Into the Fire

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Kate Bigelow stood on the bridge of Milwaukee in relative silence. With the main engines shut down and the big forced-draft blowers quiet, there were only the faint vibrations from the generators. And there was the creaking of the hull. As the stern of the ship continued to settle into the seabed, the hull and the superstructure were being stressed in such a way that they issued a continuing series of squeaks and groans. It was at once eerie and unsettling. Her chief engineer had said they would continue to settle and that there was little chance that the ship would roll onto its side like the Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia, but there were no guarantees. No LCS had ever been beached in this fashion and at this angle. Already, there was a slick of diesel and gas-turbine fuel surrounding the stern of the Milwaukee. My ship is broken, Bigelow admitted to herself. But it had done its job — fought off two frigates and brought us to the relative safety of this islet.

“Captain, engineer.” Bigelow was no longer on her headphones, and now communicated with other spaces in the ship over the IVOX system, which, miraculously, was still working.

“Captain, aye. Go ahead, Steve.”

“Skipper, I’m down here in the plant surveying the damage. I can give us power for no more than a half hour. The water’s creeping up on the auxiliary generator, and it’ll soon be offline. We’re working to cross-connect with the two portable gensets, but they will not be able to carry the load of the guns and the radars. About all we’ll be able to give you are lights and power to the bridge, MCC, and radio central. Sorry, Skipper.”

“Okay, Steve, but I want you to give priority to the wardroom and the forward officer staterooms, where we’re caring for the wounded. And let me know when you’re ready to shift the load to the portables.”

“Yes, ma’am. Engineering, out.”

Bigelow took in a quick inventory of her situation. As when the ship was in a running gun battle with the frigates, there was not a lot for her to do at the moment. The department heads, the junior officers, and the senior petty officers were seeing to the care of the ship, the care of the wounded, and the many details that would accompany the welfare of the crew, should they remain aboard or have to abandon ship. She had been to Korea several times, and the weather was always like it was today — bad. The temperature was forty-two degrees and would get close to freezing before morning. The blowing sea mist and the low ceiling were projected to continue for the next several days. She was most concerned about the next twelve hours. They had been sending situation reports out to Seventh Fleet every half hour. That made three since she had run Milwaukee aground. Her attention was captured by a bulky figure entering through the rear hatchway to the pilothouse. He was swathed in foul-weather gear, and there was an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth. A knitted watch cap was pulled low across his forehead.

“Master Chief, how was your shore leave?” Right after the grounding, Bigelow had sent her navigator and command master chief, Master Chief Wilbur Crabtree, ashore with two sailors from the combat systems department to scout the island. She had no intention of abandoning ship for this piece of rock, but then she had to inventory all her options and plan for alternative courses of action. That, too, was part of her job description.

“Well, Skipper,” Crabtree began, removing the stogie from his mouth. As an afterthought, he pulled off the watch cap to reveal a bald stubble. “I can see why no one’s living on this piece of turf. Its gravel and volcanic rock with scrub brush, lichen, and a lot of seagull shit. Just over the berm, there’s a concrete structure that looks like it was an old fish cannery. It’s cold, wet, and deserted, but the structure is rock solid. Looks like some kind of World War Two coastal-bunker complex. It smells gawd-awful. I’d hate to spend the night there. It’s damp as hell and cold as a well digger’s ass, excusing the language, ma’am.”

Bigelow considered this. She knew the master chief was from West Virginia and a small mining town near Martinsville. He would know the temperature of a well digger’s ass. “Let’s hope none of us have to spend the night there, Master Chief. But if we were to have to, I want you to begin assembling everything we might need to do just that. And if it comes to it, we’ll have to take our wounded with us, so let Chief Picard know that as well.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am. Oh, and from what I could see from the top of the small rise on this end of the island, it looks like the big island off to the northeast is under shore-battery fire from the mainland. Lots of smoke. And it seems they’re shooting back as I could hear artillery fire. Near as I could tell, it was outgoing.”

“Thanks again, Master Chief. Carry on.”

After he left the pilothouse, she dialed up the IVOX. “Radio, bridge.”

“Radio central, aye, ma’am.”

She recognized the voice of her chief information technology specialist, who was the senior rating in the ship’s communications center. “Petty Officer Matheson, how’re you making out there in radio?”

“As well as can be expected, Skipper. We came offline after the missile strike for about fifteen minutes, but we’re now transmitting and receiving on all normal frequencies and guarding those same freqs as we were before the hit.”

“Good to hear. Now I want you to prepare for what might happen if for some chance we lose the load or can’t get power to you.”

“Roger that, ma’am.”

“And, Matheson, I want you to start thinking about what you might want to take along if we’re forced to abandon ship. If that happens, I will still need to communicate, and I’ll want to talk on an encrypted basis. Got that?”

“Skipper, are we going to abandon ship?”

“Not yet, but if we have to, it will be critical that we have secure comms with Seventh Fleet, the Reagan strike group, and commander, U.S. Forces, Korea. Think you can manage that?”

There was a pause. Then, “Not sure, Skipper, but I’ll do my best. And that best may just be an encrypted Iridium satellite phone.”

“That’s fine; I’ll take your best. Just make sure I can talk, talk secure, and there’s someone on the other end who can hear me. And make sure we have plenty of battery backup.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am.”

“Oh, and how are we for the destruction of crypto equipment and classified documents?”

“The combat systems officer and I began assembling the docs and the gear right after the North Koreans opened fire. The incendiaries are in place and await your orders. Might burn the ship up along with it, but all classified materials will be disposed of completely.”

“Thanks, Matheson. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Fifteen minutes after she rang off with radio, the first North Korean artillery shells began to land on the north side of Kujido Island.

At the Pentagon, it was morning, and hundreds of staffers on the Joint Staff had been working at a frenetic pace since the first shots were fired in the Yellow Sea. There were many differing opinions as to how to rescue the LCS crew. The Joint Staff had heard from the subordinate regional commanders, and none of them had a ready plan for quick action. Those that might work put forces at risk from North Korea’s deadly inventory of antiship and anti-air missiles and risk the lives of Milwaukee’s crew. The Joint Staff debated the pros and cons of an expeditious rescue versus one that might have a higher probability of success. When the chairman of the joint chiefs asked the Pacific theater commander for a rescue plan to extract the LCS crew, he was told there simply wasn’t one; the crew would have to hang on indefinitely. The chairman considered this, then pulled in a small cadre of his closest advisors to consider how to tell the president and the secretary of defense their senior military advisor had no options for them.

But beyond giving his political masters the grim assessment, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff had an equally difficult task. The president, the secretary of defense, and the secretary of state had all spoken with their South Korean counterparts and felt they had been successful in urging restraint and convincing their close ally to let the United States rescue its own crew. He was much less successful in his discussions with General Kwon Oh-Sung, chairman of the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kwon reminded him that the North Korean ships had attacked a flotilla of ships under South Korean command. Kwon had even called him “hesitant” and had all but given him an ultimatum to rescue the crew or he would have his South Korean forces do it. Most troubling, the last two times he had tried to call his South Korean counterpart, Kwon refused to take the call because he was “too busy with operational matters.”

Eight hundred miles due south of where Milwaukee sat stranded on Kujido Island, Brian Dawson pushed himself away from the table in his makeshift office in hangar 17 at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, with a sour expression on his face. “Think I need to stretch my legs a bit,” he announced to no one in particular.

“Me too,” Hector Rodriguez, who was seated across the table, said, adding, “and I’ll be available if you need another lesson.”

“Yeah, right.” Dawson snorted. Rodriguez had just taken three games of cribbage from him, and one of those was a skunk. They played for a nickel a point, and it was starting to add up. Worse, he knew Chase Williams would find out about this and remind him he had cautioned him against taking on Rodriguez.

The JSOC team and their gear were strewn about the hangar in an orderly fashion, and the team members were well into their isolation protocol. They would not communicate with the outside world, nor would the outside world, namely friends and family, communicate with them until they were tasked with a mission or recalled. The operators and the support cadre were variously reading, sleeping, or working out in the makeshift gym they had created in the corner of the hangar. For food, there were multiple cases of MRE rations, but these were veteran special operators, and most of them had brought along their own stores of food and drink. And they were ready. On a moment’s notice they could be kitted up and out the door. And since the nature of a potential mission was still undefined, they could be out that door and undertaking any number of operational configurations.

“Hey, Mr. Dawson, I mean Brian. Mr. Williams would like to speak with you and Hector. I have him standing by on a secure VTC link.”

Dawson and Rodriguez followed Jesse Carpenter to the small cubicle he had set up, which functioned as the Op-Center detachment communications center. It was Williams’s policy to have a video teleconferencing ability whenever possible, even at a forward operating base. There, they found Chase Williams waiting for them on a twenty-eight-inch, flat, high-resolution LCD screen. He was sitting at his desk at Op-Center headquarters looking at his screen and into the small camera eye set into the top of the casing just above the screen.

“How are things downrange?” Williams asked. “You all up and running okay?”

“As you might expect, sir,” Dawson replied. “We have our own space, and we’re pretty much self-contained. The locals are curious but compliant. Mike Volner and his troops are standing by to stand by, as are we. Any more news?”

“The good news is Defender and the South Korean minesweepers managed to reach Inchon safely. The Milwaukee is hard aground on Kujido Island. A flight of A-10s out of Osan managed to severely cripple both North Korean frigates, but they managed to splash two of the A-10s, so we have a real shooting war going. Admiral Bennett, the Seventh Fleet commander, is reluctant to bring his ships to within range of North Korean land-based air since they have overwhelming airpower on that part of the Korean Peninsula to say nothing of a highly sophisticated air defense. And I agree with him. We’d be feeding his strike group into a shredder. So, for now, that LCS and the crew are on South Korean soil, but they are, in effect, hostages of the North Koreans.”

“Can the North Koreans get to our people?” This time it was Rodriguez.

“Perhaps,” Williams responded, “but we will make it hard for them. The main Yeonpyeong Island is well fortified by 155 mm artillery, capable of reaching the mainland and covering the island where Milwaukee is aground. Admiral Bennett will soon have an airborne combat air patrol at the limits of the North Korean SAM envelope. And we will have constant drone surveillance of the area before long. If the North Koreans come out with any kind of surface force, we’ll know about it and can respond.”

“So it’s a Mexican standoff,” Dawson said. Williams nodded on-screen. “But, boss, why are they doing this? This is a big gamble, even for the wacky North Koreans.”

“That’s something we’re working on, Brian. We’ll keep looking for what’s behind all this. For now, the crew of Milwaukee are hostages, not POWs. If we can find out why they tried to capture them in the first place, it might help us to get them out of there. And if you have any bright ideas, I’d like to hear them.”

After Williams’s image faded from the screen, Dawson, Rodriguez, and Carpenter sat in silence. Then Rodriguez rose and stepped over to the coffee service Carpenter had laid out in his small cubicle. It was an expensive drip-grind setup, complete with a custom dark Sumatra blend.

“Not bad, Carpenter,” he murmured as he sipped it carefully, “not bad at all.” Then, turning to Dawson, he asked, “So, what do you make of all this?”

“I don’t know,” Dawson replied, helping himself to some coffee. “Kim Jong-un is crazy, but he usually does crazy things for a reason. But whatever it is, there doesn’t seem to be a play for us. It looks like it’s going to be a blue-water Navy show and it’s going to get messy.” He paused in reflective silence, then said, “Jesse, this is damn good coffee. We need you with us on these flyaways more often.”

Carpenter shrugged off the compliment, and, after another thoughtful silence, he spoke quietly. “Sir, I mean Brian, if I understand this right, the crew of the Navy ship is, in effect, hostage to the North Koreans and are, in all probability, just pawns in some game.” Both Dawson and Rodriguez nodded. “And if there were some way we could sneak them safely off that island, then it would be a game changer, right?”

“That’s right.” He now had their full attention.

“Well, I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I have a brother in the Navy. He’s an officer and a team leader with the SEALs. Specifically, he’s with the SDV team — the team that operates their SEAL delivery vehicles. And I don’t know if you know this, but they have a detachment here, over at the White Beach Naval Facility. Now, it’s just a thought, but here’s an idea on how we might pull this off.”

Carpenter spoke for the next ten minutes with Dawson and Rodriguez drinking in every word. “So there it is,” he concluded. “It’s just an idea, but it just might work. And most of what we will need is here on Okinawa or can be staged here. If you can find me a jeep, I could run over there and check it out.”

“Even better,” Dawson said, taking out his cell phone, “let’s see if we can find us a helicopter. I’ll even go with you. We’ll let Hector hold down the fort here and guard the coffeepot.”

Rodriguez frowned but said nothing. He did go for more coffee.

From Pacific Command headquarters on down, there was feverish activity to move assets into position to support all political and military options. The primary at-sea operational force was the USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group, now steaming at flank speed for the Yellow Sea and Korea Bay. The USS Bonhomme Richard with a Navy — Marine Corps expeditionary strike group sortied from Sasebo, Japan, with an augmented Marine Corps — battalion landing team. Selected submarines in the western Pacific were being rerouted for the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. On the U.S. west coast, additional strike groups made preparations to sortie and head for the area.