Korea Strait (35 page)

Dan saw the good news at once. The harbor entrance was narrow, just two kilometers wide, and only the main channel would be deep enough for a submerged sub. That choke point was six kilometers from the downtown area. The worst-case scenario, a nuclear detonation in the center of the city basin, seemed unlikely. One scuttled containership could block the channel. The city's population would lose all their window glass, and of course be subject to huge amounts of fallout from a subsurface burst. But most of them would probably survive the initial blast and flash of any weapon the North could build.

The bad news was that the container piers—according to the guidebook, Pusan handled 95 percent of Korea's containerized cargo—were much closer to the harbor entrance. If the container cranes went, Pusan would be useless for Allied logistical purposes. Since there was no other port with its capacity, all the North had to do was put it out of action, break through the DMZ, and strategically the war would be over. He found the one-hundred-meter line; it ran eight miles offshore.

He rubbed his face. So they just had to stop that sub, whichever one carried the warhead, from reaching Pusan.

At that moment a recently heard voice came over one of the overhead speakers. Dan thought for a moment he was hearing things. Jung and Hwang looked up, both frowning. Lieutenant Kim reached up for the handset. He said tentatively, “This is
Chung Nam.
Go ahead. Over.”

“Request to speak to Commander Lenson. The U.S. adviser.”

Jung beckoned impatiently for the handset.

“Station calling
Chung Nam:
This is Commodore Jiang Min Jun, Republic of Korea Navy. Lenson is a rider, not an adviser. Who is calling on this net? Over.”

“Uh, I know who that is,” Dan said, holding out his hand. Jung stared at him for a second, then handed over the phone.

“That is uncovered HF,” Lieutenant Kim warned.

“Yes, I understand.”

”Chung Nam, Chung Nam,
over.”

“This is ROKS
Chung Nam,
Dan Lenson here,” he said into the handset. “Hello, Andy.”

“Hello, Dan. How's those boots working out, classmate?”

It was Andy Mangum,
San Francisco's
CO. Dan couldn't help smiling. “Breaking them in even as we speak. How you doing? Didn't expect to hear from you again so soon. Over.”

“Well, somebody said you could use a hand. So we swapped ends and headed back. But we have to keep our name out of the papers. If you know what I mean. Over.”

Dan struggled between delight and rage. Jennifer Roald had come through. Not with an antisubmarine squadron, but with something almost as good, maybe in some ways better; a primed and loaded U.S. attack boat. On the other hand, Mangum's hint at orders to stay covert didn't warm his cockles. It meant the administration was still scared of ticking off the Chinese. Which was not a good sign, if actual war came down.

But someone had pushed a chip onto the table—they weren't going to just fold. “Where the hell are you? Over.”

Mangum gave him a lat-long position. Lieutenant Kim went to plot it, but it was off the paper, to the east. “We'll be with you pretty soon, though. We'd be breaking the speed limit on anything that wasn't an interstate. How's your situation? Over.”

“Did they tell you what these guys are toting? Over.”

“Yeah.” The distant voice fell a note. “They told me. Haven't put the word out to my guys here yet… but I probably will. Anyway. How many bogeys on your tote board?”

“We've never had a hard count. Our best guess is three. Over.”

“Whiskeys? Romeos?”

Dan looked at Jung. The commodore had lifted his chin, blinking tiredly as he listened to the exchange. “Romeos, we're pretty sure.
Tagged by Seoul as North Korean assets. Over. Oh, wait one… what's your Opcon? Is it 213.3? Over.”

“Negative. We're still chopped direct to Pearl.”

He didn't meet the commodore's eye.
San Fran
would be with the task group, but not of it. Taking her orders from SUBLANT, not Jung. Awkward. But they'd just have to manage. “Ah, copy that. In case we need to call you, what's your handle? And what freq will you be monitoring and when?”

“This is… call us Shockwave. Like that? I just thought of it. Over.”

“I like that a lot, Shockwave. Over.”

“And as far as comm availability, I can make better speed with the comm head down, okay? We'll check in when we're in UHF range. Over.”

”Chung Nam,
out.”

“Keep it in battery, classmate. Shockwave, out.”

Dan smiled at Jung. The commodore looked pensive. Relieved, perhaps, but still thoughtful. “That was
San Francisco.
She's on her way back to us.”

“Excellent,” said Hwang, almost dancing. “I knew America would not abandon us.”

Jung squinted, but said nothing. He seemed still to be considering how to react. Finally he too gave a faint smile.

Dan was putting the handset back when the deck under his feet heeled suddenly. Men grabbed consoles, tables, handholds. Loose gear slid and clattered. Phone talkers shouted. A moment later a thud bumped through the hull. It sounded as if something heavy, a sack of rice or maybe concrete mix, had been dropped somewhere aft.

Dan closed his eyes. In the flush of having one thing go their way, he'd forgotten how many other cards were stacked against them.

He was pretty sure what it was. Not a sack of mix, a butterfingered sailor.

It was the detonation of a distant torpedo, transmitted through ocean, through steel, through air, to their ears.

T
HE sea, the sky, were even darker now. The whirling tendrils reaching down were longer and more solid-looking. One dangled from a cloud's belly directly above the mast. It groped blindly, swaying, its wispy maw visibly spiraling. Dan barely glanced at it. His gaze followed a pointing finger from the 40mm crew.

Fine on the port bow, so far in the dimness it was all but lost, black smoke mushroomed against inky cloud. A red stream glimmered, then faded. Smoke rolled upward above a distant white bubble.

He cursed fate, cursed himself. If
San Francisco
had called in a few minutes earlier, he might have persuaded the commodore to pull his force off to let her make a pass. A Los Angeles-class had powerful active sonars, and they'd be below the mixing layer that was frustrating the surface units. She could've stood off, fired a spread of heavy Mark 48s into the wolf pack, and let them maraud. There was a good case for letting Mangum deal with the remaining North Koreans. Fewer lives would be at risk if the engagement went nuclear. They'd be American lives, not South Korean, but Dan didn't think he should be assigning them different values.

Instead, another ship had been hit. And now Jung was charging like a bull into the ring. He wasn't weaving, or zigzagging, or taking any other precautions. Yes, like a bull. But not into a ring. Into an abattoir.

With a droning roar a four-engined aircraft with an elongated tail like a dragonfly's emerged from the boiling clouds and banked toward the stricken frigate. It seemed to move more slowly than an aircraft
should. It must be fighting a fierce headwind. One after the other, three specks fell seaward. Parachutes bloomed. The specks hit the sea and the chutes collapsed. Sonobuoys, going down in a line. With the rising seas Dan doubted they'd pick up much. The P-3 banked in the opposite direction and merged with the overcast once more.

Down on the forecastle the mount suddenly broke from its immobility. A clanking came from it as it trained left, trained right, elevated, depressed. The sea hollowed beneath the bow, then bulged like a tensed biceps and broke over the forecastle. The crew on the forward 40 ducked, gripping their helmets, as it rained down on them. Immediately two ran out and began frantically cleaning an optical sight.

He took a deep breath of the cool dark air, sucked it all the way down, trying to douse the tension in his gut. He didn't want more men to die. More ships to burn. There were those who loved war. He wasn't one of them. But it seemed the only thing that had ever extinguished its flames, once they started, was overwhelming force. He didn't see to the bottom of it. Sometimes he wondered if he was in the right profession. But maybe it was better to be reluctant than eager. Though sometimes there was no choice, when evil attacked those who just wanted to live in peace.

Just as there seemed to be no way out of mutual annihilation now.

He turned from the lightless sky, and went below.

CIC was a roaring babble, and desperately hot. The temperature in the packed space, with all the consoles operating, had to be over a hundred degrees. Transmissions were streaming in over the overhead speakers, reports from the other ships and probably, or so he guessed from the background noise, from the P-3s too—two or three nets were going at once. It was all in Korean so he got hardly any of it, just occasional prowords like “banjo” and “madman.” He stood out of the way of the plotters' flying elbows, watching the attack develop on the flat white paper.

Henrickson, at his side. “Where you want me, boss?”

“Help the sonarmen if you can,” Dan told him. “How about O'Quinn? Where the fuck's Joe?”

“UB plot, I think.”

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!”