answered his own question about the similarity of the PLA command structure and that of the West. Typically, he overstated the position by pointing out how General, later President, Eisenhower had ordered General George Patton to halt what Freeman called Patton’s “magnificent end run” into Eastern Europe in 1944, and how Dee had not wanted the Americans, British, and Canadians to beat the Russians to Berlin, so that “the goddamned Russians’ noses wouldn’t be out of joint.”
“That, gentlemen,” Freeman said, “was nothing less than a political decision by Ike. Another thing — it was Harry Truman who tied Doug MacArthur’s hands behind his back when the general wanted to cross the Yalu in Korea and hit the red bases inside China — another political decision. Don’t look so stunned, gentlemen. I just want you to know that we have our own commissars in the West. We just put ‘em in the State Department and call ‘em experts!”
Cline and Boyd had been equally startled by the general’s analogy.
“Jesus!” Cline told Boyd. “If a reporter ever heard him say that, the shit’d really hit the fan.”
It hit the fan anyway, but for a different reason. Someone, somehow, had gotten hold of what the general had said to Cline and Boyd immediately
