Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  “An observation party,” Henrickson said.

  “You think so?” said Jung.

  “That makes four,” Dan said. His head was clearing a little. “One sub sunk the night Mok Po got torpedoed. The second, the one we destroyed yesterday. One aground at Kanjolgap. That leaves one boat out there.”

  “There could be more,” Henrickson put in.

  Jung seemed to remember the cigarette stuck to his lip. He lit it and gazed around the compartment before coming back to them.

  “We’ve been tracking these guys for three days,” Dan pointed out. “You’re right, there could be more. But I think we’d have come up with them if they were there.”

  “We never detected the guy who shot us up last night,” Henrickson pointed out.

  “We’ve just been through a fucking typhoon, Monty. Sea state’s been shit. He obviously snorkeled at the height of the storm, when we couldn’t see squat on radar.”

  “It’s hard to snorkel in heavy seas.”

  Dan couldn’t help blinking at that statement. “These guys have been doing a lot of difficult things, Monty. Haven’t you noticed? Including figuring out some way to reduce the probability of kill on our torpedoes to about a third of what it’s supposed to be. And picking exactly the right weather and political conditions to stick it to us and snap it off.” He lifted his head, making the connection. “Commodore—did the marines find any evidence of new countermeasures? When they searched this sub that beached?”

  Jung said that was a good question; he’d have Hwang call back and ask. If necessary, they’d ask for a technical team to be dispatched.

  “We could really use anything they can tell us,” Dan told him. “But that’s how he got past us, and how he almost clobbered us, too. We’re so dependent on sonar and radar that when conditions deteriorate, we lose our ability to play. He was snorkeling and spotted us through his periscope. He pickled a couple off and got lucky. I think there’s just the one guy left. But he’s the one with the ball.”

  “The ball?” Jung said.

  “The nuke,” Henrickson interpreted.

  “Oh.” Jung closed his eyes and burned another half inch of the cigarette. He swayed, letting the smoke jet out through his nostrils, and sighed. “The ball,” he muttered.

  “Head for Pusan,” Henrickson murmured.

  Filled with sudden dread, Dan limped over and searched until he came up with a chart. “Where are we now, sir?” he asked Jung. A nicotine-stained finger made a brown mark forty miles southeast of Ulsan.

  Chill harrowed Dan’s spine. Pusan was the next city down the coast.

  “There are also—there are also reports of preparatory fires along the DMZ,” Hwang said. “And aircraft flights.”

  Dan and Henrickson exchanged glances. “Artillery?” the analyst asked. The commodore nodded.

  Dan rubbed his face hard, again. Whatever the doc had given him wasn’t just aspirin. Not only were the aches and pains going away, he was starting to float. The golden cloud effect. But he had to stay centered. Artillery along the DMZ… which would be probing fires at first, to trigger the South Korean counterbattery radars and localize them for destruction. Same with the overflights, to pinpoint hidden radars and missile batteries so they could be targeted and destroyed.

  It was the long-awaited run-up to war. The savage bloody tragedy of Korea was repeating itself. Driven by madmen, invited by weakness, facilitated by divided counsels and halfhearted attempts at appeasement. Even through the golden glow he felt sick. As soon as the glare of nuclear fission lit the hills of Pusan, the barrage would begin. Maybe the ROK Army and Air Force could still hold the enemy’s armored thrusts. Maybe America could even muster its will, as it had before in the face of disaster, and stem the offensive. Develop alternate ports, reinvade, at what sacrifice of blood and treasure he could not even imagine.

  No matter what the outcome, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, would die.

  If only they could have stopped this thing. And they almost had! They’d taken out half the group. The Korean marines had captured another. “There’s only the one left,” he muttered. But his lips felt like they weren’t wired to his brain anymore.

  “There’s Chang Bo Go,” Henrickson offered. “She’s still patrolling off the entrance.”

  “If we detect, I will go in,” Jung said. His expression left no doubt what he meant. If he got the faintest sonar return, the vaguest hint of radar contact, he’d drive into the attack. And once engaged, prosecute to the finish.

  But Dan had no doubt the men below them were just as determined. Corner them, and they’d trigger their weapon. Toss that ball they’d carried so far and so long, for the ultimate score.

  They were all, all of them, locked into the game. There were no more options. Only the two stark, remaining consummations.

  Pusan destroyed.

  Or the last Romeo, and with it the whole task group, obliterated in one burst of nuclear light.

  He scrubbed his face through the silken veil of the drug, trying desperately to drag something useful out of his woolly brain.

  If only there were some other possibility…

  . . .

  A couple of hours later one of the Kims told him the aft repair party had found his man. Since “his man” could only be O’Quinn, Dan went to sick bay at once.

  The retired captain was lying, eyes closed, in one of the lower bunks. They had an oxygen mask on him and an intravenous drip going. Beard stubble was black and gray against cyanotic skin. But he didn’t seem to be wounded. At least, Dan didn’t see any bandages. He bent to place his mouth beside the oil-smeared ear. “Joe, you okay?”

  No answer, not even a flutter of the closed eyelids. He was breathing, with harsh ragged snores on the intake, but Dan didn’t know what to make of the blue skin. Dan couldn’t make out a lot of what the little doctor was trying to tell him, but the guy kept pointing to his chest and making mock coughs.

  “Was there anyone with him?”

  The medic smiled blankly. Dan tried to charade the question, but didn’t get very far. Till one of the wounded sailors pointed to the bunk above O’Quinn. “He save that man,” the Korean explained.

  Dan was astonished to see that the guy in the upper bunk, also breathing oxygen with stertorous wheezes, was the steward from the wardroom, the one who’d refused to make coffee until Dan had argued Captain Yu into it. Then it made sense. U.S. ships, too, put messroom personnel at after steering stations, ammunition details, miscellaneous general-quarters assignments belowdecks.

  “Saved him? Really?”

  “Brought him air. I heard repair party chief say.”

  “Good work, Joe,” he told the unconscious man. So there had been someone down there. He wanted to tell him he was sorry for doubting him. Sorry he’d given him such grief, when he’d been right. But O’Quinn couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t hear anyone right now. The oxygen hissed steadily, but his skin stayed dark. It wasn’t getting to his bloodstream. His chest rattled. He sounded as if he was dying.

  “Take good care of him,” he told the medic. Then patted O’Quinn’s shoulder, feeling helpless and guilty, and quickly turned away.

  . . .

  BACK in CIC dawn arrived, along with cold rice and kimchi in a lacquered box. Dan washed a mouthful down with cold tea, so wrecked he could barely chew. He was thinking about heading for his stateroom when the comm lieutenant said he was being called on the task group covered net. Dan figured it’d be Mangum, or possibly even Captain Owens. But instead the comm officer said, “This is a secure over-the-horizon channel, sir. From something called Cement Mixer.”

  Dan blinked. For a second it didn’t register.

  Then it did.

  Cement Mixer was the code phrase for the White House Situation Room.

  He recognized Jennifer Roald’s serene intonations even distorted by hiss and distance, the through-a-tin-can hollowness of high frequency. “You’re not easy to get hold of, Commander. Don’t you have sa
tellite comms out there?”

  “Not in the ROK Navy, Captain. Over.”

  The lag before she answered told him there was a satellite uplink somewhere in their comm chain, even if he was getting the last jump by HF. Roald said, “Did you get my present?”

  She meant San Francisco.”I sure did. Thanks, Jennifer. That’s really upping the ante. Uh—over.”

  “Just keep its presence close hold. Since we had to keep certain people around here more or less in the dark about it.”

  Which probably meant the civilian defense staff. “Aye aye, ma’am. Will do. Over.”

  “Now listen carefully. This is not a secure conversation. Since we’re using a non-US HF setup.” Dan nodded, taking her meaning: the Koreans were probably listening in. “Where exactly are you, Commander?”

  “We’re about”—he craned to see the chart—”uh, about forty miles northeast of Tsushima. In the Korea Strait. Over.”

  “Have you got this thing localized?”

  He pinched his cheeks, wishing they weren’t so numb, that his tongue didn’t feel twice as big as it ought to be. “Uh, thought we did. Then it got away from us again. The flagship took a torpedo last night. Still under way though. Max speed one five. Fuel state one five. Over.”

  “I’m going to read you something the Central News Agency just released. From Pyongyang, North Korea.”

  Dan pulled a pad toward him, clicked a ballpoint. “Go.”

  “I quote: ‘Not content with escalating aggressive behavior in recent days, U.S. forces are now turning nuclear weapons over to the bandit dictator circles of South Korea. This is a clear violation of agreements denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. The world knows that the Korean people demand the liquidation of the corrupt fascist “government” in Seoul. They steadfastly call for reunification under the fearless leadership of Secretary Kim Jong n, Chairman of the DPRK National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the North Korean People’s Army, outstanding thinker and theoretician, prominent leader and the great sun of Asia. Washington must take full responsibility for the grave consequences reckless brandishing and unsafe handling of nuclear weapons on Korean soil will bring about.’ Over.”

  Dan thought about it for all of three seconds. “They’re setting up a cover story. For when this thing goes off.”

  “Exactly. It’ll be our fault, and half the world will believe it. Over.”

  The air hissed for a moment. Until she resumed. “This is Cement Mixer. You should also know that Seoul has passed a short-fuze request to us. If they can give us a lat and long, will we put a missile into the water.”

  “A missile,” Dan repeated. The concept bounced around inside a skull that felt stuffed with dandelion down. Then it connected and brought him bolt upright. “A ballistic missile?”

  “Correct. Most likely a single-warhead Minuteman.”

  The hardened-silo buster, the biggest warhead in the strategic inventory. “What’s, uh, what’s the national security adviser say?”

  “She saw Mustang twice. So far he’s refused to commit himself.”

  This didn’t surprise him. Before the assassination attempt, Dan had carried the Presidential Emergency Satched for “Mustang,” Secret Service code for President “Bad Bob” De Bari. De Bari had some good points. Others, not so good. But even at the best of times, he liked to keep his options open. And when it came to military action, for good or ill, De Bari just didn’t seem to believe in the concept that violence could produce peace.

  Roald kept going when he didn’t respond. “We ran the model here when the request came in. The kill radius in shallow water isn’t actually that great. We’d have to have the target localized within a one-mile square. And NSC wants to preserve the nuclear firebreak. Especially since North Korea now has what amounts to a regional deterrent.”

  “So you’re giving them first use?”

  “Nuclear preemption doesn’t generate much enthusiasm here.” Roald added drily, “I don’t mind telling you we could use some help with this. Over.”

  “I don’t have much to offer, Captain. We already took out two of these things. If we could get a fix on this last boat, we could kill it ourselves. But it’s just not that easy in this sea state and these shitty water conditions. That’s what we’ve been fighting since day one. Uh, over.”

  “There’s also the possibility of… premature detonation.”

  Very delicately put, he thought. Aloud he said tightly, “We understand that, Captain. Actually, consider it probable, once attack begins. But the task group commander here, uh, accepts that outcome. Over.”

  She didn’t answer for a moment. “All right then… we weren’t sure that point was clear. So what’s his plan? I assume you’re setting up a barrier operation?”

  Dan said that was correct. The final barrier would be angled across the strait from Kanjolgap to the northern tip of Tsushima. The winds and seas were dropping and soon they’d have P-3Cs from ROKN Air Wing Six out of P’ohang. “That’s only about forty miles up the coast from Pusan, so we’ll have good availability on station. They won’t tell me much about their underwater surveillance grid, but it may give us low-frequency cross bearings. One ROKN Type 209 is stationing off the harbor entrance. As a last line of defense. Over.”

  “This is Cement Mixer; copy all. So give me the bottom line. We have to make decisions here. About initiating the time-phased force deployment to support 5027. If Pusan’s not going to be there when we arrive—”

  “I just can’t say which way it’ll go, Captain,” Dan told her. “If we can get a detection, we’ll attack. Our torpedoes don’t seem to be working too well, I’m not sure why, but we’ll fix bayonets and charge in. What happens after that… I’m sorry, ma’am, that’s the only input I can give from here. Over.”

  “Very well. If you can localize, call me,” Roald said. “Before the attack. Do you copy? The option’s still on the table for the single-warhead strike. And on the rest of it… good luck, Commander. If this doesn’t turn out well, I’ll tell your wife we had this conversation.”

  He said he copied, and she signed off.

  He replaced the handset, conscious of a new ache between his shoulder blades that cut through whatever the pills were doing. Fuck, fuck, fuck… He blinked at a chart labeled Korea Strait and Approaches to Pusan. It hadn’t been there when he’d picked up. Someone had taped it in front of him and he hadn’t even noticed.

  He pulled the Compaq over and pulled up a Nuclear Effects program he’d seen listed in the program files. When he got it to execute it looked as if it had been written for the now-retired UUM-44A rocket-propelled nuclear depth charge. The old SUBROC warhead was rated at 250 kilotons equivalent, with a horizontal kill radius against a typical submarine hull, at optimal detonation depth, of eight kilometers.

  So far, so good. But what the program rated as optimal burst depth was much deeper than two hundred meters. In fact, the menu didn’t even let him enter a detonation depth of less than a hundred fathoms. He wasn’t sure of the scaling effects, but when he reduced the “water depth” variable, the kill radius shrank drastically. Most of the energy went straight up into the air, not out into the water.

  In the end, he guesstimated that a twenty-megaton warhead in such shallow seas would have a lethal radius of only around five miles. Captain Roald hadn’t said what the retargeting time would be, but he figured it would be at least an hour. Add flight time to that, and even if they had it pinpointed, a sub stood a good chance of getting clear of the danger circle before the missile arrived.

  He swiveled in the chair, wincing as the twist ratcheted up his aches, and checked the relative wind readout. The second problem was that a twenty-megaton burst in shallow water would blow thousands of tons of radioactive mud and sand into the atmosphere. Faced with that, he’d be hard put to say which would be worse for the prospect of using Pusan as a port, a North Korean bomb or the American Minuteman.

  Along with the opprobrium of being the first to use nuclear weapons.
For the North would instantly deny any such thing had been aboard, and probably even that there’d been a sub there at all. They were already laying the groundwork for accusing the U.S. of illegally smuggling warheads in through Pusan.

  Not only would the crew of the last Romeo give up their lives, but they wouldn’t even get credit for their sacrifice.

  What could motivate such people? It couldn’t be just ideology. Especially when that ideology denied immortality or posthumous reward. The only thing he could come up with was that the regime had to be holding their families hostage. If you knew your parents, brothers and sisters, children, would die if you didn’t carry out orders—yeah, that’d put steel into your spine. He tried to imagine shirking an order if his daughter’s life hung in the balance.

  The frigate leaned and he braced himself without noticing. He rubbed his mouth, staring at the chart. It was out there somewhere, slipping through the storm-roiled sea. Its crew knowing they were nearing, mile by mile, the instant of their immolation.

  There had to be some answer. Some way out. There were too many horrors bearing down on them. If they could just stop this thing…

  He stared at nothing. His hand stopped moving. He blinked, trying to see whole what he’d just glimpsed.

  It might be an alternative. It might not.

  But there didn’t seem to be any other road that didn’t lead to the hell of nuclear war.

  A torrent of excited words burst from the Pritac circuit. The plotting team sprang to their feet. Lieutenant Kim, shaken awake by the chief, shot groggily to his feet, glared around, then swung to focus on the speaker. Even though it was in Korean, Dan understood. One of the ships ahead had made contact.

  So it was time.

  Time to see whether this last desperate scheme made any sense at all.

  19

  THE wind still whistled through antennas and around the corners of the pilothouse. But it no longer screamed. Bursts of rain lashed the huddled.50 crews slickered on the wing, and a party on the forecastle retrieving a firehose trailing over the side. The dark sky was still turbulent, the sea still lumpy with gray boulders; but the worst had passed, unless the storm decided to loop back—which he’d seen them do before. After two typhoons and a torpedo detonation close aboard, belowdecks was a shambles. The compartments stank of damp and mold. They were cluttered with loose gear and the sodden grains from the burst rice sacks. The crew had tracked them all over the ship. White and swollen, they looked like maggot larvae on the tile decks. On the bridge the off watch lay wedged into the corners, snoring. The on watch clung to repeaters and chart tables, pale, unshaven, tottering, hollow-eyed.