The Gulf

by David Poyer

  He hit hard, and wrong. The roll was faster than he’d expected and he fell an extra five feet. The flat of a wave smashed him in the face and dislodged his mask. He let himself sink through the shock, and eight or ten feet down came to a stop.

  And hung there, suddenly suspended in peace like a fly in gray amber. The demented howl of the wind, the shouting, the clatter of blocks, all were obliterated by the sea. All it held was a deep thrum, the landing ship’s screws, and the hammer thud of his heart.

  He got his mask adjusted and cleared just as he bobbed back up. Terger was at the deck edge. A wave covered him; when it passed, his partner was gone. In the lower half of his mask, a vague plume of bubbles blossomed.

  Gordon took a last look around, at the iron-gray sky, the dripping line from Sumter leaping again into that terrible tautness. Faces lined the rail of the reeling minesweeper: Maudit dressed and ready; Everett gripping the lifeline, the other hand holding a stopwatch, his eyes fixed on the sea.

  Gordon’s left hand moved then. Bubbles roaring in his ears, he sank away from the light.

  * * *

  Visibility was okay, but there was even less illumination penetrating than he’d feared. This would have to be done quickly.

  Terger came into view. A double trail of bubbles showed he too was valving buoyancy. Gordon pulled out his buddy line. One end snap-hooked to his belt, the other to the other diver’s line. That should give them enough room to work. He glanced at his gauge and signaled. Terger nodded and they finned toward the vague shadow above.

  The stern came into clear view, the twin screws and rudders motionless, sharp-edged and black. They were heaving up and down, dragging down clouds of salt foam. Again Gordon felt the same dry dread he’d breathed on deck, waiting to go in.

  There are things, if a man’s promised to do them, he ought to no matter what.

  He swam forward along the port side until the cofferdam came into view. A dirge boomed through the water as it battered against the planks, twisting and turning on the hogging line. He waved Terger off and made for it.

  As he passed the turn of the bilge, the surge caught him, sucking him violently up and down, five or six feet with every roll. He didn’t try to fight or resist, just kept grimly swimming until he was up on the flailing box. He stopped a few feet off, sculling with his hands, searching along the hull.

  A faint tapping forward … he moved up a few feet and saw it. The inlet was covered with a slimy bronze grating. He saw Terger’s eyes fasten to it, too.

  Well, no point in waiting. He finned forward and grabbed the box with both arms.

  The surge spun him instantly and slammed him headfirst into the hull. He blinked broken light out of his eyes and tried to fend off with his elbows. He soared up till it was bright, then down till it was dark. Bubbles seethed around him. The box was too high. He yanked on the line, and it suddenly came loose and fell over his head. Holding his breath, he untangled it from his regulator, then vented the last bit of air from his vest.

  Should be a rope inside the box … there it was, the end neatly whipped with small stuff. This had to go through the grate. Hugging the splintered pine to his chest, he fought his way back to the inlet. It went up and down at a dizzying rate. Again the surge sent him tumbling. Confused, disoriented by repeated blows, he began to suspect this wasn’t going to work.

  He felt Terger next to him. The other diver grabbed the cofferdam and shook the rope at him. Gordon nodded, released the box, and got the fingers of his left hand into the grate.

  It was like grabbing a maddened whale. His arm was almost wrenched off as the hull dragged him through the water. He hugged it, reducing his resistance, and poked the whipped end through. He fed in four feet of it before letting go. As he did so, he pulled out his knife and rapped hard three times with the butt.

  A pinging crack in his ears. One of the cherry bombs they signaled with. He’d come up in a minute. They were almost done.

  Suction, and lots of it. They must have opened the flapper. He pushed off from the grate, signaling to Terger. The other diver, six feet away, had oriented the box with its open side toward the ship, and now lunged in with it.

  It suck-slammed into place over the grate. They hammered with fists and knife until it slid sideways, centered. Simultaneously, they thrust themselves away and swam clear.

  Or tried to. But the ship’s motion had changed. They were being sucked backward. He saw with horror Terger slammed against the skeg, then dragged aft toward the screws. Sharp as they were … he twisted to brace himself and hauled with all his strength on the buddy line. The other man saw his danger, too, and kicked, fought, till his shadow separated from the hull.

  They surfaced into a rage of water, wind, and rain. Lifted on a monstrous crest, Gordon saw for just a second the minesweeper drifted sideways out of the lee, the steadying line trailing from her stern. Then the squall wiped everything away.

  He felt rather than saw Terger surface beside him, then fight his way over. When they were face-to-face, he raised his wrist. Gordon nodded. There was blood on the other diver’s mask, but he’d gotten a compass bearing. He raised his hand and jabbed his thumb down violently.

  At ten feet, they joined up and swam due east. The sea had gone mad, tossing them about so swiftly the needle on his depth gauge ticked like a windshield wiper. Then something dragged across his back. He flinched, then realized what it was. He turned over, grabbing for the wonderful rough thickness of the steadying line, snapped near the mother ship but streaming back from the minesweeper’s stern.

  They pulled themselves up hand over hand, and broke surface again thirty feet off Audacity’s stern. It loomed above Gordon huge and unclimbable as a bucking cliff, stained and splintered with decades of collisions and patches. At one moment, he could see the eroded tips of the screw blades; at the next, green sea gnawed at the deck and he looked down at the now brightly lit fantail. There was no hope of yelling above the scream of the wind, but he waved.

  One of the boatswains saw him. Faces swung. A moment later, a heaving line uncoiled in the air, the yellow monkey’s-fist wind-lofted far beyond them. He ignored it. There was no way they were going back aboard over the stern.

  Or the side, either. In fact, he had no idea how they were getting back aboard.

  The sea lifted them again and he glimpsed Lem Everett, momentarily at eye level, hanging on to the boatswain, shouting into his ear. The wave dropped away and Gordon sank dizzily. But the next time he came up he saw seamen at the starboard davit, struggling to swing it outboard.

  They waited till the yellow horse collar was in the water, then submerged and swam up the starboard side. It was almost dark now. Finally, they collided with it. Gordon helped Terger in first. Four men hauled at the tackle. The first-class dangled slowly up, streaming water, and was swung inboard.

  Then it was his turn. When the tackle slacked and his feet hit the deck, he lost his balance and fell, banging his tanks on wood with the toll of a muffled bell.

  Everett helped him up. Other hands tripped his tanks, stripped his belt and vest off. “She snapped all of a sudden,” the banker shouted over the wind. “Didn’t you hear my signal?”

  “We were just about done by then. I wanted to finish up.”

  Glancing beyond him, Gordon saw Sumter’s stern, the towline coming taut again; they were gathering away. He turned his attention to the deck, and to Terger. He was sitting down, and Maudit was working off his hood.

  Under it the grizzled hair was clotted black. The paramedic probed it with his fingers, then shrugged suddenly. “Scalp. She bleeds like hell, Leroy, but we get her stitched up, feed you a brandy, you feel like new.”

  “Senior Chief.”

  Gordon turned, to confront the captain, hatless and bulky in foul-weather gear. “Glad you made it,” Hunnicutt said.

  “So am I. Sir.”

  The captain looked at Terger. “He okay?”

  “Just cuts. He was sucked into the props.”


  “Good thing they weren’t turning.” He looked back at Gordon. “Uh, Senior … thanks.”

  “We follow orders, Captain. But I still intend to file that protest.”

  Hunnicutt’s face went still. Then he turned away, suddenly, and went below.

  “Okay, let’s get this gear below!” shouted Everett. “All of it! Clean it and dry it out. Burgee, grab that tank before it goes over the side!”

  Gordon sat on the deck, working his fingers. He’d hurt them in that wrestle with the grating. But they’d got it done. Got it done, all right, and thank God none of his men had died.

  When he looked up again, Kearn’s eyes were on him. But the sweep officer only scowled.

  13

  U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  THREE hundred miles southeast of Hormuz, the Arabian Sea was clear as cobalt glass, marbled with streaks of foam that glowed in the sunlight. The crests, up to fifteen feet in the Gulf of Oman, had dropped to eight to ten, chivvied along by a northwesterly wind. The scattered clouds looked as if they’d just been dry-cleaned. The horizon was a serrated blade to the throat of a sky so clear and high it made Dan’s eyes tear.

  It was hard to look away. Even the busiest man will glance at a passing girl, and today Thalassa was more beautiful than any human woman. After the narrow Gulf, the Indian Ocean was like being released from a dirty prison cell. One you had to share with two homicidal maniacs.

  Shaking his head at the analogy—it was just too apt—he blinked, tugged his cap down to shade his eyes, and concentrated on the chart.

  Chief McQueen’s 1100 fix showed them an hour east of Point Orange, the convoy rendezvous. Dan confirmed the satellite fix with loran and advised the OOD to adjust course left three degrees.

  Navigation hadn’t always been that easy. When he’d first gone to sea, the Navy had still depended on sextants and chronometers. Now the phrase star fix had a quaint sound, like raising steam. He smiled faintly as he entered their position in the log, then strolled out on the wing.

  It was comfortable, warm, but the wind, not long out of Central Asia, remembered its mountain passage. He leaned against the coaming, gazing out.

  Astern, a shrinking speck, was San Jose. They’d just finished an hour alongside her. Underway replenishments were never quite routine. When two hulls were a hundred feet apart, speed sucked them together, and several ships every year scarred their sides and their captains’ careers. But Shaker had taken Van Zandt in with dash. He’d made the approach at twenty knots and cut speed just as his bow passed the AFS’s stern, settling into the notch like a housewife parking at a Safeway. In ten minutes, the black hoses were turgid, ramming JP-5 into the frigate’s voids.

  Farther aft, the traffic went the other way. Clamped-down pallets of combustible gear swayed across from the flight deck and disappeared into the oiler’s capacious holds. In return came spare parts, ammunition, and food. In sixty minutes, the evolution was complete and Shaker commenced his turnaway. A degree or two of rudder at first, then a whine of power as she surged into a hard turn west.

  Back for her third convoy. Back to the Gulf.

  More deliberately—there was no hurry for her—the stores ship had come about, too, headed east to rejoin the Indian Ocean Battle Group: seven combatants, including Forrestal and the new Ticonderoga-class cruiser Mobile Bay. They would trail the convoy to the mouth of the Strait. From there, the escorts would proceed alone.

  That’s the life, Dan thought now, looking after her. No worries. Just leisurely two-hundred-mile squares and every couple of months volleyball and beer in Diego Garcia.

  But it didn’t take much soul-searching to know he’d rather be where he was. Beans and bullets were necessities. Carriers, Tridents, laser programs—they were great. For some other kind of war. But this one had caught the Pentagon off base. The deep-water task forces were almost irrelevant. It was the small boys, frigates, minesweepers, destroyers, that would hold or lose the Middle East.

  Dan didn’t think of himself as a man of war. He didn’t love violence, or talk as though he did. But if the country needed him here, here was where he wanted to be.

  He wondered again whether he really belonged in the service. So far, the answer had always come up yes. Sometimes, though, the margin had been narrower than the flip of a coin.

  In the end, it wasn’t pay or living conditions that mattered. It was patriotism that kept men in and leadership that drove them out. Too often, the peacetime Navy bred overcautious, unimaginative careerists, officers and chiefs more concerned with promotions and benefits than with their men or their profession.

  But now he was seeing something new. A new kind of leader, forceful, fearless, ready and even eager for battle. Something the Navy had evolved, before, only in wartime.

  But mightn’t this unexpected war produce an unexpected kind of leader? It was something to think about. Wonder about. And hope for.

  Because without it, he had the feeling they were going to lose.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, they were at lunch when the captain’s phone buzzed. Shaker unhooked it as the conversation died. When he hung up, he wiped his lips, then slipped the napkin into its silver ring. His arms bulged under rolled-up sleeves as he hoisted himself to his feet. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said. “The convoy’s in sight.”

  Dan followed him topside. They stood together as white specks slowly pushed over the horizon into huge ships, sheer-walled, their empty hulls looming out of the water.

  The merchant captains had been asked to form a line. As usual, they hadn’t been able to agree how, or hadn’t cared to try. They were all over the sea, steaming slowly on five different courses.

  Shaker asked Steve Charaler, who had the deck, whether anyone else had shown up. The lieutenant said Gallery had reported by radio, but Charles Adams was still enroute.

  “Who’ve we got here?” was his next question. Dan reached for the op order. It listed two American merchants, Exxon Pacific, New Orleans, and Borinquen, San Juan; and three reflagged Kuwaitis. There were three warships in the escort. Gallery and Van Zandt would be under tactical command of Commodore Bartholomew Nauman, embarked on Charles Adams. Mobile Bay would trail them in through Hormuz, tracking the air picture.

  “Well, he ain’t here yet,” said Shaker, apparently meaning the commodore. He tilted his ball cap back and squinted out at the merchants. “Dan, you’ve done this before, what’s the best way to get these jokers pointed in the same direction?”

  “Basically just talk ’em in, Captain. They don’t have secure comms, so we use bridge-to-bridge, channel twelve. Some of them can take flashing light, if you go slow.”

  Shaker seized the handset and scowled at the radar screen. “Yeah, but which one’s which? What a clusterfuck. Uh, Gas Prince, this is U.S.S. Van Zandt, hull number nine-one, over.”

  It took over an hour to jockey, cajole, and threaten the tankers into a line. Borinquen, the Puerto Rican flag, didn’t want to lead. Shaker gave her captain a choice: Take his assigned position or head for Kuwait alone. This silenced him, and gradually order emerged.

  Meanwhile Gallery had poked up her mast top to southward. Dan studied her through the Big Eyes, twenty-power binoculars hard-mounted on the coaming. It was unsettling, like an out-of-body experience, watching a sister ship under way. Bow on, the Perrys were good-looking ships. Only from astern did they remind you of cracker boxes, or tractor-trailers painted gray.

  Charles Adams came on the net half an hour later. The old DDG was forty miles away, closing at twenty-eight knots. Shaker shifted to a scrambled circuit and discussed the first leg with the commodore. Nauman wanted them on two-nine-zero. They put the change out to Borinquen. The others followed her casually around, sheering out several hundred yards to either side.

  “Good God,” muttered Shaker. “How far have we got to walk these dogs?”

  “Nine hundred miles. All the way to Kuwait.”

  “Jesus Christ.… Okay, OTC wants us off the convoy’s
port bow. Let’s double-time over there, Steve. Say zero-five-zero on the leader, five thousand.”

  Charaler gave the order for full speed and came left, estimating the course to station, then refining his solution on a maneuvering board. Dan liked the way he did it, smooth, smart, correct. He and Wise were neck and neck for number one among Van Zandt’s 0-3s, come fitness report time.

  “What have we got set up down in Sonar, XO?” Shaker asked him.

  “Condition II Red, Captain. Full wartime watch.”

  “Let’s make sure.” Shaker pressed the intercom. “Sonar, Bridge.”

  “Sonar aye.”

  “You guys on the bubble down there? What kind of search are we running?”

  “We’re pinging active on the SQS-56, Captain. Boundary conditions give us a predicted range of ten thousand yards.”

  Dan wondered why he was bothering with the sonar. Shaker gazed blankly at the lead tanker, then pressed transmit again. “That’s not too good.”

  “It’ll get a lot worse in the Goo, Captain.” That was sailor slang for the Gulf of Oman. “And once we get past the Strait, sonar picture turns to shit. Too shallow, and thermoclines up the ying-yang. He could be counting the blades on our prop and we’d never see him.”

  “Great … Lieutenant Pensker down there?”

  “No, sir. He was here about an hour ago, then he left.”

  “Okay, do the best you can. If you see anything suspicious, I’ll send the fly-boys out for a look.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Shaker signed off. He looked around the bridge. “Dan, you know where Pensker is?”

  “Not at the moment. Wait, maybe I do.”

  He leaned to the window and looked down. On the forecastle, a long white weapon, fins folded, rested on the launcher rail. Two gunner’s mates in coveralls were working its nose cone over with scrubbing cleanser. A third figure, trailing the wires of a headset, was the black weapons officer.

  “He’s up forward, inspecting the missiles.”