CRASHBACK – Michael Fabey

The story of David and Goliath in a kinder, gentler Old Testament translation would have young David, instead of killing Goliath with his slingshot, chasing him off the field of battle while hurling nothing more than angry words at the fearsome giant. Had that been the case, the word philistine today, instead of a curse, would be a joke. Likewise the U.S. Navy in some minds suffered similar ignominy when a peewee Chinese amphibian, firing no more than angry words on its radio, chased a fearsome guided missile cruiser three times its size from the South China Sea.

Military journalist Michael Fabey uses this Dec. 5, 2013 embarrassing incident involving the USS Cowpens to underline his wake-up call for sleeping politicians that despite China’s official posture of civility on the world stage it’s quietly conducting a crash program to build a navy that can supplant U.S. dominance in the Western Pacific. And the Chinese are not waiting until they have more than their one aircraft carrier. They’re already pushing into places long claimed by their Western Pacific neighbors, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The most obvious and egregious Chinese incursion has been the building up a string of coral deposits into man-made islands and claiming them as Chinese territory. Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, calls this buildup a “Great Wall of Sand,” on which the Chinese will locate forward military bases.

Fabey’s just-released book, Crashback, explores the political, economic, and military history of this region as background to his examining the implications of more recent events and policies. His own background includes decades of award-winning reporting on military and naval affairs for such publications as Defense News, Aviation Week, and Jane’s. His integrity as a journalist gained him access to the upper command levels of both the Chinese and U.S. navies as well as sailors in the enlisted ranks. Bringing sourcing and research of this caliber to Crashback gives a sobering credibility to Fabey’s conclusion that we are already at war with China, albeit what the Chinese themselves are calling a “warm war.” But it’s a war that could quickly go hot. And if it does, no one who’s read Crashback can say they were not warned.

As Fabey argues in his prologue: “It’s a war over tiny specks of land and vast reaches of sea and sky, a warm war of dangerous confrontations and small escalations, a war over military hegemony and the diplomatic and economic influence that naturally follows that hegemony. It’s a war that pits a diminished U.S. Navy, which sailed the Pacific virtually unchallenged for decades, against a burgeoning Chinese navy that is evolving with astonishing speed from a coastal defense force to a “blue-water” fleet capable of projecting power throughout the region. It’s a warm war in which China is trying to gain ownership and military control of some of the world’s most economically vital waters.

“And it is a war that the United States has been losing.”

Michael Fabey

If Crashback becomes the handbook that spurs U.S. leaders—civilian and military—into turning the situation around, Fabey says the Chinese have their own book that’s spurring them on to challenge U.S. dominance: The “widely influential 2010 book The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era. It was written by a retired People’s Liberation Army colonel named Liu Mingfu, one of China’s most respected military writers and international strategists…

“In the book, Colonel Liu posits that America’s historically brief time of worldwide hegemony is passing, and that it is China’s manifest destiny to take America’s place as the leader among the world’s nations—starting in the Western Pacific. America will resist, the colonel says, the U.S. and China will initially fight a “warm war”—he uses that very phrase—for military and geopolitical hegemony in the region. There will be confrontations, shows of force, periodic crises. But in the end, the colonel says, China will prevail. And one reason it will prevail is this: Although it wants peace, China is not afraid of war. And America is.”

Fabey describes in moment-to-moment detail several recent examples of China’s thumbing its nose at international rules of the sea to confront with hostility U.S. intelligence-gathering maneuvers in international waters over which China claims territorial privilege. His flagship example is the Cowpens incident from which he’s titled the book. It began with the guided-missile cruiser steaming near China’s first and only aircraft carrier to gather electronic signals from the ship and its amphibian escorts. When spotted, the Cowpens’s radio crackles with demands from the Chinese carrier to leave the area. The Cowpens answers that what it is doing is legal. This exchange continues until two of the carrier’s amphibian escorts move toward the Cowpens in a threatening manner. The cruiser continues on its course, about ten miles away and heading toward the carrier, until one of the amphibians “suddenly turns and cuts across the Cowpens’s bow at an oblique angle, so close that it’s in the Cowpens’s ‘forward shadow zone,’ part of it disappearing from...sight under the front end of the cruiser.

USS Cowpens

It’s crunch time. Several things are in play at this point. It’s the first time China has openly challenged a U.S. warship in international waters. If the Cowpens continues ahead it will hit the amphibian, crushing it and sending it and its crew to the bottom of the sea. The Cowpens’s captain has been given conflicting orders—perhaps impossible, Catch-22 orders. As Fabey puts it: “to boldly take his ship and his crew into harm’s way—but for God’s sake, don’t let anything unpleasant happen out there.”

Fabey describes Captain Greg Gombert as “tall (six-foot-six) and lean, with blue eyes and a shock of brown hair, dressed in the navy’s new working uniform of one-piece blue coveralls. Intense, driven, supremely self-confident, he pushes his ship and his crew—and himself—hard. The product of a strict midwestern Catholic upbringing, steeped in the concepts of duty and hard work, at age forty-four Gombert is a man who has never failed at anything— and he doesn’t intend to fail in this mission.”

A Goliath of a man, perhaps, commanding most certainly a Goliath of a ship with “an astonishing amount of firepower.” It’s a Ticonderoga-class cruiser of a design “to be the most powerful surface warships ever to put to sea, under any flag, in any century.”

Let’s let Fabey describe what happens now: “Radios squawk out angry English—“ Leave the area! Leave the area!” On the decks, sailors who can see what’s going on are giving each other “Holy shit!” looks. On the bridge, the junior officers are looking desperately at Captain Gombert, who stares out at the rapidly nearing amphib, knowing he has to make a decision— and that there’s no good decision to make. In the end, he has no choice. “ALL BACK EMERGENCY FULL! BRACE! BRACE! BRACE!” In an instant the massive gears deep in the ship go from full ahead to neutral to full reverse, while the cruiser’s four twenty-thousand-horsepower-each engines are screaming to provide full power. The effect is like a jumbo jet landing on a too-short runway; the bow pushes down, the stern rises up. Throughout the ship, sailors and officers have to grab the nearest handholds to keep from being tumbled forward. The collision warning alarm bounces off metal bulkheads throughout the ship, like the flailing of a gong. It’s not at all certain that the ship will be able to stop in time.

“Finally, after it’s traveled two ship lengths, about twelve hundred feet, the Cowpens’s reversing screws generate enough counterforce to slow the cruiser’s forward momentum and bring it to a full stop, a mere one hundred yards short of the amphib. And in that moment, just before the screws start pulling the ship backward, the mighty USS Cowpens is DIW, lying dead in the water in the South China Sea.

peewee Chinese amphibian

“Old navy surface warfare sailors have a word for this kind of unusual emergency at-sea stopping maneuver. They call it a “crashback”— and for a U.S. Navy warship, and its captain, having to execute a crashback is never a good thing.” Not even when Gombert was following orders from his superiors as well as observing a law of the sea that “you do everything you can to avoid a collision, no matter who’s at fault.”

Gombert turns the Cowpens around and heads away, with one of the little amphibians in pursuit “like a yapping dog chasing a car."

The Cowpens’s—and the U.S. Navy’s—embarrassment had a lasting ripple effect Fabey sees as bringing a more realistic outlook among this country’s leadership. He’s cautiously optimistic:

“America of 2017 is not the America of 2013. And the next time the Chinese navy dangerously confronts a U.S. Navy warship on the high seas, it seems unlikely that it will be the American commander who orders the engine room to execute an ‘all back emergency full.’

“For America, and for the U.S. Navy, the era of crashbacks seems to be over.”

DESTINATION UNKNOWN – Agatha Christie

[Disclaimer: Agatha Christie fans hoping to read another fan's take on Destination Unknown are advised this report has been produced by a first-time Christie reader, and, as such, might better be read just for laughs. To find insight from a true aficionado please click HERE for Yvette Banek's splendid review. Hers is the one, in fact, that finally sold me on sticking a virgin toe into the Christie waters after a lifetime of avoiding what I had always assumed…]

I really don't know that I assumed anything. I just never felt quite able to pick up a book by Agatha Christie and give it a shot. My dad had some Christies in his little paperback bookcase, but in those prepubescent days I was inclined more to the Spillanes and Erle Stanley Gardners. I recall learning somehow, probably from my dad, that Christie liked to write, or at least to work out her ideas, while lounging in a bathtub, an image I carried henceforth—though oddly not with the slightest erotic connotations. Over the years I enjoyed film adaptations of her novels, although perhaps working against my reading her was the notion I've picked up along the way her mysteries were of the Jessica Fletcher gimmicky puzzler types, and while I tried never to miss an episode of the Murder She Wrote TV series, I'm not good myself at working out mystery puzzles.

All that baggage keeping me at a distance has now been cast aside. Thanks to Yvette Banek's persistent nudges I have discovered finally the mesmerizing writer who may or may not have dreamed up her intricate plots while soaking in a bathtub, and I regret not having made the acquaintance much, much sooner.

Now then, on to her debut (for me) novel, the 1954-published Destination Unknown, truly an apt title for a reading experience launched with more than the usual curiosity. The first chapter alone removed all doubt, providing an auspicious liftoff that lulled to oblivion whatever critical faculties might have been poised to flag me down with an urgent message that time was a'wasting and I had better turn to something else before this trip thoroughly bummed me out. Yvette will give you a better idea of the plot than I can, considering she's read this novel multiple times and probably knows it by heart. I will say this much: a British nuclear physicist has gone missing. A secret service officer known only as "Mr. Jessop" believes the scientist has joined others who have disappeared of late and that they've all fled to the Soviet Union. Jessop orders his operatives to follow the scientist's wife who insists her husband has been abducted and says she's going to Morocco to get away from the publicity. Jessop believes she’s going there to meet her husband.

The plot quickly thickens when the wife's plane crashes, and she is one of only two survivors. Meanwhile another British woman—same age and physical appearance as the wife—is about to kill herself in a Paris hotel room. She’s despondent over the death of her young daughter and her husband’s abandoning her. Of course you’ve guessed by now Mr. Jessop happens upon the woman—Hilary Craven—before she can swallow the lethal dose of sleeping pills, and persuades her to impersonate the scientist’s wife and see what she can find out.

Gimmicky and barely believable for sure—hell, it’s completely unbelievable. Yet, our bathtub conjuror by now has completely persuaded me to go along for the ride despite its fantastic premise. Talk about your suspension of disbelief, mine was not only suspended it went up in smoke, perhaps in one of the two airplane crashes—one of them fake—either that or I found plausibility to be an annoying distraction from a plot that had me hopping gleefully from soap bubble to soap bubble with nary a worry one of them might pop and leave me floundering in Dame Agatha’s tepid bathwater. At some point I found myself thinking of scenes in James Hilton’s haunting fantasy Lost Horizon (even the covers are similar) and recalling the absurd, strident premise of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Review snippets on Wikipedia include this from The Times Literary Supplement: “While it must be admitted that the secret, when disclosed, smacks rather of The Thousand and One Nights than of modern international rivalry for scientific talents, it may surely be excused on the ground that it provides Mrs. Christie with a story-tellers holiday from the rigours of detective fiction.”

And this, from The Observer: "The thriller is not Agatha Christie's forte; it makes her go all breathless and naïve...Needs to be read indulgently in a very comfortable railway carriage. She probably had a delicious busman's holiday writing it." Maybe while trying out a new bubblebath. She also seemed to have her tongue planted firmly in a cheek, as evidenced by lines like this one: “You can’t lose a tame scientist every month or so and have no idea how they go or why they go or where!” I nodded a vigorous affirmative as I snickered.

And this exchange between Mr. Jessop and one of his operatives:

“‘Nobody’s so gullible as the scientist,’ he said. ‘All the phony mediums say so. Can’t quite see why.’

“The other smiled, a very tired smile.

“‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘it would be so. They think they know, you see. That’s always dangerous.’”

Some wisdom’s in there, too. And more wisdom’s here, albeit presented in The Observer’s “breathless and naive” mode via the would-be suicide Hilary Craven: “‘Escape, escape!’ That was the refrain that had hummed incessantly in her mind ever since she left England. ‘Escape. Escape.’ And now she knew— knew with a horrible, stricken coldness, that there was no escape. 

Agatha

“Everything was just the same here as it had been in London. She herself, Hilary Craven, was the same. It was from Hilary Craven that she was trying to escape, and Hilary Craven was Hilary Craven in Morocco just as much as she had been Hilary Craven in London. She said very softly to herself:

“‘What a fool I’ve been— what a fool I am. Why did I think that I’d feel differently if I got away from England?’”

Soon, of course, she is no longer Hilary Craven, but “Olive Betterton,” wife of the missing scientist, playing the dangerously thrilling role of Mr. Jessop’s deep-cover operative. (The real spitting image Olive Betterton died soon after her rescue from the crashed airliner Hilary Craven was supposed to be on except for the heavy fog that diverted her to an alternate flight—oh, those coincidences, gotta love ‘em! I can just about hear Dame Agatha Christie chortling in her sea of bubbles as she thought that one up.

Is this the tub?

And here I’ll bet she actually let out an unladylike guffaw, maybe while typing this little scene in Hilary’s Paris hotel. It involves a French woman lounging in a formal salon of the Hôtel St. Louis,

Her thoughts are in French, obviously, which our dear Dame neglects to translate. Here’s the best part of the scene, short and sweet. Be sure to stay for the ending. It’s priceless:

“Mademoiselle Jeanne Maricot was sitting gracefully in an upright chair looking out of the window and yawning. Mademoiselle Maricot was a brunette dyed blonde, with a plain but excitingly made-up face. She was wearing chic clothes and had no interest whatsoever in the other occupants of the room whom she dismissed contemptuously in her mind as being exactly what they were! She was contemplating an important change in her sex life and had no interest to spare for these animals of tourists!”

Mademoiselle Jeanne Maricot observes the three chattering tourists, including Hilary Craven-cum-Olive Betterton. After eavesdropping with us on their chattering interaction, she, and those of us who know French, revert back to her thoughts:

“‘Tant pis pour Pierre,’ Mademoiselle Maricot said to herself. ‘Il est vraiment insupportable! Mais le petit Jules, lui il est bien gentil. Et son père est très bien placé dans les affairs. Enfin, je me décide!’”

“And with long graceful steps Mademoiselle Maricot walked out of the small salon and out of the story.”

Guffawing, Agatha Christie did. I’ve no doubt of it. Admittedly I expected the mysterious Mademoiselle Maricot to show up later, perhaps as a surprise Interpol operative near the end, but I should have known our impeccable Dame would keep her word.

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

MORE MAIGRETS – Georges Simenon

I've read The Late Monsieur Gallet, as promised two weeks ago, and have gone one more to give you another twin Simenon whammy with Maigret's Memoirs, one of the most amazing and entertaining examples of crime fiction craft I've ever read.

I almost skipped Monsieur Gallet after reading Scott Bradfield’s opinion in his NYT Sunday Book Review piece, The Case of Georges Simenon, that the earlier Maigrets were “rather gimmicky Agatha Christie-style whodunits.” But as I’d already downloaded the Kindle version beforehand, and as I have yet to read any Agatha Christies (I will, as I’ve promised my blogging friend Yvette Banek, the instant I’ve posted this report!) I went ahead and read it anyway. Bradfield was right. Monsieur Gallet is, in my opinion, gimmicky and implausible. I enjoyed it all the more, because Detective Chief Inspector Jules Amédée François Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire seemed as discouraged by Simenon’s awkward legerdemain as I was.

“At first the case had looked like nothing to speak of,” the French detective muses to himself. “A man who did not seem out of the ordinary had been killed by someone unknown in a hotel room. But each new item of information complicated the problem instead of simplifying it.”

And as the case drags on, we have no brilliantly deductive Sherlock Holmes here, nor even a plodding flatfoot methodically chasing down clue after clue after clue. We have, “The lack of progress in this case, circling round the lackluster and melancholy figure of the dead man, was getting Maigret down.” And here, in the hotel room where the victim died, where a forensic specialist has been working hours with superhuman concentration to decipher words on paper that’s been burned to ash, we see Maigret prowling around the room...”touching everything, dragging his feet, looking hesitant.” At last he sighs, ‘Listen, old fellow, I can’t take this any more! I admire you, but you don’t weigh as much as I do. I must go and get some fresh air.’

But then we know Maigret doesn’t operate like detectives in the more cleverly plotted novels He’s ruminative, intuitive, goes more by feel rather than deductive reasoning. This tends to work for him because sometimes the kind of clues and appearances other detectives focus on grate on Maigret like this: he “still had the same vague and annoying sensation, coming back again and again like a musical chorus: the sensation that everything touching on the death of Émile Gallet creaked, sounded out of tune and wrong, from the dead man himself to his son’s voice, and Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire’s laughter.”

I should note at this point that dissonance ordinarily bums me out, too. But I hung in there with Chief Inspector Maigret because I figured if he could take it so could I. Too, while these novels not always sweet they are mercifully short. And I had what I knew would be a humdinger waiting in the wings.

Nearly halfway through what would become a 75-book series, Simenon had the brilliant idea of letting Maigret “write” his memoirs. Already completely intrigued by the character at this point, after only three novels, I stopped scanning Amazon’s list of Penguin’s reissued Maigret series and immediately downloaded Maigret’s Memoirs. “What fun!” I almost hollered in the public library’s Virginia Room as I waited for my Kindle app to open the book.

“I ran. I flew. I leaped for joy,” I felt like doing, as Maigret says he did on his way home from drinking with his new colleagues after his coveted promotion to the Special Squad. Maigret was, however...well, let’s let him tell it:

I was still at the foot of the stairs when I started the speech I had prepared for my wife. And on the last flight of stairs, I fell headlong. I did not have time to pick myself up before our door opened: Louise must have been worried by my lateness.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

The funny thing is that from the moment I got back on my feet, I knew I was dead drunk and it was a complete surprise to me. The stairs were spinning around me. My wife was just a blurred figure. She seemed to have at least two mouths and three or four eyes.

Believe it or not, it was the first time it had ever happened in my life, and I felt so humiliated that I did not dare look at her. I slipped into the apartment like a guilty person, completely forgetting the words of triumph I had so carefully prepared.

“I think...I think I’m a little drunk...”

My enthusiasm grew by leaps and bounds as I read this memoir of a fictional character whose unique feature is his wide-open mind as he works to solve cases—wide open to us but a monolithic mystery to the other fictional characters. Maigret describes this feature in Simenon’s words as the two of them discuss creating the novel Maigret out of the “real” one: “The public has to get used to you, to your outline, your walk. I think I’ve just found the word. For the moment, you’re still nothing but an outline, a back, a pipe, a way of walking, of grunting.”

Maigret...er, Simenon clowning with daughter

 As I am only at the ground floor of the Maigret series, having read just the first two besides a later one portraying the detective as a rookie, I’m wondering now if the fleshed-out version Simenon promises Maigret (I have to keep reminding myself this is all fiction) will become more than the beginning’s “grunting outline.” Somehow I doubt it. I don’t see how the character could become any more complicated than the one I’ve already read--of course, I’m now including this “self” portrayal, which the fictional Simenon tells Maigret is of necessity “truer than life.”

“The truth never seems true,” the author tells his character’s fictional model. “I don’t just mean in literature or painting. Do I even need to mention Doric columns? We think they’re absolutely straight, but they only give that impression because they’re slightly bent. If they were straight, our eyes would see them as bulging outwards.”

With his two kds

 “Simenon” explains further: “Tell anyone a story. If you don’t organize it, it’ll be considered incredible, artificial. Organize it, and it’ll seem truer than life...making it seem truer than life, that’s the crux of it. Well, I’ve made you truer than life.”

Years later, as the series makes Maigret and his creator famous, Maigret points out to Simenon the growing complexity of his character has had an effect as well on the author. “Do you know,” Maigret says he asked Simenon, “with the years you’ve started walking, smoking a pipe, even talking like your Maigret?”

And he tells us, his readers, “Which is true, and which gives me--I hope the reader will grant me that--a quite delicious feeling of revenge.

“It is rather as if, late in the day, he was starting to think he was me!”

Maigret, perhaps in the interest of discretion for his creator and perhaps even for himself, does not mention Simenon’s reputed hedonistic habits, including at one point living in the same house with his wife and two mistresses. Maigret, as we know, is solidly (and solely) devoted to his loving wife, Louise.

Or so Simenon would have us believe.

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]