Shock of War

8

The Gulf of Tonkin

The Gulf of Tonkin was a veritable bathtub filled with Chinese rubber duckies, the biggest of which were two Chinese aircraft carriers. The carriers were not, strictly speaking, in the same class as American supercarriers.

Silas told his number two, Lieutenant Commander Dorothy Li, they weren’t even the match of the Italian ship Garibaldi, which the McLane had maneuvered with in the Philippines not six months before.

The assessment was grossly unfair. The Garibaldi was a capable ship, but she was much smaller than the Chinese vessels. While packing quite a wallop for her size, the Italian vessel was primarily an antisubmarine helicopter ship with an attachment of Harriers to extend its mission to air strike and defense.

A better comparison was the French carrier De Gaulle, a ship Silas had never seen. Displacing around 40,000 tons, the Chinese carriers carried the new Chinese J-15 Flying Shark, among the most capable naval combat aircraft in the world; and considerably more capable than the Harriers. While the Chinese vessels were conventionally powered, they boasted forty aircraft apiece (including helicopters). Together they had nearly the same punch as a larger U.S. supercarrier, though with a shorter reach and somewhat less efficiency. Their sensors and defenses were not up to American standards, but they were operating so much closer to their homeland that any disadvantage was marginal.

Their aircraft would give the McLane a difficult time. It was conceivable, in fact, that if properly handled, the Chinese fighters could sink the American destroyer, though Silas was loath to admit it.

And, of course, they would do so only over his dead body.

The carriers were a good distance away, nearly ninety-five miles by the last plot. Closer and of more immediate concern was the cruiser and her frigate.

Named the Wen Jiabao after a recently deceased premier, the cruiser was the refitted Moskva, a Russian ship sold to China ostensibly as scrap two years before. At one hundred and eighty six meters long and nearly twenty-one meters at beam, it was a good bit larger than the McLane. The Wen carried at least thirty-two long-range YJ-83 antiship missiles, each with a range of roughly two hundred kilometers.

Nasty things, those.

“Cap, have you had a look at the weather report?”

Silas looked over at his chief aerographer’s mate, Petty Officer Jondy Moor, who’d just come out off deck. Moor, who had a background as an aviation warfare specialist, had completed training for the meteorology specialty just before joining the McLane.

“What do we have?” asked Silas.

“Nasty storm brewin’, Cap. It’s gonna be a bitch.”

Moor had a satellite image with him; it showed a classic tight pin-wheel with a dot at the center.

“Category 5 typhoon. Or it will be,” said Moor. “That is the real deal.” A Category 5 typhoon — the Pacific version of a hurricane — could have winds in the area of 136 knots, generating storm surges over eighteen feet. The storm was a monster.

“It’s coming our way?” asked Silas.

“In this general vicinity. Absolutely, Cap.” The petty officer began regaling him with possible storm tracks and percentages, talking about probabilities and the difficulty of really knowing which way the wind was blowing. “We’ll have a better idea in twenty-four hours,” said Moor. “Any way you look at it, Cap, the seas’ll be ultra heavy. Even if it veers off, we get a lot of rain. Gale winds. Gonna be a bitch no matter where it goes.”

“Good job,” Silas told him. “Keep me informed.”

“Aye aye, Cap.” Moor glanced over Silas’s shoulder. “Chinese still out there?”

“Just over the horizon,” Silas told him.

“We oughta kick ‘em in the balls before they get a chance to kick ours,” said Moor.

“Not up to us,” said Silas. “Though I have to say, you have the right idea.”

9

Alexandria

Josh’s appearances at the UN and before the Senate committee made him a popular “get” for the network and cable talk shows. The only problem was that he didn’t want to be a “get.”

His experiences since returning to the U.S. had so completely depressed him that he didn’t want to do anything, not even eat. Much of it was simply fatigue — he was still hungover, physically and mentally, from his ordeal in Vietnam. Nothing in America could quite match the adrenaline rush of what he’d been through, the triumph as well as the fear. But most of what he felt was utter contempt for his fellow human beings, who were simply too selfish to understand what was really going on. They closed their eyes to the outrage, trying to wish it away in hopes that it wouldn’t affect them.

But eventually it would.

Jablonski had set himself up as Josh’s media broker, and he gave Josh a long list of possible interviews. Josh turned them all down.

“It’s completely up to you,” said Jablonski. “But it would be in your best interests to take a few. Just a few.”

“My best interests?”

The political op stared at him.

“I’m going home,” Josh said.

“I’ll give you a ride to the hotel.”

The hotel wasn’t what Josh meant. He wanted to go home home.

The problem was that he didn’t have one: the Vietnam field work was supposed to have lasted six months, with research following in Australia. So Josh had given up his apartment. He didn’t even have a storage locker: postgrad, his entire accumulation of worldly goods amounted to three boxes of clothes and six boxes of books, all of which were donated to a Goodwill outfit in Kansas where he’d been staying with his cousin’s family before leaving for Asia.

He could go back to the farm. His cousin had invited him in their brief phone call right after the UN talk.

Where else would he go?

* * *

Josh was still brooding when he returned to the hotel. He started to turn on the television, then realized it would only depress him further. Instead, he started to pack, pulling together all of his borrowed clothes.

He had to talk to Mara, say good-bye.

She was the one thing keeping him here, or keeping him around. He didn’t want to leave her.

But that was silly. They weren’t boyfriend-girlfriend. She’d been doing her job. It was time to go.

He pulled everything together in less than five minutes, checked the bathroom twice, and left the room.

“Hey, champ, where we going?” asked the marshal. By now Josh was calling him Tex, which he didn’t seem to mind.

“Home, Tex.”

“Home?”

“You can ride with me if you want. But I’m going.”

“Where’s that?”

“Tex, you don’t have that in your little earphone there?”

“Come on now, Doc. I’m on your side, right?”