“Depth under the keel?”
“Showing twenty meters under the keel, sir,” Captain Lubu Vin Li replied. “No danger of running aground if we stay on this course, sir.”
Yin grunted his acknowledgment. That was exactly what he was worried about. While his escorts could traverse the shallow waters of the Spratly Island chain easily, the Hong Lung was an oceangoing vessel with a four-meter draft. At low tide, the big destroyer could find itself run aground at any time while within the Spratly Islands.
Although the Spratlys were in neutral territory, China controlled the valuable islands informally by sheer presence of force if not by agreement or treaty.
Yin’s normal patrol route took the flotilla through the southern edge of the “neutral zone” area of the island chain, scanning for Philippine vessels and generally staying on watch. Although the Philippine Navy patrolled the Spratlys and had a lot of firepower there, Admiral Yin’s smaller, faster escort ships could mount a credible force against them. And since the Philippine ships had no medium or long-range antiship missiles or antiair missiles in the area, the Hong Lung easily outgunned every warship within two thousand miles.
They were currently on an eastward heading, cruising well north of the ninth parallel — and as far as Yin was concerned, the “neutral zone” meant that he might consider issuing a warning to trespassers before opening fire on them. The shoal water was also south of their position, near Pearson Reef, and he wanted to stay clear of those dangerous waters.
“CIC to bridge,” the interphone crackled. “Wenshan reports surface contact, bearing three-four-zero, range eighteen miles. Stationary target.”
Captain Lubu keyed his microphone and grunted a curt, “Understood,” then checked the radar plot. The Wenshan was one of the Hainan-class patrol boats roaming north and east of the Hong Lung; it had a much better surface-search radar than the small Huangfen-class boat, the Xingyi, in the vicinity; although the Xingyi was equipped with Fei Lung-7 surface attack missiles, often other ships had to seek out targets for it.
Lubu turned to Admiral Yin. “Sir, the surface contact is near Phu Qui Island, in the neutral zone about twenty miles north of Pearson Reef. No recent reports of any vessels or structures in the area. We have Wenshan and Xingyi in position to investigate the contact.”
Yin nodded that he understood. Phu Qui Island, he knew, was a former Chinese oil-drilling site in the Spratly Islands; the well had been capped and abandoned years ago. Although Phu Qui Island disappeared underwater at high tide, it was a very large rock and coral formation and could easily be expanded and fortified — it would be an even larger island than Spratly Island itself. If Yin was tasked to pick an island to occupy and fortify, he would pick Phu Qui.
So might someone else…
“Send Wenshan and Xingyi to investigate the contact,” Yin ordered. “Rotate Manning north to take Wenshan's position.” Manning was the other Hainan-class patrol boat acting as “rover” in Yin’s patrol group.
Captain Lubu acknowledged the order and relayed the instructions to his officer of the deck for transmission to the Wenshan.
Yin, who had been in the People’s Liberation Army Navy practically all of his life, was proud of the instincts he’d honed during his loyal career. He trusted them. And now, somewhere deep down in his gut, those instincts told him this was going to be trouble.
Granted, Phu Qui Island, and even the Spratlys themselves, seemed the most unlikely place to expect trouble. The Spratlys — called Nansha Dao, the Lonely Islands, in Chinese — were a collection of reefs, atolls, and semisubmerged islands in the middle of the South China Sea, halfway between Vietnam and the Philippines and several hundred kilometers south of China. The fifty-five major surface formations of the Spratlys were dotted with shipwrecks, attesting to the high degree of danger involved when navigating in the area. Normally, such a deathtrap as the Spratlys would be given a wide berth.
Centuries ago Chinese explorers had discovered that the Nansha Dao was a treasure trove of minerals — gold, iron, copper, plus traces or indications of dozens of other metals — as well as gems and other rarities.
Since the islands were right on the sea lanes between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the “round-eyes” eventually found them, and the English named them the Spratlys after the commander of a British warship who “discovered” them in the eighteenth century. It was the British who discovered oil in the Spratlys and began tapping it. Unfortunately, the British had not yet developed the technology to successfully and economically drill for oil in the weather-beaten islands, so the islands were abandoned for safer and more lucrative drilling sites in Indonesia and Malaysia.
As time progressed, several nations — Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines — all tried to develop the islands as a major stopover port for sea traffic. But it was following World War II that the Chinese considered the Spratlys as well as everything else in the South China Sea as their territory.
As oil-drilling platforms, fishing grounds, and mining operations began to proliferate, the Chinese, aided by the North Vietnamese, who acted as a surrogate army for their Red friends, began vigorously patrolling the area. During the Vietnam War radar sites and radio listening posts on Spratly Island allowed the Vietcong and China to detect and monitor every vessel and aircraft heading from the Philippines to Saigon, including American B-52 bombers on strike missions into North Vietnam.
But the most powerful navy in the postwar world, the United States Navy, exerted the greatest tangible influence over the Spratly Islands. Through its sponsorship, the government of the Philippines began patrolling the islands, eradicating the Vietnamese espionage units and using the islands as a base of operations for controlling access to the western half of the South China Sea. The Chinese had been effectively chased away from the Spratlys, ending five hundred years of dominance there.
That became a very sore point for the Chinese.
After the Vietnam War, the American presence weakened substantially, which allowed first the Vietnamese Navy, and then the Chinese Navy, to return to the Spratly Islands. But the Philippines still maintained their substantial American-funded military presence there, although they had ceded most of the southern islands to China and Vietnam.
The lines had been drawn.
The Philippines claimed the thirty atolls north of the nine degrees, thirty minutes north latitude, and the territory in between was a sort of neutral zone. Things were relatively quiet for about ten years following the Vietnam War. But in the late 1980s conflict erupted again. During the war, Vietnam had accepted substantial assistance from the Soviet Union in exchange for Russian use of the massive Cam Rahn naval base and airbase, which caused a break in relations between China and Vietnam. Vietnam, now trained and heavily armed by the Soviet Union, was excluding Chinese vessels from the oil and mineral mining operations in the Spratlys. Several low-scale battles broke out. It was discovered that the Soviet Union was not interested in starting a war with China to help Vietnam hold the Spratlys, so China moved in and regained the control they had lost forty years earlier. Faced with utter destruction, the Vietnamese Navy withdrew, content to send an occasional reconnaissance flight over the region.