There were other convoys on the road that night. All were moving west, trundling down toward the flatlands near the sea.
The preparations for Thunderbolt were under way.
CHAPTER 40
The Tango Incident
Admiral Thomas Aldrige Brown looked at a display screen filled with symbols. To the trained eye it showed a carrier, a battleship, over fifteen Navy amphibious ships, ten merchant ships, and thirty escort vessels. Of course, Brown thought, you had to know what you were looking at. For instance, a small blue circle with the letters “ANCH” next to it represented the amphibious landing ship Anchorage. He could even tell its course and speed by checking the direction and length of the line emerging from the center of the tiny circle.
Brown smiled thinly as the luminous computer display flickered slightly, updating the information it showed. He remembered the visiting congressman who’d complained that the Constellation’s plot screen looked like “the world’s most expensive video game.”
The admiral agreed. It was expensive. It was also invaluable. At a glance it allowed him to see the location and status of every ship under his command and every identified threat they confronted. And that was precisely the kind of data he needed to make decisions in battle.
Right now, though, the screen showed a mass of ships steaming placidly north along the South Korean coast. Constellation, the battleship Wisconsin, the amphibious ships, and the merchantmen were all in the center, ringed by missile cruisers and destroyers for close-in protection. They in turn were surrounded by destroyers and frigates assigned to hunt down and destroy any submarines trying to get in among the more valuable vessels.
Brown eyed the ships of his ASW screen carefully, looking for weaknesses in their patrol patterns even though he hoped that their job on this trip would be comparatively easy. Intelligence rated the current North Korean subsurface threat as low, basing its assessment on a careful calculation of all reported and confirmed sub kills by U.S. and South Korean forces. Some of his officers even argued that the entire NK submarine force had been wiped out. Brown wasn’t willing to be so optimistic. Preparedness never hurt. Never.
The plot showed the overall formation making a steady ten knots as it traveled northward. Individual frigates and destroyers in the ASW screen showed more variation — with some sprinting ahead at twenty or twenty-five knots, pinging with active sonar, while others drifted slowly at five knots, listening with passive systems. The slowly moving array of dots and lines was almost hypnotic.
Brown switched his gaze to a larger-scale display, one that showed the seas and land around his task force out to a distance of more than two hundred nautical miles. Blips marked the Soviet and Chinese patrol planes hovering near the edge of the declared exclusion zone. And a blinking notation near the corner indicated that the next scheduled Soviet RORSAT ocean surveillance satellite could be expected overhead within minutes.
The admiral grinned to himself, noting the surprised looks among his officers as he continued to stand quietly. Everybody knew that the Soviets were feeding every piece of data they got back to the North Koreans. And every staff officer in the Flag Plot had been prepared for another of his tirades about the damned Russian snoopers.
After all, how could the task force he commanded possibly hope to make a successful landing under constant observation? If the North Koreans and their Soviet backers could track them constantly, the Marines would find NK reinforcements waiting for them on whatever beach Brown picked. And that could spell disaster — no matter how many airstrikes the Constellation launched or how many Volkswagon-sized shells Wisconsin’s 16-inch guns fired. The staff couldn’t see any way around that, not short of downing the supposedly neutral recon craft.
“Admiral?”
Brown turned. Captain Sam Ross, the commander of his threat team, stood waiting with a message flimsy in hand. Ross looked as animated as the admiral had ever seen him.
“Admiral, we just got the latest report from our satellites and recon aircraft. The NKs are definitely on to us. One evaluation is that we’ve got the better part of at least two NK divisions moving to block any possible landing site.”
Brown grinned wider. “Outstanding, Sam. Uncle Kim seems worried by our presence.” Then his grin disappeared. “Okay, I’d like a more comprehensive threat evaluation from your people within the hour. We may just be out here to wriggle, but I’m damned if I want to come away with any teeth marks.” He turned back to his study of the display.
Captain Nikolai Mikhailovich Markov lay shoeless in his bunk, reading a tactical manual. He looked up without surprise when Dribinov’s chief radioman knocked and entered his cramped stateroom.
He’d been expecting this visit from the michman in charge of signals for the past several minutes. Dribinov had just finished a communications period, receiving the daily broadcast while it loitered at periscope depth with its antenna exposed. Petrov always brought the message traffic to the captain as soon as it had been processed.
Today, though, Petrov was not wholly his normal, stolid, unexcitable self. His hands actually shook as he handed Markov a thin sheaf of papers. “Comrade Captain, one of the messages is in Special Code!”
Markov kept his own excitement in check as he looked up from his manual. “Excellent, Petrov. Ask Lieutenant Commander Koloskov to come here at once.”
The radioman left hastily, knowing better than to run, but hurrying all the same.
Markov swung out of his bunk and started relacing his shoes, all his prior torpor gone without trace. He’d thought that he and Dribinov had been condemned to endlessly patrol the Yellow Sea’s muddy waters — condemned as punishment for last month’s failed attempt to embarrass the American carrier force. This latest message might signal a relief from the mind-numbing monotony of counting Chinese coastal steamers. Special Code was used only for extremely sensitive messages, matters of wartime urgency.
He would have to wait to find what the admirals in Vladivostok wanted, though. Regulations required that both the captain and his second-in-command, the zampolit or political officer, be present when all Special Code messages were broken. The two-man rule was designed not only to catch errors in decoding, but also to witness the receipt of what were always important instructions. Markov finished tying his shoes and stood up, stooping to avoid smashing his head against the low ceiling.
He turned at a soft rap on his cabin door. “Come.”
It was Koloskov, his political officer. “You asked to see me, Comrade Captain?”
“Yes, Andrei Nikolayev, it seems we have a message to decode.”
“Certainly, Comrade Captain.” Without blinking an eye Koloskov sat down next to his captain and took the blank piece of paper he offered.
Using a lead-lined code book placed between them, the two men worked in silence, translating the jumble of letters and nonsense phrases into a readable message.
The message was short:
PACFLT 4457-1096QR. Begins: U.S. amphibious task force operating in Yellow Sea. Location at 1400 Moscow time grid 261–651. Course 025, speed 10 knots. Submarine Konstantin Dribinov is ordered to attack, repeat, attack. Priority targets are aircraft carriers and amphibious ships. Nuclear weapons are not authorized. Under no circumstances may Dribinov’s identity be compromised. Message ends. PACFLT 5423-0998XV.