China Sea

by David Poyer

  Knox-class frigates ran on power generated by three steam-powered turbogenerators, 750 kilowatts each, any one of which could handle the normal electrical load. Their sixty-cycle, 450-volt three-phase output was stepped down to 115 volts for hotel services and lighting and stepped up by a motor-generator set to 400 hertz to run the radios, radars, and the other electronic equipment. But that wasn’t all you needed power for on this ship.

  “What’s up?” Dan said quietly.

  Colosimo told him their first indication of trouble had been a current reversal in one of the switchboards. At that point they had #2 and #3 ship’s service turbogenerators on the line. Apparently the automatic bus transfer had failed, dropping the load.

  “Emergency power?” Dan said, pulling the sound-powered handset out of its clip.

  “Hasn’t come on line for some reason. We’ve lost steering and—”

  At the same moment a light flickered back in the nav shack. Then the radios hissed on, the helm console hummed. The fathometer beeped, and neon numbers flickered too fast to read as it re-initialized. The helmsman whipped the wheel right and left, then cried, “I have control back!”

  Colosimo pressed the switch on the reenergized 21MC and began an exchange with Main Control. Dan hoisted himself into his chair, but two sentences into the exchange every pilot light on the bridge suddenly brightened, going intensely hot as if jammed with lightning, then went off again. This time the darkness lasted for about a second and a half before power returned. Dan started to sweat. Surges and outages were not good for equipment. He pulled out the handset in front of the CO’s chair, clicked the dial to the forward switchboard, gave the crank a spin.

  “Machias, main switchboard.”

  “Captain, Shi-hime. The hell’s going on down there?”

  “We were standing by to shift over to number three generator. It didn’t take and now voltage is jumping around all over the place. I slammed in the main bus transfer to give you juice up there on the steering. You got it back?”

  “We had a couple intermittents, but it’s on right now. If we lose rudder control in these seas it’s gonna be nasty. How about the other emergency loads? Fire control, radar, mounts?”

  Machias said they’d try to keep those, and Dan said no, cut them off. “The only vital loads we got tonight are steering and blower fans. If those fans go, the boilers will snuff out. You know that. Then we’ll really be screwed.”

  The electrician’s mate hesitated. “You want me to cut ’em off, you got it. But shouldn’t Mr. Armey be passin’ these orders?”

  “Right, yeah, I’ll call Main Control. Give me a second, then request permission to secure the nonvital loads.”

  Machias rogered that and hung up. Dan threw a look around the bridge, then through the windshield. The faint red light from the pilothouse penetrated the Plexiglas just far enough to show him windshield wipers flailing away underwater. Beyond that was just heaving black. He bent and whipped the crank again, this time clicking to Main Control.

  “Skipper?”

  “Here, Jim. Main switchboard call in, about securing power to the mounts, and so forth?”

  “I think that’s Johnile on the bitch box—yeah.”

  “What’s going on down there? We’re getting surges; then it cuts off.”

  “Best I can figure, we skipped the warmup procedure when we were putting number three SSTG on the line. Overload, overspeed, speed variation, voltage all over the place.”

  To the accompaniment of cries of alarm, the steering console and lights and radios and the light on the gyro binnacle went out again. “Ca-rap,” Armey said. “We’re losing it down here.”

  “We’re black dark up here, too, Jim. How about the diesel generators? We’ve got to have power or we’ll broach.”

  “Lemme get on this; call you right back.” The handset on the other end rattled down.

  Dan glanced to where Colosimo and Compline stood centerline, staring ahead. Then the power came back on, inside and out. At the same moment, the roar of rain slacked off. A white seethe from outside snatched at his eye, and he glanced out through the window, then leaned closer, appalled at what the flickering radiance of the reilluminated forward running light had suddenly pulled from the surrounding night.

  The sea surface was covered with long patches of beaten foam. They glowed incandescent silver in the pale rolling light. In the black hours the seas had grown from twelve-to-fifteen-footers, heavy but no real threat to the ship, into deep-troughed monsters that had to be forty feet high. As he watched, one crashed down over the gun mount, burying it till only the mount captain’s bubble on top swam above the boiling froth, and berserked aft as if for him personally and tore itself apart around the ASROC launcher. He could see it shaking on its steel pedestal. Then the spray flew up solid and smacked the windows, covering them, and for a few seconds it was as if Gaddis were already vanquished and buried, plunging on her last voyage bottomward.

  His hands tightened on the radar repeater, fighting both terror and a sudden and unexpected hate. The fear because without power a sea like this could destroy them. Like most destroyer types, the Knoxes had more “sail area,” more wind-catching superstructure, forward than aft. Without power her head would fall off, the pressure of wind and sea driving her bow around till she was beam on to the oncoming breakers. The sea would have them, and it had no mercy. It would capsize a ship and bludgeon it down without thought and without regret. Would batter and submerge whatever survivors fought free, till at last they slipped below, to eternal peace beneath the raging storm.

  The hate was new. He’d never felt that for the sea before. The thought bewildered him for a moment before he pushed it aside.

  His head jerked around as he heard someone say, “Abandon,” or maybe only thought he did. Remembering the Pakistani crew. He waited through several wild rolls and plunges till she floated almost level for a moment, then slid down and headed across the deck toward the typhoon chart. The surface beneath his feet began tilting again as he neared, and he ran the last few steps up a steep slope. He grabbed the table and hung on as Gaddis howled over the top of a sea and rolled like a horse trying to shake off its rider before trampling him to death.

  Compline panted, “Sir, I was coming over to brief you, after I saw where it plotted—”

  “That’s OK, Chief. What’s it doing?” He aimed the red spot of his flashlight as the chart table light flickered again, off, then on.

  Colosimo: “Looks like it’s tracking west again now.”

  The ship crashed down so hard every plate and beam flexed. The wipers stopped dead before starting again. Dan’s knees sagged under the abrupt increase in his weight. He heard retching from the far end of the pilothouse: the phone talker, doubled over an inverted battle helmet.

  “We’re only getting updates every eight hours. It could be looping and wobbling all over the chart.” He swallowed; in the heaving darkness, the violent, visually unreferenced motion, even the best sailors got queasy. “I guess I screwed up, getting us into this.”

  “Forget it, sir. If we went south, it’d ’ve come after us there, too.”

  Compline read the rest of the message out. Hong Kong predicted hundred-knot winds near the eye, with gusts to a hundred and fifty. He grabbed for the safety line, a steel cable tensioned athwartships above their heads, as Gaddis heeled farther over.

  Robidoux lurched out of the chart room. For a second Dan wondered if the quartermaster was drunk as he zigzagged over the deck, but it was just ship’s motion. He joined them at the chart table. “Sir, I’d recommend we come about and put the seas on our quarter.”

  “That would reduce this slamming,” Colosimo said.

  “I’ll keep that recommendation in mind, gentlemen. But if we do that in the dangerous semicircle, it’s going to blow us right into the eye.”

  Without warning the console went dead again. The white seas outside the window vanished. Gaddis rolled long and hard, steel groaning and wailing in utter blackne
ss broken only by the yellow beams of the emergency lanterns. When she went over the wind seemed to lessen. When she straightened it shrieked around the pilothouse. Dan bent a leg around the radar repeater and picked up the sound-powered handset again, but couldn’t get Armey back. Well, if anyone could get power back, his CHENG could. If only they had more electricians.…

  In the howl of the wind and the creaking and clanging as the hull twisted and rose and slammed down, the drum of spray and rain on the windows, he never heard the engines stop. There was just too much sea noise, too much wind. This high and this far forward you couldn’t hear the screw turning even in utter calm. The only indication was a yell from the helmsman. Dan put his flashlight spot on the gyrocompass repeater, saw it clicking over to the right as the ship’s head swung, slowly at first, then faster as the wind seized it. He bent to peer out but saw nothing, tuned his senses instead to the wind direction.

  No question, they were falling off rapidly.

  As she gave way, a huge sea bore down on her. Gaddis poised herself at the top of a leap, then began toppling and didn’t stop till they were all hanging from gear and handholds, feet dangling and kicking. She came back a few degrees; then Dan felt her stagger anew as another thousand tons of typhoon-driven water slammed into the side.

  Was there anything more he could do? Not up here. He let go of the rail and skidded toward the ladder down, fetching up against the scuttlebutt. Then clung, uncertain what to do as another huge wave smashed into the darkened ship broadside. Clanging echoed up from belowdecks, and the stuttering groan of heavy gear getting ready to shear its bolts. The steel rails holding pubs in their shelves in the nav shack gave way, avalanching hundreds of pounds of paper out onto the deck. He wanted to go below, help Armey get the engines lit off again. But he didn’t like the way Compline and Colosimo clung silently to handholds.

  At last Dan clawed back toward his chair, hauling himself like a rock climber over the helm console. In the flickering flashlights and battle lanterns the enlisted looked like a gathering of the damned. They clung chalk-faced to the wheel and lee helm, staring at him as if their fates were in his hands alone. He held their eyes for a moment, trying his very best to look confident. Maybe it worked; one or two gave back a weak quirk of the lips that might have been intended as a smile.

  “Sir, anything I ought to be doing?” Dom yelled over the deafening clamor of the sea hammering at the windows. The port door groaned and flexed, and suddenly thin streams of water jetted straight out around its oval outline.

  Dan jerked his eyes away from it, suppressing a desire to ask the reservist if he really wouldn’t rather be back comparing growth funds in Cincinnati. “What’s Main Control say?”

  “No word yet.”

  “We should have had the emergency diesel generators cut in as soon as we had serious fluctuations from the SSTGs.”

  Compline: “I’ll call Aux Two, find out why the diesel generator set hasn’t kicked in.”

  “No, let them fucking work; don’t keep calling them.”

  The phone talker, in a hoarse voice: “Sir, as soon as they lost draft they had to cut the burners. They can purge and try to relight, but without electrical power it’s going to be real rough.”

  The pilothouse rolled back and forward, cracking the whip as the hull beneath twisted, and one of the men clinging to the helm console lost his grip. Robidoux fell twenty feet, kicking and grabbing for grip on the smooth tile, and succeeded only in cracking his head against the ladder stanchion. He slid limply into the corner of the bulkhead. Compline caught the body on the second pass and hauled him under the chart table, lashing him in place with a gas mask strap under the arms.

  Colosimo cracked out orders. He was holding up, Dan thought; he didn’t sound frightened or overwhelmed. Once again, Dan was torn between going down to Aux Two and getting the gen set started and staying here and trying to hold the center together. But the question answered itself. He was the only CO Gaddis had. Armey and Sansone could handle the generators better than he could.

  His job was to save the ship.

  A tremendous wall of water crashed suddenly into the side, far more violently than any before it. The windows flexed inward and the warping door pissed water in powerful streams and he had a flicker glimpse of one of the gratings flashing past—waterborne, airborne, he didn’t know. The worst of it was how little he could see. Just hear the chaotic howl of shouts, the shrieking wind, the agonized groan and scream of the ship as she staggered back upright, a Niagara torrent roaring off her canted forecastle. The rumble and crash of something carrying away on the flag bridge or off the damaged mack.

  She couldn’t take much more. The question was, What could he do?

  “Sir.” Colosimo’s strained voice. “I don’t think she’ll take too much of this.”

  “Just what I was thinking, Dom. Jim’s got to get those generators going.”

  “How far will she roll before she goes over?”

  His flashlight found the clinometer on the bulkhead. It stood at forty degrees just then, but that last roll had been much more violent. If she went far enough to gulp water down her uptakes, the boilers would flood out. Beyond that, and she’d never come up again.

  He forced his mind to close down, to think it through coldly as a classroom problem in seamanship and damage control.

  Faced with heavy weather, topside icing, and a light ship in an Arctic storm, Jimmy Packer, his CO on his first ship, had flooded deep tanks and chain lockers and blown off the air search antenna with a demo charge to reduce weight high in the ship. Thank God they weren’t carrying ice now, but Dan had no confidence in the ability of this crew to carry out controlled flooding. If it wasn’t done perfectly, the combination of off-center weight and free surface would make Gaddis even less stable. He didn’t want to go that route.

  The textbook answer to lost power in a storm was to stream a sea anchor and run downwind, but he didn’t think the reduced, half-trained crew he had could do that, either. Wrestle heavy timbers into position on a wave-washed, rolling deck, he’d lose guys over the side. Pity it wasn’t shallower; they could anchor and ride it out. But his last look at the chart had showed over fourteen hundred fathoms. No way to anchor, no way to put drag on the bow.

  An image teased for a moment but shrank back when he reached for it. He groped for a second, then let it go and went on.

  Some authorities advised putting your stern to the seas in a terminal situation. As Robidoux had recommended. But damn it, not only would that head him into the storm center; he couldn’t do that without power, either. It might have worked when they first lost steerageway. Slamming the rudder to leeward, using her momentum to carry her through the trough. But now they were trapped.

  Without electrical power and engine power, they were helpless. He cursed the designers who’d made this a single-screw class. In most destroyer types you had two separate engine rooms, two separate plants. The Knoxes not only had just one, but it also depended on electrical power to keep the boilers lit off. When you lost power, you were up a tree for real.

  The squeal of the sound-powered phone, like a squirrel being crushed. He beat Colosimo to it. “Lenson.”

  “Armey here. We’re taking water down here.”

  More good news. “Water? From where?”

  “Main deck, I think. I’m not sure exactly where yet, but the guys think the aluminum-to-steel interface on the main deck’s starting to separate. You know, where Khashar rammed us into that liner, in Fayal? The sea leans on the deckhouse while the hull’s trying to roll up. That’s a hell of a stress, and that’s a weak seam anyway with the dissimilar-metal riveting. I sent the hull techs up to check it out, but I don’t know what they can do in the middle of this.”

  This was serious. Loose water, rolling back and forth without swash plates, was terrifically dangerous in heavy seas. It dropped stability even worse than simple flooding, and if it reached the switchboards they could forget about ever getting power back. Dan
felt ice touch his spine. “What about the bus transfer?”

  “I can’t get it to take. We’re gonna have to do a thorough troubleshoot on that panel. Right now I’m rigging casualty power cables up from the de-gen set.”

  “Are the diesels running?”

  “Tried to start ’em twice. We got enough compressed air for one more try.”

  Dan felt sweat break under his arms despite the cold. “If you run those air banks down and the diesels don’t start—”

  “Right, then we’re really fucked. Believe me, I know. What’s the situation up there?”

  “Beam to and rolling like hell. I can hear gear coming off topside.”

  “Yeah, we’re getting flung around down here. I cracked my fucking arm against the panel and damn near broke it. Can’t you do a sea anchor or something?”

  “I’d have to put guys out on deck.” Dan swallowed, looking out at the black howling waste outside. “Without lights, too. We’ll lose some of ’em.”

  “We’ll lose everybody if this bitch goes over.”

  He sucked air, scared suddenly to the depths of his guts. But the engineer was right. Some, rather than all.

  “OK, you convinced me. I’ll get Chick and Topmark to pull a party together. Give me a call when you’re ready to use that last slug of air.” He slammed the phone down and swung on Colosimo. Dan was opening his mouth when black jaws closed suddenly over the pilothouse and the deck jerked out from under his feet, leaving him floating, one hand locked desperately to the windshield wiper motor box.

  The ship shuddered all over, whipsawing from one end to the other. He could actually feel the hull flexing as the immense sea Rolfed it from stem to stern. Water covered the windows, black as oil, sucking in the few random photons shed by the dimming battle lanterns. He had no idea how deep they were buried. When she staggered back up, the roar of water sluicing off the flying bridge, just above their heads, was so loud his voice was lost under it. He tried again. “Dom. Dom!” Colosimo turned a startlingly pale face. Dan yelled, “We need to get some men out there, rig a sea anchor. Get the word to Doolan and Topmark.”