Korea Strait Read Online Free Page B

doesn’t belong there. For some reason—and believe me, doesn’t happen often—our good buddies and bosom pals the Koreans want us around when they bring it up. Want to go? Captain Owens thought you might.”
    Dan didn’t know who Captain Owens was, or why he thought he’d want to see whatever this was. But he was already turning on the light, reaching for his pants as he tucked the phone in the crook of his shoulder. “I guess. Okay. Khakis all right?”
    â€œKhakis are fine. And you don’t need to shave, just be down in front of the entrance in about a hundred and twenty seconds. Tell your guys you’re with me. And if you’ve got a camera, bring it. On the off chance.”
    â€œBe right down,” he said, sticking his feet into his Corfams and pulling on his shirt at the same time. Thirty seconds later the door closed behind him.

2
38° 35.11’ N, 129° 07.7’ E: Aboard ALS-25
Chung Wan
    THE smooth-surfaced sea heaved under a cloudless aramanthine sky. It was just before dawn. There was no wind. Not a ripple marred the ever-changing, everlasting interface between water and air. But it rose slowly, then fell away along the worn steel of the hull, all but imperceptibly, as if the sea were breathing.
    One to two-foot swells at most, Dan judged, leaning over the side to gaze into bottomless turquoise. Every hundred feet or so a wave broke with a quiet splatter. It left a patch of ivory lace rocking, slowly melting, till the clear blue welled up again. Small silvery fish hovered in the hull-shadow, fluid rippling commas poised tensely between quiescence and alarm.
    Beside him Major Zach Carmichael, U.S. Army, who was beyond any reasonable doubt Defense Intelligence, was telling him about the Maritime Department of the North Korean Reconnaissance Bureau. “That’s who’s most likely running it. The most elite of all NK Special Forces. Disciplined. Tough. Sworn never to surrender. They caught one before, in a fishing net. When they got it to the surface they were all dead.”
    â€œDrowned? Hull breach?”
    â€œShot each other, far as we can tell. Last one used a grenade.” Carmichael sounded as if he admired this.
    On the flight out, on an ROK helo, he’d looked down to see the lights of fishing boats setting out, nodding their way toward their salty crop-fields from the flickering yellow lights of hamlets that clung to blackened zinc cliffs. Rocky islets dotted the coast. As the sun rose the pilot pointed out North Korea in the distance. Dan gazed out on a hazy,featureless sweep that gave no hint that anything human had ever existed. Save, far away, the contrail of a MiG patrolling the Northern Limiting Line, the naval extension of the DMZ out to sea.
    They’d droned out till the land fell back and vanished in a nebulous mercury blurring. Gradually a ship emerged from the rosy haze. From her anachronistic, towering masts, her dented gray sides, she’d slid down some stateside shipway during World War II. They’d circled, the copilot barking into his throat mike in abrupt Korean, then moved over the bluff bow. He’d dangled, rotating on a sling, till Koreans crouched against the rotorblast reached up, receiving them like gifts from heaven. First Dan, then Shappell, then Carmichael.
    Now they stood aft on the main deck, looking out on a wide rounded counter. The flat stern was almost featureless except for two large centerline hatches, a towing chock, a stanchion with the stern light, and bitts spotted to port and starboard. The black steel underfoot was scarred and dented with decades of dragged chains and dropped shackles. So many layers of old paint scabbed it, it looked like the Black Hills seen from above. A canvas awning reminded Dan of
The Sand Pebbles
. But wherever she’d been built, she was Korean now. They swarmed over the fantail. The divers, just now lifting their helmets above a gently heaving froth of