“Rescue boats all out, sir. Three returning.”
“Very well,” answered the skipper of the USS frigate Des Moines, binoculars steadied against the flying bridge stanchion, watching through the haze as the two LAMP helos dropped vermilion marker flares about the Beaufort rafts now two miles or so from the Blaine. The crippled frigate was listing hard to starboard, white smoke still pouring from her. Now and then a crimson streak of fire could be seen erupting from deep inside her.
The skipper of the Des Moines had to make the decision whether or not to use the choppers as additional rescue vehicles or to release them to complement his radar as part of his protective screen. All about him he could hear radio chatter between the Des Moines rescue boats, including the ship-to-shore launch.
“Helos to resume screen,” he ordered. For the price of a few more men lost to exposure in the oil-slicked sea, the young skipper decided he would prefer to use the choppers as airborne eyes. Something had gone drastically wrong aboard his sister ship, the Blaine, and until he knew why, he’d rather be reprimanded for overcaution — protecting his ship — than have to explain to a naval board of inquiry, as Brentwood would have to if he pulled through, how it was that his men had abandoned the multimillion-dollar ship when she was still afloat. And though it was sheer chance, it wasn’t going to do Ray Brentwood, badly wounded as he was, any good to have to explain how it was that he and his second officer were the first to be pulled out of the chuck by the Des Moines. Already there’d been strict orders that upon return to port, there was to be no comment made to anyone until Admiral Horton, chief of naval operations, had directed otherwise.
Most of the men picked up were already dead, drowned, despite their life jackets, by the oil breathed in, some asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen in the oil slick fires that were still burning around the smoking ship.
“Sonar contact. Range three thousand yards.”
“Bearing?” asked the skipper.
“Zero fiveniner.”
“Hard right rudder,” instructed the skipper. He flicked onto the CIC channel, pushing the “squelch” button, drowning out the rescue craft traffic.
“What have we got, Tom?”
From the CIC below the bridge there was a pause, the computer racing through engine signature matchup.
“No match.” Which meant it might be hostile but was definitely not friendly. The young skipper was thinking fast; the signal was increasing, its echo louder. “It should be closing,” said the skipper to the electronics warfare officer down in the CIC. “How about passive mode? Any noise from it?”
“Negative.”
“Very well. Torpedoes ready?”
“Ready.”
“Standby to fire.”
“Stand by to fire.”
“Lookouts sharp!”
The starboard lookout shouted an alarm, but it turned out to be one of the white igloo-shaped Beauforts, bobbing up and down.
“Contact fading,” reported the radar operator. It was an awful decision — the damned thing was thirty fathoms below the surface. A new sub with no known signature waiting? The computers weren’t sure, absorbing a lot of clutter from the dozen or so small rescue boats and clutter from the sewn-in metal reflectors on the Beauforts.
“Size?” asked the skipper.
“Can’t say,” reported the EWO. “Echo returns, but it’s fuzzy.”
The skipper decided he couldn’t take a chance.
“Range?”
“Twelve hundred yards.”
“Bearing?”
“Zero six three.”
“Stand by to fire one and four.”
“Ready to fire one and four.”
“Bearing?”
“Zero six three. Holding steady.”
“Range?”
“Eleven hundred yards and closing.”
“Fire one and four.”
Two MK-48s, the most sophisticated torpedoes yet made, were running through the chop in excess of sixty feet a second, diving, homing in on the target.
“Contact fading.”
“He’s hightailing,” came a voice in the background, but the target wasn’t running; it was the angle of the ship turning that only made it seem that way.
Two miles ahead, the sea rose out of itself, shattered white and brown-speckled, the whoomp of the second torpedo quickly following the first — the sound of both reaching the frigate seconds later. The brown spots in the white mushroom were Beaufort life rafts, tumbling down into the vortex of the collapsing column, its bubbling base dirty with oil, bodies, and pieces of metal, possibly from the Blaine as well as from the target blown skyward, several of the Blaine’s crew spilling out of the falling Beauforts, disappearing along with the glints of metal.
The contact vanished from the screen, the skipper not knowing whether he’d sunk an NKA diesel sub, though this surely would have made more noise, or whether what he had torpedoed was a hunk of metal having sunk and been suspended in the heavier salinity layers and for which he had killed over forty more of the Blaine’s already shipwrecked crew, those close to the explosions of the torpedoes having their spines and necks snapped by the concussion.
It was his prerogative and his conscience. No board of inquiry would fault him. Parents would write and say they understood, which would be the most terrible burden of all.
As the Lufthansa began its descent into West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, Chin felt the thickening pressure growing above his eyes. He had already taken an Ornade capsule but didn’t want to use any more. He wouldn’t be driving, which the label warned against, but he would need a lot of concentration. Nothing less than the fate of his country hung in the balance. In the seat pocket in front of him he saw a copy of Paris Match, a headline about the Communists for Peace volunteer force. Chin was sure the force wouldn’t be composed of merely anyone who wanted to fight “U.S. imperialist aggression.” It would be the cream of the crop, special forces from the SPETSNAZ air/ marine commandos most probably, including the pith-helmeted Vietnamese, the latter particularly courted by Moscow as the outstanding brothers in the fraternity of socialist states — the ones who had “humiliated the Americans in Vietnam.” Even so, it wouldn’t be the numbers, initially only a few thousand or so, from different Communist Bloc countries that would leave East Berlin that would prove to be strategically important in the eyes of the world, but rather their entry in the war on the side of the NKA.
Even now, as affluent young West Germans cruised down West Berlin’s neon-sparkling Kurfürstendamm less than two miles from the eastern sector which, though it had ostensibly been socially and commercially integrated with the West, retained its own political demarcation proscenium, radio and television were reporting that there were already mass rallies in East Berlin’s Alexander Platz. The vast square was jam-packed with everyone from athletes marching in from the Sportforum in the suburb of Weissensee to workers from as far away as Karl Marx Stadt in Dresden over a hundred miles south, bussed-in crowds spilling out onto the Unter den Linden and down past the reinstated statue of Frederick the Great. While bands played the national anthems of each country, from Cuba to the dozen or so African nations, hardly any of which the East Germans knew much about, the crowds kept growing and surging amid calls for socialist solidarity in the face of American aggression. The East Germans were clearly taking the idea of the Communist volunteer force much more seriously than Moscow.
Then the “Internationale” was struck up by the band of the Bereitschafts Polizei, the blue-uniformed civil police, and enormous splotches of yellow, red, and black, the long-time colors of the GDR, and the red flags of the revolution struck a vivid contrast to the white uniforms of the athletes and the hazy blue sky.
The East Berlin parades could be seen by hundreds of West German residents, mainly Turkish Gastarbeiters, or “guest workers,” looking through the holes made by souvenir hunters and down over the remnants of the Wall from apartment balconies in Kreuzberg, the suburb an island of foreigners within the island of West Berlin. It was here Chin now headed within twenty minutes of landing at Tempelhof. The cab driver, like the older Insulaners, “islanders,” of West Berlin, had heard all the noise before, whenever the Communists wanted to whip up an anti-West rally.
Kreuzberg was a suburb which had always been avoided by most West Germans, not because of its proximity to the old Wall but because for most West Germans, Kreuzberg belonged to the Turks who had come in their thousands after the Wall had gone up in ‘61 and who, though they liked deutsch marks, did not like what they saw as West German decadence. The Turks were not so much unfriendly as separate. It suited them and it suited the KCIA, for in the netherworld of the only West German city exempted from the drafts, in order to attract businessmen and young workers, Kreuzberg had also become a haven for dropouts and squatters. It was good cover.
As they entered the outskirts of Kreuzberg, Chin could still hear bands less than a mile away and the tinny sounds of loudspeakers. It seemed as if someone was being denounced and then a band would strike up, but because of a wall of trees, he could not actually see what was going on, and this put him on edge.
When he arrived at the row house, a three-storied “redbrick” ‘ place out of the nineteenth century, he saw that the gardens about it had run wild, unattended for years, many of the cobblestones in the street visible beneath the worn-out scabs of bitumen through which green vegetation was poking. Very un-German this, he knew, but one way that frustrated landlords had of trying to force squatters out. All it did was attract more.
Appearing twisted and bent, the woman walking toward him as he looked through the bubbled glass was an elderly asthmatic, and it took her a long time to answer his knocking. Even before she reached the door, Chin could smell strong, pungent Turkish coffee and sausage. A battered-looking “Golf” van came round the corner, stopped, and unloaded a group of Turks, who were talking and laughing at the day’s end as they dispersed down the street, most of them smoking and taking no notice of him. Several doors opened, children spilling out onto the road, greeting fathers who, putting lunch boxes down on the pavement, lifted their children high, twirling them in the air. They seemed oblivious to the racket from beyond the Wall.
Chin looked up for the late sun to judge how much time they’d have, but it was blocked by me Wall, which in this part of Kreuzberg had not been battered by the souvenir hunters of Gorbachev’s heyday. Then he wondered whether the rapidity of the fading light was due to the fact that the Wall that rose straight up from the small backyard of the house was blocking it or whether someone in Seoul had slipped up in the panic, looking at the wrong month on the calendar and so getting the wrong sunset time. For all his training, this uncertainty panicked him for a moment, but then the door opened at last. As he entered, bowing graciously to the Turkish woman, he saw the other agent emerging from the bathroom, head bowing, apologizing profusely. When the old woman had passed them back into her kitchen, they matched the deutsch mark, though it was hardly necessary, as Chin recognized him as one of the agents whom had worked with years before, when assigned to Bonn. Behind the Wall they could still hear massed bands playing in the distance as they got into a gray BMW.
Six miles south along the line of what used to be the graffiti-scrawled Wall they came to a cream-colored, nondescript apartment building in the suburb of Neukölln, near East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport. From the black-tarred top of the apartment they would be able to see the airport proper, the two giant Condors, Soviet-made transporters, sitting side by side a hundred feet from each other, not far from the main terminal, their tail planes much higher than Chin remembered from any of the recognition charts he’d had to memorize. The sheer brutishness of their size, their lower half a blue wave pattern, the top a mottled khaki, made them frightening even from a distance. Now more bands could be heard; they were obviously marching south from Alexander Platz, the sound of the bands drowning out the usual putt-putting sound of East German cars, Tribants mostly, which during his earlier posting had always sounded to him like the two-stroke motorbikes mat weaved in and out of the traffic, a law unto themselves. He could smell a mixture of high octane in the late afternoon air as the fumes from planes landing and taking off from Schönefeld washed over into the west on a brisk east wind.
There was a tremendous roar from the southeast, and turning, he saw it was the 6:00 p.m. Aeroflot flight from Moscow. Through the smell of the kerosene fumes he could detect a faint but much more pleasant odor of fried liverwurst. Everything was at once so foreign yet so familiar. Here the DMZ had been known as the death strip. The mixture of the familiar and unknown was unsettling in Chin’s tired and nerve-racked condition, the Wall having once created the deadly illusion of safety in the West. But he knew that the Wall had served exactly the same purpose as the DMZ in Korea: locking in the peoples of the Communist blocs, prisoners of the totalitarian state, the same state that was at this very moment ripping his country apart, sweeping down from the North like the barbarians of old had swept against the Great Wall of China.
Then it happened. The other agent had assured him that everyone necessary from the trade legation in Berlin was ready. But now he learned that one of the men, the RSO, or resident station officer, had had to back out at the last moment because he felt someone, either from the West German police or from the Staatssichereitsdienst, the reinvigorated East German state security service that was supposed to have disappeared in the post-Gorbachev euphoria, was watching him.
The agent Chin had made the meet with realized that Chin was not listening to the explanation. Instead, the older man had stopped, hands in his light gray summer raincoat, looking up and down the street. “Those trees,” he said, “I’d forgotten—”
“What?” asked the other agent apprehensively. “Oh, yes, ginkgo trees — the same as home.”
“But they are not indigenous to Germany,” said Chin. “I remember it struck me the first time I was here. In—”
The other agent didn’t care about trees and, as delicately yet persuasively as he could, ushered Chin inside the apartment block. “I don’t know about the trees,” he told Chin. Chin could see he didn’t care, but the older man was smiling. It was an omen. How was it, how could it be, that the same beautifully exquisite fan-shaped leaves, native to his homeland, were here— across the other side of the world in Berlin? Still green and full of light, bravely growing and vibrant in the dying rays of the sun that were now flickering down through leaves intertwined with — or were they being strangled by? — the indestructible barbed wire that was still there. Through the branches of the ginkgo trees, he saw scrawled, “Freiheit!” Freedom. The um and the yang. From the turmoil of opposites would come the eternal calm. Such omens were no accidents, he believed — they only underscored the unity of all and the unhealthy futility of drawing borders through men’s souls. His country was on the edge of the precipice — the time had come for the clash of the opposites. From inevitable turmoil would come the eternal calm. “When do they start to load?” he asked.
“Eight o’clock,” answered the other agent.
Chin glanced at his watch. “Then we have two hours to fill.” The other man said nothing.
The five of them were in a room on the eighth floor, on the eastern side of the apartment. “Huh,” one of the agents grunted. “After Gorbachev they were going to be one big happy family.”
“That was before Suzlov,” said another agent. “Everything changes and everything stays the same.”
One of the three men who were introduced to Chin began brewing coffee, another passing around cigarettes from a gold-plated case. Chin hesitated. He’d tried too many times to give it up.
“American,” said the junior man, an army captain in mufti.
Chin took one, sat back, and felt himself relax, inhaling the smoke deeply, letting it settle in his lungs before blowing it out in a bluish-gray jet. He felt strangely at peace; everything would now be simply a matter of operational procedure, and the men under his command could tell from his face there was no turning back. Chin told them of the five U.S. and ROK servicemen who had been beheaded at Panmunjom. Seoul HQ, he said, had told him that they had a video of it, not a very good one, taken by one of the last units to get out of the DMZ but that Seoul HQ wouldn’t release it to the media. “Upset the folks at home,” Chin said. “What about the airport security tower?” he asked.
The younger one drew a sketch on the back of a copy of Abendzeitung. “We’ll take them out — or at least keep them occupied,” said the agent.
“Have you got suppressors?” Chin asked. “We don’t want any noise here putting us off.”
“Yes, suppressors, of course. Two rifles.” The agent identified the marksman, who inclined his head respectfully. Chin told him to destroy the sketch, then said nothing more. There was a long silence, the evening light growing dimmer.
Chin could sense the question in the air from all four of them but calmly kept smoking, composing himself. The marksman was looking over at the younger agent and the other two with the suitcases. “We were wondering, sir,” began the younger agent tentatively, “should we not do it now?”
Chin looked around at them, taking his time. “Are you afraid? I don’t want people who are afraid.”
“No, no,” hastened the younger agent with forced unconcern. “I merely thought that while there is light—”
“There is no point in half measures, son,” Chin responded. He paused, the end of his cigarette glowing more brightly now. No one put on any of the lights in the apartment. Nearing the end of the cigarette, Chin asked for another one, accepted it graciously, tapping it on the gold case, thinking for a moment about his young colleague who’d been trampled outside the Secret Garden. Chun looked up.
“Are there any other questions?”
There were none.
“Lee,” he signified to the young agent. “You should stay here to stop anyone at the door. Just in case. I will go up with the others.” Chin nodded toward the other three men.
“Sir?” asked Lee. “With great respect, sir, I would wish to be with my colleagues. We have served together in Berlin and-”
Chin shrugged easily. “Very well. I will stay here.” He looked around, seeing it would be no problem to put the sofa across the door. But in truth he expected no one. They had been very careful, they all said, leaving the embassy and all their homes in West Berlin at different times, using different routes. And Chun was now sure no one had followed him from Tempelhof.
When Chin glanced at his watch again, it was 7:30. “Go up in ten minutes,” he said quietly. “Has the roof lock been freed?”
“Yes, sir,” answered one of the men. “Everything has been prepared.”