The admiral glanced about as they continued walking toward the premier’s office. “Yes.”
“Will you stop it?”
“No. The Americans would see that as indecisiveness.”
“Quite correct,” commented Chernko. Foolhardiness was one danger — indecisiveness the other. “Yes,” he assured the admiral. “The best thing is to steer a middle course.”
The admiral frowned with concern. “This is very difficult to do. With Japan on your port side and Korea on your starboard, there’s not much room.”
“No.”
One of the premier’s aides rushed by them, a sheaf of cables in a folder.
“I’ve never seen them move so fast,” said Chernko.
“Now what’s happened?” worried the admiral aloud.
“The damned Cubans,” interjected a voice from behind. It was the air marshal. “With that loudmouth Castro gone, I thought they’d settle down. But no. I tell you, their biggest export is trouble.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
In Seoul, thirty-three thousand American soldiers, in the biggest mass surrender since Corrigedor in 1942, made the short but humiliating march across the NKA’s pontoon bridge, built in the shadow of the old Chamshil Iron Bridge, toward the shell-pocked Olympic Stadium, where they were separated according to regiment. Fifty-two senior officers were weeded out as quickly as possible, the NKA interrogators insisting, upon pain of death, that the officers sign confessions of “criminal imperialistic aggression against the Democratic Republic of Korea.”
Only three signed. Seventeen of the others, described over the loudspeakers as “recalcitrant warmongers,” were shot in the dressing rooms below the baseball stadium, their bodies dumped on the diamond from a captured U.S. Army truck that roared about the field of six thousand prisoners, the blood of the murdered men dark on the poorly lit artificial turf.
One of the bedraggled and shell-shocked soldiers, a U.S. private from the Eleventh Division, clutching a military blanket about him, watched each of the bodies fall limply onto the tread-torn diamond, wondering aloud why they had not killed all of the officers who had refused to sign.
“Why seventeen?” he asked numbly of no one in particular.
“To scare us,” answered an ROK lieutenant who had torn his intelligence corps patches off moments before he was captured. “To show the others what happens if they hold out. To show us what will happen if we resist.”
The American looked around the dimly lit stadium, few of the lights working after the artillery barrage, “There are ten times as many prisoners here as guards.”
“But they’ve got the guns,” said the ROK soldier.
One of the bodies they saw was a major, his collar stud standing out even in the poor light. He looked as if he were smiling, but it was an illusion — a death mask of pain — tortured before they shot him. The private noticed for the first time that the white U.S. stars on the truck’s doors had been smeared red. When it drove out of the stadium, there was a silence heavy with the stench of pickled cabbage and excrement. The NKA had forbidden use of any of the toilets behind the stands, and most of the wounded were now crowded into the north corner beyond the diamond, where they had to defecate into a shallow trench.
Soon the loudspeakers were ordering all intelligence officers to report to the stands.
“Fuck you!” the ROK lieutenant shouted in perfect English, and got a weak round of applause.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Heading out into the mid-Atlantic, the U.S. nuclear submarine USS Roosevelt received its digitized “burst” message via its trailing VLF aerial. The message lasted less than two-hundredths of a second — too short a time to alert an enemy sub to vector. The Roosevelt, one of the Sea Wolf class II dual-purpose (Hunter/Killer and ballistic missile) subs, normally patrolled deep at a thousand feet below the surface, but in order to be on station to receive the scheduled burst message through its very low frequency aerial, the sub’s captain, forty-three-year-old Robert Brentwood, had had to bring the Roosevelt to 150 feet. The message told Robert Brentwood and his crew two things: They were “spot on” their prearranged patrol route, and the “balloon had gone up” in Korea. This meant that they, like all NATO units, were now on the second stage of the four-step-alert ladder. But as to exactly what had happened in Korea, they did not know, nor, under the CNO’s standing orders, was it necessary for them to know what had gone on over seven thousand miles away. Besides, the coded messages, in order to keep the location of the American subs secret from the Russians, had to be kept as short as possible.
“Your brother’s out there somewhere with the Seventh Fleet, isn’t he, Captain?” asked the executive officer, Peter Zeldman.
“Last I heard,” answered Brentwood. “GM frigate.”
“Your kid brother might end up in action before you do, Skipper.”
“Hopefully, Pete, none of us’ll end up in action,” said Robert thoughtfully, adding, “My guess is it’s some border incident on the DMZ. Probably blow over in a few days.”
Zeldman wished he hadn’t said anything about the skipper’s brother — he’d merely meant it as a bit of conversation, something that was in short supply on a six-month patrol back and forth across the Atlantic in various attack and defensive patterns between Norfolk, Virginia, and Holy Loch.
The immediate question for the crew was, how long would it be before they were in Scotland? Robert Brentwood knew that, next to being home in the United States, the high point for most of them was refit and supply at the Scottish sub base. While the repairs at Holy Loch were usually minor, not requiring a stay of more than a day or two, sometimes they had more shore leave than expected if he decided a new coat of anechoic, or “sponge,” paint, as the crews called it, was needed. The red paint absorbed active sonar pulses sent out by sub chasers and so denied them any return echo or at least diluted the echo so much that it was too weak to be of any use to the enemy. Painting the bottom of the 360-foot-long, 42-foot-wide sub that served both as an attack submarine and a Trident II balistic missile carrier was a job that took two weeks in the dry dock, affording the crews, alternating shifts, at least a week’s liberty, even longer if the sub’s barnacle-encrusted exterior had to be scraped down and new primer applied. However, with Roosevelt on second-stage alert, Executive Officer Zeldman had a hunch none of them would be seeing Holy Loch for a while.
He put the question to Brentwood, who said, “We’ll see.”
“Skipper’s not exactly bursting with information, is he?” said the third officer.
“He’s got his reasons,” answered Zeldman, not permitting himself to be drawn into taking sides. But the lieutenant did have a point.
Zeldman couldn’t quite figure Brentwood out either. He was one of those men, Zeldman thought, who seemed to be born old. It wasn’t that he looked old, despite slightly graying hair, but rather that he had an unflappable manner and deep-set brown eyes with a penetrating quality about them that constantly made you feel he knew what you were going to say before you said it. Luckily, however, unlike some people, who thought they knew everything, Robert Brentwood wasn’t the least bit arrogant or impatient with others, the kind of man, Zeldman concluded, a boy would be lucky to have as a father. But Zeldman doubted if the skipper would ever be one. He wasn’t married, unlike most of the crew, or even engaged.
Zeldman had put it down to Brentwood’s obsession with his work. He was first and foremost a submariner — everything else took second place, so much so that Zeldman had become convinced that though Robert Brentwood came across as a strong, silent type, he must be driven deep down by a burning ambition to surpass his father’s achievement as admiral. Zeldman was quite wrong about this — Robert Brentwood had no intention of trying to surpass his father’s reputation. He merely loved submarines. Always had. Years before, when Lana and David had asked him how he could possibly sign on for “coffin duty” in what was essentially nine titanium-alloy spheres welded together and covered in a superstructure that at times looked stronger than it really was, Robert Brentwood had no good answer. All he could tell them was that he did not share their fear of death by sudden implosion. Death was inevitable; the way you went, he told them, was beside the point. And what Zeldman had at first taken to be his quiet, all-knowing air was nothing more than shyness.