Sky Masters

1

Just as fifty-seven-year-old Fleet Admiral Yin Po L’un, commander of the Spratly Island flotilla, South China Sea Fleet, People’s Liberation Army Navy of China, reached for his mug of tea from the young steward, his ship heeled sharply to port and the tray with his tea went flying across the bridge of his flotilla’s flagship. Well, evening tea would be delayed another fifteen minutes. Sometimes, he thought, his lot in life was as if the gods had sent a fire-breathing dragon to destroy a single lamb — and the dragon finishes drowning in the sea along the way.

The skipper of Yin’s flagship, Captain Lubu Vin Li, chewed the young steward up one side and down the other for his clumsiness. Yin looked at the poor messboy, a thin, beady-eyed kid obviously with some Tibetan stock in him. “Captain, just let him bring the damned tea, please,” Yin said. Lubu bowed in acknowledgment and dismissed the steward with a slap on the chest and a stem growl.

“I apologize for that accident, sir,” Lubu said as he returned to stand beside Yin’s seat on the bridge of the Hong Lung, Admiral Yin’s flagship. “As you know, we have been in typhoon-warning-condition three for several days; I expect all the crew to be able to stand on their own two feet by now.”

“Your time would be better spent speaking with Engineering and determining the reason for that last roll, Captain,” Yin said without looking at his young destroyer skipper. “The Hong Lung has the world’s best stabilizer system, and we are not in a full gale yet — the stabilizers should have been able to dampen the ship’s motion. See to it.” Lubu’s face went blank, then pained as he realized his mistake, then resolute as he bowed and turned to the ship’s intercom to order the chief engineer to the bridge. The most sophisticated vessel in the People’s Liberation Navy should not be wallowing around in only force-three winds, Yin thought — it only made the rest of his unit so unsightly.

Admiral Yin turned to glance at the large, thick plastic panel on which the location and condition of the other vessels in his flotilla were plotted with a grease pencil. Radar and sonar data from his ships were constantly fed to the crewman in charge of the bridge plot, who kept it updated by alternately wiping and redrawing the symbols as fast as he could. His ships were roughly arranged in a wide protective diamond around the flagship. The formation was now headed southwest, pointing into the winds which were tossing around even his big flagship.

Admiral Yin Po L’un’s tiny Spratly Island flotilla currently consisted of fourteen small combatants, averaging around fifteen years of age, with young, inexperienced crews on them. Four to six of those ships were detached into a second task force, which cruised within the Chinese zone when the other ships were near the neutral zone.

On the outer perimeter of the flotilla, Admiral Yin Po L’un deployed three Huangfen-class fast-attack missile boats, capable against heavy surface targets, and four Hegu-class fast-attack missile boats with antisubmarine and antiaircraft weapons. He had an old Lienyun-class minesweeper on the point, a precautionary tactic born of the conflict with the Vietnamese Navy only six years earlier. He also had two big Hainan-class fast patrol boats with antiair, antiship, and antisubmarine weapons operating as “roamers,” moving between the inner and outer perimeters. All were direct copies of old World War II Soviet designs, and these boats had no business being out in the open ocean, even as forgiving and generally tame as the South China Sea was. The ships in Yin’s flotilla rotated out every few weeks with other ships in the six-hundred-ship South China Sea Fleet, based at Zhan-jiang Naval Base on the Leizhou Peninsula near the Gulf of Tonkin.

Yin’s flagship, the Hong Lung, or Red Dragon, was a beauty, a true oceangoing craft for the world’s largest navy. It was a Type EF5 guided-missile destroyer that had a Combination Diesel or Gas Turbine propulsion system that propelled the 132-meter, five-thousand-ton vessel to a top speed of over thirty-five nautical miles per hour. The Hong Lung had a helicopter hangar and launch platform, and it carried a modern, French-built Dauphin II patrol, rescue, antimine, and antisubmarine warfare helicopter. Yin’s destroyer also carried six supersonic Fei Lung-7 antiship missiles, the superior Chinese version of the French Exocet antiship missile; two Fei Lung-9 long-range supersonic antiship missiles, experimental copies of the French-built ANS antiship missile; two Hong Qian-91 single antiair missile launchers, fore and aft, with thirty-missile manually loaded magazines each; a Creusoit-Loire dual-purpose 100-millimeter gun; and four single-barreled and two double-barreled 37-millimeter antiaircraft guns. It also had a single Phalanx CIWS, or Close-In Weapon System gun. Developed in the United States of America, Phalanx was a radar-guided Vulcan multibarrel 20-millimeter gun that could destroy incoming sea-skimming antiship missiles; from its mount on the forecastle perch behind and below the con, it could cover both sides and the stem out to a range of two kilometers. The Hong Lung also carried sonar (but no torpedoes or depth charges) and sophisticated targeting radars for her entire arsenal.

The Hong Lung was specifically designed to patrol the offshore islands belonging to China, such as the Spratly and the Paracel Islands, and to engage the navies of the various countries that claimed these islands — so the Hong Lung carried no antisubmarine-warfare weaponry like the older Type EF4 Luda-class destroyers of the North Fleet. The Hong Lung could defeat any surface combatant in the South China Sea and could protect itself against almost any air threat. The Hong Lung’s escort ships — the minesweepers and ASW vessels — could take on any threat that the destroyer wasn’t specifically equipped to deal with.

“Position, navigator,” Admiral Yin called out.

The navigator behind and to the Admiral’s right called out in reply, “Sir!”, bent to work at his plastic-covered chart table as a series of coordinates were read to him from the LORAN navigation computers, then replied, “Sir, position is ten nautical miles northwest of West Reef, twenty-three miles north of Spratly Island air base.”

“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.

That was when Admiral Yin Po L’un had been assigned his Spratly Island flotilla. To his way of thinking, these were not the Spratlys, or the Quan-Dao Mueng Bang as the Vietnamese called them — these were the Nansha Dao, property of the People's Republic of China. China had built a hardsurfaced runway on Spratly Island and had reinforced some stronger reefs and atolls around it enough to create naval support facilities. Their claim was stronger than any other nation. Several other nations had protested the militarization of Spratly Island, but no one had done anything more than talk. To Admiral Yin, it was only a matter of time before all of the Nansha Dao returned to Chinese control.

But the Filipino Navy, such as it was, still held very tight control over their unofficially designated territory. Yin’s job was to patrol the region, map out all sea traffic, and report on any new construction or attempts to move oil-drilling platforms, fish-processing vessels, or mining operations in the neutral zone or in the Philippine sector. He was also to report on any movements of the Philippine Navy’s major vessels in the area and to constantly position his forces to confront and defeat the Filipino pretenders should hostilities erupt.

Not that the Filipino Navy was a substantial threat to the Chinese Navy — far from it. The strongest of the Filipino ships patrolling the Spratly Islands were forty-year-old frigates, corvettes, radar picket ships, and subchasers, held together by coats of paint and prayers.

Still, a threat to Yin’s territory — no matter whom it was from — was a threat, in his mind, to all of China.

Thirty minutes later, Yin’s task force had closed to within nine miles of the contact while Wenshan and Xingyi had closed to within one mile; Yin positioned his ships so that he could maintain direct, scrambled communications with his two patrol boats but stay out of sight of the contact.

“Dragon, this is Seven,” the skipper aboard Wenshan, Captain Han, radioed back to Admiral Yin. “I have visual contact. The target is an oil derrick. It appears to be mounted or anchored atop Phu Qui Island. It is surrounded by several supply barges with pipes on board, and two tugboats are nearby. There may be armed crewmen on deck. They are flying no national flags, but there does appear to be a company flag flying. We are moving closer to investigate. Request permission to raise the derrick on radio.”

So his instincts had been right… “An oil derrick in the neutral zone? How dare they place an oil derrick on Chinese property.” Yin turned to Lubu. “I want the transmissions relayed to us. Permission granted to hail the derrick. Tell Captain Han to warn the crew that they will be attacked if they do not remove that derrick from the neutral zone immediately.”

A few moments later, Yin heard Han’s warning: “Attention, attention the oil derrick on Phu Qui Island. This is the People’s Republic of China frigate Wenshan on international hailing channel nine. Respond immediately. Over.” Captain Han on Wenshan was speaking in excellent English, the universal sailors’ language even in this part of the world, and Yin had to struggle to keep up with the conversation. He made a mental note to congratulate Han on his resourcefulness — the Wenshan was not a frigate, but if the crew of the oil derrick believed that it was, they might be less inclined to resist and more inclined to follow orders.

“Frigate Wenshan, this is the National Oil Company Barge Nineteen on channel nine. We read you loud and clear. Over.”

Admiral Yin seethed. The National Oil Company. That was a Philippine company run by a relative of the new Philippine president, Arturo Mikaso, and headquartered in Manila. Worse, it was financed by and operated mostly by rich Texas oil drillers. American capitalists who obviously thought they could, in their typically imperialistic way, just set up an oil derrick anywhere they pleased.

The audacity.

To even attempt to build a derrick in a neutral zone…

And Yin knew it wasn’t really neutral at all. It was Chinese territory. And the Americans and the Filipinos were trying to rape it.

“National Oil Barge Nineteen,” Han continued, “you are violating international agreements that prohibit any private or commercial mineral exploration or facilities in this area. You are ordered to remove all equipment immediately and vacate the area. You will receive no further warnings. Comply immediately. Over.”

“Vessel Wenshan, we are involved in search and salvage operations at this time,” a new voice on the radio, young and at ease, replied. “Salvage operations are permitted in international waters. We are not aware of any international agreements involving these waters. You may contact the Philippine or American governments for clarification.”

“National Oil Barge Nineteen, commercial operations in these waters are a direct threat to the national security and business interests of the People’s Republic of China,” Captain Han replied. He knew that Admiral Yin would not approve of his debating like this over the radio — he was a soldier, Yin would tell him, not a scum-sucking politician — but he wasn’t going to move a meter closer to the Philippine oil derrick unless everyone on board understood why. “You are ordered to discontinue all operations immediately or I will take action.”

There was no further reply from the barge crew.

“HF radio traffic from the barge, sir,” Lubu said, relaying a report from his Radio section. “They may be contacting headquarters.”

Contacting headquarters? There was no reason for the people on the drilling platform to do anything other than dismantle. And to do it immediately. Yin shook his head in disbelief. And anger. China had been forced to cede an island chain that was rightly theirs, forced to set up a neutral zone and allow free navigation in the area, only to have it thrown back in their faces. The arrogance!

“This is unacceptable!” Yin spat. “Any idiot knows this is Chinese territory, whether this is called neutral territory or not. How dare they…!”

“We can relay a message to Headquarters and report the violation, sir…”

Yin bristled. “This is not a mere violation, Lubu. This is an act of aggression! They know full well that the neutral zone is off-limits to all commercial activity, and that includes salvage operations — if indeed that is what they are really doing. This task force will not sit idly by while these bastards ignore international law and challenge my authority.”

Lubu had not seen his Admiral this angry in a very long time. “Sir, if we are seriously considering an armed response, perhaps Headquarters…”

Admiral Yin cut him off. “These people aren’t worth the aggravation of an explanation. Have you forgotten that I’m in charge of this area? It is my responsibility to protect our territory.” Yin shook his head angrily. “The brazenness of this is what’s so astounding to me. Don’t they remember history? Hasn’t there been enough of their blood shed over these islands? Have they gone senile? Well, let’s remind them of the full power of this force.” Yin turned to Lubu. “Captain, relay to Captain Han on Wenshan: ‘You are ordered to move within one thousand meters of the platform so as to provide sufficient lighting and covering fire from your deck guns, then dispatch a boarding crew to take the captain, officers, and other personnel on board the derrick into custody. After the crew is removed from the barge, you will destroy the entire facility with heavy gunfire. ’To Xingyi: have them move closer and be ready to assist. To the rest of this task group: ‘go to general quarters.’ Relay the messages and execute.”

“Number-one launch is manned and ready, sir,” the officer of the deck reported. “The chief reports davits for launch number three are fouled; he recommends switching to launch four.”

“So ordered. I want that launch freed up as soon as possible. Have other launches checked and report status to me immediately.” Han wasn’t going to say why — he was afraid they might need the damned launches for themselves. A few minutes later, with the Wenshan barely maintaining a close and comfortable position away from Phu Qui Island, the motor launches were lowered overboard. Each wooden launch, forty feet long and eight feet wide, carried a crew of three and eight sailors armed with AK-47 look-alike Type 56 rifles and sidearms.

The launches were only a few dozen meters away from the Wenshan when the world seemed to explode for Admiral Yin, Captain Han, Captain Lubu, and the rest of the task force.

The engines on the Wenshan had been racing back and forth in response to the helmsman’s attempts to hold the ship’s position steady. Han had been watching the number-four motor launch moving away from the ship and did not hear his crewman’s warning: “Shoal water! Depth three meters… depth two meters…. depth under the keel decreasing.”

From the barges on Phu Qui Island, bullets began pelting the starboard side of the Wenshan as the crewman aboard the oil-derrick barges fired on the approaching launches and at the Wenshan itself.

Captain Han had not heard the shoal-water warning. He ran back into the bridge. “Radio to Hong Lung, we are under fire from the oil barges…”

“Captain, depth under the keel…!”

Suddenly the Wenshan was pushed laterally toward the island and struck a coral outcropping surrounding Phu Qui Island. The patrol boat heeled sharply to starboard, the sudden, crunching stop flinging every crewman on the bridge off his feet. The gusting winds only served to push the Wenshan harder against the coral, and although the brittle calcium formations gave way immediately under the four-hundred-ton ship, the sound of straining steel combined with the howling winds and the cries of the surprised crewmen made it seem like the end of the world was at hand.

The officer of the deck had raised his headset microphone to his lips and shouted, “Comm, bridge, relay to Hong Lung, we are under fire, we are under fire…” Then amid the tearing and crunching sounds: “We have hit the reef, we have hit the reef.” But the message transmitted to the rest of the task force group by the startled and terrified radioman was, “Wenshan to Hong Lung, we are under fire…. we have been hit.”

When the warning from the Wenshan pierced the air in the bridge of the Hong Lung, Admiral Yin spun on his heels to Captain Lubu and shouted, “Order Wenshan and Xingyi to open fire, full missile and gun salvo.”

Lubu wasn’t going to question this order — he had been fearing just such an occurrence. He quickly relayed the command to his officer of the deck.

Seconds later the stormy night sky erupted with flashes of light and streaks of fire off in the distance. Using their sophisticated Round Ball fire-control radar, the fast attack craft Xingyi had maintained a continuous attack solution on the barges with their Fei Lung-7 surface-to-surface missiles. As soon as the warning cry had been issued by Captain Han on Wenshan, Captain Miliyan on Xingyi had ordered all missiles and guns made ready for action. When he received the message from Admiral Yin, the Fei Lung guided missiles were in the air.

The Flying Dragon missiles received initial course guidance from the Round Ball targeting radar, and a small booster engine ignited that punched the twenty-two-hundred-pound missile out of its storage canister. After flying a hundred yards away from the ship, the big second-stage sustainer motor kicked on, accelerating the missile to Mach one. A radar altimeter kept the missile precisely at one hundred feet above the choppy waters until it hit the easternmost barge and exploded six seconds after launch.

The pointed titanium armor-piercing warhead section thruster cap of the Fei Lung missile allowed the missile to drive through the thin steel hull of the outermost barge before detonating the warhead. The four-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead created a massive firestorm all across the Philippine oil platform, spraying red-hot chunks of metal and propellant for hundreds of yards in every direction. A wall of fire caused by a wave of burning petroleum washed across Phu Qui Island, swirling into an inverted tornado that defied the late summer rains and stabbed skyward.

Captain Han watched the spectacular firestorm that was once a Philippine oil derrick for several moments until he realized that the Wenshan had returned to an even keel and that the forward 76-millimeter gun had opened fire on the platform, pounding the mountain of flames with twenty kilogram radar-guided shells. “Cease fire!” Han shouted at his officer of the deck, who was staring in rapt fascination out the forward windshield at the maelstrom. “Cease fire!” he repeated before the forward 76 was silent. “Helm! Move us out to two kilometers from the island. Signal the motor launches and the Hong Lung that we are maneuvering out of shoal water.”

As Wenshan eased away from the huge fires still raging on the Philippine oil barges, Xingyi launched two more missiles at the barge until Admiral Yin on the Hong Lung ordered him to stop. One Fei Lung missile was quite enough to suppress any hostile fire from the small oil facility, and two missiles would have completely destroyed it — four missiles, half the Xingyi’s load, could devastate an aircraft carrier.

Admiral Yin’s intent was clear — he wanted no one alive on that platform.

“Seven, this is the Dragon,” the radio message began. “Recover your boarding parties and rejoin the group. Over.”

Captain Han picked up the radio microphone himself. “I copy, Dragon,” Han replied. “I recommend that one of my motor launches search for survivors. Over.”

“Request denied, Seven,” came the reply. “Dragon Leader orders all Dragon units to withdraw.”

One hour later, all traces of the Philippine oil derrick and barges were swept away in the rising tide of the windswept South China Sea currents. Except for a few pieces of pipe and half-burned bodies, the oil platform had ceased to exist.

Since the Marcos years, the official residence of the Philippine President, Malacanang Palace, had undergone a major transformation. Concerned for his security, Marcos had transformed the graceful eighteenth-century Spanish colonial mansion into an ugly fortress — he had blocked most of the windows and replaced stained glass and crystal with steel or reinforced bulletproof glass. Wishing to distance her government from the dictatorial excesses of the Marcos regime, Corazon Aquino had chosen to live in the less pretentious Guest House and had turned the palace into a museum of shame, where citizens and tourists could gape in wonder at Marcos’ underground bunker — some called it his “torture chambers” — and Imelda’s cavernous bedroom, stratospheric canopy bed; her infamous shoe closets and her bulletproof brassiere.

The new President of the Philippines, seventy-year-old Arturo Mikaso, changed the Malacanang Palace back into a historical landmark that his people could be proud of, as well as a livable residence for himself and a workable office complex for his Cabinet. The style and grace of the precolonial Philippines were restored, the heavy security barriers were removed, and, like the American White House, large portions of Malacanang Palace were now open for tours when they were not in use by the President. In time the palace again became a symbol for the city of Manila itself.

But now, in the growing summer dawn, the palace was the scene of a hastily arranged meeting of the President’s Cabinet. In Mikaso’s residential office, where the President could see the Pasig River that wound through northern Manila, President Mikaso sipped a cup of tea. Mikaso was the elder statesman, a white-haired man who was taller and more powerful-looking than most Filipinos, a wealthy landowner and ex-senator who was immensely popular with most of his people. Mikaso had been elected as President of the nation when Corazon Aquino’s second four-year term came to an end. He won the election only after forming an alliance with the National Democratic Front, the main political organ of the Communist Party of the Philippines; and the Moro National Liberation Front, a pro-Islamic political group that represented the thousands of citizens of the Islamic faith in the south Philippines.

“How many were killed, General?” Mikaso asked.

“Thirty men, all civilians,” the Chief of Staff of the New Philippine Army, General Roberto La Loma Santos, replied somberly. “Their barge came under full attack by a Red Chinese patrol. No orders to surrender, no quarter given, no attempts to offer assistance or rescue after the attack. The bastards attacked, then slinked away like cowardly dogs.” A tall, dark-haired man, standing alone near the great stone fireplace, turned toward General Santos. “You have still not explained to us, General,” Second Vice President Jose Trujillo Samar said in a deep voice, “what that barge was doing in the neutral zone, anchored to Pagasa Island…”.

“And what are you implying, Samar?” First Vice President Daniel Teguina, who was seated near the President’s desk, challenged. Teguina was politically an ally of Samar but ideologically a complete opposite. Part of the coalition formed during the 1994 elections was the appointment of forty-one-year-old Daniel Teguina. Much younger than Mikaso, Teguina was not only a vice president, but also the leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, an exmilitary officer, newspaper publisher, and leader of the National Democratic Front, a leftist political organization. With General Jose Trujillo Samar — who besides being the second vice president was also governor of the newly formed Commonwealth of Mindanao, which had won the right to form its own autonomous commonwealth in 1990 — these three men formed a fiery coalition that, although successful in continuing the important post-Marcos rebuilding process in the Philippines, was stormy and divisive. “Those were innocent Filipino workers on the barge…” said Teguina.

Samar nodded and said, “Who were illegally drilling for oil in the neutral zone. Did they think the Chinese were going to just sit back and watch them work?”

“They were not drilling for oil, just taking soundings,” said Teguina.

“Well, they had no business there,” Samar insisted. “The Chinese Navy’s actions were outrageous, but those workers were in clear violation of the law.”

“You’re a cold bastard,” Teguina cut in. “Blaming the dead for an act of aggression…”

“Enough, enough,” the elderly Mikaso said wearily, gesturing for the men to stop. “I did not call you here to argue.” Teguina glared at both men. “Well, we can’t just sit back and do nothing. The Chinese just launched a major act of aggression. We must do something. We must—”

“Enough,” Mikaso interrupted. “We must begin an investigation and find out exactly why that barge was operating in those waters, then…”

“Sir, I recommend that we also step up patrols in the Spratly Island area,” General Santos said. “This may be a prelude to a full-scale invasion of the Spratlys by the Chinese.”

“Risky,” Samar concluded. “A naval response would be seen as provocative, and we have no way of winning any conflict with the People’s Liberation Navy. We would gain nothing…”

“Always the general, eh, Samar?” Teguina asked derisively. He turned away from him to the President. “I agree with General Santos. We have a navy, however small — I say to send them to protect our interests in the Spratlys. We have an obligation to our people to do nothing short of that.”

Arturo Mikaso looked at each of his advisers in turn and nodded in agreement. Little did he realize the extraordinary chain of events he was about to set into motion with that slight nod of his head.