Second, the National Command Authority, which was Pentagonese for the President, wanted everyone to know where this force was and where it was going — within limits. It was a highly visible signal of America’s resolve and determination to stand by its South Korean ally. And the limits had already been set. With the President’s permission, Brown had declared a one-hundred-nautical-mile exclusion zone around his task force. The Chinese and the Soviets, and in fact all shipping and aircraft, had been warned to keep clear. Anything that came too close would be shied away, and if it insisted on approaching, it would be sunk or blown out of the sky. There were some Soviet missiles with ranges of three hundred miles, but the North Koreans weren’t supposed to have any of those. One hundred miles should provide an adequate safety margin.
But the Kavkaz was going to be a problem.
Brown watched as the map display shifted, showing the oddball assortment of warships, amphibious ships, and merchant vessels forming up off the Okinawa coast. It was taking longer than he would have liked, and the Soviet spy ship showed no signs of withdrawing to the edge of the declared exclusion zone. Surprise, surprise.
He wanted the Soviets to know he was enroute to Korea, but he’d be damned if he wanted them sniffing up his backside all the way there. The admiral swung away from the display and signaled his flag lieutenant. “Get me the captain of Thach.”
The captain of the USS Thach, a Perry-class frigate, grinned into the phone. “Aye, aye, Admiral. We’ll herd the bastard away.”
He put the phone down and looked across the three miles separating his ship from the ungainly Soviet intelligence trawler. “Mr. Meadows, lay us a quarter-mile to port of that seagoing abomination.”
His executive officer smiled dutifully and issued the necessary helm orders. He sometimes thought his captain had read Moby Dick once too often. The frigate heeled slightly as it came around on a new course, closing with the antenna-festooned Kavkaz at fifteen knots. At a range of just under five hundred yards, she turned again and ran parallel with the Soviet vessel. Thach’s captain leaned casually on the cold, metal railing and nodded to a rating standing nearby with a signal lamp. “Okay, Mahoney, do your thing.” The carrot-haired rating grinned back at him and started flashing out the message his captain had just drafted: “This is U.S. Navy warship Thach. You are inside a declared maritime exclusion zone. Alter course immediately to leave the zone.”
Kavkaz’s captain kept them waiting for a couple of minutes before replying. Mahoney read the signal aloud as it was blinkered over. “This is a Soviet ship in international waters. You are interfering with our right of innocent passage.”
“Innocent, my ass!” muttered the American captain. He scribbled a testy response and waited while Mahoney sent it over. He hoped the kid wasn’t going to try to “burn up” his opposite number by sending so fast the Russian couldn’t follow along. It was a favorite game among signalmen, but this message was something he wanted the Soviets to ponder.
“Thach to Soviet ship. I repeat, this is a maritime exclusion zone. Failure to comply with my order will be treated as a violation of said zone. You will leave immediately.”
“We have no information on such a zone.” The American captain nodded and smiled grimly. This kind of bullshit could drag on for hours, and Admiral Brown had made it all too clear that he wanted results, not negotiations. The Soviets had been duly notified. Now he would make the notification a warning. He pushed a button on the squawk box. “Guns. Prepare to fire a shot across that son-of-a-bitch’s bows.” The Thach’s gunnery officer had been waiting for just such an order, and everybody on the bridge heard the alarm bell and the mechanical whine as the frigate’s single-gun 76mm turret slewed toward the Kavkaz. This time the message got through.
Brown watched the dot representing the Soviet intelligence trawler pull away from his formation. Its captain had made it clear that he was doing so only under protest and because of a “Yankee threat to initiate unprovoked hostilities.” The admiral knew that the Soviets would soon broadcast TV pictures of an American warship “bullying” an unarmed vessel, but it didn’t really bother him very much. Maybe that was precisely the right kind of signal to send to potential adversaries around the globe.
Kavkaz really was dragging its heels, though — moving away so slowly that it would take most of the day for the trawler to clear the exclusion zone.
Brown didn’t push it. As soon as he was satisfied that the Soviet ship really was leaving, he recalled the Thach. Just to keep the Kavkaz honest, every so often a pair of armed attack jets would overfly the ship — low. Until they were exactly one hundred nautical miles away, he wanted that seagoing collection of Soviet intelligence agents to know they lived at his sufferance.
Brown studied the display as his task force turned onto its primary course. The distance from Okinawa to Korea’s east coast was roughly six hundred nautical miles, and at an average speed of twelve knots, the trip would take just over two days. He expected the real North Korean threat to begin once they left the East China Sea and entered the Yellow Sea near the Korean coast. The admiral rubbed his eyes and wondered just how much sleep he would get until then.
A radar operator suddenly sat up straight in his chair. “Airborne contact, range one eighty miles, no friendly IFF.”
Not much, Brown judged, moving toward the command phone.
CHAPTER 30
The Bridge
The battered Army three-quarter-ton truck ground its way across the Haengju Bridge along a single lane reserved for northbound traffic. Tanks, trucks, jeeps, and artillery pieces moving south packed the other three lanes, crunching over sand laid on the highway to improve traction. Temperatures all over Korea were falling, and chunks of ice now bobbed and spun in the Han River, rolling westward toward the Yellow Sea. It was quickly growing into the worst winter in recent memory.
Once across the bridge, the truck turned out of traffic onto a small access road winding southeast with the river on one side and towering, snow-dusted evergreens on the other. Dozens of other vehicles moving along the same road had already melted the snow on its surface into a slippery, slushy gunk, and it took the driver several minutes of frantic gear-shifting to force the truck up the road to its destination.
“This is the end of the line, sir. HQ of the First of Thirty-Ninth.”
Second Lieutenant Kevin Little stared at the ramshackle collection of tents nestled among the tall green trees. For a moment the scene summoned up half-forgotten memories of family ski trips in the Washington Cascades. He held on to the memories like a lifeline as he climbed out of the heated cab and stood shivering in the raw air. Rhee slid out beside him. Then he pulled his gloves off, zipped his white camouflage jacket all the way up, and struggled to pull the gloves back on over fingers that were already growing numb. It didn’t do much good. The weather was getting worse and the wind cut deep through every layer of clothing he had on.