China Sea

by David Poyer

  Dan waited as heavy silence larded the too-warm air. Finally he cleared his throat. “Uh, maybe I misunderstood, but you mentioned something about off-loading ammunition.”

  Uddin barely turned his head. “The ship herself may have been leased, but the ordnance aboard was clearly purchased outright. We own it, and our personnel are setting up to off-load it now.”

  “You’re not taking my ammunition!”

  Three four-stripers glared at him simultaneously. Khashar succeeded in getting the first word out. “You see. This is the sort of ‘cooperation’ I have had to put up with.”

  “Relax, Lieutenant Commander,” Sasko said warningly, extending a hand as if to hold the others back from physically attacking Dan. “This will all be settled at a higher level than ours.”

  Dan set his teeth, forcing himself back into his chair. They were retaliating for losing the ship by taking every round of ammo aboard. “Well—I understand that, but look; you’ve got to leave me something for self-defense. Fifty-cal, at the very least. Some of the twenty-mil.”

  No one answered him. The attaché said, looking away, “It’s unpleasant for all concerned. But the bottom line: As the senior officer on scene, I have verbal direction for Commander Lenson to assume duties as OIC, receive an additional draft of augmentees, and get under way at once. You will not permit your men to go into town, Lenson. Anti-American sentiment is very high at the moment.”

  “Meaning, they would be torn apart,” Uddin said, as if he felt a certain satisfaction at the prospect.

  * * *

  GRAY GMC trucks showed up half an hour later, and the Pakistanis began shifting ammunition to them. Dan made sure Doolan was on deck enforcing safety precautions, then went down to his stateroom and started punching the pubs to put together the reports he had to make. He kept glancing at the phone, expecting a call from Khashar. Despite their differences, he expected some sort of turnover, even if frosty. But it never came. When he gave up at last and phoned the CO’s cabin, no one picked up.

  He got his cap and went out on the main deck. Tosito and Zabounian were watching the last of the forty-mil going over in cases, two sailors to a case. Troops watched stone-faced from the pier, automatic rifles slung ready to hand. “You seen the captain?” Dan asked them.

  “Aren’t you him?” said Zabounian.

  “I mean Khashar.”

  “Special K left with the chief of staff. Took the log with him, too. I started a fresh one. One question: What’s our name now? Gaddis or Tughril?”

  “Make it Gaddis again,” said Dan.

  “They leaving us any ammo at all, Skipper?” Tosito asked him.

  “We might have a couple of clips left for the quarterdeck pistols.”

  “You serious, sir?”

  “Well, not quite. The small-arms ammunition and the pyrotechnics are still ours, but that’s it. I tried to talk them out of a self-defense allotment of the heavier stuff, but there wasn’t any give. Dave, I put together a draft logistics request message. Check it out and add what else we need; give it to Captain Sasko in the wardroom.” He took a breath, tried to shake himself into something resembling an in-charge mode. “We better get hot. They mentioned augmentees, but we can’t wait. They want us out of here ASAP. I’ll call Jim and make sure he has a steaming watch. If you can take the bridge and Chick the deck gang—”

  “There’s somebody coming,” said Tosito.

  A bus was trundling down the pier, weaving through the departing ordnance trucks. The troops flagged it down, climbed aboard, then waved it through. Men in civvies, white and black but unmistakably American from their size and clothes and the way they carried themselves. They filed up the brow, lugging seabags and suitcases.

  A familiar voice from behind him. Juskoviac, in khakis now, rendering a reluctant salute. Dan returned it with the same lack of enthusiasm.

  “I didn’t volunteer for this,” were the first words out of his ex-exec’s mouth.

  “I didn’t either, Greg. But here we are. Are you listening?”

  Sullenly: “I’m listening.”

  “You know these men? Where they came from?”

  “Whoever didn’t want ’em, far as I know.”

  “I see. Well, get them into their berthing areas. Get ’em into uniform. Pass the word: under way in three hours. Tell Jim to fuel as quickly as possible. Have Chick inventory every round we have left. Dave, see what consumables you can scare up and get that logistics request off. Muster everybody on the fantail at eleven hundred for word.”

  At 1100 the crew, or what he had for one, fell in for muster, instruction, and inspection. Dan looked them over, noting the paucity of officers and chiefs. He had Chick Doolan, Jim Armey, Dave Zabounian. Engelhart, with his melancholy visage. And now Juskoviac, already looking cheerful and aggressive again, which meant absolutely zip. He had Compline, Tosito, and Mellows. Sansone, too. It was time to fleet him up to chief and damn the paperwork. Not a heavy command structure and a damn light crew to go to sea with.

  He took five minutes to welcome the new men. He made sure they had bunks and were assigned to divisions. Once they got to sea he’d promulgate a watch, quarter, and station bill, set up watch sections, and shake things down into steaming order. He went on to the tasking that Sasko had passed verbally, with the promise of official orders from CINCPAC—Commander in Chief, Pacific—to follow shortly.

  He said dryly, pitching his voice to carry over the creak of seagulls and the talking that would not stop in the ranks, “Since the withdrawal of deployed forces for Desert Shield started, piracy has flared up in the Singapore area. Cargo ships, tankers, and yachts have been boarded, crews killed, cargoes and even ships stolen. In the most recent incident, a Dutch captain and Filipino first officer were shot on the bridge by pirates who emptied a tanker’s safe.

  “Local nations thought they had a handle on the situation by leaning on Jakarta, resulting in twenty Indonesians being shot. And it did stop, for a while. But now that most of the Seventh Fleet has deployed to the Gulf, it’s broken out again, and now the gangs are more ruthless and better-organized.

  “Right now State and UN authorities are trying to coordinate combined action against the pirates. But what’s left of the Pac Fleet has to stick close to Korea, in case things heat up there.

  “That leaves us as the only readily available force for antipirate work. So we are getting under way in one hour, first stop: Singapore. Detailed directions will follow, but it is most likely we will take our place in an ad hoc task force made up from those states that border the China Sea and Malacca Straits area.

  “Are there any questions?”

  The men stared back at him, the new drafts wearing the tough, unimpressed faces sailors shipped when they joined a new command. He nodded to Juskoviac. “Take charge and dismiss the men. Sea detail at noon sharp.”

  Sixty minutes later, he stood on the bridge and looked around slowly, still unable to believe it. Then he pressed the switch on the 21MC. “Main control, bridge.”

  “Main control aye.”

  “Ready up, Jim?”

  “Ready to answer all bells, Skipper.” Armey sounded relieved, too. “But you know, they wouldn’t furnish fuel. We’re down to fifty-two percent.”

  “We’ve still got diesel we can burn, right? For the motor generators?”

  “Yeah, we still got that.”

  “And you know, I can’t blame them. It really was their ship.”

  “Well, it’s ours again now.” For the first time since Dan had known him, the engineer sounded almost relaxed.

  Dan clicked the button twice and went out on the wing. The line handlers on the pier were gone. The tug was gone, too. The Pakis weren’t making anything easy. Well, he could understand that, too.

  “Take in all lines!” he yelled down, and Topmark began shouting orders. The last dripping line snaked up through the fairleads, and yellow water burbled as the screw began to revolve. The pier fell away, and the ship that was now his again slowl
y wheeled, pointing her bow toward the flat blue edge beyond Manora Point as from the mast, once more, the Stars and Stripes blazed out like white smoke and red fire in a steady wind from the sea.

  III

  TNTF

  12

  01° 09' N, 103° 51' E: THE STRAITS OF SINGAPORE

  THE humid air was in the high eighties. Rain that smelled of petroleum smoke and decaying vegetation was pouring out of a gray sky, drumming and whooshing on Gaddis’s forecastle and windshields as if she were cycling through a Robo Wash. Dan stood irresolute at the chart table, having penciled in a course curling in around Sentosa Island to the pilot pickup point.

  He felt wrung out and groggy, not just from the tropic heat some seventy miles from the equator but also from having been awake for two days and nights. The trek south along the coast of India, then east past Sri Lanka and across to the Nicobars had been routine till then. But a cracked bilge pump casing followed by a night passage of the Strait of Malacca didn’t make for calm nerves.

  A cracked casing could ruin a skipper’s sleep all by itself, since if it gave way it could flood the engine room in a matter of minutes; but the nighttime run through the strait had been the capper. The traffic separation scheme required westbound traffic to hug the Malaysian side of the deepwater channel and eastbound ships the coast of Sumatra, to the south. He could deal with weirdly lighted local fishing craft, crossing traffic, strong tidal currents, and numerous shoals and sandbanks. But around 0200, a huge contact had detached itself from the glowworm-green parade across the scope and cut due south, into the eastbound lane. The effect was like a tractor-trailer plowing across a median into oncoming rush-hour traffic, except that heavily laden tankers and containerships have no brakes. Ships had backed and veered in all directions, and from a frictionless flow shipping had splintered into chaos for hours, rammed even tighter by the still-incoming pressure at either end of the strait. At one point a huge supertanker had come barreling down on Gaddis as she hugged the ten-fathom curve against Bengkalis Island. Somehow they’d missed each other, the frigate crowded into water so shallow Armey had called up telling him they were sucking mud into the intakes and they’d have silted exchanger tubes if he didn’t get into deeper water. And Dan shouting back to get everybody topside fast if he heard the collision alarm. But somehow they’d squeezed past each other, the tanker towering over them in the dark, then gradually fading to a shrinking stern light. And after some hours of the Vessel Traffic Information Service manager shouting himself hoarse over Channel 73, the scattering of shiplights, like confused and wandering stars, had finally resumed their steady plod east and west, welding Asia and Europe and the Americas with a bridge of floating steel.

  And now dawn and heat and the monsoon wind pushing black clouds trailing rain like the stinging tentacles of Portuguese men-of-war across the blue-green hills of Sumatra. The prickly scatter of island returns on the radar and ahead the tip of Malaysia and the city-state where he hoped for fuel and parts and ammo. Without them, he wasn’t going anywhere. And orders; he needed orders and a chat with the local authorities.

  Ah, the joys of command. This was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it?

  The funny thing: despite it all, it was.

  Scrubbing his face hard with his palms, he forced himself to concentrate once again.

  * * *

  BY noon they were clipped into a back pocket of the world’s second busiest port, moored outboard of a worn-out breakbulk whose rusty indented sides looked down on Gaddis’s pilothouse. When he was satisfied the lines were right, he passed “secure the engines” down to Main Control. The rain had let up temporarily, trailing its skirts inland, and he looked across the south basin at a shining mass of glass and steel rising from a jumble of particolored roofs. To seaward spread a second city of anchored ships, scores of them riding the dark green surface. Beyond Singapore low hills rolled into the distance, the deep light-sucking hue of rain forest and jungle. Dan remembered how the Japanese had bicycled down out of them in 1941 to take the “impregnable” fortress from the rear. Not Western imperialism’s finest moment.

  The squealer, while he was musing on history. He snatched it off the bulkhead. “Captain.”

  “Sir, Chick here, on the quarterdeck. Fella down here in a boat says he’s the consul.”

  “Great, great! Just the boy I was going to try to find. Take him to my stateroom. Tell Usmani coffee and cake, if we have any.”

  * * *

  THE consul was extremely meager and almost seven feet tall, an astonishing apparition whose head brushed the acoustic-tiled overhead of Dan’s cabin. He wore a gray silk pin-striped suit and carried a calfskin briefcase and a furled umbrella. They shook hands. “Dan Lenson, commanding.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Captain. Derek Kingon, U.S. consul to the Republic of Singapore. Our younger visitors call me ‘Klingon.’ I really have no idea why.” Kingon had a Boston accent so pronounced and nasal that for a moment Dan’s brain hesitated, trying to decode what he had just said. But at last it computed, and he waved Usmani in as the messman appeared at the door. The Pakistani set down coffee and a dish of crackers—supplies were getting short—and left, easing the door to. Dan drained his cup and poured another from the carafe, fighting to regain some alertness. Kingon eyed the crackers doubtfully, took a perfunctory sip at the coffee.

  “Well, and how may I be of service? I can recommend some tour companies. Your crew will want to see Pasir Panjang and the Tiger Balm Gardens. All guides Tourist Promotion Board–certified. If you can give me some idea of how many—”

  The squealer. Dan said, “Excuse me,” and grabbed it. “CO.”

  “Fuel barge alongside, Skipper. They want to know how we’re going to pay.”

  “Tell him he can start pumping, I’m with the consul now and we’re going to discuss that.” Dan hung up. “Sorry, Mr. Klingon, I mean, damn it, Kingon, you were saying…”

  “Tours, about how many men you would be needing tickets for—”

  “I’m sorry.” Dan suddenly felt apprehensive. “We can talk about tours later, but I’d hoped you’d have instructions for me. I’ve been making reports daily, asking for orders, but I haven’t gotten any response. I left Karachi for here on verbal instructions. It would make me feel a lot better to get confirmation. We need to talk about how to charge our fuel and water and port fees, too.”

  “How are your communications?”

  “Not good. I’d like to send a cable or something back to Pensacola, if you could help me do that. For the last few days there didn’t seem to be anyone on the circuit when we were ready to transmit. I’ve been sending my sitreps anyway, in case the problem’s in my receiver, but I want to send some kind of land-line wake-up call.”

  “I can take care of telegrams or telex, if you would like me to. As for your fuel and so forth, well, all I can say is that Navy ships often call here. The Regional Contracting Center arranges supplies, I believe. I’d contact them with any problems in that arena.” The consul waited, cup poised. “Anything else?”

  “You really don’t have anything for me? Have you checked at your office?”

  Kingon smiled. “I’m sorry, Captain. I wish I did. All I can suggest is the regional Navy center, as I said—”

  “You wouldn’t have a number, would you?”

  “Oh. Certainly!” Kingon brightened, taking out a notebook. He gave Dan two numbers, for admin and officer in charge, and a home number for the OIC as well.

  Kingon moved on into what was apparently a set speech. Singapore was clean, efficient, and relatively free of corruption, but at the same time, it was not far from a police state in some respects. There was one party, the People’s Action Party. Criticism of it or of the prime minister was not tolerated. Drugs, long hair on men, and any sort of public rowdiness would attract instant police attention. One could be fined up to five hundred dollars Singaporean for jaywalking outside the double yellow crossing lines, for failing to flush a public toilet, for smoking in a
public place. “You might have heard about an American teenager, his parents are residents here, who was publicly caned for possession of marijuana. Mr. Lee Kuan Yew is very concerned about narcotics. Warn your crew that both possession and attempted purchase are illegal here. The punishments are quite draconian.”

  Dan started to say he didn’t have any drug activities aboard, but then he remembered how when he’d been an XO one of the hospitalmen on Van Zandt had not only been buying hash ashore and selling it to the crew, but had also been looting morphine from sick bay. The point being just now he had a lot of men aboard he didn’t know very well.

  That made him think of Usmani, and he said, “I’ll make sure they know that, about the liberty environment. Another question. I discovered a stowaway on board after I left Karachi. Hiding under one of the RHIBs. The man who served us a moment ago, actually. He’s a Pakistani national. If I might turn him over to you—”

  Kingon grimaced and was shaking his head before Dan had gotten past the word stowaway. The consul absolutely could not take custody, had neither police powers to confine a man nor funds to send him home. “Nor will the Singaporean authorities accept him. Stowaways are a real headache. No one wants them, and yet the shipowner—I’m thinking merchant captains now, but you’re under the same obligation—is required to afford them humanitarian treatment. I’m very much afraid he’s going to be your problem for a while. There are two solutions. The legal one is to retain him aboard until you encounter a ship under the Pakistani flag, a warship, I guess—you said he was navy?—and turn him over to its commanding officer.”

  “What’s the illegal one?”

  “Give him an opportunity to escape and look the other way. Only I’d wait till I was somewhere else than here; the island’s so small and the authorities are so efficient, you’d have him back in hours.”