Tiger's Claw: A Novel (4 page)

And to his surprise, Bradley let the M-16 rifle fall from his hands behind him into the mud.

“
Pick that weapon up, Basic!
” Weber shouted. “Are you
insane
?
Pick it up, now!
”

“Take it back, Weber,” Bradley said flatly.

“What did you say, Basic? Did you just address me by my last name?”

“I said: take it back, Weber.”

Weber’s eyes were bulging in complete and utter disbelief, and he stuck his face close to Bradley’s once again. “
You will address me as ‘Sir,’ Basic!
” he shouted, louder than Bradley ever remembered him doing so before. “And you will not direct me to do
anything
!
I
give the orders here!”

“I’ll tell you once more, Weber: take back what you said about my father,” Bradley said.

“Getting rid of you is going to be easier than I thought, McLanahan,” Weber said, his incredulous expression replaced by a broad, satisfied smile. Bradley’s eyes met his, which turned Weber’s expression back to one of red-hot rage. “You’re one step away from a board of review, maybe even an on-the-spot dismissal.
Get your eyes off me, Basic!
” But Bradley didn’t look away. “How dare you mouth off to a second-class, Basic? How dare you look
me
in the eye? Who do you think you are? You’re nothing but a candidate here, McLanahan, a
wannabe.
The only way you survive to attend my beloved Academy is to obey your superior officers, and that’s
me.
” And he punctuated that last sentence with another punch in Bradley’s chest with three fingers of his right hand . . .

. . . except the jab never landed, because Bradley swatted his hand away.

“You just laid a hand on me, Basic!” Weber shouted, his voice just now beginning to grow hoarse. “That’s an automatic trip to the squadron commander. You’re one step away from going home to your daddy.
Get your eyes off me, Basic!
”

“Take back what you said about my father, Weber,” Brad repeated, then added, “or you’ll be sorry.”

“You’re
threatening
me now, Basic?” Weber exclaimed, his eyes bulging in anger and disbelief. “If you want to go home to your daddy so bad, McLanahan, why don’t you just ring out? It’s easy. I’ll take you to the squadron commander, and you tell him you want to go home, and that’s it.” Bradley said nothing.

Weber moved face-to-face with Bradley. “But if you want to stay—if you’re afraid of getting rejected by your own daddy by going home before you even begin fourth class—then this is what you have to do: you apologize sincerely for touching me; you promise to uphold the basic principles of the Academy; and you agree to assist me in all my additional duties for your entire fourth year, in addition to all your other requirements. If you agree to all these things, I’ll omit filing a report on you for your breaches of conduct in this evolution, and you can continue Second Beast.” Weber nodded. “You did very well in First Beast, McLanahan, and even though your M-16 is lying in the mud right now, you haven’t done anything more egregious than what a lot of dipshit Basics do in Second Beast. You can still pull this out of your ass if you choose to do so. What say you, McLanahan?”

Bradley didn’t take his eyes off Weber, but looked him straight in the eye . . . for just a few moments, before caging his eyes, looking straight ahead at nothing, then said, “Sir, Basic McLanahan begs the cadet sergeant’s indulgence and sincerely apologizes for his inexcusable insubordination. Basic McLanahan was completely out of line, promises never to touch or threaten an upperclassman ever again for any reason, appeals to the cadet sergeant’s mercy to allow him to continue the Second Beast, and humbly requests the cadet sergeant’s permission to be his undergraduate assistant during the fourth-class year. Basic McLanahan also promises to completely honor, uphold, and defend the principles of the Air Force Academy to the complete satisfaction of the cadet sergeant.” Bradley closed his eyes, filled his lungs, then shouted, “
Sir!
”

Weber nodded and smiled with smug triumph. “Very good, Basic,” he said. “We might make a fourth classer out of you yet. Now pick up your rifle, then return to the beginning of the Pit. On the double.”

“Sir, yes sir!” Brad responded. He turned and stooped down to pick up the M-16 . . .

. . . and as he did he heard Weber say in a low voice, “Now if we can just get your whack-job daddy to apologize for the mess he’s caused our country, we’d all be in real good shape.”

Brad couldn’t describe what he was thinking about at that moment, or why he did what he did. All he knew is in a split second he had tackled Weber and was on top of him in the mud. He remembered getting two good punches in on Weber’s face before he heard several whistle blasts and shouts and felt hands reaching for him from behind . . .

. . . and he knew those whistle blasts signaled the end of his attendance at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and probably the end of any career in the military as well.

ONE

T
HE
S
OUTH
C
HINA
S
EA
,
TWO HUNDRED MILES SOUTHEAST OF
H
O
C
HI
M
INH
C
ITY
, V
IETNAM

T
HAT SAME TIME

The American survey ship
Lady Garner
had been at its assigned search area for five months. From its home port in Long Beach, California, the ship had been hired by the Vietnamese oil company 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
Baohùzhe,
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.

The captain picked up the intercom microphone. “Comm, better send a message to headquarters and to our liaison office in Ho Chi Minh City; tell them we may be getting harassed by the Chinese navy, and ask for assistance. Give them our position.” He switched to the ship-to-ship emergency channel. “Chinese navy vessel
Baohùzhe,
Chinese navy vessel
Baohùzhe,
this is the United States survey ship
Lady Garner;
we are not in Chinese waters, repeat, not in Chinese waters. We are well within Vietnamese waters and are operating under a license from the Vietnamese government. Do not approach. We are not under way and are conducting scientific probes of the sea bottom authorized by the Vietnamese government. Over.”

“Survey ship
Lady Garner,
this is the cruiser
Baohùzhe,
warning, you are illegally in Chinese territorial waters, and you are ordered to depart immediately,” came the reply. “Exploration of this region of any kind is not permitted. Acknowledge!”

“
Dette er gal!
” the captain muttered. “This is crazy! Notify the security detail and have them set up extra lookouts—I want to know if the Chinese send out any small craft to . . .”

At that moment they heard a tremendous
BOOOM!
directly overhead, loud enough to rattle the thick storm windows on the bridge. “
What was that?
” the captain exclaimed. “Did we just get overflown by an aircraft going supersonic?” It was night—there was no way anyone was going to see an aircraft flying supersonic. Richardsen mashed the microphone button. “Cruiser
Baohùzhe,
you are on a collision course with us. We are at anchor in the Vietnamese exclusive economic zone, with permission from the Vietnamese oil ministry. And order that jet not to fly over us again going supersonic!”

“Survey vessel
Lady Garner,
this is the People’s Liberation Army Navy cruiser
Baohùzhe;
you are in Chinese waters illegally,” the voice from the Chinese cruiser said. “Prepare to be boarded for inspection. Do not resist.”

“This is the captain of the
Lady Garner,
and I do not give you permission to board!” Richardsen radioed.

“
Lady Garner,
you are in Chinese waters. We do not require your permission to board any vessel in Chinese waters.”

“Officer of the Deck, sound alert condition three, all hands on deck,” Richardsen said, using Clark’s title instead of his name to emphasize the increasing tension level. On the intercom he radioed, “Comm, notify headquarters and the liaison office that the Chinese cruiser is approaching at high speed and says he means to . . .”

“Bridge, Sellers on the port stern lookout, I hear a helicopter approaching,” a security officer radioed. “One or two hundred yards away, maybe less.”

“Survey ship
Lady Garner,
this is the cruiser
Baohùzhe.
Our patrol helicopter reports that you have armed men on deck. Weapons are not permitted on civilian vessels without permission from the People’s Liberation Army. You are ordered to throw all your weapons over the side. Our personnel are authorized the use of deadly force. Comply immediately!”

“What’s going on, Skipper?” the executive officer, Kurt Branson, said as he stepped quickly onto the bridge.

“The damn Chinese navy,” Richardsen said. “They got a helicopter on the way and . . .”