Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  None of the Koreans looked pleased. “I don’t like the idea of a Japanese harbor,” Hwang said.

  “Oh, for—haven’t you ever heard ‘any port in a storm’?” He tried to make a joke of it, but nobody laughed. He pulled the chart over and searched the coast of Honshu. It seemed to him that even if they could get close in to land, it would afford some lee from the worst of the seas, at least till the eye passed. “I don’t know these ports the way you do—Matsue?”

  “Sakaiminato,” Yu corrected him disapprovingly. “Not a good harbor.”

  “Fukui?”

  “That is not a port at all.”

  Jung muttered, “The ROKN does not seek shelter in Japan.”

  Dan sat forward on the settee. “Now wait. I understand you don’t like the Japanese. That’s fine. Personally, I wouldn’t jump for joy about putting into Shanghai. But if it was a matter of ducking in from a typhoon, I’d do it. The safety of my ship, my crew, against a little embarrassment? I’d go in. Sure.”

  They looked to the commodore, but Jung shook his head. “The ports in western Honshu are not good ports. We will not go into Japan.” He tapped the open sea north of Ullungdo and Tokto. “We will clear to the northeast, then ride it out in the open sea. That is the safest place for us now.”

  They scrutinized the chart again. Dan tried to envision how the wind would veer as the storm’s eye advanced. Opening the range on a typhoon was always a good thing, especially when you were in the dangerous semicircle—that area, on the advancing eye’s right hand in the Northern Hemisphere, where the winds were strongest, and also where those winds tended to blow you directly into the eye’s path.

  Steaming northeast, though, would put them in the trough of the waves. At some point, when it got too rough, they’d have to give up seeking northing and just aim their bows into the rollers and gut it out. If they could. If it lost power, a destroyer, with her low freeboard, tended to broach—put her beam to the seas, start rolling, and eventually capsize.

  At that point the task force would cease to exist as an organized unit. It’d become isolated ships, each fighting for her life; struggling to keep power, keep steerageway, and stay afloat.

  He couldn’t exactly disagree with the commodore’s decision. It wasn’t the one he’d have made, but it was defensible. The proof of the pudding would be what happened. How fast the storm came on, how powerful the winds and seas became. And of course how long each ship, and each crew, and each commander, could take it.

  “Any questions?” Jung said at last. “Then put that message out: course 045, away from the storm. Twenty knots.”

  Dan doubted they’d be able to make twenty for long in these seas, not without a hell of a pounding, but no one objected. Hwang rolled his chart and they rose.

  “Perhaps that message should include an order to prepare for heavy weather,” Dan said. “Secure all equipment, prepare anchors for streaming, rig safety lines, ballast down—the usual precautions. Just as a reminder?”

  “We are already prepared for storm,” Yu said with a scowl. “All Korean commanders know this. Not your concern.”

  “Well, certainly Chung Nam probably is, but I wonder if the other units in the squadron—”

  “All my commanders know what to do,” Jung agreed. He threw a heavy arm over Dan’s shoulders. Against his will, Dan thought of Leakham’s accusation. “We don’t need to remind them. This force will do well in the open sea. That’s the place for us. I will of course leave Commodore Leakham to his own decision, but I believe you’ll see he too will not trust the northern Honshu ports.”

  Dan wanted to say he hoped he was right. But he didn’t, just smiled and finished his tea.

  DAWN, and the sea’s former smile transformed into a leer of rage. He crouched on the bridge, clutching a radar repeater and watching the anemometer bump and lurch. The needle edged 130 and went nearly to 150 on the gusts. That was in kilometers per hour, of course. Translated into knots, he made it around 75 steady, 90 on the gusts.

  Brendan was a Class 3 typhoon. Only halfway up Nature’s scale of mindless violence. But at sea, with nothing to break the wind, it pushed up green, shaggy, rippled mountains across miles of fetch. On the radar a sparkling wash obscured everything within two miles, return from the wave-faces direct to the antenna sentineling tirelessly above. Beyond that a straggling line of pips flared and faded as TF 74 fought its way northeast. The U.S. and ROKN ships were intermingled. The subs didn’t show, of course. At their last radio availability Jung had ordered them to go deep and shadow the surface units. Dan got the impression that as soon as the eye passed he’d reconstitute and resume the exercise. They’d be past the assigned dates by then, but somebody else could worry about that.

  He was impressed with how smoothly Chung Nam took heavy seas. He’d never ridden a ship with active stabilizers before. The Korean frigate was traveling a little to port of cross-sea, at eighteen knots. With fifteen to twenty-foot seas coming from a little forward of the quarter, a ship this size would normally be rolling forty to fifty degrees.

  He remembered the terror of forty-foot seas in the Arctic. How Ryan had gone damn near beam on more than once, leaving every man aboard walking on the bulkheads rather than the deck. The never-ending worry about whether they could keep the engines and bearings supplied with lube oil at a seventy-degree list.

  He looked out to starboard as a foaming crest rose, seemed to hesitate, then toppled. A faint groan or hum came from forward. The fins turning, adjusting. Anticipating, then accepting the immense strain of thousands of tons of water bludgeoning their solid steel stocks. Instead of rolling, the frigate rode nearly upright, canting only a little, like a surfer, balanced, gliding down the wave. It passed and she rode up, but caught herself and only lurched the faintest bit, a slight jar, as she refused the roll back.

  Impressive. But he wondered to what degree they’d work in really heavy seas, the chaotic fifty- or sixty-foot mountains that lurked at the sunlit heart of the typhoon. What he gazed on was nothing compared to that apocalyptic violence. What if the fins came out of the water? How would they respond then?

  He didn’t want to find out.

  THE hours dragged by. Lunchtime came, and an invitation from Jung. In CIC, folded and rammed into a corner, Dan couldn’t face it. “Please convey my respects. I’m not feeling well enough for lunch,” he told Kim #3.

  “You are sick of the sea?”

  “Something like that.” Even coffee made him nauseated. His in-sides felt like a septic line backed up from a blocked drainfield. Sooner or later it was all going to let go. He didn’t want it to be in front of the commodore. He sprawled in a stupor, only vaguely registering the whine of the wind, the mumble of the diesels, the groan and hum of the stabilizers conducted through the metal against which the bone of his skull rested.

  He dozed off, then came awake again, coughing. The low space was the same, the hum of fans, the pall of smoke, the fungoid faces dangling over the scopes. He hauled himself to the nearest repeater. The green speckle of sea return pimpled the screen, but he made out a bowing in the line abreast formation as the smaller units labored to keep pace.

  He wondered dully where Andy Mangum was. Deep, deep, was his guess, twisting in the oozy weeds, down where the only witness of the tempest’s rage was a conch-whisper in the sonarman’s cochlea. He bent over red polyethylene, gut knotting, but all that came up was a sharp thin cough-and-spit of acid.

  On the bridge the stink of vomit and cigarettes was cut by the iron smell of the heaters and the moldy aroma of standing seawater. The doors were weeping through their gaskets. The tile deck was plastered with transparent-wet paper towels. The windshield disks squealed like tormented hamsters, whipping off spray and rain.

  Putting his face to one, he peered into a heaving waste. Glanced at the anemometer and translated the reading laboriously into knots. He checked the heading and peered again, trying to get a bearing on where the seas were coming from. They seemed larger than before, b
ut it was hard to tell, given the mist and blowing spray. Another ten knots of wind and visibility would vanish. They’d have to run on radar and faith.

  He bent over, kneading his turgid gut and trying to deny the nausea. He’d never felt quite this bad at sea before, though he’d been more frightened. But he’d always had plenty to do, watches to stand, a division or department to supervise. Something to take his mind off his misery.

  With the SATYRE at all stop, though, he and the rest of the TAG team were excess cargo. He decided to try his bunk again. Get his eyes shut for a few seconds. He was just so fucking exhausted. Maybe he was coming down with something.

  He was making his way down the ladder when there was a soft thud. The metal he gripped quivered. Not hard. Just a quiver. The same sort of tremor those aboard Titanic might have felt.

  A second later all hell broke loose.

  Chung Nam toppled fast and hard. She went so suddenly that the ladder jerked out of his hands. He floated up weightless in the narrow companionway. Only years of seagoing reflex snagged him the next rung. By then he was nearly perpendicular to the ladder, because it was on its side, whereas he’d dropped straight down.

  With a boom that quaked through the hull, gravity returned. His knee slammed into a metal edge so hard he knew before sensation arrived that it would be bad. Pain shot through both wrists as they snatched his falling weight. Above him, below, men were shouting.

  The ladderwell lay over at about seventy degrees, and the ship shook. Crashes shuddered aft. He scrambled to his feet and, bent over, scrabbled back up along the inclined bulkhead, boots shooting out from under him on the glossy paint, one hand on the ladder to steady himself.

  He reached the top and pulled himself through the hatchway.

  The pilothouse deck lay nearly vertical, a steep, wet-slick, tiled cliff no man could climb without pitons and a rock hammer. High above, the boatswain hung from the degaussing console, boots kicking desperately above a forty-foot drop. Others clung to repeaters, the helm console, the chart table. The officer of the deck was wedged behind the commodore’s chair. A ruck of charts, clipboards, cuttlefish-flavored peanut snacks, containers of the barley water and orange pop the enlisted brought on watch, binoculars, and struggling men stirred at the base of the cliff. Even as he surveyed this the frigate heaved again, taking another sea from the beam, and an ominous grinding rumble came from below. It hammered again and the shock this time told him there was something down there, something hard, something beneath the ship. He couldn’t imagine what it was. Ice? No, that was impossible. Not here, in summer.

  The bulkhead he lay on shook again. He scrambled up, but his boot skidded away under the shattering porcelain of a teacup and he went down into the scrum. An elbow smashed his nose so hard he saw strobes going off. He fought back, got a knee on someone’s chest. He had to get to the helm. No ship could live like this, broached to, battered by successive seas. But the helm was twenty feet above, and there was no way to climb that glassy inclined deck.

  Above him he caught Kim #2’s eye. Dan yelled above the scream of the wind, the batter and creak as another sea body-slammed them, shaking the frigate from end to end. “You’ve got to get her head into the seas!”

  The lieutenant stared, then looked away through the windows. The wiper was still spinning, but nothing was visible outside but a hurtling gray. The world was dark, as if the sun was eclipsed.

  Dan fought upright again, got to the after bulkhead, and started climbing it, hauling himself from hand- to foothold on junction boxes and cable brackets like a rock climber. He tasted salt. Above him the helmsman stared openmouthed, white as the paper towels that clung to the deck like taco wrappings in a parking lot. “Get your helm over! Right hard rudder!” he roared, but the seaman just blinked. He gave no sign of comprehending English, and Dan certainly didn’t have the Korean. He couldn’t even remember the word for “starboard.” Where the hell was Yu? Hwang? Jung? Someone to take charge up here?

  A seaman with a sound-powered headset, clinging above him, yelled something shrilly. Dan switched his gaze to Lieutenant Kim, who was struggling upright. “What?” he yelled.

  “Taking water forward,” the officer of the deck interpreted hoarsely.

  “You’ve got to get her pointed into the seas. And secure the stabilizers. They’re not working.”

  Kim screamed at the helmsman. After a second the man reacted, cranking the wheel over. Dan spotted a handhold above him. His foot slipped just then, though, leaving him dangling. The pain in his arm sliced right through the excitement. “Ah, fuck… that hurts. Full power! Use full power! You have to get her around, get out of the trough!”

  But Kim was screaming just as loudly back at him. “Turn switch! Turn fucking switch!”

  ”Which fucking switch?”

  “Blue switch! No! Blue switch!”

  He got to it and snapped it over. Realized after a second it was the power to the stabilizers. Then got a boot-toe wedged into the cables. The helmsman had the wheel hard over now. The boatswain had joined him with a length of line, and was bighting him to the console.

  The frigate sagged back upright, at first a little, then with more confidence. As soon as he could get traction on the deck Dan pushed himself uphill. Kim let go of the captain’s chair and got to the engine control, which on Chung Nam wasn’t part of the helm console, as on U.S. destroyers, but beneath the forward windows. He slammed the throttles forward and headed for the centerline gyrocompass. The boatswain started across to him, but lost his footing and slid, yelling, down the toboggan-slide of the still-canted deck, gathering wet paper as he tumbled, and slammed into the others struggling upright at the bottom. They went down in a discordant howl.

  The rudder indicator was at hard right, gyro indicator passing 150. “Point into the seas,” Dan screamed. The lieutenant stared back, gaze fixed, then whipped around and faced front, peering into the spinning circle of sight. He pointed to the right. Dan looked back at the console. The engine order indicator was labeled in Korean. It seemed to be coming up to full power, but he couldn’t tell if it was full diesel or full turbine. Whichever, she seemed to be pointing up. Or so said the instrumentation, and he couldn’t tell any other way.

  He looked back up to see Kim glancing over his shoulder again. “Where’s the water coming from?” Dan shouted.

  “Water?”

  “The goddamn report, Tae wi! Taking water forward! Where from?”

  “Where from—from forward storage!”

  “Port or starboard?”

  “Port side. Port side.” Kim shouted something long at the seaman with the headphones. “I am getting damage-control team there.”

  “Good, now you’re thinking.”

  Where the fuck was the captain? Dan could get them out of a broach, but he didn’t know the handling characteristics of an Ulsan-class frigate. The deck leveled, then fell off to starboard. He guessed the seas were from about 170 true, south by southeast. They were passing 180 and swinging right.

  He put his finger on 170 on the compass and jabbed the helmsman in the ribs. The man flinched, and shifted his rudder to hard left. Dan looked up to see Kim cranking the telephone. “Keep pointing!” Dan screamed at him. Where the/Mcfc was Yu?

  On cue, the little captain reeled through the doorway. Dan glanced back. The door to the chartroom was open. He slid down the deck, grabbed the jamb, and spun inside in a figure skater’s pirouette as Yu started shouting orders.

  He grabbed a chart rack and eased the door shut with his other hand and then stood in the dark, not reaching for the light switch, catching his breath and listening to Yu screaming on the far side of the partition. The deck came back level, though it was pitching heavily, a long slow climb and then drop. This was good. It told him her bow was pointed where it had to go. If the power held, if the helmsman could keep her into the swell, they should be all right. If the storm didn’t blow even harder, that is, and he didn’t really see how it could, since its eye, by Buys Ballo
t’s famous rule of thumb, should be behind them now and dropping farther astern each hour.

  He gave it two or three minutes and then came out the port door. This made it look as if he’d just come up off the ladder. He picked his way through the bridge team, who were clearing up debris, restow-ing gear, and swabbing up various fluids, to stand beside Yu, who was belted into his chair. “Captain.”

  “Commander.” The skipper scowled at him. Seated in the elevated chair, he was eye to eye with Dan.

  “Stabilizers go out?”

  “We hit thing,” Yu said.

  Kim made a report. Dan waited till he was done. “That’s the flooding?” he said.

  “Hole in port side, frame 15. That’s where port stabilizer.” Yu coughed into his fist. He had half a cigarette in his mouth, but it was soaking wet and bent at a right angle. “Your nose,” the captain added.

  When he touched it his fingers came away stained as if he’d been picking cherries. Yu sniffed and handed him a handkerchief.

  ”Kam sa ham ni da. We hit something? Is that what you said?”

  “I think floating container. We see sometimes off Japan. Japanese very careless. Russians too. All is under control. Kim tae wi take proper action. We are repairing, patching hole. All under control.”

  Dan eyed Kim, who looked away. “Yeah, that’d do it,” he told Yu. A washed-overboard container, steel, sharp-cornered, loaded with who knew what. Every seaman’s nightmare. He peered through the blurred disk in front of Yu, but couldn’t make out much. Judging from the jolting, the skipper had her about twenty degrees off the seas. She was riding rough and pitching hard, but it could be worse. “Have you heard from the commodore?”

  “He’s in his cabin. I advise him of the situation.”

  Dan offered the handkerchief back but Yu told him to keep it. The boatswain undogged the starboard door. The wind shrieked through it, and spray blew in as if pressurized. Yu cursed at him shrilly until he dogged it again.

  “Are we on turbines?”

  “Yes, turbines. Standard power.”