by David Poyer
“I can order the test if you want. Are you studying?”
“Oh yeah, I’m reading that manual every night.”
“It ain’t a hard test to pass, but there’s lots pass ain’t advanced. Well, we’ll see.”
Finally Fitch left. As soon as he was out of sight, Phelan jumped up, leaving the bowl for somebody else to clean up, and went directly to sick bay. Golden was reading a Conan the Barbarian comic book and was glad to get off a few minutes early. Phelan closed and locked the door behind him.
He was squatting down in front of the safe, the card in his hand, when he realized he’d screwed up. He’d told Fitch he was robbed, which was the story he’d used at the legation. But he’d told the exec, Lenson, that he’d saved a little girl. If they got to talking about him, they might compare stories. They might get suspicious.
But they wouldn’t. He was getting crazy, that was all. Paranoid, yeah. But they were so fucking stupid, Fitch, the officers. He was safe here. He was reaching for the dial again when something inside his head stopped his hand in mid-movement.
What if he didn’t open it; didn’t use? Just rode it the rest of the way out. Cold turkeyed it. And really got clean.
Phelan squatted there, undecided and a little angry, scared, that the idea insisted on his considering it.
So he did. Thought about not using. Even though he could.
Then he thought, Hell, I can do that anytime. Relief flooded him at the decision. He could do it tomorrow. All he needed right now was something to calm himself down. Come down easy, that was the trick. In a couple days, he’d be clean and then he wouldn’t have to touch any of it again. He’d only use a little. One cap, that was all he needed. They owed it to him. After all he’d been through.
His body twitched with hunger. The dial clicked into the final number, and the gates to paradise came open deep within the guts of a gray ship.
10
U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt
THE staccato clatter of chipping hammers filled the passageway outside Radio Central, varied with ripping noises, thumps, and yells. Beneath Dan’s boondockers, where the de-flooring party had passed, was naked steel, still bearing the circular scars of shipyard grinders.
RM1 Wolfe pulled off a stencil, revealing a gleaming red arrow six inches from the bottom of a door. “Uh, can I ask a question, XO?”
“Sure.”
“Why down here? What’s wrong with eye level, where they’re supposed to be?”
Dan straightened, looking down the passageway at the stack of torn-up tile. How many thousands of man-hours had been lavished on it, buffed daily for XO’s inspection, stripped and waxed every week till it shone like a calm green sea. Now it was flammable trash, ready to go over the side.
“If we have a major fire, this passageway’s going to be full of smoke. And you’ll be on your belly, crawling for the weather decks. Get the picture?”
“Oh,” said the petty officer. “Who thought of that? That makes sense.”
Two hull techs banged their tools down, conferred over a sketch, then began sawing a hole in the skin of the ship. Behind them, electronic technicians were popping lids off cans, laying a coat of deck gray mixed with sand.
Dan decided to get out of the way and let them work. He pulled out his wheel book and drew a line through 01 LEVEL DECK.
As he headed aft, the whole ship clanged, clattered, and whined. Van Zandt’s crew was stripping ship. Ridding her of every piece of tile, wood, or plastic, every nonessential that could shatter, break, burn, or explode—as well as modifying quite a few things in ways not strictly in accordance with the NAVSHIPS Technical Manual.
“Where they’re supposed to be.” He’d sidestepped the petty officer’s real question. Because no one had approved what they were doing. No one had been asked to. Not one message had gone to Washington about it. Not one dollar had been spent on research and development, environmental-impact studies, leading-edge engineering, or comparative testing. Shaker had simply given the orders. And Dan had decided, despite some misgivings, to carry them out.
The midships passageway, eight feet wide and half the frigate’s length, was crowded with boxes and garbage bags. A narrow walkway threaded between couches and rolled-up carpets from the wardroom and chief’s mess. Against the bulkheads were stacked cruise boxes filled with civvies, dress uniforms, Corfam shoes, and everything made of the deadly polyester Shaker called “walking napalm.” One box was Dan’s. There were bundles of surplus charts from the quartermasters’ shack. Lengths of wooden shoring. Souvenirs: pseudo-Persian carpets, djellabas, sheik outfits. Bunk curtains and shower curtains. The oiled walnut cabinet that had held the flag and silver of the old Turner Van Zandt, lost at Savo Island taking on two Japanese cruisers.
“How’s it going, Chief Dorgan?”
The harried-looking storekeeper, neck trickling perspiration, was directing four petty officers bagging armloads of pubs and records. “Getting it done, sor. But I never realizing this fooking tub carry so much paper. What’m I gonna do, I need to look up a regulation?”
“Same as you always do, Chief. Make one up.”
Dan had briefed the senior enlisted after he’d left Shaker’s cabin the day before. Not without some doubt. The officers could issue all the orders they liked, but it was the chiefs who either made things happen or let them fall by the wayside. To his surprise, there’d hardly been a grumble, hardly a hint of their usual response to anything out of the ordinary, which was not-very-muted bitching and moaning.
The varnished gratings from the bridge bobbed by him on the shoulders of two signalmen, followed by their cherished collection of foreign flags. The ship’s library lay stacked on deck, along with chair covers, plaques from the captain’s cabin, and boxes of videotapes, mostly kung fu, mercenary, and porn. Two disbursing clerks were packaging everything frangible: glass covers, shaving mirrors, the sneeze shields from the serving line, and the trick Greek painting from the chiefs’ quarters, an ample nude that became an innocent landscape when turned upside down.
The air on the fantail was like a hot, wet sponge. Squeezing a reluctant breath out of it, he looked around.
It, too, was the scene of hectic activity. Between him and the slowly heaving horizon was a small mountain range of cleaning fluid, furniture polish, paint remover, drums of extra oil and grease the gunners and snipes had been packratting away since commissioning day. Brocket and Jimson, the supply officers, were bustling about getting it inventoried and strapped onto pallets. To port came a sudden cough and buzz; Ensign Loamer was testing the portable pumps. A petty officer aimed a nozzle, and a cone of mist split the oppressive sun into a rainbow. Dan let the wind of Van Zandt’s passage blow it over him, lifting his face gratefully to the cool fog, tasting the sting of brine.
“Hey, Percy.”
“Sir.” Loamer ran toward him, tripping on a hose.
“How are those flash hoods coming?”
“We’re still cutting up the fantail awning, sir. Going to start the stitching pretty soon.”
“When’s the last time somebody looked at our gas masks?”
“Well, I don’t know, sir, I’ve only been aboard since—”
“I know, I know. Pull them all, all over the ship. Check them for airtightness and replace the filters. Today.”
“Yessir, but we got the pumps to test, and the—”
“I understand that, Percy, and now you got gas masks to do, too. So don’t waste time arguing, all right?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Start your repair-team leaders going through the lockers. Make out a requisition for a hundred and fifty more OBA canisters. Write it down, Mr. Loamer! If you need new gaskets, strainers, hoses, order them, too. Make sure we have the right fittings on the eductors. Let me know what you need by sixteen-hundred and I’ll get a message off to San Jose.”
When the ensign rushed off, Dan stood by the lifeline, looking out over an oily, windless, gently heaving sea toward a far-off line of ocher.<
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In their tortuous passage through the southern Gulf, doglegging to avoid Iranian waters, oil rigs, and offshore loading points, they’d steamed 350 miles to make the straight-line distance of 200 from Bahrain. Now, re-creating the chart in his mind, Dan guessed he was looking at Dhubai. Guessed; this southern coast was low; sand, desert, or saltwater marsh. It sloped so gradually upward from sea level, the radar showed only ghosts. Here, close to land, dust fogged the air, making the shore look more distant than it was.
His squint caught something off the bow, dark and inchoate, shimmering and weaving in the sun-tortured air. Why, he wondered, was everything in the Gulf so hard to see as it really was … then just for a moment the mirages steadied into cliffs. Abrupt masses of rock, fissured and gullied by erosion or earthquake. The Musandam Peninsula. The United Arab Emirates on this side, Oman on the other. The bluffs reminded him of Nevada, when he’d gone out there to see his daughter.
And between Van Zandt and the distant land stood a procession of ships, tankers, freighters, coasters, set out like chess pieces across the oily sea. Most were beam to him, proceeding into or out of Dhubai for repair, refueling, and offload. There must be eighty of them in sight. And this was only the beginning. Traffic would be even heavier in the approaches to the Strait.
The Strait of Hormuz: the busiest maritime channel in the world. Through that thirty-mile-wide gap between the Omani peninsula and the coast of Iran passed 19,000 ships a year, and sixty percent of the world’s supply of oil.
He looked aft, where the frigate’s bow wave, marching away from the wake, disappeared into the blurry melding of atmosphere and sea. Dropping astern now was a nest of dhows, slowly circling as they laid or hauled their nets. They’d caused him anxious hours in the past two months. Milling around on no fixed course, following the schools below them, occasionally they’d aim themselves across Van Zandt’s bow as if intent on snaring frigates rather than fish. He’d be sleeping light tonight.
Then, with a stab almost as of pain, he remembered: She wasn’t his anymore. Now the OOD would call Shaker if he was confused by lights, or wondered which way to turn.
He couldn’t decide whether to feel relieved or regretful.
Tim Jimson came up with a question about pay for the new corpsman. When that was settled, Dan fingered his wheel book. So much more to do … but he lingered still, looking off to port. Toward the Mubarek oil field. Its black derricks poked over the curve of the sea, writhing in the shimmer like black flames. Above several flickered yellow points. The sky was stained with smoke and dust. And farther off, so far he could only just make it out, a huge inky pall streamed endlessly upward: a British-owned separation platform. The target of a Pasdaran attack, it had been burning since before Van Zandt arrived in the Gulf.
Beyond it was Abu Musa, Iranian-held, a base for the revolutionary guards—the Pasdaran, fanatical vanguard of Khomeini’s fundamentalist revolution.
“Commander Lenson: Bridge.”
Jerked from reverie, he went into the hangar. Shaker answered the bogen. “Dan? Where are you?”
“Fantail, sir. Been making the rounds.”
“How’s strip ship progressing?”
Dan gave him a rundown. Halfway through it, Shaker interrupted, “When are the passageways going to be done?”
“I’d say four, five more hours, sir. By the way, Doc Fitch asked me about sick bay. He wanted to keep his tile, said it’d be more sanitary. I said he could.”
“I guess that’s okay, but I want metal everyplace else.”
“Yessir, it’s being done.”
Shaker hung up. Dan looked at his book again, then went into the port hangar.
It was dark in there, and almost cool. The insectile bulk of the helicopter filled it like a butterfly in a tight pupa. In the minimal space left over, three crewmen had rigged a scaffold and were working, bent over hinged-out aluminum like Saturday mechanics under the hoods of their pickups. Dan looked around; a CO2 extinguisher stood near to hand; only one thing missing.… He called up to their oblivious backs, “Hey! Chief Mattocks up there?”
“Yeah! Who wants him?”
“Me. Where’re your pilots?”
The chief emerged for a moment; his face was smeared with blue grease. “Dunno, sir. You check their stateroom?”
“Maybe I will.”
As he turned away, he heard a mutter from one of the other crewmen; it was just loud enough to make out: “Don’t knock too loud, you might wake ’em up.”
* * *
Late that afternoon, as soon as strip ship was complete, Shaker called a surprise general quarters. Lenson was in the ship’s office, proofing a hastily revised conflagration plan. As he sprinted through the mess decks, the crew jumped up from full trays, cursing heartily. The ladders were thronged, but only for a moment; the clamor of feet came loud through the overhead. He reached CIC, to find Shaker calmly examining his watch. “You take TAO,” said the captain. “We’ll say I’m dead.”
Dan snatched the headset out of Wise’s hand. He glanced swiftly around, barked, “CIC, manned and ready,” and focused his attention on the surface repeater.
The two-foot-diameter horizontal display was a madhouse of ships and low fliers. To the east was the dull green glow of land, freckled with mountain. To the west—they’d left Dhubai behind—was a scatter of fishermen. To the north, in the shipping lanes, were two solid, clearly outlined columns of ships, so many the course-and-speed circuits had been overwhelmed.
He swiveled, his hands still occupied with his life vest. The air picture was not quite as crowded. Its operator had managed to keep up, identifying aircraft through the automated link with the AWACS, the Saudi-owned, U.S. Air Force-manned radar bird that orbited over the Gulf twenty-four hours a day. West of them were two helicopters, probably servicing the oil field they’d just passed. To the south, dozens of aircraft, commercial airliners, were stacked up over Dhubai. In the upper Gulf, the prime worry was Iraqi aircraft, Exocet-armed Mirages and Styx-carrying Badgers. They lay in wait for ships enroute to and from Khārk Island, the main Iranian oil terminal. Here the danger lay to the north. Near the coast of Iran, pulsating electronically to stand out from the land clutter, were the symbols for hostile aircraft. Two of them, over Larak Island, not far from the Iranian Navy base at Bandar Abbās.
The intercom said, in Pensker’s taut voice, “This is a drill. ESM contact, bearing two-six-oh true, snoop scan radar.”
“ESM identify,” shouted Lenson across the compartment.
“ESM identifies: Soviet radar: associated with Styx missile.”
Dan passed it to the bridge and put the weapons console on standby. The next thing he heard was, “I-band homer, bearing two-six-five degrees true.”
“Styx missile, bearing two-six-five true”—he thought for a fraction of a second—“Weps control! Fire chaff, port battery, activate Phalanx automatic mode. Mark 92, search and acquire; assign to Mount 31.” He snapped a switch beside his chair. “Bridge, TAO: come left, steady up two-nine-oh. Gun control, TAO: Your target bears two-two-five relative. Air target, low flier, incoming. Load with mixed infrared and proximity fuze. Commence fire when locked on.”
The captain reappeared and crossed the room to stand beside the ECM operator. A moment later, the sailor cried out, “New contact! Surface radar, frequency twelve megahertz, pulse repetition rate three point two. Corresponds—”
“Classify friendly,” shouted Lenson. “That’s a Bahraini.”
“Correction. PRR four point seven.”
“Iranian, Combattante-class gunboat. Classify hostile! Weps control, TAO: Load one Harpoon, set search mode two, range unknown, fire on command, next round search mode one. ECM, get me a bearing!”
“H-band homer! Missile incoming, starboard side!”
“XO, you’re out of action,” said the captain. Dan stopped in mid-order and handed the headset to Wise. The operations officer took over instantly, ordering more chaff and telling Pensker to shift his rudder. T
he captain looked displeased, and he altered it hastily to maintain present course.
“You were right the first time, Al. Missile hit forward, frame twenty,” said Shaker.
Wise told the bridge. A moment later the 1MC said, “Missile hit forward, frame twenty, Repair Two provide.”
“Let’s go,” said Shaker. Dan ran after him down ladders and passageways till they reached Repair Two. The team was already dressed out and moving, laying hose and comm wire behind them. The captain reached up and with a piece of chalk Dan hadn’t seen made an X on a pipe. To one of the men, he said, “Fragment hit, main firemain.”
The team instantly divided, most continuing forward as the team leader yanked a valve to isolate the broken main, two dropping axes to break open a pipe-patching kit. Shaker paused at a bogen. A moment later the lights went out and ventilation died.
An eerie silence fell, broken only by the muffled panting of the men. Battle lanterns came on, yellow beams groping through sudden darkness. The air grew hot. Shaker was chalking every other man, declaring them casualties. Loamer came out of a side passageway and the captain X’d him on the chest, chewing him out meanwhile for leaving DC central.
They reached frame twenty. Bodies lay strewn about the deck. The char of third-degree burns blackened their bare chests. Dan stepped on a hand, lying some distance from the nearest body, and nearly slipped in a pool of “blood.” The moulages looked realistic. “Forget about him!” shouted the captain at a man who bent. “Report the casualties, then concentrate on saving the ship!”
After watching them fight the “fire” for ten minutes, Shaker left. Shortly thereafter, the 1MC said, “Prepare to abandon ship. Nearest land bears one-two-zero magnetic, distance twenty miles.”
The interior of the ship, dark as a mine disaster, filled again with running men, this time rushing for their assigned life rafts and a hasty muster. Dan matched names on the bridge, sweating. He found two missing and passed the word for them, hoping they were the ones Shaker had told not to report. Van Zandt quaked under his feet as the engines went full astern; below them, Guerra was running his own series of casualty drills.
