WW III

interference — but she said she “couldn’t stand the rain.” What she meant was she couldn’t stand the strain — didn’t like baby-sitting and having to read the same bedtime story fifteen times, with interminable cries of “toilet” and “thirsty.” Ray didn’t blame her, didn’t blame the kids, missed them terribly — said so in his letter each week. But next leave, damn it, he and Beth were going to take off. A couple of days up on the Olympic Peninsula, a little place like La Push, cottage by thundering green-white surf, the smell of dead intertidal life giving off that fresh “ozoney” tang, and craggy, pine-covered mountains sweeping down to the sea. He and Beth in bed — all day. Then chilled cans of “Oly”—none of the diet stuff. Make love till they couldn’t do it anymore.

He felt the ship alter course slightly.

Strangest thing was, he couldn’t picture her face clearly after a month out, her facial expressions blurred in memory, precisely when he thought they ought to be clearest.

The voice tube’s hollow whistle sounded.

“Captain here — what is it?”

“CIC, sir — immediate.”

Brentwood grabbed his cap from the peg and headed for the Combat Information Center one deck below the bridge.

“What’ve we got?” he asked, entering the blood-red cave of winking consoles. “Bogey?”

“Not sure, sir,” reported the first officer. “A blip from five thousand feet. Hundred miles from us. Very fast, then nothing but scatter at sea level.”

Brentwood looked at the situation board. The carrier Salt Lake City was a hundred miles behind them. “Downed aircraft?” asked Brentwood.

“None reported, sir.”

Brentwood turned to the radar operator. “What do you think, sailor?”

“Don’t think it’s a black box down, sir,” answered the operator, meaning an airliner. “No SOS.”

“Is it in the Alley?” Brentwood asked, referring to the civilian corridor between Japan and Korea.

“Yes, sir. Off Cape Changgi.”

“One of the radio beacons acting up?” suggested Brentwood.

“Negative, sir. First thing I checked.”

“No steady beeps since first sighting?”

“No, sir. Sporadic.”

Brentwood studied the chart in the CIC’s subdued light. Cape Changgi was the eastern tip of Pohang Harbor, two-thirds of the way down South Korea’s eastern coast. “How far are we from the area?”

“Around a hundred miles, sir.”

“Exactly?”

“Ah — ninety-three point seven miles, sir.”

“Very well. Flank speed.”

“Flank speed,” came the confirmation.

“Steer two seven five.”

“Two seven five.”

“Announce Condition Three,” ordered Brentwood.

“Condition Three, sir,” replied the officer of the watch, informing the crew over the PA system. The ship was now in the middle of five stages of alert, a third of its complement ready for immediate action.

Brentwood rang the galley for a mug of coffee and glanced at his watch. He estimated they should be off Pohang shortly after dawn.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

At Fort Dyer, Sergeant Franks checked the thermal imager again. No movement, but the usual noise of North Korean loudspeakers from which Pyongyang Polly’s seductively soft, warm voice wafted through the rainy darkness, as usual exhorting the Americans to desert. The reward for turning over a radio, Franks noted, had held steady at two thousand won, while the amount paid for defecting with a helicopter had increased slightly to sixty thousand. There wasn’t going to be any war, she told them, unless the “gangsters in Seoul” and their “guerae migook”— “American puppets”—invaded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in which case the loyal workers and peasants of “our great respected leader and teacher” would repel the aggressors.

“Are you lonely, Private Long?” asked the sexy voice. “Who wouldn’t be? You are forced to stand guard for the corrupt lackeys in Seoul and Washington. While you are standing in the rain, your capitalist bosses are sitting in their warm mansions, enjoying their women and their wine. They send young men like you away from your families. You think they would come in your place?”

Private Long, a newcomer from Yongsan base, had been warned about this “personal approach bullshit.” He grinned at his buddy, but he was shaken. It was an unnerving experience, no matter how often you’d been told to ignore it — particularly when she started in with personal details that you thought were unknown to anyone else, least of all the North Koreans. To make matters worse, the volume of the speakers was now so loud, to compensate for the thunderstorm, that Long knew she could be heard all over. She mentioned his fiancee, Joan. Would she remain faithful to her soldier? “So far, far away, Private Long. Of course, your friends will look after Joan — make sure she won’t be lonely. Why don’t you come over? There are nice girls in Pyongyang. Sweet dreams.”

For Private Long, everything about the Korean night was alien. The monsoon was different, the stench of human feces, used as fertilizer, rising from the rice paddies, revolting. Even the sounds of the insects were different. He ached to be back home.

Sergeant Franks called the platoon corporal to take over the TI scope so he could go and talk to young Long. Halfway down one of the sandbagged trenches radiating from the bunker’s hub, Franks heard an explosion.

“Minefield!” someone yelled.

Franks cocked his M-60, swung it onto the sandbagged parapet. “Lights! — Two o’clock!” Three searchlights swept and crisscrossed the DMZ. He saw tracer arcing leisurely toward their position. “Mark and fire!”

Shooting erupted from both sides. A searchlight tinkled and died. The firing kept up.

“Flare!” ordered Franks. This was followed by a loud pop, and night became flickering day. It was an errant musk deer, one of its hind legs missing, the other caught in the fence, frantically thrashing against the barbed wire — the animal’s huge, soulful eyes bright beneath the dying flare, its doglike bark growing louder.

“Get a light on it,” said Franks, and taking careful aim, shot it dead.

Soon everything was quiet again except for the reassuring hiss of the monsoon’s rain. Following normal procedure, Fort Dyer reported the “false alarm” to “Big Blue,” the situation board deep in the underground headquarters in Seoul twenty-five miles away.

In Seoul the meteorologists forecast more rain.

CHAPTER TWELVE

In the predawn darkness off Korea’s east coast a hundred and eighty-five miles south of the DMZ, six bombers were coming in low. Their undersides white, the remainder of the fuselage a navy blue, the Russian-made TU-22M Backfires were traveling at Mach.9, the sea a leaden blur beneath them, their wings fully extended rather than in the swept-back position, sacrificing speed for greater maneuverability. Each bomber, its nine-ton load the equivalent of several World War II squadrons, carried two seven-hundred-pound CBU cluster bombs, each of these containing 150 smaller three-pound bombs, set for a DP, or dispersal pattern, saturation bombing; three one- thousand-pound “iron” or high-explosive bombs; and ten one-thousand-pound concrete-piercing bombs — the remainder of each bomber’s load, around eleven thousand pounds, made up of fifty two-hundred-pound FAEs (fuel air explosive), a close relative of napalm. All six planes in tandem V-formation were under strict orders not to activate either their “Bee Hind” gun-control radar in the rear barbette of each aircraft or the “Down Beat” attack-