Korea Strait (29 page)

Dan tensed. He caught the others' alarmed glances too. He murmured, “Well, Commodore—that risks your own men as well. If you're thinking of forcing a collision.”

“I was actually thinking of having her ram from astern. That would destroy either the screws or the prop. An accident, yes. Regrettable. But it would force them to surface.”

A tactic Dan hadn't considered. He rubbed his mouth, considering the geometry of such a close pass, whether the 209's commander could actually localize the sub he was trailing well enough to put his bow in her screw. It sounded pretty fucking dangerous. What if the screw sliced through a ballast tank? He kept getting echoes of Nick Niles's valedictory injunction. “Try to keep everybody alive this time,” his saturnine whatever-the-opposite-was-of-mentor had said.

Blood heated his cheeks at the memory. The imputation—that he was some kind of killer, some kind of Jonah—was grossly unfair. But
somehow he'd internalized the mission. He was going to bend over backward to make sure no one got hurt.

This seemed like a good place to stick in his oar. “Well, sir—that
might
work. If he got lucky. But if he got unlucky, you could lose the boat. Both boats, actually. Is identifying them worth that kind of risk? I'm not sure it is.”

“Those are my orders. Identify these craft. Your alternative?”

“Well, sir, if those are the orders—I'm not recommending this. But I'll raise it for discussion. If your orders
absolutely
are to make positive identification? You could ask Seoul for permission to attack instead.”

Jung's eyelids drooped. “Why would I do that?”

“Because Higher obviously feels they're a threat.”

“Why do you say that?”

Captain Yu drifted a couple of paces nearer.

“Because your national command authority's gone to a higher defense condition,” Dan said. “Unless that has zip to do with what your task force is doing out here. Which I don't think it does.”

Jung didn't meet his eyes. Finally he said, “It may. But then again it may not.”

Dan had no idea what that was supposed to mean. They were both looking down, at a standstill, when the Teletype clattered again. Jung's head snapped around. The flimsy came sailing across the space in the sailor's hand. Kim studied it. He looked up.

“From
Chang Bo Go.
Outer torpedo doors opening on contact!”

At the same moment one of the sonarmen shouted behind the black curtain. Yu reacted instantly, lunging forward to slam the lever down on the intercom to the bridge and shout into it. The plotters burst into activity, drawing arrows across the paper and pressing their headphones to their skulls with the tips of their fingers. Jung took hold of the plotting table with both hands, lips compressing, eyebrows drawing together as his face turned to granite. After a moment he snapped an order. Kim passed it on instantly over the Pritac.

“What is it?” Dan said.

“From
Kim Chon:
torpedo in water,” the chief said in a tense murmur. A moment later the sonarmen called out again from behind their curtains.

Just that suddenly, Dan realized, they were at war.

. . .

JUNG muttered something in Korean. A curse, Dan suspected. Or maybe a prayer, to what deity in what tradition he didn't know. Maybe to the same titanic and dreaded presence sailors since before the Phoenicians had tried to propitiate. The great Mask Melville's mad captain had struck through to find eternal Truth, and met instead eternal Death.

The voracious, savage, and eternal Sea.

The frigate heeled, the noise level rising as the whooshing hum of the turbines spooled up from aft. He leaned over the table, gripping it with the same instinctive reaction as Jung, as if the ship were a horse they could urge to greater effort.

From
Kim Chon,
still on her crossfield sprint to the eastern side of the barrier, the arrow indicating torpedo effects pointed in front of the flagship. The plotter lifted his pencil from another arrow drawn out from
Chung Nam's
own trace. The sound lines intersected six thousand yards ahead of the forward barrier edge. The flagship was at that moment at the rear of her assigned barrier box.

Dan grabbed Yu's shoulder. “Is your Nixie streamed? Turned on?”

“Of course. We practice evading torpedo. Not a problem.” Yu frowned down at his fingers. Dan retrieved them, hoping the guy was right. He checked the heading indicator on the bulkhead. It marched steadily around as the ship shimmied, digging her butt into the turn at full power. Yu was putting his stern to the oncoming weapon, or weapons—there could be more than one, you couldn't tell from the reports. And he was speeding up.

Put the noisemaker out, aim your stern at the torpedo, and make tracks—that was about all they could do.

A minute passed. He stood clinging to an overhead handhold, still trying to wrap his head around the abrupt metamorphosis from peacetime steaming to mortal engagement. The first shot had been fired. No one
declared
war anymore. They hardly ever had, in Asian waters. But from now on, a state of war existed.

Only… whom was that war with? That was the puzzler.

The plotters leaned forward again. Dan's gaze moved from one hastily sketching pencil to the next.

Mok Po
was turning left.

The second
X
they plotted made it perfectly plain. The non-ASW-capable patrol combatant, her easterly neighbor in the barrier, was cutting between the retreating flagship and the oncoming torpedo. As he leaned forward, horrified, the next
X
went down, at a noticeably greater interval from the first.

“She is at flank speed,” Kim #1 said in an undertone. His eyes met Dan's. He was still holding the Pritac handset. The one he'd just transmitted on, passing on Jung's snapped-out command.

Dan blinked, trying to deny what he was seeing. “He ordered her across your front—?”

Kim sucked in his breath and nodded. He looked appalled.

Dan snapped to Henrickson, “Keep an eye on this.” He caught the door before it dogged and followed the old skipper's double time up the narrow ladder.

It was full dark; no moon; he'd forgotten it was night. But as he stepped out onto the bridge wing after Yu, a light went on. It was off
Chung Nam's
port quarter. The lit bubble slowly grew, turning from white to yellow to red. It went out for a second and dark fell again. Then the horizon lit from one hand to the other in a searing flash that tracered silent sparks, like ascending meteors, through a whole quadrant of the sky behind them.

A muffled thud rolled out of the dark. Then a ripple of detonations, both sharp and dull, drumming and popping like the finale of a fireworks display. Scarlet fire arched, then faded, leaving a dull red glow like the embers of a dying wood-fire. He stared, breath bated in utter horror, unable to accept what he'd just witnessed.

”Mok Po?”
he breathed.

Yu said, voice grim,
”Mok Po.”
Then spun, and shouted angrily at the officer of the deck.

Chung Nam
tilted at the end of a roll, caught by the stabilizers. She began skating around, trembling with that strange dreamlike sensation of being balanced. Yu pulled himself in through the door and hiked to starboard, shouting with each step. Yells broke out all over the bridge, but it wasn't panic or disorganization, just a well-drilled crew responding to a rapid stream of terse orders.

Rushing out to the starboard wing, Dan looked down to see faintly, by a dim blue battle-light that had glowed to life directly above them, the triple tubes of the torpedo launcher swinging out to train abeam.
Crew swarmed over it, then suddenly scrambled back as if from a live bomb.

The frigate steadied a point to the left of the drifting ember that as they ran through the blackness grew slowly, finally became recognizably a ship, adrift and aflame.

He ducked inside and grabbed a set of binoculars. Through them he made out she was listing, on fire, with an ominous darkness aft. Torpedoed, some hulls just broke apart. He could make out forms running about the deck but couldn't see what they were doing. He didn't see any water-spray, no hoses being employed, no evidence the fire was being fought.

The muffled bump of compressed air came from below him. One by one, three tubular masses extruded from the launcher. Each hovered for a moment over the racing sea, then arched over and dived splash-lessly into the black. A green fire bloomed beneath the surface, wavering, formless, weird. Then swiftly dropped astern, pulsating and lengthening until the launcher coughed again and another weapon catapulted out.

Shouts, the groaning of the helm. Again
Chung Nam
banked and skated. He clutched the binoculars so hard his finger joints protested. He felt frustrated, nervous, charged; above all,
useless.
He slammed his fist on steel till pain informed him he was bruising bone.

He spun, hammered down the ladder again, and burst into CIC.

Jung, Kim, Henrickson, and O'Quinn stood where they had when he'd left. The plotters bent forward like rowers on the stroke. The red and blue and black traces were a little longer, that was all.
Mok
Po's ended in a tiny stylized picture of a sinking ship. Five short neatly drawn lines. And the six-digit date/time group.

“You put her between you and the torpedo,” he muttered.

The commodore eyed him. “She had no ASW capability,” he said at last. “This ship does.”

Dan gripped the table edge, fighting for control. He'd never witnessed a more cold-blooded act. Then, through the horror, protruded a reluctant edge of professional admiration. This son of a bitch was
stone. This
bastard didn't care who he killed.

He tried to speak and found he couldn't.

“Run time,” said Kim. He held up a stopwatch. Dan lifted his head, giving up on words. There were no words. Not for this.

They listened, waiting for the detonations.

None came. The seconds stretched out. The Koreans looked ever grimmer. They probably knew men on the stricken ship.

“What happened?” Jiang snapped. Kim shouted to the sonarmen. They yelled back, and Dan got the gist: nothing. Not one of the three Mark 46s they'd fired had connected. He was surprised. The weapon had been in the inventory for many years; it was dependable. Still, misses happened.

”Very well,”
said Jung. He mopped his face with his palm, and Dan saw it was dripping when it came away. He felt shaky too. If he hadn't seen it before, in other situations, he wouldn't have believed how swiftly everything you thought and knew and assumed you were prepared for could come unglued. And all turn to utter shit.

Yet it just had. “Is
Kim Chon
launching too?” Dan asked the table in general.

“I've ordered her not to, unless she's fired on,” Jung said. “In case this was the action of one hothead. But to remain in instant readiness to attack. By the way, she has active contact on one of the others.” He placed his finger on a newly drawn dot. “She will maintain track and attack instantly if she suspects hostile intent.

“And now”—he switched his gaze to Kim—”we will call on them once more to identify. If they do not, we will destroy them all.”

T
OPSIDE again, he gripped the rail on the 01 level, looking down and out. The bow wave rolled out slowly into the black. Sailors talked excitedly beside him, pointing across the water.

Two hundred yards away
Mok Po
was burning. This close the firelight illuminated everything with terrible clarity. Everything aft of the patrol craft's aftermost mount was missing, gone, blown away. Fire roared amidships. Her bow was rising slowly as the stern section sank. And the men… some gathered on the bow, watching as the flagship approached. They didn't yell or wave, just stared. Another knot struggled around a boat, but even from this distance Dan could see they weren't making much progress. It looked like the davits were jammed.

But the inflatable rafts weren't going over. The fiberglass capsules that held them were still lined up neatly on the flying bridge. As he watched, a plume of white burst from amid a knot of men along the main deck. It wavered, sprayed straight up, then steadied and swung around to play into the flames.

He couldn't quite believe it, but it didn't look as if the CO had ordered abandon ship. He shook his head. It was both courageous and incredibly dangerous. Judging by how much of the stern was missing, they had to be taking at least some flooding in the engine spaces. If whatever bulkheads sealed off the remaining watertight compartments gave way, the craft could go under literally in seconds. She'd slide aft and down as the sea rammed into her like a crazed bull, killing anyone still belowdecks and sucking down those floundering in the water.

Not that he didn't understand how her skipper must feel. Exactly the same, probably, as he'd felt during
Horn's
trial by nuclear fire.

The door behind him thumped open. O'Quinn said, “Jesus. Straight up the fucking ass. Didn't they have their Nixie streamed?”

“They probably did. These guys don't neglect countermeasures.”

“Then it wasn't acoustic.”

“Huh? Uh—no. Probably not.”

“Sraight runner? Unlikely, from a submerged shot. Only one thing left.”

Dan nodded, heart sinking. He should have come to the same conclusion. Wake-homing torpedoes were a Russian invention, dismissed as myth by the U.S. Navy for many years. But they were real. And the Chinese had them.

It looked like now they knew whom they were facing.

And with one less advantage the surface ships had counted on in case it came to an exchange of ordnance.

“They're gonna stick it out?”

“Looks like it.” Dan figured he should get back to CIC, but couldn't tear himself from watching yet. They witnessed side by side as another hose cut on, as the bowless hulk rolled and a prolonged wailing protest of stressed steel and the cries of embattled seamen came plain across the dark sea.