Korea Strait (12 page)

“We'll stay with the usual signals,” Leakham announced. “Red flares and the voice radio warning on VHF primary tactical. They're perfectly workable. Everyone's familiar with them. I don't want to introduce new signals just for this exercise.”

Dan looked at Jung, who was sitting with legs crossed. The Korean was the OTC, not Leakham. But Jung wasn't objecting, or even, apparently, taking much interest. Dan tried one more time. “I see your point, sir. But I'm not sure why having another emergency disengage signal would be confusing. The sub has to surface to use VHF radio. And if there's patchy fog, or someone's not looking in the right direction, he might miss the flare.”

The U.S. commodore was shaking his head before Dan was done speaking. “Matter closed,” Leakham said. “Any other questions?
Substantive
questions? Yes, there in back.”

“On the data-keeping requirements—we've only got the one rider. What happens when he's down for sleep?”

Dan rose, ready to explain once more it was ship's company's responsibility to keep the data, not the riders'. With only one TAG member aboard each unit, he couldn't be in four spaces—bridge, CIC, sonar, and underwater battery plot—the clock round. But before he could speak Leakham said pontifically, “Data keeping's essential, but
it's more important to keep the exercise events moving ahead and on time. Especially if the weather degenerates. We can't let this stretch out or we won't get everything accomplished. Let that be your guide.”

“Sir, excuse me—”

Leakham didn't even look his way. “Thanks for coming, good hunting, and there are still some muffins left,” he told the room. Put his arm around Jung and ushered him out, up to the flag quarters.

DAN got back to
Chung Nam
well steamed. What the hell was up with Leakham? He'd blown him off in front of the entire group on the emergency disengage issue. Then given the skippers carte blanche to push data recording to the back burner. Certainly they wanted to complete all the events. But without seamless and trustworthy data, TAG couldn't evaluate the play later. The guy acted as if they had history. But Dan didn't remember any fat, arrogant assholes named Leakham. The first thing he did was look for Henrickson. He found the analyst in the wardroom. “How'd the conference go?” the little analyst asked.

“It sucked, big time.”

He explained. Henrickson looked disturbed too. “That's just fucking wrong.”

“So how do we fix it?”

“Well, Leakham's not OTC for this exercise.”

“He sure as shit acts like he thinks he is.”

“Well, he's not. The host nation's officially in charge—we specifically write that into every SATYRE. Go through Jung. Draft a message from him outlining exactly how important getting the data is, and who's responsible for it. Then he puts it out to everybody, problem solved.” Henrickson added, “I'll draft it if you want.”

“That's great. Could you do that, Monty? Just make it short—people don't read long messages.”

“Absolutely. Three paragraphs.” The analyst pulled a pad of the pulp-paper ROKN message blanks out of his briefcase.

“You seen Cap—you seen Joe O'Quinn?” Dan asked, turning back at the door.

“Not today. He was pulling late hours on the last event. He's probably catching up on sack time.”

Dan realized he hadn't seen O'Quinn since the exercise had started. Just that one glimpse of him pondering the sea as they got under way. “Why doesn't he eat in the wardroom? I haven't seen him around much.”

“He hates Korean food. He brought a bunch of granola bars and stuff.”

“Guess I can understand that.” The same kimchi and pickled fish meal after meal was getting to him too. Unfortunately, as the ranking TAG guy, he felt bound to eat with the Koreans.

“They give you anything good on
McCain?”

“Blueberry muffins.”

“Bring me one?”

“Sorry,” Dan said. “Guess I should have, huh? Next time.”

HE went up to check on the 19, made the rounds to encourage the data keepers, then went back to the bridge.

The afternoon sky was overcast.
Chung Nam
and
Dae Jon
charged along at fifteen knots through a three-foot chop kicked up by a slowly increasing wind. The chop wasn't good news, he thought. Waves generated low-coherence background noise. With the water as shallow as it was already, that would make a sub, especially a quiet one, that much harder to pick up.

Event 30001 kicked off Phase II. A step up in complexity, a barrier exercise with subsequent two-ship play. The Korean 209 was offline to the east, snorkeling—running submerged, but with an air intake the size of a wastebasket above the surface to run her diesels and charge her batteries. Hwang said it took her about forty minutes to do a full charge.

So
San Francisco
was playing target. The nuke boat would start at the northeast corner of the op area and head southwest. The barrier, consisting of
Chung Nam, Dae Jon, Gushing,
and
Vandegrift,
would align on a bearing of 300 degrees true and conduct an intercept search while steaming slowly northeast. They'd be preceded by
Cushing's
helicopter, dropping sonobuoy patterns.
San Fran
would attempt to slip through. The surface units would use standard search procedures. Once they made contact, they'd separate into two teams, Yu in charge of one,
Cushing's
CO honchoing the other, and
take turns carrying out deliberate multiship attacks. Dan thought it should prove interesting. In water this shallow—only three hundred feet through most of the exercise area, heavy mixing and no layer—the sub would be very difficult to pick up.

Hwang was talking over the barrier intervals with Jung. Dan stood at the edge of that conversation, left out of the Korean, but tracking its drift as they did the math and summarized in English for him from time to time. The sticky wicket was that with passive detection ranges so low, the ships would have more frontage to cover than they could actually search. An interesting problem; he wondered if he could write a program to generate the optimal tactic. It'd have to have a graphical user interface, and maybe a menu, and use regression analysis.... He got a couple of notes down in his PDA.

Finally Jung decided to deploy SAU 1—Surface Action Unit 1,
Chung Nam
and
Dae Jon
—to port, then leave a gap between them and SAU 2, to starboard. Both SAUs would go active, pinging hard, flooding the sea with noise and radar too, just in case
San Francisco
popped her scope up. But
Cushing's
helo, flying at two thousand feet, would drop six sonobuoys, set to passive, into the gap. “The sub'll pick up the gap and drive for the hole. Once the sonobuoys pick her up, we wheel in and she is in the bag,” Hwang said. “Is it a good plan, do you think?”

They looked at him expectantly. Dan doubted it would be that simple. U.S. nuclear submarines, which were both very covert and capable of high submerged speeds, were notoriously slippery. He figured it was about the best they could do given the wretched sound-propagation conditions. But he couldn't say so. “I'm not actually supposed to, uh, vouchsafe a tactical input.”

“Vouchsafe?” Hwang frowned.

“Sorry. It means advise. I can't comment on your plan. Just record it.”

Jung's face darkened. He opened his mouth, then closed it and sat back instead.
”Ke ro ke ha ko, jeon mon bo nae,”
he said to Hwang. He sounded angry, but then, Dan thought, almost all Koreans sounded enraged. It was just how the intonation struck an American ear.

“The commodore approves,” the willowy Korean told Dan. “We are ordering the units to their comex stations.”

“Yes sir,” Dan said to Jung, hoping he didn't get ticked off that he
hadn't signed off on his plan. He felt like he was dancing on a tightrope. The Koreans seemed so concerned with face.

He went down at lunchtime and confronted the usual. Hot tea, fish, kimchi, cigarette smoke, ten guys chattering in Korean, or worse, trying to tell him jokes in their fractured English. Kim #2 got off a real roarer. “Once upon a time, Tarzan lived in jungle,” he said. “Understand?”

“Yeah, I got that,” Dan said.

“One day his wife was in adversity. Tarzan catched a vine and was flying. Suddenly he was crying. ‘Ah! Ah!' Why?”

“Gee,” Dan said. “I don't know. Did he hit a tree?”

“His wife catched his middle leg,” #2 said, and waited for Dan to laugh.

He managed to smile. “That's a good one all right. A real knee-slapper.”

“Knee-slapper.” #2 slapped his knee and giggled. “Knee-slapper!” He said something to the others and they just totally broke down. Dan shook his head in disbelief. What an audience.

“You tell one. You tell funny story.”

He didn't think of himself as a teller of tales, but in the course of almost twenty years in the Navy, he'd heard a few. Most of the really funny ones were too raunchy to be retold. “Okay,” he said.

“One cold night in New Jersey this guy's car breaks down on a hill. It's a really foggy, drizzly night. He stands by the side of the road for a long time, but no cars go by.

“Then finally he sees a black limousine coming slowly through the fog. It comes right up to him and stops, and he realizes it's a hearse. He bends down but can't see anyone inside, the windows are tinted and it's dark, so he opens the door and gets in.

“But when he turns to thank the driver for stopping, there's nobody there. Nobody—except a big black coffin in the back.

“He's staring at the wheel, shocked, when suddenly the car starts moving again. It moves very quietly, up the hill, then down, faster and faster. At the same time he hears moaning coming from the coffin. He's paralyzed with terror. A curve looms ahead, with a drop-off on the outside of the curve, and he starts to pray. Just before they're about to go off the side of the hill, a hand floats in through the window and turns the wheel.

All the Koreans were staring at him now, eyes wide. “So the next curve the same thing happens. The guy's petrified. Like, turned to stone.

“Suddenly the car slows down, and he recovers enough from his terror to pull the door open and tumble out on the road. He rolls down the hillside and gets all torn up, but he's just so glad to be out of that car he doesn't care. He comes out on another road and runs down it till he comes to a tavern. Like a bar—you know? All wet, still shaking, he orders a couple shots of whiskey and tells everybody what just happened. The bar goes quiet as they realize he's crying, and he isn't drunk.

“About fifteen minutes later two guys walk into the tavern, panting and sweating, and one says to the other, ‘Hey, Louie, there's that idiot who climbed into the car while we were pushing it.'”

They stared. Finally they smiled politely. Kim chuckled uncomfortably, glancing at his mates. But no one slapped his knee. Maybe humor just didn't translate. Dan slurped the last of his tea, making it noisy to be polite, and was about to excuse himself when a voice crackled over the announcing system. They jumped up and left, pausing only for a hasty bow in his direction. Dan jumped up too. He didn't grok the whole announcement, but he'd caught
”jam su ham”
—submarine.

WHEN he got to the bridge it was dark. He hadn't thought it was that late. But part of the darkness was rain. The wing doors were open, and cool freshness and wind filled the pilothouse. The little tight space was crowded with helmsman, lee helmsman, Captain Yu, the officer and junior officer of the deck, the rest of the watch, and the ASWRON 51 staff, Jung's people, too. The disks set into the windshields hummed steadily, giving them three circles of visibility despite the rivers streaming down the windows. Jung wasn't in his chair. Dan decided it was just too crowded and went back down to CIC. You could get a better tactical picture there anyway.

An hour later
Cushing's
SH-60 reported a contact on one of the sonobuoys in the gap. The tracking team was still plotting it as the frigate heeled, cutting through the seas to a new course. A vibration wormed through the ship's fabric, and a low whoosh built from aft.

“The turbines,” one of the JOs told him. Dan nodded, though he was surprised; at high speed they'd lose any chance of gaining sonar contact. The boys must be confident they actually had a sub. He pulled out his PDA to get down a note. He saw from the little blue penciled circles tracking alongside theirs on the DRT that
Dae Jon
was out to port, lagging a bit. That made sense. She was steam powered and didn't have the frigate's acceleration. But both elements of SAU1 were pelting hellbent down an intercept course. He checked the range to the datum and calculated a torpedo danger circle. This was the range inside which the submarine, at bay, could strike back.

But they didn't reach it. Three minutes later, the sonobuoy lost contact. The plotters etched in the little kite-shaped datum symbol, marking last known location. Yes, there, they were drawing in the torpedo danger circle.

Dan gripped the edge of the DRT table as they leaned into a roll, then back the other way. The joiner bulkheads creaked. They were weaving at high speed. Presenting a more difficult target. The frigate's motion in a high-speed regime was unsettling. She didn't roll so much as abruptly lurch, as if she were balanced on her keel. The heat in the cramped close space didn't help. Nor did the radish-and-garlic breath of the plotters. He took deep breaths, loosened his belt surreptitiously, and tried to think about something else.

Just short of the dotted danger circle
Dae Jon
broke left and
Chung Nam
right, wheeling in a yin-and-yang around the datum. The whoosh descended the scale. Dan felt deceleration tug him forward as they coasted out. It looked as if Captain Yu, who was the on-scene commander, was looking to hold contact with his own ship, and sending
Dae Jon
in for the initial attack.