By ten a.m., the captain could clearly see the islands of Ung-do and Yo-do, lying at the mouth of the large bay that leads to Wonsan. As he had done ever since the near-shipwreck on the way to Sasebo, Bucher double-checked Murphy’s navigation. Then he rang up all-stop on the annunciator. The Pueblo went dead in the water exactly 15.5 miles from the nearest landfall. He saw no activity outside Wonsan—not a single patrol boat, freighter, or fishing vessel. Aside from yesterday’s excitement with the trawlers, the communists seemed to be ignoring the American ship. Bucher felt a bit disappointed.
Friar Tuck and Harry Iredale ambled out on deck for their daily plumb of the depths. A work party came topside to clear snow and ice that had accumulated during the night. With the temperature edging higher, there was little buildup. Bucher heard the rhythmic sloshing of the ship’s superannuated washing machine as it cranked to life in the fo’c’sle with the first laundry of the day.
Steve Harris called from the SOD hut to report that the CTs were picking up signals from two search radars conducting normal sweeps. There was also something new: voices on North Korean radio channels.
“Anything indicating an interest in us?” Bucher asked.
“Not that we can read, Captain. Probably routine traffic, but we’re recording and will go back over the tapes.”
Bucher had no use for that process. Taping and translating the communist chatter would take hours, as the two Marine sergeants went over the recordings inch by inch with Korean dictionaries in hand. They were supposed to be Bucher’s early-warning system, but their inability to translate in real time meant he had to guess at what the communists were up to. To reassure himself, he again scanned the coast with his binoculars: still no movement.
It seemed as if the Pueblo were the only ship in the world.
At noon the captain was back in the wardroom for lunch. The mess was into its second seating, 25 men digging into generous portions of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy, and succotash. Lacy, who’d turned over the conn to Charlie Law, squeezed in with the rest of the officers.
“Everything okay on your watch, Gene?” Bucher asked.
“Yes, sir,” the chief engineer answered, smiling. “And we’re catching up with some housekeeping in this nice weather.”
“Yeah, almost like the balmy winters on Newfoundland’s Grand Banks,” cracked Schumacher.
A call from the bridge interrupted the conversation. Law reported an unidentified vessel approaching from about eight miles away. Bucher told him to call again if it got within five miles. The officers continued talking and eating; there was no cause for alarm. The captain had tucked into his second helping of meat loaf when the phone buzzed again. The alien craft was now five miles out and closing rapidly.
Maybe this wasn’t such an ordinary day after all.
Bucher dropped his fork and hurried to the bridge. The air was noticeably colder; the sun glowed weakly through wintry overcast. He focused the big eyes on the incoming vessel and made a tentative identification: a submarine chaser, flying a North Korean ensign and bearing down on the Pueblo at flank speed.
The sight irritated the captain; leave it to these godless bastards to interrupt his midday meal. He called for Schumacher and Steve Harris to join him on the bridge. To reinforce the Pueblo’s facade as a research vessel, Bucher told Tuck and Iredale to lower their Nansen bottles. Then he ordered his signalman to hoist flags indicating oceanographic activity.
The sub chaser kept coming. Bucher clambered down to the pilothouse to recheck the Pueblo’s position. It had drifted farther out, floating 15.9 miles from Ung-do. The captain returned to the flying bridge with Harris, who studied the communist boat and flipped through his identification book.
“She’s a Russian-built, modified SO-1-class submarine chaser,” the lieutenant concluded, confirming Bucher’s ID. Modern versions of such craft, 138 feet in length, were armed with two 25-millimeter antiaircraft guns and four 16-inch torpedo tubes. This one also had a 57-millimeter deck cannon.
On its bow the gunboat displayed the number 35.
“Get below,” Bucher told Harris, “and find out if your CTs can eavesdrop on any talk with her base.”
Unbeknown to the captain, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft at that moment was flying about 50 nautical miles east of his position, listening to North Korean military channels. The crew of the Air Force C-130 heard the North Koreans dispatch several warships to intercept the Pueblo.
“We have approached the target here,” sub chaser No. 35 radioed as it sped toward Bucher’s boat. “It is U.S. Did you get it? It looks like it’s armed now…. I think it’s a radar ship. It also has radio antennae. It has a lot of antennae, and, looking at the wavelength, I think it’s a ship used for detecting something.”
Bucher, clad only in a khaki shirt, trousers, and shower slippers, sent below for his leather flight jacket and boots. He pulled a white ski cap with a red tassel over his head and began to dictate a running account of No. 35’s approach into a portable tape recorder, as Chuck Clark had done when the Banner was harassed.
The sub chaser closed to 1,000 yards. Through his field glasses Bucher saw helmeted men manning its guns. The captain ordered Lacy to replace Law as officer of the deck. So far, the incident was nothing out of the ordinary, but Bucher wanted his most experienced officer at his side if things got dicey.
He told Schumacher to work up a situation report to keep Admiral Johnson in the loop. The captain also ordered his enginemen to light off the twin diesels, in case he decided to bail out.
No. 35 came closer and began circling the Pueblo. On the second circuit, it ran up a signal flag: WHAT NATIONALITY? Bucher ordered the American colors hoisted.
Ensign Harris, excited and apprehensive, joined the others on the upper bridge. Bucher put him to work writing a narrative of communist actions in the log. Harris climbed back down to the pilothouse, plopped into the padded captain’s chair, and started scribbling.
Lacy sang out that three torpedo boats also were racing toward the Pueblo at better than 40 knots, their rooster tails visible several miles away.
This was beginning to look like full-blown harassment. Part of the Pueblo’s mission was to test the North Koreans’ reaction to a ferret’s prolonged presence, and they certainly were reacting. The captain told Murphy to check the Pueblo’s position yet again; it was still nearly three miles outside the no-go zone.
Closing to 500 yards, the sub chaser ran up an attention-getting set of flags: HEAVE TO OR I WILL FIRE.
The message baffled Bucher. His ship already was stopped. What were these idiots talking about? He told Murphy to look up the precise meaning of “heave to” in a nautical dictionary, to make sure there were no nuances he didn’t know about. There weren’t.
As the captain struggled to divine their intentions, the North Koreans settled on their course of action:
“We will close down the radio, tie up the personnel, tow it, and enter port at Wonsan,” one communist gunboat radioed. “We are on the way to boarding.”
Hearing this, the Americans aboard the C-130 tried to alert Bucher. They had no direct way to contact him so they radioed Kamiseya, urging that he be informed immediately of the trap that was about to snap shut on him. But no warning came from Japan.
Bucher dropped down the ladder again to the pilothouse. He wanted to check his coordinates once more, to make absolutely sure of where he was. Radar didn’t lie: The Pueblo was now 15.8 miles from the nearest shore. Murphy had plotted their position a half dozen times; it was impossible that both he and the captain had been wrong over and over again. Bucher hauled himself back up to the flying bridge and told his signalman to raise another string of flags: I AM IN INTERNATIONAL WATERS.