by David Poyer
Dan clung to the table, blinking, feeling something wet and warm running down the back of his neck. He knew what it was before he lifted his hand. A seaman tossed him a folded handkerchief. Dan clamped it to his scalp, starting to nod his thanks, then caught sight of the heading indicator.
It was jerking right again, in great swoops as the bow labored through the seas. Each swoop was accompanied by a grating boom that set his teeth on edge. It seemed to be coming from astern, though he couldn’t be sure; or maybe from below, the keel area. He tried to force his stunned brain into computing what that meant. The only thing that came didn’t make sense. Or wait, maybe it did.
They were headed back toward the torpedo firing bearing. Meaning that if this next fish was an acoustic homer, they were running headlong into it.
He lurched forward and grabbed the chief of staff’s shirt. “What the fuck’s going on, Hwang?”
The tall pale officer lifted his head. “The first torpedo exploded close astern.”
“On the Nixie?”
“How would I know?”
Dan nodded reluctantly; of course he couldn’t. But despite the grinding of steel being gnawed apart, she seemed to be answering her rudder. So they were ahead of the game, compared to Mok Po and Mesan, anyway. “But what’s he doing?”
“The maneuvering of the ship is not the commodore’s responsibility. It is that of the captain.”
“I don’t see Yu down here.”
“He is on the bridge.”
The second hornet grew louder. Closer. Chung Nam rolled as another heavy sea plowed into her, or she into it. Her frame shuddered, flexing like a whip. But steel wasn’t oiled leather. Stressed too hard, frame welds cracked. Ships broke up. He wished he could interpret the shouts and screams that came from talkers and petty officers around the space. Were they taking water? Reporting major damage? Was the hull patch holding?
Henrickson grabbed his biceps. He pointed to the computer, which he’d anchored to the tabletop with silvery strips of duct tape. “He’s still coming around.”
“I have no idea what these people are doing, if that’s what you’re asking me, Monty. They’ve still got their rudder hard a-starboard. Shit! I hate not knowing what’s going on.”
“You mean you hate not being the skipper,” Henrickson said. “And you know what? I wish you were.”
The rudder swung at last, but halted amidships. They stared at it. When it didn’t budge, Henrickson rather reluctantly glanced down at the keyboard. He inputted numbers. “Son of a bitch. He’s trying to do a Dingo in reverse. Head away first, from the acoustic, then cross back and do a wake knuckle to shake the wake homer—”
“Is it gonna work?”
The display changed. It now showed an elongated loop, an upside-down 6. Henrickson stared at it, then blinked up in disbelief.
“Only if he gets totally lucky on his timing. We never even heard that the fucker fired these. Not one peep. Nothing from the P-3s. He just bushwhacks us out of nowhere—”
The incoming screws grew louder, became a circular saw chewing its way into them. Dan clapped his hands over his ears.
Faintly, though his palms, he heard a thunk-whisssh of outgoing air. The torpedo tubes. They fired again. And three seconds later, again.
The enemy torpedo exploded.
This explosion, this shock, made the previous one seem like a mere tap. Instead of a dropping lurch, it jerked the deck out from under some men, sent others flying through the air. The bulkheads whipped so hard that the remaining lights fragmented instantly into an airy froth of glass. Henrickson’s Compaq catapulted off the table, somersaulted through the slanting air, trailing duct tape like a comet’s tail, and crashed into a tote board. The space went dark, succeeded a quarter second later by the rattle of tripping relays and the dim amber beams of the overhead-mounted battle lanterns. Dust and paint chips and fragments of overhead insulation blurred the already murky air. The DRT face cracked, and the lighted, projected tracking rosette within jarred and went dark. The noise was deafening. Stacks, consoles, repeaters, shrieked and bobbled as the heavy springs of their antishock mountings flexed. A warbling chorus of alarms and overspeeds triggered on. The rudder-angle indicator, heading indicator, and most of the other indicators and gauges either fell to zero registration or froze. The IMC gave an expiring chirp and went dead.
The dim filled with shouting, the thunder of running boots, and an ominous, gradually diminishing sequence of robust cracking sounds that seemed to come from below them. Dan pushed himself up off the rubber deck matting, not remembering exactly how he’d gotten down there. He felt no pain, but knew from experience that that had nothing whatever to do, at that moment, with whether and how badly he was hurt. He rubbed his neck. His hand came away bloody, but sticky; not fresh; he figured it was just seepage from the scalp wound.
Jung was sagged against one of the consoles. Dan hesitated, then pushed his way over. “You all right, sir?”
“I believe so. I believe so. But I don’t think we are doing so well.”
He nodded at the indicators. Dan became conscious then of the way she was rolling. Slow and heavy. No moan of the stabilizers, no engine-whoosh, either. “Engines tripped off? Maybe they can get them relit.”
Kim said heavily, from the sound-powered circuit, “We are taking leak.”
“Where? Aft?”
“Engine room.”
Not good news. Especially since whoever’d just gunned them was still out there.
Wallowing, without power to train or fire weapons, Chung Nam was helpless in the face of another salvo. They didn’t need homers now. One or two straight runners, the big idiotproof Type 53s the Russians had given all their third-world clients, would finish the job.
“What’s going on?” O’Quinn, wearing a too-small battle helmet. “It’s a spare. Want one?”
“No thanks.”
“Time to go swimming?”
Dan cleared his throat. It was hard to formulate words, given that his paralyzed mind expected every moment to end in the final punctuation of an exploding torpedo. “I hope not,” he got out at last.
O’Quinn, on the other hand, seemed buoyant, as cheerful as Dan had ever seen him. He glanced back at the dark stacks. “No power, no sonar, no point hanging around up here. What’d he say about the engine room?”
“Taking water.”
“I’m gonna go down, see what needs doing.”
“This crew knows how to do damage control, Joe.”
“But they haven’t been doing it as long as I have. You can always use another pair of hands on an eductor.” The heavyset retiree slapped him on the shoulder. “See ya.”
“Better stay up here, Joe.”
“You and Monty can handle it. Take care of yourself.” He waved casually to Henrickson and exited by the after door.
“You too, Joe,” Dan said softly, looking after him.
DAN caught up with Jung in the pilothouse, standing centerline with Captain Yu. They glanced at him as he came off the ladder, but didn’t break their rapid conversation. He looked past them at the sea.
And all that was there was the sea. He caught one faint gray vertical on the horizon. Either Kim Chon or Cheju, but stern to, steaming away. He checked the magnetic compass to confirm: steaming to the south.
Jung had ordered them to leave the damaged flagship behind. And looking at a huge gray comber as it bore down, he doubted they’d live much longer, in this sea, without power, taking water.
“Just how bad are these leaks? Is it a split seam?”
Yu stared for a moment. “We are not actually hit. Very close blowup.”
“A detonation close aboard,” Jung interpreted. Dan caught the little skipper’s poisonous glance, though it was behind Jung’s back, and a light went on. His flag captain wasn’t just worried. He hated the commodore. Resented him. Jung was younger, taller, better spoken, and if Hwang was right, better connected in the capital. Not a new situation at all, at all. But revealing.
“Anything I can do?” he asked them both.
“We have all in control,” Yu snapped.
“Want me to take a look at the damage?”
“No, all in—”
“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind,” Jung interrupted smoothly. Yu fell silent, but the set of his shoulders told Dan he’d be just as happy if all the fucking foreigners, and his commodore too, jumped overboard.
He looked at the sea again, at the way the wind was blowing off the tops of the crests and smearing them across the hollowed craters of the combers. What was out there, under them, listening like a panther in the night for its wounded prey? At any moment another torpedo could crash into the hull. Send them to the bottom forever. His gut told him what it wanted very clearly. Go to his fucking stateroom, grab his fucking life jacket, and get as close to a fucking lifeboat as he could.
The rest wasn’t his problem. He couldn’t do anything more on the tactical level. But if Chung Nam went down, or caught fire, it would be his problem, in a very personal way.
He stood motionless, pulled in both directions. Wanting to run somewhere—where, he couldn’t have said—and wanting to help. But how? He wasn’t in the chain of command. He didn’t have a job anymore, even in the most tenuous sense.
All he had to offer was his hands, his experience, his brain.
His body told him again to stay topside. But instead of listening he was remembering what someone had told him once deep in a forest in Bosnia. A woman who’d died seeking the truth.
If you run, you hit the bullet. If you walk, the bullet hits you.
That’s what she’d said, before her bullet had hit her. It wasn’t a bad motto. Not when danger was all around you, when there was no haven and no protection and nothing, really, you could do to affect what happened next. When all that mattered was what you could do for someone else.
He felt his teeth show in a sardonic smile. Try to keep everybody alive this time, Niles had said. Well, no chance of that. Not anymore.
But maybe he could still help out.
He saluted Jung and Yu, got preoccupied glances in return, and headed below.
THE power was still out aft of the stack. Every door and hatch was dogged solid and had to be undogged and dogged again behind him. He was wheezing by the time he got to the interior passageway on the main deck. It was smoky with exhaust fumes, dark as a subway tunnel, and shot through with the random beams of battle lanterns. The deck was slick with water. Men were shouting, cursing, and the hammering clatter of dewatering pumps made it even harder to hear.
Immediately he felt at home. He pulled a breathing apparatus off a rack, donned it, popped the oxygen candle, and tailed on at the end of a hose team. Behind the mask he was just another guy. Tall for a Korean, but bent over as they edged through the door leading down into the engine spaces, even that probably didn’t stand out.
He blinked ahead through the scratched lenses, his breathing loud and fast in his ears. The speaking diaphragm buzzed as he sucked air. The team caterpillared its way down a ladder into the dark. Steel gratings rang under his boots.
The biggest fear and greatest danger aboard ship was fire, so he was relieved not to see the hateful orange flicker. Just a white gush of foam below, the gleam of lanterns, a black slick and roil of water.
He was working his way after the team when the world toppled. The slick steel slanted suddenly beneath his boots. The men ahead of him reeled back, pinning him against the door, which slammed shut. He wheezed into the mask as the weight of five men drove the breath out of him. He tried to shove back, but the burden was too great.
Then the world toppled again, in the other direction, and the crush lifted and men flailed for handholds, going the other way. He grabbed a handrail just in time and clung like a frightened bonobo, staring down into a black gulf. If he lost his hold he’d shoot forward, over the railing and down into the mass of machinery below.
It had to be the stabilizers. Damaged already, they’d gone out again, and no wonder—no electrical power, hence no hydraulics. The whipping action of the explosions couldn’t have done them any good either. Anyway, they were out, and Chung Nam rolled in earnest now At the mercy of the typhoon, powerless, unstabilized, defenseless; their enemy could deliver the coup de grace at any moment.
They might not even need to waste another torpedo.
The rolling became even more savage. He braced again, one hand for himself, one hand for the hose, and to his surprise found a space had opened between himself and the #5 man. Despite everything, the team was still edging forward. He panted, screwing up his courage to match theirs, and hauled with all his strength, pulling the dead awkward water-filled weight behind them another yard. Judging by its swollen stiffness, the hose was charged. Chung Nam still had fire-main pressure, then. Her inmost heart still beat.
A shout echoed back along the line. He didn’t understand, but when the man ahead turned his face it was naked, unmasked. Dan pushed his own up, sucking in air over and over. When the guy ahead shucked his OBA he slipped out of his too. They left them in a pile on one of the platforms and moved on.
After some minutes of hauling and gripping, wrestling the bulky weight of the hose along catwalks that were as much handholds as walking surfaces, he crouched up to his waist in water in a low-overheaded space that was totally black except for shots of light from ahead. The hose writhed in his grip like a drugged python. The main space was nowhere near as cavernous as it would have been on a larger ship. But he was still lost, in a dripping Escher universe of catwalks and accesses meeting at impossible angles.
A flicker revealed faces upturned to where white water jutted through a vertical seam. The inrush burst through hammered plugs and tore away patches men tried to jam into it. Shouts echoed. Following pointing and gesticulations, Dan and the #5 man wrestled the hose around a corner and lashed it down. Another hose led up, toward an open scuttle where faint light showed above. He jumped down to where more figures struggled, and blundered into a body in the dark. The grunt sounded familiar. Dan grabbed an arm. “O’Quinn? That you? What’re they trying to do?”
“Fuck you doing here, Commander?” O’Quinn shouted hoarsely.
“Trying to keep us afloat. Like you. What’s going on?”
“Hold that, will you? We’re riggin’ this fuckin’ eductor. Hold it tight, goddamn it.” Dan got his hands where O’Quinn pointed. The other bent and he heard the clank of metal, then a scrape and clang as a wrench slipped and flew. The Koreans talked quickly, all together, and O’Quinn shouted, “Fuck. Fuck! No, let it go. Forget it! Just put a crimp in that fuckin’ hose. Twist it and… okay, you guys know how to do that. Good. Just hold that for a second.” Another grating squeak of metal on metal. “Okay. Let her go.”
A hollow roar, a throb under his hands. It felt like the thing was working. He took his hands off gingerly and it held. “This the only penetration?” Dan yelled.
“It’s a fucking parted seam. We got more leaks aft.”
“Yu says they never hit us.”
“Maybe not, but the fucking next goddamn thing to it. There’s a lot of fumes back aft. I’m thinking flares or something, from the smell.”
“Fire, you mean?”
“Not sure. I don’t think fire, but I kept thinking I heard somebody yelling back there. I tried to get these assholes to go look, but they won’t leave the main space.”
“They’re right, Joe. They’ve got to get a handle on the flooding. That’s priority one.”
“I know, I know, they’re fucking right. But how about we go look? We’re like fifth wheels down here anyway.”
“Where are they? This way?”
“You’re turned around, that’s forward. No, aft somewhere—aft of the launcher—”
“Shaft alley? After steering?”
“Not that deep. Maybe some kind of deployment room for the towed array. All the way aft. I don’t know exactly, but I can hear guys yelling back there.”
“You can
hear them? You sure?”
“That’s what I said.” O’Quinn jerked his head.
It sounded okay to go see if they could help. So he followed the older man through the darkness, past and nearly under a massive boxlike structure he recognized as one of the gas turbine enclosures.
The ship fell ominously silent once they left behind the clamor and clanging of the damage-control party. The whole aft section felt abandoned. They were climbing, not walking, going hand to hand along gratings and ladderways that tilted and shifted as the ship rolled. Dan wondered what was going on topside. If a torpedo hit now, they’d never make it out.
A grating suddenly gave way under their boots. O’Quinn slipped, slid, and went into the water. Dan grabbed his collar. When he came up he was spluttering. Laughing.
“Been fucking here before, boy.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“PCF out of An Toi. Coastal Division 11. Hit a mine. Blew the bow off. Got her home though.”
“Spruance class, in the Med.”
“Did you get her home?”
He nodded in the dark, remembering the ones who hadn’t made it. But the ship—yeah. He’d brought her back, and most of her people with her. Why couldn’t he focus on that? On how many he’d brought back, not how many he hadn’t?
He knew the answer. His own perfectionist self, his most persistent and merciless critic.
It wasn’t that Niles had accused him that rankled. The admiral had only voiced the condemnation Dan Lenson himself had leveled long before.
“Asked you a question, Commander. Did you hear me?”
He bared his teeth in the dark. “I heard you—Captain. Yeah. We got her home.”
