Read Online Operation Malacca by Joe Poyer - Free Book Online

and that it will take the people off the research station. Their estimated time of arrival is nine hundred hours tomorrow.'
    Ànd,' Keilty interrupted, 'you have a heavily armed destroyer, a hundred marines, and two MTBs. And your last chance.' He stood up abruptly and went on deck, pausing to speak briefly with Charlie in his tank near the bow where they were preparing to take him below. After a few minutes he left and climbed forward over the winch until he was leaning against the railing at the bow of the ship. He watched the curving knife edge of the prow slash methodically into the marching procession of whitecaps, the water curling away to either side of the bow, half as high as the deck, in black sheets. The lifting crash of the bow against the waves set the entire ship to shuddering under the sharp concussive shocks. He stayed there watching, wondering what they were deciding below, feeling that he had made a fool of himself with his outbursts.
    He turned and clambered back to Charlie's tank, hoping that at least if they didn't have sense enough to put a stop to the Vietnamese foolishness, they would have brains enough to dear out of the strait as fast as possible.

CHAPTER SIX
    When Keilty returned to the wardroom an hour later, he found himself stopped at the hatch by a marine guard with a Sten gun, fully cocked.
    `Sorry, sir, but ye dinna go in there.
    Keilty looked the brawny Scotsman up and down, noticing the set and intelligent face, and decided against making a fuss.
    'Do me a favor,' he said. 'Get Admiral Rawingson out here. He'll get me a pass or whatever the devil I need.'
    The marine hesitated a moment, then turned and spoke briefly into the intercom. The hatch opened seconds later.
    `There you are,' Rawingson growled. 'Wondered where you got to.' He put a hand on Keilty's shoulder and pulled him in, saying to the guard, 'It's all right, Corporal, we need him in here.'
    As Keilty entered, he noticed that now, not only was the cooling system prevailing against the pre-monsoon heat, but cooler heads prevailed also. The men were grouped around a large map tacked on the display board at the end of the room. There was no more angry discussion, nor were insults or imprecations being tossed back and forth.
    Instead, they were listening closely to the American Secretary of Defense as he carefully went through the various alternatives. Keilty moved halfway into the room and perched on a table. He pulled a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and thumbed an old, worn Zippo to light it, then settled down to listen. Rawingson sat down on the bench below him and bummed a cigarette, then turned his attention also to the map.
    The map was a larger version of the one Rawingson had shown him two days before.
    Over it, a sheet of acetate was taped, with grease-pencil markings indicating, first of all, the location of the bomb, then the currents in the strait and the surrounding area.
    The Bradley's meteorological officer had drawn in red the wind currents in the vicinity.
    A black area shaped like a many-pointed star was located in the Celebes marking the spawning grounds of the summer monsoon. Black arrows also extended northwestward across the Indonesian islands and into the Bay of Bengal to the west of Burma. A series of numbers that Keilty
    could not read from where he sat probably indicated expected times of arrival along the monsoon path.
    Directly north, over southern China and North Vietnam and extending west to Thailand, the limits of a high-pressure area were drawn in green. This presumably was forcing the monsoon to approach more slowly than usual.
    'It is our feeling,' the American Secretary of Defense was saying, 'that they have been planning this attack which they call "Operation Malacca" for quite some time now. They have been extremely fortunate that the weather has furnished such a large high-pressure front.' He indicated the area from the China Sea to Thailand, 'It is producing fair and very dry