Tiger's Claw: A Novel

Petrolimex to map out an area of its economic exclusion zone and explore the possibility of setting up oil rigs. Displacing almost three thousand tons, the Lady Garner’s profile was dominated by the 150-foot-tall oil derrick in the center of the ship, which steered drills and pipes through the hull down through thousands of feet of seawater. Even through thousands of feet of seawater and earth, the bore could be steered by the geologists with incredible precision—one nudge of a joystick thousands of feet away from the objective could mean success or failure. There was also a large helicopter platform on the nose able to recover helicopters as heavy as thirty thousand pounds even in rough seas. The Lady Garner was serviced by strings of supply vessels from the United States, Australia, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines that carried extra fuel, pipe, provisions, and relief crews for the expected nine-month deployment to the search area.

But the low-tech derrick was not the ship’s main tool. The Lady Garner was one of the most sophisticated offshore exploration ships in the world, able to perform several different methods for searching for oil, natural gas, and other minerals. Although most of the men and women on board ran the ship, the most important persons were the geologists, chemists, and computer technicians who operated the seismic generators, gravity survey equipment, sonars, chemical analysis laboratories, and other high-tech systems.

The objective of their five months on-site was just being laid out in front of the captain, project manager, chief engineer, and chief geologist and simultaneously transmitted to officials at Petrolimex in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and the Lady Garner’s headquarters in Long Beach. “Good evening, everybody,” said Gary Boudrain, the project manager, into the video teleconference camera. Boudrain was a big man from Louisiana with deep wrinkles on his weathered face, the result of over thirty years at sea all over the world. “I’m Gary Boudrain, the project manager aboard the Lady Garner survey ship, on station in sector twenty-seven in the South China Sea. With me is the chief geologist, chief engineer, chief chemist, and of course Captain Victor Richardsen. I trust everyone has received the Traffic Light Map.”

Heads nodded on the ship and on the video teleconference screen. The Petrolimex officials were smiling broadly, and that made Boudrain feel very good. “We have good news: it looks like we have a good cluster, and my team and I recommend dropping an exploratory well.”

He hit a button on his laptop computer, and the image on the screen changed to a map of a section of the South China Sea with hundreds of green and red dots on it. This was the product of their five months at sea: the Common Risk Segment Map, known as the Traffic Light Map. The green dots indicated a good chance for oil and gas, and red dots for poor areas. There were several clusters of green dots—those were their objectives.

“There haven’t been too many surveys of the South China Sea in recent years due to the political and economic turmoil,” Boudrain went on, “especially around the Spratly Islands, but I’m pleased to say our mission here is a big success. We are sitting atop one of the largest clusters of good potential oil and gas deposits I’ve seen outside of the Middle East, perhaps as much as a billion barrels of oil and seventy-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas in this one sector alone.” Boudrain didn’t think the oil executives’ smiles could get any broader, but they did. “We have every reason to believe neighboring sectors contain similar deposits, based on the geography. My project staff unanimously agrees to strongly recommend drilling an exploratory well to verify our findings.”

The video teleconference didn’t last too much longer—it was clear the Petrolimex executives were anxious to share the news with their superiors in the Oil and Gas Ministry of the Vietnamese Politburo. Boudrain and his staff answered a few questions about their findings and the next step, and the conference was terminated. “I think you kicked a home run, Gary,” Victor Richardsen said. The captain was born in Norway, and even though he had lived in the United States for almost ten years as skipper of the Lady Garner, he was still getting American cultural references mixed up.

“I usually don’t like to use such definitive terms, Skipper,” Boudrain said. “Remote geological surveying is an inexact science at best, and dropping an exploratory well in these waters could cost Petrolimex upwards of fifty million dollars. But what we found here is truly extraordinary. Lots of us believed the South China Sea had vast deposits of all kinds of minerals, but this is the first real indication that it could be true.”

“Gratulerer igjen, Gary,” the skipper said. “Congratulations again. I am going to check in with the watch on the bridge, and then I am going to turn outwards. God natt.” He shook hands with the rest of Boudrain’s staff, then departed.

The Lady Garner was one of the most high-tech survey ships in the world, and the bridge reflected this. It took only two men to stand watch on the bridge, and just four when under way. There was still a wheel, throttle levers, and a large compass on the main console, and they were all operable if needed, but steering, propulsion, and all other major functions were now controlled by computer. In the darkness of the bridge, with the only illumination coming from the dimmed computer screens, the captain couldn’t make out the faces of the watchstanders, but he knew these men almost as well as his own six children. “How are you boys doing tonight, Todd, Mac?” Richardsen asked.

“Very well, Captain,” the officer of the deck, Todd Clark, replied. Clark was a recent graduate of the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo, California; this was only his second cruise in the Lady Garner, but he was an exceptional seaman and doing well. “All systems normal. Station keeping is running at twenty-five percent of capacity.” The survey vessel used a sophisticated set of thrusters under the ship to keep itself precisely in place—it could keep the massive vessel within a few dozen yards even in gale-force winds and heavy seas. “Weather is forecast to be hot and showery. We might have a small thunderstorm later in the morning.”

“Typical summer weather,” Richardsen said. “We just received the briefing from the project manager, and I think we will be green-lighted to drill an exploratory well. That means we will be here several more months.”

“Great news, Skipper,” Clark said.

Richardsen checked the radar display, but the storm was not yet on the screen. Just for curiosity’s sake he switched the radar from weather to surface-search mode—and immediately saw a very large ship coming toward them from the north. “We have traffic to the north,” he said. “Verify our anchor lights are on, please.”

“Yes, sir,” Clark replied. A moment later: “All at-anchor lights on, Captain.”

That was good, Richardsen thought, but this guy was heading toward them awful fast and not veering east or west. He was a bit less than twenty miles out, but for some larger ships it took that much distance and more to make even a slight turn. “Better turn on the derrick and service lights too—that should make us visible farther out for his lookouts, as long as they’re not all asleep.”

Just before Richardsen switched the radio to the common ship-to-ship channel and picked up the microphone, they heard in heavily accented English on the 2182 megahertz maritime emergency channel: “Attention, attention, unidentified vessel, this is the People’s Liberation Army Navy cruiser Baohuzhe, north of your position. You are in Chinese waters illegally. You are ordered to leave this area immediately. Acknowledge.”

“Tull!” the captain swore. “Mac, verify our position.”

“Yes, sir.” John “Mac” Portman was one of the most experienced sailors on the ship, serving on the Lady Garner almost since the ship first put to sea. The navigator was also the helmsman on this computerized vessel. A few moments later: “GPS position verified with the LORAN, Captain. Dead on the plat, thirty miles inside the Vietnamese EEZ.”

Are we going to get grief from the Chinese navy again? the captain asked himself. Chinese patrol boats and aircraft had been shadowing them for days, and other survey vessels had been harassed by Chinese “fishing boats”—more likely old navy utility vessels—trying to ram them. Although they could call on the Vietnamese navy and air force for help, the Vietnamese navy had very few ships that ventured out this far from shore, and very few patrol planes flew at night, so they had little protection. They had a small security detail with night-vision goggles and sniper rifles to protect against pirates, but nothing that could take on the Chinese navy—not that he had any intention of challenging them.

They were adjacent to one of the most hotly disputed regions of the world: the Spratly Islands. The Spratly Islands were a chain of islands and reefs between the Philippines and Vietnam that were claimed by several nations. There was less than four square miles of land above high tide spread out over four hundred thousand square miles, but it had been long assumed—now very much verified—that there were substantial oil and natural gas deposits in the area. Six nations—China, Brunei, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia—variously stationed troops and conducted patrols through the area. Because the area was so hotly disputed, all parties agreed not to explore for oil or gas within the archipelago until the territorial arguments were resolved, and the Lady Garner was careful to stay within Vietnam’s economic exclusion zone.