Korea Strait (30 page)

But the men over there had firemain pressure. They still had power. If they could get the fire out before it set off the ready ordnance, get the engine room dewatered and the bulkheads shored up, they might have a chance of keeping her afloat.

Reluctantly, he turned away.

Back in CIC Yu and Jung were screaming at each other. Or at least the little skipper was screaming. Junior officers and men stood frozen, gazes averted from their seniors. “What's going on?” he muttered to Hwang, who was standing as far from the altercation as he could get.

“Captain Yu wants to stop and lower the whaleboat. Take over firefighting supplies. Commodore has refused permission.”

They didn't need him in that decision, but Dan hoped they got it settled soon. Dawdling around here, outlined by the flames, was as dangerous a position as he could well imagine if whoever had torpedoed the PCC was hanging around. But just then Yu swung away,
face flushed nearly black. He shoved an enlisted man out of the way and stormed out.

Jung cleared his throat and passed a hand over his hair. He turned back to the plot. No one said anything, and after a moment he observed hoarsely, for some reason in English, “We cannot linger here. We will send a message to Seoul reporting the loss and requesting them to send assistance. Commander Hwang, see to that.”

”Yae, jeon daejang mm.”

“We're too far out for helicopters. They will have to send fishing craft. Send the position twice. Make absolutely sure they record it correctly.”

The chief of staff aye-aye'd again and Jung turned back to the DRT, eyes narrowed to X-Acto cuts. The turbines speeded up again. The heading indicator began to spin. Bending over the paper, Dan saw that
Kim Chon
was fifteen thousand yards distant and headed southwest. The trace showed she still held contact, though not with which sub.

The teleprinter chattered. Jung took the flimsy, lips compressed. Dan studied him, his emotions a mess. The guy had just sacrificed another ship to protect his flagship. Then left its men to the sea, and all without a word of regret or any indication, really, that he even rued having had to do it. Maybe it was tactically justified, but it took an iron will to condemn others to die. He'd had to, once or twice, and he still wondered, deep in the night, if he could've been smarter, have saved them somehow

He looked across the space as O'Quinn came in. No doubt he had nightmares too, about the guys he'd welded that hatch down on.

The trace showed
Chung Nam
steering southwest. At flank speed, judging by the vibration. He remembered the patched hull and hoped the concrete held. “Where's
Chang Bo Go?”
he asked the chief, who shrugged.

“Still at depth,” Jung said.

“Unless she's been torpedoed too.”

Dan took a deep breath, hoping not. But what he didn't understand was why the 209 hadn't taken out the hostile after it had fired on
Mok Po.
She'd been shadowing. She'd reported the outer doors opening. But hadn't fired. He wondered what the last teleprinter message said, and who it was from, but Jung had already folded it
and stuck it into his breast pocket and buttoned it in, and it wasn't Dan's place to demand to see.

“We can't let these guys get away scot-free,” he suggested.

“I'm warning them one last time to surface. Then I attack without making distinctions,” Jung said. He spoke to Kim, and the lieutenant pulled down the handset.

They had it in hand, so Dan tried to back off. Look at it with some distance. This group, Chinese probably, had committed an act of war. Since they still weren't identifying, and were obviously operating together, Jung was fully justified in carrying out as savage an attack as he could with the remaining forces at his disposal.

Which over the next half hour he proceeded to do. With
Kim Chon
holding contact one thousand yards astern of her unknown, he assigned Captain Yu to conduct a deliberate attack from abeam. Dan cautioned that they might encounter wake homers. Jung said brusquely he'd reached that conclusion too. He sent a message to their own sub to stand clear. Kim called their target one last time on the underwater phone, but again, got not a syllable in response.

This time two torpedoes hit the water eight hundred yards to port of the contact. The shock when they went off, one after the other, rattled the frames.

“Target is breaking up,” Hwang translated the sonarmen's report. “They're putting it on the loudspeaker.”

The space went quiet. Men listened to the distant, reverberating crunch of imploding bulkheads. Then more explosions. And last, an eerie, ululating whine that faded slowly as the hulk sank away into eight hundred fathoms of dark sea.

The teleprinter broke the silence with its zipping rattle. This time Jung shared the message.
”Chang Bo Go
reports unable to fire torpedoes,” he said. “Fault in the fire control system arming logic. They're trying to set up a manual workaround.”

“So they tried to fire?”

“Apparently so.”

Dan thought that over. Not encouraging. Understandable; after all, they were still on their delivery trials, not only of a new boat but of a new class. But still not good news, that a third of their remaining force, and the only sub, couldn't pull the trigger. “What about contacts? Do they have any?”

The commodore shook his head. This was bad too. It meant there were three subs down there slipping through the deep, aware now they were being hunted.

Jung slouched with hands in his pockets, looking into the trace as if into a screen that foretold the future. His face was like a sagging, blotchy rubber mask. Dan checked his watch. Nearly dawn. He needed coffee, but didn't dare leave. If they picked up another contact, or got another torpedo warning, things would move very fast indeed.

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.