Sea fighter

by James H. Cobb

  Drained by his burst of emphatics, the elderly professor’s head sank back to the pillow. “No man can be right all of the time, Miss Rendino, and a dictator has no one who can tell him when he is wrong.”

  Mobile Offshore Base, Floater 1 0110 Hours, Zone Time;

  July 12, 2007

  POM! POM! POM! … The platform’s deck Klaxons bellowed their metallic call to arms.

  Blasted awake out of a rare and precious night’s sleep, Amanda stared bleary eyed at the luminous hands of her wristwatch. “Not again!”

  The interphone shrilled on her desk in counterpoint to the clamor outside of her quarters. Rolling off the cot, she stumbled to the desk and clawed the handset out of its cradle. “Garrett here.”

  “The Union Express is coming out, Captain,” the platform duty officer reported. “Their heavy gunboat squadron has sortied from Port Monrovia and is closing with us at twenty-two knots. Commander Gueletti has taken the platform to battle stations as per SOP.”

  “I concur. Do we observe any additional activity?”

  “Negative, ma’am. Just same old same old.”

  “Let’s not take that for granted. Carry on and stay alert.”

  Amanda yanked on shirt, shorts, gun belt, and battle vest. Slinging a set of low-light binoculars around her neck and donning her command headset, she slipped her feet into her sandals and exited into the night.

  The platform was alive with shadowy forms moving through the low bloodred deck lighting. Marines and Navy hands streamed from the housing modules, scrambling half dressed and half awake to the gun towers and bulwark emplacements. Amanda headed for Starboard 4, one of the gun towers assigned to the Little Pigs support personnel.

  Scrambling up the tower access ladder, Amanda found the three-man, or rather two-man-and-one-woman, weapons crew already at their stations on the gun platform. With the nylon cover stripped from the Mark 96 over and under mount, they fed the ready-use belt of 25mm rounds into the Bushmaster autocannon and socked a fresh ammunition cassette into the stumpy 40mm grenade launcher superposed beneath it.

  The gunner, an electrician’s mate by the ratings badge on his dungaree shirt, activated his targeting scope and gun-mount drives, the gyrostabilizers coming on line with a mosquito whine. His loader, a signalman, hogged reload cases closer to the gun while the yeoman/talker fitted a headset over her ears. “Tower four manned and ready,” she reported into the lip mike. She listened for a moment and then enunciated forcefully, “Three targets incoming … Bearing three … one … zero.”

  The gunner nestled his shoulders into the curved rests of the Bushmaster and pressed his face into the night-vision sight, the pale green light leaking from the eyepieces drawing a luminescent raccoon-mask pattern on his face. Twisting the control grips, he drifted the long, wicked-looking barrel of the autocannon onto the bearing. Amanda lifted her own glasses to her eyes and acquired the Union vessels.

  There they were again: the rakish, boxy silhouette of the Promise, the cabin-cruiser sleekness of the Allegiance, and the spare minimalism of the Chinese-built Unity. The three big Union gunboats were running in line astern, parallel to the platform at about a two-thousand-yard range. Amanda’s binoculars had enough magnification and light-gathering power to show that the gunboats had their main batteries trained outboard and leveled at the platform.

  But then, they had done the same on all of the other nights as well.

  A carrier clicked in Amanda’s command headset and Lieutenant Tony Marlin whispered in her ear. “Captain. Do you want us to get the Manassas ready for launch?”

  “Negative, Tony,” she replied, lowering the glasses and keying her mike. “Continue with your maintenance. That’s a priority. Although I’m afraid that you and your sea crew will be doing all the work tonight.”

  “We’ll manage, Captain. But it’ll sure be great to get back out on patrol again so we can get some sleep.”

  A sputtering streamlet of sparks arced upward from the lead gunboat, bursting in midair between the Union flotilla and the platform. A magnesium flare glared down from the sky. The gunner jerked his head back from his sights as the photomultiplier overloaded momentarily before ramping down. “Dammit all,” he swore under his breath. “This is the fourth night in a row for this shit! What do these guys think they are doing out here?”

  “They’re trying to wear us down, Carlyle,” Amanda replied. “Harassing us. Keeping us awake. Trying to make us get sloppy and careless. It’s an old trick. Back during the Second World War, during the Guadalcanal campaign, the Japanese had a couple of big seaplanes that they’d fly over our positions at night. Our people nicknamed them ‘Louie the Louse’ and ‘Washing Machine Charlie.’ They’d circle for hours on end, running their engines out of synch and dropping small nuisance bombs, just to deny our people sleep.”

  “We going to let these guys get away with it, Captain?”

  “There’s nothing much we can do, except take it. We’re still at fire only if fired upon. They get to make all the faces at us they like.”

  The gun boss muttered under his breath into his gunsights. Amanda smiled briefly. “Don’t worry,” she added. “They can’t keep this up forever. Those gunboats burn diesel every time they come out. We can catch up on our sleep on our next leave, but there’s no way for Belewa to replace that oil.”

  The Union warships continued their deliberate intimidating circuit, keeping their range and circling the platform. A second rocket flare arced over the platform, bursting and raining down its harsh metallic light. By it, Amanda could see the mounts atop the other gun towers tracking silently. On the roof of the PG hangar, the Marines had deployed Javelin and Stinger antitank and antiair missile launchers. Amanda recognized Stone Quillain’s rangy silhouette as he hunkered beside one of the missileers.

  Other navy gun parties crouched behind sandbag revetments along the platform edges, manning Mark 19s and Ma Deuce 50s. Marine fire teams warily prowled the decks as well, alert for stealthy boarding attempts. As Amanda looked on, one Marine unhooked something from his MOLLE harness. Cocking back his arm, he threw an object into the sea.

  A dull thud sounded off the platform and a jet of spray shot into the air, sparkling in the fading flare light. A concussion grenade hurled to discourage any sabotage-intent combat swimmers attempting to approach the platform underwater.

  Amanda keyed her headset. “Command Tower, this is Captain Garrett. Let me speak with Commander Gueletti, please.”

  “Gueletti here, Captain.”

  “Looks like it’s going to be another long night, Steve. I suggest we go to a fifty percent stand-down at battle stations. Let’s let our people get what rest they can.”

  “I concur, Captain. Going to fifty percent stand-down at battle stations. I’ve got the cooks working on battle rations and hot coffee as well. We’ll get some out to you presently.”

  “Good thinking, Steve. Thank you.”

  Amanda glanced over at the young female talker on the gun crew. “Give me the headset, Yeoman. I’ll be up here for a while, so you might as well get some rest.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” Amanda exchanged her light mobile headset for the heavier hardlinked earphones the young rating passed to her. The enlisted hand then curled up in a corner of the platform, using her heavy foam and Kevlar battle vest as a pillow. Over on the other side of the mount, the loader stretched out on the deck as well; Carlyle, the gunner, elected to stand to.

  The TACBOSS and the electrician’s mate maintained the silent watch.

  The night wind brushed lightly at Amanda’s cheek. Distractedly she noted that it was blowing from the northeast, an unusual point of the compass for this part of the world. The trades along the African Gold Coast usually came up from the diametric opposite, the southwest. Amanda frowned for a moment, then shrugged the puzzlement away, returning her attention to the circl
ing gunboats.

  Washed out in the glare of the falling star shells, a faint flicker backlit the clouds along the seaward horizon. Lightning stirred far away.

  The Atlantic Intertropical Convergence Zone July 2007

  Beyond Amanda Garrett’s awareness, a vast but subtle convulsion of nature was taking place as she kept her watch that night.

  The first of a series of exceptionally strong high-pressure ridges was marching across the North Atlantic, not only initiating a series of savage winter storms in western Europe but also temporarily distorting the entire global weather pattern. The Atlantic Intertropical Convergence Zone, the perennial low-pressure belt that separated the westerly trade winds of the Northern Hemisphere from the easterlies of the Southern, was being pushed southward by almost a thousand miles. From its usual African landfall at Cape Verde, it was shifting to a point along the coast of Gabon.

  While the convergence zone, once known to the world’s mariners as “The Doldrums,” is generally known as a region of still airs and light winds, it is also recognized as a generator of sharp and angry squall zones and raging thunderstorms. One such tropical depression began to form off the Gabonese coast. Trapped between the trade-wind zones and unable to push inland over the continent, it hovered sullenly over the equator for the next ten days, a vast clot of stagnant cloud cover, absorbing moisture and thermal energy like an overcharging battery, growing steadily in size and strength.

  Then, as abruptly as it had come into being, the extensive high-pressure area over the North Atlantic dissipated and the standard global weather patterns reasserted themselves. The Atlantic convergence snapped back to its apportioned place and the southern Trades swept northward to the Gold Coast once more, shouldering the Gabon depression ahead of them.

  Caught between the easterly and westerly trade winds like a pebble between two contrarotating wheels, the massive tropical depression began to collapse upon itself … and to spin.

  Mobile Offshore Base, Floater 1 0528 Hours, Zone time;

  July 22, 2007

  Amanda snapped completely awake, yet she could not name the reason why. Her phone had not rung, the alarms had not sounded, and no one had knocked at her door. Her quarters, dimly lit by the hint of dawn light filtering in past the blinds, were cool and quiet beyond the white-noise rumble of the air conditioner. And yet something was indefinably but definitely wrong.

  Lifting her head off the pillow, Amanda pushed her senses out in all directions, like a mother reacting to some subliminal warning about her child. And then the realization struck her. The sea. Something wasn’t right with the sea.

  Floater 1 was a vast and stable platform, well anchored to the ocean floor. Yet the complex of superbarges still rode the ocean’s waves, pitching and rolling minutely with the surface action.

  The rhythm of that movement, second nature to Amanda after her months aboard, had changed. And that disruption was profoundly disturbing.

  Rising from the cot, she pulled on shirt, shorts, and sandals and stepped out on deck.

  Red sky at morning. / Sailor, take warning …

  The old poem flashed into her mind.

  The air was still and sticky, with little to breathe within it. A few of the hands on morning watch lingered uneasily at the rail, feeling the same sense of disquiet as Amanda. The sky to the east flamed a bloody scarlet, and from the south a series of heavy, oil-topped rollers flowed in toward Floater 1, taking the platform almost broadside-on.

  There was something disturbingly organic about those waves, as if they were being generated by the pulsing of some vast heart far out beneath the ocean. Amanda lifted her eyes to the southern horizon and studied the wispy cloud front rising above it. A cloud front that arced across the sky in a smooth, near-perfect curve.

  “Damn, damn, damn!” Amanda didn’t even realize she’d whispered the curse aloud. Hurrying back to her housing module, she had a look at the barometer mounted just inside the door. What she saw there made her run for the platform command tower.

  Platform Commander Steven Gueletti was in the glass-walled observation deck atop the tower, and he wasn’t alone. Christine Rendino and the Platform’s enlisted meteorologist were there as well. Nobody looked as if they’d gotten any sleep.

  “Good morning, Captain,” Gueletti said grimly. “I was just about to call you. We have a situation developing here.”

  “So I noticed,” Amanda replied, coming up the ladderway. “What’s happening with our weather?”

  “It’s that big damn storm front we’ve had hovering around to the south of us. It’s started to move, and it’s heading in our direction.”

  “That doesn’t feel like just a storm front to me out there, Steve,” Amanda replied, crossing to the central chart table.

  “It isn’t,” the Seabee replied. “Not anymore. The son of a bitch started to eye up on us last night. We’ve been sitting up with the weather sats, watching things develop.”

  “Why wasn’t I notified?”

  “There wasn’t any sense to it until we knew what we were facing, and it was time to make some judgment calls,” Christine interjected, joining them at the chart table. “And that time is upon us, boss ma’am. Welcome to the party.”

  The satcom printer in the corner started to rasp and hiss. “New satellite download coming in, sir,” the meteorology rating announced.

  “Let’s have a look at them, Clancy.”

  The met rating returned from the printer and spread a sheaf of color hard-copy prints across the chart table.

  “Damn, damn, damn!” This time it wasn’t a curse, it was an awed whisper.

  An eye thirty miles across peered up from the print, an eye surrounded by a broad, spiraling mass of white and gray cloud that almost filled the Gulf of Guinea.

  “Those don’t happen here,” Gueletti said flatly. “Tropical storms just don’t happen in these waters.”

  “Oh yes they do,” Amanda replied. “Maybe only about twice a century, but they do. And it looks as if we’ve just hit the jackpot.” She glanced up at the meteorologist. “What’s the Beaufort projection on this thing?”

  “The downloads we’re getting from the Ocean Meteorology Buoys indicate Force Ten at this time, ma’am,” the enlisted man replied. “Surface winds averaging fifty knots with twenty-five-foot waves. Heavy rain and spume. But she’s building fast. Faster than anything I’ve ever seen before.”

  Amanda nodded. “That stands to reason. Any tropical cyclonic in these longitudes would be a mean and unpredictable freak. This is probably more like a large-scale neutercane effect than a classic hurricane.”

  “I concur, ma’am. She won’t have legs, but she’ll ramp up quick and tear the hell out of the immediate environment.”

  Another printer activated, spewing out a new sheet of hard copy. Christine moved to collect it. “It’s an advisory from the National Hurricane Center,” she reported, reading the document. “Our baby has officially been dubbed tropical storm Ivan, and they already have it red-flagged. They’re projecting she’ll go over the line to full hurricane status sometime tonight.”

  “Ivan the Terrible,” Gueletti grimaced. “I see somebody back there has a sense of humor.”

  “Well, we know when. Now how about where?” Amanda inquired. “Do we have a projection on the point where she’s coming ashore?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The meteorologist moved some of the satellite photos aside to clear the chart displayed on the tabletop. “If Ivan maintains its current heading, the eye should come ashore just to the west of us, somewhere between our position and the Guinea border.”

  Amanda’s brows lifted. “That puts us right dead on in the northeastern storm quadrant. That’s the dangerous quarter north of the equator. Any chance at all for a deviation?”

  The met hand shook his head. “There are no factors apparent, ma’am.”


  “How much time do we have?”

  “The eye will come ashore about noon tomorrow. The leading edge will hit us about four hours before that. Call it 0800. We’ve got a little more than a day.”

  Amanda met Commander Gueletti’s eyes. “Okay. Steve, this is the package. We have a dyed-in-the-wool hurricane bearing down on us and we are in the worst possible position to meet it. You know the capabilities of Floater 1 better than anyone else in the Navy. What options do we have?”

  The Seabee officer looked grim as he replied. “Captain, the only option you ever have with a storm at sea is to get the hell out of its way. Since we can’t, we’re going to have to sit here and take it … right in the teeth.”

  Amanda acknowledged the statement with a nod. “Understood. Carry on, Commander. Let’s do what we have to do.”

  Gueletti lifted an interphone from its cradle on the edge of the chart table and punched up the 1-MC circuit. “Attention, this is Platform Command.”

  Beyond the windows of the greenhouse, his voice boomed and rolled over Floater 1. “All hands on deck! All watches! All divisions! Lay to on the double! Set full emergency protocols. Batten down and rig for heavy weather. I say again, batten down and rig for heavy weather.”

  Gueletti restored the phone to its cradle. “We’ve got some interesting times ahead, Captain.”

  Amanda glanced out and across toward the Union coast. “We aren’t the only ones,” she replied.

  Mamba Point Hotel, Monrovia 0819 Hours, Zone Time;

  July 22, 2007

  “Most of our population will never have experienced anything like this storm,” Belewa said with a shake of his head. “Our primary concern must be the coastal villages. Anything close to sea level is going to be inundated. We’ve got to get our people inland and to higher ground.”