Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  “Standard?”

  “Too much and she makes boom boom,” Yu explained. He demonstrated with his hands. Dan guessed he meant slamming. “I will hold twenty degrees of the seas. Maybe try thirty.”

  Dan had no suggestions. Her skipper was the best judge of how much she’d take. The boatswain handed him a damp festoon of toilet paper. He stared at it a moment, then wadded a sheet up and packed his nostril with it.

  The Pritac crackled. The voice was nearly blotted out by the whine of wind in the background. Yu stood in his chair to turn it up, riding the motion like a movie cowboy standing up in the saddle. Kim came over to listen. ”Dae Jon,” he said.

  ”Monjae ka sang keot seo.”

  Dan got the gist from their expressions: the message was from Dae Jon, and bad news. He wedged himself in front of Yu and plunged his face into the black rubber scope hood. It smelled like grease pencil, rubber, vomit. Jellyfish light ebbed and eddied, but he made out the smeared pip of the old destroyer. He ratcheted the knobs and got 275, about eleven thousand yards, if he had the right contact and the range wasn’t in meters. He didn’t think it was—the console looked like USN-issue.

  “Eleven thousand yards, bearing two-seven-five,” he said. “A little aft of our starboard beam. Five and a half miles. Uh… about nine kilometers.”

  “Eight point eight,” Yu corrected him. He bent to squint out the whirling disk. A comber towered ahead. Chung Nam pitched to scoop it up. Her bullnose cut a wedge from the sea and skyrocketed it toward the clouds. It broke apart and crashed aft, boiling, creaming. The lifelines submerged, drawing momentary lines on the surface before the wind obliterated everything and plastered foam across the windows. Dan noticed someone had rotated the gun mount to point aft.

  “What was that message, Hamjung?

  ”Dae Jon is losing engine.”

  He squinted into the ambergris light. Losing power in seas like this… in a ship that old… He bent into the hood again and ratcheted like grinding coffee. Giving Yu time to come out with a decision. That next contact was McCain, he thought.

  When he looked back the flag captain was on the phone. To Jung, probably. He spoke and listened. Frowned. Rapped out Korean too fast even for Dan to catch separate syllables, then handed, almost threw, the handset at the lieutenant.

  “What’s he say?”

  “We go take look,” Yu said. “But that is my decision, not commodore’s.”

  He snapped an order. The bridge team took on a collective silence. The helm servos groaned as the wheel came over. The wind keened, dead on, then shifted, like some experiment in stereo listening, to port.

  Dan waited, but Yu didn’t add anything. Finally he cleared his throat. “Should we ask McCain to help out? Or at least let them know Dae Jon’s in trouble?”

  Yu seemed displeased, a look Dan was getting familiar with. At last he gave a combined shrug and nod. “You do.”

  He got on the Pritac and passed that Dae Jon was reporting loss of power and Chung Nam was heading to assist. McCain rogered and asked if they needed help. Dan glanced at Yu, but the skipper gave him no clue. Dan said, “Mike Romeo, this is TAG coordinator: guess that’s up to you. Over.”

  “Mike Romeo out.”

  They were coming around. He got in the hood again and switched the display to relative bearings. They weren’t dead on Dae Jon, but they didn’t want to be. At sea, the surest way never to get where you wanted to go was to aim right at it. He thought he saw the other contact moving downwind too. Engine trouble, that’d make sense.

  He just hoped she had enough power left to keep bow to sea.

  SHE emerged from the flying spray and heaving sea like a gull from a storm-cloud. Just a sketch at first. Then solidifying into the intimately known shape of a Gearing-class destroyer. He stared across from his crouch behind the splinter shield, keeping low to avoid the worst of the spray, deafened by the apocalyptic roar of the vortex. Watching her plunge and roll with a terrifying sense of dejavu. The wind tore at his hair and buffeted in his ears. It was impossible to breathe when he faced it, an effect he’d never understood. You’d think it’d be hard to breathe out, not in, with the wind ramming itself into your teeth, but somehow you couldn’t do either, just sort of suck vacuum.

  This was what Reynolds Ryan had looked like in the Arctic, all those years ago. He hoped Dae Jon, ex-USS New, met a kinder fate. The two closed slowly, both pitching heavily head to sea, the frigate on a gradually converging course.

  Yu came out, shielding his binoculars with his arm, and stared across. Dan made out a figure on the bridge opposite, in khakis. It started semaphoring, using its arms, no flags. Yu signaled back. The other figure kept sending. Yu gave him an acknowledgment and crouched to join Dan, who was tremendously impressed. He doubted one in a hundred U.S. naval officers could do semaphore. Fewer and fewer even knew Morse.

  “He is still losing engine,” Yu hollered.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “He doesn’t know. Just losing power.”

  He yelled, “How are your people doing with the leak forward?”

  “It is down to ten liters a minute.”

  “The pumps can handle that.”

  Yu didn’t respond, because just then a truly massive swell drove at them out of the fog and spray. No time to shift the rudder, though Dan had sensed the helmsman trying to judge the wave-periods. Putting the stem to each sea as it came, then swinging right to make up on the other destroyer. It was tricky and you couldn’t do it every time.

  It hit Chung Nam, blitzed down her forecastle, then hit Dae Jon. The older can’s narrow prow went under. The breaking sea flooded all the way up to the 01 level, nearly submerging her boxy old-fashioned 5738 mount, and shoved her round bodily, till she was nearly bow on to the flagship.

  She came back slowly, too slowly, to face the next. Dan saw she was just barely maintaining head to sea. Any fewer revolutions and she’d broach, as Chung Nam had for one or two seas. But if she didn’t have reserve power, the old can couldn’t recover. She dipped again, and this time he made out a black thread drawn down into the water from the far hawsehole. Her CO had deployed his anchor. It would never approach bottom, but its drag would help keep her head to the seas.

  “I can think of nothing to help,” Yu shouted, one hand clamping his cap to his head. “Can you?”

  Dan yelled, “I dumped oil once.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was in the Red Sea. A passenger ferry. I had a passing merchant dump lube oil upwind.”

  Yu cocked his head. Dan thought of adding, but didn’t, that though the seas had been heavy, it hadn’t been in a typhoon. Looking at how Dae Jon was pitching, he didn’t think oil would make all that much difference here. “That was in typhoon?” the Korean yelled, paralleling his thought process.

  “No. It wasn’t in seas like this. And I don’t know if we could fight our way upwind of her, either.”

  “If she broaches, she will capsize.”

  “Most likely.”

  “The crew will be trapped.”

  Dan tried to think of something more they could do. He couldn’t come up with anything. If she capsized or went down, it would be impossible to lower boats in seas like this. In the end, the men on the ship opposite might as well be in another dimension. All they could offer was companionship amid the storm.

  They stared across the boiling sea, and the man across from them gazed back.

  THEY stayed in company until dark. Yu went in, but Dan stayed out, soaked through, but unwilling to go below. If you could put aside terror, the stormy sea was sublime. The voice of the whirlwind hypnotized the heart.

  Just as the running lights snapped on, McCain emerged from the spray and mist as if procreated from them and took station half a mile on the other quarter of the laboring destroyer. As dark fell Yu sheered off, opening the distance to her imperiled sister. Dan lingered till he could make out only distant mist-haloed sparks, blotted out each time a comber roared past.


  He went below reluctantly. Stripped his sodden clothes off and found dry skivvies. Then wrapped his arm around the frame again and lay curled tensely, shoes wedged where his feet would find them even if the lights failed. He kept trying to think of something they could do. But there was nothing.

  That was his last conscious thought.

  12

  THE phone was buzzing. He dredged himself up from confused dreams and groped. Jammed his finger into something sharp. “Fuck… Captain,” he said. Then cleared his throat and corrected himself. He wasn’t in command anymore. Just a foreign passenger, an alien body, a bacillus… “Uh, Lenson here.”

  “Commander?”

  “Here. Yeah.” His sea-tuned unconscious had registered that the surge and buck had eased, the wind no longer wailed to the crash of breaking seas. But his other hand, the one not on the phone, was still locked into the bar above the bunk.

  It was Hwang. “The commodore was wondering where you were.”

  “Well, where’s he?”

  The chief of staff told him the bridge. He said he’d be right up. His watch, to his horror and shame, said 0912. He shaved quickly, brushed scum off his teeth, and climbed topside.

  Light flooded the pilothouse. Every crumb of debris and evidence of struggle had been swept up, swabbed down, buffed away. The ship’s bell shone with fresh polish. Circular gleams showed where the tile had been waxed, and he caught the bite of lemon oil and window cleaner. No one spoke. The only sound was the subdued moan of the servos as the helmsman corrected a degree this way, two degrees that. Past the polished Plexiglas the sun sparkled off five- to six-foot waves. He checked the gyrocompass and oriented himself. They were headed northeast again.

  Jung was studying a clipboard in his elevated chair. Dan checked the chart. He went out on both wings and looked around. Dipped his face into the radarscope. One contact, ten miles at 120 degrees true, no indication who it was. Back in the picture, or so he hoped, he went up and saluted. ”An neong ha se yo, jeon daejang nim.”

  Jung returned the salute deadpan. ”An neong ha se yo, Mr. Lenson.”

  Literally the phrase meant “hope you had pleasant dreams,” but it was used for “good morning.” He waited for the commodore to open, which he did with “Weather’s better today.”

  “Yes sir. Typhoon still tracking north?”

  “I’ll let Pyongyang worry about it,” Jung cracked. “It passed thirty-eight degrees north about 0500.”

  ”Dae Jon?”

  “Proceeding to Chinhae for repairs. She’s only making ten knots, boiler trouble, but she’s in no danger of sinking. We’ll need to remove her from the order of exercise. And rewrite the schedule of events to reflect losing two days.”

  “Yes sir. I’ll get on it. So you’re resuming the SATYRE?”

  “Well—we have another typhoon.”

  He did a double take. ”Another typhoon? Are you serious?”

  Jung flourished the clipboard. “Nowhere near impending, but it’s spinning up down there. Callista.”

  “Jesus.”

  “My choices are to stay out here, or head into P’ohang. Or, I guess, just back to Pusan, and scrub the rest of the exercise.” He studied the wavetops. “I thought I’d get your input before I make that decision.”

  Dan rubbed his face. “Well, sir—the most important part of the SATYRE’s the free play. That’s where we find out which tactics work and which don’t. And it’s unlikely we’d get two storms in a row tracking up the same coast. Isn’t it?”

  “So you’d like to continue?”

  “If you feel it’s at all possible. Yes sir.”

  Jung tapped the clipboard on the coaming. “Let me think about it. Meanwhile, draft a restart message. Resume with event 0023 this afternoon. If we can achieve the geometry for a re-startex by then.”

  “Aye sir,” Dan said. “Anything from COMDESRON 15?”

  “I had a conversation with Commodore Leakham an hour ago. He’ll conform to my decision.”

  “And the subs?”

  “Also checked in. Commander Hwang has their posits on his plot. For your geometry. He asked if they had any damage to report. They said not.” Jung looked out at the sea while Dan waited. Took off his PhotoGrays and rubbed them with a bit of lens paper from his shirt pocket. Then handed the used tissue to Dan. He hunted around for a wastebasket, slightly taken aback. The boatswain took it out of his hand without a word.

  HE was in CIC with Hwang and Henrickson working away at the restart message when O’Quinn came in. The front of his T-shirt was smudged with black grease. So was his forehead. “What’s going on, Joe?” Dan asked him.

  “Trying to get those stabilizers back on the line.”

  “Oh, you know stabilizers?”

  “I know hydraulics. Was a chief engineer once. Don’t worry. The crew’s doing all the real work.”

  Dan frowned. “I didn’t mean that. I meant—”

  “Forget it, okay? I’m just helping them a little bit on where to put the chain hoists. To bend the splines back into true. Or close as we’re gonna get, outside the yard.”

  “I was going to go down and check out the hull penetration.”

  “Don’t bother. It’s under control.” O’Quinn looked away. “How’s the gut doing?”

  “I quit eating,” Dan said.

  “How long you gonna be able to keep that up?”

  He made a production of his shrug.

  JUNG called him back to the bridge at 1130. He was still in his chair, looked as if he hadn’t moved. His steward was clearing his tray. Hwang stood beside him, hands behind his back, rocking on his heels. The chief of staff looked grave. He had a bandage on his cheek.

  The commodore waved another clipboard at him. “From CIN-CROKFLT. A Japanese air patrol’s reporting a hot datum off Honshu.”

  “A hot datum. An intruder?”

  “An unidentified submarine.”

  Jung swung down. “Let’s get this on a geo plot,” he said to Hwang. He glanced at the enlisted, whose attention seemed to be wholly on their jobs. To Dan he said, “Let’s go out on the wing.”

  The wind was light and fresh, scrubbed by the storm. An occasional whiff of stack gas varied it. Dan took off his cap and let the sun iron his scalp. It felt good after days of overcast. The stocky Korean propped himself against the splinter shield. “Whatever it is, did you notice the course—no, you didn’t, it’s in Korean. Well. The unknown is roughly off the Northern Limiting Line and six hundred kilometers east.”

  Dan located this as on the Tokyo side of the Sea of Japan—then corrected himself: of the Eastern Sea. “Japanese territorial waters?”

  “Not exactly, but it’s within this new ‘economic exclusion zone’ they declared.”

  “You have a fisheries protection zone.”

  “Not the same thing at all,” Jung said.

  He started to ask the difference, but decided it wasn’t worth the breath. “What about the course?”

  Hwang came out with the chart. He folded down the little worktable on the wing and spread it out. He tapped the kite-symbol of the datum and ran his finger along the extended track. “Heading southwest,” he said. They regarded it.

  “What else?”

  Hwang lifted his eyebrows. “That is about it, Dan. Unidentified submarine contact. Tracking on course two-three-zero true when detected. Speed ten knots.”

  “Initial detection by radar?”

  “It says only, initial detection was by a Japanese SDF patrol aircraft.”

  “Then radar, most likely,” Dan said. “Which means it was snorkel-ing when detected. Which at ten knots means a fairly large craft. A thousand tons or better.”

  The commodore looked thoughtful as Hwang walked dividers along the track. “If it holds that course, and the Japanese do not succeed in forcing it to surface, it will exit their exclusion zone at thirteen hundred,” the chief of staff murmured.

  “And enter ours when?” Jung asked.

  Hwang explained, seem
ing uncomfortable, “The fisheries resources protection runs from a point on the Thirty-eighth Parallel at a longitude of one hundred thirty-two degrees fifty minutes east, past Tokto, down to Tsushima Island. So it looks to me like it could remain outside that zone all the way to the Strait. If, indeed, it is headed for the Korea Strait.”

  Dan said, “But it’s international waters.”

  Any unidentified submarine in international waters was to a certain extent fair game. They couldn’t attack it, but according to international convention they could track it, request it to identify itself, even harass it to some degree, though not to the extent of placing it in hazard.

  “Yes, you are right. Very good. I will think out loud here a little,” Hwang said. “It is not American; it would identify itself. Therefore it is either Chinese, or from the DPRK. The Chinese fired the missile over Japan. I believe this could be another provocation by the Chinese.”

  “That’s the most likely explanation,” the commodore said. “Not necessarily that it’s a provocation—submarines have rights of peaceful transit. But that it is Chinese. Nonetheless—”

  “Nonetheless, it might be DPRK,” Hwang finished.

  “Like the Sang-o off Sokch’o,” Dan put in.

  They both looked at him. “It might be,” the tall Korean said mildly. “They also dispose of other types. As you know. Many minisub-marines… but I do not really think anyone would put one of them so far out to sea as this.”

  Dan wasn’t so sure. Judging by the the way they scuttled their own subs and shot each other to avoid capture, he wouldn’t put venturing that far offshore past the North Korean Special Forces. “These are the Yugos you’re talking about? The minisubmarines?”

  “I’ve heard them called that,” Jung said, “but I don’t think there’s a Yugoslav connection. The North has about fifteen. They use them for penetrations and covert ops, along the coast.”

  Hwang said, “They have twenty-plus Romeos and a few Whiskeys. Either of those could be capable of operations that far out at sea. If it is the Northerners, I believe it would be one of these types.”

  “Whiskeys” were fairly large submarines, as diesel-electrics went; they were a Russian design about twice the displacement of a World War II U-boat. About equivalent to the Tangs and Barbels, the few U.S. diesels that had been lingering in the twilight of their service lives when Dan had joined the fleet. Romeos were a bit larger, a bit quieter, an improved design; both the Chinese and North Koreans had built copies. He said, “That’d make more sense. Again, based on the transit speed at detection.”