“Pusan hasn’t fallen,” put in Mayne.
“No, sir, but it’s a long way south.”
“I know, two hundred and fifty miles,” answered Mayne.
“Bridges over the Naktong are cut, sir.”
Mayne nodded, glancing up from behind his desk at the large stand map of Korea. “Well, General, you people try to secure the airfields around Pusan. NKA can’t get across from Seoul very quickly. Cahill’s at least seen to that.”
General Gray stiffened, sensing an undercurrent of condemnation of Cahill’s action. “In any event,” continued the president, “you people have a lot of faith in the M-1s. They could still turn this thing around, couldn’t they?”
“Yes, sir, I think they will. I merely wanted to know about deployment of reserves in case—”
“Let’s see what Cahill’s armor can do south of Uijongbu first.”
“Very well, Mr. President.”
Mayne flicked the phone off “conference” and, his hands forming a cathedral, leaned back in the leather chair, looking thoughtfully across at Schuman. “What I want to know when this is over, Harry, is how the hell were so many North Korean agents allowed to infiltrate the South? My God, they’re blowing everything up left, right, and center.”
“They’ve had a lot of years to plan it, Mr. President.” Mayne’s cathedral collapsed. “Well, blame can wait. What we need now is for those tanks to stop the NKA dead in their tracks.”
Schuman was about to comment favorably on the pun but thought better of it.
Entering the Pentagon crises room, several of the Joint Chiefs’ aides noticed it had been freshly carpeted, golf-green. The military psychologists, Gray told them, had found that the old deep maroon tended to depress people. With Mayne and his defense cutbacks, there’d been enough of that. Besides, Gray had always kept a putting iron and one-hole mat in his office to unwind after the conferences. Used to look like hell on maroon. Several of the aides allowed themselves a smile at the general’s joke, but it was difficult to do with the wall map of Korea showing red arrows well below what had once been the DMZ.
When all the chiefs had arrived, Gray informed them that despite his conviction that the M-Is Cahill had unleashed from the revetment areas beyond Seoul would turn the battle, it would also be necessary to start moving the thirty thousand reserves across the Sea of Japan. It was a logistics problem that airlift alone, even if they’d had landing strips, could not solve. They would have to use troop ships.
“They’ve got no subs to speak of,” an aide said encouragingly.
“No,” interjected Admiral Horton, chief of naval operations. “They didn’t have any Nanuchkas either — until they attacked the Blaine.”
“Nor any Skimmers to speak of,” put in another aide. “That could be aiR-1aunched.”
“We’re not sure it was hit by an AS missile,” replied the admiral. “Could have been by one of those MiG-29s they didn’t have.”
There was a heavy silence, but Horton wasn’t about to back off from his criticism of Gray’s heavy reliance on the National Security Agency. With the same determination that the admiral had argued against putting out frigates as a naval group screen without air cover, he believed just as strongly that the military could not gather intelligence by electronic means alone. “What I don’t understand is how you people missed the MiGs. We’ve got a billion-dollar satellite up there that’s supposed to be able to read Pravda and you don’t see any fighters?”
“I doubt we missed them, Admiral,” replied the NSA representative, James Halpern. “My guess is they were probably ones we already know about but were flown down from Manchuria or across the Yellow Sea from Shanghai. Training’s probably done over southern China.”
“Probably won’t do it for us, Jim,” said the admiral. “You either know where they are or you don’t.”
There was another awkward silence. Gray moved to a more positive note. “At least we have the reserves to move. I didn’t think we’d get that much from the president, to be quite honest.”
“Why not?” asked Admiral Horton. His directness was unnerving to the other combined chiefs of staff. “He can do that. Problem is getting Congress to go along.”
“I don’t think there’ll be any problem there, Admiral,” General Gray assured him. “This isn’t a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It’s invasion, plain and simple.”
“Maybe, but I’ll sleep a lot better when I know your tank boys have stopped them, General.”
“So will I,” conceded Gray. “What about the Blaine?“ It was a little tit for tat.
“Blindsided,” replied the admiral. “The carrier Salt Lake City was in contact with her right up until she was hit. Another frigate is going to assist. If the Blaine’s still afloat.”
“You keeping Senator Leyland posted?”
“Yes. Soon as we know anything more definite, we’ll inform him.”
Later, after he was satisfied everything that could be done by the Pentagon was being done, General Gray rose, indicating the conference was over, but as they filed out he asked Air Force General Allet about the extent of the sabotage in South Korea against the airfields. Gray already knew the answer, but it was a pretext to get Allet off to the side. “Bill, we’ve been caught with our pants down on this one. Everyone here’s been so goddamned worried about Europe and the Mideast—” He paused.
“Point is, now we’re in it, we ought not to paint too rosy a picture about any short-term victory.”
William Allet looked up in surprise. “You mean you don’t think the M-1s can buy us the time we need?”
“Oh sure, they’ll knock the crap out of those damned tin cans. Point is, I think we need to give those North Korean bastards a lesson they won’t soon forget. Senator Leyland’s of the same mind.”
Allet nodded, but General Gray didn’t know whether that meant acquiescence or mere acknowledgment.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Brentwood heard the screams of men trapped in the tangled debris of the red-hot bulkhead, the jagged hole amidships causing the Blaine to heel dangerously to starboard as she reduced speed from flank speed of thirty-five knots to slow ahead at five, still taking water. He ordered the port side compartments flooded, trying to bring the frigate back onto an even keel, lifting the punched-in starboard side above the waterline. Over the sound of the men the Phalanx Gatling gun kept up its murderous fire, aided by the Blaine’s remaining helicopter attacking the retreating patrol boats as they sped southeast now that they’d crippled the American frigate.
The Blaine’s designers, sacrificing weight for high speed and greater maneuverability, had installed state-of-the-art electronics in the warship, but with its armor plate less than an inch thick, the result was a gaping wound in her side roughly twelve feet in diameter, fires raging inside the aluminum superstructure, reaching temperatures unheard of in the slower, heavier ships of old — the decks becoming so hot that fire hoses and the firefighters’ boots began to burn. Twenty-three men were killed outright by the explosion of the Exocet against the ship’s side, another nine dying from burns and hemorrhaging before the asbestos-clothed rescue crews could get anywhere near them. Four men simply disappeared at the point of impact. But by far the most damage was caused by the toxicity of the fumes as the ultramodern materials in the superstructure, everything from tabletop plastics in the mess to plastic-coated wiring, melted, their deadly poisonous gases spreading in a hot fog throughout the ship, the Blaine’s position now visible on SATTNT photos as a white blob, so dense that normal infrared was having difficulty penetrating it. Some of the crew had time to don gas masks, but except in the more heavily armored and protected combat information center immediately below the bridge, the curling, tumbling smoke pouring through aisles and ventilation shafts of the ship killed another fifty of the crew. Within five minutes half the CIC watch became nauseated to the point they could no longer properly monitor the radars, which for the most part were either malfunctioning or useless anyway, the Exocet’s impact having severed communications within the gutted ship that was now moving ghostlike in the fog. Messages had to be sent by runners trying to circumnavigate the inferno in the belly of the ship, where white jets from the fire hoses crisscrossed, the water immediately vaporizing as it struck superheated metal.