Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  Mesan had gone dead in the water. A new datum symbol near her represented where the torpedo had been fired from. Some two thousand yards to the east, Cheju, the assisting ship during the last attack, had slewed around in a tight turn and was racing in. Kim Chon, the only PCC left in the task group, was following in Chung Nam’s wake as the flagship barreled into the attack.

  Dan wondered exactly what Jung had ordered. It looked like an urgent attack, to divert the sub’s attention from the ship she’d wounded. He really, really wished they had a helo. A dipping sonar could get them passive bearings without risking a hull and a crew But there were no helos. And even if there had been, they couldn’t have launched in this wind, with a landing platform going up and down the way Chung Nam was heaving. He clung to the table as the flagship lurched. A wave slammed against the bulkhead and roared down the port side, sounding just like a subway train.

  Jung stood swaying to the lean, arms folded, mouth impassive. Lieutenant Kim stood to his left, Commander Hwang to his right. They stared at the lit tabletop. Dan noticed that the flagship was well inside the torpedo danger area, and approaching the optimal range to fire.

  The gaps between successive one-minute positions seemed very long. He reached up and found a handhold on a bitch box and hung on, wondering when or even whether Jung planned to drop to a speed where the frigate’s own sonar would be effective. She was rushing toward destruction, blind to what lay ahead. But just as he was opening his mouth the commodore snapped out an order in that harsh-sounding language that even when you were exchanging compliments sounded brusque. Now, giving mortal commands, it was even more peremptory.

  A weak, distant voice, breaking up as it transmitted, came over the speaker. He caught the name Mesan. Still afloat, then. He glanced at the radar, trying to keep track of who was where. Fast as the plotters sketched, their trace would lag reality by a minute or two.

  Jung snapped another order. The turbines wound down. The men around him swayed, and Dan tightened his handhold as the sea decelerated the rushing hull.

  A cry came from the sonar cubicle. The contact light blinked on over the DRT. In midwriting the sub plotter switched to red pencil, whipped the protractor around, and jotted his first range and bearing to the new contact. The ASW officer was speaking into his sound-powered phones. A warning bell began shrilling, faint through the bulkhead, but perfectly audible.

  Dan moved a step to the side, pushed past a phone talker, and pulled the curtain aside. Sonar control was also underwater battery plot; ordnance was controlled from here, as well as sensors. The petty officers didn’t look up from their screens. O’Quinn, seated with them, was just as rapt. Dan said to the senior Korean, “How many torpedoes do we have left?”

  “Sir?” He smiled, but obviously didn’t understand.

  Dan tried to communicate it by sign language but gave up halfway through. He switched to the American. “Joe? Do you know?”

  “What?” O’Quinn jerked out of his hypnosis.

  “Do you know? How many fish we’ve got left?”

  He blinked. “How many fish? These Ulsans don’t have a dedicated torpedo stowage space. I don’t think they carry more than one reload.”

  Which meant the six rounds in the two triple tubes right now were all they had left. That wasn’t good news.

  On the other hand, they probably wouldn’t get to make more than one more attack.

  The turbines cut in again. The frigate lurched, with the same tormented groaning the stabilizers had made since their repairs. Chung Nam seemed to skate around, surfing on the crest of a swell. The heading indicator spun crazily, slowed, and eased to a stop at last thirty degrees to port of their last course.

  He couldn’t believe it. Jung was increasing speed as he attacked. Though he was zigzagging at last, probably not so much to evade a straight runner as to throw off the sub’s target motion analysis.

  But if their target got off a torpedo, they’d never hear it. At this speed, the sonarmen were totally deaf.

  A speaker burst into life. Almost as if to himself, Hwang murmured a translation. “From aircraft tail number thirty-two. Passive sonar contact, bearing sixty-one thousand yards, zero three zero. Possible submarine. Proceeding to attack.”

  The team stared at the plot. For a moment Dan didn’t understand either; then his whole body flinched, almost like a seizure. “No!” he shouted. “That’s San Francisco. Call off the attack!”

  Jung nodded and gave the order. The air coordinator repeated it, his tones urgent. Dan sucked one breath after another, dreadfully slowly, until an acknowledgment came back. He ran his hands over his face, cursing himself for a dangerous idiot. Too tired to think of it, he hadn’t made sure the Korean P-3s knew about the incoming U.S. attack boat.

  “They acknowledge, Commander,” Hwang said. “I apologize. We overlooked passing that information to our MP air.”

  Jung nodded agreement, glanced at them, but didn’t say anything. He seemed too absorbed in the unfolding attack even to speak. Which Dan understood. They were playing chess in three dimensions, at high speed, with sudden death as the penalty for a wrong move.

  His skin crawled as he looked back at the range. Through the exchange with the aircraft they’d still been closing, and still at flank speed, pushing deeper and deeper into the zone of danger. The rudder shifted, and the heading indicator spun in the other direction, but the range still kept dropping.

  He stopped breathing. They didn’t fire, they didn’t fire, they still didn’t fire. They were abeam of the target, unless it had turned. This was the right target aspect for the Mark 46. But they were too close now, the acquisition numbers degraded fast if the fish didn’t have time to—

  “Fire,” barked Lieutenant Kim. A moment later the hissing clunk of an air slug pumping out a quarter-ton of metal, explosives, and electronics came through the bulkhead. Three long seconds followed. You had to separate homing torpedoes in salvo fire or their seekers would jam each other. Then another hiss and clunk shivered the frigate’s frame.

  Three more seconds, and the last pulse whunked and hissed. Kim barked again—the ASW officer controlled the ship and its weapons during an attack—and the rudder indicator reversed. The frigate leaned hard, still at speed, and pivoted her stern through the firing bearing. She was less than a thousand yards from the sub and now headed directly away.

  Dan watched the sweep hand on his watch. They ran for a minute. Then another. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. He expected every second to die in nuclear flame. Actually it would happen so fast, at this range, he’d probably never know he was dead at all. Just phase shift instantly into superheated gas, carbon dioxide, and radioactive steam, along with the water and steel and other men around him.

  Instead the seconds kept going by.

  He sagged, unbelieving. Their torpedoes would have reached their target in about fifty seconds. He told himself they were activating, circling, they’d acquire and home and explode any moment. But still no thud of a hit came.

  His gaze locked with Jung’s. The older man’s chin was stubbled gray. Sweat stood on his forehead too. His graying hair stuck up in spikes, and for the first time his uniform shirt looked rumpled. “What’s wrong with our fucking torpedoes, Lenson? They’re American. Do you have any idea?”

  “You launched too close, I think. Time to acquire—”

  “I don’t buy that. Even if we fire too close, it should just circle once and reacquire. One should have worked. Out of three.”

  Dan thought so too. Their enemies had to have some kind of countermeasure. U.S. submarines did, though he didn’t know much about them; the topic was highly classified. “If we hadn’t attacked at such a high speed we might have heard something. Jamming. Ejecting some sort of countermeasure.”

  “The slower we go, the more vulnerable we are.”

  “It’s a trade-off. Correct.”

  “Tell the captain we will reattack,” Jung snapped to Kim in English. The junior officer swallowed, looking frig
htened, but spoke into his phones.

  “What’s our torpedo load?” Dan asked them.

  Kim swallowed again. “We have three remaining.”

  “The three in the starboard tubes?”

  “I am sorry. Three reloads, once those are fired. So six are left.”

  More than he’d expected. But now he wished they had something other than the Mark 46s. He’d always considered them good weapons. But for some reason they didn’t seem to be cutting the mustard here in the Eastern Sea.

  But there wasn’t anything to be done about that, and Jung was barking orders again; the rudder-angle indicator was hard over again. Dan did some swallowing of his own. His mouth was so dry it seemed to close up. They were going in for another attack. This time, goddamn it, he’d have to make them do it at low speed. He cleared his throat. “How about the planes? Can we vector them in?”

  “They’ve departed the area,” Hwang said, remotely. “I forget you do not follow the radio comms. They have expended all torpedo and sonobuoy loadouts. They offered to stay and do passes until their fuel ran out but the commodore ordered them to return to base. There will be no reliefs; the crosswinds are too high on the runways for them to take off again.”

  THIS time Jung did something Dan should have expected, but hadn’t; he sent both Cheju and Kim Chon in to the attack as well, all three converging, and sheered the flagship off at the last moment, as soon as they gained a solid active contact. Which was at only sixteen hundred yards. It was insanely dangerous, but with three attackers, on continuously altering courses and speeds, it would be nearly impossible for their target to build enough of a track on any one to shoot accurately.

  Six torpedoes hit the water. The crunch of a hit tolled through the hull. The sonarmen shrieked. Another crunch, louder.

  “Two hits,” Henrickson yelled.

  “Got it, great.” He thought of the men who were dying below them, but couldn’t spare compassion this time around. Right now, he just wanted them all dead. Like killing hornets as they tried to sting you. He stuck his head into Sonar. “Joe! Did you hear anything like jamming? Or something being ejected?”

  O’Quinn pried an earphone off one temple. “No. But maybe they were out. They can’t carry unlimited amounts, if it’s some kind of mobile countermeasure.”

  That was true; if it was a swim-out decoy, each round would take the place of a torpedo. And such things were expensive and scarce. Jung’s tactic might be the best they could do. Just get in there toe to toe and slug. Keep throwing ordnance until they got a hit. It was hell on the nerves, but eventually it should grind the other side down.

  But how many subs were left? Did they have enough ordnance, and fuel, and sheer guts to outlast them?

  And what if one of these shells had the pea under it?

  His fingers danced over the keys of his Compaq. He could model fuel. He could model torpedoes per kill. He could simulate acoustic vertical beam width, and target doppler, and acquisition capability degradation.

  But the biggest variables of all—storm and chance, Jung’s dogged stubbornness, and his enemy’s fanatical courage—he could put no numbers against at all.

  THE task group re-formed a search line and headed south. The cross seas made the deck lurch and sway, but no one seemed to mind. Rain roared against the bulkheads. The plotters and talkers were guzzling orange pops and smoking up a storm. Some looked dazed, others near manic, eyes glittering and movements badly controlled. They chattered in high-pitched voices and cackled at nothing Dan could see was funny. Jung slumped at one of the consoles, face gray. His hands shook as he lit up a silver-tip.

  “You doing okay, sir?” Dan asked, slipping into the seat next to him.

  “I had to leave Mesan.”

  With a surge of guilt he remembered the torpedoed frigate. “What’s her damage?”

  “Screws blown off. Rudders gone. Thirteen men dead or missing, five wounded. Taking water.”

  Two ROKN ships out of action; two North Korean subs sunk. The exchange rate was too even to be encouraging. “We’re not that far from shore now. Maybe they can send somebody from P’ohang to help.”

  The Korean nodded somberly and sucked smoke. It trickled out of his nostrils. “They’re getting a tug under way,” he said. He squeezed his eyes closed and put his head back, rotated it as if his neck hurt.

  Dan suddenly became conscious of his own fatigue, his aching feet, his own sore neck. He looked at his watch. Dinnertime, but he wasn’t hungry. What he could use was strong and black. “Want some coffee?” he asked the commodore.

  “Good idea… Keopi jeom ka jeo o ji,” Jung said to a passing petty officer.

  Dan looked around the space. “And how about, uh—how about some for the rest of the boys?”

  Jung looked taken aback. Suspicious. Then his face relaxed. He snapped out more Korean. Dan thought he caught Captain Yu’s name. The man looked startled, then astonished. But still bowed quickly, then hurried off.

  Dan was searching his mind for what he ought to be doing next when a bell shrilled. Jung came to his feet as if spring-loaded. Dan pivoted, looked through the parted curtain into Sonar. Saw all four men sardined in there staring at the screen with eyes wide. And heard, from the speaker, the band-saw whine of counterrotating screws singing through the deep.

  Growing louder, closer, with each passing second.

  “Where the hell’d that come from?” Henrickson breathed.

  “Torpedo!” O’Quinn yelled. “Red Eighty!”

  Dan had never heard of “Red Eighty” as a position indicator—it must date from before his time—but figured it meant from the port quarter. From a sub they’d never thought was there, never heard or suspected. “Is the Nixie streamed?” he shouted at Hwang.

  “Yes.”

  But he wasn’t looking at Dan. Nor was anyone else. They were all looking at Kim.

  The tae wi stood with gaze unfocused, index finger on the Talk button of his mouthpiece, other hand on the plot table to steady himself. But he didn’t speak.

  Jung put out a hand as if to touch him. Then froze. Dan found himself starting forward too, orders jumping to his lips, wanting to tear the microphone out of the guy’s hands. But the other stations on the phone circuit wouldn’t understand him. Not in English. It was up to the ASW officer to respond. It took a physical effort to clamp his teeth together, and wait for him to act.

  For an infinitely long second Kim did not. Then he jerked suddenly down on the button, and speech flooded from his lips.

  The rudder slammed over. The turbines surged. Chung Nam heeled. To port, which meant a starboard turn. The first part of the Dingo maneuver.

  Jung glanced his way, and their gazes locked. Then the commodore’s moved on, to the rudder-angle indicator. Dan stared at it too, waiting for the reverse-rudder order, to come around hard to port, to snap out turbulence for the wake homer to follow away from the ship rather than toward it.

  But it didn’t reverse. Instead the angle steepened. The deck heeled, men slipped, the stabilizers groaned, pencils rolled. A reel of magnetic tape leaped out of its rack. It hit the sonar stack, then spun wildly out through the curtain into the main space, unwhipping yards of rust-colored ribbon that snagged instantly into a hopeless tangle. The shrill squeal kept getting louder, as did the turbine whoosh.

  “What the fuck—,” breathed Henrickson.

  He was interrupted by a wave that felt like it hit broadside. It slammed into the frigate like a whole team of linemen crashing into a quarterback at once. She staggered again, and a sustained moaning shriek burst from the stabilizers as if each atom of hardened steel were being tormented into consciousness. Dan clutched the console, crouched, wishing right now above all else that he’d accepted Jung’s offer, no, Jung’s direct order, and gotten his life jacket.

  The heading indicator hesitated. Then suddenly kicked around in heavy, ship-whipping jerks, ten, fifteen degrees at once. She rose high on a sea and then plunged, aiming it seemed nearly straigh
t down.

  “There’s number two,” O’Quinn shouted through the din, the whine, the clatter and roar. A thinner, more remote hornet-whine joined the first.

  Dan stared at his computer screen. It was replaying the maneuver he’d just modeled. But Chung Nam wasn’t. She was headed forty degrees to starboard of her original course. Directly away from the torps. Directly away… exposing her stern, her wake—

  He let go of the console and staggered across the space between him and the DRT. Fetched up against it with a painful slam of the steel corner into his hip. “We have to come left,” he shouted. “And fire a Mark 46, on 030!”

  Jung shook his head.

  “What’re you doing? If it’s a wake homer—”

  “We don’t have a torpedo to waste,” Jung said.

  Dan stared at him in utter horror. “To waste? If it’s a wake homer—”

  “What’re the odds if it’s wake first, then acoustic? You said fifty percent. But only ten percent if it’s acoustic first, then wake. They’re not stupid out there. They’ll fire the wake homer second.”

  He opened his mouth to argue: the numbers were speculative; they didn’t know the other side’s loadout, analysis, training; then closed it. This was Jiang’s task group. His tactics. His enemy. Dan Lenson wasn’t even an adviser. Just a rider.

  The whine was deafening. Every man’s face in the closed hot space was pale, averted, as if they were trying not to listen, as if not hearing might change the doom boring in on them at fifty knots. Dan’s legs shook. He didn’t want to go into the water. Not in seas like this. With the rest of the task group going on without them, sticking with the enemy, the way he had absolutely no doubt Jung would order them to with his last outgoing command.

  A tremendous explosion jarred and whipped the frigate. It felt as if her stern were lifted, then dropped fifty feet onto solid stone. Lights burst with the spark-laced ping of shattering glass. Equipment snapped off the bulkhead and catapulted through the air. A fire extinguisher caught a man in the back, knocking him down.

  Simultaneously with that image hitting his eyes, something nailed him in the back of the skull. White flame seared his retinas. He staggered and almost went down, but a hand, Henrickson’s maybe, jerked him back up. His ears ululated. In the little sonar cubicle a short scream was cut off by the clap of a blow. Jung and Kim slammed together, recoiled, and grabbed, keeping each other on their feet. The commodore was shouting. Kim was nodding, then turning away, hunching his shoulders as he passed on whatever he’d been told into the sound-powered phone.