China Sea

by David Poyer

  Dan had considered this, how he was going to get them to the position the sealed orders had given without telling the crew about the orders themselves. “Well, we think we know where they’re out of. Question is, Do we go in and get them or wait for them to come out?”

  “Zhanjaing’s the headquarters of the Southern Fleet,” Armey said. “If you decide you’re going in there, leave me behind in a life raft, OK?”

  “Just kidding, Jim. We’ve got to catch them out of their hole. So I asked Commander Colosimo to check out their target set and see if that narrows things down for us any, gives us some idea where to look. Dom?”

  The reservist unfolded a chart. “Basically I just plotted reported attacks from IMO and industry records over the last four years. We didn’t wake up to the problem till then.”

  Examining the results, Dan saw immediately that the second largest group of small circles lay north of the Paracels, grouped around the position he’d memorized. When you looked at the shipping routes, the reason was evident to the most casual observer: that was where the Singapore–Shanghai, Hong Kong–Jakarta, and Japan–Singapore routes crossed. Predators followed prey. He placed his finger there. “Looks perfectly obvious to me where we’re headed.”

  “And if this next depression stays on course, it’ll come right over us.”

  “Well, we’ve come through a typhoon; we can take another storm.” Armey shifted in his seat, and Dan prompted him, “Go on, Jim. Don’t leave us in suspense.”

  “Our last refrigeration unit is out. We have two operating firepumps left. We got the strake patched, but I don’t think we’re in shape to take on another storm—or a battle, for that matter.”

  “Sorry, Jim, we haven’t come this far to turn back for anything short of a major materiel casualty.” When Armey had no comeback, Dan tapped the chart again. “So that’s it. And not that far away. We can be there in two days.”

  They didn’t look convinced, but not even Armey had an audible objection. Dan refolded the chart and handed it to Colosimo. They were gathering their legs under them, getting ready to leave, when he added, “One last thing. Watch your backs. I had a very disturbing encounter with one of our less career-oriented petty officers just before the storm. And I’ve been getting threats on the sound-powered circuits.”

  Engelhart grunted, “You mean when you and Machias faced off in the hangar? I heard about it. Ever since then I’ve had people nagging me about their whiskey ration.”

  “I told Juskoviac to administer the booze.”

  Doolan said, “You think it’s smart, putting Greg in charge of that?”

  “I don’t think he wants my job anymore,” Dan told him. “If he ever really did. What I don’t want to do is make him some kind of martyr. You got a better idea, you can implement it when you’re CO, OK?”

  “Sure, Skipper.” Doolan pushed air away with both hands. “Take it easy. Just asking. And about Machias, I’d have locked him up, if I were you. After he pulled the knife on you.”

  “I can’t lock everybody up, Chick. Nor can I spare the people to guard them. We’ll need every hand we’ve got if we run into the Katori again.”

  “But will they fight?” said Engelhart dourly. “And can we keep the lid on ’em till then?”

  “I think they’ll fight,” said Dan. “Anyway, stay alert. And wear those side arms.”

  “You never picked yours up,” Chick pointed out. “We had it back on the fantail, waiting for you.”

  “I don’t think that would send the right message, to have me wearing one. All right, gentlemen. I believe that will be all.”

  * * *

  THAT afternoon he was sitting on the wing, half-asleep, when Doolan came up and laid the dense weight of a holstered pistol in his lap.

  When the weps officer left, he sat rubbing his eyes, listening to the firing commands going out for the afternoon drills. Wondering if he could get Juskoviac to take over as CO. He no longer wanted this mission or assignment or whatever it was. He didn’t have any objection to taking on the Chinese. But he didn’t like the idea of having a crew he couldn’t depend on, a failing ship, anonymous logistics, and, instead of orders, operating contingent on the guessed-at intent of concealed, unnameable higher-ups.

  Along with that, he was grappling with a tactical problem.

  Coldly and dispassionately as he could, he had analyzed the coming battle. Had sketched several tactical approaches on a maneuvering board, and even done some Lanchester and probability of kill calculations.

  Both sides had radar, but he felt he could assume Gaddis had better sensors—better ESM and sonar—and more skillful operators.

  In terms of speed, the gunboats gave the other side the edge, though if he caught the cruiser alone, he thought he could most likely match her. Some Second World War warships had been built for astonishing speeds, but he doubted if boilers that old could be pressed to their design limits.

  As far as armament went, they were roughly equal. The old cruiser had bigger guns and more of them, but Gaddis’s automatic five-inch could fire faster and probably had more accurate radar control. With one glaring exception. The cruiser had missiles. He wasn’t sure what they were and he didn’t think they had over-the-horizon targeting capability, but even without it there was a significant range band where his opponent could hit Gaddis and he could not strike back.

  How could he transit that zone and come to grips with them?

  Any woman can tell you that, Bobbie Wedlake had said. You make yourself look like something he wants.

  He sat with the pistol on his lap as men shouted on the boat deck and a clanking came from the feeding mechanism of the guns. The forties cracked again, and the sulphur reek of propellant filled his nose as the smoke of the guns shrouded the ship, plunging west.

  24

  HE stopped the fourth merchant vessel they passed the next day but changed his mind after they hove to and let them go, not giving any justification or rationale, simply blinking a curt international-code: “Continue on your original course.” The reason he gave the bridge team being that another contact was bearing down on them and he didn’t want any more witnesses to this than he had to have. They accepted it, but the truth was he’d simply lost his nerve at the last minute.

  This skull-and-crossbones stuff was a high-stress occupation. And he had to get some sleep. He couldn’t keep driving himself, on the bridge day and night.

  The next ship he stopped was a small engines-aft merchant whose decks were piled high with containers. She hove to obediently at the flashing-light message, and he got Pistolesi and his boys in the water and on their way before he could change his mind again. Then paced the bridge, biting his lips and telling himself he had to do this, that it was inherent in the mission.

  They were over there a long time, while Gaddis stood by, monitoring the distress channels and maintaining steerageway into the seas. At last he saw activity. One of the smaller containers, the international standard twenty-foot boxes, began inching toward the stern. With the binoculars, he made out a yellow forklift pushing it. The container paused at the deck edge, teetered, then toppled into the sea. Several more followed it over the side.

  “Tell him two more and that’s enough. And hurry it up. I want him back aboard,” Dan told Doolan. The weapons officer raised the PRC-10 and relayed the order.

  By the time the merchant was a departing dot on the gun-gray sea, the containers were aboard. The deck gang got them aboard with some difficulty. Being a warship, Gaddis had very little in the way of hoisting gear, but since the containers were empty, they eventually succeeded. Six of the 8×8×20 boxes rested now on the forecastle; the rest stood about on the fantail, where they were being cut in two to the accompaniment of the whine of pneumatic saws and dazzling firefalls of sparks.

  Now Dan sat in the wardroom with Compline, Zabounian, and Pistolesi standing before him, his chin propped on locked knuckles as he contemplated a rich selection of pocketables spread out on the tablecloth.
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br />   He’d told the masters-at-arms—overseen now by Chief Compline, whom he’d asked to take over Mellows’s former duty as chief master-at-arms—to be waiting on the boat deck to search Pistolesi and his returning boat crew. Along with the things they’d been sent over to secure—paint, pump motors, wire, house flags, and lighting gear—they’d come back with a sizable hoard of South Korean, Japanese, and U.S. currency, a dozen watches, pornographic videotapes with titles in Chinese, and a fat Ziploc stuffed with a brownish shredded material of vegetable origin.

  Finally he raised his eyes to the man who stood unhumbled at the head of the table. “You couldn’t keep your hands to yourself, Fireman Pistolesi. Could you.”

  “Sir, the guys put it to me on the way over. We ain’t been paid in a month. Even if we was, there’s nothing in the ship’s store but belt buckles and Aqua Velva. So we decided to take it out in trade. The master over there, he had no problem with that. Soon as we boarded, he took us down to the safe. I never even had to ask. Which was good, because I don’t think he and I would have made a lot of sense to each other. Anyway, we did like you said, kept the cold-weather masks on the whole time.”

  “He gave you these watches, too? And the grass?”

  “I told you, these were very hospitable guys, Skipper. We didn’t do no inventory. He just cleared out the safe, shoved everything in Marky’s bag. He just wanted us to leave, was the feeling I got. I never saw the grass till now. If that’s what it is.” He raised his eyes to the overhead. The wardroom was silent except for the slow creaking of the bulkheads and the whine of power saws from aft.

  “Mr. Zabounian.”

  “Sir.” The supply officer came to attention.

  “The cash, the watches, and the tapes go in your safe. If and when we make port again, you will mail them direct to the master of that ship Pistolesi just robbed. No return address. Just mail it without one.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “The marijuana or hash or whatever this is goes over the side. Roy, I want witnesses to the destruction. I also want one of those search-and-seizure forms completed and filed.”

  “Sir, you ain’t going to charge me with—”

  “The question of what I am going to charge you with, Pistolesi, is suspended until the completion of this operation,” Dan told him. “It may be that none of us are coming back. In that case, it doesn’t matter. It may also be that we survive, steam into Subic, and I’ve forgotten about this incident and the forms got lost. Considering your positive contributions. But damn it, we’re all walking a narrow line out here. We get over the edge too far and we’re never going to make it back.”

  “Sir, this is blackmail. That ain’t the way you should deal with me.”

  Dan regarded him for a moment more, then shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. You don’t want to play that game? OK, we won’t.”

  “That’s good, Skipper. I figured you’d—”

  “Chief Compline: Take this man back to the fantail. Mr. Zabounian: My compliments to Mr. Doolan, and ask him to muster a five-man firing party. M-16s, each loaded with one round, total four rounds of ball ammo and one blank. For disobeying orders in the face of the enemy, Fireman Joseph E. Pistolesi is hereby condemned to—”

  “Jesus God, sir!”

  “Are you listening to me now, Pistol? You’re over there shaking these poor bastards down, and meanwhile I have to sweat every closing contact. You know why? Because if any of them’s a warship—it doesn’t matter whose, Japanese or Korean, Dutch, French, Russian, whatever—if it’s a warship, he’s duty-bound to come to their assistance on the high seas. Then what? Either we take them under fire, other navymen doing their duty, or else the mission’s down the tubes and we’re all up for trial. And not in a U.S. court, either.”

  “Look, I didn’t know that, sir. Forget I said anything. You make out any form you want. We’re playing by your rules now. Jesus God!”

  Sweat was trickling down the fireman’s cheeks now, and his beard stubble showed dark. But maybe they were both playing, Dan thought. Certainly he was trying desperately to imitate someone who knew what he was doing. He was abruptly sick of the game. He snapped, “Get this shit out of my sight. And frog-march this son of a bitch out of here.”

  * * *

  HE prowled restlessly about all that afternoon, inspecting the preparations, making suggestions, putting his shoulder to it when his weight was needed. The pillaged containers, each sliced in half, were being manhandled and come-alonged into position along Gaddis’s deck edges, facing outboard. That is, their open interiors faced inboard; their ends, decorated with the logos of shipping lines and trucking lines, faced out.

  He’d puzzled over the frigate’s hull. They couldn’t leave it gray and have any hope of being taken for other than what they were. But it wasn’t possible in seas that continued this heavy to even think of putting men overside to paint. Then Topmark had proposed a white band along the deck edge. If the light was right, the boatswain said, it might look like the color scheme on some of the merchants they had passed.

  Dan had gotten the germ of the idea from Bobbie Wedlake’s sardonic remark, added it to a ruse de guerre Capt. Thomas Leighty had come up with off the coast of Cuba, hunting USS City of Corpus Christi during a barrier exercise, and mixed in an antisubmarine tactic the British had tried in the First World War, something called a Q ship. Bobbie had done the actual design. Sketching the outline of a 1052 on a drawing pad, she’d first truncated the damaged mack, slicing metal off its telltale shape to make it more closely resemble a merchant ship’s stack. Stacked forward and aft, the containers would imitate deck cargo. The guns, barrels depressed as far as they would go, would be covered with tarps. Put together, it all might create the illusion that Gaddis was a rather small breakbulk steamer with an opportunity deck load of containers.

  Until the observer was close enough, of course. At a certain range all illusion would evaporate, revealing a destroyer-type warship, rake-bowed and low to the water, clumsily painted and furbelowed into the image of a sea-tramp. He could only hope the masquerade got him inside gun range. Well, the weather was cooperating. The advance fringes of the next storm were pushing downpours and squalls ahead of it. The frigate rolled steadily through them, rain clattering down now and then as the crew jockeyed the last containers into position and griped them down against the corkscrewing bucks and slams of a ten-foot sea on the quarter.

  He was on the helo deck inspecting the tiedowns, satisfying himself they were solid yet could be quickly released, when Gaddis leaned into a series of prolonged rolls. He glanced uneasily at the seas behind them, then at a steadily blackening sky. Not again, he thought. If the seas grew much heavier, he’d have to abort the whole operation. Beyond a certain sea state the gunboats couldn’t board, and if they couldn’t board, they’d probably retire to port.

  “Captain? Have a word with you?”

  It was Juskoviac, to Dan’s surprise. The XO had not addressed him for days, even when they brushed by each other in the passageways. Dan led the way toward the aft edge of the flight deck. The clanging and cursing were a little less loud there, and no one could overhear them.

  “Yeah, Greg. What you got?”

  “I want you to know there’s significant doubt about the way you’re running this ship.”

  “Doubt in your mind or someone else’s?”

  “I mean in everybody’s mind. I understand you authorized arming the officers.”

  “I did, along with the chiefs and first-class. In case of attempted boarding. Where’s your side arm, XO?”

  “In my safe, in my stateroom. It’s not an antiboarding measure. Nobody bought that. I don’t think this is the way to maintain a good relationship with the crew.” Juskoviac hesitated, then added, “Nor is, uh, hanging people. No matter what they may have done. Or threatening to shoot them, like you did with Pistolesi.”

  Dan almost smiled. If his purpose in dealing summarily with Mellows had been to inspire fear, he’d succeeded with t
he exec. “This is not a normal underway period, Greg. In several significant ways.” He waited, but the exec didn’t respond. “So, what did you decide on the liquor issue?”

  “Half a pint, at noon.”

  “Seems like we ought to pipe ‘up spirits,’ eh?”

  But Juskoviac didn’t smile. His sullen, stubborn expression was grating, but Dan tried to maintain his patience. Doolan was right; he was turning into the kind of cranky, touchy CO he’d always disliked himself. By now he’d figured out what he was doing with Juskoviac, more instinctively than by plan. He was using the XO as a lightning rod, providing a ready channel for incipient unrest, figuring that if it truly became imminent the exec would remember a shred of loyalty or, failing that, of fear.

  “Any more petitions circulating, Greg?”

  “It won’t be limited to petitions this time,” Juskoviac said. He looked over his shoulder at the guys finishing the griping down. A squall was emerging astern, taking on solidity and mass as it overtook them from the overlooming darkness to the east. Dan considered altering course, then decided not to. He had clear orders at last; he’d head directly to the indicated point.

  But with that decision fresh worry gnawed. Sure, he’d gotten orders. But from whom? Was it possible that they weren’t Navy orders? His mind skittered back and forth like a squirrel in traffic. Were they caught in the toils of a plot so subtle he still had not grasped it? They were almost on station. Shouldn’t he have gotten the promised targeting message by now? “Final targeting information will be provided en route”—but how? Gaddis carried Link Fourteen, a non-automated interface with the Naval Tactical Data System, but the frequency was dead; no one was transmitting. Compline had no access to Fleet Broadcast. Dan had Radio and CIC monitoring all the uncovered channels he could think of, but he didn’t see how it could come in that way without running the risk it could be intercepted, overheard by Chinese listening posts, and recorded. Saying “so long” to the deniability of the whole operation.