Ian Slater: South China Sea

“Why do you wish to go aboard?” asked the boat’s skipper, a spruce young Bruneian in his late twenties. “There’s not much to see. I mean, nothing more than you can see from here.”

“I’d still like a closer look,” Owen said. “Five minutes is all I ask.”

“Very good,” the boat’s captain said in impeccable English. “We’ll keep the hose spraying the well deck.”

“Right you are,” Owen responded.

Once on the deck, however, he could still feel the heat through his boots. He looked about quickly but could see no weaponry, only the casings of expended 5 .45mm and 7.2mm rounds. Owen also saw that to get near the bodies of the dead Americans and others, let alone remove them, was impractical at the moment, many of them so badly burned their flesh had melted into the deck. So he left the drill ship none the wiser.

“Until that cools down, we can’t do much here,” he told the patrol boat captain.

“Who’s going to shut it down?”

Owen shrugged. “One of the companies who stopped the fires in Kuwait, I expect”

“But they weren’t at sea.”

“No,” Owen agreed, “no, they weren’t.” His expression in the raging firelight was one of mounting anxiety. Even if the fire was extinguished, if they couldn’t cap it, it would be the biggest oil spill the world had ever seen — a spill that would make that of the Exxon Valdez and Penchara River look tiny, a spill that would spread out and surround all the joint ventures spread over the South China Sea and beyond.

In the cylindrical dry-deck housing riding piggyback on the SSN Santa Fe, the swimmer delivery vehicle Mark XV was being checked over by two Navy SEALs. The combat swimmers were making sure that all systems were go aboard the flat SDV, which measured twenty feet long by seven wide. With its horizontal stern stabilizer and two vertical control fins, the Mark XV resembled a big Formula One racing car shell, minus the wheels, mat had been squashed into a long rectangular shape. In its nose, a blunted triangular housing, was a state-of-the-art obstacle avoidance sonar.

The SDV was also equipped with a computerized doppler Inertial Navigation Subsystem — which would take it to the Chical via its silent-running, nickel/cadmium-battery-powered motor. Its normal external component of two fourteen-hundred-pound torpedoes, a 331-pound warhead on each, that once launched from the SDV could run at twenty knots plus, was removed so as to raise the normal five-knot speed to ten knots.

The two SEALs chosen for the look-see mission were ready to flood the piggyback housing to equalize the inside and outside pressure in preparation for launching their craft. They could have disengaged from Santa Fe a half hour before, but they were waiting to take advantage of promised bad weather. Via infrared cameras, satellites had picked up a bank of anvil-shaped thunderhead clouds stretching from Sabah, past Brunei, to Sarawak, a sure sign of thunderstorms building on the west coast of Borneo. And so the SEALs who would man the Mark XV waited, the Santa Fe meanwhile trailing her long VLF, or very low frequency, aerial, receiving burst message updates on the weather.

In the Santa Fe’s combat information center the captain ordered silent running. Among other measures, sandwiches would be prepared in the galley so as not to run the risk of any noise from the big food mixers that might send out telltale vibrations, no matter how small. Even so, unlike a diesel electric boat, a nuclear sub like the Santa Fe could not be absolutely silent, as the pump needed to keep the reactor cool could not be stopped. But the Santa Fe’s captain was confident that the sound of his boat would not be detected by any potential “hostile,” given the noises of other South China Sea mercantile traffic. Also, once the weather worsened and thunderstorms began, the surface hiss of the torrential downpour would help hide the sound of Santa Fe’s water pump, and the heavy, cooling rain would also allow the SEALs to more comfortably board the hot drill ship.

When the torrential rain began, the SDV was only a half mile from the Chical, and within forty-five minutes the two SEALs had left the SDV and were climbing up the ladder aft of the drill ship’s galley housing. The flames still roared high, but the downpour was now so heavy that the decks, if not cool, were only moderately warm. The derrick’s steel, still hot, was turning the rain instantly to steam. In their rubber suits and front-mounted Draeger rebreather systems, the two SEALs moved cautiously through the hot fog as if through a giant sauna, which covered the ship in a ghostly pink light.

One SEAL carefully, and mostly by feel, made his way down the aft galley ladder to the engine room. There, with the help of his waterproof flashlight, which cut the steam in a sharply defined roiling beam, he saw the first body. The dead man’s white boiler suit had blended so well in the hot steam now pervading the ship that the SEAL didn’t see it until he was almost upon it. He found a half-dozen more bodies strewn about in the engine room and, as he had with the first, carefully searched the dead men’s clothing, wrists, ears, mouths, and chest areas.

Up on the forward well deck the other SEAL also found bodies, difficult to locate in the shroud that now covered the ship, though the flame from the fire was still vomiting skyward As he got closer to the well deck’s forward hatch, he found over twenty corpses in and around the paint locker and, like his colleague, searched every one as carefully as time would allow.

The heavy rain-peppered swells looked like great ominous walls closing in until they passed beneath the anchored drill ship, the strain on the four anchors obvious from the crack and splitting sounds of chain and cable.

Once back aboard their SDV, docked aft of the drill ship, the SEALs compared notes. In all, they had searched forty-one bodies, the remainder of the drill ship crew either shot while in the water or, like the two bodies found wedged and floating by the prop, most likely killed from concussion after jumping overboard in panic and striking their heads on some part of the ship during midroll.

The two SEALs immediately sent their findings to the Santa Fe via their VLF transmitter:

BROOD ONE TO MOTHER STOP DRILL SHIP’S WELLHEAD AFIRE STOP ALL BODIES EXCEPT THOSE IN WATER DEVOID OF VALUABLES STOP AM RETURNING STOP MESSAGE ENDS

This transmission was quickly relayed through the chain of command up from the Seventh Fleet’s Blue Ridge to CINCPAC to the Pentagon, and finally to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The implication of the message was clear: everyone aboard Chical had been robbed. Only those wedged near the prop, which was difficult to get to, had retained wedding bands, wallets, necklaces, watches, and the like. As with the boat people years before, anyone with gold fillings or gold bridges had had them ruthlessly removed by pliers or whatever else would do the job.

“So you were right,” the President told his assistant, Ellman. “It was nothing more than a damn pirate raid.”

Ellman nodded. “Set the wellhead aflame to occupy us — to cover their real intent.”

“Vicious bastards,” the President said. The thought of having gold fillings ripped from your mouth, even if a body was dead, was so barbaric it made his gut turn. Still, better a gang of pirates than a clash of nations, one country’s sovereignty breached by another. Ellman’s press assistant suggested it could have been both, but Ellman shook his head. “No. I think it’s clear that this is the act of a bunch of cutthroats, plain and simple.”