THE helicopter sketched a charcoal line across a rough gray paper overcast, aimed directly at him. Lenson slouched with thumbs in this belt loops, steel-toes braced wide, briefcase slung off his back. Chung Nam rolled with a slow nodding lean. Around him the crew shouted and rushed about. Looking flushed, Kim #3—there were so many he’d resorted to numbering them—swung his landing-signal paddles on the fantail like a jayvee cheerleader warming up her pompons. The helo banked and rapidly grew larger. Its clatter echoed across the choppy sea.
Two days had passed. Phase I was complete. Every sonar team had at least five hours’ practice tracking San Francisco and four hours tracking the smaller, and therefore harder to acquire, Chang Bo Go. The Korean 209 had joined up the day before.
The helo landing team froze in their tracks, saluting him. Or rather—Dan turned his head—saluting Jung, who’d just stepped out on the frigate’s tennis-court-sized helo deck. Dan didn’t salute, since he was uncovered, but he bowed. The commodore nodded back, then turned his attention to the approaching aircraft.
Five minutes later they sat squashed together with five other passengers, gripping their briefcases as the quivering fuselage banked hard. The deck rolled up and hovered nearly above them. They grew suddenly heavy. The sea scrolled past. He looked across the fuse-lage to meet Jung’s eyes. They stared at each other until Dan dropped his gaze.
USS John S. McCain was the Destroyer Squadron 15 flagship. Since Jung was OTC, he’d wanted to hold the pre-Phase II meeting aboard Chung Nam. But Leakham had argued McCain had better comms, a full flight deck, and spaces for a large meeting. As Dan followed Jung and the others through her centerline passageway he felt like Woody Allen unfrozen in the far future. The air was chill with air-conditioning, which Chung Nam didn’t have. The wide passageways were lined with advanced equipment. The crew, of which there seemed to be very few, wore spotless dark blue coveralls and ball caps instead of denims and greasy tees. The cold air smelled strange. It took a while before he realized the “smell” was the absence of stale smoke.
“Good morning, good to see ya. Commodore Jung, what a pleasure.” Leakham, bulky and blond and hearty, was working the arriving COs in the spacious immaculate wardroom. He pumped Jung’s hand. “Bring any PowerPoint matter? We can upload and project it here. No? Well, come on in. Decaf, muffins, hot fresh tarts on the sideboard.” Dan got only a nod. “Lenson. How you doing over there?”
“All right,” he said, but Leakham was already greeting the next officer in line, gaunt, bronzed, and glorious in white shorts and gold-encrusted cap; one of the Australians, from Darwin or Torrens.
Dan got a blueberry pastry and coffee, marveling at how strange human beings of European descent looked now. At first all Koreans had seemed identical. All dark haired, and almost all (except Jung) fairly small. But with his eye meeting no one else for days on end, they’d become individuals, each unique.
Now, back among Americans, he saw their differences not as within the norm of accustomed variability but as grotesqueries. The varied hues of face and hair and shape seemed no longer commonplace, but shocking and freakish.
He finished the muffin, ravenous, and was tearing into a flaky still-warm raspberry tart when a balding captain, probably Leakham’s chief of staff, called for seats.
The meeting went fast. He made only a few notes. Two events on the third were being switched, to avoid carrying one, which depended on visibility, into darkness if it went late. The weather didn’t look good, though. A tropical storm near Indonesia would bear watching, the met briefer said. They’d see increased overcast, rain activity, and wind speeds between fifteen and twenty knots. But unless it actually came their way, the landmasses of Japan would mask any marked long-period swell activity.
Jung called on Dan for remarks. He reminded the assembled COs to make sure the TAG reps riding their ships had full access to tactical decision making. They should discuss with those riders their rationale for any departure from standard operating procedures. “I want to emphasize again, we’re not here to grade you,” he said, looking each in the eye in turn. “We don’t expect or require you to hew to existing tactical guidelines. We put those out as suggestions, based on what’s worked in the past, or what theoretically should give you better detection ranges, higher detection rates, better probabilities of reacquisition on a lost contact. And in the end, a better probability of kill during the attack phase. But it’s ultimately up to you which tactics you implement. SATYREs can be a fruitful source of future tactical improvements, but only if we understand what’s going through your head. Your intent is just as important as the maneuver itself. We’ll then evaluate that maneuver against its objective success. Eventually the result will show up in your publications. So keep a close eye on those data-keeping requirements, and assign people you know are on the ball.” He asked for questions, got none, and sat down.
Jung made a few remarks. He finished, “As the British learned in the Falklands—the last time submarines were faced in a wartime re-supply operation—ASW is a force-intensive activity. Even when it’s successful, it usually results, not in a kill, but just in keeping the enemy at bay.
“Given that—and we do understand that, I assure you—Korean Navy doctrine is still somewhat different from standard NATO doctrine. We believe the most effective means of keeping the threat at bay is the kill. A dead submarine will not reattack. We emphasize overwhelming force, and offensive action at all costs. I understand this is at variance with U.S. procedures. But the difference is only one of emphasis. I expect to work very closely together during the remainder of this exercise, and I hope it is as productive as Commander Lenson”—he reached out suddenly, and Dan flinched as he was patted on the shoulder, no, almost caressed—”seems to think it will be.”
Fat and bluff, Leakham heaved himself up and smiled around. Muffin crumbs clung to the front of his shirt. “Well, that’s about all Commodore Jung and I had. Anything more before we break?”
Dan lifted his hand. Leakham looked away, but at last had to nod, though he frowned as he did so. “Lenson.”
“One thing I’ve noticed, sir.”
Another frown. “Go ahead.”
“I’m not sure we’re where we ought to be as far as prearranged signals for disengagement. We had an incident in event 27005 where a ship was getting out of station. It didn’t proceed to extremis, but if it had, how would we have stopped the exercise play and warned both sides to go to safety courses?”
Leakham chuckled. “I don’t see that as a problem, Mr. Lenson. There are standard disengagement signals in ATP 28.”
“Well, sir, those signals assume there’s several thousand yards, even miles, between the engaged units. The predicted direct-path ranges over the next few days here are so close I don’t feel entirely comfortable—”
“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.
He went into the sonar compartment for a while and discussed the search procedures with Henrickson. The ship leaned in a couple more tight turns while he was in there. He figured it was normal evasive maneuvering in the vicinity of a sub. He borrowed the sonar-men’s tables and worked out the effective acoustic range of their torpedoes. They were homing torpedoes, of course, Mark 46s, using a small active sonar in the nose to pick up and then zero in on their target.
This triggered another thought, and he ran down his attack checklist and went out into CIC again and checked that their own antitorpedo countermeasures were streamed. The SLQ-25 was the same decoy the U.S. Navy employed. It howled the identical noise spectrum into the water as a ship’s screw. A fish approaching from astern would home on it and explode, instead of going into the propeller.
He was occupied with this when he glanced at the DRT.
The green pencil trace—Dae Jon’s—was crossing almost directly over the datum.
He froze, not believing what he saw. His first thought was that the plotters had erred. He shoved between them and fingered the trace. “Is this good? Is this valid data?”
Even as he asked he knew it was. The track had diverged nine minutes earlier, about the time he’d gone into sonar. The evaluator gave him a blank look. Dan swore and wheeled, charging up the ladder to the bridge.
The pilothouse was absolutely dark and unfamiliar and he blundered into someone, who shot back abuse in Korean. Dan said the only phrase he could muster, “Sorry.”
“Commander Lenson?”
It was Yu; of course if you were going to run into someone, it had to be the captain. On the other hand, Yu had tactical command of both ships. Dan said quickly, “Sorry, sir, but I can’t see yet. Captain: Dae Jon is very close to San Francisco’s safety zone. Maybe inside it by now.”
“She is making attack.”
“I understand that, but your plot shows her far too close in, sir.” He peered out the windows, expecting any moment to see the red flare from the submarine that meant danger, disengage. But there was nothing but the black of midnight sea. The speed disks roared. Rain hammered on the windscreens. “I strongly advise you signal ‘disengage’ at once and withdraw to a safe distance.”
“Commodore is not on the bridge—”
“Sir, he’s not OTC for this event. You are.” At that moment a distant red-orange spark caught Dan’s eye out the starboard wing window. He swiveled instantly and pointed. “And the sub’s at periscope depth. Sir, you have to disengage.”
His eyes were adapting now and he could make out the men and equipment as black shapes against the faint luminescence from dials and indicator lamps. He left Yu standing and crossed the bridge and undogged the starboard door.
The warm rain cascaded down out of blackness. It smelled like a root cellar and like coal smoke and it soaked him within seconds. He ignored it. His face was welded to the little three-power scope on top of the pelorus stand. Through it he made out the orange wink of the strobe far away. He twisted the scope and made out the silhouette of a destroyer only a few degrees off it. Yeah. Showing a port running light. It was bearing down on the strobe, and by the distance intervals on the plot below, at flank speed.
It seemed like minutes as he fought his way through the door again, groped in the dark for the right microphone, and hit the button. Perhaps a tenth of second elapsed between pressing the button to speak and the red transmit light illuminating. In that instant his brain warned him he’d pay for this. But then he remembered the men in a fragile envelope not far below the surface. The knife-edged bow of the old destroyer, flank speed, bad visibility… an electric shock ran up the injured nerves of his spine. He couldn’t wait for someone else to act.
“Buffalo, Buffalo,” he said as clearly and slowly as he could. “Event terminated. Dae Jon, Dae Jon: Speed zero, I say again, speed zero. Turn to safety course due north immediately. Acknowledge.”
He wanted her dead in the water, now. An accented voice came back with a stilted interrogative. Dan repeated the order till he got a roger. Then said, “I say again, Buffalo, Buffalo. All units clear and disengage to safe standoff distance.”
The Koreans were shouting at him. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He shoved it off and went through the litany again, slowly, precisely, sending in the clear so everyone could hear and not waste one precious second searching a signal book. He signed off, let up off the button. Took a deep breath. Then turned.
The bridge was emptying. He could only guess, but someone must have ordered it cleared.
THE confrontation wasn’t pleasant. Midway through it, with Yu spluttering in a spit-spattering froth of English and Korean, trying to tear him a new asshole without the vocabulary for it, San Francisco came up on the tactical coordination net. Laying it out in dry phrases, a midwestern voice from the American sub notified the overall exercise OTC—Commodore Jung, though Hwang had been the one who actually answered the radio—that San Francisco would no longer participate in exercise play. He was withdrawing to the east for the remainder of the dark hours and would report his pullout to SUB-PAC. He requested that all Korean units stay well clear of him west of 127 degrees east longitude.
“May I talk to him?” Dan asked Hwang. He got a hesitation; then the handset.
“Romeo Kilo, this is TAG exercise coordinator. Request to speak to Romeo Kilo actual. Over.”
“This is Romeo Kilo actual. Over.” The sub’s skipper, in person.
“This is TAG coordinator. Request to know reason for your dropping out of exercise. Over.”
“This is Romeo Kilo. I can’t play with these idiots. Over.”
Dan cleared his throat, conscious of Hwang, and Yu, and the officer of the deck, Kim #2, he thought, listening to the exchange, which was being piped over the speaker as well as through his handset. Plus everybody in CIC as well, no doubt. “Uh, this is TAG coordinator. Understand there was a violation of standoff distance. Over.”
“Romeo Kilo. You could call it that. I call it irresponsible maneuvering, too close at too high a speed. He missed me by less than two hundred yards. That’s too dangerous for me to continue participation. Over.”
Dan rubbed his forehead. Without the sub, they no longer had an event. “This is TAG coordinator. The signal for a dangerously close approach is a red flare. Over.”
The sub skipper explained he’d tried to fire one, but it had hung up in the ejection tube. When the inner door had been opened to extract it, it had ignited and fallen out on the deck. Dan closed his eyes. No wonder the guy was pulling out. At periscope depth, with a destroyer charging down on him, and a fire aboard too. “Any casualties? Is the fire under control? Over.”
“Romeo Kilo. Fire is out. A couple guys down with smoke. Over.”
Dan eased off the button, trying to think. He thought he knew where the Koreans were coming from. They had the fighting spirit. He didn’t want to discourage that. But he also understood the sub skipper’s misgivings. Captaining a billion dollars’ worth of nuclear submarine was as exacting a trade as there was. His job was to get everyone working together. That was the only way to keep the exercise going. But at the moment, it was falling apart.
“Commander Lenson?”
Hwang. The staff officer tugged at his sleeve. Past him, in the corner of the pilothouse, Dan saw Commodore Jung. His stocky shape stood square in the dimness, like a rock around which the surf seethed. Dan steeled himself and went over. “Commodore. Commander Lenson here.”
“I understand you interfered in Captain Yu’s conduct of this event.”
“Sir, Dae Jon was within San Francisco’s standoff distance. The sub was at periscope depth. It was too dangerous to continue.”
“Yu is the OTC. You could have advised him. Rather than causing him to… rather than assuming his responsibilities.”
Jung’s tone was iron, the silence in the pilothouse complete. Dan decided diplomacy might be in order. “Sir, it’s U.S. Navy doctrine that anyone observing a hazard during an exercise may terminate the exercise. Must terminate the exercise. If that’s not Korean procedure, I most humbly apologize. Both to you and to the captain.” He bowed, both to Jung and Yu, to make it plain even to those who didn’t follow English what he was doing.
Jung cleared his throat but didn’t respond, so Dan pressed on. “Unfortunately we have a problem.”
He explained about San Francisco’s onboard fire, her CO’s reaction to the close pass, and his withdrawal from the exercise. Jung’s shadow stroked its chin. Said slowly, “If they leave, the only submarine involved will be Chang Bo Go. That won’t be sufficient?”
“Well, sir, no, it won’t. The free play just won’t work with only one sub.”
Jung said angrily, “I’m not happy about this, Commander. Korean doctrine too emphasizes safety. But after all, we also train the way we fight. And I don’t plan to admonish any of my skippers for being too combative. No. I will not do that.”
“No, sir. I understand where you’re coming from on that. And if I acted too hastily, I apologize once again.”
“Very well; that is closed. But about the submarine… what can I do about that? Is she really going to withdraw?”
“They take safety very seriously, sir. And you can’t blame them.”
“Tell me what to do,” Jung said.
Dan thought a moment. He didn’t like the idea, but it was all he could think of. “Well, sir,” he said slowly, “there might be one thing we can try.”