China Sea

by David Poyer

  The craft, which Bobbie described as large gray speedboats with guns, had closed rapidly from two directions, closing a pincers on their solitary prey. At a range of about half a mile, one had signaled them with what she called an Aldis lamp. Instead of replying or heaving to, Wedlake had increased speed and sent another distress message.

  At that point, with the crew mustered and under cover, he’d opened the lockers and distributed the shotguns.

  “I told him not to fight,” she’d told Dan, looking straight up at the overhead from tearless eyes. “That they’d rob us but let us go. But he said if everybody thought that way, it would just keep happening. If once in a while a master upped the price, the bastards wouldn’t consider them all easy pickings.”

  Dan had sat awkwardly silent, not sure what to say. It was one of those situations where there was right on both sides. It had just happened to fall out that this time the captain had gambled and lost.

  The end had been signaled by a sudden burst of automatic gunfire from both boats. One had fired into the superstructure, aft of the bridge, obviously trying for the radio room. The other had let loose two spaced rounds into Marker Eagle’s engine spaces. At that point the engineers had stopped the diesels, despite Wedlake’s keeping the throttle forward from the bridge. As she lost way, the attackers had swung in and boarded over the stern. The stern ramp itself was swung up, like the drawbridge of a garrisoned castle, but a platform the men smoked and fished from off watch had been undefended. Dan nodded, remembering the Sikh watching TV there, armed with a baseball bat. The boarders had shot the lock off the door and swarmed forward through the cavernous vehicle storage area.

  Several crewmen had made a stand there, firing back amid the containers and vehicles, but had been shot down.

  At that point, Bobbie told him, Eric had ordered her to the hiding place. He’d prepared three spaces for an extended siege: the crew’s workout room, the purser’s office, and the master’s cabin. She’d begged him to come with her, but he’d refused. Said his place was on the bridge. He’d given her a quick, apologetic peck on the cheek, then turned away and begun shouting at his men, as if to avoid speaking to her again. So at last she’d obeyed. Gone below, bolted the door, and dropped the steel locking bar into the brackets he’d had welded to the bulkhead after they’d been boarded in the Strait. Then crawled into the little laundry space and waited.

  “So you never actually saw who boarded you?” Dan had asked her.

  She said yes, she had. She’d been curious, so just before going to earth she’d undogged a porthole and stuck her head out. To find herself looking at the backs of four men standing just aft of the bridge area.

  They wore green fatigue uniforms and olive balaclavas and carried AK-47s. They were quiet and orderly. Someone, maybe an officer, was shouting up at them from the craft close alongside. Roberta: “I heard what he said. It was, ‘Ba ta ca ganjing.’”

  Dan had asked her, “Do you know what that means?”

  “Clean it up, make it all clean—something like that. When he stopped, one of the men with the gun yelled back down. He said yes, he would do that.”

  Dan had asked her if she spoke much Chinese. She said only a little; she’d been studying Pinyin on tape in order to be able to bargain in the shops.

  He told his officers all this as they sat in his cabin. When he finished, they sat without speaking. At last Armey murmured, “They don’t sound like pirates to me.”

  “They’re pirates, all right. But I know what you mean. The discipline, the uniforms, the weapons. They’re not Malaccan bandits or ragtag sea beggars like the guys we were chasing in the Sulu Sea.”

  “PLA navy?” said Doolan.

  “I’d say yes and no,” Dan said. “They’re obviously Chinese, according to what Bobbie overheard. And they’re obviously freelancers in some sense. But you’re right—they’ve got uniforms, discipline, arms. They’re operating out of a base, with regular logistic support.”

  “Probably Zhanjaing,” said Colosimo.

  “Which is where?”

  “The Leizhon peninsula. North of Hainan Island.”

  Dan asked the reservist, “OK, what else do you know about this? Obviously more than we do.”

  “Actually not much more. But I read the IMO circulars in my reserve job and Commercial Crime International, and I get to see the transportation intelligence out of USTRANSCOM and the Office of Naval Intelligence Merchant Desk. Like Dr. Guo said in Singapore, they’re freebooting elements of the Chinese military. It’s like a car-stealing ring. The real junkers just vanish. The more modern ships turn up in Zhanjaing and get ransomed back to their owners, minus cargo. That’s probably what they had planned for this one, only we rode over the hill.” Colosimo shook his head. “They’ve obviously got official sanction at some level. In a sense, they’re not so much pirates as something else—something like privateers.”

  “My understanding of privateers was that they were licensed and it was wartime.”

  “Maybe a better analogy is the Elizabethans. Hawkins and Drake and Henry Morgan. The Spanish called them pirates. The English called them raiders or adventurers. Spain and England were not officially at war, but Drake still kept his plunder. The queen got a healthy cut for her failure to prosecute.”

  “That’s probably exactly what’s happening here.”

  “Well, not only that,” said Colosimo. “Ask yourself: Why would the Chinese permit pirates to operate from their waters?”

  “Because someone up the line is getting paid off?”

  “Certainly that’s happening, but how do they justify it to their superiors? I think somebody’s playing a deeper game. Pirates operate in the China Sea—other nations aren’t up to suppressing them—so China must step in and impose order throughout the region. It’s another excuse for hegemony, as they call it.”

  Doolan said, “But wasn’t that what Suriadiredja and the task force were aiming to do in Phase Three? Come up here and take these guys on?”

  “Only everybody wimped out on him.”

  Colosimo: “Sure. Nobody’s willing to step up to the dirty dishes. The smaller nations are afraid to antagonize the Chinese.”

  Dan remembered the investigation into Kerry’s murder, and his voice took on a less detached tone. “It works in the U.S., too. So they just keep going. Ship after ship. Island after island. Now they’re moving south toward the Spratleys, and all the seabed and oil between here and Borneo.”

  “You don’t seriously think we’re going to stop them,” Armey said.

  “No. I don’t. But it would be nice to catch them bending over and kick ’em in the ass.” Dan took a breath. “Here’s what I’m concluding about all this. I don’t think ending up here, the way we are, is as random as it looks. They’re operating without a flag, so the Chinese can disavow them if anybody complains. I think we’ve been set up as the same kind of unidentifiable throw-down piece. Like a gun with the serial number ground off, you can’t tell who it belongs to, where it came from.”

  To his relief, they didn’t seem to think he was nuts, or at least didn’t say so. Armey and Doolan nodded thoughtfully. Colosimo said, “I haven’t been aboard here very long. But I was active side surface line, and I have to admit, this is way out of the ballpark, what I’m used to.”

  “If someone was to be positioned to go against these freelancers—”

  “Then they’d have to be outside the system,” Dan said softly. “Deniable. Without orders. Like they used to say on Mission: Impossible: ‘If you are captured, the government will disavow any knowledge of your actions.’”

  “It’s pretty off the wall, all right,” said Doolan after a long moment.

  Dan looked from face to face. “Well. I can’t be sure. But if it was. If that’s why we’re here and what they expect us to do and if I decided to roll those dice … are we up to it?”

  “I wouldn’t mind shooting back,” Doolan said. “If we had something to shoot.”

  But Jim Armey d
idn’t respond. He looked worried. “Yeah?” Dan prompted him.

  “I don’t think it’s that way at all, Skipper. Even if you’re right, even if that was our—mission?—they’d have let one of us know. They’d have let you know.”

  Dan said, “OK, you think I’m wrong?”

  “Not exactly, but maybe too eager? Considering we’re in the neighborhood of a major storm, we aren’t in the best shape materiel-wise. We could take a lot of damage, maybe lose some guys out here.” He stopped.

  “Damn it, Jim, if you can persuade me I’m going nutzoid on this, I’ll be the happiest guy on this ship. I’m not trying to push a rock uphill on this one; I’m trying to avoid a boulder coming at me downhill.”

  The chief engineer hesitated, then added, “Skipper, you’re the man in charge here. You point this sonofabitch, I’ll make it go there. But if they wanted us on some kind of secret mission, this isn’t the way they’d go about it. In my opinion. And they’d have armed and fueled us and given us better manning than these wharf rats and bottom scrapings we’ve got.”

  “You don’t think the CO’s right and they gave us expendable people?” Doolan asked Armey.

  “No, I don’t. If I got a fire in the main spaces, I don’t send Fireman Fuckup to put it out. I send the first team. So I don’t know.… Plus, now we got a typhoon sitting on Luzon, trying to decide whether to come after us. How much longer are we going to stay out here? I hope it’s not so long we find ourselves in the dangerous semicircle with the propulsion plant in the condition it’s in.”

  The chief engineer looked around almost desperately. “Look; like I said, I’m with you. All I’m saying is we got to make a decision. We just don’t have a lot of time to dick around out here.”

  Dan waited, but Armey added nothing more, nor did any of the others comment. “All right,” he said, getting up. They rose, too. “Let’s leave it at that for now. We’ll keep an eye on the storm track and reevaluate our options as we go. Make sure your departments are rigged for heavy weather.”

  “Was that a decision, Skipper?” Doolan asked in a low voice, jamming his hands in his pockets and not moving as the others filed out. “Look; I need to know. Jim needs to know. And the guys are asking us, every hour on the hour.”

  “I plan to stay out here till either we find these assholes or Hercule forces us south. So let’s start thinking about how we’re going to catch up with them and what we can do if we do.”

  He’d intended it as dismissal, but the weapons officer didn’t take it that way. Doolan put his hand on Dan’s shoulder, stopping him. The door closed behind Armey, and they were alone. “One last word?”

  “I’m all ears, Chick.”

  “This is with all due respect. We don’t have the ammunition to go looking for trouble. We find that cruiser again, he won’t turn away the next time. He’ll blow us out of the water with those six-inchers.”

  “I hear you,” said Dan. “But we can’t go into Subic now. Even if they gave us clearance, we couldn’t go in with the typhoon parked over the island. We have sea room here. We have fuel. So for now, here’s where we’re going to stay.”

  Doolan held Dan’s gaze for a second or two, as if trying to read what he found there, then dropped his eyes. “Aye, aye, sir. Am I dismissed?”

  “You’re dismissed, Chick.”

  * * *

  USMANI brought in Dan’s lunch. He ate it wordlessly, mind a thousand miles away. He was wondering, again, what he was supposed to do. No, not what he was supposed to do, what he ought to do. Because he didn’t have to do anything, in the sense of having orders. The only orders were the absence of orders, and what he had to infer from that void.

  He’d groped his way through this before and come to no conclusion. He’d puzzled over it sitting on the bridge at night. His brain had returned to it time after time; it had obsessed him even in sleep. Now he believed he glimpsed an outline beneath the veil.

  The key was putting himself in the place of whatever intelligence had conceived this bizarre and dubious mission.

  Whoever had put him here would anticipate he’d raise this question, even if only internally. They’d expect him to look forward to his eventual return and the questions that would be asked. And they’d expect him to understand that they had anticipated his doubts.

  He stared at the bulkhead till the little stateroom started closing in on him. He tossed down his napkin and left. Stopped at the bridge, where Dave Zabounian was holding the fort against the assault of squalls and fifteen-foot seas.

  Compline’s storm chart showed the typhoon stationary six hundred kilometers to the east, bringing devastation, no doubt, to thousands on the heavily populated northern island. It might stay there, lose energy, and gradually exhaust itself in rain. It might start west again. Or spin north or even south, wobbling and meandering like the immense gyroscope it was. No one could tell.

  If it went due west, it would put Gaddis in the position of a #1 pin in the path of a twenty-pound ball. But in the Northern Hemisphere, cyclones tended to spin to the right of their direction of movement like a cue ball with english on it. If this one did that, rolled west and then hooked, they’d find themselves in the dangerous semicircle, where the storm’s forward speed added to its wind velocity.

  If he’d listened to the quartermaster, Dan would have headed south long before. As it was, he’d tied himself to this square of ocean, and his options were growing steadily less attractive. Move too far west and he’d fetch up in Vietnamese waters. He was bounded on the north by Hainan and the coast of China. The Paracels lay to the south, but even if they hadn’t been Chinese, the scatter of reefs and low islands offered no shelter or lee—rather, a mortal threat. And steaming east would take him straight into the murderous onrush of the typhoon.

  Yeah, you’ve set things up real well, Dan told himself. He didn’t like the looks of these seas. Not only were they building, but he was also seeing the long rolling swells he remembered from hurricanes in the Caribbean. He did not like the weird greenish tinge to the gray light. He stood with his hands in his pockets for a while, peering up into a charcoal sky from which fluttered pale ribbons of rain. The monsoon cover masked any cirrus development, but he could see how the wind aloft had increased; the close clouds raced overhead, curved like the paws of panthers.

  He let himself out the starboard wing door and drifted aft, pushed by cold gusts. He checked himself on the midships flat, and blinked over the side at the rushing sea as his internal dialogue resumed.

  If they expected him to doubt, the answer had to be that they expected him to assume he’d be rewarded for his covert action and for silence afterward.

  If he was right and Gaddis swam now beyond the ken of national governments by design.

  A burst of singing came from aft, carried against the wind, and he turned his head, half-listening. He was still thinking. Thinking that in that case, they’d miscalculated.

  He did not need the assurance of reward.

  Now that he’d seen the kind of things these bastards did, he wanted to sweep them from the seas.

  It would mean personal danger and not only the kind you ran in combat. If he was wrong, if Gaddis’s situation was an artifact of coincidence and official neglect, the price would be steep for any casualties he took opening unauthorized action. The UCMJ still imposed the death sentence for murder and other capital crimes. He was no lawyer, but pillaging and looting, endangering the safety of the command, uttering fraudulent checks, and improper hazarding of a vessel also came to mind. Capture was not inconceivable, either. He might find himself turned over to an international or, worse yet, a Chinese court.

  He shook his head impatiently. From above came the whine of the wind and a clatter and buzz of tools as hull techs and ETs, lashed tight against the constant pitching, ripped shredded metal off the mack. One of the missiles had hit it dead center, blowing a big hole in the aluminum skin. Other techs were working on the radar, repairing the waveguides.

  Whe
ther or not he was right, a secondary consideration supervened. Doolan and Armey had both pointed it out. How could he bring these freebooters and murderers to bay when the enemy both outgunned and outnumbered him? Why would anyone send a frigate on such a mission, anyway? Wouldn’t it be cleaner and simpler, if a message had to be sent, to send a sub in to put a torpedo into the pirate leader?

  He still suspected the bottom line was deniability. If Gaddis was caught or sunk, she and Dan Lenson could be disowned. A commissioned, first-line submarine could not.

  The singing came again, louder, and he stared aft. Something about it made him listen more closely. Then he frowned.

  He walked aft, circled the helo hangar, and came out on the flight deck.

  The first thing he smelled was charcoal, then roasting meat. The torched-in-half fifty-five-gallon drums the Supply Department kept for ship’s picnics had been set up inside the empty hangar, shielded from the wind and rain and spray. And despite the pitching, the rain, the howl of the wind outside, the party was going full blast.

  Everybody had a cigarette in his mouth, even sailors Dan had never seen smoking before. A boom box detonated with rhythmic thuds. The men did not look at him as he walked by. They were eating T-bone steaks off paper plates. One of the supply petty officers stood behind the grill, teeth gleaming, chef’s cap perched on the back of his head, spearing and rearranging white-veined chunks of meat with a long, wicked-looking stainless-steel serving fork. Dan said, “Smells good.”

  “This one here got your name on it, Cap’n.”

  “Where’d these steaks come from, Machowski? I thought we were out of chill stores.”

  “These here come off the merchie, Cap’n. Pistolesi and them brought ’em. How you like yours, rare?”

  “I’ll pass.” Dan told his disquiet, So what? If we didn’t eat them, the fish would. They were lawful salvage.

  He stood for a moment, watching. The men wore a casual mix of uniforms: dungarees and coveralls, blue jackets or foul-weather jackets, shoes and steel-toed boots. They swayed as the deck rolled beneath them. A thin film of salt water surged across the nonskid at the hangar door, pooled in the scuppers, then vanished over the side. Their uniforms were filthy, unwashed, but that wasn’t their fault. Because of the shortage of freshwater, the ship’s laundry had been shut down since they left Brunei. Ditto for their dirty, too-long hair. Some were unshaven. He noticed they still wouldn’t meet his eyes. They stared at their plates or talked animatedly to each other, avoiding his glance. What the hell was going on? He didn’t mind their enjoying themselves. He wished he could cut loose himself. But there was something off about their casual chatter, the way they spooned canned beans rapidly into their faces. As if hiding something.