China Sea

by David Poyer

  He wrenched his attention back to the maelstrom outside, where the wind was shearing the tops off the waves and laying lashes of spray across the heaving glossy backs of the swells. The sky was the same black as the sea, sinister, lightless, light-absorbing, so that the ship across from him seemed to glow with some pallid internal radiance. Her stern tipped down to an oncoming sea, and the snowy foam shot upward as it struck and covered what looked like minelaying rails and swept on to crest and break around the after mount like surf over a half-submerged rock. He stared at the aft turret, waiting for the next gun-flash with his hands crimped so tightly on the mouthpiece of the phone his fingers dug deep into the rubber. Gaddis was losing way. She was losing steam, losing power, losing the ability to maneuver. Once he lost mobility, this battle was over. The other ship would take position on her stern and sledgehammer him to pieces.

  Then he noticed something strange.

  The Katori wasn’t firing anymore. No more bursts of light flickered from the dark pyramid. No more dangling wires of tracer probed from her upper decks. She was rolling slowly, sluggishly, wallowing as the swells passed over and under her.

  Gaddis’s five-inch fired again, and the forties resumed slamming away. Dan stared, seeing the rounds’ red-hot flight end as they plunged point-blank into the dark mass that he saw now was streaming smoke from end to end. He hadn’t made it out before because it was blowing downwind, away from him, and the smoke was the same color as the storm and the sea and the mist.

  Then, before his fixed and disbelieving eyes, the long, slim, smoldering ruin tilted with enormous deliberation over to port.

  Zabounian, stepping out onto the bridge from his GQ station in Combat, gaped at the carnage. Dan grabbed him. “Stop!” he yelled. “Stop it! Cease fire!”

  “No, we can’t do that—”

  “Cease fire, I said!”

  The other ship hesitated for a long time on the edge of going over, and the sea foamed and seethed up over its stern with an obscene and impatient craving. Staring, he could imagine the panic onboard: the struggle for ladders and escape trunks, men trampled and fighting and falling. The most rigid discipline could give way at such moments. The last moments, for all too many, of their lives. He knew. He’d been there, on a dying ship, and not the faintest spark of glee or triumph or even relief penetrated the blank horror he felt now, watching it happen to other men.

  She was nearly beam on to the storm seas now, and if she struggled to rise the repeated blows of the swells kept driving her down. Dan watched, seeing not just her but Gaddis as she’d struggled helplessly in the typhoon. Each time she lifted, a little less of her fantail was visible; the sea crept up her strakes till at last steam burst at her crosstrees, and faintly through the wailing wind came a despairing, nearly human shriek.

  Then she capsized. The sheer strake came up and beneath it the long black length of her, bilge keels thrust up like stubby fins. The screws, still ticking over, beat in slow futility at the turbulent sprayfilled air. Gaddis was still coming around, moving on her momentum, and he saw holes in the cruiser’s bottom where the armor-piercing projectiles had gone clear through, plunging downward. A visible stream of spray and smoke blew from each, a dying breath exhaled from the now rapidly compressing atmosphere within the sinking hull. The sea surged, and for a moment nothing showed above the roiling foam. Then, like a surfacing whale, still blowing from multiple rents, it resurfaced, yet now only a few feet projected above the triumphant sea.

  As they watched, each clinging to some handhold in total silence, the bow began to rise. It came up with terrible slowness, then paused, hanging in the gray air. The rest of the doomed ship had disappeared beneath a greasy black-gray froth, dotted with spumy geysers of smoke and spray and oil and air. Raked and sharp, anchor chains thundering free as it pointed straight up, it aimed itself into the stormy sky for what seemed a last, long, straining effort, the final, dying struggle of a living creature.

  Then, with an indescribable combination of grace and horror, it slipped slowly beneath the maelstrom that surged and boiled still where it had disappeared.

  Lenson stared, unable to move or think. Faintly he heard someone shouting orders; saw Gaddis’s own prow dip as if in salute, no, simply a plunge to an overtaking sea, and then swing hard right. Then the deck beneath him went over so savagely he was pinned against the coaming by his own weight. The jagged white shapes laced his vision again, and he became conscious of an immense pain in his head.

  Bobbie Wedlake’s voice in his ear, her hand on his arm. “Come inside the pilothouse. I’m getting Neilsen up here to look at you.”

  “Forget that. Have him take care of the wounded.”

  “News flash: That includes you. There’s blood all over your face. Your leg, too.”

  “Find out what’s happening down below. Call Jim; fight the fire. If we don’t get power back, we’re not going to come through this storm—”

  She didn’t answer, just half-led, half-dragged him inside. He collapsed just inside the knee knocker, and she eased him down in a practiced way that made him wonder remotely where she’d learned it. Her wiry frame was stronger than it looked.

  Then he went away for a while.

  When he came to he was slumped against the bulkhead. He sat motionless, frowning. Someone was exploring his scalp with his fingers. But that wasn’t it.

  For a moment he’d heard screaming, far away, on the wind.

  No, he thought. Not again. Not the eternal dead who had shipped with him on every cruise since Reynolds Ryan. He had not heard their cries for years. He shook his head, denying them, and someone said sharply, “Hold still.”

  But then it came again, louder, and closer, and he realized with a shuddering breath that it was not in his mind.

  He struggled upward, pushing the corpsman away. Grabbed the dogging bar for support, then staggered out on the wing.

  Clinging to the gyro repeater, he stared down at the passing sea.

  Oil slicked the waves, gentling them into ghosts of themselves. Limp, unmoving bodies, life jackets, debris, rose and fell on the anointed sea.

  And among them, creatures who waved at the ship that drifted slowly past, who gestured helplessly, some in defiance, others in imploring surrender, yet others who simply regarded him silently, rising and falling with the swells as he looked down. His mind skittered madly, like an operating system hunting here and there on a hard disk for a program it could not find.

  Zabounian, beside him, tentatively. “We could put a few of the life rafts over.”

  “Yeah, I—no. We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’ve got U.S. markings on them.”

  A knot of Chinese moved down Gaddis’s side, about thirty yards off. An easy toss with a heaving line. Their keening came through even the howl of the wind. Dan swallowed. They reached blackened oil-smeared arms up in supplication. They were the damned in hell, he looking down like the saints in heaven. They were holding up their arms to him—

  Bobbie said from behind him, “To hell with them.”

  Dan glanced at her set white lips. “If I don’t help, they’ll all drown,” he said. Barely able to speak, because looking out, he was one with them. He’d known that same shock and hopelessness, not once but twice; in the chill water of the North Atlantic and in the warm shark-prowled Gulf. Now he looked out on it again and grasped from another angle the suffering and waste of battle. He licked his lips and tried once more. “You don’t understand. The storm—”

  “Too fucking bad,” she said coldly. “They killed everybody aboard when they attacked us. How many others do you think they’ve murdered out here?”

  “What do you think, Louis? Can we pick them up?”

  “They’re pirates, sir,” said the quartermaster “Their hands against every man and every man’s hand against them. We don’t have anyplace to put them anyway.”

  Dan limped out on the wing again, gripping his thigh as if he could hold back the growing pa
in. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind. He wasn’t even sure he had a mind anymore. Everything seemed suffused with light. He must have lost a lot of blood. Finally he said, “All right, get BM1 Topmark up here.”

  He ordered the boatswain to station a man at each abandon ship station, instructed to stand by to trigger half the ship’s life rafts. Gaddis carried inflatable rafts sealed inside fiberglass capsules that lined the rails. Hydrostatic pistols released them if the ship went down, but they could be triggered manually as well. “Half of them—every other one. That’ll leave enough for us; we don’t have half our rated crew anyway.”

  To his surprise, they didn’t protest, even looked relieved, as if redeemed from their own vengefulness. Topmark left, and Dan told the OOD to use whatever waning engine power they had left to steer upwind of the drifting survivors.

  Still it would not save them all. Some had already slipped beneath the angry sea. Others would die in overloaded rafts, or of exposure, or of wounds that, tended, might not have proven fatal.

  And that was not all. Something else nagged at him. Something he’d overlooked. Something important.

  He stood silently on the bridge, wondering what it was. He felt strange, as if he himself had died, maybe with those who had died long ago, maybe those who were dying out there now, screaming and pleading against the howl of the wind.

  Topmark came back a few minutes later. “Life preservers and rafts going over, sir.”

  “Very well.”

  Zabounian came up and stood beside Dan again. In a low voice he said, “Sir, we got the Raytheon up again. We’ve got another contact coming in.”

  Dan nodded slowly. That was what he’d been trying to remember.

  Gaddis coasted at last to a halt and began to drift downwind in the oil-slicked sea. Slowly at first, then with gathering speed. Picking up the roll of the swells. He wondered fuzzily what he should do. Rig a sea anchor? Deploy the anchor again? He’d better get them started. Yet it seemed so futile.

  “There it is,” said Topmark, lowering the binoculars and pointing something out to Zabounian. “To the right of that low cloud. About one-one-zero relative.”

  They stood watching the shape coalesce from the fog. It was moving fast. They could see that even without radar. As it broke through, they saw what it was.

  The second Shanghai. Undamaged, fresh, and angry, the gunboat was roaring in toward them as they wallowed helplessly in the heavy seas.

  Then suddenly it seemed to stop, between one wave and the next, and a ripple of spray showed along its side. Not high, not an explosion like a torpedo strike or a mine detonation, just a momentary flash of white, like the instantaneous revelation of skirt by a flamenco dancer.

  Dan leaned against the riddled, scarred splinter shield, screwing his face into the binoculars. Blocking from his brain the cries and screams of the wounded, the snap and crackle of fire aft.

  A squall edge swept over the gunboat, and when it emerged again from the trailing skirts of rain, something had changed. It was riding lower in the water.

  Zabounian muttered, “Isn’t that about where we dropped the containers?”

  And Dan saw that it was true, the racing gunboat had plowed straight over one of the still-floating container sections at full speed and ripped its bottom out or at least mangled its screw and punched holes in the thin, light planing hull.

  Zabounian plucked a handset off the bulkhead and snapped the selector switch to the fire control circuit. He snapped, “Mount fifty-one? Bridge. Your target, gunboat. Bears one-ten relative, five thousand yards. With ten rounds VT—”

  “No,” Dan said. Then louder, grabbing him by the shoulder and wheeling him around: “No! God damn it, cease fire!”

  He hesitated for a long moment, eyes locked on Dan’s face, then said quietly into the mike, “Belay that; I have a check-fire order from the CO. Stand by.”

  He let up on the transmit button, but before he could speak, Dan said, “What do you see out there?”

  “I see our last target. What do you see, sir?” Almost suspiciously, as if he suspected Dan’s judgment. God knows, he suspected it himself. But he was pretty sure this was right.

  He looked around the bridge, seeing blood splashes, seeing, recognizing, for the first time Chick Doolan’s smashed body huddled near the wing door, the bullet holes, the scarred raw metal where fragments had sliced open aluminum. Knowing that all this, all of it, was in vain if no one returned. Total victory was as useless to the penumbral cause in which they soldiered as total defeat. Gaddis had come halfway round the world to convey a message. If that message was not delivered, they might as well never have come, never have made the long voyage, never have endured the ordeal and made the sacrifice.

  He said slowly, “I see a messenger.”

  “You mean we let them go?”

  “We let them go. Otherwise, who’ll tell the story?” He pushed himself off the bulkhead, timed his crossing to the lean of the ship, and limped across to the bitch box. “Main Control, Bridge. Jim, how’s it going down there? Any headway on the fire?”

  A heavy, exhausted voice came up in reply, one Dan knew but could not quite yet identify. “Bridge, Main Control: Status report. Main space fire extinguished. Reflash watch set in the fireroom. Five more minutes, we’ll give you one-bravo boiler operational at reduced steam capacity. Max estimated speed at that time ten knots.”

  “Who’s speaking? Is Commander Armey still in the fireroom?”

  The dragging voice coughed and coughed and said, “Mr. Armey’s in pretty bad shape, sir. He was on the boiler flat when one of those shells came through.”

  Dan let up on the lever for a moment as his throat closed, then took a fresh grip on it and on himself and asked, “Who else is down? How’s our casualty list look?”

  “Not good, sir. We’ve got a lot of wounded and four or five dead.”

  “Who am I talking to? Who’s in charge down there?”

  “This is Sansone, sir.”

  “Have you got enough men to steam, Al?”

  “We’ll cook you some fuckin’ steam, sir. Don’t worry about that.”

  “Roger, Chief. We’ve got a lot of casualties up here, too. We’re going to head south as soon as you can get the screw turning again. Try to get out of the way of this storm. At least, try to duck the worst of it.”

  “Aye, sir. I’ll advise when we can answer bells.”

  Sansone signed off. Dan clicked off and looked around the bridge, at the smoke-blackened, shocked faces. The boatswain stared back, eyes red-rimmed and weary. “Good job, sir,” he said.

  “You, too, Petty Officer Topmark.”

  One of the signalmen, at the wing door. “Sir, permission to hoist the U.S. colors.”

  “Do it, and—no, wait. Bring that black rag up here.”

  He brought it up a few moments later. Dan held the black cloth for a few seconds, feeling their eyes on him. Then he hobbled out onto the wing. The deck was littered with .50-caliber and twenty-millimeter cartridge cases. He knotted a handful of the blackened brass into the flag, so that there was no chance it would float. Then he leaned over the splinter shield and dropped it straight down into the sea. It splashed; bobbed for a second or two, already swept aft by the motion of the ship, then vanished as the bow wave broke over it white and clean.

  He still felt dizzy, but a little strength had returned. He gave Zabounian his instructions, then gathered himself, and, limping slowly and deliberately, headed down to check out his ship.

  THE AFTERIMAGE

  ROYAL THAI NAVAL BASE COMPLEX, SATTAHIP, CHUK SAMET, THAILAND

  IT felt like déjà vu all over again. The ranks of Asians in uniform, swinging in to take their places on the pier. The band, better than he’d expected; they’d warmed up with some Eastern-flavored marches he’d never heard before. The reviewing stand, replete with dignitaries and saffron-robed monks. And behind them, the flag- and flower-festooned length of a freshly painted Knox-class frigate, gleaming in the sun th
at now and then broke through the clouds over the soft green hills and danced flashing off the waters of the bay.

  The Thai national anthem came to an end, and Dan broke his salute crisply. He waited until the others glanced around for their seats, then let himself down. A government official stepped to the podium. Lenson crossed his legs, careful not to show the soles of his shoes, and feigned attention to the steady stream of language he did not understand. His own turn would come soon. He had been carefully instructed in what he was to say, and more specifically on the many things he was not to mention. Still, it was a momentous occasion, and he felt thankful to be here.

  After Gaddis’s action against the Chinese cruiser and her subsequent battering in two more days of heavy weather, he’d taken her south till he got the message directing him to his next port of call. The orders had pointed him west, to transit to the Gulf of Thailand with no intermediate landfalls. He had the fuel to make it, but barely; the frigate’s tanks had been nearly dry when she arrived off Phra Island. A Thai patrol craft had escorted her at night into Sattahip, where she’d immediately been dry-docked for hull inspection, sonar dome and shaft X rays, repairs, and blasting and painting.