Two hundred seventy miles south, night mist shrouding her, the fast guided-missile frigate USS Blaine, part of the Seventh Fleet’s carrier screen, sliced an oily calm between Korea’s southernmost point and Japan’s Tsushima Island off her starboard bow. As the ship left the warmer waters of the East China Sea, heading north into the Sea of Japan, the sweet smell of land wafted by, momentarily subduing the rubbery smell of the bridge. It was a routine patrol, and Ray Brentwood, the tall, thirty-seven-year-old Annapolis-trained captain of the Blaine, was on the bridge halfway through the eight-to-midnight watch.
For a moment Brentwood found himself thinking of his wife, Beth, their two young children, and of Lana, his sister in New York, whose last letter to him was full of unhappiness about her marriage. His eye caught sight of the sign — REMEMBER THE STARK! — taped to the bulkhead, and he immediately put all thoughts of family out of mind. He’d drawn the sign up himself and had copies posted throughout the ship. The Stark, a U.S. guided-missile frigate of the Perry class, like the Blaine, had been attacked in the Straits of Hormuz in ‘87 by an Iraqi jet firing two Exocets. Only one of the missiles had gone off. One was enough. Thirty-seven U.S. sailors killed, ass-kicking all down the line, the captain court-martialed, and behind all the official inquiries, families and friends devastated by the loss.
The sign on the Blaine was the young captain’s exhortation to his crew to keep sharp, not to let the boredom or fatigue of a Far Eastern patrol dull efficiency, to remember that for all the wondrous “gizmology” aboard the USS Blaine, and wondrous it was, the first warning that a missile was going to hit the Stark had not come from the ship’s state-of-the-art SLQ-32 radar but from a man—the Stark’s forward lookout — who saw the Exocet’s blue exhaust ten seconds before it hit. Above all, the sign was a reaffirmation of man over machine in the most mechanistic age in history.
At the end of his watch, before going down to the ward room for a snack, Brentwood made his way to his cabin, drew the green drape shut, tossed his cap onto the bulkhead peg, and sat down at the bare, gray metal desk to perform his weekly duty of writing home. He smiled at the snap of the four of them, taken a few months before during the spring, when they had visited Beth’s folks in Seattle, across from their navy home in Bremerton. They were all in gaudy-colored shorts, young John, four, bribed to grin with the promise of a Big Mac, Jeannie’s seven-year-old smile trying to be sophisticated, despite the missing teeth. Beth, petite, brunette, didn’t like the photo. “Unfair,” she’d proclaimed good-naturedly. “Ray’s eyes are so nice and blue. Healthy-looking. Can’t see mine for the bags. Aghh— look at my hair!” Said she looked worn out, “too pale… a hundred and four,” instead of thirty-four, which her mother said was par for the course, seeing as how the navy had moved them four times in five years, and with two young ones. “Divorce,” her mother had added ominously, was highest in the navy-forced separations its major cause.
Nevermind forced separations, he’d told Beth jokingly; it was tough enough when you did get together. With the kids at this age, trying to make love was like planning D-Day. Impossible before ten o’clock at night, by which time Beth could only flop exhausted in the living room, needing an hour of Ann Landers and anything that moved on TV to unwind. They’d tried getting Ray’s mom to come to Bremerton from New York to “see the kids”—run interference — but she said she “couldn’t stand the rain.” What she meant was she couldn’t stand the strain — didn’t like baby-sitting and having to read the same bedtime story fifteen times, with interminable cries of “toilet” and “thirsty.” Ray didn’t blame her, didn’t blame the kids, missed them terribly — said so in his letter each week. But next leave, damn it, he and Beth were going to take off. A couple of days up on the Olympic Peninsula, a little place like La Push, cottage by thundering green-white surf, the smell of dead intertidal life giving off that fresh “ozoney” tang, and craggy, pine-covered mountains sweeping down to the sea. He and Beth in bed — all day. Then chilled cans of “Oly”—none of the diet stuff. Make love till they couldn’t do it anymore.
He felt the ship alter course slightly.
Strangest thing was, he couldn’t picture her face clearly after a month out, her facial expressions blurred in memory, precisely when he thought they ought to be clearest.
The voice tube’s hollow whistle sounded.
“Captain here — what is it?”
“CIC, sir — immediate.”
Brentwood grabbed his cap from the peg and headed for the Combat Information Center one deck below the bridge.
“What’ve we got?” he asked, entering the blood-red cave of winking consoles. “Bogey?”
“Not sure, sir,” reported the first officer. “A blip from five thousand feet. Hundred miles from us. Very fast, then nothing but scatter at sea level.”
Brentwood looked at the situation board. The carrier Salt Lake City was a hundred miles behind them. “Downed aircraft?” asked Brentwood.
“None reported, sir.”
Brentwood turned to the radar operator. “What do you think, sailor?”
“Don’t think it’s a black box down, sir,” answered the operator, meaning an airliner. “No SOS.”
“Is it in the Alley?” Brentwood asked, referring to the civilian corridor between Japan and Korea.
“Yes, sir. Off Cape Changgi.”
“One of the radio beacons acting up?” suggested Brentwood.
“Negative, sir. First thing I checked.”
“No steady beeps since first sighting?”
“No, sir. Sporadic.”
Brentwood studied the chart in the CIC’s subdued light. Cape Changgi was the eastern tip of Pohang Harbor, two-thirds of the way down South Korea’s eastern coast. “How far are we from the area?”
“Around a hundred miles, sir.”
“Exactly?”
“Ah — ninety-three point seven miles, sir.”
“Very well. Flank speed.”
“Flank speed,” came the confirmation.
“Steer two seven five.”
“Two seven five.”
“Announce Condition Three,” ordered Brentwood.
“Condition Three, sir,” replied the officer of the watch, informing the crew over the PA system. The ship was now in the middle of five stages of alert, a third of its complement ready for immediate action.
Brentwood rang the galley for a mug of coffee and glanced at his watch. He estimated they should be off Pohang shortly after dawn.