Xia then looked up at Liao, who nodded to give permission for what must be done. Xia grabbed Fatso’s ankles, and, with all his strength, dragged him to the deck edge. He then pushed him under the rail with his foot. The splash was visible to Liao from the pilothouse as Xia turned to Li Ming’s lifeless body and grabbed her wrists. After he dragged her to the rail, he rolled her thin frame underneath and pushed her over the side without ceremony. Liao shook his head in contempt. She should have listened to me! Xia found a hose and washed off the deck, gunwales, and railings of She Kou before they turned to Hainan and home. As the vessel chugged ahead through the waves, Liao saw Li Ming’s body floating in their wake. Dammit, he thought. Xia should have weighted the body first.
Keeping his eyes on the banca boats, Liao pulled the throttles back to slow the trawler… He wanted to see this firsthand.
He saw a crewman move aft on the easternmost boat but did not detect further motion. The boats in the lee appeared normal, and then began to turn in different directions. One collided with another, but Liao saw no signs of fishermen hauling in lines or otherwise trying to avoid further damage. Another boat turned away to the west, and Liao studied it for signs of movement. Seeing none, he scanned the other bancas. The only sign of life he saw was on one of the two boats that hit each other: a man waving a single arm while on his knees. Liao scanned again, dwelling several seconds on each boat, but could not discern any further movement.
Mission accomplished! They had done it!
The intruding thieves had been executed for trespassing on the Zhongsha Islands, and Liao had captained the vessel that ensured the rights of the People’s Republic were upheld — even here at this faraway outpost on the very edge of heaven. There would be more crimes to avenge in these waters, and Liao was honored to lead the effort. In payment, he would acquire power and wealth and would rise in the Party hierarchy. And he would soon choose, as a bride, a beauty not unlike the women he saw on television. Any girl he wanted would be his.
Beyond the drifting bancas, now under no one’s command, he grew concerned when a shadow came into view on the gloomy horizon. He studied it, and saw it was a ship of an unusual shape and standing into potential danger. His first impression was that it was an oilfield servicing vessel, and he hoped it would navigate clear of the invisible cloud that the winds were carrying toward it.
Get out of there! he thought. Then his eyes widened in alarm, and his heart rate increased.
It was a warship.
At her watch station between the two main engine rooms of the guided-missile cruiser, USS Cape Esperance, Ensign Isabel Manning was bored out of her mind.
After two hours of working on her quals as Engineering Officer of the Watch under instruction in the cruiser’s Central Control Station, Isabel had checked and rechecked all the gauges and readings of the LM 2500 marine gas turbine, monitored the log entries, conducted a walk-around inspection with the chief, and even helped Fireman Apprentice Williams with his personal qualifications standards. She could trace the gas turbine “steam cycle” in her sleep; air was drawn from the downtakes, compressed, fuel and spark combusted to drive the turbine and auxiliaries and draw in more air for compression.
It was a never-ending cycle. Suck, squeeze, bang, boom, the snipes called it. And exhaust through the uptakes. Hell, it was a jet engine, an actual airliner engine adapted for a ship! Aboard this cruiser no one could escape the constant background whine of the rotating turbine blades. But here, she was mere feet from it, and all of the watch team wore foam earplugs to protect their hearing from the relentless din.
However, it wasn’t the noise that drove Isabel up the bulkhead. No, it was the soul-crushing monotony of pipes and pumps and dials and trunks and lagging and fire mains and circuitry that made up the engineering spaces of this, and any, ship. No windows, everything painted white, and only the gentle rolling of the deck to indicate they were on a ship underway. She was the only woman on this watch, and around her the male sailors seemed fascinated as they tended the machinery, took readings, and inspected fittings. Ensign Manning, on the other hand, was dying of boredom, and if she had to spend her whole career down here as Chief Tobin had, she would slit her wrists.
What was worse, she was missing it, missing the close-aboard passing of Scarborough Shoal on this freedom-of-navigation operation up the South China Sea. She hovered in the background during the navigation brief and saw they were going to transit inside five miles of the shoal. This would be a target-rich environment of surface traffic and probable Chinese Coast Guard, or intelligence collectors, with plenty of fishermen and merchants to add to the problem. Above her, in the ship’s Combat Information Center, analyzing threat emitters and playing electronic warfare cat-and-mouse as the two navies collected intel off one another was another challenge.
For junior officers like her, opportunities to handle Cape Esperance in the SCS surrounded by surface contacts and under the captain’s watchful eye, to learn and make good decisions under pressure, were rare. And once past the shoal, the plan was to transit around Luzon into the Phil Sea and open water — fewer challenges, more boredom. Right now, the action for an aspiring Surface Warfare Officer was topside on the bridge, and in CIC… anyplace but here in Central Control, her ear-splitting personal hell. She lamented that she wasn’t scheduled on the bridge watch team. Damn XO!
Four bells sounded on the 1MC: 1400. Two hours of the afternoon watch complete with two more to go. Ugh.
Returning to CCS, Ensign Manning made a log entry: “Answering all-ahead one-third bell for 7 knots; steaming as before.” Sigh.
Eight decks above on the busy bridge, Captain Ron Thompson studied the boats he saw off the starboard bow as they emerged from the mist. Bancas by the look of them, he thought. He focused his eyes. What are they doing?
He grabbed the binoculars by his bridge chair and found the boats. If they weren’t just wallowing in the swell, they were maneuvering in an unusual manner. He then saw two of the bancas collide. Who the hell are these guys? The Keystone Cops?
Thompson turned to his Officer of the Deck, Lieutenant Hal Wagner, a mustang with lots of shiphandling experience. “Hal, look at these knuckleheads… I don’t know what they’re doing.” Thompson picked up the phone and dialed his XO in the Combat Information Center below.
“XO, sir.”
“Mike, do you have the contacts zero-four-five at about 4,000 yards?”
Lieutenant Commander Mike Eddins answered him. “Yes, sir, looks like a nest of fishing boats about 2,000 yards off the bank. North of them are a few bigger boats that we think are Chinese. Trying to get a positive ID on all.”
“These banca boats off our bow are all over the place, and I just saw one run into another. No real factor but we’re gonna come left a few and give them a wider berth. Yeah, I see the boat to the north, a trawler. Have you got emissions on him?”