Read Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 for Free Online Page A

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 bom 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 bn the Leizhou Peninsula near the Gulf of Tonkin