Korea Strait (7 page)

Hwang put a hand on his boss's shoulder. Said something rapidly and low in his ear. Jung grunted, swayed, at last sank to his cushion again. But Dan caught Leakham's glare. He hoped he hadn't made himself an enemy.

The silence was interrupted by a thin wail that began outside the windows. It rose and strengthened, became a keening, discordant chorus. For a moment Dan couldn't place it. Then he did. He hadn't heard it for a long time. Since grade school, in fact.

Hwang and Jung were lurching to their feet. Dan got up, uncertain what to do. Owens took his arm. “It's the monthly civil-defense drill,” she said.

“An air-raid drill?”

“Just follow them,” she said, nodding at the Koreans. Bending to slip their zoris on, they were already filing out.

THEY joined the swarm queuing at the elevators and thronging the oversized staircases down. Dan found that Koreans neither bowed and gave way in a crowd, nor apologized when they slammed you into a wall. It was like trying to get to the bargain counter in Macy's basement. Only main strength and aggressiveness got them down the stairs.

Outside the sirens wailed on, endless and scary in the canyoned streets. The traffic lights pulsed red. Troops with M16s, pot helmets, and armbands shouted M's at any sluggard. They followed the restaurant manager across the street. All traffic had stopped, the drivers leaving their cars unlocked in the middle of the road. Large blue
M's
marked the subway entrance.

“This looks like the DC metro,” Dan said, gazing around at white concrete, wide stretches of tiled pavement, fluorescents in long rows high on the curving overhead. The crowd pushed and jostled as they reached the first landing, turned, and kept going down.

“Except it's cleaner,” Owens said behind him.

“Well, yeah…” A little man with a pinched face, baggy clothes, and a black stovepipe hat backed into him, thrusting a slung bundle of high-smelling twigs into his face. Dan pushed back, then at the last minute pulled the shove, not wanting to be too rough. Without even glancing back the old guy gave him a practiced elbow to the gut that doubled him over and left him wheezing.

“See, they can take care of themselves,” Owens cracked.

“I guess so…. Where to now?” They'd come out on the platform, maybe sixty feet belowground, he guessed. It was packed solid with people. The tracks stretched off into the distance.

“Here's fine. Just don't get too close to the edge. They stop the trains during the drill, but you don't want to get pushed off the platform.”

Dan craned on tiptoe, looking for the others. He caught Jung and Hwang's military caps some meters away, but there was no chance of getting to them. Packed tight the Korean masses smelled like
garlic and beans and ginseng, an exotic flavoring somewhere between body odor and the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. Dan caught opaque glances, but no one spoke to them. Being foreigners didn't win them any extra space, that was for sure. Everybody looked grim, as if they didn't like thinking about why they were down here. He turned and was jostled chest to chest with the attaché, looking down on dark hair. She smelled a lot better than the old man had. “How long… sorry, they're pushing me… how long do these drills last? Captain?”

“Not that long. They'll check the buildings, make sure no one's lagging back. They get a nice stiff fine if they do.”

“They take this seriously, huh?”

“There's a million enemy troops, three thousand tanks, and nine thousand artillery tubes thirty miles away,” she told him. “They pretty much destroyed this city last time they invaded. In 1950. Yes, they take it very seriously.”

The crowd surged, wedging them even more tightly together. Urbanites were still streaming down the staircases. Dan felt her breasts pressing against him. To his horror he realized he was getting a boner on for a senior officer. “Whoa, thirty miles!” he said, trying to get his mind off where his hips were rubbing.

“That's how far we are from the DMZ.” She didn't lower her voice and Dan figured either she didn't expect the people crowded tight against them to understand English, or they knew all this already—probably why they looked so dour. “We don't realize it back in the States. But if they start firing, and use chemical weapons, half the population of this city will die in the first forty minutes.”

“But they're not going to. We've got them deterred—”

“Oh, so far, yeah. If they thought they could win, they'd have been here long ago. But they came damn close the last time they tried it.” She glanced up at him, and he thought for a horrible second she'd felt his erection and was going to remark on it. Instead she said, “You remember your history.”

“Of the Korean War?” He cleared his throat, trying to get his mind off her groin locked to his. From the side of his sight he glimpsed the old man with the twigs eyeing them curiously. “Well, that they attacked—took Seoul—pushed the Army back all the way down the peninsula to Pusan. We held there, then MacArthur landed at Inchon and cut them off.”

“But then the Chinese came in,” she prompted. “And kicked our tails back south, and it took us two years to fight our way back to the starting line. What I'm afraid of is, CFC—that's the Combined Forces Command, combined U.S./ROK forces, headed by an Army four-star—they act like the other side's going to call the same play the next time. But it won't work twice.”

“Nothing ever does,” Dan said. “Boy, we're crowded pretty freakin' tight here—”

“Ten more minutes, they'll sound the all clear. I was up at the DMZ last week. You can feel the tension.”

“I hear they're starving up north.”

“That's when a dictatorial regime gets dangerous, Commander. When there's famine, and it's isolated… though I sometimes wonder if they're as isolated as we think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the Chinese use them to jerk us around. And they're making threatening noises now too… which is why I don't think the SecDef's decision to withdraw the Second Infantry was well timed.” She nodded at the drawn faces around them. “I don't know how they stand it. They've been sitting on a major fault line for fifty years. And the earthquake could come any day.”

“I hear the ROK Army's not so bad. And we're behind them, if the bad guys do attack.”

“If the Air Force can interdict, and the Army can get reinforcements here in time.” She wriggled her watch up, tilted a blue-veined wrist. He caught another hint of her scent. Jasmine? Something flowery. “Should be any minute now… And if the Navy can protect the sea lanes, to supply those reinforcements… which brings us to your SATYRE, which is more important than it looks.”

“How's that?”

Owens pulled his head down. Her whispering into his ear didn't exactly reduce his arousal. “I mean, there's a lot riding on what you report about their readiness. As you know. The Navy's considering withdrawal from the western Pacific as part of our reduction of forces.”

“Holy smoke,” Dan said. “No—I hadn't heard that.”

“Since Second Division left, the Navy's got to take a bullet too. If the Koreans look like they can take over the sea lanes, we'll lease
them six destroyers from the Pacific Fleet, help them buy or build five more 209s, and basically pull out. There'll still be a U.S. naval command here, but it'll be a shell without a pea under it. The idea being the fewer American forces, the less irritating it'll be to Kim Jong Il. Which I think misreads the situation… but like I said, things look different up close than they do from inside the Beltway.”

Dan said, “Surely he can't think he'll win. Kim, I mean. Even if we don't have the forces actually on station. We're getting good at rapid force deployment. And what we did to the Iraqis and the Serbians from the air—that should make the North think twice.”

Owens looked as thoughtful as someone squeezed against him could. “The only way they could succeed is to stop the Air Force from striking from Japan. And at the same time, keep us from reinforcing through the southern ports.”

“That's a tall order.”

“Let's hope they reach the same conclusion.”

Dan remembered the headlines in the
Korea English Times.
. “But what I was reading this morning, about Pyongyang turning down the Japanese offer to build new reactors for them if they close down their old Chernobyl-type power plants—”

“Part of the picture. The crippled-tiger syndrome. You know? That's when they turn man-eater. And again, I don't think the North's in this alone.”

“The Chinese?”

“They play five moves ahead. Sooner or later, they plan to either bully us out of East Asia, or bloody our nose till we back away. The flash point could be Korea, Taiwan—even Japan. That's why I don't like reducing our forces. It puts the smell of blood in the water. And that's just the wrong message, around these parts.”

The wail of the all clear echoed down the stairwells. The PA system shouted out impatient-sounding Korean, adding, as if in afterthought, “All clear. All clear. All go now. Thank you for participate.”

The press eased only by degrees, but he breathed easier once he got their groins unlocked. She must have felt him. But not a smile, not a wink. He hoped she took it as a compliment. As they ebbed toward the exit, he thought of one more thing. “Where's this spy sub come in? With the all-girl crew?”

“The Sang-o? I don't know, and it worries me. Hopefully they're
just probing our defenses. As usual. If it's something else… well, let's just hope it isn't. Okay?”

He was nodding when he remembered the other thing he'd been meaning to ask her. “Uh, Captain—Dick Shappell mentioned, at one point, it was you who got me aboard that sub. Or suggested to him that I go along.”

“That's right.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Other than that you're an antisubmarine expert?”

“That's the only reason?”

“No. Since you ask. A friend from DC said you were headed out my way. That you were one of the good guys, and might need a hand now and then.”

He got another inch of clear space between them. “Can I ask who?”

“Jennifer Roald ring a bell?”

“Oh sure. Captain Roald…in the Sit Room. Yeah, we worked together.” He was impressed. There was a good old girl network now.

Owens stuck out her hand. “Okay? It's been great talking to you, Commander.”

“Yeah, very… very interesting. Uh, Captain.”

She tilted her head, then added, “Just try to sort of…
relax
around me, Commander. Can you do that?”

He felt his face burning. Cleared his throat, but couldn't think of one damned thing to say.

Fortunately just then he caught Commodore Jung's uplifted beckoning wave from beside the exit. Shappell and Hwang stood beside him. He raised his hand in reply, and pushed toward them through the relieved, chattering crowd.

C
OMMANDER Hwang piloted the little tan Hyundai. Dan figured it was just as well, once he saw how Koreans drove. No rule was sacred and they took no prisoners. He didn't relax until they got out of Seoul onto the highway. The sky was clear and shining, the air warm, yet not so hot as to be oppressive. He shook out a map and ran a finger down a crease. Over plains, mountains, plains again. The embattled peninsula, a clubfooted version of the Italian boot, stretched south till it frayed away into the East China Sea.

He closed his eyes, frowning, not liking the memories that came with that body of water. Where in a ship without a name he'd crossed the shadow-line separating warship from pirate…

“The shape drives the history,” Hwang said.

Dan opened his eyes to purple mountains, rice-terraced hillsides in greens so brilliant they hurt to look at long. The hills escalatored down to a valley so lovely it stopped his breath. It was instantly recognizable from a thousand painted screens. The road coiled along it, through minuscule hamlets with red-tiled roofs and walls of painted block. “Sorry,” he said. “I missed that. What you said.”

“You know our history?”

“Hardly any of it.”

Hwang laughed. “Do Americans even know their own?”

“No argument here,” Dan said. He groped under the seat for the bottled water. Offered one, then cracked another for himself.

The willowy, pale chief of staff said, “For seven hundred years there were three kingdoms in Korea. The Chinese aided whichever
gave them the most influence. At last the Silla Kingdom defeated the Koguryo and Paekche, with the help of a Chinese army. They ruled for many years and became prosperous. Only to grow self-indulgent and peace-loving…as has happened many times before.”

As Dan puzzled over what he meant—that the Republic of Korea was self-indulgent and peace-loving? that the Chinese were the eternal enemy? or that prosperity itself was?—he was jostled forward as Hwang braked, muttering under his breath.