Korea Strait (6 page)

He wasn't used to being fed, much less by a woman in a flowered kimono. But their host had been insistent. And since he'd turned down the
soju
the rice whiskey, he figured it'd be best to go along.

The rest of the TAG team, under Henrickson, had gone on to Pusan. Now five men and one woman sat in stocking feet around the low red-lacquered table high in the 63 Building, the loftiest skyscraper in Seoul. Commodore Jung sat beside Commander Hwang, backs to a charcoal-glowing fireplace. Dick Shappell, the heavyset blond captain named Harry Leakham—commander, Destroyer Squadron 15—and Captain Carol Owens, the U.S. naval attaché to the Republic of Korea, rounded out the guests. They were all in civvy slacks and open-necked shirts, except for Owens, who was graceful and diminutive in a pantsuit and blouse.

Beside each diner reclined a woman in a bright silk
handbok
. The women's faces were powdered ghost white, lips tinted cherry red, hair glossy black as a lacquered generator winding. The one feeding him was named Mi Ra. She was pretty but when she leaned close he caught her scent, less inviting than alien, like an unfamiliar spice you wouldn't like if you tasted it. Being fed by hand was embarrassing.
But a notch up, he told himself, from fighting it out hand to hand with a desperate female commando.

“You must have
soju
with us, Dan,” Jung said again. Dan had refused twice before as politely as he could. Across from him Shappell squinted, silently urging him to accept.

“Again, Commodore, as I said, I'm going to pass on that. I just can't handle it the way you can. With thanks.”

Jung rolled his eyes, pouting. “You won't drink with us. Really, a little will not hurt you.”

“I'll stay with this wonderful green tea, Commodore. It has nothing to do with you, or this truly fine… meal experience… you're so generously treating us to.” Though he figured it would no doubt be the Korean government actually picking up the tab.

Jung took off his PhotoGrays. His girl snatched them from his hands and polished them with a napkin, cooing as she did so. He ignored her, scratching his neck. “You have not told us how old you are, Dan.”

“I'm thirty-nine, Commodore.”

“And married? Certainly yes; I see a ring. Any children? Any boys?”

“Yes sir, I'm married. My wife works in Washington. I have a daughter. She goes to school in northern Virginia. And you, sir?”

Jung said smiling that he was forty-five, and very fortunate; he had two daughters and two sons. He didn't mention a wife. He turned to Leakham and put him through the same quiz. Shappell and Owens he ignored, either because he already knew them, or for some other reason, Dan couldn't guess. Layers beneath layers…He felt out of place, as uncomfortable probably as Owens's server, who stared at her, as if she'd never seen a female guest at this table before. Maybe she hadn't.

“You open now,” his mother robin giggled, breath licking-warm in the porches of his ear. Deftly chopsticking a morsel from the brazier bubbling on the table, cupping her hand beneath, she fed him the delicious barbecued beef. He wished she'd stop, felt like grabbing the chopsticks, but kept his smile pasted on. Shappell had briefed him on the protocol. Don't offer to pay; Jung had invited them and trying to do so would insult his hospitality. Don't tip. Bow back whenever anyone bows to you. Don't talk business while the food's on the
table. And never wipe your nose—it was an insult, though they might let it pass if an ignorant Westerner did it.

He tried to relax, to enjoy what the Korean officer no doubt intended as a treat and an honor. He'd been very lucky yesterday. Not just in having nothing more than a bruise to show from what should've been a knife in his heart, but managing not to get bent too.

As soon as he'd stepped onto the salvage ship's fantail they'd stripped him, bundled him into fleece-lined clothes, and handed him a mug of scalding hot chai. Their captive had disappeared. She'd be subjected, Dr. Kim said with a face like cast concrete, to interrogation by ROK military counterintelligence. Oh yes, he told Dan, it was well known that some of the Reconnaissance Bureau infiltration teams were made up entirely of women. Dan's shivering had gradually eased as he'd been checked over by the ship's medic, then debriefed by the DIA major. Not too long after, the destroyer had closed up, to run Dan, Shappell, and Carmichael back into port.

“So what's your take on how we're going to set up this Phase Three play?” Leakham was asking Jung.

The commodore made a face. “Let's talk about that later. For now let's enjoy to the full this delicious food. This lovely company.” He cuddled the kitten next to him, who giggled and popped another morsel into his mouth. Dan wondered how far this geisha routine was supposed to go. Jung's cheeks were turning darker, flushing from the hot booze, of which he'd had several cups, tossed back and then handed to his girl for refilling. Dan couldn't watch, and the fumes turned his stomach. He'd had to quit years back.

When his legs cramped, he excused himself and found the restroom. Washed his hands, looking in the mirror. He looked haggard. Needed a haircut too. All night he'd kept seeing that knife coming at him. The woman's slim torso punctured with bullets, the terrible wounds in her back where they'd tumbled out.

Finally he'd gotten up and tried to call his daughter, figuring the time would be right for her to be getting up. He'd just missed her, her roommate said; she'd already left for class.

Shappell came in and used the traditional-style urinal, porcelain skis on either side of a hole in the floor. “How you holding up?” he said over his shoulder.

“Okay.”

“Love that octopus stew?”

“
Don't
tell me what it is, all right? All that garlic and red pepper. I'm eating it, aren't I?”

Shappell laughed.

Dan lowered his voice. “Say, Dick… should we be discussing classified stuff here? I mean, this isn't exactly a secure location, and these geishas or whatever they are…”

“You don't think they check those girls out six ways from Sunday? These people are a lot more security-conscious than we are.” Shappell laughed again, zipped, and held the door for him.

Back at the table the servers were whipping away the little tulip-shaped bowls, leaving slices of orange and lemon and dishes of multicolored molded rice balls. Mi Ra fed him one. Almondy, sweet, not bad at all. The next tasted like licorice, the third, like cinnamon. He decided to stop while he was ahead. There was another drink too, which smelled like sweet rice. He turned it down as politely as he could, though it was getting annoying having it pushed on him. Especially since he actually
wanted
a drink. After what he'd been though, didn't he deserve one?…He barricaded that off-ramp in his mind, knowing what lay at its end. Nothing good.

Jung laughed and said something to the girls. They rose swiftly, dipped to the guests, beaming and giggling, and vanished. The commodore stretched and burped. He smiled around. “That is good manners, in our country,” he said.

“How about this?” Leakham said. He tilted on his cushion and let go a loud fart. Shappell winced, Owens rolled her eyes, but Jung roared and slapped the table. Pointed at Leakham, who was grinning like a ten-year-old, and roared again. Beside him Commander Hwang waited, hands cupped on his knees, smiling, but with a narrowed, cool, all-examining gaze.

They moved into a discussion of the barrier strategy. Dan was still uneasy talking about it in a restaurant, but hey, if Shappell was okay with it… Anyway, what they were discussing was more in the nature of tactical philosophy. What was really classified was the specifics: ranges, frequencies, detection probabilities. The unglamorous facts.

“The trouble is that the exercise area is so shallow,” Hwang was saying primly. “The ‘Red' submarines, it is true, will find that reduced depths will reduce our detection-range advantage. Perhaps to as
little as a quarter the normal ranges. Which will either force us to commit four times as many forces, or to reduce the length of our barrier.”

“Or use more sonobuoys,” Leakham said.

“Our exercise budget is limited. We are not a wealthy country like America. And sonobuoys suffer reduced effectiveness in shallow water too. Passive localization will be very difficult.”

They discussed figures of merit and transmission-loss rates. Jung emphasized again, waving a bottle of Korean beer, how important it was to thoroughly tune both sensors and sonar teams during Phase I. “I have operated in these waters for many years. At this season, in the center of the basin, every decibel we gain between thirty and one thousand hertz will give us another kilometer at ten kilometers, half a kilometer at fifty kilometers. The barrier can lengthen and our detection rate goes up. Especially significant if we see heavy mixing due to storms.”

Dan caught Owens's eye. The attaché smiled at him. He half smiled back and looked at Jung again.

“We will play against both the American nuclear sub—which one is it—”

“
San Francisco
”

“Yes,
San Francisco
and our new 209. We have just taken delivery of
Chang Bo Go
The crew may not be thoroughly familiar. Which we can exploit.”

The 209s were new German-built diesel submarines. Leakham said, “What's their snorkel interval?”

Jung cocked his head. He raised his eyebrows at Hwang, who blinked, caught off guard.

Dan cleared his throat. “We can calculate it.”

They looked at him. He pulled out his PDA and called up the graphing calculator function. Most skippers and tactical action officers were content to use the tables in the NWPs, the naval warfare publications, that TAG put out. But he always liked to know the equations behind the tables. Sometimes you could find an edge around the margins. “It's a twelve-hundred-ton boat, right? A quarter of that'll be batteries. They'll run about twenty-three watt-hours per pound at a discharge rate of one hundred hours.” He totaled that, subtracted what he figured the life-support systems would require, and set up an algorithm, glad now he'd skipped the
soju
. A curve floated up on the
screen. He lowered his voice, making sure none of the servers were near. “The indiscretion rate—when the snorkel has to be up—will be around five percent at a speed of advance of five knots, fifteen percent at ten knots, and fifty percent at fifteen knots.”

When he looked up he sensed he'd done something out of place. Made Jung and Hwang lose face? He hoped not. Chappell was intent on whatever he could discover in his martini glass. Owens blinked off into space. After a moment Leakham said, “Okay, I'm ready to share on tactics.”

“Share?” Hwang repeated. “Not sure what you mean, Captain. I mean, Commodore. We use the standard tactics. Out of ATP 28.”

“I mean some things we came up with out of JIMPAC.” The joint U.S.-Japanese exercises a few months before. “I was in Sasebo for the hot washup, and it really opened my eyes. Some new ideas the Japs are coming up with. Special shallow-water tactics—”

“We know the Eastern Sea,” Hwang said, and Dan saw that yes, despite the courteous tone he was annoyed. “We know what tactics work there. It's just a matter of adjusting to environmental conditions, sea state and so on. And guessing the intent of the enemy, of course.”

“In this case, the Red side,” Shappell put in.

“No, you need to think outside that box,” Leakham said, reeling a little as he sat. Sweat ran down his face as he drained his beer. “You know Kasugata? Admiral Kasugata? The Japs are putting a lot of study into this. Getting really smart on it. He's got a new way to use towed arrays in shallow water. A hunting matrix, he calls it. Here's how they work.”

He searched around for paper. But Jung said coldly, “I don't really care what Kasugata thinks. We know our seas better than any of the Japanese.”

Dan remembered how much the Koreans hated the Japanese, who'd behaved with appalling brutality during the occupation. Obviously Leakham either didn't know or didn't care. Shappell was shifting on his cushion. He tried to break in, but Leakham interrupted. “There's never a point where you say, you know it all, Commodore. You go by ATP 28, you're back in the seventies as far as tactics go.”

“We know our seas,” Jung repeated stubbornly.

Leakham beamed, patting the air like a used-car salesman trying
to close a stubborn customer. Sweat dripped from his chin. “Hey, that's why
we're
here, Commodore. We'll work with you, no problem. Get you some help, get you up on the step here—”

Jung said nothing; his eyes were slits. His chief of staff leaned forward and tapped a finger on lacquered wood. “That is not the point of this exercise, Commodore.
You're
here to learn from
us
. Our expertise, in our home waters. Who caught the Sang-o yesterday, after all? We did.”

“Oh, like hell, man,” Leakham blustered, a man-to-man tone that might have worked in a stateside golf club. “Let's not bullshit each other, okay? The USN's always been number one at this game. And the Japanese, they're a close second. That piece of junk broached and self-destructed. You guys had no idea she was there until she popped up. And
then
you let 'em scuttle.” He glanced at Dan. “Right, Lenson? You were there, yes-no? Didn't I hear you went down to the wreck?”

Jung was struggling to his feet, scowling. Dan caught Owens's glance of alarm. Yet she was sitting still, saying absolutely nothing…. He realized why. She couldn't step into this; being rescued by a woman would lose Jung even more face.

He cleared his throat and said, “You're wrong, Commodore.”

Leakham froze. “Huh?”

“—and you're right. Just as you, Commodore”—he turned to Jung—“are right, but also mistaken. We're doing SATYRE 17 to learn from each other, and bring new ideas to the table. No one country has a monopoly on seamanship. Neither the heroic Korean Navy nor the equally brave U.S. Navy.”