China Sea

by David Poyer

  II

  EASTING

  6

  THE NORTH ATLANTIC

  SEVEN hundred miles from land, ten-foot seas followed Tughril like wolves loping after a solitary elk. The wind was at force five, air temperature high thirties. The sun was a fluorescent tube behind white plastic. Color shifted around it in the overcast sky like fragments of frozen rainbows. Dan stood shivering forward of the ground tackle, fists jammed into his foul-weather jacket.

  Poring over the October and November pilot charts, he and Commander Irshad had roughed out the crossing in two great-circle legs, Nantucket Shoals to the Azores, then on to Gibraltar and thence into the Med. The deep tanks aft of Frame 120 held 212,000 gallons of Distillate Fuel, Marine. Steaming one boiler, with two burners pulled, the ship’s most economical operating speed was 14.5 knots. At that speed her range was 2,700 miles. Pub. 151, Distances between Ports, gave 2,098 nautical miles from New York to Fayal, Azores, and another 1,096 past that to Rota.

  That struck him as a little close for comfort. If they got orders halfway across to divert for a best-speed transit to the Gulf, he’d have to request replenishment at sea. But since there still wasn’t anything on the street about their heading for Iraq he left it at that, reasoning they had the current with them and a generally following wind till midocean.

  The days before departure had passed in a blur. He’d met Blair for an all-too-brief weekend in northern Virginia, then snapped back to backstop Armey on the final preps for getting under way.

  Meanwhile the augmentees had been reporting aboard, already bitching about being restricted to the forward berthing. They kept to themselves. They didn’t, some of them, even look like sailors, and Chief Mellows had to order several ashore for haircuts. Dan understood. When you asked for volunteers, you got the guys nobody wanted.

  Anyway, it wouldn’t be for long. He figured total transit time to Karachi at twenty-eight steaming days. Add port calls and the Suez Canal, a month and a half. He figured he could hold things together that long.

  Today they were three days out, and he sucked the cold air with a sudden lift of his heart. Some cruises had been milk runs; some had been hell. Two had ended in disaster. But despite the bad memories and sometimes dreams, he’d never forget the clear sunsets of mid-ocean, the smoky red dawns of the Persian Gulf, the howl of an Arctic storm. He’d left his youth somewhere in the wake, but on a day like this he remembered it imminent and tangible as the first time he’d ever seen salt water, coming from State Circle down to the Academy on a bright morning in June.

  Behind him the ship rolled, a barely perceptible haze whipping off the uptakes. Someone was looking down at him from the bridge. He lifted his hand, but the distant figure didn’t respond. He turned back, knowing he ought to get to work but unwilling to break away just yet.

  From the outthrust bow, cantilevered to protect the sonar dome, his gaze plumbed straight as a lead line. The heaving deep was blue as boot-camp dungarees at the surface, but beneath that a transparent blue-black sucked his gaze into lightless depths. The forefoot scalpeled it open with a roaring hiss. It spackled the undulant skin, smooth as melted glass, with spatters of spray before peeling it up and apart in a transparent curve that shattered into a crash of foam. The steady roar sounded like a gigantic sheet of Velcro being ripped apart. Beneath it millions of tiny bubbles boiled aft along her belly, then tore apart in the enormous whirling of the thrusting screw.

  A bell caught his ear, followed by a hornet hum. He turned to witness the tapered barrel of the five-inch quiver, then rise swiftly till it pointed to the zenith. It paused there, then swept down, rotating till it aimed off to starboard.

  The hollow clank of the transfer tray, and the barrel jerked. It whipped toward him, then halted again, quivering. The dark rifled lumen of the bore pointed straight at him as he stood at the bullnose. His grip tightened on the lifeline. Then the internal motors died, their pitch descending the scale, and the weapon reverted from uncanny life to inanimate metal.

  Out of nowhere, he remembered the day before they got under way. The crew had been loading stores, U.S. and Pakis tossing the moon-marked boxes aboard side by side, when Evilia Beard had come down the pier. Swinging along, she mounted the aft gangway and saluted the Pakistani ensign, then faced the OOD, who had come out of his slouch to confront her where the brow debouched onto a wooden pallet. There was a short exchange, during which she suddenly blanched, at which point Dan strolled over.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Khashar,” Beard snapped. “Is this his idea?”

  The OOD: “It is Pakistani Navy regulation. No women are allowed on board Pakistani ship.”

  “What? Horse shit! You get him on that J-phone and—”

  “I’ll have a word with him, Evilia—”

  “You stay out of this. This is me and him.” She turned back to the Pakistani. “Did you hear me, mister? Get your commanding officer on that phone. Tell him I’m waiting out here.”

  They waited for several minutes. Finally he came back. “You are not permitted aboard,” he said. Beard stood motionless, fingers working. But at last she’d spun, clattered back down to the pier, disappeared.

  Dan really couldn’t say why he’d thought of that just now.

  Shortly thereafter, he went aft.

  * * *

  HE put in an hour in the Weapons Department office, now the Mobile Training Team admin area, going over the training schedule with Chief Warrant Officer Engelhart. Engelhart was one of the augments, a somber, hollow-chested Uriah Heep who looked older than anyone had a right to be and still go to sea. Still he was fit enough; Dan had seen him clambering around the SLQ-32 arrays at the top of the mack. Another fanugie was the sonar chief, Bernardo Tosito. A native of Guatemala, “Tostito” was stony-silent as a graven image. He’d been recalled to sea duty from a shore billet in Tampa to run ping ops scheduled with a Turkish diesel sub when they got inside the Med.

  From Gaddis’s old crew he had Dave Zabounian, the supply officer, who Dan had discovered was a steady conning officer, too; Chick Doolan, still in charge of the Weapons Department; and Jim Armey. Greg Juskoviac had been left behind in the States, to Dan’s undisguised relief.

  He had about twenty senior enlisted, including Marsh Mellows, Yeoman First Ribiero, and Quartermaster Second Robidoux. Foley had gone ashore, bound for USS Thomas S. Gates, a new Tico-class cruiser. Not without envy, Dan had shaken his hand and said so long. He still had Sansone, who’d taken a bust to first class. Dan had noted at his mast how hard Sansone had worked during the yard period, how the explosion itself most likely had not been his fault. But the saying that even ill winds blew good to somebody did not apply in the surface Navy. Ottero had paid. Armey had gotten a letter in his jacket. Sansone had been lucky to make it out of admiral’s mast with a bust to E-6 and a $500 fine. He worked now with a closed self-absorption that discouraged conversation.

  Armey came in, and Dan tossed him the schedule. The engineer suggested deleting a two-hour drill on manual operation of the Hagen automatic combustion control console. Dan said, “They need to work on the Hagen, don’t they?”

  “Right, but first they got to be comfortable with running it automatically.”

  “They’ve been to school on it.”

  “They sat in the seats, you mean.” The chief engineer sat, passing a long hand slowly over his face like a blind man recognizing someone he had once known.

  “You doing all right, Jim? You look beat.”

  “I’m OK, sir. Just pulling too many hours in the hole.”

  “Just call me Dan; I’m not the skipper anymore.”

  “OK—Dan. As soon as you turn your back they’re cutting corners. Al says even when he points out they’re not lining things up right, they’re not listening anymore. Two fellas started throwing punches down in Aux Two last night—”

  “Throwing punches? You mean our guys and—”

  “One of the augmentees. Guy named Pistolesi. They call him ‘
Pistolero.’ He’s been trouble from the second he came aboard.”

  “Get him up here.” Dan slammed his chair down. “The son of a bitch can’t keep his hands off people, I’ll restrict him to his bunk and off-load him in Rota.”

  Armey tried the phone, but whoever answered it hung up when he began to speak. “They hear English, they hang up,” he said. “I’ll go down. When you want him?”

  “Make it ten hundred. OK, so the rest of the schedule looks good to you?”

  * * *

  “SIR. Commander Armey said you wanted to see me.”

  Dan measured him in silence. He’d expected a hulking brute, but Pistolesi in person was slender and fine-boned, with a sharp, nervous face. A scar or wound had healed irregularly across his left temple. A blue dotted line of old tattoo showed at the collar of his coveralls. His name was Magic Markered over his pocket, not stenciled or in block letters, but in fancy Olde Englishe script.

  “Where you from, Fireman Pistolesi?”

  “Hack’s Neck. Sir.”

  “I mean, you joined us from where? Stapleton, right? Staten Island?”

  “That’s right, sir. Off the Iowa.”

  “Were you with her when she had that turret explosion?”

  “Month I came aboard. Was down in number three fire room when it went.”

  “I understand you were involved in a fight in the spaces yesterday. I also see from your record that you went to mast for fighting on the Iowa.”

  “Sir, you didn’t stand up for yourself on Iowa, the fucking nig—the fucking blacks’d cut you to pieces.”

  “I see. What about this time?”

  “I cuffed one of the fucking ragheads to get his fucking attention. Yeah.”

  “One of the ragheads? Look, Pistolesi—”

  “Sir, due respect, but you sit up here and drink tea with the officers. K-man and them. We got to straighten these fuckers out before they blow this fucking ship up. You whale ’em one upside the head, they pay attention. That’s the way their own people treat ’em.”

  Dan relaxed. Pistolero could be dealt with. “OK, you got a point. Now listen to mine. Number one: you are not in the Pakistani Navy. You are in the U.S. Navy. Number two: We are now on their ship. We’re eating their food—”

  “Their fucking food sucks—”

  Dan came out of his chair and roared face-to-face, “You got a bad habit of interrupting me when I’m talking. Don’t interrupt me again, Pistolesi!”

  “Uh—yessir!”

  “I agree, they do things differently. But this is their ship now and you’ll treat them with respect. You don’t like their food, try bread and water in one of the fan rooms till we hit Spain. You receiving me?”

  “Yes, sir.” The fireman was breathing heavily, eyes still on the deck. But he said nothing more.

  Dan watched him for a couple of seconds, then added, “I need your help getting us safe to Karachi. We don’t have enough people and we need you. So work on your self-control. Dismissed.”

  Pistolesi wheeled and left without another word.

  * * *

  AT 1100 a short fellow in a stained jacket appeared at his door. Between his gestures and the time of day, Dan gathered Khashar wanted him in his cabin for lunch. He nodded and said all right, he’d be there in a few minutes.

  His former stateroom had undergone a subtle change. Khashar was nowhere in sight, but the prayer rug on the floor, the bulkhead photo of an ex-British Battle-class destroyer—one of his previous commands, no doubt—lent the room what little personality a shipboard space could assume. Dan nodded to the waiting officers. They were all smoking except for Irshad, who looked green. Dan felt ill himself from the closed-in haze but was able to ignore it. He found Tughril’s gait pleasant, a rolling pitch that put him in mind of a trotting horse.

  The cuisine reminded him of Bahrain. Lamb and rice in a baked biryani. Hot nan bread. A tray of sweet hand-molded items and fruits. The officers ate with tableware, though he’d seen the enlisted men, on the mess decks, dipping in with their right hands. There wasn’t much talking at first, till Khashar, wiping his mustache with a napkin, said, “Alhamdulilah.” The others murmured and sat back as the steward served out sweet tea white with milk.

  Khashar turned to Dan. “I was watching you up on the bow this morning. Communing with nature?”

  “Something like that.” They discussed the buildup, Desert Shield, the increase in U.S. forces Bush had announced just before they sailed. Dan was cautious about his opinions, but they seemed unanimous in their protests that Saddam had to be put down, that he was as much a menace to the Arab world as he was to the West.

  * * *

  AT 1300 he pressed the buzzer outside Radio. A face appeared at the grating; the door clicked and unlocked.

  The little room was walled by gear racks, but most were empty. Power cables and antenna feeds dangled like tied-off arteries. The main transmitters had been left aboard, but all the cryptographic gear had been stripped out and jumpers plugged in to make the system work without them. Radioman Chief Compline was one of the new gains. He was short and rotund, and something was wrong with one of his legs, making him lurch when he walked. Dan sat and began going over the daily situation report. Paragraph 1 gave their noon position and whether they were ahead or behind planned progress. It gave percentages for potable water, feed water, fuel, and the rate of consumption. Para. 2 was a training update. Para. 3 was materiel status and casualty reports, including parts or circuit cards they’d need en route. Para. 4 was personnel issues, and Para 5 was any comments or concerns he had as the officer in charge.

  “Look all right, sir?” said Compline.

  “Send it out.” He handed it to the chief, who swiveled around and pulled a key toward him. Dan watched fascinated as he dot-dashed it out. High-frequency CW, same as the Titanic had sent as she went down, in an age of computers talking to each other in thirty-two-bit code.

  * * *

  THE deck was rolling too hard to go for a run, so he drifted through the spaces. The very air smelled different. She was turning into a Pakistani ship already.

  At 1500 General Quarters sounded. He knew the schedule, so he was on the bridge wing when the alarm went. The high-pitched electronic bonging was unchanged, but the excited Urdu that followed it over the 1MC struck his ear strangely. The thunder of boots and the slamming of watertight doors, the clang of dogging wrenches, were reassuringly the same. He was tucking his pants cuffs into his socks when Khashar and one of the junior officers undogged the door and came out to join him.

  Khashar ignored him, speaking rapidly to the OOD. Dan slid away to give them room, steadying himself against the signal-light stanchion as Tughril rolled. The seas were growing. Toward midocean a tongue poked down from the stationary low that parked itself south of Iceland. He wouldn’t be surprised if they hit some heavy weather.

  Behind him a rushing roar spooled upward. Brown smoke shot out, unscrolling across the pearly sky. Tughril accelerated smoothly, roll diminishing as her speed increased. Peering into the pilothouse, he saw the handles of the lee helm at flank. Dan noted the time. Khashar was the boss, but with five tons of fuel an hour going up the stack, he might benefit from a reminder if he left the pedal down too long.

  Below and aft of him Dan could look down now directly onto the boat deck, where the crew was pulling the rubberized gun covers off the forty-millimeter.

  He’d never seen one in active service, but he recalled these long barrels with their wraparound springs and cone-shaped flash hiders from World War II movies. They’d been manufactured for the big push on Japan and then greased and laid away in some cavernous government warehouse to sleep the decades away. Now oiled steel gleamed in the dull sea light as the trainer spun furiously at a handwheel. A crewman in flash gear and heavy gloves hoisted a curved clip of the fixed shells, looking for all the world like oversize rifle cartridges. From above him came a yell and a clatter, and looking up, he saw the twenty-millimeter swing to the same beari
ng.

  Hammered together from fruit crates, shoring lumber, and empty drums, a spindly shape bobbed in the smoothed road of Tughril’s wake. Then it began to sway, picking up the rhythm of the waves. The ship plowed on, at full speed now, throwing out a hissing arc of spray each time the bow guillotined down into a sea.

  Khashar swung himself up into his seat on the starboard wing, crossing his short legs jauntily. Dan leaned over the splinter shield, shading his eyes as the frigate leaned into a snap turn. A paint can darted from some hidden nook and launched itself over the side like an old-fashioned depth charge. It hit the sea and was immediately overwhelmed and obliterated in the tearing surf Tughril now dragged behind her.

  He took Khashar’s intent. Drop the target; run straight for a mile or two; then execute two ninety-degree turns, till you were headed back parallel to your original course but offset a thousand yards from it. The target was out of sight now, behind the superstructure as Tughril began to roll beam on. He leaned in to check the radar for any passing traffic.

  Another hard right at flank speed. Khashar liked to maneuver fast and with a lot of resultant motion. The wind thrummed in the signal halliards, pressing itself against his face.

  Dan got his ear protectors out of the little vial on his belt. The clamor of wind and sea retreated, replaced by the thump of his heart. He focused on the target, rolling violently half a mile away.

  The sound made him flinch, the whip crack of the twenties above, the rivet hammer of the fifties. The five-inch unleashed a blast that rattled the gratings under his boots, and a choking cloud of brown powder smoke swept back on the wind. Below him the forty fired with alternate balls of instantaneous flame, succeeded by puffs of burnt propellant sucked instantly aft as the ship bulled forward. Wave spray broke in a cold glowing spatter across his face. Brass clink-tinkled across nonskid.

  A thousand yards away, ivory spray hearted with black high-explosive smoke suddenly sutured the water, some well short of the target, others far over. He opened his mouth to the captain, then closed it. If they’d been firing at a real ship, some of those overshots would be superstructure hits. Some of the short rounds would ricochet up off the water.