The Cascading, Book II: Fellow Girl Read online

  The Cascading,

  BookII

  Fellow Girl

  My Ling’s Journey

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by C.W. Ullman

  WGA Registered 1729035

  ISBN 978-1-891037-05-04

  …And then there are the others--the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic…

  Jean Anouilh

  CHAPTER I

  What she wanted to rip from the red-headed man’s face was his smirk, but all she could grasp was the necklace around his throat. Unable to pull him overboard with her, she could only grab his military identification tags and chain and hope she could drag him over the railing. But the chain snapped, and at the apogee of her flight after being thrown from the ship, My Ling’s singular thought was to stay alive so she could eventually find and kill this sailor. While that thought would define her life, a more immediate situation had to be negotiated. As a girl born to the flat lands of a rice plantation, schooled privately in violin and raised with equestrian training, My Ling had never seen mountains made of water.

  She plunged into a roiling sea, but quickly bobbed up because of the life preserver tightly strapped to her body. She was afloat between an ocean swell one hundred feet tall and the military vessel from which she had just been thrown. While she thought the ship was moving toward her, it was actually the motion of the 93,000 ton warship driving through the sea that was pulling her to it. With its massive wake, the ship created a powerful draft that pulled everything toward its hull. The bulky life preserver inhibited My Ling from taking the normal swim stroke she was used to making in the pool on her parents’ estate. She was getting little traction in the ocean rolling side-to-side pulling her forearms through the water. Then she remembered her legs and started kicking in the direction away from the ship. She found another life vest floating in the water and grabbed it to give her more buoyancy, but she was still being dragged back toward the ship. Floating in her direction was another vest and she grabbed that and kept kicking.

  She looked over her shoulder and saw the tail of the ship approaching and heard a low, rumbling sound that sent a chilling fear through her. She had never felt sound and wondered if it was the wind. When she heard it getting louder, she realized it was coming from the carrier. She did not know the sound was being emitted from four, twenty-five-foot-tall, thirty-ton propellers.

  She thought if she could get out of the life vest she could swim the crawl, her strongest stroke. This thought was interrupted when an ocean swell picked her up to the level of the flight deck of the carrier and drove her in the direction of the ship. While staring at the Enterprise from atop the swell, she helplessly rode the edge of the wave toward the vessel and waited to be crushed against it. But the wave crested just before impact and she was rolled onto its backside. When the mass of water crashed into the ship, it exploded off the vessel, ejecting her away from the Enterprise. After she landed in the sea, she looked in the distance to see another rolling mountain of water coming her way. She wanted to dive under the towering mass, but the life vests prevented her from submerging.

  However, the life vests did not prevent the undertow created by the action of the propellers from dragging her below the surface. She kicked as hard as she could, hearing the enormously loud rumbling of the ship’s drive shaft and propellers punching through the water. She did not want to look behind, knowing that the enveloping sound forewarned of horror. She kicked with all the strength she could muster using the little air she had gulped just before the downward pull grabbed her. She stiffened her knees to get more push with her feet, when the unexpected happened.

  The giant churning prop suddenly shot up above her and was now above the waterline. The Enterprise, riding in high seas, had one of the largest waves come in close behind another and crashed down on the bow of the ship. In that moment, the tail end of the vessel was lifted completely out of the water. The tail crashed down feet from her and then rocked back up again as the water blast from the propeller drove her further away from the ship, trapping her for seconds in a whirlpool.

  When the whirlpool slowed, she bobbed up in open ocean and was able to take one full breath. She did not completely exhale because of what she saw. The sky overhead had grown very dark, but the high seas had suddenly calmed. She watched the blackened sky extend a light gray, triangle-shaped wisp of cloud. My Ling had never seen anything like this and thought it beautiful. As she watched, the seas became virtually flat, the air felt very humid, and it started to rain. The gray, wispy cloud filled with darkness, gradually turned downward. She watched it dip and do something odd: it started to spin. My Ling was witnessing the formation of a tornado at sea, a water spout. If she thought her experience with the Enterprise was harrowing, what was about to happen would be even more frightening.

  When the swirling cloud eventually touched the sea, it began turning faster, making a whooshing sound that became louder until it roared like the sound of a train. The roar was punctuated with loud rolling bursts of thunder, as lightening struck the distant ocean. While she watched the spout, something fell into the ocean beside her. She quickly turned, thinking the Navy vessel had come back and something had fallen from the ship, but the vessel was a half mile away. She turned back to view the spout and something else fell in the water near her. She saw what it was this time, a fish. Then she saw another and remembered her teacher in school talking about jumping fish, but My Ling saw none of them jumping out of the water, only falling into it.

  Though it was four hundred yards away, she could detect the detail of the spout. It was composed not only of water, but of something else. She thought she made out a form in the cyclone, but was unsure until overhead she saw one of the forms fly by. The water spout was pulling dolphins and other fish out of the sea and flinging them hundreds of yards. To deflect being struck by fish, she covered her head with one of the life vests. She looked up and gasped when the cyclone became blacker and bigger. It was headed directly for her.

  My Ling turned away and kicked as the roaring freight train sound became louder. The rain stopped, but a rush of air in her face made it hard to breathe. Then there was no air. The waterspout was pulling all of the air into a vortex, making it impossible for My Ling to draw a breath. Intuitively she began wrapping the dangling cords of the life vest around her arms, wrists, and hands. She stopped kicking as the shadow of the funnel darkened the sea around her. Then she felt with horrible familiarity her body being pulled involuntarily through the water, this time sideways, in a massive whirlpool. As the force flipped her onto her back, she looked across a two-hundred yard depression in the ocean with the funnel in the middle. She descended the saucer-like depression until the terror of it made her close her eyes. She was being fed to the vortex, so she squeezed her arms to her body, ducked her head to her chest, and weakly called, “Cha” (father).

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  She awakened to a cloudless, sunny sky. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious; however she became aware of how thirsty she was when trying to peel her tongue off the roof of her mouth. Using her left hand to push hair from her face, she looked around slowly to see only sea. The fingers of her right hand were bound up in the ties of the life preserver. She unwound the ties gently becaus
e of the pain in her hand. The white ties were now pink and became redder as she got closer to those wrapping her hand. She turned her freed hand up to open it and discovered the source of the redness. She had cut her hand on the metal identification tins she had been gripping tightly in her palm.

  She was about to throw them away, but stopped when she realized they were going to serve a purpose. When she finally confronted Russell William Armstrong to end his life, she wanted to make sure he knew who she was. If she had his I.D. tins she knew he would remember her as the girl he had thrown from the ship. He would realize that the girl who ripped the metals off his neck while he smiled, was exacting revenge. She thought of the tags as kim loai (metals), because she reserved the term huy chu’o’ng (medals) for the military awards her father received.

  She put the metals in a blouse pocket with a flap that buttoned. She then tightly rewrapped her bleeding hand, hoping the cut was not too deep and would heal properly as this was the hand with which she held the violin bow. It would have been far worse had she cut her left hand, the one that held the neck of the violin.

  She did not know which way to go and hoped that a boat would come by and rescue her. My Ling tried pushing herself up on her life vest to see if she could spot land, but saw nothing but water. She decided to kick in the direction she imagined land might be and watch as the sun set to indicate the direction of Vietnam.

  She knew they had flown east to get to the ship, so if the sun set in the west all she had to do was swim with the sun on her right and eventually she would reach land. But she had a problem when the sun was high in the sky as it was now. She put the thought out of her mind and swam in the direction where seagulls had gathered in the air about a mile from her. The ocean was a lake: there was no roll, no motion, nothing; it was flat, calm, and breezeless.

  As she swam toward the birds the sound of the flock became louder. Some periodically flew toward her and hovered overhead, craning their necks to one side to look at her. Then they would go back to the flock that was diving into the water. She swam closer to the congregation of birds and discovered that most of the birds were floating. There were about twenty of them ducking their heads into the sea and pulling up fish to swallow. My Ling was confused that fish were so close to the surface for such easy pickings. Coming closer, she saw that some of the birds were pecking at a larger dead fish floating on the surface. They watched her drifting in their direction and squawked and raised their wings to scare her. To avoid birds diving at her, she decided to swim around them when a small ocean swell picked her up and she was able to see that the gulls were not eating a dead fish, but a dead child.

  She recognized the red blouse that a girl wore who sat near her on the helicopter. My Ling remembered that the crying girl was wedged into a space near the copilot’s seat. and she tried to soothe the girl’s fears by smiling at her. It seemed to help, because once the helicopter’s erratic flight calmed down and flew away from the base camp, the little girl stopped crying. When the pilot later told them the helicopter was going down, My Ling looked quickly in the little girl’s direction, but knew she could not help her. My Ling’s only concern at that point was encouraging her little brother, Quang, to jump with her into the water. Quang did not jump and from the looks of this girl, she did not either. She was missing an arm and her leg was burned black. My Ling yelled at the birds to fly away, but they jeered back at her. She slapped the water to get them off the girl who was also missing part of her back where the gulls had dug away at her flesh, but they did not budge.

  “Stop,” a man’s voice whispered.

  She looked around, but saw no one. Was she hearing things? Was that a squawk from one of the birds? She spotted a pile of debris floating in the water near the dead girl and wondered if there was a man in the middle of it. She could not see anything like a man, so she kicked the water to keep moving.

  Then she heard, “Stop swimming.”

  She stopped. Something fell in the water about twenty yards from her. An arm arose and tossed something again into the water. She called tentatively, “Hello?”

  “Stop swimming, don’t move, and keep your voice quiet,” a man’s voice responded.

  She was about to ask why when the voice whispered, “You’re on top of a shark.”

  My Ling instantly froze. She leaned her head forward slightly where ten feet beneath her legs, she saw a large shadow block out the ocean below as a shark glided past. It became evident why the arm was throwing food when the water separated and the head of the beast broke the surface and took down the food.

  “I am keeping the shark away by throwing food. When the food hits the water the shark eats it. Don’t move and don’t be louder than the birds,” the voice whispered.

  My Ling stayed still and watched. As she slowly scanned the water around her, she realized she was seeing the remains of the children from the helicopter. Most of the bodies had been picked over by the birds. As she floated in the water, the bodies slowly floated toward her. She wanted to get out of whatever current was pushing them at her, but was afraid of the shark. She watched as this small flotilla of body parts made its way toward her.

  She whispered, “Can I move?”

  “No,” said the disembodied voice. “Draw your legs up.”

  The headless torso of a child was feet from bumping into her when, from behind, she felt a water surge causing the body to drift away as though something was pushing it. She started to turn when suddenly she was slammed aside by a stone-hard mass crashing by her as it drove for a strike at the lifeless corpse. She covered her mouth to stifle a scream when the jaws of the shark broke the surface of the water to snatch the lifeless form. The dorsal fin, sticking three feet out of the water, passed inches from her face, followed by the powerful bicaudal tail that was longer than My Ling was tall. The passing tail slapped her, knocking her yards away, where she remained motionless. The seagulls squawked and sprang into the air and My Ling’s bladder emptied involuntarily into the ocean. She wanted to cry for help or scream, but could not, because her mouth was filled with water. With all her will, she suppressed the need to cough or vomit. The shark dove under and she momentarily felt relief, until it dawned on her it would be back. She waited to be struck.

  My Ling bobbed in the water with her legs pulled up inside the vest, while attempting to duck her head below the collar to make her body as small as possible. She waited as anxiety coupled with fear and despair made her want to scream, but was smothered by the need to survive.

  She waited, wanting to close her eyes because she dreaded seeing the mouth of the shark with its jagged teeth plunging over the top and shredding her. Unable to close her eyes, not speaking, not breathing, and not moving she waited for the boat sized creature to return. She waited and bit into the life preserver to prevent herself from yelling.

  “Are you hurt?” the man’s voice asked.

  My Ling did not want to answer, thinking the shark would come after her.

  “The shark is gone. Look to your right,” the disembodied voice said.

  My Ling looked, where fifty yards away she could see the two fins of the shark weaving side-to-side in the water as it left for the open seas.

  “Are you hurt?” the voice asked again.

  “Do you think it will come back?”

  “I hope not. You were on the helicopter?” the man asked.

  “Yes, I was with my little brother,” My Ling answered.

  “I was the copilot. My name is Lieutenant Ba Duong. What is your name?”

  “My Ling. What happened?” My Ling asked as she pointed to the debris field.

  “The U.S. ship would not let us land. We crashed into it when we ran out of fuel and many of us were set on fire. The captain died in the crash. My left arm was badly burned. Many of the children drowned as soon as they fell into the sea. I was able to keep five of them alive with life vests thrown from the U.S. ship. The helicopter stayed afloat just long enough for me to get two vests off the aircraft. We floated
for a day and some of the children could not stop crying. That wasn’t a problem until the shark came. The little ones were uncontrollable and every time the shark swam near them they would scream. I tried to keep them quiet…” His voiced trailed off.

  “What are we going to do?” My Ling asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t see land and don’t know which way to go,” Lieutenant Ba offered.

  My Ling was drifting in his direction where he was covered in life vests. When she was able to get a look at his face she gasped. His skin was blackened and seeping blood. His left eye was melted shut and just below it, she was not sure, but thought she saw exposed bone.

  “A boat passed by awhile ago and I could not wave because the shark was circling. Maybe another will pass by…soon,” he hoped.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to get away from this,” he said pointing at the surrounding water. “The birds won’t leave us alone if we don’t. I need some help, my legs aren’t working.”

  My Ling swam over to him and looked for a spot to grab hold. She pushed him in front because she did not want to look at his face. She shoved on his back and kicked to get out of the floating field of body parts.

  “Don’t kick fast or hard. It will bring the shark back,” he said.

  She remembered her swimming lessons when her father taught her to slowly kick when she was going long distances. Of her family, she had the best endurance. Her father told her to think of the palms swaying in the breeze and to let her legs sway in the water. Using the term “sway” instead of “kick” made it seem easier to go long distances.

  “Do you have any fresh water,” Lieutenant Ba asked.

  “No,” she replied.

  They slowly moved away from the pool of debris distancing themselves from the sound of the birds. My Ling had been kicking for twenty minutes, and was slowly overcome with a feeling of futility. Her legs were tiring. She could not see land and did not even know if she were going towards it.