Korea Strait (22 page)

The chief of staff came in a few minutes later. “Looking for the commodore?” Dan asked him.

“Not really.”

“Well, he was just in here asking where you were. I think he's up on the bridge.”

Hwang sighed.

A radioman stopped at Hwang's elbow. The chief of staff took the clipboard with another sigh. He glanced down the message. Then reached out to steady himself as the ship took a lean.

When Dan looked back he'd paled. “What's wrong?”

“This is interesting.” The chief of staff inhaled noisily through his teeth.

“Can I see?”

“It's in Korean. The English version went somewhere else.” Hwang looked at the chart, then at the message again. He walked his fingers across the lat-long squares and went even whiter. As pale, in fact, as Dan had seen any of the Koreans get.

“What is it?” Dan asked again.

“There's been a slipup with the met reports.”

“What kind of slipup?”

“They said the typhoon was stationary.”

“It's started moving again?”

“Apparently it's been moving the whole time.” Hwang snapped at the radioman, who responded with a subdued but voluble explanation. He turned back to Dan. “Unfortunately, someone made an error. For the last twenty-four hours they have been transmitting the same position data.”

Dan felt the same spear-stab to the heart that the chief of staff had obviously taken. “They sent the six-hour updates. But they didn't change the position of the eye?”

“That is correct. We thought it would head northwest, once it began moving again. But someone made a mistake. The position was not updated. Even though the storm was moving. And yes, it moved northwest. Or northwest by north.”

Dan eyed the chart too, dreading what was coming. He'd been through enough storms not to find the prospect of another exciting in the least. “Damn it. I had a bad feeling about this son of a bitch.”

“It is the steel. The fishermen say the steel draws the storm.”

He wasn't sure what the guy meant by that; maybe it was a proverb. “Uh-huh… I thought we were getting a lot of wind, a lot of precipitation, this far away. So what's the bad news?”

“That
is
the bad news.”

“I mean, what's its current position?”

Hwang took a pencil. He checked the message again, then made a small ideograph on the chart. He lettered in a date-time group, referred to the chart again, and took hold of the jointed rule attached to the chart table. He swiveled it, set the degrees knob, and ran a pencil line out from the position. Then cleared his throat, looking unhappy. He reached up and unsnapped a phone.
”Hwang sareongkwan im ni da. Taepoong ae kwan hae an joe eon soshik yi it suem ni da.”

Dan figured he was reporting to the commodore. He leaned over the chart, feeling the dread, knowing before he looked what he'd see.

In the hours they'd lost track of Brendan it had hooked to the right, just as he'd feared. The ideograph—it must mean “typhoon”—lay between Tsushima Island and the Japanese mainland. Only seventy miles south of where the task force plunged and struggled in increasingly heavy rain and spray. The storm-track Hwang had laid out headed due north from there. It would go up the east coast of Korea, only a few miles offshore.

It wouldn't pass directly over them, but it'd be close. And it would block them from reaching either of their only two possible harbors of refuge.

T
HE commodore's breath wasn't so sweet nor his canned-peaches-in-syrup cologne quite so effective as they all but snuggled on his stateroom settee. Koreans simply didn't have the same ideas about personal distance as Americans. Hwang and Yu sat across the coffee table from them. Jung offered cigarettes from a carved teak-wood box. Hwang and Yu lit up. So did Jung. He didn't offer Dan any but said, “Would you like tea, Commander? I will order fresh tea.”

“That sounds good.
Kam sa, ham ni da
—thanks.”

Up here on the 02 level the wind was louder than in CIC, its shrill keen distinct against the creak and groan of flexing steel. And aluminum, Dan reminded himself—the Ulsan class used the light metal for its superstructures, a technique U.S. shipbuilders had abandoned after some horrific fires. In a storm, though, a lightweight top-hamper was a plus. The steward brought tea and laid out more of the rice cookies as well.

“We must make a decision quickly,” Jung began. “First of all, I believe we cannot make P'ohang in time.”

The chief of staff took that as his cue to unroll a chart. He'd drawn a track based on the storm's predicted speed of advance. He laid a pair of dividers on the table. Jung picked them up and measured. Dan called it at 130 nautical miles to P'ohang. No one said anything. A sea kettledrummed along the bulkheads. The ship started to roll, but the stabilizers caught it, and the tea sloshed in the cups, interrupted just as it had started to tilt. The wind rose to a whistle, then dropped back to the banshee keen.

They debated the situation, the little flag captain taking the lead while Jung listened. The discussion was in Korean, but Dan followed it; in this situation seamen of any nationality would be making the same points, pondering the same forces and gambits. If they tried for harbor, they'd be making downwind. An easier point of sailing, but they'd be cutting in front of the storm. Like a deer trying to get across a highway in front of a speeding truck. If they could sustain twenty knots, they'd probably make shelter ahead of the worst of the winds and seas. But they'd have no time to snug in pierside, and might also have to deal with mountainous seas at the harbor entrance. If any of the squadron lagged or had engine trouble, they'd have to leave her behind, T-boned in the path of the eye….

“Your recommendation?” Jung asked him in English.

“I think you should make for a Japanese port, Commodore,” Dan told him. “Forget P'ohang. If anything goes wrong, you're screwed. Stay out here, and you'll be in the dangerous semicircle. Japan's your safest option.”

None of the Koreans looked pleased. “I don't like the idea of a Japanese harbor,” Hwang said.

“Oh, for—haven't you ever heard ‘any port in a storm'?” He tried to make a joke of it, but nobody laughed. He pulled the chart over and searched the coast of Honshu. It seemed to him that even if they could get close in to land, it would afford some lee from the worst of the seas, at least till the eye passed. “I don't know these ports the way you do—Matsue?”

“Sakaiminato,” Yu corrected him disapprovingly. “Not a good harbor.”

“Fukui?”

“That is not a port at all.”

Jung muttered, “The ROKN does not seek shelter in Japan.”

Dan sat forward on the settee. “Now wait. I understand you don't like the Japanese. That's fine. Personally, I wouldn't jump for joy about putting into Shanghai. But if it was a matter of ducking in from a typhoon, I'd do it. The safety of my ship, my crew, against a little embarrassment? I'd go in. Sure.”

They looked to the commodore, but Jung shook his head. “The ports in western Honshu are not good ports. We will not go into Japan.” He tapped the open sea north of Ullungdo and Tokto. “We
will clear to the northeast, then ride it out in the open sea. That is the safest place for us now.”

They scrutinized the chart again. Dan tried to envision how the wind would veer as the storm's eye advanced. Opening the range on a typhoon was always a good thing, especially when you were in the dangerous semicircle—that area, on the advancing eye's right hand in the Northern Hemisphere, where the winds were strongest, and also where those winds tended to blow you directly into the eye's path.

Steaming northeast, though, would put them in the trough of the waves. At some point, when it got too rough, they'd have to give up seeking northing and just aim their bows into the rollers and gut it out. If they could. If it lost power, a destroyer, with her low freeboard, tended to broach—put her beam to the seas, start rolling, and eventually capsize.

At that point the task force would cease to exist as an organized unit. It'd become isolated ships, each fighting for her life; struggling to keep power, keep steerageway, and stay afloat.

He couldn't exactly disagree with the commodore's decision. It wasn't the one he'd have made, but it was defensible. The proof of the pudding would be what happened. How fast the storm came on, how powerful the winds and seas became. And of course how long each ship, and each crew, and each commander, could take it.

“Any questions?” Jung said at last. “Then put that message out: course 045, away from the storm. Twenty knots.”

Dan doubted they'd be able to make twenty for long in these seas, not without a hell of a pounding, but no one objected. Hwang rolled his chart and they rose.

“Perhaps that message should include an order to prepare for heavy weather,” Dan said. “Secure all equipment, prepare anchors for streaming, rig safety lines, ballast down—the usual precautions. Just as a reminder?”

“We are already prepared for storm,” Yu said with a scowl. “All Korean commanders know this. Not your concern.”

“Well, certainly
Chung Nam
probably is, but I wonder if the other units in the squadron—”

“All my commanders know what to do,” Jung agreed. He threw a heavy arm over Dan's shoulders. Against his will, Dan thought of
Leakham's accusation. “We don't need to remind them. This force will do well in the open sea. That's the place for us. I will of course leave Commodore Leakham to his own decision, but I believe you'll see he too will not trust the northern Honshu ports.”

Dan wanted to say he hoped he was right. But he didn't, just smiled and finished his tea.

DAWN, and the sea's former smile transformed into a leer of rage. He crouched on the bridge, clutching a radar repeater and watching the anemometer bump and lurch. The needle edged 130 and went nearly to 150 on the gusts. That was in kilometers per hour, of course. Translated into knots, he made it around 75 steady, 90 on the gusts.

Brendan was a Class 3 typhoon. Only halfway up Nature's scale of mindless violence. But at sea, with nothing to break the wind, it pushed up green, shaggy, rippled mountains across miles of fetch. On the radar a sparkling wash obscured everything within two miles, return from the wave-faces direct to the antenna sentineling tirelessly above. Beyond that a straggling line of pips flared and faded as TF 74 fought its way northeast. The U.S. and ROKN ships were intermingled. The subs didn't show, of course. At their last radio availability Jung had ordered them to go deep and shadow the surface units. Dan got the impression that as soon as the eye passed he'd reconstitute and resume the exercise. They'd be past the assigned dates by then, but somebody else could worry about that.

He was impressed with how smoothly
Chung Nam
took heavy seas. He'd never ridden a ship with active stabilizers before. The Korean frigate was traveling a little to port of cross-sea, at eighteen knots. With fifteen to twenty-foot seas coming from a little forward of the quarter, a ship this size would normally be rolling forty to fifty degrees.

He remembered the terror of forty-foot seas in the Arctic. How
Ryan
had gone damn near beam on more than once, leaving every man aboard walking on the bulkheads rather than the deck. The never-ending worry about whether they could keep the engines and bearings supplied with lube oil at a seventy-degree list.

He looked out to starboard as a foaming crest rose, seemed to hesitate, then toppled. A faint groan or hum came from forward. The
fins turning, adjusting. Anticipating, then accepting the immense strain of thousands of tons of water bludgeoning their solid steel stocks. Instead of rolling, the frigate rode nearly upright, canting only a little, like a surfer, balanced, gliding down the wave. It passed and she rode up, but caught herself and only lurched the faintest bit, a slight jar, as she refused the roll back.

Impressive. But he wondered to what degree they'd work in really heavy seas, the chaotic fifty- or sixty-foot mountains that lurked at the sunlit heart of the typhoon. What he gazed on was nothing compared to that apocalyptic violence. What if the fins came out of the water? How would they respond then?

He didn't want to find out.

THE hours dragged by. Lunchtime came, and an invitation from Jung. In CIC, folded and rammed into a corner, Dan couldn't face it. “Please convey my respects. I'm not feeling well enough for lunch,” he told Kim #3.

“You are sick of the sea?”

“Something like that.” Even coffee made him nauseated. His in-sides felt like a septic line backed up from a blocked drainfield. Sooner or later it was all going to let go. He didn't want it to be in front of the commodore. He sprawled in a stupor, only vaguely registering the whine of the wind, the mumble of the diesels, the groan and hum of the stabilizers conducted through the metal against which the bone of his skull rested.

He dozed off, then came awake again, coughing. The low space was the same, the hum of fans, the pall of smoke, the fungoid faces dangling over the scopes. He hauled himself to the nearest repeater. The green speckle of sea return pimpled the screen, but he made out a bowing in the line abreast formation as the smaller units labored to keep pace.

He wondered dully where Andy Mangum was. Deep, deep, was his guess, twisting in the oozy weeds, down where the only witness of the tempest's rage was a conch-whisper in the sonarman's cochlea. He bent over red polyethylene, gut knotting, but all that came up was a sharp thin cough-and-spit of acid.

On the bridge the stink of vomit and cigarettes was cut by the iron
smell of the heaters and the moldy aroma of standing seawater. The doors were weeping through their gaskets. The tile deck was plastered with transparent-wet paper towels. The windshield disks squealed like tormented hamsters, whipping off spray and rain.