Ian Slater - South China Sea

The Pentagon’s view, however, was quite different. Its hope was that the very announcement of the American-led EMREF being activated, via Hawaii, would send a timely and clear message to Beijing — to stop the fighting and to withdraw its troops from Vietnam.

Within the closely guarded and vivid red-lacquered gates of Beijing’s Zhongnanhai, the government’s VIP compound, reaction was swift, with a message to Generals Wei and Wang to hold their positions at all costs, that “decisive” reinforcements were en route from Nanjing military district to the border. In fact, the Vietnamese supply line from Hanoi eighty miles to the south had been cut again, this time by PLA MiG-29 Fulcrums, so that Hanoi’s ability to resupply its troops south of Lang Son and Dong Dang was even further impaired, inviting a fresh Chinese attack, with Generals Wei and Wang eager to seize the moment and press farther south.

THE ADVANCE PARTY of the Emergency Response Force, a mixture of 2,150 Marines and three squadrons of 216 British Special Air Service and 200 Delta Commandoes, left Britain and the United States by air ahead of Second Army. Meanwhile, General “George Scott” Douglas Freeman was busy in the cavernous interior of the lead L-100-30 Super Hercules.

In addition to the 127 other combat troops in the first Hercules, another twenty of the aircraft would fly into Hanoi with the remainder of the advance party, which would chopper eighty-five miles north into the area around Lang Son. The advance units of Freeman’s Second Army and all its material were already on their way from Japan aboard the fast 20-knot vessels of the Military Sealift Command, including amphibious assault ships, helo- and Harrier-carrying ships from the 40,500-ton Wasp class, a 39,300-ton Tarawa, and an 18,000-ton helo-carrying Iwo Jima class. They were escorted by 30-knot Burke-class and Spruance-class destroyers, two Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruisers, and two combination SSBN/ SSN Sea Wolf submarines with cruise missiles and torpedoes.

At 9:55 Chong moved away from the temple of Asakusa Kannon to the phone booth nearby and dialed Tazuko Komura’s contact number. When she answered, he knew she would be wearing white gloves. He asked for a Mrs. Yoshi. Tazuko Komura told him he must have the wrong number, there was no Yoshi living there. He rang off.

Before Chong had made his phone call, six JDF intelligence officers had been milling in the crowd around the Asakusa Kannon — the minimum needed to follow anyone. All of them had seen Jae go into the phone booth and dial. Immediately, two of the closest agents made their way to the phone booth, one of them rudely stepping in front of a woman waiting her turn to enter the booth.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but I am going to use the phone.” The agent said nothing. “I am going to use the phone,” the woman repeated.

“No you’re not, mother.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Be quiet,” he said, “or I’ll arrest you.”

“Arrest me?” she said, surprised. “And who are you, please?”

The agent was losing it. Amid the murmur of the crowd around the shrine, their voices couldn’t be heard, but if the old woman kept on nagging at him…

He would have to get the rare one, he thought, a woman who thought herself equal to men — the man they were watching, still in the booth, might hear them arguing as he came out.

“And who are you, please?” the woman repeated.

The agent had seen Jae dial four of the six numbers, but not the last two. It was something, but not enough. They’d have to feed it into the computer and have it print all the possible combinations of numbers.

“And who are you, please?” she said once again.

“Be quiet!” the agent hissed. He couldn’t hear what Jae was saying.

The agent walked away as Jae hung up.

“I thought you were in such a big hurry,” the woman called after him. “Did you hear him?” the elderly woman challenged the person lining up behind her. Jae came out of the booth. “And who is he? He’s a lout, that’s what he is. A shrimp brain!”

The person she was addressing, another woman, but much younger and prettier, smiled weakly but obviously didn’t want to get into it.

“Moyashiko,” bean sprout, the old woman said as she made her way into the phone booth.

The agent joined his companion, and both of them sought out the American agent, Henry Wray, who was waiting in one of the surveillance cabs. The Japanese agent lowered his eyes in a sort of obeisance. “I only got four of the numbers,” he confessed.

“Did you?” Wray said, but the American’s tone was more a hearty declaration than a question. “Well, we got the whole six!”

The agent’s mouth was agape. “The truth?”

“The same,” Wray said. “JDF boys had a bead on him the moment you saw him waiting. It’s a number in the north of the city, in Kita-Ku.”

“Do we pick him up?” the agent asked eagerly.

“No,” Wray said. “He’s just a messenger. We can get him anytime. What we want are the soldiers — who he calls — the action boys. Besides, we pick him up now, his friends soon know, the cell disbands, and then we’re back to square one.”

“But we still tail him.”

“Your boss and I think that’s the best way to proceed.”

The agent nodded. Whether or not he agreed, it was impossible to tell. “Will we pick up the contact?”

“We’ll do that,” Wray replied, indicating the other four agents in the car.

Tazuko Komura, after walking away from the public phone, made her way back to her apartment block, and in her tiny, boxlike kitchen, which smelled of pickled cabbage and fish, she sat down and turned on the news. The yen had risen again, worrying Japanese business about the resultant high price of her exports relevant to other countries. Tazuko was struck by the irony that the Japanese yen — because it was one of the strongest currencies in the world — was now giving Tokyo a headache with millions at stake in exports.

She handled the TNT-based compound carefully but confidently, each malleable plastique piece of grayish-white C4 looking like a rectangular bar of putty except for its inverted-V-shaped bottom. Next Tazuko pushed in two aluminum blasting cap tubes, out of which came the detonating cord that would be started via a small, tubular, battery-operated electronic timer, its top resembling the rotary dial of a telephone except that instead of each hole moving ten spaces from operator to 1, the ten-holed rotary dial of the electronic timer was marked from one-quarter minute to forty-eight minutes. She would, of course, use the 48 setting, giving her ample time to walk away.

Now on the news, the CNN feed was showing the massive sea lift of the U.S. Second Army from Japan, each of the two corps making up the army of 108,000 men. But for every man at the front, several were needed in support functions, so the actual number in combat would be no more than 27,000.

Tazuko turned up the TV volume and heard that the American general in charge was someone called Freeman, but whether or not he was with the task force, they didn’t say.

An hour after Jae had made his call, U.S. CIA agent Henry Wray and his Japanese colleagues arrived at the phone he’d rung. It was another public booth.

“Clever,” Wray said. “I thought it’d be a residence. Should have known better.”

“Yes,” one of the Japanese agents said, but he quickly made it clear that this was not a slight against Wray, just an admission that they had all thought it would be residential.