Chun felt Great Leader’s deck cant as it turned, slowly at first, but faster as the submarine’s speed picked up.
It was still too slow. When the American torpedo reached its target area, the Great Leader was moving at just nine knots. That wasn’t fast enough for Chun’s abruptly ordered turn to form the “knuckle” of disturbed water needed to confuse the torpedo’s onboard sonar.
Instead, the torpedo steered right through the patch of mild turbulence, corrected its course slightly, and then drove straight into the Great Leader, striking just aft of its conning tower.
The Mark 46 exploded and ripped open a gaping hole in the Great Leader’s pressure hull. The submarine flooded in seconds and settled to the bottom on its side, trailing a stream of bubbling air, debris, and fuel oil.
North Korea’s prewar naval strategy sank with it.
Captain Richard Levi swept his eyes over the rows of merchant ships riding at anchor in Pusan harbor and then looked back at the three moored closest to O’Brien. Andrew T. Thomas, Polar Sea, and the Thorvaldsen. He’d done it. He and his crews had brought their ungainly charges to safety. Now gangs of South Korean longshoremen swarmed over the three, unloading their precious cargos for immediate shipment to the front. Levi permitted his shoulders to sag ever so slightly. Now he could rest.
“Captain?”
He turned to find a signals rating waiting. “Yes?”
“Message from Seventh Fleet, sir. Marked urgent.”
Levi took the message and scanned it. Almost imperceptibly he straightened. Relaxation would have to wait.
“New orders, Captain?” his executive officer asked.
“Yes, Mr. Keegan.” He looked out across the crowded harbor again, focusing on a group of gray-painted Navy ships anchored together near Pusan’s largest dock. “We’ve been assigned to the amphibious group assembling here. We’ll join the escort when it sails north.”
For a moment he stared at the massive amphibious transports and helicopter carriers riding uneasily at anchor. It was time to strike back. Time to cut the North Koreans off at the knees. Then Levi turned away from the sight. He and his officers had a lot of work to do before O’Brien would be ready to get under way again, and not enough hours to do it in. He didn’t have time to waste.
CHAPTER 39
High Tide
McLaren stood motionless for a moment, listening to the wind howling outside the command tent. His breath misted in the chill air before vanishing. It was so cold outside that not even the headquarters’ most powerful oil-fired heaters could do more than make things inside the tent barely livable. He snorted, reminding himself that conditions were infinitely worse for the fighting troops on the front lines. They existed in a kind of frozen hell, unable to stay warm unless they moved, and liable to be killed by enemy fire if they moved. He shook his head wearily. Christ, if either side in this war were really civilized they’d have long since called the fighting off on account of weather. With things as they were, both sides might even be taking more casualties from frostbite than from enemy action.
The Combined Forces J-3, Major General Barret Smith, moved up beside him, tamping tobacco into his pipe.
“How much longer, Barney?”
Smith lit a match and puffed his pipe into life. “The Met boys say this latest cold snap should lift by morning. Their satellites show another warm front moving through by then, and that could raise temperatures by up to forty degrees.”
“Still be below freezing, then?”
The dour-faced New Englander nodded.
“More snow expected?”
“Yes.”
McLaren frowned. Now that the UN forces had achieved almost complete air superiority, he begrudged every snowstorm. They limited his air support to the available all-weather attack squadrons — several of which had been worn down to uselessness by cumulative losses. He wanted clear skies so his fighter-bombers could hammer the NK columns from the air and see the SAMs reaching up for them from the ground. Every hour of limited visibility gave the North Koreans time to recover from previous aerial poundings, and McLaren didn’t want to give them a minute’s rest.
Smith interrupted his thoughts. “Staff’s ready for the briefing, Jack.”
“Coming.” He turned on his heel and strode back to the main table — now covered with charts showing the rugged hills around Ch’onan. McLaren’s eyes narrowed as he saw the markings of planned defensive positions scattered across the maps, but he stayed silent. Instead, he looked around the table at the shadowed faces of his senior staff. They looked tired, but not as exhausted as they had in the first days following North Korea’s surprise attack. War, like all other human occupations, had its own rhythms, and his officers were beginning to adjust to them. “Okay, gentlemen, let’s get down to it.”
Smith stepped further into the light. “Certainly, General.” He bent over the map table. “Now, as you can see, we’ve laid out a proposed — ”
“Hold it, Barney.” McLaren shook his head. “Let’s start at the top first. I want an overall brief before we get into the small-scale stuff.”
The J-3 took the pipe out of his mouth, surprised. But he recovered fast enough. “Of course, Jack, whatever you say. Colonel Logan?”
Logan took Smith’s place under the light and launched into a detailed evaluation of the military situation across the whole Korean peninsula. The J-2 spoke plainly, only occasionally referring to his notes when McLaren asked an unexpected question. Of all the headquarters staff, the colonel had been the most changed by the war. His old, lazy, “get along, go along” attitude toward the job had sloughed off — replaced by a hard-driving determination to get the facts, no matter what the cost in sleepless hours or even lives. It was as if Logan were burning himself up from within to make up for his failure to predict North Korea’s invasion.
The picture he painted was mixed.
First, Seoul had not been seriously attacked, despite being surrounded on all sides. Instead, the five second-line North Korean infantry divisions besieging the South Korean capital had contented themselves with heavy artillery bombardments directed at suspected UN defensive positions and with halfhearted thrusts aimed at the city’s water and power supplies. All had been repulsed. On the other hand, civilian casualties in Seoul were growing, and all attempts at air resupply had failed miserably. Even so, the South Korean garrison commander estimated he could hold out for several weeks under the present conditions. And the raids launched by his Special Forces units were tying down a large number of NK troops needed at the front.
Conditions were similar along the rugged eastern half of the DMZ. The ROK units there had thrown back every North Korean attack on their positions and saw no difficulty in holding their ground indefinitely. At the same time, their commanders saw little prospect of being able to go over onto the offensive. Neither side could hope to make significant gains in an area so crisscrossed by natural and man-made defenses.
The news in the air war was less ambiguous. After fourteen days of unpleasant surprises and heavy losses, the UN edge in equipment and air combat training was beginning to pay off. North Korea’s most modern fighter and ground-attack squadrons had been decimated, and its small force of surviving pilots and planes had been almost completely withdrawn from combat — pulled back to defend Pyongyang and the North’s other cities. Kim Jong-Il and his marshals clearly expected the Americans to repeat the devastating strategic bombing campaigns that had been so successful during the first Korean War. McLaren’s U.S. Air Force liaison officer smiled sourly at that. He’d just gotten off the phone with the USAF Chief of Staff. Growing tension with the Soviet Union had forced the President to cancel the planned transfer of an F-111 bomber wing from Europe. So there wouldn’t be any bombing of North Korean cities — not for the foreseeable future. This air war would be waged solely on the tactical level.