by David Poyer
“Do you feel we need to respond?” said the captain after a moment.
“Sir, we’ve already responded. Chief Compline rogered for their distress call. It’s only about twenty miles off our intended PIM anyway.”
Khashar looked doubtful as Irshad laid out his recommendation: a thirty-knot course to intercept. Dan said, “Sir, I concur with that.”
“Come left, one-three-zero,” the CO said at last, turning away as he said it.
Dan and Irshad looked at each other; was that a helm order or what? The OOD checked with Khashar, who was back in his chair now, lighting a cigarette, and got an angry response. He suffered it in silence, passed an order to the helm. The gyro swung around to steady at 130. The speed was unaltered, though, and presently Dan pointed this out. The lieutenant said, “If the captain had wanted the speed increased, he would have said so.”
“You know as well as I do that if we maintain this speed, we’ll pass astern of the contact. He forgot it, that’s all.”
The lieutenant wouldn’t meet Dan’s eyes; he obviously didn’t want to fall afoul of the silent officer in the chair. Dan sighed and tried Irshad next. He didn’t even answer, just stared ahead through his binoculars. For a moment Dan considered reaching over, seizing the shining polished brass handle, and yanking it over to “ahead flank” himself. To hell with it. He crossed the bridge and said, maybe too loudly, but he was getting sick of tiptoeing and scraping, “Captain, we need to increase speed.”
Khashar breathed smoke out and watched it curl off the inside of the window. “We’re already at twenty knots. There’s no indication we need to go any faster.”
“They sent a distress signal. Sir, our obligation under international agreements governing distress at sea is to respond as quickly as possible.”
Khashar spoke angrily. The engine order telegraph pinged.
Dan, sweating for some reason, turned away. Then he forced himself back. “Sir, we’ve got two hours plus till we intercept. I’d recommend using that time to get organized. Get the boats ready and the gear loaded, flake out a towline, get a damage control party ready to—”
“That will do,” said Khashar coldly. “You really do not have to instruct me in any of these matters, Commander. I know my duty, I know my men, and I know international law and my own regulations. You do not need to instruct me, and I do not believe I require your presence on my bridge. I would recommend that you return to your book and your coffee in the wardroom.” He turned his head.
Dan debated a response, debated against what frustration, anger, and growing hate pressed him to say, finally decided none was called for. He said, “Aye aye, sir,” and went back to the charthouse, feeling the gazes of the enlisted men following him. Hard to tell, impossible to guess, what was going on behind those expressionless black eyes.
He was really looking forward to Karachi.
* * *
THE next message came in fifteen minutes later, saying the water was rising and assistance was needed fast. This time Compline said that an Italian merchie had answered, too, but its position plotted well to the south, at least six hours away at the best speed she indicated she could make. Jedda had promised a tug but had been unable to provide a sailing time yet.
The distressed ship came up on radar at sixty thousand yards. Dan felt the bridge team’s eyes on him every time he came out to dip his face into the repeater or to scan the sea ahead with his binoculars. Taken at face value, what the captain had just said barred Dan from the bridge. And he was tempted to take Khashar at his word, to go below and play passenger for the rest of the voyage. But he’d decided he wasn’t taking any hints. He’d stay here doing his job till they threw him off by force. One good thing about the sideswiping in Horta: it would lend him credibility if Khashar entered a complaint against him. Once you’d established that you were acting in the interest of safety, a court-martial found it hard to hold your actions against you. Rain rattled at the windows, then slacked, leaving a sky the color of wet concrete.
At 1700 the lookout must have reported sighting the other ship, because everyone rushed to the starboard side and focused their glasses on the same point. Dan stood at the chartroom door, not bothering to look. According to her reports, Al Qiaq wasn’t making as much headway as she’d hoped. For a moment he wondered why they were headed upwind; then the chart gave him the answer. Downwind lay shoal water, swash islets, and the black symbols of wrecked ships. The Sawakin reefs. Tughril came farther right, to 145, heading for what in a few more minutes he could make out with his naked eye: a distant white speck against blue-black. Even at this distance there was something irregular and disquieting about its motion.
Robidoux had been poring over a pub and now nudged him with an elbow. “MV Al Qiaq,” he said. “Saudi registry. Twin diesels. A passenger ferry.”
“Thanks, Robby.” The photo showed a modern vessel with a short forecastle, high superstructure carried up from the main deck, a single funnel midships, and a mast on the afterdeck. He couldn’t make out from the picture if there was ro-ro access forward, but there was clearly a ramp aft. “Take it out to the OOD,” he said.
He went out to the wing and looked down at the RHIB. The dark gray inflatables—RHIB stood for “rigid-hull inflatable boat”—were nearly as big as the old-style motor whaleboats, but much lighter and far easier to launch and get back aboard. Instead of diesels they had fifty-horse outboard Johnsons. A couple of familiar faces down there. Pistolesi, shrugging a black coil of cable into the boat. Usmani, the fellow who’d fondled the shipyard worker in Philly, looking glum as he manhandled a pump along the deck. For a moment Dan wished he were going with them, fighting something honest like a separated seam or a cracked intake casting. But his place was on the bridge, trying to flatter and kick-start Khashar into the right decisions. Lips set, Dan went back in, checked the radar, made sure the bright dot that was Al Qiaq was tracking down the grease-penciled line to intercept.
Irshad muttered, “What’s your thought on this?”
“Me? I’d run up alongside and send the repair party over. See if we can help ’em out.”
“They look very low in the water. What if they sink?”
Dan frowned, swung up his glasses. In the half-light he saw what the Pakistani meant. The ferry was down by the stern. Some sort of dark liquid eddied about her afterdeck, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Her stern rose, wallowed about, then dropped into a trough with the grace of a sack of sand. For a fraction of a second he’d seen a hollow interior, caught a glimpse of a ramp.
“What if they sink?” Irshad muttered again.
Dan glanced at him, surprised to see he was licking his lips. “We’ll have to take everybody off.”
“I don’t know if we are ready for that.”
“Well, we’d better get ready. There’s a section in the rescue and assistance bill on what we’ve got to do to embark refugees and stuff. That’ll cover where we put them and so forth.”
He headed toward Khashar, but before he got there the captain swung down from his chair and walked past him. Lenson spun nearly in a circle, watching Khashar go on past the helm console, open the door that led to the ladder down, and vanish without a word or a look back.
The OOD removed his eyes from the glasses long enough to glance at the empty chair, then said to Dan, “Sir, we’re going alongside?”
“Too soon to tell, Lieutenant. We need to establish comms, find out how bad off they are. See if you can raise the bridge on UHF.”
After several calls, while the ship ahead drew steadily nearer, an excited voice answered. Unfortunately, Dan didn’t grok Arabic, and it seemed to puzzle the Pakistanis, too. Or maybe the man on the tossing ship was trying to speak English, but it wasn’t coming across. The signal light clattered. After a long pause, a burst of light came back, but modulated by no intelligible communication. OK, Dan thought, so this wasn’t going to be easy.
“Is the boat ready to go? Repair party, pumps, lines aboard?”
/> “I will check. I believe so.”
“Take a look at the wind direction. You want to give the RHIB a lee to lower into. I’d cross the wake, then pull up and match speed off her port side. As close as you can without banging into her.”
The OOD muttered something, touched the speaking tube, then decided against it. He brought the head around by eye, lining the tossing ferry up on the pelorus. In the failing light Dan went out on the wing. The wind ironed his khakis against his chest as he searched the bridge opposite. A heavyset fellow in a black fisherman’s cap looked back. Hard to tell at this distance, but he seemed to be wearing a beard. The others must be below, working on the leak.
Letting his binoculars drop to their strap, Dan swept his arms up and down several times. The man opposite stared at him. Dan then climbed onto the little platform that ran along the outer edge of the wing. From there he hauled himself up another couple of feet, till he was straddling the corner of the splinter shield.
The man opposite raised his glasses. Excellent. Dan bent over and thrust his rump out. He pointed to it several times, then with a flattened hand mimed something hinging or folding down from it. He noticed the Pakistanis watching him from inside the pilothouse. Their faces were carefully noncommittal. He faced the other ship again and was rewarded by a vigorous nod and wave. The man in the cap disappeared.
Dan jumped down to the gratings as a curtain of spray hurtled over the port side and rattled over his head, then craned out, trying to see into the fast-falling darkness. They’d have to do this right the first time. Would it be easier if they were steaming into the wind? No, it’d give them better helm control, but it wouldn’t give the RHIB the shelter they needed to launch safely. This course was as good as it was going to get. Al Qiaq, of course, was still hoping for Jedda; that was why she was on it. He slammed the door open, wrestled the wind for it, and dogged it closed. “How far to Jedda?” he yelled to Robidoux. “And what’s the tide doing here?”
“Wait one … about sixty nautical miles, with a dogleg around the Mismari Reef. Tide … that’s a tough one, sir. There’s no tables for Sector Six, and the sailing directions mention frequent crosscurrents.”
Irshad: “At least a day yet, at the speed he’s making good.”
“If we can keep her afloat that long. You want to make sure the RHIB’s loaded, all personnel have life jackets on and secured, that they have lights, and that their radios work. Tell the boat officer the easiest approach will be to make for that ramp on her stern. Do you see the ramp?” Irshad nodded.
“They’ll be dropping it in a couple of minutes. That’ll be a lot easier than trying to get up those sheer sides. Once it’s down, we lag back to give them a lee, smooth that pitch out, and they can head on over. You sure you don’t have anybody who speaks Arabic?”
“Not the kind of Arabic they’re speaking.”
Dan picked up the portable radio. It was on Channel 16, a line-of-sight distress frequency. Tughril was angling in, approaching the ferry’s wake. The big seas were rolling through it, but the wide, flat stern of what Dan saw now was a rather larger vessel than he had at first thought had ironed them down to five to seven feet. Events were accelerating now, taking on that vicious smooth velocity that could at any time career out of control into utter disaster. He lifted the radio again, figuring to try French on them, then thought, Wait a minute; Compline got their distress message. He thumbed the 21MC. “Radio, Bridge: Chief Compline there?”
“Speaking.”
“Chief, when the distress call came in, how did you copy that? We can’t seem to get through to the other fella’s bridge team.”
“There’s at least one guy speaks English over there. ’Cause I was talking to him.”
“Call him back. Keep it short, but ask him to lower their stern gate. Think I got that message across nonverbally, but make sure. Number two: I want them to maintain present course and speed, their best man on the wheel, and hold the swings to two degrees max. Number three: See if your English speaker can come up on Channel 16 and translate; we’re gonna have to coordinate our movements pretty closely while we’re running alongside.”
Compline rogered. Dan double-clicked the lever and checked the relative positions of the two hulls again. Maybe five hundred meters back, Tughril was coming left now to parallel course, ratcheting up steadily on the heaving ferry. Looking across to her, Dan saw a party of seamen at the stern gate. As he watched, it came slowly down, and they scrambled back as a sea licked at their boots. He saw also that what he’d taken for oil or loose water, a mobile darkness on the ferry’s decks, wasn’t oil at all.
“Good God,” he breathed.
They were human beings, hundreds of them, lining the gunwale as the frigate moved in, shedding speed to fall in on her port quarter. The ferry’s crew seemed to be fighting to move them away from the rail. But the passengers weren’t obeying. It would be difficult to get the assistance party aboard if they couldn’t keep the stern gate area clear. And what if those panicky hundreds suddenly decided they’d feel safer in the RHIB? It was a disaster in the making.
But if the other ship foundered, they’d be trying to pick people out of the water in a heavy sea, at night. They’d die then, a hell of a lot of them. And he had only a few more minutes of light to do anything.
He was still staring across, making sure there wasn’t something he’d forgotten or overlooked, when someone cleared his throat behind him. He moved aside as Khashar emerged onto the wing, cigarette in his jaw. The captain surveyed the approaching ferry, the seamen waiting on the boat deck. The stolid dark face with the heavy Stalin mustache looked icy calm. For a moment Dan felt relieved.
Then Khashar swung and shouted an order through the open pilothouse door. The helmsmen’s faces flew around. Their hands tightened on the wheel. Irshad gaped from the chart table. Dan didn’t know what the order was. All he saw was the astonished expressions, the glances they exchanged.
Khashar spoke again, angrily and threateningly, but the faces did not alter and no hand moved to obey. Instead they did a strange thing. Their glances flicked to Dan, then returned to their work, their charts and instruments, or else they simply stared ahead, as unresponsively as if the bridge were peopled with wooden images.
Khashar blinked as if disbelieving what he saw.
Trying to head off what was going suddenly and horribly wrong, Dan took his arm, realizing as he did so that save for the obligatory handshakes, he’d never touched the man before. He said, “Sir, we have a clear duty to render assistance here. We need to get in there before this light fails, get the assistance party over there.”
Khashar shook him off, not even favoring him with a look. Instead he spoke again to the silent listeners. This time the Urdu sounded incantatory in the pilothouse, mingled with the rush of wind.
Irshad slowly etched a line on his chart. The lee helmsman stood immobile at parade rest, only the nervous flickering of his clasped fingers betraying life. The helmsman stared with oblivious intensity at his gyrocompass.
Khashar shouted, his rage filling the enclosed space. The men paled, but yet again not one moved. Dan saw that the helmsman was holding them in position, glancing over at the ferry from time to time, then back at his repeater.
The captain bit savagely at the ends of his mustache, then turned to Dan, his face suffused with blood. He said, as if each word cost him an effort, “What were you suggesting, Commander?”
Dan explained his plan. When he was done, Khashar nodded. “I have reported this situation to Islamabad. We will wait for orders.”
“We can’t wait for them to get back to us, sir. Look; it’s getting dark.”
The captain chewed his mustache for a moment more, then grunted, “Carry out the assistance,” and moved a step forward, out of the way.
“Aye aye, sir.” Dan forced his horrified attention away from the crew’s silent disobedience, Khashar’s rage-flushed cheeks, what would happen to them and to him as soon as this revolution was over
. He leaned through the wing door. “Right ten degrees rudder! Steady course zero-four-zero. Engine ahead two-thirds, indicate RPM for ten knots.”
The helmsman shouted his reply; the lee helm answered up. Dan motioned Irshad over. He came unwillingly, glancing at Khashar, but the captain ignored them now. He was staring off toward the ferry, which was rapidly growing larger as they came up astern.
Both ships were rolling, but out of sync, the seas coming in on their port bows, lifting first Tughril, then Al Qiaq. The gunwales were black with people. By now Dan could make out individual heads. He told Irshad to pass to the boat coxswain to trail on the sea painter till he gave them the cast-off signal from the bridge. Once in the water, they’d proceed directly to the stern gate, put over a bow line, then debark everybody but the coxswain. The crew of the ferry would have to help with the pumps and eductors; a davit near the stern gate might help. “And tell them to keep their hard hats on and buckle those life jackets tight,” he finished.
He watched the ferry’s stern draw nearer. The closer they got, the safer the RHIB’s passage would be. On the other hand, too close and the hulls would suck together; plus the ferry’s yaw and wallow didn’t give him a hell of a lot of confidence in their helm control. He wanted to drop into a slot about fifty yards off her port quarter. He called Irshad out onto the wing again to explain. “Just like an underway replenishment, only you’re going to have to keep a sharp eye on her stern,” Dan told him, conscious at each word of Khashar’s back, still turned to them. “That’s where you’ll see the first motion if she’s going to yaw significantly or come around into you. Maybe you should have your OOD watch the stern, yell if he sees her kicking out. OK, got it? Now goose her in the ass and get in there.”
Tughril surged ahead and Dan tensed, but Irshad chopped power just as the stem passed the stern gate. The frigate rolled hard as she slowed, and he wondered if they could hold this position without slamming into the ferry. All it took was an unexpected sea, a second’s inattention at the helm. But the helmsman was concentrating. Dan saw him sweating. “Tell him he’s doing good,” Dan said to the OOD.
