bloody stonefish.” He waited for a response but none of the other nineteen prisoners in his group said anything, some frantically trying to figure out how best to deal with raw fish with your bare hands. “Stonefish’ll kill you in less than five minutes.” Only Shirley Fortescue balked at what lay in front of her. “Don’t worry,” Murphy said. “None of these are stonefish.”
“Why bring it up, then?” she said tersely. “You enjoy frightening people?”
“Don’t get your knickers in a knot, Shirl. Just somethin’ to say, y’know.”
“And I’ve told you before my name’s Shirley,
“Piss on you, lady.”
“Hey, Mike,” Danny Mellin interjected. “Ease up.”
“No problem, Dan, just trying to pass the time.”
“Well, don’t,” Shirley said. “It’s going to be tough enough as it is. We don’t need your warped sense of humor on top of it.”
“Listen up, you two,” Danny cut in. “We’ve got trouble enough without
“War’s already started,” Murphy answered petulantly.
“Yeah,” Danny said, “but we’re in the middle of nowhere—”
“We’re in the Paracels,” Shirley cut in. “Far as I can tell, somewhere near Pottle or Woody islands.”
“Whoopee,” Murphy said.
“Mike,” Danny said, “put a lid on it. What I was saying was that we have to start figuring a few things out because when they’re done building this airstrip, what are they going to do with us?”
“What makes you so sure it’s an airstrip?” Murphy asked, tearing hungrily at a piece of fish.
“Well,” Danny said, “it’s the wrong shape for a baseball diamond.”
Shirley Fortescue laughed.
“Yeah, well,” Murphy said, feeling foolish in light of Mellin’s repartee. “Why in hell would the Chinese be blowing up a reef and rolling it flat when there’s already an airstrip on Woody Island?”
“Because,” Shirley answered in as civil a tone as she could manage with the Australian, “Woody Island’s airstrip was wrecked by the Vietnamese in the first few days of the war. It was blown up and the island occupied by Vinh’s marines within a few hours of
“The rig you were on?” Danny said.
“Yes. We got the news on the distress channel from a few foreign rigs drilling offshore.”
“So now Upshut Island is to replace Woody Island,” Danny said.
“Right.”
“Ah, rats!” Murphy said, his tone trying for a jauntiness that he knew the others were either too thirsty or too hungry to share. “Your lot,” he told Danny. “Seventh Fleet won’t let ‘em build an airstrip here — middle of bloody nowhere or Paracels — whatever. Yanks’ll bomb the crap out of it.”
Neither Shirley Fortescue nor Danny Mellin said anything for a few moments. The Australian was indisputably brave, as his helping Danny earlier in their capture had demonstrated, and he was clearly intelligent enough to have been working on one of the South China Sea rigs before the war had started, yet he was surprisingly naive politically, as evident from his remarks about the Seventh Fleet bombing Upshut Island.
“Haven’t you noticed, Mr. Murphy,” Shirley began, “how many Americans, British, and Australians have been brought to this island?”
“Yeah, Miss Fortescue, I have. So?”
“You don’t see any reason for that — the fact that there must be over a hundred of us here?”
“All right, so they’re using us as bloody coolies,” Murphy retorted. “Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”
“Mike,” Danny said calmly, “they’re using us as bloody hostages.” He paused. “As well as coolies. The President isn’t going to order the Seventh Fleet or any other fleet to bomb the ‘crap’ out of this speck in the ocean. Not with so many American and British and—” Murphy looked thunderstruck, so Danny tried to lighten it up. “They won’t even bomb Aussies!”
Murphy was still silent.
“Lookit,” Danny continued, “even when we bombed the crap out of Hanoi, our guys never went near the Hanoi Hilton.” Shirley Fortescue looked nonplussed. “Hanoi Hilton,” Danny explained to her, “was the POW jail in Hanoi. During ‘Nam.”
“Oh…”
“Bloody hell!” Murphy pronounced. “Then how the dick are we gonna get off this bloody island? I mean, I thought we’d at least be traded or something.”
“What do you suggest meanwhile?” Shirley asked. “We swim for it?”
“Very bloody funny.”
“Actually,” she riposted, “it isn’t bloody funny
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
If it had been handheld computer games that had taken Southeast Asia by storm, then in Japan it was the craze for karaoke, patrons of bars singing to recorded music. And this night Jae Chong was foot stomping and humming along to a raucous rendition of country music, including a tub-thumping version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Jae ordered another drink, and though several other people had their hands up ahead of him, he was the one the waiter decided to serve first. The waiter, Jae thought, probably despised him for being Korean, but he was a Korean with money, and that made all the difference. For more yen, the waiter would treat him like royalty, and Jae was spending big. Why not? He was convinced that by now every police station in Japan had his photograph or artist’s likeness and yellow sheet.
The only thing keeping him off Japanese TV’s “Most Wanted” program was, ironically, the very press that had been so vocal in calling for the capture of all terrorists responsible for the bullet train wreck. For while it was widely known that there were Korean terrorists in the country, it was not known that the Japanese Defense Force had a CIA-type agency, and to keep the press off the scent, the JDF had to arrange a cover story for the killing of the three policemen, including the American agent Wray. There were Japanese constitutional restraints forbidding an intelligence agency from having links or even liaison with the U.S. CIA.
But Jae Chong was under no illusion. Once the JDF had its story watertight, then his photo would be flashed across every TV screen in the country as
And Jae Chong knew that once his face went public, he’d be lucky to last a week. In any event, his cover was now completely blown. Whatever Pyongyang’s assurances to its agents in South Korea, he knew Pyongyang would make no effort to recover him, because, unlike Moscow’s rules in the old cold war, Chong and other “abroad agents” were considered expendable. There were only two Pyongyang rules, the first being that if you were caught, no recovery effort would be mounted. Second, if you talked, your next of kin would be shot. Not surprisingly, it encouraged North Korean agents to commit suicide when blown.
Jae faced the inevitable in a drunken stupor and a cloud of Lucky Strike, without rancor, without remorse. He hated the Japanese deeply for what they had done to his grandparents during the Second World War, and besides, to tell the truth, he’d enjoyed the relatively rich consumer life in Japan as compared to the hardships of home, where all the money possible had been drained off and funneled into North Korea’s nuclear program. Trust the U.S. President to have believed that a final “understanding,” in short, a financial buyoff in terms of U.S. aid, had caused North Korea to “deconstruct” its nuclear weapons program. True, the factories in question had now been effectively gutted of any nuclear potential, but with Pyongyang’s old ties to the Soviet Union still largely intact with Russia, the men who ran Pyongyang now had Russian and North Korean scientists going back and forth on mutually beneficial
