by David Poyer
Jung said, “Either of you see a reason why we shouldn’t edge over there and see if we can pick it up?”
Dan said, taken aback, “Well, sir—I thought we were going to try to resume where we left off in the exercise. Proceed to the free-play phase.”
“Can we free-play with an unidentified contact?”
Dan stood fidgeting, unsure how to answer. From the technical point of view, his response should be a flat no. They wouldn’t know signal strength, or target geometry. They wouldn’t have a 19 aboard their submerged quarry to pinpoint and record its location minute to minute. They wouldn’t know its plans to evade, its attack tactics, or really anything else from its point of view.
True, in a general sense the best training was against a real opponent. But they weren’t out here just to train. According to Owens, he was actually evaluating the ROKN’s readiness for war.
In the end he decided the only truthful response was, “No, sir, we can’t. Not and fulfill the data-gathering requirements for a solid quantitative analysis.”
The commodore considered, not looking happy. Finally he said, “It’s a real-world submarine. Possibly an intruder.”
“I understand that, sir. It doesn’t change what I just told you. And we don’t know it’s an intruder. What the Japanese passed us was only his course on detection. He could be headed back to China now. Or even Russia—their Pacific Fleet’s starting to revive a little.”
“Let’s do a message.”
Hwang whipped out his notebook and prepared to copy. Jung went on, “To Fifth Flotilla, info First Fleet, CINCROKFLT, COMNAV-FORKOREA, and whoever you think needs to know—”
“Seventh Fleet, COMPACFLT. TAG as well,” Dan put in.
“Of course. Propose we steam to intercept. Meanwhile we will move the comex of our first event thirty miles to the east. That will place us within two to three hours of the extended course of this contact.” To Dan he added, “I know the SATYRE is a valuable exercise, but it is still only an exercise. If Seoul orders me to intercept, I’ll have to obey. I’ll try to position us so either option is possible.”
Dan said reluctantly, “I guess I can’t argue with that, Commodore.”
Jung smiled, but it was a strange expression. He brushed at his lips as if ashamed of it, then made a shooing motion. The chief of staff bowed instantly and left. When he was gone the commodore said, “What is your agenda here, Mr. Lenson? Why is completing this exercise, getting your precious data, so very important to you?”
“I don’t have an agenda, Commodore. It’s just my assignment. That’s all.”
“But you seem so exceptionally—determined. No matter what. Typhoons. Mechanical failures. Putting up with our Korean food—”
“Your meals are delicious—”
“Embarrassments—such as your subordinate getting it on at the memorial ceremony. Oh, yes, I heard about what you said to the security officer. Very clever. But it makes me wonder, why? What is driving you so hard?”
Dan stuck his hands in his back pockets. Time to prevaricate for the Cause. “It’s my job, sir, as I said. And I’m a stubborn guy.”
“Obviously it’s brought you far. So many decorations. Such a distinguished career.” Dan couldn’t tell if there was sarcasm there or not. So he didn’t answer that one. After a moment Jung added, “And you’re bending your efforts now to developing shallow-water tactics against diesel-electric submarines?”
“That’s what TAG wants me to do. Sir.”
“Hostile submarines? Or only friendly ones?”
When he didn’t answer Jung went on. “Do you see why I ask?”
Dan said doggedly, “There’re just too many ifs in your argument, Commodore. If we knew for sure it was headed our way—if we knew for sure it was Chinese or North Korean—then I’d say you had a point. Till then, as far as I can see, our mandate’s to continue with the SATYRE. As close to the way it was originally planned as we can.”
Jung looked toward the horizon. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. A thin stream of smoke unreeled on the wind. He didn’t say anything more. And after a while, realizing he wouldn’t, Dan bowed and left him.
. . .
HE was in CIC when a warning rumble sounded, so loud Henrickson looked over from the sonar console. “What the hell was that?”
“Uh—gangway,” Dan said, lurching to his feet. Clinching desperately to hold in a sudden overwhelming spasm, he broken-fielded it for the little closet one deck down. He just made it when the world exploded.
An hour later, after repeated attempts to leave followed by decisions he’d better not, he reeled out and stacked himself against a bulkhead. He mopped his forehead with the last sheet from the last roll in the stall. It had been close. From not being able to shit at all, to not being able to stop. He felt like a fired cartridge. His gut still cramped though there was nothing more to expel. He made it to his stateroom, chased out the steward, who was cleaning the sink, and rolled onto the bunk.
Cradling his stomach, he tried not to groan.
HE spent the rest of the day in his bunk, in the head, or in rapid transit between the former and the latter. Toward late afternoon a double dose of Henrickson’s Imodium locked the gates at last. He couldn’t face dinner, though. An orange pop was all he could stomach.
Well after dark he ventured out, still shaky, to find no one he knew on the bridge. The chief in CIC avoided his eyes. But there was O’Quinn, unshaven, hunched morosely over a mug of coffee and smoking the free Korean cigarettes. Dan nodded warily. “Joe.”
“Commander. Feelin’ any better?”
“Some, I guess.”
“See why I stick to food I bring with me?”
Dan didn’t point out that he had to eat with the commodore, that part of the job here was to cement relationships with the host navy. If they could do that, everything else—data gathering, sharing tactical insights, accepting corrections and new initiatives when they were developed—got easier. But O’Quinn just didn’t accept alternate points of view. So be it; he’d ask for someone else for his next team deployment. A wave of weakness hit, and he suddenly had to either sit or fall. He slid his chafed butt onto a stool and blotted cold sweat off his forehead.
“You look punk, Commander.”
“I’ll be all right. What’s going on? Get the planes fixed?”
“They’re back on line. Can’t you tell? Noisier now, but they should work.”
“Great. What happened? What’d we hit, anyway?”
“The hole’s a perfect triangle. They’ve got a concrete patch on it. Should be good till we make port again. Only thing I can figure is the corner of a floating container. The planes were trying to correct for the impact when one of those big breakers hit from the other side. Bent the shafts, popped the splines, but the breakers blew before anything got really tore up.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. How about the exercise?”
They spent the next few minutes going over the status of play. The transmission runs were over. A limited event was going on with Chang Bo Go. O’Quinn said he’d told Carpenter, over on Dae Jon, to run a systems test on his 19, make sure everything was good to go after taking so much spray and rain during the storm.
“Did we check ours?”
“Soon as the rain stopped.”
“Good. Good.”
O’Quinn’s glance licked across his. “You don’t expect too fucking much from me, do you, Lenson?”
“I expect the same effort I look for from the other folks on the team, Joe. But you don’t make yourself the easiest guy in the world to work with.”
“Would there be a point? A promotion, maybe?” He snickered. “I can just see it. Joseph Regale O’Quinn, head of tactics development at TAG. Head of personnel. Or maybe—how about—how about, accident prevention.”
“Lay off it, Joe.”
“Fuck it.” O’Quinn wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and lit another free smoke. “Fuck it. Fuck it up, fuck it down, fuck it all
, all around…. Okay, what’s next?”
Dan asked if he’d heard anything more about the Japanese contact. O’Quinn reached for a clipboard. “Yeah, we got something on that. I plotted it. Here it is. The Japs are prosecuting. Holding it down. Got a destroyer out there, but it’s mostly sonobuoy tracking by air, and some location data from this SOSUS network they’ve got in the Sea of Japan.”
SOSUS was shorthand for undersea surveillance, arrays of fixed listening hydrophones and a shore-based computer to process their outputs into usable data. Dan went through the traffic, looking at O’Quinn’s plot from time to time. “There’s two of ‘em out there,” he said after a couple of minutes.
“That’s what I thought too. Looking at it close.”
Though the Japanese didn’t say it in so many words, the location data jumped about so much there had to be two contacts, not one. It even appeared that at one point, one had popped up its snorkel to draw off a plane that was getting too aggressive on the other.
He frowned. Two submarines, apparently running in company. And though the reported courses varied—it looked like they were trying to evade their trackers—the overall course made good still looked generally southwest.
“They don’t say whose they are. Or what class. Not in these messages.”
“Right, just ‘unidentified submarine.’ And you know why,” O’Quinn said.
“Why?”
“Because if they identify them, they have to do something about them. Call somebody down. And the fucking Japs just don’t want to stick their dicks into that shithole.”
Dan swallowed. His stomach, already tenuous, didn’t care for that image. Nor for the stale smoke and old whiskey smell O’Quinn was putting out. He switched to a small-scale chart and tried to puzzle out where their trespassers could be headed. Once past Tsushima and the Strait, they’d be in the East China Sea. From there, he guessed, Tsingtao or Shanghai if they were Chinese; the fleet bases there. If they were North Korean, he had no idea where they were headed. Perhaps to the same ports—they were Beijing’s clients, after all. If they were Russian, he guessed they’d make a hard port turn, through the Nansei Shoto and out into the Pacific.
“Hey, and you watch,” the older man added. “Once they leave that exclusion zone of theirs, the Nips will drop them. No hot pursuit for them.”
Dan’s gut knotted painfully. He had only minutes before the white bus would leave again. “What’s your call? On nationality?”
“I figure they’re Russkis. Probably Kilos. Headed down past Taiwan on their way to a little R&R in Vietnam.”
“Oh yeah?” Dan looked at the plot with new interest. Kilos were old friends. Old enemies, actually. Running into a couple might yield useful data. “Let’s go in the sonar shack.”
They got down the classified references and read up on the Whiskey, Romeo, and Kilo classes. The sonarmen played comparison tapes as they all listened, noting the characteristic tonals both snorkeling and running silent, electric motors only, on the battery.
But then his gut twisted again, and he had more pressing things to think about. Such as whether he could get to the can before he wiped out another set of shorts.
HE was in there when someone knocked on the door. “Occupied,” he yelled.
They knocked again. “I’m fucking in here,” he shouted.
“Is that Commander Lenson?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s Hwang Min Su, Dan. Just thought I’d let you know. We got a reply to the commodore’s message asking for direction. COMROK-FLT orders him to steam to intercept the contacts off Honshu. Try to pick up from the Japanese. If they continue toward the Strait. And if the Japanese have not lost them by then.”
“Oh yeah?” A disappointment, but not unexpected. After the storm, the Japanese and Australian withdrawals, all the other problems, it was finally time to write SATYRE 17 off. He’d done all he could. Washington would just have to make its decision without his input. His disappointment was suddenly eclipsed by the sensation a sea anemone must feel when a little Greek boy pries it off its rock and sucks its guts out.
“Dan? Are you all right in there?”
He grunted through the closed door, “Yeah. So—the exercise is off.”
“Well, officially just suspended. For forty-eight hours.”
“Okay. Thanks for telling me.” He raised his voice. “Oh—what’s Leakham doing?”
“The U.S. contingent will stay in the op area. Do one-on-ones with San Francisco.”
“Okay. So the plan is, we head on out and intercept these guy’s extended track—”
“No. We will force them to surface and identify before they cross into our protection zone.”
“The idea being…”
A pause before the reply. “To demonstrate we have control of our waters.”
“Got it,” Dan said. Seoul was playing the same games Washington did. Jerking the forces this way and that, cracking the whip. Not too concerned with what that meant to the guys out at the tip. He just hoped it didn’t leave them out here for another typhoon. Callista, this time. Brendan had been about all he cared to take.
“Anything I can do for you? Heard you were feeling below the weather.”
“Under the weather.”
“What?”
”Under the weather,” he shouted through the closed door as another spasm started. Tin/me,. I’m just taking a fucking shit, okay?”
HE was back in his cabin, lying exhausted, when someone tapped on his door, then let himself in. It was a grinning little man who explained in broken English that he was “doctor.” Dan figured him for a corpsman, but went through a point-and-grimace charade that ended with the guy motioning him to get out of bed and pull down his pants. The diagnosis seemed to consist mostly in the guy’s smelling his butt, but at least he was up anyway when another paroxysm hit.
The door to the head didn’t open to his frantic jerk. Someone was in there. He hammered frantically on it. “Fuck. Fuck,” he muttered, to the compassionate gaze of the corpsman, who had come into the passageway after him and who stood now stroking his chin and tsk-ing sadly. Then he turned and left. The door cracked and Dan practically knocked the sailor inside down, getting past him. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
When he came out, though, the little guy was back, waiting in his stateroom with a packet of white powder. No writing on it. Just a brown packet. He pointed to Dan’s sink and mimed turning the faucet, mixing it into a glass, drinking it down. Dan nodded. When the “doctor” left he sniffed the powder. Then shuddered, and poured it down the sink.
HE was on a train trying to sell Colin Powell a piece of veal for $6.98. The train was vibrating, about to go off the tracks. Powell kept insisting a four-star general should get his meat for less.
Then someone was shaking him. He threw his arm out, over his eyes. “The fuck.”
“Hey. Dan?”
It was Henrickson. O’Quinn stood behind him in the passageway. Dan sat up, sensing how weak he was. Feeling, and hearing, the vibration all around him. Chung Nam was on turbines, and the sick floating feeling was her cutting through heavy seas on the stabilizers. He pulled an arm across his face, feeling grit at the corners of his mouth and eyes, hearing stubble rasp like a wire brush on rust. What he couldn’t figure out was, why had Powell wanted the veal at all? “The fuck’s going on?” he grunted.
“Got a little problem,” O’Quinn drawled.
“What is it? A fire?”
“Not exactly,” Henrickson said. “What it is, we’ve got to pack up to crossdeck.”
“Crossdeck.” He struggled to sit up. He must have a fever. Things were swimming, he felt chills. “You mean—offload?” The frigate leaned farther, and from down the passageway came a shout of excited Korean.
“Leakham says since the exercise is terminated they’re detaching.”
He played for time, trying to get his head in gear. But his transmission kept slipping and all he could do was repeat the last word he heard. “But—
detaching?”
“Correct. Pulling out of the exercise. Whatever’s left of it.”
“Shit.”
“Anyway, he’s sending a chopper. Wants us packed and on deck an hour from now.”
”Leakham wants us off?” Dan frowned.
Henrickson said patiently, “That’s right. Chopper’ll be here in an hour.”
O’Quinn put in, “Oh—and there’s now three probsubs headed our way.”
The terminology was a little archaic, but Dan understood it. “Prob-sub” was “probable hostile submarine,” the highest classification of contact unless someone had actually seen a periscope. ’Three?”
“They’re not sure, that’s fixed-array sound-channel data. Passed by the Japanese.”
Dan swung his feet to the deck and felt for his shoes. “Uh—here’s what’s wrong with that scenario. We don’t take our direction from Harry Blowhard Leakham. Whatever the… whatever he thinks. In fact, whatever orders I get from that quarter, I’m going to do the exact opposite.”
O’Quinn smiled darkly; Henrickson blinked. “Uh, my understanding, Dan, the SATYRE’s been called off. Real-world operations. No point in us staying around.”
“Jung put it on hold for forty-eight. Not shut it down.”
“Well, technically you’re right. But the Australians pulled out, the Japanese are gone, the U.S. squadron’s on its way over the horizon, and the Koreans are steaming away from the op area at twenty-five knots. So you could argue pretty conclusively SATYRE 17 is in fact dead.”
Dan was out of his bunk by now and trying to stuff his legs into his trou. They kept getting tangled up. Finally he realized he had one shoe on. That was why it was so hard to get his foot through the pants leg. He kicked it off savagely. “Uh, technically, Monty, if the South Korean Navy’s on its way to intercept, force to the surface, and identify three unidentified submarines, most likely Russian Kilos, don’t you think the U.S. Navy Tactical Analysis Group would like us to observe the action?”
