Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  “That’s all we’re asking here, Andy. One shot.”

  “Come in quiet from astern, then apply full power and blow by him.”

  “Got it.”

  “One thing, though: even if he snaps off a fish at us as we cross his bow, we’re gonna need everybody else to hold fire. We can probably fox what he’s carrying. But we absolutely cannot have you guys start splashing torpedoes while we’re in the same cubic. Jung’s got to promise us that. In writing, by message.”

  “Message will go out to you—”

  “Not to me. Make it to SUBPAC. Just to cover us if this goes to shit and we don’t come back.”

  Dan understood. Even if you didn’t plan to come back from a mission, you got paper to cover it. At the very least you wouldn’t go down in history as a total fuckup. Things like that were important to Annapolis guys. You could argue it as a plus or a minus. But when you looked at the record of the place over 150 years, you found a hell of a lot of heroes, not many incompetents, and no cowards or traitors at all. Not a bad record, all things considered.

  And now he sat in Sonar, headphones tourniqueting his ears, trying to decode what sounded like a subway train running under miles of fiberglass insulation. Guided in on the contact by the detecting ship, the chief sonarman had managed to lock onto the Romeo. Dan had asked about San Fran, but got only a preoccupied shake of the head. This seemed like a good sign. The enemy sub was at 015 relative. Yu was keeping the contact on the frigate’s bow, maintaining a constant bearing and range. Cheju was on the target’s starboard quarter. Kim Chon lagged a mile astern, since her fuel state was even worse than the flagship’s.

  Which was bad enough; they were below 10 percent now. He expected any minute to hear the diesels falter as they sucked sludge. He just hoped whatever they had in the bunkers, it was high-quality stuff. Of course, if the engines failed, Jung couldn’t attack. Which meant they might not die.

  But at this point in the game, worrying about his own life seemed rather beside the point.

  The sonarmen suddenly leaned into their displays. He frowned at them too, blinking through burning eyes. Nothing he could see, or hear. The subway clattered and roared in his ears. But the techs were pointing at spokes of light, talking a mile a minute. He pulled a hand down his face. It came off dripping. Surely they’d do more than murmur and point if it was a torpedo approaching.

  But then he saw it: a momentarily brighter shimmer in the dance of light. ”Er rae da! Bhang hyang Kong Saet Dasut!” the chief shouted. “Torpedo! Bearing zero-three-five!”

  Dan jumped up instantly and rushed through the curtain. He found the ASW officer bent over the relit and apparently repaired DRT, so intent he didn’t react the first time he was addressed. When he looked up Dan grabbed his arm. “Remember, we don’t fire. We don’t fire! Those are the commodore’s orders.”

  Kim’s gaze slid past him, over his shoulder. “I take my orders from captain,” the lieutenant muttered.

  Dan turned, feeling suddenly threatened.

  Yu stood in the doorway, for once without a cigarette. He looked wrecked and ghostly. Their eyes met, and Dan felt the world rock. His mind instantly outlined a whole downstream scenario from the captain countermanding Jung, ordering Kim to fire instead. But he couldn’t let them put weapons in the water while Mangum was inside the kill envelope. A torpedo couldn’t tell the difference between U.S. hull steel and North Korean.

  But it wasn’t his ship. Nor even his navy… still, he just couldn’t… the conflicting demands shorted out his mind, leaving it null, like a sine wave canceled by a mirror-image signal. He wavered, one arm half raised.

  Yu blinked at him, then came forward. He put his finger on the just-drawn noise spoke. ”Bhang hyang?”he asked Kim.

  “The direction? Not fired at us, Captain.” The ASW officer must have been thinking along the same lines, because he cut his eyes at Dan and answered in English.

  “Stand by to fire.”

  “We are standing by, Captain.”

  Yu met his eyes again. Dan said in a low voice, ”San Francisco will pop up and radio when she’s clear.” Trying as unchallengingly as he could to remind the guy that the U.S. boat was still down there.

  “That was Romeo firing on your submarine?”

  Dan was about to answer when Korean spluttered like a lit fuze behind the curtain. Kim bent forward as the plotters lunged in, jotting like madmen.

  “What is it?” he muttered. The lieutenant didn’t answer. Dan felt like shaking it out of him, but got a grip and forced himself to step back. This was their action. Their ship. He had to let them handle it. The not-so-funny thing was that doing that was harder than anything he’d ever had to do as a skipper himself.

  Henrickson, at his elbow. He said in a low voice, “Dan? Machinery noises.”

  “What kind of noises? From the Romeo, you mean?”

  “We’re not sure from who. Or what they are. Just… transients.”

  A “transient” was a onetime sound, rather than the tonals or continuing frequencies pumps or motors put in the water. A slamming hatch was a transient. Ejected garbage was a transient. But telling one from the other, or interpreting a particular burst of noise, took hundreds of hours of training. “So what is it?” Dan asked, knowing he probably wasn’t going to get much of an answer. And he didn’t; the analyst just shrugged.

  The plot now showed a high-rpm contact headed east. Dan figured this was Mangum. The bearing of the torpedo sounds swung after it with each successive plot. And each successive plot showed more white space between the points. Andy was putting the pedal to the metal. Jamming every ounce of nuclear-generated steam he had into his turbines.

  Dan gripped the DRT like a pinball wizard, praying they had enough of a head start. No matter what your top speed was, seven thousand tons of submarine took time to accelerate. He stepped back, tried to breathe out the tension, but it didn’t ease, not even a little. He didn’t want to think about how he’d feel if Andy and the men of SSN-711 didn’t come back because of his harebrained idea.

  On the other hand… the bomb hadn’t gone off yet.

  Of course it still could, any second. Looking at the plot, he saw no one had bothered to sketch in a danger circle for a nuclear burst. They were all inside it anyway. Though the way she was pushing it now, in excess of thirty-five knots, San Fran might be nearing its edge.

  A shout from Sonar. Henrickson ducked out again. “Torpedo sounds ceased.”

  “Christ,” Dan muttered, prying his fingers off the tracer. He caught Kim’s tentative grin and tried to smile back. At least the eighty guys his classmate commanded were still safe. For now.

  The next time he looked at the plot something seemed out of place. He had to lean closer, follow the plotter’s tapping finger, before he saw it.

  The red pencil-dots that denoted the Romeo were being drawn in at progressively closer intervals.

  The plastic arm of the parallel rule reached out. Pencils flashed, and another dot lay even closer. Displaced slightly to port, as if their enemy had his rudder over. But at very low speed indeed.

  Henrickson, reporting again. “No screw noises from contact. Mechanical transients continue.”

  Dan took a deep breath. Held it, and let it out. Waiting from breath to breath to be destroyed. Offering himself up to whatever had sustained him this long, brought him through so many trials. He’d never been able to define exactly what it was. Only that it was there. Because now and then, in the extremity of need, he’d felt it beside him, closer than any person could ever be.

  The plotters leaned forward again.

  And seconds later, again.

  Now the red dots lay nearly atop each other. The transients kept coming. After a few minutes he moved unwilling limbs and went in to hear for himself. Even with headphones clamped tight and the gain all the way up, the sounds were very faint. Distant metallic scrapes. A dull recurrent pounding, like a cracked bell tolling deep underwater.

  He went back out an
d stood beside Yu, hanging off a handhold on one of the intercoms like a brachiating chimp. Hwang had come in while Dan was behind the curtain. They stood together, not saying anything.

  Yu asked the chief of staff something in a harsh voice. Hwang shook his head slowly. Dan could interpret that. The next order, to Kim, was easy to guess too. The plotters kept working, but traded uneasy looks. The tae wi spoke into his sound-powered mike as if sipping something bitter. Dan looked up to see the heading indicator start to spin.

  Chung Nam was coming right. Headed for the motionless target. The beat of the diesels picked up through the steel around them.

  They were going in for the kill.

  Then another shout came from Sonar. Yu’s head snapped up. He hesitated, then rapped out an order. The ASW officer instantly passed it on.

  Dan couldn’t take it anymore. He cleared his throat and when Yu looked up said, hearing his voice rasp higher-pitched than he’d expected, “What’s going on, Captain?”

  Yu let him hang for a second, then said, “It is sound of blowing tanks. Our dangerous friend has decided to surface.”

  DAN stood gripping the starboard splinter shield, staring across half a mile of crumpled sea the color of forged iron at a presence he’d never expected to even glimpse. The conning tower tolled in a pen-dulumlike roll. The sky was still threatening but it wasn’t raining, at least at the moment. With the binoculars he’d snatched from the lookout he saw figures at the top of the sail, below the vertical cylinders of scopes and masts. They looked busy over there. As he watched, a large ensign unfurled, snapping in the wind. It was red and white and blue. It occurred to him only then that he didn’t know what North Korean colors were. Shouldn’t they be all red, like the Chinese? He set his elbows and tried to steady the field of view, but all he could say in the end was that they definitely weren’t Chinese colors. A relief, after all, to finally be certain.

  Jung stood contemplative beside him. Dan handed over the glasses without a word. The commodore balanced them on the tips of his fingers. Below, on the main deck, the torpedo tubes were trained outboard. The crewmen stood a few feet off, carefully clear of the firing bearing, staring in the same direction.

  At last Jung said, “Well.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now what?”

  Dan looked across again. Yu was on a closing course, but at a low speed. Chung Nam barely had steerageway on. He craned aft; caught another escort on the horizon, gray as the clouds. And to the east, more visible now, the sooty bleak mountains of what the chart called the Kyongsangnam-Do. Not far past them the headlands of Pu-san would reach seaward. It had been a damned close-run thing.

  And it still wasn’t over. A clacking from above reminded him of that. He looked up to see a signalman working a light. Jung handed a penciled note to Hwang, who wheeled and ran it up the ladder. He held it against the wind as the signalman looked it over, adjusting his signal lamp. Then swung it to point at the sub and grasped the handle. The shutter began batting rapidly, sounding like an old typewriter.

  “No common frequency?” Dan asked Jung.

  “We don’t communicate. Or, I should say—the only way I’ve communicated with them up to now is with shells.” Jung lowered the glasses and scowled. “I don’t believe they are interested in talking. Perhaps not even capable of it anymore. These people are not quite human. They are robots, programmed with lies until their minds don’t work in normal ways.”

  Dan thought about that. This wasn’t the urbane, tolerant Jung he’d seen up to now. “So, uh—are these navy? Or special ops?”

  “I don’t believe there’s much difference. To tell the truth.”

  Dan looked at the signalman, who’d abruptly stopped transmitting and was studying the conning tower through a massive pair of stand-mounted binoculars. “What are you sending?”

  “A demand to surrender.”

  “Then what?”

  “If they refuse, we destroy them.”

  Dan rubbed his face, trying to find something to say to that. Nothing came.

  A dazzling pinprick ignited against black-painted steel, like a distant welding arc. He could read flashing light, not at a signalman’s speed, but he could decipher it. But this was in Korean and he quickly gave up. Instead he accepted the binoculars one of the bridge crew handed him and leaned on the shield, checking the enemy out again as Chung Nam slowly closed over the ragged gray waves.

  She didn’t seem to have any way on at all. He didn’t see the white kick of turbulence at her stern. The heavy, slow way she rolled, tilting drunkenly this way, then that, argued she’d lost power too. He saw no evidence of damage along the hull, though. It was smooth, both boxy and subtly streamlined, except for huge freeing ports. It looked very much like an old U.S. Guppy boat, except for a narrow upward projection of the periscope housing that he vaguely remembered was necessary because of the poor quality of Soviet optics. Another finned projection jutted from the bow; he called it as a sonar transducer.

  Now he saw a second group busy on the after surface of the sail. They swung something up and steadied it. An automatic gun of some kind.

  Jung looked up from the form the signalman’s runner had brought down. Dan raised his eyebrows but the commodore didn’t explain, just went into a long to-and-fro with Hwang. The chief of staff sounded agitated. Dan tried to leash his impatience. This was their enemy. And their lives at stake. Maybe the best thing for him to do was go below and turn in.

  “Who the fuck are you kidding,” he muttered to himself.

  “Excuse me, Dan?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  The commodore squatted in the lee of the shield, his back to the wind, and shook out a silver-tip. The chief of staff bent to light it. Jung said around cupped palms, “They want us to surrender.”

  Dan whistled. “Pretty ballsy.”

  “Like I said: There’s no way to talk to these people.”

  Dan said, trying to pitch it as an offhand comment: “Well, seems to me they’re talking now. They just aren’t saying what we want to hear yet.”

  Both Koreans regarded him. He pulled an arm across his forehead and tried to function. It was getting harder with each passing hour. “Uh, I was thinking. Usually the only way people act like this is if their families are threatened. Like, if they surrender, their relatives get shot. So how about something like this—you ask them again to give up. But say what you’ll do is, put the word out that the sub and all aboard were destroyed in battle.”

  Jung stood expressionless, smoking hard, but listening.

  “In battle,” Hwang said, “or in a nuclear explosion?”

  Dan saw an even better way to do it. “Yeah—or in some kind of low-order detonation. Hey—if it was a low-order det, that means it was the bomb design that was at fault.”

  “They would blame their scientific establishment,” Hwang said, looking more interested. “And not the crew of the submarine.”

  Jung cocked his head, but didn’t look like he was buying it. He studied the Romeo, about seven hundred yards off now. Dan saw the wan ovals of faces turned their way. The thin lines of gun barrels. He leaned over to look down on their own forecastle. Chung Nam’s stabilized 76mm returned the stare of the sub’s machine guns, the long, tapered tube pointing easily up and down with the frigate’s roll.

  Finally the commodore nodded. Hwang already had a message started. Jung glanced at the pad when the commander was done. Nodded again.

  A runner’s boots banged on the ladder, and the shutter rattled again.

  A staccato clatter from across the water echoed it. Binoculars up, Dan saw white water leap up beside the Romeo. A test, or a warning burst. Or both. He could hardly believe this. Torpedoes and guns pointed at them, powerless to move, and they were still defiant.

  Of course, what they carried belowdecks might even the odds.

  When the next reply came down the commodore and Hwang bent over it for some time. Their faces were a study in bafflement and rage. Dan tried
not to look curious. He paced back and forth, the gratings clanging under his boots. The boots Mangum had given him aboard San Francisco. They fit better than he’d expected. He propped one on a stanchion base and examined it. Once you got salt into leather it kept coming to the surface. He’d rubbed it off a couple of times with a rag and fresh water, but there the ghost was again. He turned it to inspect the heel, then examined the other boot. He leaned against the shield and closed his eyes.

  Jung said, louder than before, “Commander? Can I interrupt whatever it is you’re doing over there?”

  “Yes sir. Sorry, Commodore.” Startled awake—he’d actually been out, leaning against the shield—Dan blinked at the paper. “Uh—so what’s he say?”

  They were both staring at him, almost sullenly, though it could simply be the same utter exhaustion he felt. Hwang said, “We don’t really know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “He won’t communicate any further with us,” Jung said. His lowered eyebrows looked threatening.

  “Won’t communicate, sir?”

  “Do you have to repeat everything I say? He won’t talk. Not with us. Not with the ROKN.” After a moment the commodore added, frowning across the water at their nemesis, so long trailed, so suddenly revealed: “He will deal only with an American.”

  GATHERED around Jung’s chair in the pilothouse, Dan, Henrickson, Hwang, and the commodore debated it. As soon as he heard, Henrickson started shaking his head. “It’s a trick. They want a hostage. Once they get their hands on an American, they’ve got a bargaining chip.”

  Hwang said mildly, “I don’t know about that, Monty. This is part of their usual bargaining posture. To show contempt for us. They did this at Panmunjom. Did it in the Four Nation talks, too.”

  Dan looked on, arms folded, trying to figure it out. They could both be right. They could both be wrong.