by David Poyer
And it really, really wasn’t his concern anymore.
* * *
LATE that night he was carrying a towel under his arm, headed aft in his worn gray sweats for the weight room, when the counterbalanced door to the escape trunk at Frame 100 slammed open in front of him and sailors rushed out yelling into the narrow passageway. He caught “Chaloy jaldi jaldi,” or words to that effect. Flattened against the bulkhead, he grabbed at one of them. “What is it? What happened?” but was thrown off. “Jaldi Jahaz say bahar niklo!”
As soon as the trunk was clear he jerked the door open and stared down.
The stink of burning oil hit his face, and with it shouts muffled by steel. At the same moment the GQ alarm went. He stuck his head into the passageway, but all he saw were rapidly retreating backs. He grabbed the ladder and swung himself out.
The emergency escape trunk was a square steel well, closed off from the spaces through which it passed by watertight access doors. Its vertical walls were set with welded-on handholds. Some anonymous artisan had put in innumerable hours wrapping each rung with marline work, not just for decoration but also to improve the grip for desperate greasy hands. As he climbed rapidly downward, another wave of shouting sailors surged up. He swung into the corner, catching a boot in the neck as they clambered over him, then kicked himself free and dropped. His running shoes rang on the inner bottom. He jerked the door open that led into the lower level of the engine room.
Scorching hot air hit his face. He was looking aft and thwartships, at the space-filling bulk of the low-pressure turbines and the main reduction gear. To his left were an electrical panel and a vacant log desk. The telephone pendulumed at the end of its cord. His ear tuned through the tremendous hum of the gears, the multitudinous vibrations of pumps and turbines. He didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. The only hints of danger were the haze that filled the slanting brightly lit air and the unmistakable smell of burning petrochemicals.
More excited voices on the 1MC. Someone slammed the door open at the top of the trunk. Letting go the bottom door, Dan grabbed an emergency escape breathing kit off a rack. If the smoke thickened, it would give him a few minutes. Then he moved cautiously out into the space, slipping across the slick gratings beneath which oil-sheened water eddied. His eye snagged on a CO2 extinguisher. He flipped the clamps free and dragged it after him, staying low to avoid the smoke. He couldn’t stay long. He had no safety line, no backup man to get him out if he lost consciousness. Maybe the best thing to do was retreat, get out, and trip the Halon flood. But if anybody was still down here, unconscious or hurt, he’d be smothered by the inert gas.
The smoke rippled up on a current of heated air above the huge gray bulk of the reduction gear casing, disappearing through the gratings into the upper level. He couldn’t see where it was coming from till he crouched between the lube oil service pumps. He dropped to his knees and peered beneath the gray sheer sides of the casing, down through perforated metal into the shadowy recesses of the bilge. Only it wasn’t shadowy now. It glowed with smoky orange flame. The flame danced quickly over a darkly gleaming surface, turning an ebony pool to a lake of fire.
He glanced behind him, to see Al Sansone and Jim Armey stepping out of the trunk. Dan pointed, voice useless in the clamor of the turbines.
The first-class took off running, plunging past Dan into the smoke down the aisle between the main gear and main condenser. Armey took a more direct route up, leaping onto the condenser intake and hammering a grating loose from below with the heel of his hand. Suddenly alone again, Dan jumped back as a meter-long tongue of smoky red flame licked up between his Nikes. He jerked the cylinder around, gripped the release lever, then hesitated. In this closed space, if he started pumping out carbon dioxide, what were they going to breathe? Pushing that thought aside, he jerked the pin out and aimed the nozzle, vision dissolving from the rapidly growing heat.
* * *
THEY had the fire out in less than ten minutes, working together just the way they’d all drilled over and over for a Class Bravo fire in a main space: Sansone coming down the ladder from the fire-hose rack, Armey feeding slack off the reel. Dan had circled the sump tank, driving the flames back with roaring jets of cold white gas, till Sansone reached him. Then he’d dropped the extinguisher and fallen in as number two man, helping the boilerman control the suddenly rigid hose as Armey spun the valve open. Sansone braced his boots on the grating and pulled the bail back to Mist. Suddenly the smoke vanished, the water bloom cutting through the haze. The flames retreated as the mist advanced, the blast of seawater fog not so much quenching the flames as sucking heat from them till they could no longer sustain ignition. They circled the casing, Sansone bending to send the mist probing and swirling into the bilge, chasing and exterminating a final lunge of the flames.
Then it was out. The boiler tech laid the hose carefully out in the aisle, and they took a break, wheezing, clutching their knees.
Armey came down the ladder with a flashlight. He pulled up a grating and disappeared beneath it. He emerged from under the lube oil purifier, forearms and chest smeared with oil and soot. “It’s out!” he bawled, over a clamor Dan realized was lessening, winding down.
He recalled himself then, remembering the haste and terror with which the engine-room watch had shoved past him, and sprinted to the log desk and grabbed the handset. No one answered. He tried the 21MC next and finally raised a voice that switched only reluctantly to English. “We abandon the ship,” it said. “Get on deck. Help us put boats in water.”
“You’re what? Listen. I’m in the engine room. The fire’s out. Get the steaming watch back down here. We need the repair party, need a blower rigged for desmoking.” He had to argue for some time before he was sure the message had gotten across.
“What’s going on up there?” Armey said, coming up, wiping at his eyes with a bright blue bandanna.
“Apparently they were trying to launch the boats.”
The engineer gaped. “For a li’l lube oil fire like that?”
Sansone said, “That’s the way it’s been down here since day one, sir. Anything goes wrong, it’s the will of Allah. No point doing anything about it. I figure we watch over ’em every second, it’s even money we get to Karachi before it all goes to shit in a real serious way.”
Dan nodded slowly. He looked around the space, then looked at his hands. Armey offered his bandanna. Silently Dan took it.
7
THE AZORES
THE land was a black barrier, mountaintops erased by the low overcast. They’d been volcanoes in the dim past, the spiny outcroppings of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The sea heaved uneasily, deep blue as an old watch cap, still dimpled by rain from the low steel clouds. When Dan lifted his binoculars he could make out the humpy peninsula that screened the old city and, past it, straggling up the mountain, the glowing whitewashed buildings of Horta, capital of the Azores and the largest city on the island of Fayal.
For a week after the fire they’d steamed east by southeast, angling toward an imaginary point well south of Fayal. In all that time the seas had grown, harried and maddened hour after hour by a roaring wind that had backed around, opposing itself to all progress eastward. Fleet Weather reversed its original recommendation after forty-eight hours, advising ships in the central Atlantic to stay north of forty degrees north latitude. Too late for them, of course; they’d doglegged south following the meteorologists’ earlier advice and had to pay for it in two days of thirty-foot seas and seventy-knot winds.
They actually could have made port last night, but Khashar had decided not to run in close under the island during the night; they’d passed the darkest hours steaming slowly on an east–west course, then turned north at 0500. The sky was still overcast, but the wind had dropped during their final leg in and the anemometer wavered now between ten and fifteen knots.
Ever since the fire, a standoff had existed between the halves of the crew. Like a creature with two brains, two wills, Tughril h
ad staggered eastward with a divided heart. Dan had pulled all his men off training and reorganized them into a shadow watch team. He stood watch on the bridge, trying to keep an eye on things and at the same time stay out of Khashar’s way. Every time Dan was around the captain, he had an uneasy sense that the guy was waiting for an excuse to blow. He had a job to do, so he did it, but he kept out of the captain’s way except at mealtime. Khashar kept inviting him to lunch. It was tense, but he figured he was in a sense being the lightning rod. The downside was that he was getting really sick of boiled lamb and greasy rice.
Khashar had never mentioned the night his men tried to abandon ship. Not once.
“Three thousand yards to turn point,” murmured Robidoux. Dan told him he didn’t need continuous reports, just to let him know if anything didn’t look kosher. This wasn’t a demanding evolution. Just proceed in toward Horta Light, hang a right on a radar range, pick up the pilot, then let him conn them in. Warships usually took the last berth on the mole, and it was always a port-side moor. He raised the glasses again and examined the cottony wisps of squall that clung to Pico Alto, miles off to starboard but still perfectly clear in the rain-washed air.
A rattle on the outboard ladder, and Jim Armey hauled himself up. The engineer’s face was gray and his coveralls stiff with dirt and dried sweat.
Dan returned his salute. “Jim. How’s it looking down below?”
“Got the bus transfer problem nailed down. They’re flying the circuit board in to the air base.” Armey rubbed his eyes, squinting forward. “That a C-5?”
They watched the huge aircraft in the distance, so huge and slow it seemed to float. Dan said after a moment, “Stopping to refuel. On its way to Saudi.”
“Gosh, we’re almost in.”
“It’s a short sea detail.” Swinging the Big Eyes—the huge pedestal-mounted binoculars—around, Dan took him on a tour of the island.
“You been here before?”
“Twice, but you never stay long; it’s just a stop on the way someplace else. Like for Columbus. There’s a park at the top of that volcano, a mile across and about a thousand feet deep. Kind of a Lost World thing. You going ashore?”
“Like to, but we’ve got the fuel barge coming alongside—”
“Take a damn break, Jim. We can get a decent dinner, at least.”
Armey said he’d think about it and went below again. Dan turned back to the nearing land. He could make out individual buildings now, church spires rising on the hillsides amid masses of trees, the long black line of the mole. He lowered the glasses and looked down.
Into a sea clear and blue as sapphire. It appeared harmless and welcoming, ruffled by faint cat’s paws of wind. Sometimes, when it looked this lovely, it was hard to remember the placid surface hid a thousand fathoms of darkness, an unquenchable craving for the bones of ships and the lives of men.
Beside him the port bearing taker spoke urgently. A moment later yelling came from inside the pilothouse. The deck leaned as the bow came right, swung too far, and corrected back to within a point of the peninsula that screened the town.
The engine-order telegraph pinged, and the ripple and rush of the hull slackened. Glancing down at bits of weed rocking past on the paling sea, he estimated they were making ten knots. The dark knobs screening the town slid away. Masts and white-shining hulls came into view past the breakwater. The gleaming upperworks of what looked like a cruise liner were slowly being revealed, just forward of where the frigate would moor.
He went below for a head call and refreshed his coffee from the pot in the Combat Information Center. When he came back up, Horta spanned the horizon. He checked the chart with Robidoux. The QM said the Omega fixes were plotting three hundred yards east of the visuals, but the error was consistent. He went back out on the bridge and lost himself in reverie as Tughril slowed further, pivoted. The mole stretched out like a black barring arm of volcanic stone, then opened, welcoming them in. Old men in ragged shirts and straw hats swung nets into the water. A windmill stood on the mountain, arms clicking rapidly around in the steady wind. The water was even paler now, the tint of female turquoise.
He looked down at an excited man in a tossing small boat. He was yelling up, whipping his cap back and forth. He pointed at the bridge, at him, and after a perplexed moment Dan raised his hand to return the greeting. The gesture seemed to drive the fellow into a rage; he threw his hat down into the boat.
It was bobbing in the wake when Dan suddenly realized who it must have been. He did a double take, focusing the glasses. Yep, a black-painted P on the boat’s side.
“Sir.” A crisp salute never hurt with this captain. “We’ve missed the pilot. Small boat just passed down the port side.”
Khashar turned a lazy gaze on him from out of a cloud of smoke. “This doesn’t look like a very challenging harbor.”
“He’s required by Portuguese regulations, sir.”
“If necessary I will apologize to the harbormaster.” The Pakistani stared ahead, making it obvious that the exchange was over.
Dan wavered, then shrugged inwardly. It looked straightforward enough. The mole lay ahead to port. Their berth was closest to the entrance, just aft of the moored cruise ship. Ahead were a small military pier and a patrol boat, to starboard a shoal of pleasure craft cupped by another, smaller seawall and beyond that the town. Khashar had brought the ship’s speed down, though they were still surging ahead faster than Dan liked. The stern of the cruise liner walked steadily closer, a red-and-yellow Spanish ensign flapping briskly. Dan liked the wind. All Khashar had to do was park himself fifty or sixty meters off the pier and the sail effect would sideslip him into the berth. The captain spoke to the helmsman sharply. The bow came left, then left a little more. Dan tensed, but it stopped there.
“Sir, I’d take this a little slower if I were you. She doesn’t back very efficiently.”
Khashar didn’t answer. He stared rigidly forward at the rapidly approaching mole. Dan hesitated, looking at the others on the bridge. Not one of them met his eyes. He looked at the liner again.
There is a moment, dreaded by every ship handler, when the momentum of thousands of tons of steel means collision can no longer be avoided, but it has not yet actually happened. These are the longest minutes ever made, and Dan stood gripping the rail and staring as the high rounded stern of the liner drew closer. He saw the line handlers staring up at it from the forecastle. “Get back!” he yelled, accompanying the order with a violent pushing-away motion. They glanced up, seemed to grasp their danger all at once, and ran. The strip of milky green water narrowed steadily. Gray-haired passengers stared down from the stern gallery of the liner. He waved them back, too, and they retreated hastily. The lee helm pinged then, but far too late. He couldn’t help baring his teeth and tensing his forearms as if to push off as the bow coasted into the liner’s quarter.
The sound was tearing and gritty, like a dozen Dumpsters being dragged over concrete by a bulldozer. The spray coaming along the gunwale bent inward, then the lifeline, stanchions wrenching inward one after the other as they popped and twisted off their bases. Bolts cracked and bonged across the deck. Each stanchion left its own separate black gouge across the white-painted hull of the liner. The jolt came back along the hull, rocking him gently as the greater mass of the bigger ship shouldered Tughril off. As the bow rebounded to port, the frigate continued to move forward. The result was that the point of impact moved steadily aft along the starboard side. The grinding and screaming continued, marching steadily closer, scuppers popping up and writhing like live things as they were crushed, stanchions snapping inboard, held now only by the vibrating lifelines. Steel grated and screamed. The liner’s high hull was still swelling outward at the level of the frigate’s main deck, and as the point of impact moved aft it gradually rose.
As it reached the bridge, Dan grabbed the bearing taker and hauled him into the pilothouse and dogged the door. The white hull, so close Dan could read a palimpsest of previous ch
ippings and paintings, bit into the splinter shield where he’d stood a moment before, snapping up the wooden handrail and gnashing it into varnished kindling. A white-uniformed steward stared at them through a porthole. Then the curved wall receded, and the squealing and groaning moved on aft, accompanied by reverberating bangs.
Khashar was yelling, berating someone, Dan couldn’t tell who. A knot of men in work clothes gaped up from the pier.
He was opening his mouth to suggest a hard backing bell, to be followed by a nudge ahead, when Khashar shouted what was obviously an order. The helmsman and lee helmsman yelled back, and the engine order telegraph pinged. It looked like hard rudder and a full ahead bell. Son of a bitch … he was about to speak again when Khashar yelled again, and the ahead bell came off and the handles went back, and the rudder angle indicator swung back to amidships. The vertical line of the jackstaff hesitated, then swung slowly to the right. The mole loomed closer and closer, the black rock and concrete looking extremely hard and jagged. Then the back bell took effect, and from the forecastle lines uncoiled in the air.
Chick Doolan, beside him: “What the hell was that? I was down in the breaker, all of a sudden it sounded like a train wreck.”
“We had a close encounter with the liner, there.” Dan looked up, saw people gathered along her rail, examining the gouges. There wasn’t anything more he could do, but he still didn’t leave his post until Tughril lay moored at last, snugged to solid rock while above her, rank after rank, the white houses gazed serenely down.
* * *
HE avoided the wardroom for the next half hour and sent Doolan down to muster the guys in the port breaker. When they were assembled he laid a few groups on them about conduct ashore. The Azores were pretty pro-American, but a sailor could get into trouble anywhere if he didn’t use his head. The moment he dismissed them, they stampeded for the brow. There, that was done; at least they were off the ship for a few hours.
