Korea Strait

by David Poyer

  They scowled. He stared back. He didn’t want it to become a contest, so he added, “That is Commodore Jung’s offer. Shall I tell him you accept?”

  “It is not accepted. We will all die before surrendering,” Im stated. The Party guy, or whatever he was, some kind of security or commissar type, and the exec both nodded vigorously. “We will never turn over our trust to Seoul bandit running dogs.”

  Dan thought about San Francisco. He hoped Mangum was far away by now, but maybe there was another possibility, if they hated the South so much they wouldn’t even talk to them. Give them some choices, see if there was any flexibility. “Uh—then how about to Americans? Will you surrender to us?”

  “Never to American imperialist pigs.” They shook their heads and looked away.

  The wallowing just didn’t stop. She’d take four or five bad rolls, then the next one would wind up with her just about standing on her beam ends. The table slid sideways. The Koreans grabbed it, but slowly, uncoordinated; they were feeling it too. Park especially looked green. Dan swallowed a sudden spurt of saliva. Well, all they had to do was press a button and none of them would be seasick ever again.

  To hell with this. If they wanted to die in proletarian glory, they could all fucking die. He pushed to his feet and stood riding with the motion. “Anyway, that’s your choice. I’m going now. You have one hour to decide your fate.”

  The commissar type reached for something at his belt, but the captain’s hand got to it first. He patted Park’s hand reassuringly. “You are not leaving us,” he told Dan.

  “You’re bound to release me. I came under a white flag.”

  Park chuckled. “That is bourgeois tradition. Not revolutionary tradition.”

  “Captain?” Dan addressed himself to Im, not the others.

  The skipper hesitated, then waved at the chair. “Sit down. Sit down. We can talk a little more. You know, we are special trust, with what is up forward.”

  “I understand that, Captain. My proposal is designed to help you keep that trust.”

  Im frowned. “But how can that be? When you are enemy.”

  Dan considered. What did they have in common? Only one thing he could see. It might not be much. But it was the only card he held. He passed his hand over his hair and cleared his throat, hoping he got each word right.

  “I may be your enemy, Captain, but we are both seamen. I too have commanded a ship. I know what it means, to care for your crew. To put the mission first, of course—but still, to consider what happens to your men. To do what is best for them. Not for yourself.”

  The dark eyes studied him. Dan hesitated, trying to piece together something convincing, then went on. “There are honorable ways to meet defeat. Without throwing away your men’s lives. We are on opposite sides today, true. But I admire your bravery. You came very close to accomplishing your mission. And I can understand that you do not wish to turn such a powerful weapon over to your country’s enemies. I wonder if you remember how the Germans disposed of their fleet after World War I.”

  All three looked bemused, so Dan abandoned the European history

  angle. “Look, we’ve destroyed or captured all the other subs in your task group. And now you’re too damaged to make way. Your mission’s over! The only thing you can do now is die. Uselessly. Condemning your men as well.”

  Park was frowning as Won translated. Dan let him catch up, then went on. “What if you scuttle instead? Sink your ship, with the weapon aboard it. You all live. You get citizenship and new names. As far as the People’s Government will ever know, you were all killed in battle. That way your families will be safe as well. That is the wisest thing for you to do.”

  Park jerked to his feet, shouting. Not at Dan, but at his fellow officers, and at the crewmen who stood behind him. He pointed at Dan, screaming now. He jerked at his belt, and Dan saw the butt of the pistol.

  With unhurried ease, the captain lifted a hand and laid it over the political officer’s. Pulled the pistol from its holster himself, and handed it behind him to Won as he said a few words to the sailors.

  Park looked astonished when they seized him. He stared down at Im incredulously. Then, abruptly, began to scream. The sound was high-pitched as a dentist’s drill under the cupping steel. Dan couldn’t make out words, though maybe there were words in it. If there were, the crewmen ignored them. Park struggled but the crew—the two beefeaters who’d dragged Dan aboard, he saw—were too brawny for him. They pushed his head down and forced him through the aft hatch, hands twisted behind him. The outraged, piping scream grew fainter, then cut off as the hatch sealed.

  Im sighed, looking after him. No one spoke for a few seconds. Glancing forward, Dan saw sailors eyeing them around equipment cabinets, the jambs of joiner doors. They looked as shocked as Park had.

  “They are truly all gone?” Im asked him.

  “Who’s that, Captain?”

  “Our other submarines.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “All four?”

  “Three we sank. The other ran aground and was captured.”

  “Has the war begun?”

  Dan looked him in the eye. “Not yet. Do you still want to start it?”

  The captain rubbed his knees as he sat. His expression was growing closer to that of a human being. But he still didn’t answer.

  “Your mission was to destroy the harbor of Pusan,” Dan said. “To prevent UN reinforcements and supply. But the American Army is sailing for Pusan now. Even if the People’s Republic attacks, it cannot win. Hundreds of thousands will die. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans—from both sides of the DMZ. But victory for the North is impossible now.”

  He tried to catch Im’s gaze, but it was not in the compartment with them. “Captain, do you really want your crew to die for nothing? Surely not, as brave as they’ve proven themselves. I see most are only boys. They have their whole lives ahead. They trust you. You are their captain. Are you going to condemn them to death? For nothing? I’m betting you don’t.”

  Im looked away. Rubbed his face, looking at the bloodstain at his feet.

  “It might be that enough have died,” he said softly.

  Dan breathed out. “I think so too, Captain.”

  “My men will be cared for? Protected?”

  “I guarantee that personally.”

  “You will tell me how to do this thing, Captain?”

  “I will—Captain.”

  Im looked at his commissar’s pistol, then thrust it into his pocket. He glanced at Won, who was still staring, supporting himself on the table. He said a few words in a low voice. The second nodded hard, swallowing.

  Won straightened suddenly, and gave his captain a rigid salute. Im returned it solemnly. Then turned to Dan, and gestured to the table.

  “Let us discuss this thing a little more,” he said.

  EVEN without his Party guy around, Im drove a hard bargain. He wanted the sub sunk in his presence, now, as soon as the crew was taken off. He wanted a written guarantee that the device it carried would never be retrieved. His crew was to be rescued, given new names, and paid five thousand dollars U.S. apiece. Dan tried to disguise his relief. Rather than agree immediately—he had the feeling

  that might lead to fresh demands—he said he had to check the details with Jung.

  The fresh air atop the sail felt like emerging from the seasick circle of Hell. Chung Nam stood off half a mile, bow on; the other frigate Dan couldn’t pick up in the heavy seas. He tried not to look at the vomit staining the cockpit as he breathed deep. He keyed the VHF portable they’d given back to him. A lookout stared with an unreadable gaze. He was so drained he could barely stand.

  ”Chung Nam, this is—this is Lenson. Over.”

  “This is Hwang, Dan. Go ahead.”

  He reported the deal and asked for Jung’s blessing on the terms. It came back within the minute. He acknowledged and signed off.

  Then suddenly sagged against the steel, dizzy and all but unconscious. H
e felt like a capacitor suddenly discharged after holding too high a voltage for too long.

  It was over. The mushroom cloud would not bloom over another city, nor destroy another ship. Chung Nam and her crew were safe. He didn’t much care for the guys aboard this last Romeo—they’d tried their damnedest to kill him—but he couldn’t deny they were brave too. And now they too would not have to die.

  Pusan was saved. Which meant the war could be won. Or at least that the South had a fighting chance.

  All in all, not a bad day’s work.

  Voices from below. He peered down the trunk, almost losing his balance and falling, but grabbing a handhold in time. Captain Im was down in the sail’s interior, giving instructions, pointing out on deck. Won was nodding. They both looked grave. Im glanced up at him, looking distracted. Then grabbed the ladder and came up fast, boots ringing on the wet steel rungs.

  They stood together, looking toward the whaleboat, which was approaching from the lee, where she’d apparently hove to while Dan had been below.

  Dan didn’t say anything. There was nothing left to say. He’d had bitter times, he’d lost men and seen ships go down in battle, but he’d never had to scuttle in defeat. He couldn’t imagine how that might feel. Im didn’t give him any clues. Unless he thought just saying nothing was all Dan needed to get it.

  “You made the right decision,” Dan told him in a low voice.

  Im was considering that, maybe getting ready to answer, when shouts came from below. The captain frowned. He leaned over to look down the trunk.

  Automatic fire chattered below them. Dan threw himself back as the bullets tore through Im’s body. The captain rose up off the steel grating, then fell. He was crumpling into the hatchway when Dan got his hands on his shoulders.

  When the Korean’s legs came out of the well they were pumping bright blood. His stomach was torn open. Im’s face wore the same shocked look his political officer’s had when the crew grabbed him.

  The firing stopped. Dan glanced down at the reeling deck. Five crewmen stood frozen in the act of rigging lifelines. They were staring up. The whaleboat was still three hundred yards off, and making heavy weather of it, pushing her bow toward the sky, then plunging as if she’d never come up. Making headway, but she wouldn’t be alongside for a few minutes yet.

  He leaned quickly over the trunk, just taking the briefest snap-glance down.

  He glimpsed a khaki Soviet-style uniform, with red collar tabs. Park’s wide scowling face turned to stare up at him. An AK muzzle whipped up.

  He jerked back just as more bullets blasted past, clanging fragments off the steel lip of the hatch.

  When he knelt by Im, the captain was dead. Dan shook him but he didn’t respond. Fuck, fuck… fucking Park, the Party guy, had gotten loose somehow. Threatened the crew until they let him go. Now he was trapped up here with a dead man. And in two or three minutes this political idiot would figure out he had to trigger the bomb right now. Before the guys he’d browbeaten back into line changed their minds again, and decided they’d just as soon live after all.

  He looked over the cockpit coaming again. At the guys down on deck. Christ, how young they were, just boys most of them, still gazing up at him.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered. “Shit. You bastard—”

  He bent quickly and fumbled through Im’s bloody bullet-ripped coveralls until he found Park’s pistol. He wiped the captain’s blood off on his jacket, racked the slide to make sure there was a round in the chamber, then stuck it under his belt and threw his leg over the coaming. Straddled it, looking down, trying to ignore the roaring sea. Just as he’d remembered, there were rungs down the side of the sail.

  The deckhands below were still watching. He pointed to the approaching whaleboat and gave them as cheery a wave as he could muster. Could he get to it before things went to shit? He didn’t know. Anyway, he had to get down to the main deck, whatever came next. Stay up here, and they had him cornered.

  He threw his other leg over and started down.

  The first couple rolls weren’t too bad. Maybe fifteen, twenty degrees. But then came the hard ones, with a vicious snap at the end that came close to flicking him off the narrow, wet, rusty rungs into the boiling sea. They weren’t really even rungs, just curved steel bars welded to the sail plating. He clung, feeling old injuries tear again in his neck and shoulders. The tea-green sea boiled beneath him as the swells broke over the lurching hull. Flung off into that foaming, swirling turmoil, he’d never make it back to the surface; air-filled water gave way beneath a swimmer, sucked him down.

  Hugging the sail, he suddenly noticed something he hadn’t before: the skin of the tower itself. He’d thought, from a distance, that it was steel. Then, that it was the radar-absorbing rubber compound U.S. subs were sheathed with.

  But looking closely now, he saw it was neither. A rubber compound, yes. But embedded in it were hundreds of thin metal… laminations. Only slightly thicker than foil, they stuck up about a millimeter above the base material. Like the heat-radiating fins you saw on the outdoor side of air conditioners.

  The sail rolled again, harder, and he had to grip with all his might to stay on it. Forget what the fucking sail’s coated with, he told himself. Just concentrate on not dying here, okay?

  It rolled twice more, harder each time, before he got to the main deck. By then his hands were streaked with blood, his own mixing with Im’s, his skin grated off by the rusty rungs. He groped for footing, got it, slipped, and almost went overboard. At last he got his boot-toes locked to that narrow ledge between sail and deck edge, and eyed the door.

  The door he’d leaped toward from the whaleboat, had been dragged through by two large Koreans. Now arguing shouts came from it, blown his way in snatches by the blustering wind.

  Past the sail he caught the whaleboat coming up on the far side. The crew were waving to him. He measured the distance, looked again at the seas. Hope ignited. Rough, but not too heavy to swim in, if he could clear the frothy turbulence around the pitching hull itself. He was a strong swimmer. If he could jump clear, and no one started shooting at him, he might make it.

  He sucked air, trying to pump himself up for the plunge. In the next few moments he might die. But at least he’d go out trying to escape.

  But when he looked back the Koreans on deck were still watching him. Others were checking out the approaching boat, and the dark cloud of Chung Nam on their horizon. He could read no emotion on their faces. But neither was there the fanatic hatred with which the female commando had charged him, intent on his death.

  These guys weren’t special forces, as she’d been. Just plain navy. Did they even know what their savage state had done to them? Did they have any conception of freedom? He had no idea. But they were watching him. They looked so fucking young. They were watching him—

  Im had surrendered to him, the Yankee officer. They knew that much. He was in charge now. That was what they were waiting for.

  Not gladly—not at all—he put aside any thought of swimming for it. He might make it, but he’d be abandoning them. They weren’t his people. Not exactly. But…

  But he’d given their captain his word. His personal guarantee he’d take care of them. That Im was dead now, that the tables had turned against Dan, didn’t alter that commitment.

  “Try to keep everybody alive.” Admiral Niles’s words. He’d resented them. But that didn’t mean they weren’t true. They applied to everyone, didn’t they? Even the enemy, when they weren’t really your enemy anymore.

  He hung there, knowing what he had to do but still not wanting to do it. Giving it another second. Then another.

  A sea hit and exploded, spattering him with liquid salt. The sub rolled and his boots shot off the wet black tiles. He grabbed the last rung with his left hand, went for the pistol in his right, and hung grimly. She lay over, the sea boiling and snatching at him. He clung with his arm cramped closed, panting against the strain, counting the

  seconds till she
came back. Was she coming back? It seemed dreadfully long.

  But then she did, and he pushed aside hesitation and fear. He thumbed the hammer back on the automatic, scrambled around into the doorway, and leveled it.

  Two sailors stood by the door. Past them, Park had his hands and one boot on the ladder up. An AK was slung over his back. The political officer met his eyes. Then, arms working frantically, he began un-slinging his weapon.

  Dan shot him three times in the chest from five feet away. The high-pitched cracks crammed the enclosed sail solid with sound. He expected with each shot that the men between whom he fired would knock the gun from his hands. But they didn’t. They didn’t move as Park, hatred smeared across his face, struggled to get the sling untangled, to pull the assault rifle into position to fire.

  He was still trying when Dan shot him once more. This bullet caught him in the throat. Park jerked his head back. He stopped struggling and relaxed. His eyes froze into an expression of incommunicable terror. He lay with arms thrust through the ladder, hanging from it by them and the rifle sling.

  Suddenly the crewmen came to life. They seized Dan from both sides and jerked the pistol from his hands. His head rocked as one slapped his face. The men out on deck came boiling aft.

  Then someone was shouting down below. Won stormed up from the control room, bellowing, cheeks flaming. The exec took the situation in with one glance. He kicked the body hanging on the ladder, shouting, waving his arms. He kicked the dead man again, spitting curses, and jabbed his finger at Dan.

  The men hesitated, then released him and stepped back. The guy who’d slapped him grinned sweetly. He held his palms up, chuckling, as if it were all a game and he’d just scored a good one.

  Dan looked past them at the two who still held AKs. Won stood directly in front of them, shouting at full pitch into their faces from six inches away. They looked confused, then just sullen.

  The far side door, the port door into the sail, banged open. The exec turned his head and barked an order to the seamen who crowded in.

  They jerked the rifles from the hands of those who held them and whipped them out into the sea. The weapons disappeared into the foam. Dan jerked the pistol away from the guy who’d grinned at him, and hurled it after them with all his strength.