Ian Slater - South China Sea

Dragging herself to the base of the tree island, up through tall, slimy elephant grass, Shirley hoped none of the specks she could see, which were guards on the rail line, was using binoculars.

It was something she needn’t have worried about, for even given the vital role the railway was playing in the battle of Disney, the People’s Liberation Army — or any other army in the world, for that matter — wasn’t flush enough to provide each soldier with a pair of ten-power field glasses. Though the day wasn’t cold, she was shivering from having been so long in the water. As the sun climbed higher, the entire countryside steamed with moisture evaporating, so thick in parts that, as if in a mirage, some of the Chinese cavalry seemed disembodied from their mounts.

The elephant grass gave way to a patch of brown grass where a deadly black and yellow krait was curled up, basking in the early sun. It struck out. She dodged, letting out a yell. The snake vanished. A cavalryman heard her. So did Mellin and others. Almost immediately she heard the sloshing of water against her tiny island. She could hear Danny Mellin’s voice but couldn’t see him, though he’d barely left her before she’d seen the snake.

“Shirley, one of them’s seen you. Make out you’ve hurt your leg. Can’t move.”

“I’m sorry, Danny, I—”

“No matter — just stay where you are.”

Within a few minutes a mounted PLA trooper, his horse making a loud, sloshing noise, looked down at her imperiously, his right hand waving a revolver at her to get up. She made a pathetic-sounding plea. “My leg.” She pointed. “It’s hurt. I can’t—”

A stick of wood as thick as a man’s arm and about four feet long shot up from the mist and bashed the trooper’s head. He slumped on the frightened horse’s neck.

“Didn’t you hear her, you bastard? She’s fallen and she can’t get up!”

“Mike — what are you — I thought Danny—”

“I’m here too,” Danny told her, coming around from the blind side of the tree island.

Shirley nodded at Trang, who had the horse by the bridle, talking soothingly to the animal in Cantonese.

“Maybe he only understands Mandarin,” Mike joked.

“He understands love,” Trang said.

“Well, keep him on this side,” Mike said, “where they can’t see much from the railway. Trang, I hope you can ride.”

“Of course.”

“Swap clothes with him,” Mike said. “No, I don’t mean the bloody horse!” They all laughed, all on the edge of that hysteria that comes in the wake of near disaster, a sense of overwhelming relief that Danny Mellin knew he had to get on top of lest it make them foolhardy.

Trang changed into the mounted trooper’s uniform and, using the coiled rope on the saddle’s pommel, Danny, Shirley, and Murphy tied themselves into a line of three prisoners.

“Trang!” Danny called. “Take it slow. Parallel to the rail line, but don’t go in close till you see a culvert. And Trang…”

The Asian looked down at the American. “Yes?”

“Make sure you can get that Kalashnikov and sling off in a hurry.”

“I will. Who has the Malenkov?” He meant the Soviet-made handgun.

“I do,” Murphy said. “Hope it fires after it’s been wet.”

“I hope we don’t have to use it,” Danny said.

“So do I,” Shirley echoed. “But what happens if another rider sees us?”

“Then,” Murphy said nonchalantly, “I’ll hit him with the fucking stick!”

Trang spotted a culvert then, about a quarter mile west of them. It was difficult to tell exactly, but Mellin figured the culvert itself looked about a quarter mile long. For his plan to work, a culvert was better than open track. “Keep a watch out for the maintenance sheds along the track,” he told the others. “There should be one every couple of miles.”

“ ‘Bout the size of a dunny,” Murphy explained. “An outhouse!”

Despite her fatigue, Shirley found the Australian’s buoyant mood infectious, and she began giggling uncontrollably, as one sometimes does when physically and nervously exhausted.

“Trang,” Danny said, “give me his knife.”

Shirley suddenly stopped laughing as she realized what had happened to the luckless cavalryman — that Murphy’s blow had killed him, that they were at war with the Chinese.

Soon they were passing more islands on the flooded plain. At one point another PLA cavalryman waved and Trang waved back, his three prisoners strung out behind him. “My God,” Murphy,said. “ I almost waved to him.”

“C’mon,” Mellin said sternly. “I know we’re all dog-tired, but let’s stay with it. If we can—”

A horn beeped. Soldiers by a bogged truck were waving for Trang to come on and bring the prisoners in.

“Shit!” Murphy said. “If Trang doesn’t take us in, they’ll suspect something.”

“We’ve got no choice,” Danny said. “Now listen, here’s what we do. Go in close. Wave, Trang, but tell them you have to take your POWs to the culvert.”

There was more horn blowing. Shirley was more frightened than she’d been the day she was taken from her rig. She knew why the soldiers wanted them to come in — they had seen her soaking wet — and Danny Mellin knew too. Everybody did. But there was no option.

The battle of Disney Hill was swinging back in favor of the Chinese, whose supply trains kept bringing up ammunition and more soldiers. But once they moved below the 22nd parallel and into USVUN territory, they came under devastating TACAIR support. It was provided by one of the oldest aircraft in the U.S. inventory, the Skyraider, capable of carrying more ordnance than its own weight, and with a loiter time that made it the sentimental favorite by far of those downed pilots who— while waiting for rescue pickup from the relatively slow Skyraider — would hang around and shoot up anything that tried to get near them before they could be rescued by chopper.

It was a paradoxical military situation, since the more territory Freeman’s army gained — by pushing farther north — the less it could depend on TACAIR, because of the Washington-decreed inviolability of Chinese airspace beyond the Chinese-Vietnamese border. In Washington the “Yalu” complex was alive and well in the State Department from the days of the deep-seated American fear of an all-out nuclear battle between the United States and China.

But for D’Lupo, Doolittle, Martinez, and all the others in the seesaw battle of Disney Hill, politics was a bullshit land where men in three-piece suits talked diplomatese over café latte while the men on the line were dying for yards.

And it was now that General Freeman gave another controversial order: that Melbaine’s battalion was not to seek any ground farther than the ridgeline of Disney Hill, for at least that way if Wei’s forces crossed the 22nd parallel in force, they would be open to unrestricted TACAIR as well as artillery bombardment.

“Fine!” Doolittle growled. “Why don’t we just pull back into the rice paddies and let ‘em have the whole fucking lousy hill?”

“You don’ understand, man,” Martinez said, adopting a tone of mock condescension. “You just a dirt farmer. Don’t you know how important this hill is to the negotiations? Testing our will, man. Here and at Dien Bien Phu. Ain’t you ever hearda Pork Chop Hill?”

“Stick it up your ass,” Doolittle replied. “And rotate, mate.”

“Wish to Christ we had more ammo,” D’Lupo said. “Half of that last drop is in the fucking drink. All on account of that prayer of his. Meanwhile, the chinks are getting resupplied by the fucking Ningming express, which we can’t fucking bomb because it’s in fucking Chinese territory. And they’re using Black Rhinos.”