General Briggs called the videoconference to order.
On the line were Vice President Lee James; Defense Secretary Burt Trainor; several of Briggs’s senior aides; Admiral Neil Arthurs, commander of USPACOM — the U.S. Pacific Command — based at Camp Smith, Oahu; Brigadier General Jack Bell, commander of the 18th Wing at Kadena Air Base, Japan; and Army General Andy Garrett in Seoul, commander of Combined Forces Command Korea, overseeing some six hundred thousand active duty U.S., Korean, and U.N. ground, air, and naval forces and now another 3.5 million ROK reservists called up over the past few hours.
Briggs immediately turned the meeting over to General Bell at Kadena, who quickly briefed the president on the details of the incident, played the radar track of the entire event with what little audio was available, and showed the latest satellite imagery of the crash site.
“Just to be clear, General,” the president asked, “our plane was in international airspace, correct?”
“Our planes don’t need to penetrate North Korean airspace, Mr. President,” Bell replied. “We can get what we need from a safe, legal distance.”
“That’s not what I asked, General. I asked if our plane was, in fact, in international airspace.”
“It was, Mr. President.”
“There’s no doubt about that?”
“No, sir.”
“None whatsoever?”
“None whatsoever,” Bell replied.
“Was our plane doing anything provocative?”
“No, sir.”
“Could it have been doing something that may have been misperceived as hostile?”
“No, sir,” Bell maintained. “Look, Mr. President, these are routine recon missions. We do them every day, several times a day. We’ve been doing them for years.”
“Were our guys doing anything out of the ordinary, anything at all?” the president pressed.
Bell shook his head. “The only thing different about today was the urgency of your request that we give you real-time updates on the state of DPRK troop and missile deployments.”
“Has anything like this ever happened before, General?”
“Mr. President, our planes get intercepted all the time. It’s a game of cat and mouse, cheat and retreat. You know the drill. I briefed you in detail on this the last time you came out to visit us.”
“I remember it well, General.”
“Sir, the last time a North Korean fighter jet shot down an American recon aircraft was 1969. It was an EC-121. Thirty-one American airmen were killed that day, Mr. President.”
“I’m well aware of the incident, General,” the president replied.
“Well, just for the record, on January 23, 1968—fifteen months before that recon flight was shot down — you’ll recall that the North Korean navy attacked and seized the USS Pueblo. They killed an American sailor. The captain and the rest of the crew — eighty-two men in all — were held and tortured for eleven months.”
“Of course I recall the Pueblo,” the president said. “What’s your point, General?”
“My point, sir, with all due respect, is that President Johnson did nothing to punish Pyongyang for the Pueblo incident. That was an act of war. So is this. Is it really any wonder the North Koreans then shot down an American plane a few months later when they realized there was no price to be paid for taking American lives?”
“That’s enough, General Bell,” Admiral Arthurs at USPACOM said. “I know you and your men are hurting, Jack, but watch your step. And don’t forget: Johnson already had a pretty serious war on his hands, General. Perhaps he didn’t think it wise to start another one with a million Korean Communists.”
“Yes, sir,” Bell said. “My apologies sir.”
“Look,” the SecDef said, stepping in, “the past is past. We’re not about to relitigate Vietnam and the Pueblo incident. The question is, what should we do now?”
The president turned to General Garrett at Command Post Tango, the high-tech, state-of-the-art American war room in Seoul.
“What are you and your men facing, General? How bad is it?”
“Mr. President, it’s a pretty serious situation we’ve got on our hands over here,” Garrett replied. “My heart goes out to General Bell and the families he’s having to console. But I would remind everyone that Pyongyang has the fourth largest military in the world—1.2 million active duty forces, seven million more in the reserves, and one of the largest special ops forces on the planeT — about 125,000 men — and they’re all pointed my way. They’ve got 170 infantry divisions and brigades, 3,800 tanks, 12,000 pieces of artillery, and on a normal day, 70 percent of it all is pre-positioned within ninety miles of the DMZ, in some four thousand concrete-hardened underground facilities, none of which our satellites can penetrate.”
“And today?” the president asked.
“The latest intelligence estimate was 90 percent.”
“Then they really are mobilizing for war,” the president said.
“That would be my assessment, yes, Mr. President,” General Garrett concurred. “And that doesn’t take into account their air force, navy, submarines, or long-range ballistic missiles, all of which we are seeing on a heightened state of readiness as well.”
“What kind of firepower are we talking about?”
“If they don’t go nuclear?”
“Right.”
“Using just the artillery pieces already on the front lines, they could hit Seoul and our frontline forces with half a million rounds an hour.”
54
The news hit Caulfield hard.
He hadn’t eaten all day. He was surviving — if you could call it thaT — on coffee and cocaine. Darkness seemed to be closing in around him, hour by hour. And now this. The North Koreans had just shot down an unarmed U.S. plane. Without provocation. In cold blood. Caulfield didn’t need to be in the briefings to see what was coming next. He could read the handwriting on the wall.
The president was going to hit back. He had to — hard. And there was Derek, his older brother — the brother who had practically been a father to him since his real father had left home when he was five — sitting on the DMZ. Directly in the line of fire.
Sweat began pouring down his face. His skin felt like it was crawling. He had to get out of here. He needed fresh air and time to think. But none of that was going to happen. Not today. Maybe not for weeks.
The president felt every muscle in his body tense.
He had no illusions about what was coming. It was going to be a bloodbath, and the South wouldn’t be the only ones to suffer. North Korean No-dong and Taep’o-dong missiles could reach Tokyo, U.S. bases in Okinawa and Guam, even Beijing. The whole region could be engulfed in war within days. Where would it stop? How would it end?
The president’s father had been a young staff assistant in army intelligence in Washington during the Korean War. Oaks still remembered the phone call ordering his father into the Pentagon that Saturday night, June 24, 1950. He remembered gathering around the radio with his mother and younger brothers. He remembered listening to reports of more than 135,000 North Korean infantry troops and hundreds of Soviet-built tanks racing across the 38th parallel in an audacious predawn, Sunday morning raid, local time, backed by unrelenting artillery fire.
Three days later, they had seized Seoul, backed by Communist China and aided by a phalanx of Soviet advisors.
By the time the cease-fire was signed on July 27, 1953, 2.5 to 3 million had been killed, including 36,940 Americans. Millions more were wounded and maimed. The damage up and down the peninsula was incalculable. But this, Oaks suddenly realized, would be much worse.