by David Poyer
“Five fathoms … three fathoms … shoaling fast!”
“Back full! All back full, back emergency!” He ran back out and stared hypnotized downward again. No question, the seafloor was rising to meet them, already visibly closer. The coral mushrooms reached for Gaddis’s thin-plated keel, her even thinner bow dome, bulging and tender as a swollen scrotum, made not even out of steel but of stiffened rubber … the stern hammered as the screw reversed. The helmsman spun the wheel left as the stern pulled to port. Still her momentum carried her forward, seemingly without braking effect. He yelled in, “Collision alarm!”
“Stand by for collision. All hands brace for shock,” stated the 1MC in Doolan’s laconic tones. The collision alarm began an electronic dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit that set his teeth on edge as he waited for the deceptively gentle shudder that meant a ship was being disemboweled. Please God, he didn’t want it to end this way. How had he forgotten, carried flank speed heading inshore? The reef wasn’t charted, of course. The printed soundings showed twenty fathoms. But Colosimo had warned him how undependable charts were here. He had no excuse for this little lapse in judgment.
Gaddis began to slow, slewing still farther as the single big prop walked her stern left. Beneath his tranced sight the multicolored reef moved past, brilliant scarlet fire coral, bulbous dark coral heads, deep green canyons or fissures dropping to a glowing white bottom. With a physical tightening throughout his body, throat to anus, he stared across the flat sea to a purple-brown turmoil not a hundred meters to starboard. The gentle swells broke without foam, with a flat, swirling turmoil. He’d done enough scuba diving to know what that meant. The sea there was about four feet deep.
Were they backing down? He nearly screamed into the pilothouse again but saw the EOT handle still racked to back full, the lee helmsman holding them down as if that would help. The speed came off so fucking slowly… Another patch of uneasy sea whirled ahead. He watched helplessly as it drew closer. Closer.
Ping. Ping. The EOT handles coming up to “engines stop.”
He breathed out, very slowly, feeling the top of his brain trying to push its way out of his head and go floating off like a helium balloon.
Gaddis drifted motionless, hovering in a fluid so transparent he could see each detail of the bottom, see sea fans and large whelks, if that was what they were. So shallow he could make out the trails they’d dug through the sand … but she was still floating free; somehow he’d avoided impaling her. His fingers finally got a message through to a brain that had blocked it out till now: we hurt. He looked down and saw them clamped like spring clips to the splinter shield. He let go and chafed his palms together self-consciously, feeling eyes pinned to him from within the dark cave of the pilothouse. Seeing something in them for the first time. There had been hostility before and resentment. Now there was something else, something new: doubt and uncertainty and something not far from fear.
He swallowed hard, his relief at being still afloat, immense as it was, erased by the realization that his crew was looking at him the same way the Pakistanis had regarded Hussain Khashar.
* * *
THE starboard RHIB purred on ahead, so slowly it hardly drew a ripple across the undulating, gleaming, somehow greasy-looking sea off which sunlight sparkled in an airless calm. Guided by a lookout atop Gaddis’s mack with binoculars and PRC-10, the inflatable had first made a wide circle, searching out the route back to deep water. Nudging the bow around with infinite caution, Dan had followed it gradually out of the watery maze of the reef. Far ahead of them the port RHIB, manned by a fire team of gunner’s mates with M-16s and an M-60 and officered by Dom Colosimo, was a wasting speck on the heat-wavering seahorizon. Beyond that, elevated by refraction, shimmered the violet rounded ovals of distant islands. The outliers of the Pilas group, if his increasingly chancy navigation was correct. The encounter with the reef had delayed their response to the distress message, but the inflatable would put a small force on scene. He hoped it would be enough.
“Forward lookout reports sailboat ahead,” said Chief Tosito, poking his head out like an intimidated turtle. Dan nodded and reached for his binocs.
They made up on it slowly, plodding along behind the starboard RHIB. Maybe too cautiously; the chart showed the depths here as sixty fathoms. But he didn’t want to repeat that last little thrill. He still couldn’t believe she hadn’t bent her prop tips or collapsed the sonar dome. The reports came in on the PRC-10 from the fire team, running out ahead at full throttle. The boat was hove to. No sign of anyone on deck. They were approaching. Using the bullhorn. No response. Moving in on the port quarter. Hailing again. At last, boarding.
Then silence, for too long. Dan studied the craft ahead, now clearly visible at four thousand yards. The inflatable was standing off, motionless in the calming sea. The assisted vessel was a white-hulled, yawl-rigged motor-sailor of considerable size and breathtakingly graceful lines. Her poles were bare. He couldn’t make out the ensign that hung down in the lifeless air. He inched the fields of his binoculars left to right, searching the shimmering sea to either side. The only other signs of human presence were the rainbow-striped sails of the Filipino outriggers Colosimo called vintas. Dan remembered the intermittent contacts the operations specialist had mentioned. The vintas were wooden and rode low in the water. That would make them almost invisible to radar, whereas the yacht, with metal masts and what he could make out now as a radar reflector at her main crosstree, would show up more distinctly.
At last the VHF crackled. It was Colosimo. “Captain?”
“Gaddis actual speaking.”
“You’d better come aboard here and take a look.”
* * *
HE told Doolan to heave to five hundred yards off and climbed down a hastily rigged jacob’s ladder into the inflatable. The outboard purred him through the glassclear water. Jewel-like drops of it hung in the air, then plummeted into the hand-polished surface of the fluid boundary between sea and air.
She wasn’t the Queen Shallop but the Queen Salotte. Her stern listed her home port as Christchurch. Close up she was even more beautiful, a white sea bird with sweeping lines and raked masts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of boat. Fresh blue canvas aft of her main cabin. The sails had been dropped, hastily by the looks of them; they lay tumbled on the booms like kicked-off panties. She had no way on, but an auxiliary generator murmured across the water and a piloting radar rotated atop her mainmast. She looked unharmed till the Johnson dropped a note and he began to judge where he might be able to reach up to pull himself aboard. Then he saw the holes in the shining fiberglass.
A few minutes later he stood in the motor-sailor’s pilothouse, looking at a smear of fresh blood on the carpeted deck. The wide windows had two perforations in them, the small, barely cracked penetrations of a high-velocity rifle bullet. He yelled down to the boat, “Head out to the northeast. Look for people or bodies in the water.” The coxswain raised his hand in acknowledgment.
“Everything that can be stripped off is gone,” Colosimo said, looking up at Dan from below. A cocked-and-locked automatic was thrust under his web belt. “Not a cassette tape left. Binocular stowages empty. Somebody went through the women’s quarters. Hard to tell what’s missing, but there are clothes all over. There’s a safe open in the master cabin. No damage. Whoever opened it knew the combination.”
“The master or the owner.” Dan followed Colosimo below, down a companionway. An air-conditioning unit was still running, and it was like descending into a colder zone of abandonment and fear. A spacious lounge area shone with hand-fitted teak. Dangling cables showed where some sort of entertainment electronics, a large-screen TV or sound system, had been ripped out. The rotten-fruit smell of alcohol led him to smashed glass below a hastily looted bar. He looked into small but expensively appointed cabins behind louvered doors. The drawers had been pulled out and their contents emptied onto the bunks. A shoe caught his eye, lying in a corner. A woman’s espadrille, or maybe a gi
rl’s—it was small enough—no longer new but not worn out, either. It was impossible to tell what was missing, and it was unimportant next to the main thing on his mind. “Where do you think they are? The crew? Passengers?”
Colosimo was silent. Dan rubbed his face, wishing this were something as harmless as a nightmare. He kept seeing the shoe. “Shot? Overboard?”
The reservist said, in a low voice, “If they’re lucky.”
“If they’re—” He stopped, not wanting to pursue it any further. Instead he swallowed and said, “We finally raised the PCG. They’ll have a boat here in an hour.”
“That’s good,” said Colosimo. He didn’t say anything else, just stood brooding, looking around the cabin. Finally he turned and climbed back into the open air again.
Dan kept the RHIBs out searching. They reported back no sign of the crew, alive or dead. No sign of the pirates, either. Only scores of small bancas to the north, any of whom could be those of the people who had killed everybody aboard the Queen Salotte. There was no way to tell short of searching them all, which was out of the question. When one coxswain tried, he caught one outrigger, but the others scattered, bursting apart in a swift-running swarm like sardines at the approach of a tuna. They were astonishingly fast, skimming away across the breaking water of shoal patches as their colorful sails dipped and swayed.
Dan stood on the open deck, looking down at where a bullet had scarred its way across the pristine white. He slowly clenched his fists.
17
THE SOUTH CHINA SEA
THEY never actually saw the aircraft. It was a radar detection, a high, crossing contact at 30,000 feet. The news arrived in Dan’s cabin via a call from CIC. “The ESM guys say it’s radiating long-range surveillance. It’s pretty definitely a dedicated overflight, probably out of southern China.”
“You’re saying it’s maritime surveillance? Targeted on us?”
“Overflying the TF, right, sir. They’re keeping tabs on us.”
“Have you reported it to Clear Bell?”
“Clear Bell” was Suriadiredja’s radio voice call. The petty officer said it had gone out over the task force coordination net as soon as he picked it up.
So they were being tracked by the Chinese. Dan reflected, hanging up, that it was hardly worth their while.
The TNTF had lost Sea Lion as it crossed the 15° North line. There hadn’t been even a lame explanation this time, simply laconic words on the bridge-to-bridge stating she was returning to Singapore. Now only three ships remained, steaming steadily north through slate-blue, wind-harried swells kicked up by the renewed monsoon wind.
The task force had emerged from operations in the Sulu Sea with empty hands. It was perfectly obvious to Dan, in hindsight at least, that its corvettes and frigates were too large and deep-draft for the task. Even the patrol craft had drawn too much water to follow the bancas and vintas across reefs and coral heads. Whenever they tried to close, the small craft skimmed away, vanishing like mosquitoes ahead of a charging sloth. The two Philippine Coast Guard craft had been almost useless, plagued by radio and engine breakdowns.
No one had found a trace of the crew and passengers of Queen Salotte.
That was disturbing, their 0 for 0 record so far. But what Dan found just as disturbing was the continued silence from PACFLEET and, indeed, everyone else to whom he had sent a stream of steadily more urgent messages as they’d steamed north through the Mindoro Strait and along the coast of Luzon. The single response Compline had logged was from COMNAVBASE Subic, putting off his request to enter port for overhaul, resupply, and to off-load suspects in the Vorenkamp murder case. Not denying permission, exactly, simply stating that his request had been forwarded. He’d stared at the message—on the reverse side of an older one; the radiomen were down to using both sides of the paper now—with numb disbelief. It was as if he were an outcast, as if he and the ship beneath his feet and the crew that ran her no longer belonged to the U.S. Navy at all.
That evening a flashing light message came over the darkling sea from Nala:
IN VIEW OF REDUCED PARTICIPATION OPERATION OCEANIC PROSPECT TERMINATED X USS GADDIS RELEASED TO PROCEED AS DIRECTED BY NATIONAL AUTHORITIES X OUR FORAY HAS DEMONSTRATED POSSIBILITY OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION AND HAS SUCCESSFULLY REDUCED SCALE AND NUMBER OF PIRATICAL INCIDENTS IN AREAS WHERE SUCH HAVE RECENTLY OCCURRED X MANY THANKS TO OFFICERS AND MEN USS GADDIS SIGNED WALUYO SUPRYO SURIADIREDJA ADMIRAL NAVY OF REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA
Shortly thereafter Nala and Monginsidi turned westward together. They drew off to the west, then swung again, together, headed south. Dave Zabounian called down from the bridge for a new course. Dan had none to give him. The task force had dissolved. The operation was over. They had no orders and nowhere to go.
That evening Gaddis lay alone on a sullen sea. She rolled slowly, barely with way on. One boiler lit off, just enough turns on the screw to maintain steerageway. Dan sat on the bridge, watching the terminator sweep toward them. He tented his fingers and listened to the murmur of the quartermaster to the boatswain, the sigh of the monsoon wind as it streamed past the open wing door. To his left the sun sank steadily, drawing a scarlet veil down after it across the darkling sky.
He had to think. Had to find some sense in this.
This was not the way the U. S. Navy operated.
Even steaming on independent duty, a ship was under the operational command of one of the fleet commanders. When it was commissioned, it reported to him for assignment. It operated under his orders, according to his operating schedule. He assigned it to a task force, when it deployed.
Of course, Gaddis had not been formally recommissioned. It had been turned over to the Pakistanis, then turned back to him; but he had to admit, it had never actually been reflagged. In a legal sense, it could be argued that she had not been a U.S. Navy ship since leaving Philadelphia.
But he’d dealt with that. He’d reported in to PACFLEET the day he’d gotten under way from Karachi, both by radio and by a cable he had handed to the attaché before getting under way. He’d reviewed Article 606 of Naval Regulations and Naval Warfare Pub Seven, Reporting Requirements, and made his required reports in the clear. He’d given copies of his movement report, combat readiness report, and logistics requirements reports to Captain Sasko as well, to make sure they went out. And never gotten a reply. Dan had assumed that was because he was turned over to a foreign opcon and because he still didn’t have covered communication capabilities. As well as the fact that much of the Seventh Fleet had deployed west to support Desert Shield. Hey, he could understand being left on someone’s desk for a few days. But still it was disturbing, that he’d never received an acknowledgment.
The next and just as unsettling question was what his own status was. He’d been head of the MTT but, aside from a verbal order from Sasko, had nothing to confirm that he was in command. That hadn’t bothered him overmuch. Not at first.
The question was, What did they expect him to do now, with a ship steadily declining in readiness and a crew that ranged from disgruntled to barely this side of mutinous? With a body in chill stores and two murder suspects locked down?
Outside the blackness arrived, the night laying itself over them heavy and dense and yet somehow comforting as a lead X-ray apron. He stared out into it and groped in the darkness, but his outstretched fingers found nothing but a tenuous fog.
* * *
THE next morning he was shaving when someone tapped on his door. He half-turned from the mirror, lathered with a Santa Claus beard. “What is it?”
“It’s me, Captain.”
It was Juskoviac. “What you got, Greg?” Dan asked, turning back to the mirror and lifting his chin to get underneath.
He saw then, in the mirror, that several enlisted men stood behind the exec. He laid down the razor slowly and dried his hands on the towel.
“The crew’s presenting a petition, sir.”
“A petition,” Dan repeated. He looked at them in the mirror, then picked up
his razor again. “I’m shaving right now. Give me a few minutes; then meet me on the bridge.”
Later, in the fresh khakis Usmani had laid out, Dan stood on the port wing as the cool breeze ruffled his hair. The sky was overcast again, and they’d come far enough north it was time to think about a jacket. Gaddis barely stirred through slate gray four-foot seas. Dan had called Mellows up from the chiefs’ quarters. The burly master-at-arms stood a few feet aft, arms crossed. Dan watched the men emerge from the signal shack and come forward. One took his hat off; the others didn’t. Dan noticed the exec wasn’t with them now.
“What’s this about a petition?” he said, ignoring the sheet of paper one held out. “I don’t want to see that. I want to hear what you’ve got to say.”
“Sir, we want to know what the fuck’s going on,” said a man Lenson recognized as a machinist’s mate third, family in Texas. “We’re not getting paid and we’re not doing anything out here. We want to know the ship’s schedule, find out when we’re going home.”
“All right. What else?”
Sullen stares directed at their boots. Clearing of throats. Dan said, raising his voice, “You’re up here. Let’s get it out on the table.”
“We ain’t had any liberty since we left the Med,” said another sailor. “You got the guys cut C.V. locked up in the fan room, Captain. It’s either Pistol or Shi-hime. So just to let you know what some people is saying, they say the next time we see land, we’re goin’ ashore.”
Dan said coldly, again, “What else?”
Silence and more glances. “That’s about it, Captain,” one said. “Just we don’t understand what we’re doing out here. There ain’t even any smokes.”
He considered just telling them to go below, cutting them off without an explanation, but that did not seem fair. He’d always found leveling with the American enlisted man paid better than trying to snow or bully him or buy him off. So he pushed down his anger and said, “First off: Whoever gave you the idea you could come up here with a petition is wrong. We don’t have a right of petition in the U.S. military. But I will tell you, the early wrap-up on Oceanic Prospect caught everybody flat-footed. I sent a message requesting that we go into port in Subic. We can get resupplied there, get some of our casreps fixed, and jack up the pork chops on our pay problems. They came back that we have no orders from Seventh Fleet to do that, that they have a lot going on with Desert Shield and all, and for us to stand by and we’ll be given a date to go in.”
