Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  Erect in his elevated chair, Yu didn’t respond to Dan’s salute. Lenson cleared his throat and tried again. ”An neong ha sim ni ka, Ham Jang mm.”

  ”An neong ha si yo, jung-ryung Renson.” The little captain’s voice was rusty, his slitted glance poisonous, but Dan noted he’d gained the honorific of being addressed by his Korean rank. “You survive injury. Congratulation.”

  “Thank you, sir. So has Chung Nam.”

  ”Aniya, she has.”

  They discussed the turbines for a few minutes. They didn’t share a technical vocabulary, but Dan gathered that Yu didn’t have much hope they’d be back on line before a major yard availability. “Have you seen the commodore, sir?”

  “I believe he’s in cabin.”

  ”Kam sa, ham ni da, Ham Jang nim.”

  The little skipper bowed gravely in his chair, then went back to contemplating the onrushing sea.

  TAPPING at Jung’s cabin, Dan caught a clicking from within. But though he listened it wasn’t repeated. A moment later the door was opened by Jung’s noiseless young steward. He stared at Dan’s coveralls, then bowed him in.

  Jung lay prone on his bed, naked on a plastic sheet. The steward resumed what he’d been doing, which was giving him a massage. Brown skin gleamed with oil. Buttocks glowed like pale moons in the dim room. Jung had moles elsewhere than on his face, Dan noted. Bruises as well—he’d been tossed around too in the last few days. The attendant began slapping the commodore’s back with cupped hands. That was what he’d heard out in the passageway.

  “Yeah,” came a muffled voice, facedown in the mattress.

  “Sir, it’s Lenson.”

  “What do you have, Dan? We’ve got a detection. We’ll be going in to attack in about an hour.” The steward/masseur eyed Dan as he kneaded the senior officer’s thighs. “I don’t expect we’ll see our families again. But you have time to send a message.”

  “Sir, I’d like to run an idea past you. Rather than just charging in there and jumping on their… backs.”

  Jung didn’t respond for a second. Then he rolled over and sat up. Dan averted his gaze. The steward handed the commodore a towel. Jung looked desperately fatigued as he waved the man away. His voice dragged as he muttered, “I know about the offer to preempt. I’ve advised Seoul against it. We’re too close to populated areas.”

  “It’s not that, sir. Though I think that’s the right decision. Something else occurred to me.”

  Jung looked only faintly interested, as if he’d already resigned himself to immolation. “Well, sit down, let’s hear it.”

  Dan perched on the settee and tried to organize his thoughts. “Uh—okay. The crux here is that we seem to be able to detect and localize, even track this last guy without eliciting a reaction. Okay? We’ve done it, we’ve tracked him. He avoids us when he can. But when he can’t, we can ping on him all we like. He’ll maneuver to evade, if it doesn’t take him too far off his base course, but he always keeps going. He took a potshot at us when he popped up his scope and there we were, but overall he’s oriented to his mission, not to taking out naval units. With me so far?”

  Jung nodded, looking annoyed, as if he’d been through all this and didn’t need to be told again. Dan hurried on. “Now we’d have to coordinate pretty tightly to get this idea to work. It’d be risky too.”

  “There are no options left without risk.”

  “You’ve got that right, sir.” But then he forgot what he was going to say and had to cough into his fist and search for it. They were all so fucking exhausted…. He coughed again and it came back to him. “Yeah. Anyway, we can’t attack. If we do, the crew’ll set the bomb off. They won’t make Pusan, but they’ll take us out, the task group, and hand Pyongyang a propaganda bonanza to boot. Bandit South Korea allows evil U.S. to import nukes, only somebody made a mistake and one went off.”

  “But we have to attack him,” Jung pointed out, scratching a broad chest bare of hair. “There’s no other choice. Otherwise he goes into the harbor and detonates. And even at that, they still can claim it was one of your nuclear weapons.”

  “With all due respect, sir, that’s not precisely correct. About the propaganda thing—yeah. You’re right. But about attacking—we don’t have to fire on him. We don’t have to sink this guy.”

  “What? Of course we do.”

  “No sir, actually, we don’t. I thought so too, at first. But all we’ve really, absolutely got to do is keep him from reaching his target.”

  He gave Jung a beat to mull that over, then continued. “His mission’s to destroy the port. Right? But if he—let’s say for example, he can’t make headway. What happens? The prevailing current in the Strait’s northerly. So it carries him back north, away from Pusan. Not very fast, but that’s what it’ll do. Correct?”

  “That’s right. About the current.” Jung frowned. “So you’re proposing we… tell me again what you’re proposing.”

  “Sir, I’m just tossing the idea out. I’m not sure how we’d go about implementing it. All I’m saying is, if we don’t attack this guy, he might not. But if we blind him somehow, or cripple him so he can’t make way, he can’t accomplish his mission. What happens if they can’t accomplish their mission, these special ops types? Do you have any insight into that?”

  While Jung considered, Dan checked his watch. He’d used up six minutes so far of what otherwise would be his last hour alive. Once they got to the datum, Jung would unleash a coordinated attack. He’d use all his ships: the probability of kill was too low otherwise. And the sea would erupt, not with the mild detonations of Mark 46s, but with something only a few living had ever seen: the unimaginable rage of a nuclear detonation.

  Somehow he’d survived one nuclear burst. He’d never make it through another. Not as close in as they’d have to be to attack. His own life—well, he didn’t want to lose it, but after coming so close so many times, he didn’t fear death as much as he once had. But the hundreds of young sailors in the task force—he wished he could find a way they didn’t have to be vaporized, burned, torn apart, or to die of radiation or cancer.

  “All right,” Jung said at last. “I think I see where you’re going. If we could disable this last Romeo, then you’re saying, what? He might not detonate?”

  “Well, he probably still would. But at the very least we could leave just one unit to track him, and clear the rest outside the danger area.”

  “Of course Chung Nam would be the one to remain,” Jung said. “It is the flagship. It is also already damaged.”

  “I’d expect nothing less, yes sir,” Dan said. Their gazes met.

  “But how to cripple this submarine. Have you thought about that? Mark 46s, warheads set on safe?”

  “No. They’d still think they were being attacked.”

  “Then how?”

  Unfortunately this was where Dan had run out of bright ideas. “I’m not really clear on that point yet, Commodore. It’d have to happen so quickly they couldn’t react. Or so quietly they wouldn’t figure out what was going on until they were dead in the water.”

  Jung rubbed a trickle of oil, or maybe sweat, off his chin. Back in an adjoining room his attendant was crooning a Korean song. “Which would be—how?”

  “Like I said, sir, not clear on that yet. I thought I’d ask one of my men who’s an ex-submariner.”

  Jung stood. He grabbed the towel as it fell and started wiping off the oil. He snapped orders to the steward, and the shower came on. Jung padded toward it on fat bare feet, leaving oily prints on the carpet. Then turned back. “I will have Hwang convene my officers as well. I hope one of us will come up with something useful.”

  “Yes sir,” Dan said. Looking past Jung into his bedroom, he saw, laid out ready to put on, a spotless white dress uniform. With medals, not ribbons. The kind of uniform you got married in. Or buried in, if you wanted a military funeral.

  “Otherwise,” said Jung, “I will attack as soon as we are in position.”

  ON the brid
ge again, and still raining. No one in the pilothouse said anything. They looked lost in thought. Someone was praying or cursing under his breath in the chartroom. Dan pulled sweat off his forehead and gripped the Pritac handset tighter. Every second he had to wait seemed like an hour. But every time he looked at his watch, the minute hand had gone too far, too fast.

  “Carpenter here, sir.” The usually breezy voice sounded anxious.

  “Rit, that you?”

  “Mr. Lenson? Commander? Yes sir, I’m here.”

  Dan hadn’t seen Carpenter since the incident at the cemetery. He’d been aboard Mok Po through the second storm and the running battle down the Strait. Despite everything that’d happened since, Dan still felt a snap of anger. He tried to keep it out of his tone. “Rit, you doing okay over there? How’s the food?”

  “Not bad, sir. Doing okay. Over.” A pause, then he said, “I feel like I still owe you another apology, though.”

  “Not me, Rit. You didn’t offend me. The insult was to the guys in that cemetery.”

  “Well, any of them’d probably have just cheered me on.”

  Dan thought that was probably both true and totally beside the point. He bit back at least three possible replies and said, “Never mind that now. Got a tactical question. Put on your bubblehead hat.”

  “Never took it off. Over.”

  He explained how he saw the situation, and what he and Jung wanted to do. When he finished, Carpenter didn’t respond for a couple seconds. When he came back he sounded thoughtful. “I’ve done some figuring myself over the last couple days.”

  Dan coughed into his fist. Whatever he and O’Quinn had inhaled down there, his lungs didn’t like it. “Anything useful?”

  “Well, this last Romeo. You either want to blind him, which means take out the scope, or the sonar—right? Or better yet, both?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Or else disable the motors. Let’s take blinding him first. I don’t see how you could do it without him sticking the scope up first. I don’t see him doing that. Deafen him? Blow his sonar? No way I know of to do that.”

  “Roger that. Over,” Dan said. He got a better grip on the handset. For some reason the plastic was slippery wet. “Okay, uh, so that’s out. How about disabling his propulsion?”

  “Uh, well, we’re talking about pretty well-shielded electric motors. Some kind of really huge electromagnetic pulse might burn out the armature. I read something about that in Popular Science a couple years ago. But we don’t have anything like that, that I know of.”

  “Me either, Rit.” He felt his heart sinking. Well, he’d tried. “Just thought I’d raid your brain on it. See if I was missing anything. Over.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help. Or—wait a minute. Wait a minute.”

  He waited.

  “Just occurred to me. Maybe it’s stupid.”

  “Try me.”

  “It was back when I was on the… well, never mind that. We were up in Russian waters. Bird-dogging one of the new Alphas. Couple of hundred yards behind them, right in their baffles. They never knew we were there. But when we broke away a destroyer picked us up. They were holding us down. Anyway, they grabbed a trawler that was going by. Got them to try to drag their nets across us. Never got anywhere close, of course. Every time he stood on, the skipper’d nudge the rudder over a little and we’d sidestep out of the way. You could actually hear that net coming through the water at you. I was on the set at the time, that’s how I know.”

  “They seriously think they could catch you in a net?”

  “Well, it’s happened before. Boats had to tow the fishermen around till the net broke. Just lucky it didn’t wrap up in the screw.”

  Dan rubbed his mouth. The net idea obviously wouldn’t work, but something in Carpenter’s suggestion intrigued him. It brought to mind an Arctic night years before, when his very first ship had managed to hit a submerged sub with an experimental towed sonar.

  He cleared his throat, trying to blank out what that recollection led to. “So what if a net, or something, did get fouled in the screw?”

  “Well, I don’t know, sir—most diesel boats have net cutters. Or used to.”

  “You think these guys would?”

  “I honestly don’t know that, Commander.”

  Dan tried to call to mind the Sang-o’s stern, or what he’d glimpsed of it on the way forward from where he and his Korean diver buddy had caught their first look at it. He seemed to recall some sort of cagelike structure around the screw, but he didn’t think it had been a cutter. And the Romeos were a different class, so their arrangements could be quite different from those of the smaller design.

  Hwang came on the bridge, nodded to him. Dan ducked his head back. The chief of staff was in spotless pressed khakis. He looked shaken but resigned. Dan blocked him out and turned to look to starboard. The sea was rough and a strange color, a dismal, almost rusty gray. Far away, where the squall was wearing thin, he could just make out a flat shadow that might be land.

  “Anyway,” Carpenter’s distant voice buzzed on, “what would you use out here? We don’t have any nets. Or any trawlers.”

  Dan had been trying to think of something, but so far couldn’t. Modern ships didn’t carry much in the way of heavy line. Chain cable, anchor cable, was too heavy. Mooring line might do it, but generally you didn’t haul around a heck of a lot even of that. If Chung Nam carried two hundred yards he’d be surprised. But to seriously try to foul the screw of a submerged submarine, they’d need more.

  A lot more, trailed from every remaining ship in the task force. Crisscrossing their quarry’s track till one happened to get sucked into the propeller. He pulled a sheet of used paper toward him and scribbled equations. The probabilities looked low. Too low. “Shit,” he muttered, crumpling the paper and checking his watch again.

  Twenty minutes left. “Well, thanks for the suggestion, Rit. It was just a thought. A coordinated attack looks like the best bet. Who knows, we might get lucky. If we don’t see each other again—”

  Carpenter said again that he was sorry about the girl. “But I gotta level with you, Commander, I never regretted a minute of it.”

  “I bet you didn’t.”

  “See you on the flip side, boss. One way or the other.”

  Dan signed off and turned away. But the tile deck was slick with rice slurry and wet paper, and as the frigate rolled, his foot went the wrong way. He lurched for a handhold but just then something occurred to him. He missed his grab, and his head slammed into a repeater in a flash of pain.

  “You all right?” said Hwang, helping him up. “You hit that thing pretty hard.”

  Dan didn’t answer. He was still going over it—the thing that’d caught him, the image, just before he went down.

  “We need to get hold of San Francisco,” he told the chief of staff. “She’s still in company, isn’t she?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “Get her on the horn. I need to talk to her captain.”

  20

  HE hated waiting more than anything. And they’d been waiting for two hours now, to learn whether they’d live or die. The first keenness had worn dull, reminding him of the old saying about hours of boredom and seconds of terror. You couldn’t sustain mortal dread for long. On the other hand, you couldn’t be bored when you didn’t know which second would be your last. He flipped the pencil again, not caring when Henrickson, beside him, winced.

  He was in the sonar shack, a spare set of headphones clamped to his temples. He’d talked to Mangum again on the Pritac, and explained their proposal. San Francisco’s skipper had thought it over. Then said, “We’re quiet. But I’m not sure we’re that quiet. Sounds high-risk to me, classmate.”

  “There isn’t any other way, Andy. I know it’s a gamble. But this isn’t a peacetime operation anymore.”

  “Let me just shoot him. Get up so close he can’t react and—no, fuck it, we’ve got that long run built in before the 48 arms.”

 
“He’d hear it coming. And push the button.”

  “Right… Let me talk it over with my guys here. See what I haven’t thought of.”

  Dan had waited some more, the seconds creeping like drugged snails, till the sub’s CO came back on. “Consensus here’s that if we close fast from his baffle area, then pull out, pass down his side at close range, and cross his bow, we might just manage to wrap our array around his screw.”

  Mangum didn’t sound eager to try it, and Dan bared his teeth considering the maneuver. It was breathtaking, all right. It would take split-second timing.

  Shadowing foreign submarines, getting their sonar signatures and observing their tactics, was one of the Silent Service’s least-talked-about coups. But he hadn’t considered the towed sonar array. The 688s deployed it from the tip of one of the stern planes, he couldn’t recall which one, so it didn’t foul the boat’s own screw. The arrays were super durable. They had to be, to take the strain of being towed through the water. Getting one in a Romeo’s blades would probably wreck not just the prop but whatever gearing was engaged too.

  But passing down the other boat’s side, then crossing in front of her to drag the array into her—that would take balls an order of magnitude bigger than he’d imagined his old classmate carried.

  Mangum went on, “You might as well know we’ve been tracking him for the last day, by the way. Picking up what we can by listening. At the moment he’s running shallow and noisy. We figure damage from snorkeling in those heavy seas. He’s making about seven knots. So we’re going to total quieting, and go in and give this a try.”