by Ian Slater
For Mayne, the Oval Office had always seemed too big for serious contemplation, no matter how cozy it looked in the narrow-focus television brought to it, hiding by omission the large area between the fireplace and the white leather lounges in front of the desk. The Secret Service thoroughly approved of the smaller room. For the men who protected him, the Oval Office, being on the southern corner of the west wing, was a much more vulnerable target for anyone who might penetrate the elaborate, yet mainly unseen, protective screen of heat and movement sensors that covered every sector of the grounds. The Secret Service had installed a rectangular titanium shell, sandwiched in the paneling of the study, making it even more secure. But above all, the president liked the room because he could darken it completely and keep the secret that only he, his wife, and Trainor shared. This morning he sat down with the Pentagon’s updated report of the North Korean invasion.
Early in his presidency Mayne had decreed that situation reports be as brief as possible, no more than two pages, double-spaced, a one-and-a-half-inch margin for his comments. Despite all the words put in his mouth by speech writers and advisers throughout the country, at heart he disliked any kind of verbosity. For Truman it had, as everyone knew, been “The Buck Stops Here” sign that greeted visitors; for Reagan, “It Can Be Done”; for Mayne it was “Get to the Point— Quickly!” He had long accepted the fact, so difficult for others to understand, that decisions from the White House, including those involving life and death, often had to be made without all the facts being in. All the facts in any given situation would take a lifetime to uncover, a luxury that only academics and “gunning for you” journalists could afford.
When he’d finished the first page of the Korea report, he pressed the button for his national security adviser, Harry Schuman, to come in, and kept reading with a growing sense of alarm. The most disturbing of the Pentagon’s “facts” was that if the American tanks could not hold the line and “substantial U.S. reserves” were not committed “immediately,” Korea could be lost within weeks — faster than it had taken Hitler’s Panzers to overrun Poland in ‘39. If this happened, warned the combined chiefs of staff, U.S. treaty obligations and guarantees throughout the world would be considered worthless, of no more use than Chamberlain’s piece of paper. And the temptation of the Soviet-Warsaw Pact nations in eastern Europe, particularly East Germany, pushing to reabsorb and effect the “reunification” of East and West Germany might prove irresistible. Mayne simply did not believe the latter; Moscow, no matter its posturing in the post-Gorbachev era, would not endorse such a move in the GDR. The Kremlin, as much as anyone else, wanted to avoid another war — conventional, nuclear, biochemical, whatever.
Harry Schuman, a bushy-eyebrowed southerner whom the White House staff called “Kentucky Fried,” entered the office, and wordlessly Mayne handed him the first sheet of the report as he continued pondering the second. The Pentagon in his view was overplaying the concern about NATO versus the Soviet-Warsaw Pact forces in Europe. But they were correct, he believed, about a victory for North Korea weakening confidence abroad, particularly right next door in Central America and in China, where Beijing coveted Taiwan as theirs because of all the mainland Chinese who had gone over with “Cash My Check” in ‘49 when the Kuomintang had fled the victorious Mao. Most of all, if there was any serious weakening of confidence in America in the Middle East, Iran would be “licking its chops,” as Trainor was apt to put it, and Israel, always surrounded, could be attacked yet again. And if Iraq used chemical weapons, as she’d done against Iran in the ‘79-’88 war, it could well spark a string of firecrackers from the Gulf to the Bering Strait. Mayne picked up the phone to Gen. Ernest Gray, head of the combined chiefs of staff. “General.”
“Mr. President?”
“Your people are telling me that if I don’t commit more forces to Korea immediately, we’re in serious trouble.”
“We’ll lose Korea, Mr. President.”
“The Koreans will lose it, Ernest. We’ll be kicked out.” Mayne felt uncomfortable with calling the general “Ernest”— didn’t sound right — yet “Ernie” invited a familiarity that he didn’t like to encourage with the military as their commander in chief. “What I want to know,” continued the president, “and this is no reflection on your colleagues, but — are we overreacting?” Mayne had seen the television shots of a few of the bridges going, but TV had a way of making a dormitory riot seem like a whole university was on fire when, as he remembered from his own days as a freshman, most students didn’t even know where the dorm was, let alone a riot.
“I support General Cahill’s decision to take out the bridges, sir,” said Gray. “I know it didn’t go down well on the six-o’clock news, but militarily speaking—”
“I have no problem with that, General — awful as it is — but your people worked overtime on the Hill to get more M-1 tanks in Europe so that we could spare several companies for Korea’s DMZ. The M-1s would be the ‘bulwark,’ you said — if I remember correctly — against any possible incursion by the North. Now we have the incursion and I’m not hearing anything about the ‘bulwark.’ “
“Ah, Mr. President — there’s a coded update coming in now. It might be—”
“Fine. Call me right back.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
At the Pentagon General Gray and his aides were in a quandary. On the one hand, to admit that the battle of tanks shaping up south of Uijongbu had not been decided was to admit the Pentagon might indeed have been overreacting about losing the peninsula. On the other hand, to paint too gloomy a picture would be to undermine confidence right down the line. What the Pentagon was really doing was hedging their bet — angling for reserves to be in place in the unlikely event that the M-1s could not hold the line.
The decoded message was reporting the attack on a guided missile frigate, the Blaine. This had already been noted from satellite photos, but when Gray rang the president back, he used it as ammunition for the Pentagon’s overall argument. “What we’re saying, Mr. President, is that the stakes, not just for the Koreans but for the United States, are enormous here. On top of Vietnam any hint of defeat in Korea could undercut confidence not only among our allies but in our, ah—”
“You mean my administration?” Mayne cut in.
“To put it bluntly, sir, yes.”
“Bluntly is what I get paid for, General, but I’ve been talking this over with Harry Schuman. The fact that we can’t hold so far with forty thousand U.S. troops and the ROK forces might be just as bad a signal to send. If confidence has been undermined, then it’s been undermined — I don’t want to send any more boys in there if we’re going to lose the place anyway.”
“All I can say, Mr. President, is that General Cahill and ROK command concur with the JCS assessment. It’s a very tenuous situation, sir.”
Harry Schuman scribbled a note and pushed it across the desk as Mayne asked General Gray what precisely had happened to American air cover. As he answered, Gray could tell from the echoing quality of his voice that the president had put him on “conference,” Harry Schuman sitting in. As far as Gray was concerned, Schuman should stay in his office in Foggy Bottom for all the help he was to the military. Always prevaricating.
“General,” put in Schuman, peering over his bifocals as they switched to visual conferencing, “it’s my understanding that we have the Seventh Fleet moving in off—” he turned to look at the stand map of Korea next to the president “—Pohang?”
“Yes, sir, but their planes aren’t in range yet for air cover over the Uijongbu corridor. In any case, we’ll have to clear the area of MiGs before our navy choppers and what few A-10s we have left can go tank hunting up there. And the point is, sir, no matter how much air cover we can provide, the battle’s ultimately going to be decided on the ground. Our tanks and theirs’ll be too close to—”
“All right, General. But keep me informed half-hourly. Sooner if necessary. Meanwhile I’ll authorize reinforcements from Japa
n. What I want to avoid right now is sending any troops from the United States. Everyone knows Japan’s our reserve base for Southeast Asia — so we can do that without causing undue panic.”
“Fine, Mr. President, but if you’ll permit me, sir, I need to know whether the reinforcements can be deployed immediately.” Mayne glanced across at Schuman to see if he had any advice.
“General,” put in Schuman, “it’ll be twenty-four hours before they reach Korea. I think it’d be a good idea to leave that question open for now.”
“Sir,” answered the general, “we’re going to need marines or airborne if we’re to secure a landing zone. NKA infiltrators have effectively cut off—”
“Pusan hasn’t fallen,” put in Mayne.
“No, sir, but it’s a long way south.”
“I know, two hundred and fifty miles,” answered Mayne.
“Bridges over the Naktong are cut, sir.”
Mayne nodded, glancing up from behind his desk at the large stand map of Korea. “Well, General, you people try to secure the airfields around Pusan. NKA can’t get across from Seoul very quickly. Cahill’s at least seen to that.”
General Gray stiffened, sensing an undercurrent of condemnation of Cahill’s action. “In any event,” continued the president, “you people have a lot of faith in the M-1s. They could still turn this thing around, couldn’t they?”
“Yes, sir, I think they will. I merely wanted to know about deployment of reserves in case—”
“Let’s see what Cahill’s armor can do south of Uijongbu first.”
“Very well, Mr. President.”
Mayne flicked the phone off “conference” and, his hands forming a cathedral, leaned back in the leather chair, looking thoughtfully across at Schuman. “What I want to know when this is over, Harry, is how the hell were so many North Korean agents allowed to infiltrate the South? My God, they’re blowing everything up left, right, and center.”
“They’ve had a lot of years to plan it, Mr. President.” Mayne’s cathedral collapsed. “Well, blame can wait. What we need now is for those tanks to stop the NKA dead in their tracks.”
Schuman was about to comment favorably on the pun but thought better of it.
* * *
Entering the Pentagon crises room, several of the Joint Chiefs’ aides noticed it had been freshly carpeted, golf-green. The military psychologists, Gray told them, had found that the old deep maroon tended to depress people. With Mayne and his defense cutbacks, there’d been enough of that. Besides, Gray had always kept a putting iron and one-hole mat in his office to unwind after the conferences. Used to look like hell on maroon. Several of the aides allowed themselves a smile at the general’s joke, but it was difficult to do with the wall map of Korea showing red arrows well below what had once been the DMZ.
When all the chiefs had arrived, Gray informed them that despite his conviction that the M-Is Cahill had unleashed from the revetment areas beyond Seoul would turn the battle, it would also be necessary to start moving the thirty thousand reserves across the Sea of Japan. It was a logistics problem that airlift alone, even if they’d had landing strips, could not solve. They would have to use troop ships.
“They’ve got no subs to speak of,” an aide said encouragingly.
“No,” interjected Admiral Horton, chief of naval operations. “They didn’t have any Nanuchkas either — until they attacked the Blaine.”
“Nor any Skimmers to speak of,” put in another aide. “That could be aiR-1aunched.”
“We’re not sure it was hit by an AS missile,” replied the admiral. “Could have been by one of those MiG-29s they didn’t have.”
There was a heavy silence, but Horton wasn’t about to back off from his criticism of Gray’s heavy reliance on the National Security Agency. With the same determination that the admiral had argued against putting out frigates as a naval group screen without air cover, he believed just as strongly that the military could not gather intelligence by electronic means alone. “What I don’t understand is how you people missed the MiGs. We’ve got a billion-dollar satellite up there that’s supposed to be able to read Pravda and you don’t see any fighters?”
“I doubt we missed them, Admiral,” replied the NSA representative, James Halpern. “My guess is they were probably ones we already know about but were flown down from Manchuria or across the Yellow Sea from Shanghai. Training’s probably done over southern China.”
“Probably won’t do it for us, Jim,” said the admiral. “You either know where they are or you don’t.”
There was another awkward silence. Gray moved to a more positive note. “At least we have the reserves to move. I didn’t think we’d get that much from the president, to be quite honest.”
“Why not?” asked Admiral Horton. His directness was unnerving to the other combined chiefs of staff. “He can do that. Problem is getting Congress to go along.”
“I don’t think there’ll be any problem there, Admiral,” General Gray assured him. “This isn’t a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It’s invasion, plain and simple.”
“Maybe, but I’ll sleep a lot better when I know your tank boys have stopped them, General.”
“So will I,” conceded Gray. “What about the Blaine?“ It was a little tit for tat.
“Blindsided,” replied the admiral. “The carrier Salt Lake City was in contact with her right up until she was hit. Another frigate is going to assist. If the Blaine’s still afloat.”
“You keeping Senator Leyland posted?”
“Yes. Soon as we know anything more definite, we’ll inform him.”
Later, after he was satisfied everything that could be done by the Pentagon was being done, General Gray rose, indicating the conference was over, but as they filed out he asked Air Force General Allet about the extent of the sabotage in South Korea against the airfields. Gray already knew the answer, but it was a pretext to get Allet off to the side. “Bill, we’ve been caught with our pants down on this one. Everyone here’s been so goddamned worried about Europe and the Mideast—” He paused.
“Point is, now we’re in it, we ought not to paint too rosy a picture about any short-term victory.”
William Allet looked up in surprise. “You mean you don’t think the M-1s can buy us the time we need?”
“Oh sure, they’ll knock the crap out of those damned tin cans. Point is, I think we need to give those North Korean bastards a lesson they won’t soon forget. Senator Leyland’s of the same mind.”
Allet nodded, but General Gray didn’t know whether that meant acquiescence or mere acknowledgment.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Brentwood heard the screams of men trapped in the tangled debris of the red-hot bulkhead, the jagged hole amidships causing the Blaine to heel dangerously to starboard as she reduced speed from flank speed of thirty-five knots to slow ahead at five, still taking water. He ordered the port side compartments flooded, trying to bring the frigate back onto an even keel, lifting the punched-in starboard side above the waterline. Over the sound of the men the Phalanx Gatling gun kept up its murderous fire, aided by the Blaine’s remaining helicopter attacking the retreating patrol boats as they sped southeast now that they’d crippled the American frigate.
The Blaine’s designers, sacrificing weight for high speed and greater maneuverability, had installed state-of-the-art electronics in the warship, but with its armor plate less than an inch thick, the result was a gaping wound in her side roughly twelve feet in diameter, fires raging inside the aluminum superstructure, reaching temperatures unheard of in the slower, heavier ships of old — the decks becoming so hot that fire hoses and the firefighters’ boots began to burn. Twenty-three men were killed outright by the explosion of the Exocet against the ship’s side, another nine dying from burns and hemorrhaging before the asbestos-clothed rescue crews could get anywhere near them. Four men simply disappeared at the point of impact. But by far the most damage was caused by the toxicity of the fumes as the ultramodern materials in the
superstructure, everything from tabletop plastics in the mess to plastic-coated wiring, melted, their deadly poisonous gases spreading in a hot fog throughout the ship, the Blaine’s position now visible on SATTNT photos as a white blob, so dense that normal infrared was having difficulty penetrating it. Some of the crew had time to don gas masks, but except in the more heavily armored and protected combat information center immediately below the bridge, the curling, tumbling smoke pouring through aisles and ventilation shafts of the ship killed another fifty of the crew. Within five minutes half the CIC watch became nauseated to the point they could no longer properly monitor the radars, which for the most part were either malfunctioning or useless anyway, the Exocet’s impact having severed communications within the gutted ship that was now moving ghostlike in the fog. Messages had to be sent by runners trying to circumnavigate the inferno in the belly of the ship, where white jets from the fire hoses crisscrossed, the water immediately vaporizing as it struck superheated metal.
The second missile, eight minutes after the first, hit her port rail, its high orange explosion erupting in front of the bridge, where Brentwood was issuing orders for damage control. The fireball enveloped the bridge, sections of the bulletproof glass bulging like some grotesque metallic monster, the sudden heat driving the exploding glass into the bridge, molten shards instantly killing the helmsman and decapitating the OOD. Brentwood saw a blinding white slab, his body crashing into the deck, hands pressing hard against his face, his fingers awash with the warm blood, the second officer, his clothes lacerated, his left arm shattered, eyebrows burned, stumbling, grabbing the battery-operated megaphone, yelling at Brentwood that they should “abandon ship.”
“Very—” began Brentwood. He nodded and blacked out, his face appearing to the second officer as if parts of it had melted, flaps of skin dangling loosely from what had been a face. Hearing the order to abandon ship, the tactical warfare officer one deck below in CIC inserted the key, opening the Clark Meyhew automatic destruct charge, setting the fuse on the Mark II decoder for fifteen minutes.