Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  “She’s high in the administration. You’ll inform her of our situation—”

  “No, sir. I won’t.”

  Jung glared at him.

  “Sir, that’s not the appropriate channel for this pulse. The right one’s General Harlen, to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The ambassador, to the secretary of state. Or your president direct to ours. Not two guys on a float in the Eastern Sea, to the deputy undersecretary for manpower and personnel. Believe me, that’s not going to solve any of our problems.”

  “You will call your wife,” Jung said again.

  “No sir, I will not. But there’s someone else I can talk to. Who might actually do us some good.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Dan told him. Jung thought it over. Then after a moment, nodded a reluctant assent.

  HE was in CIC again. This time Jung sat opposite. The commodore looked alternately glowering and scared. Dan liked the glower better. Fortunately, he’d remembered the phone number. He didn’t know how the comm guys were making the connection. Probably HF to an international operator, in South Korea or Japan.

  This call probably wouldn’t do any good, and he was skipping at least four levels of command. But he couldn’t just do nothing. As it rang he flashed back to a rosewood-furnished space in the West Wing basement. A small watch staff whose job was to keep the president informed, to staff out his communications, and on occasion, to advise him on the management of a military crisis. A glass-windowed booth, looking out over it.

  “Situation Room. Director’s station.”

  You never used your name answering a phone there. Because you never knew whom you’d have to pass unpleasant news and unwelcome orders to. Generals and admirals had been known to shoot messengers. But he recognized this voice. It was a woman’s, cool, self-possessed, brisk. Captain Jennifer—never “Jenny”—Roald, USN. He’d worked with her once to stop a terrorist strike. He figured that might have earned him two or three minutes of her time.

  “Captain Roald?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Commander Dan Lenson. How are you, Jennifer?”

  “Lenson—oh, Dan. Where are you? I heard you went back to the fleet.”

  “I did. Or at least to TAG.”

  “The Tactical Analysis Group, Team Charlie. That’d be a good fit for you.”

  “Actually it’s Bravo. There’s no Team Charlie.”

  “There isn’t? Oh… that’s right. Well, it’s nice to hear from you, Dan. Things are pretty busy here, so—”

  “Captain, right now I’m attached to the ROK Navy. Calling from the Sea of Japan.”

  Her voice sharpened. “You’re in Korea?”

  “Correct. We’re aboard the ASW group bird-dogging this Whiskey slash Romeo formation that’s tracking down the coast.”

  “The one on the east coast?”

  Did that mean there were more? He started to ask, then didn’t, since he didn’t know how secure the line was. “Correct. Anyway, we just got the message, detailing what that group is—well, what makes that group so super special. Know what I mean?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. Opposite him Jung leaned back, lighting a cigarette and looking dark. He was following the conversation on the overhead speaker.

  Roald’s voice went dry. “This is not a secure phone, Commander. Nice to hear from you, but what’s the point of this call? That’s so important you have to skip the whole chain of command?”

  “Well, I’m sitting here with the commodore in charge of the antisubmarine group. And I have to tell you the Koreans are starting to feel like we’re leaving them twisting in the wind. Can I give them some good news?”

  “I can’t answer that. But the forces in support of Op Plan 5027 are being notified.”

  5027 was the plan for joint defense of Korea. “Well, that’s good, Jennifer, but—has the heavy lift started to sail? The MPS lift?”

  “I won’t discuss that, Dan.”

  “Captain, here’s the problem. We need more assets here in the Strait. To deal with what you’re calling the WRGE. The ROKN’s good but the environment’s shit. They don’t have the sonar ranges to stop these guys. We need augmentation out here. We’ve got surface forces and Korean patrol air. But the U.S. destroyer squadron hauled ass for Japan three days ago, and we just don’t have the coverage.”

  He heard her go off-line, talking to someone else in the booth. Then she came back. “Dan, Korea’s on the front burner here, if that’s what you’re asking me. We have activity along the DMZ. But we’ve got to manage the developing situation in Taiwan too. Forces are thin.”

  He swallowed. “Activity” along the DMZ. Which meant… shades of the crowded subway station, the monthly drills… did she mean artillery? Or just patrols? If the shells were falling, Seoul would already be evacuating. Millions of people—the old man who’d elbowed him, the elegant girls with the parasols, executives and store clerks and hotel staffs and mothers and grandmothers and kids, everyone—all streaming south in terror that what had happened to Hwang’s family half a century before would happen to them. Then he tuned in to what else she’d said. “Taiwan? What’s happening in Taiwan?”

  “You’re really out of touch out there, aren’t you? The Chinese are threatening Taiwan.”

  “Forget that! It’s a diversion. We need an ASW task group here. With helos. We’ve got to have helos.”

  “The Enterprise task group will be there in two days. Unless the president decides to divert to the Taiwan Strait.”

  “He can’t send it to Taiwan! This is the hot button. Right here—”

  Her tone was cool again. “This is not the proper line to discuss operational matters on, Commander. I suggest you devote your efforts on-scene, to helping the ROKN deal with its submarine threat. I’m going to hang up now.”

  “I know that, Captain, but this is the only line out I have. And what I’ve got to say is too important for you not to listen. Jennifer! Please!”

  He wasn’t proud of the pleading note, but it worked. She hesitated. Then said, “All right, Commander. Only because we’ve got history. Okay? Give it to me in three sentences or less.”

  “You got it. Executive summary. Don’t get fixated on what’s happening up along the DMZ. The target is Pusan. I say again, Pusan. Look at the op plan, the logistics situation, for what that means. This crisis will turn on what happens in the Strait. If we can stop this group, I don’t think they’ll come over the DMZ. And maybe we won’t have to fight another Korean war.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all, Captain. Thanks for taking my call.”

  “Don’t abuse the privilege again, Commander.”

  She hung up.

  Jung was mining his eyes with his fingers. He seemed about to speak when one of the petty officers shouted across the space. “Radar contact. Small. Presume snorkel. Zero-nine-eight. Twenty-nine thousand yards. The aircraft is attacking with air-dropped torpedoes.”

  The team around the DRT scrambled up from squatting. Jung snapped orders. Kim repeated them over the air. The deckplates began to vibrate as fifty-four thousand horsepower brought Chung Nam up to flank speed again.

  Dan pulled himself to his feet, with dread, with nausea, but at the same time too with a reluctant eagerness to get this over with one way or another.

  The hunt was on again. But they were nearly blind and running out of fuel. Their quarry was forewarned. Their weapons didn’t seem to work. Another typhoon was on its way. And somewhere below them was a weapon that, should they press whoever controlled it too hard, would destroy everything within ten miles’ radius.

  When he thought about it, this time they were as much the quarry as the hunter.

  16

  THE plotting team worked with tight-lipped diligence, sketching gradually expanding circles around the now twenty-minute-old datum. Chung Nam steadied on a course of 100 true. The hull rumbled as the screws reached full power. She was already at general quarters, had been all night. Da
n wondered how long the crew could stay sharp. After that many hours even trained men reacted slowly, or made stupid mistakes. He glanced at the clock; a little after 1500. Four hours of daylight left.

  Opposite him Jung coughed as he chain-lit another silver-tip. Then suddenly reached out, seized him by the shoulder, and gave him a one-armed hug. Dan tensed.

  “Where’s your life jacket?” the commodore muttered into his ear. He stank of tobacco and sweat.

  “In my stateroom. Sir.”

  “We’re going in to the attack. Get your life jacket on.”

  “You’re not wearing one, Commodore.”

  “That does not inspire confidence, when I wear a life jacket.”

  “Does it inspire confidence when the American rider wears one?”

  Jung’s lips curled in mirthless acquiescence. “All right. I just hope neither of us needs it.”

  Dan just nodded, since his mouth had gone too dry to speak. It seemed like you’d get used to combat, but he was scared just as shitless as he always was. He swallowed and tried to relax. “So, what’s our plan, sir?”

  Jung said they’d have to accept the risk of the nuke going off. Dan nodded numbly; he’d expected nothing less. The commodore said he’d position TG 213.3 above where they guessed the intruders were and hold them down by brute presence, working with the patrol air and attacking each time they made sonar contact, caught a snorkel above water, or were fired on. At the very least that should hold the enemy to a low speed of advance. If they couldn’t kill them all, they’d form a final barrier just north of Pusan.

  “And if they do set off the bomb, it should at least destroy the remaining subs, as well as our forces,” he finished.

  “I guess it might at that,” Dan said reluctantly. Not an elegant plan, either tactically or in terms of minimizing the risk to the prosecuting force. But he couldn’t think of anything better.

  “We’ll head in at twenty knots. Then turn parallel to their line of advance and slow below sonar washout speed nine thousand yards from the farthest on circle,” Jung said. ”Mesan and Cheju are arriving from the south. They both have full torpedo loads. I’ll use them for the first coordinated attack. Yu will stand off with his towed array streamed. It is possible we may pick something up.”

  Dan doubted it, not with sonar conditions the way they were and the sea state degenerating as the wind whipped up the waves. As the coasts of Korea and Honshu closed to form the Strait, the fetch, the distance across which that wind operated, was shrinking; but the bottom was shallowing, too. “What’s this storm going to do to us?”

  The chief had a weather fax ready. Dan examined it, hoping this time the weather guessers were keeping up with the clock. Typhoon Callista was rated as a Class 4, even more powerful than Brendan, but thank God, it was tracking much farther south. With any luck it would miss Korea and head past into the Yellow Sea. The forecast for the Strait area was thirty knots gusting to forty, ten- to twelve-foot seas.

  “Could be worse,” Hwang said over his shoulder.

  “Could be better. For mixing conditions.”

  The air controller reported from his console, and Korean faces grew graver. “What’s he saying?” Dan asked the chief of staff.

  “The aircraft has expended both torpedoes on a magnetic anomaly contact two thousand yards south of the last datum.”

  “No hits?”

  “No hits, no detonations. Also the aircraft are not sure how much longer they can maintain contact.”

  “Fuel state?”

  “That’s not the problem. It’s winds at low altitudes, and sea state wiping out their sonobuoy returns.”

  “They’ve got to maintain contact. If they lose these guys, we’ll never get them back.”

  Hwang looked grim too. “They know this is a high-priority mission. They’ll stay out till they go down into the sea. It will be a useless sacrifice, I am afraid.”

  Jung came back down from the bridge, no doubt having passed on his orders, about paralleling and streaming the array, to Captain Yu personally. He looked haggard and moved slowly, and Dan realized the commodore hadn’t slept any more than he had, maybe even less. He saw Henrickson leaning with arms folded near the vertical plot, watching the action, and gestured him over.

  “Where’s your life jacket, Monty?”

  “Left it on my bunk.”

  “You should be wearing it.”

  “You’re not wearing one.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Henrickson, you’re not even military. Get your fucking life jacket on.”

  “All the hatches are dogged. I can’t get below.” The analyst gnawed at his lip, glancing toward the plot table. “We just charging in? That’s all we can think of?”

  “We’re gonna slow to sonar speed in a few minutes and parallel their track nine thousand yards out. The two new joins are going in for a coordinated attack.”

  “Did he say what speed?”

  “No.”

  “I think their speed-noise curves are wrong. But I guess with this heavy a sea it doesn’t matter. Anybody given any thought to anti-wake-homing tactics?”

  Dan rubbed his cheeks hard. His mind kept slipping, as if gears weren’t quite meshing. “Uh, I don’t know much about them. Got any suggestions?”

  “I ran some possibilities last night. Since I didn’t have much else to do.”

  Henrickson pulled his own computer over on the desk and flipped up the screen. The notebook hummed as the hard drive powered up. “We don’t know what they’re carrying, but I’m assuming it’s some version of the 53-65. Wake-homing, antiship, six-hundred-pound warhead. Range twenty thousand yards at full speed. The Russians sold them to the Chinese. This is a smart fish. It picks up wake turbulence and follows it to its source. You can’t jam it or decoy it. And it runs out at fifty knots, so unless you have a long head start, you can’t outsprint it either.”

  “None of this sounds promising. You think that’s what hit Mok Po? A wake homer?”

  “That’s consistent with the stern damage, and she had her Nixie streamed and turned on. So it was either a wake homer, or a real lucky shot with a straight runner.”

  Dan contemplated the screen, which now displayed the 53-65’s wavy approach course as it acquired a wake. Henrickson went on, “This is really a good torpedo. Even if you spoof it, it presses on through the countermeasure and reenables on the other side. Team Charlie got their hands on three of them four years ago. We gave one to DARPA, one to DIA, and kept the one that had the fewest bullet holes in it. We took it apart, put it back together, and did fifteen instrument runs down at Tongue of the Ocean. There really isn’t a soft kill possibility. The only way to evade it is the Dingo.”

  Dan had never heard of a Dingo, but this was the second time he’d heard a Team Charlie mentioned. He’d understood from the briefings back at TAG that there were only two teams, though. As for the other acronyms Henrickson had just used, DARPA was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. He filed it and pressed on with the immediate problem. “Dingo—what’s that? An evasive tactic?”

  “Yeah. As soon as you hear the thing coming, fire a Mark 46 on straight run, surface mode, shallow setting, off the side the detection’s coming from. Simultaneously you go to all ahead flank and hard rudder and buttonhook back, just like a Williamson turn, as soon as the 46 clears the tube. With me so far?”

  “I’m with you. Then—”

  “Then, as soon as you pass about one twenty off your original track, you go to full-power reverse. If you do it right, you end up dead in the water, but with your bow headed back down your own track.”

  “Dead in the water, during a torpedo attack?”

  “Just hear me out, okay? In our tests, the 65 either lost the ship’s wake and reenabled on the Mark 46, if it was tracking near center-line, or followed the quarter-wave, if it was offset.”

  He fingered the keyboard. The display changed, and Dan watched the tactic play out. The hostile torpedo bo
red in from astern. The target ship executed its turn. The torpedo overshot, carrying on along its original course, apparently following the original bow wave, which had been generated before the turn. It went into its sidewinder wriggle again as it reenabled and started searching again; then suddenly snapped back into homing mode and tracked steadily off the screen to the left.

  Henrickson said, “A Mark 46 running shallow at top speed generates just enough turbulence to engage the seeker. Usually, that is… When it does, the 65 heads away after it. Eventually it overtakes, it’s faster than the 46, but by then it’s outside reacquisition parameters for its original target. It goes back into search mode and chases its tail till it exhausts its fuel, deactivates, and sinks.”

  “That’s a complicated tactic,” Dan said. “And isn’t it suicide, if it’s not a wake homer? Going to zero speed, backing down?”

  “Yeah, that’s your downside of Dingo. If it’s not a wake homer they kicked out at you, if it’s an acoustic homer, you just cut your Nixie cable during the buttonhook and walked right into the punch.”

  “And I suppose there’s no way to tell which one’s coming at you?”

  “Not till two thousand yards out, when the acoustics turn on their active homer. And by then it’s too late.”

  “Shit.” Dan swiveled, blowing out, trying to pull his eyebrows down off the overhead. “This isn’t an approved tactic, is it?”

  “We put it out in a tacmemo last year. So it’s not in ATP 28, no, but it’s on the street.”

  “To the Koreans? Are they on distribution?”

  “No. U.S. only.”

  He rubbed his mouth again, wishing he wasn’t so dog-tired. He had the feeling he was missing something. This wasn’t the way to do tactical development: on a notebook computer, at general quarters, charging in on a confirmed hostile at thirty-four knots. “What about our Mark 46s? There’s something fucked there. The air-dropped ones didn’t work any better than ours. We keep firing them but we don’t get kills.”

  “We can hear them running. They’re just not hard-locking, for some reason.”

  “Countermeasures? Jamming?”