Korea Strait (10 page)

Yu smiled coldly. He lifted an eyebrow at Kim, nodded to Dan, and left.

Kim took a last drag and ground out the butt in the silver ashtray, a little more violently, Dan thought, than was absolutely necessary. Tension between the junior officers and the captain? Well, there nearly always was. “Shall we continue? Your coffee—he will make it. We will come back when it is ready. By way: “captain” is
ham jang
.
Kam sa, ha mi da, Hang jung nim:
thank you, Captain sir. Since you are studying Korean.”

Dan hadn't intended to study Korean, but it didn't seem he had any choice now. He'd outsmarted himself again. “Got it,” he said reluctantly. “Thanks. I mean,
kam sa, ha mi da.
”

AFT again, through a narrow passageway lined with doors. Another boyish figure bowed silently, toting the bag they'd insisted on taking from him on the pier. “Your room here,” Kim said, cracking a joiner door. Dan glanced into a small cabin with a porthole, a tan plastic tatami on the floor, a single bunk spread with a bright red knit wool comforter. His Compaq was racked above a foldout desk. He reminded himself to check where the rest of the team was bunked, make sure they were comfortable and had what they needed.

They continued aft. Two General Electric LM-2500 gas turbines and two German-built diesels were shoehorned into the engine spaces. He'd read about this combination. It was called CODOG, combined diesel or gas. Both engines used JP-5, but you could loiter on the diesels for weeks at a low fuel consumption. Then light off the turbines and accelerate to thirty-four knots. Though not for long; they burned a torrent of fuel.

Up narrow ladders, forward again, and he was walled in by gray bulkheads, gray overheads, cable runs, gray diamond-checked floor mats over bare aluminum. He bent under shock-mounted panels hanging from the overhead, but still caught his scalp on the edge of an air duct. CIC, the combat information center, and a tight little one it was. The radar repeaters, consoles, sonar stacks, and plot tables were familiar makes, but crammed into half the cubic he was used to.

Up yet higher to the bridge. Again, the equipment was familiar, but
wedged into half the width and height an American seaman would feel comfortable in. Monty Henrickson was out on the starboard wing, deep in discussion with a Korean. The junior officers and the enlisted bridge team were all slight and all smooth-shaven. Dan worried how he was going to tell these guys apart.

Captain Yu was sitting in a tall leather chair, still smoking. His hooded reticent gaze met Dan's, but flicked past without change or acknowledgment.

Henrickson came over. “The rest of the guys get off all right?” Dan asked, meaning Oberg and Carpenter and Wenck, who'd ride the other ships to observe and get the data.

“They're all installed. No problem.”

“Carpenter too? Didn't decide he'd rather sit this one out with his mamasan?”

“I saw him humping his gear up the brow two ships over. He'll be there, Commander. Rit may push the envelope liberty-wise, but he does his job.”

“By the way, how do we talk to our TAG riders, Marty? They're out twenty miles away, we're on the flagship here?”

“Basically we don't, not that much, anyway. There's PRCs—the handheld radios?—but the range isn't that great and they're not encrypted. There's an exercise coordination net monitored from CIC.”

“Right, I saw that in the op order.”

“We can pass direction via that, but to be perfectly frank, by the time it gets passed phonetically by people who don't speak English that well….”

“I get the picture. What were you doing out on the wing?”

“Installing the nineteen. These little antennas, they won't work inside, but I don't want the box out in the rain.”

“So?”

“So, I'm gonna need to put the antenna assembly out on the wing, or maybe up on the flying bridge. Run cable up to it. Not a permanent install, just clamps and a handful of monkey shit.”

Dan acted as a go-between, relaying the request to the captain. Yu spoke magisterially, and the Korean Henrickson had been arguing with picked up a phone.

Suddenly one of the enlisted men wheeled and shouted. At once everyone popped to as rigid a brace as Dan had seen since plebe
year. He turned to see Jung threading through the rigidly unmoving junior officers and phone talkers with the gravity of a battleship approaching its mooring buoy. He came to attention too. But the commodore greeted no one, did not even meet their eyes. His PhotoGrays had gone to full dark. He took the starboard chair, the one Yu had just slid down out of, settled himself, still without a word, and gazed forward, tapping out a cigarette that one of the junior officers immediately darted in to light for him.

THEY cast off an hour later, with less ceremony than an American or British warship. The deck gang took in lines, chanting and swaying in unison. Yu rapped out a couple of commands, the deck vibrated harder, and
Chung Nam
accelerated out of the nest. Looking back, Dan saw their inboard companion casting off, line handlers boiling about the forecastles of the rest of the flotilla. One by one, so smoothly it was clear they were well drilled, the patrol boats and frigates peeled off and came to a course for the harbor exit.

Chung Nam
inclined into a roll, then picked up the rhythm of the sea. Looking back, Dan saw they led a line of gray elephants, white bones gripped in their teeth. They ran out past Kadokto, a low rocky shadow, and the Hungnam headland, out into the Korea Strait.

It was cooler out here. He leaned against a bearing transmitter on the port wing, enjoying the sun and wind. The bow wave broke with a roar like surf on a pebbly beach. The sea's hue deepened from coastal green to a light-filled blue that drew his eye down into it. Every so often a gust of stack gas whirled down, sulfurous, choking when it got dense, but at the same time comforting just for being what he'd smelled a thousand times. Sea sparrows dipped and swerved along the bow wave. From its height, and the way they cruised through the wave systems, he judged they were making in excess of fifteen knots.

The Form One—the line ahead formation—turned south a couple of miles out, the flagship leading, each ship pivoting precisely in the guacamole green rudderwash of its predecessor. Another island came into view far to port, backlit by the morning sun into a black line only faintly softened by a haze the color of barbecue sauce. He went inside and checked the chart. Tsushima, midway between the southeastern tip of the peninsula and the southern main island of Japan, Kyushu.

He went back out and stood for a long time, brain pleasantly vacant, before glancing down to see a head he recognized below him. Joe O'Quinn was standing on the main deck. The wind ruffled his thinning hair and showed his scalp. He was looking out across the sea the same way Dan was. He thought about calling down to him, seeing if his mood had improved. But didn't. Let O'Quinn make the first move. Or let him go to hell.

Instead he turned for the pilothouse. It was time to start SATYRE 17.

THE first days' events, kicking off Phase I, were two to four hours long, and took place within four imaginary squares. Each square was thirty minutes of latitude or longitude, respectively, on a side. Their corners met sixty-eight miles due south of Cheju-Do, Cheju Island. The area was very shallow for antisubmarine work. According to the chart, the bottom sloped from 120 meters—all Korean charts were in meters, not fathoms—at the northeast corner to only 49 meters, about 160 feet, at the southwest. But since their main goal was to test littoral sensors and tactics, that made sense.

Dan, O'Quinn, Henrickson, Jung, and the shortest Lieutenant Kim put in an hour over the chart, talking out the concept of operations. They had to start with water conditions. Water conditions determined just about everything in ASW. And to play this game, you had to understand the nature of sound.

Underwater sound, such as machinery noise from a submarine, traveled, or “propagated,” by three pathways: direct path, convergence zones, and deep sound channels.

“Direct path” meant sound coming straight from the source to the receiving hydrophone. Point to where you heard it from, and you were pointing at the sub. The trouble was, sound tended to curve upward over long ranges. It was a refraction effect, since water at depth, under pressure, conducted sound faster. Direct-path sound formed a curved funnel shape, seen from the side. If you were outside that funnel, you wouldn't hear the sub at all.

Complicating it even more were the “layers,” surfaces at which the sea's temperature and salinity suddenly changed. They reflected sound, meaning you couldn't hear someone on the other side. The main layer, between the warmer, mixed water near the surface and
the cold stillness of the depths, moved up and down between about 90 and 250 feet. Dan had felt the change on his skin during his dive on the Sang-o: an instantaneous transition between warmth and chill. If a sub hid under a layer, a ship could pass right over it and never know it was there. Like a child pulling a blanket over himself to hide from the monsters.

The tendency of sound to bend upward over long distances formed “convergence zones.” After about thirty miles, it hit the surface and bounced. If you had sensitive equipment, and positioned yourself right, that meant you could hear your quarry thirty, or sixty, even ninety miles away.

The “deep channel” was just that—deep. So deep he wasn't even going to worry about it here.

A playground this shallow—a wading pool, in ASW terms—meant they couldn't depend on the deep channels and convergence zone paths that were the bread and meat of open-ocean surveillance. Here, they'd use either direct path or active sonar. But “going active,” pinging and listening for the echo, gave away your own location. And the quieter a submerged sub could run, the shorter direct-path detection range became. Not only that, Op Area 25 was right on the highway for shipping transiting the Strait, adding to the ambient noise.

Everything out here loaded the dice in favor of their submerged adversaries. Unfortunately this was where, and how, the naval wars of the future would probably be fought.

“So,” Jung said, “You know what ASW really stands for?”

Dan said no. “Awfully slow warfare,” the commodore explained. It was worth a chuckle. “So we are going to do some of that in the next few days,” Jung went on, touching his mole lightly, maybe unconsciously, with the tip of his little finger. “Our passive ranges will be between one point five and perhaps four thousand yards, active direct path. There will be high biologics and fishing activity. We can also expect reverberation. So, let us turn to event 27003.”

That afternoon's exercises were “structured,” meaning both sides knew exactly what maneuvers the other would be making and when. USS
San Francisco,
an attack nuke, would meet the slowly steaming Korean line on a gradually converging course. Starting at a distance of twenty thousand yards, depth one hundred feet, she'd run past
them at a range, at the closest point, of three thousand yards from each ship in turn. Her first run would be a fast pass with all machinery engaged. Subsequent runs would cycle various combinations of pumps, sonars, and other equipment at varying speeds and depths. The purpose was twofold: to accustom the sonar operators to the visual and auditory return from a submerged submarine, and to tune the equipment itself to maximum sharpness.

Dan looked at his watch. Time to start. Jung was back in his chair, flipping through messages. Should he do anything? Or let the squadron staff handle it? The frigate didn't have a separate flag bridge. The skipper and the commodore had to share the pilothouse, and he had to keep all these different Kims straight. At last he went up to the commodore and saluted.

“Yes, Dan?”

“Comex, sir. Time to begin.”

“Commander Hwang, start the exercise.”

Dan hadn't seen the chief of staff come on the bridge. Hwang said a few words to the lieutenant. “This is Sierra Two Lima,” Kim said carefully into a microphone. “Startex. Startex. Startex. Event 27003. Sierra Two Lima. Out.”

Dan paced the bridge, then found a place to park by the chart table.
Chung Nam
should be on 270 at ten knots for this event. The other Korean ships would follow astern of her. But he didn't see it happening yet. In fact, he didn't see
anything
happening.

He was clearing his throat when Hwang saluted Yu. He spoke apologetically. The captain frowned, and shot angry Korean at the officer of the deck. Who in his turn wheeled and spat abuse at the helmsman. The gyro spun slowly and settled on 270.

The exercise proceeded. He went out onto the bridge wing and checked the 19. Henrickson had lashed the black box to the deck gratings. A cable ran up to a stubby whip clamped above them. The 19 computed and recorded ship location five times a minute, accurate to within twenty feet. When the mainframe back at TAG digested its recordings, those from the other ships, and those from the submarine, they'd be able to watch the tactical picture develop in twenty-second increments. When the decisions in the logs and the reports of the ship riders were factored in, analysis would yield who'd sunk whom, who'd missed chances and made wrong decisions, which tactics worked and which didn't.

He went down to CIC and poked his head through the black curtains into the little corner sonar room. It always seemed hushed back there. A survival of the days when sonarmen had actually listened. Now they depended more on sight, interpreting the visual displays on their screens, than on their ears. Monty Henrickson and the three Korean techs were so intent they didn't notice him for a few minutes. When they did, the eldest smiled and bobbed his head. Dan nodded back. The supervisor reached up and turned a dial.

A distant throb filled the compartment, the muffled but still audible signature of a U.S. nuclear submarine. Mixed with it were subtexts, the clicks, whines, and buzzes of biologics, pulsing throbs he guessed were the other ships and maybe
Chung Nam
's own self-noise.