Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  That was ASW; a game of slow hours and very fast seconds.

  Henrickson pulled his sleeve. Dan turned, and got involved in a discussion of what the latest bathythermograph readings meant. The ship vibrated around them. In some corner of his mind he wondered what their fuel status was getting to be. They had to be burning a lot, running on the turbines for so many hours. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, though, so he refocused his attention on the sound speed profile.

  FOR the next two hours Chung Nam and Kim Chon executed a coordinated intercept search around the point where they’d destroyed the sub, gradually moving the pattern southwest at the estimated sustained speed of Romeos on battery. The sonarmen reported only the amplified hiss-howl of the hollow sea. The remaining submarines had dissolved into it. They were still there somewhere, but passive conditions were too mushy and active ranges too short to comb them out of the vacant meaningless crackle, the furious emptiness of noise without signal.

  Dan was pulling at his lip, pondering, when he saw Jung beckoning from the door. When he joined him the commodore led the way out into the ladderway. Gray vitiated light bled down from the half-open door at the top. Startled, he realized it was day again. “Yes, sir?”

  “Seoul’s informed us our contacts are North Korean.”

  “North Korean? Uh, sir, I don’t think so—”

  “I know. I thought they were Chinese too.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible. The North doesn’t have wake homers, far as we know.”

  “If those were advanced torpedoes, the Chinese must have furnished them. But this is from intelligence. Very high confidence level, they say.”

  Which could mean anything, including a spy carrying Kim Jong H’s golf bag in Pyongyang. Dan pursed his lips, debating whether to accept it. He didn’t really want to. He had no love for the Chinese. And whatever was going on, they were involved somehow. That was a given in this part of the world. But at last he nodded. “If they’re sure. So it’s the North. The offensive. At last.”

  ”Or part of the offensive.” Jung patted his breast pocket. “Also. The Chinese have issued a warning to the Japanese. They are not to interfere in the Eastern Sea.”

  Dan registered both pieces of information. Then multiplied them against each other. The product was appalling. “What do you mean, part of an offensive? There are other forces involved? And the Chinese are protecting them?”

  “There’s a surface amphibious group heading down the west coast. They used Brendan for cover from satellites and air reconnaissance.”

  He steadied his voice. No matter how bad the news, he had to stay with the facts. Just as Jung was doing. “Intel says they’re North Korean too?”

  “Correct. Right now we don’t know their intended landing point. It’s unfortunate most of our maritime patrol aircraft were on the east coast for this exercise.”

  Dan nodded, feeling unreal. It was what they’d all waited for for so long. Only the bad guys weren’t coming over the DMZ, as everyone had expected for decades. The Germans hadn’t come through the Maginot Line, either. Pyongyang was doing an end run.

  But they didn’t have that much amphibious shipping. From what he understood of their force levels, not even a division lift. Which wouldn’t make much impact, no matter where it came ashore, not against ROK and U.S. air strikes, and behind that the combined armies.

  So what was going on? It didn’t make sense. Just as the phalanx of steadily advancing submarines had made no tactical sense.

  ”Mok Po reports she’s still afloat,” the commodore added. “They are very good people over there. I always was impressed on my inspections. She has a generator back. Captain Min sent down a diver. He reports the blades of both screws are blown away, though the shafts seem to be intact. She’s even under way again. At three knots, under tow by her whaleboat.”

  “That’s clever. The whaleboat, I mean.”

  “We Koreans are at our best in adversity. I told him to head for Ul-lungdo for now. If his after bulkhead suddenly gives way, the fishermen there can pick his men up.”

  Dan nodded. “Casualties?”

  “A few. Yes.”

  He glanced at Jung, but apparently that was all he was going to say on the subject.

  “So what’s the idea?” Dan asked him. “These intruders, these Romeos are North Korean with Chinese torpedoes—fine, if Seoul says it’s confirmed, I’ll buy it. But this isn’t falling into place for me as a cohesive operational picture. Where are they headed? What’s their piece of this? Why did they attack—no, one of them attacked—then the others go into evasive mode, deep, quiet, gone? That’s what doesn’t jell here. If they’d done a coordinated attack they could really have screwed us up. With the advantage of surprise, like that.”

  “I hoped your people could tell me. Your skilled analysts. Your PhD’s.”

  Dan sucked air through his teeth. “Well—we’ll try to come up with something. Sir. But right now, I’m in the dark too. This just isn’t how subs deploy, or operate.”

  “The Northerners seldom do anything the way the rest of the world does,” Jung observed. “That’s what they call juche.”

  “I thought juche meant ‘independence.’”

  “Only to an American.”

  Jung smiled. Dan hoped it was a joke. “Okay, so—what are your orders? I assume those were orders you got?”

  “Correct. From CINCROKFLT. From now on we are to destroy all unidentified submarine contacts without warning.”

  Dan wondered if that mandate had been approved by General Harlen at CFC, whether U.S. Forces Korea was at Defcon One too, whether this was an ROK-only crisis or a combined-forces one. And whether the De Bari administration was standing behind its ally in what looked like the opening moves of a major war. At stake would be whether events were ramping up to an ROK-only fight, in which no ROK forces would come Opcon to CFC, or a combined fight, in which they all would.

  But maybe he didn’t want to hear the answer. It wouldn’t make any difference to him or the other TAG riders, anyway.

  The TAG riders… With a sense of falling he realized now what he’d dragged them into. Seventh Fleet had seen it coming. They’d directed them to get off Korean decks and out of the Eastern Sea. Leakham had tried to extract them.

  But had Dan Lenson cooperated? Obeyed a perfectly rational order? Had he let his men leave an incipient war zone?

  No. He remembered the radio conversation now with dismay. He’d done the opposite. Encouraged them to stay. Led them, by his own stubborn, self-righteous example, into the middle of a battle they had no business being in.

  And they weren’t even military, most of them. Civilians or retired, except for Oberg, who he suspected was a special ops type of some kind. He closed his eyes, feeling condemned. “Shoot on sight, then,” he muttered.

  “Those are our orders.” Jung felt in his other pocket, got the holder out, and dropped it. One of the sailors was on the deck instantly, groping, holding it up. Jung fitted a cigarette to it without even looking at the kid. He leaned against the ladder and held the inhaled smoke longer than any human being should, squinting as if the light scorched his lids. Dan saw how worn-out he was. But if there was going to be a running fight, it could last for days. They’d all end up a lot more exhausted than this. If not dead.

  He looked away from that very real possibility. “We need assets out here, Commodore. Romeos have to charge one in six, at least. We’ve got to have the hulls to give us radar coverage when they come up.”

  “There were no plans for action this far south. Mesan and Cheju are on their way to us out of Donghae. They will join in about”—the commodore squinted into his watch—”seven hours. Fleet at first thought they could assign me all of Squadron 11. But Seoul ordered them to keep the rest of the Eastern Fleet off the DMZ. For defensive operations, in case there is a second amphibious strike group.

  “We should have maritime patrol air assets out of Chinhae, though. Whatever they give me, I wil
l take tactical command and form an ASW strike group.”

  “Sounds like a plan. When’s the air coming available?”

  “That is on its way.”

  “And this second storm? ‘Callista’?”

  “We won’t start to see increased winds for another twenty-four hours.”

  Dan thought it through as Jung smoked. Then cleared his throat. “Here’s my recommendation, if you want it. I know you’ve probably already gotten started on most of it.”

  “I’d like to hear your ideas.”

  He took a deep breath. “First off, when your air assets report in, let them do the bulk of the radar flooding. Stand your gray-hulls off to the west, between this group and the coast. To kind of shepherd them away from it: if they get into shallow water, they’ll be ten times harder to pick up.” Jung nodded slightly, and Dan went on. “We’ve got what, two hundred miles till the Strait? Crank up to twenty-five knots and head south. Set up a fuel rendezvous. Get a tanker out there to get everybody topped off. Request resupply on your torpedos and sonobuoys. Get helo detachments out here, as many as you can find decks for. Then set up another barrier around thirty-six north.”

  But even as he spoke Dan became aware of a gap in his logic, a doughnut hole in what he was suggesting. They still didn’t know where this group was heading, or what its tasking was.

  There was only so much three diesel boats could do. The only plausible mission he could come up with for them in the Strait area was to interdict U.S. reinforcements coming into Pusan. But if that was the plan, the intruders wouldn’t be in company, and they wouldn’t have angled so far out to the east, all the way to Japanese waters, before zigging back toward land. They’d have slipped down the east coast one by one, hiding by day, snorkeling by night, and taken their positions silently and waited for the first MPS ship out of Guam to round Kyushu and heave over the horizon, wallowing-deep with vehicles and ammunition.

  “But what are these guys trying to do?” Jung said, blinking reddened lids up at the growing radiance at the top of the ladderwell. “That’s what’s got me short-circuited.”

  “Same here. But if we don’t know, we don’t know. The point of ASW operations isn’t to guess enemy intentions.”

  Actually, he thought, the point wasn’t really to destroy subs either, though you didn’t pass up the chance when you had it. It was to deny the enemy the use of them, to keep their heads down and so busy just surviving they couldn’t act offensively.

  If they could do that, and keep the southern ports open for the buildup and resupply, then no matter what the Communists did farther north, the Air Force would clobber the hell out of them on the way down the peninsula. Eventually they’d stop, be pushed back, and lose.

  But this was the typhoon season, and it looked like an active one. What effect would that have on air support? And the carriers, the Air Force bomber squadrons from Okinawa, the long-planned U.S. surge—was it on its way? The massive artillery barrage everyone had always expected to signal Der Tag hadn’t started. The tanks still hadn’t crossed the line. The op plans had been written around those assumptions, and the planning and programming and budgeting and acquisition and time-phased force deployments and logistic arrangements had too.

  But it wasn’t playing out that way, and he found that far more ominous and sinister. It meant the other side had a strategy, a weapon, or an advantage that the Good Guys didn’t know about; one the experts who’d gamed the Allied defense and counteroffensive didn’t even suspect.

  Jung climbed the ladder slowly, pulling himself up with muscular arms. Dan stayed at the bottom, relishing the steady cool current of relatively smoke-free air that streamed down it and at the same time worrying. He felt so fucking cut off out here. If he had just one comm channel that didn’t run through the Koreans, he could at least ask what was going on. He didn’t even have general news, to find out what the world reaction was. The Koreans, at least aboard Chung Nam, didn’t publish anything like the daily bulletin a U.S. ship put out to keep the crew abreast of headlines and sports scores. It was a self-contained world, the way it must have been in the Pacific in World War II.

  He looked up at the growing light, feeling alone. Feeling the sway and creak of the ship around him. A steel cocoon that protected him, but that for a couple of hours there had felt more like a magnet for torpedoes. He wondered howMofc Po’s crew was doing. Creeping toward an island haven while war crescendoed around them. He hoped their bulkheads held, hoped they made it. He’d been in their shoes.

  Now it was dawn, the break of another day that would probably confirm war had come again. War with a savage enemy who’d planned and armed and trained for decades. He didn’t feel ready. But probably not one of the hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides felt that way, not one of the thousands of sailors who must be putting to sea as news rippled across a stunned country. As the sirens wailed in Seoul, starting the evacuation.

  He kneaded the back of his neck and yawned so hugely that his jawbone felt dislocated when it snapped closed.

  Henrickson let himself out into the little enclosed space. “Dan? You okay?”

  He tried to push the fear away. Tried to sound as if he weren’t terrified. “Sure. Let’s go see if Yu’s boys are still honoring that coffee chit.”

  From the way Henrickson eyed him, he didn’t think he was going to make it as an actor.

  15

  HE sat behind the black curtain in Sonar, hands on knees and hunched like a supplicant. He felt so hollow that if someone dropped in a pea and shook him, he’d probably sound like a maraca. He stared at what O’Quinn had just plopped in front of him.

  “Go ahead, take it.”

  “No, thanks, Joe; you need it more than I do.”

  But it was something familiar, a touch of home. Sugar and peanuts and chocolate…

  “Brought a damn case of them,” the older man said. “Never tell what kind of crap they’re gonna dish up on these foreign deployments. Unbend a little, Commander. Have a Snickers.”

  Dan unwrapped it slowly, torn between hunger and nausea. Took a tentative bite, and chewed.

  Across the closet-sized space two sonarmen stared with absolute concentration at endless, similar, but never completely identical amber lines that slowly precessed from the bottom to the top of their screens. Dan liked their concentration. An enemy more dangerous than a shark lurked within that arcane glow. He hoped they saw it before a warhead triggered beneath the hull. A little electric fan bolted to the tape rack went wrow, wrow, wrow. Something electronic clicked knitting needles behind him. The console plate read “Signaal,” so it was part of the PHS-32 antisubmarine combat system. Dan wondered why they’d bought a Dutch sonar system. Then figured why not; Washington was weird about what it would or wouldn’t sell its allies. While losing absolutely no sleep over what its enemies bought, extorted, or simply stole.

  “So what’ve we got?” the older man prompted, lighting a cigarette.

  Dan pushed himself upright in his chair, trying to center through fatigue and sugar buzz. “Uh, we’re steaming southwest along the coast, thirty miles west of the attack group’s presumed centroid.”

  “Thirty miles. Hunting a convergence zone?”

  “Roger. This is where we figure the annulus ought to be. ROK MPA’s over the group, radar flooding.”

  MPA was maritime patrol air, aircraft with sonobuoys and magnetic anomaly-detection gear—equipment that read the local magnetic field, which would be distorted by the presence of a mass of steel, such as a submarine. “They’re armed, right?” O’Quinn asked.

  “Correct. Lightweight torps. Now, these bogeys have absolutely got to vent boat and recharge soon. I don’t know what they’re breathing down there; the way I plot their cycle, they’re way overdue.” He woke up his notebook and brought up his calculations.

  O’Quinn eyed the screen suspiciously. “I used a pencil and paper. Got the same answer.” He looked toward the plotting team. They didn’t seem to be doing much. “Well
, nobody ever said the Reds weren’t tough. Maybe their commissars just told ‘em to hold their breath. What’s Jung’s scheme? He got one?”

  “Refuel, rearm, pursue, and prosecute. Barrier ops in the Strait, backed up by whatever listening arrays they have on Tsushima. These guys are going to play hob with the reinforcement shipping if they get loose down in the East China Sea.”

  “They’re not headed for the China Sea,” O’Quinn said.

  “What? That’s where the heavy lift prepositioning has to come though. Equipment sets for two Marine brigades, heavy Army brigades—”

  “I’d bet not. Know why? ‘Cause they’ll figure the same way you just did. There’s no way they’re getting through the Strait, not with the defense the ROKs are gonna double-team down there. Maybe nukes could. Not diesels.”

  “Then where are they going?”

  “My guess, wherever they can screw us up the worst, laying mines. Remember Wonsan?”

  “Wonsan? No. What is it?”

  The older man blinked. His cheeks were mottled red. “Up on the east coast, where we tried to land in the last war. After Inchon. They mined it, big-time. Took the sweepers weeks to clear it out. And that was when we still had a minesweeping capability. That’s their game. Something sneaky like that. Not go through the Strait.”

  “I don’t get the impression expected loss rates carry a lot of weight in the North Korean decision-making process,” Dan told him. “If they can insert just one Romeo south of Tsushima, we’ll have to scrub out every square before the MPS ships enter it. That’ll take major forces. Slow our buildup. And maybe just lose us the war.”

  Dan explained what Hwang and Captain Owens had told him about the strategy for stopping an invasion. O’Quinn looked puzzled. “So what’s the problem? If the Air Force is going to attrit the hell out of them?”