General Amos Caldwell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, looked up from the yellow tablet on which he had been making notes. "How many options are there in a situation like this, Mr. President? Seems to me we simply can't allow this deliberate and premeditated provocation to go unpunished."
"Are the Joint Chiefs in full agreement on this?"
"I would have to agree with General Caldwell, Mr. President." Admiral Fletcher T. Grimes was Chief of Naval Operations, a crusty, lantern-jawed man who twenty years before had commanded an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin. "This is the Pueblo all over again. We can't let those bastards get away with piracy, damn it!"
"So? What are we going to do about it, Fletch?"
"We have a carrier battle group less than twelve hours from Wonsan. Use it!"
"How?"
"Air strikes… backed up by amphibious landings, if necessary. The Marines in Okinawa are on alert already. If we show the Koreans we mean business…"
"I'd go one further, Mr. President," Caldwell said. "This calls for full-scale intervention, right down the line. Army. Air Force. Special Forces."
"Invasion."
"We'll look pretty damned silly if we don't use every means at our disposal to bring about a resolution of this… this crisis, Mr. President. These people mean business. I suggest we show them we mean business as well."
"Good God," Schellenberg said. "Don't you think we ought to take the diplomatic approach first? The days of head-to-head military confrontation are over!"
"Who says?" The Director of Central Intelligence leaned forward at the table, hands clasped. Victor Marlowe, head of the entire American intelligence community, had personally brought word of Chimera's capture to the White House the night before. His voice carried a quiet, almost bantering tone which fooled no one at the table. They all knew how important Chimera was to him. "Mr. Secretary, you know as well as I do that gabbing with those people isn't going to get us anywhere."
"How do you know unless we try?" George Hall, the White House Chief of Staff, said from the other side of the table. "Mr. President, this could really backfire on you in the polls. There's time for a military option later."
"I'm aware of the polls, George," the President said. "Let's leave them out of this for the moment — "
"It's not just politics, sir. Korea was not a popular war in 1950, and it won't be popular with the people now."
"Popular!" General Caldwell scowled. "Since when are issues like this settled because of their popularity?"
Ronald Hemminger, the Secretary of Defense, smiled. "You haven't worked inside the Beltway long, have you, General?" There were subdued chuckles from around the table. General Caldwell was new to the position, having received his appointment to the JCS after his predecessor's recent retirement. His intolerance for Washington politics was well known.
"But he's right, you know," the CIA Director said. The bantering was gone from his tone now. "We let the Koreans get away with Pueblo in '68. They held our people… what? Eleven months? We let the Iranians get away with the embassy seizure, and they kept things boiling for four hundred forty-four days! This is a chance for P'yongyang to dirty our faces on every front page in the world."
"Hell, you're just pissed that they snatched your spook ship," Schellenberg said.
"That has nothing to do with it. They've snatched close to two hundred Americans! You want to see them paraded on the evening news every night for the next year or two? You want another Lebanon? Mark my words: we let them get away with this, they'll be all over us. A military option is our only option here!"
The President looked at the Secretary of Defense. "Ron, what do you think?"
Hemminger looked unhappy. "Protest at Panmunjom won't win us a damned thing, Mr. President. Hell, every year or two some KorCom border guard kills one of our people on the DMZ. We protest, they counter-protest, we take it up with the Military Armistice Commission, and nothing gets done. This'll be the same goddamned thing. But a military assault… Shit, we're gonna have to cover our asses until we know how the Russkies are gonna react."
Phillip Buchalter, the President's National Security Advisor, shrugged. "What are we gonna do, hit North Korea with trade sanctions?"
No one bothered to laugh. The United States already had no direct contact with North Korea at all.
"There are ways of dealing with them," Schellenberg said. "Ways short of starting a war. We could approach them through a third party which has diplomatic relations with P'yongyang. The People's Republic of China, for instance."
"That'll look just great in the Washington Post," the DCI said. He turned to face the President. "You wanted options, Mr. President. Well, you've got plenty of them, soft to hard." He began ticking points off on the fingers of his left hand. "We bring the matter up at the next MAC meeting at Panmunjom. We put through a formal diplomatic protest through another government… the PRC, or a clear neutral like India or Sweden. We hit 'em with carrier air strikes at selected targets, try to shake 'em up. B-52 raids mounted out of the ROK, same thing. Covert ops… use Delta or someone to go in and bring our people out." He held up a sixth finger on his other hand. "We send in the Marines." He opened all of the fingers on both hands. "Or we hit 'em with every goddamned thing we have. Full invasion."
"Hell, Vic," Schellenberg said. "Why'd you leave out nuking the bastards?"
"Be serious."
"No, you be serious! Good God, what do you want, a new Korean War?"
"I wasn't aware that the old one was over," said Grimes.
"We go in full-scale and we'll never be free of it! And the Russians, man, the Russians! We have half a dozen new trade or disarmament treaties on the line right this minute, and they'll all be up for grabs if something like this blows up!"
"Speaking of treaties, we could have some real trouble with Tokyo over this," Buchalter pointed out. "Our basing agreements with them clearly prohibit our launching offensive missions from their territory."
"Wonderful," the defense secretary said. "Three squadrons of Falcons in Japan, and we can't use 'em."
"There's always South Korea," Marlowe said. "They won't mind rubbing North Korean noses in it."
"You really do want a war over there, don't you?" Schellenberg said wonderingly. "Haven't you guys at Langley heard? The Cold War's over!"
"And haven't you people at Foggy Bottom heard there are American lives at stake here? I'd like to get our people back, damn it, and talking Kim II-Sung and his cronies to death is not going to do it!"
The battle positions around the table were being drawn along predictable lines. The DCI wanted Chimera back and wanted to avoid the sort of intelligence tar-pit they'd been trapped in during the Iran crisis. State wanted a political settlement. There were disarmament treaties and foreign obligations which would be jeopardized by a fresh round of military saber rattling. Defense was worried about the Russians. The Navy wanted to use the carrier group they already had in the area. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wanted a full invasion with combined arms.
The President was himself an old Navy man, and his own, deep-down gut feeling was to send in the carrier group. The threat of carrier-borne air-strikes against North Korean targets ― fuel tank farms, military bases, airfields ― might be enough to make them back down.
"Here's the way we'll play it," he said at last. The bickering around the table ceased at once, each head turning to face the President. He looked at the Director of Central Intelligence. "Vic, we can't go into this blind. I'll want you people to step it up with the intel. We have to know where our people are being held and what the North Koreans are up to."