Clancy, Tom – Op Center 01 – Op Center

As he swung down Pennsylvania Avenue, Hood was bothered by the fact that he was able to overlook Mike’s flaws more readily than Martha Mackall’s … or Sharon’s, for that matter. Martha would have called it sexism, but Hood didn’t think so: it was a question of selflessness. If he got on the horn and asked Mike to bail out over Little Rock, hitch back to D.C., and fill in for him, he’d do it, no questions asked. If he paged Orly, he would leave the lecture in midsentence. With women, it was always a dance.

Feeling as though he had two left feet, Hood pulled up to the White House gate, one of two that protected the narrow private road that separated the Oval Office and the West Wing from the Old Executive Office Building. Presenting his pass, he parked amid the cars and bicycles there and, briefcase in hand, hurried to meet the President.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Tuesday, 11:17 P.M., Sea of

Japan, twelve miles from

Hungnam, North Korea

The policy among most Communist nations regarding territorial waters was that the boundaries, as decided by international treaty, did not apply to them. That the limit was not three miles but twelve, and often fifteen where enemy troops have been known to patrol.

North Korea had long maintained that it owned waters that stretched well into the Sea of Japan, a claim disputed by Japan and the United States. Navy patrol boats routinely pushed the envelope, sailing within four and five miles of the North Korean coast, and were occasionally challenged; when they were, they came no closer but rarely retreated. In more than forty years, confrontations had been few. The most famous incident was the North’s seizure of the USS Pueblo in January of 1968, accusing the seamen of being spies; it took a day shy of eleven months of negotiations before the eighty-two-man crew was released. The deadliest encounter occurred in July of 1977, when a U.S. helicopter strayed over the 38th parallel and was shot down with the loss of three crew members. President Carter apologized to the North, admitting that the men had been in error; the three bodies and one survivor were returned.

After a brief stopover in Seoul to deliver her film, Recon Officer Judy Margolin and pilot Harry Thomas were skyborne again for their second pass over the North. This time, however, they were obviously expected and picked up by early warning and tracking radar on the ground as they swept in over Wonsan. A pair of airborne MJG-15P interceptors quickly entered their attack zones, one coming in low from the north, one high from the south. Harry expected a chase toward the sea, and knew he could outrun the old planes easily if he was facing in the right direction.

Pulling his nose up, he started to roll while ascending and accelerating. Temporarily losing sight of the Russian-made jets, he found them again when one MiG’s twin 23mm NS-23 cannons caught the fuselage on the starboard side. The loud pock-pock-pock sounded like balloons popping and took him totally by surprise.

Despite the screaming of the engine, he heard Judy moan into her mouthpiece; from the corner of his eye, he saw her slump against her harness. Finishing his roll, he banked south and continued to accelerate.

“Sir, are you all right?”

There was no response. This was insane. He’d been fired on without so much as a warning. Not only did that run counter to the four-stage method of North Korean aerial engagement, with contact coming during stage one, but the first burst was supposed to be fired below the aircraft-away from the direction it would typically fly after being spotted. Either the North Korean gunner was a poor shot, or he had been given some dangerous orders.

Breaking radio silence, Thomas sent a Mayday to Seoul and said he was coming in with a wounded crew member; the MiGs followed him toward the south, neither firing as they shrunk in the wake of his Mach 2 retreat.

“Hang on, sir,” he said into his mask, not knowing whether the Recon Officer was dead or alive as he soared into the starlit night sky.

THIRTY-NINE

Tuesday, 8:20 A.M., the C-141 over Texas

Rodgers had to hand it to Lt. Colonel Squires. When he’d seconded the twenty-five-year-old from the Air Force to head up the Striker team, he’d told him to set up their offense, take pages from every military book that worked. And so he had.

As he sat there with the binder in his lap, he saw maneuvers and battle tactics that instinctively duplicated plans from Caesar, Wellington, Rommel, the Apaches, and other warrior-strategists, as well as from current U.S. plans. He knew that Squires hadn’t had formal training in these matters, but he did have an eye for troop movement. It probably came from playing soccer as a kid growing up in Jamaica.

Squires was napping beside him, or he would have poked him in the ribs and told him what he thought of his single echelon offensive deployment against a primary avenue of enemy approach. When he got back, he’d pass this one to the Pentagon: it should be SOP for a battalion or regiment that had suffered heavy losses. Instead of setting up an operational belt along defensible terrain, he set up a small second echelon and sent his first echelon group in a flanking maneuver to pin the enemy in a crossfire. What was unique-and ballsy-was the way he moved his second echelon group forward, then, through the defensible terrain, to push the foe toward the heavier line of fire.

Squires also had a humdinger of a plan for a raid on a command and control installation, with a four-pronged attack from the drop zone: one frontal, two from each side, and one from the rear.

Private Puckett stepped around the Lieutenant Colonel and saluted. Rodgers removed his earplugs.

“Sir! Radio for the General.”

Rodgers saluted and Puckett handed him the receiver. He wasn’t sure whether it had gotten quieter in here or if he’d gotten deafer, but at least the tremorlike droning of the four big turbofans didn’t seem quite as bad as before.

He put one plug back in and pressed the receiver to his other ear. “Rodgers here.”

“Mike, it’s Bob Herbert. I’ve got an update for you- it’s not what you might have been hoping for.”

Well, it was fun while it lasted, Rodgers thought. We ‘re going home.

“You’re going in,” said Herbert.

Rodgers snapped alert. “Repeat?”

“You’re going into Dee-Perk. NRO has a problem with satellite recon, and the chief needs someone to eyeball the Nodong site.”

“The Diamond Mountains?” Rodgers asked, nudging Squires, who was instantly awake.

“Bingo.”

“We need the North Korea maps,” he said to the Lieutenant Colonel, then was back on the phone with Herbert. “What happened to the satellites?”

“We don’t know. The whole computer system’s gone bugshit. Techboy thinks it’s a virus.”

“Is there anything new on the diplomatic front?”

“Negative. The chiefs at the White House right now, so I’ll have more for you when he gets back.”

“Don’t let us slip through the cracks,” Rodgers said. “We’ll be in Osaka before dinner, D.C. time.”

“We won’t forget you,” Herbert said, then signed out.

Rodgers returned the handset to Puckett, then faced Squires. He had brought up the map on the laptop; his clear eyes were expectant.

“This one’s for real,” Rodgers said. “We’re to check up on the North Korean Scuds.”

“Just check?”

“That’s all the man said. Unless we’re at war before we land in Osaka, we don’t go in with explosives. If necessary, my guess is they’ll use us to coordinate an air strike.”

Squires angled the screen so Rodgers could see; he asked Puckett to unscrew the bare light jiggling overhead so he could see the screen without glare.

As he looked at the map, he contemplated the suddenness with which his expectations and mood had changed. He’d gone from complacency and academic appreciation of Squires’s work to readiness and an awareness that the lives of the team would depend on those plans and on the rest of Squires’s preparations. He was sure those same thoughts-and a few doubts-were going through the Lieutenant Colonel’s mind as well.

The map, just six days old, showed three truck-mounted Nodongs in a crater nestled between four high hills in the foothills of the mountain range. There were mobile artillery emplacements ringing the perimeter, in the hills, making a low flyover too risky. He scrolled the map westward, to bring in more of the eastern side. The map showed radar facilities at Wonsan.

“It’ll be a tight squeeze,” said Squires.

“I was just thinking that.” Rodgers used the cursor to indicate a course. “The chopper will have to fly up from Osaka, in the southeast, and veer out to sea just above the DMZ: south of Mt. Kumgang looks like the best spot. That will put us down about ten miles from our target.”

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