Ian Slater - WW III

“I doubt we missed them, Admiral,” replied the NSA representative, James Halpern. “My guess is they were probably ones we already know about but were flown down from Manchuria or across the Yellow Sea from Shanghai. Training’s probably done over southern China.”

“Probably won’t do it for us, Jim,” said the admiral. “You either know where they are or you don’t.”

There was another awkward silence. Gray moved to a more positive note. “At least we have the reserves to move. I didn’t think we’d get that much from the president, to be quite honest.”

“Why not?” asked Admiral Horton. His directness was unnerving to the other combined chiefs of staff. “He can do that. Problem is getting Congress to go along.”

“I don’t think there’ll be any problem there, Admiral,” General Gray assured him. “This isn’t a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It’s invasion, plain and simple.”

“Maybe, but I’ll sleep a lot better when I know your tank boys have stopped them, General.”

“So will I,” conceded Gray. “What about the Blaine?“ It was a little tit for tat.

“Blindsided,” replied the admiral. “The carrier Salt Lake City was in contact with her right up until she was hit. Another frigate is going to assist. If the Blaine’s still afloat.”

“You keeping Senator Leyland posted?”

“Yes. Soon as we know anything more definite, we’ll inform him.”

Later, after he was satisfied everything that could be done by the Pentagon was being done, General Gray rose, indicating the conference was over, but as they filed out he asked Air Force General Allet about the extent of the sabotage in South Korea against the airfields. Gray already knew the answer, but it was a pretext to get Allet off to the side. “Bill, we’ve been caught with our pants down on this one. Everyone here’s been so goddamned worried about Europe and the Mideast—” He paused.

“Point is, now we’re in it, we ought not to paint too rosy a picture about any short-term victory.”

William Allet looked up in surprise. “You mean you don’t think the M-1s can buy us the time we need?”

“Oh sure, they’ll knock the crap out of those damned tin cans. Point is, I think we need to give those North Korean bastards a lesson they won’t soon forget. Senator Leyland’s of the same mind.”

Allet nodded, but General Gray didn’t know whether that meant acquiescence or mere acknowledgment.

Brentwood heard the screams of men trapped in the tangled debris of the red-hot bulkhead, the jagged hole amidships causing the Blaine to heel dangerously to starboard as she reduced speed from flank speed of thirty-five knots to slow ahead at five, still taking water. He ordered the port side compartments flooded, trying to bring the frigate back onto an even keel, lifting the punched-in starboard side above the waterline. Over the sound of the men the Phalanx Gatling gun kept up its murderous fire, aided by the Blaine’s remaining helicopter attacking the retreating patrol boats as they sped southeast now that they’d crippled the American frigate.

The Blaine’s designers, sacrificing weight for high speed and greater maneuverability, had installed state-of-the-art electronics in the warship, but with its armor plate less than an inch thick, the result was a gaping wound in her side roughly twelve feet in diameter, fires raging inside the aluminum superstructure, reaching temperatures unheard of in the slower, heavier ships of old — the decks becoming so hot that fire hoses and the firefighters’ boots began to burn. Twenty-three men were killed outright by the explosion of the Exocet against the ship’s side, another nine dying from burns and hemorrhaging before the asbestos-clothed rescue crews could get anywhere near them. Four men simply disappeared at the point of impact. But by far the most damage was caused by the toxicity of the fumes as the ultramodern materials in the superstructure, everything from tabletop plastics in the mess to plastic-coated wiring, melted, their deadly poisonous gases spreading in a hot fog throughout the ship, the Blaine’s position now visible on SATTNT photos as a white blob, so dense that normal infrared was having difficulty penetrating it. Some of the crew had time to don gas masks, but except in the more heavily armored and protected combat information center immediately below the bridge, the curling, tumbling smoke pouring through aisles and ventilation shafts of the ship killed another fifty of the crew. Within five minutes half the CIC watch became nauseated to the point they could no longer properly monitor the radars, which for the most part were either malfunctioning or useless anyway, the Exocet’s impact having severed communications within the gutted ship that was now moving ghostlike in the fog. Messages had to be sent by runners trying to circumnavigate the inferno in the belly of the ship, where white jets from the fire hoses crisscrossed, the water immediately vaporizing as it struck superheated metal.

The second missile, eight minutes after the first, hit her port rail, its high orange explosion erupting in front of the bridge, where Brentwood was issuing orders for damage control. The fireball enveloped the bridge, sections of the bulletproof glass bulging like some grotesque metallic monster, the sudden heat driving the exploding glass into the bridge, molten shards instantly killing the helmsman and decapitating the OOD. Brentwood saw a blinding white slab, his body crashing into the deck, hands pressing hard against his face, his fingers awash with the warm blood, the second officer, his clothes lacerated, his left arm shattered, eyebrows burned, stumbling, grabbing the battery-operated megaphone, yelling at Brentwood that they should “abandon ship.”

“Very—” began Brentwood. He nodded and blacked out, his face appearing to the second officer as if parts of it had melted, flaps of skin dangling loosely from what had been a face. Hearing the order to abandon ship, the tactical warfare officer one deck below in CIC inserted the key, opening the Clark Meyhew automatic destruct charge, setting the fuse on the Mark II decoder for fifteen minutes.

Only a yeoman, first-class, who had been on the chopper deck astern, assisting the helicopter to land on the fifteen-degree-kiltered deck, noticed, while racing forward along the relatively undamaged walkway, that although the port quarter was a shambles of twisted railing, the decking about it buckled from the missile’s impact, the multimillion-dollar ship, though limping badly, was still afloat. He shouted at one man who was tightening his life jacket on the starboard rail not to jump, that their sister ship in the carrier screen, the Des Moines, must be coming for them. For a second, the yeoman couldn’t see the figure he was yelling at, a gunner’s mate still wearing his asbestos hood, looking strangely like a polar explorer, lost momentarily in the churning white smoke that was boiling up from the well deck. The wind shifted for a second, smoke clearing, but the mate was gone. Looking over the side, the yeoman could see several oil-slicked men striking out in an Australian crawl, others breaststroking, the noises of their cries remarkably like wounded seals, heading as best they could through the black scum of the debris toward one of the half dozen Beaufort life rafts that were now bobbing unconcernedly on the oil-smooth chop like huge, contented orange-glow igloos.

In the Uijongbu corridor it was still raining late in the afternoon, the monsoon seeming to set in for the rest of the wet season. As forty M-1 tanks fanned out into overwatch positions, two wingmen or flank tanks overseeing the advance of a middle tank, which in turn would pair up with one of the remaining two and watch over the advance of the third tank, Clemens took delight in watching them spreading out to encircle the PT-76s. The latter were now withdrawing across the paddies, heading for the foothills of the mountain range as fast as they could. Clemens cursed, being unable to move in for the kill in his disabled tank, but did his best on his radio from his defilade position on the reverse side of the hill to guide some of the M-1s through the thick, choking smoke that the fleeing North Korean tanks and infantry were laying down across the darkening green of the countryside and around the enormous flooded ditch that the NKA had blown out of the ground to serve as an antitank defense. Through the noise of the battle and that of his own tank’s motors Clemens could hear the American commander brusquely alerting all tanks to go around the ditch that Clemens had warned was not just another paddy. The commander also ordered the tank crews to ready their fording equipment in the event that any of the other normally waist-deep paddies, flooded by the monsoon, proved too deep to negotiate on tracks alone.