by David Poyer
“Twenty-two miles, sir.”
“From there to the Ardeshir field?”
“Wait one … forty-eight miles.”
“Mister Firzhak! What’s your course to station?”
“I’m steering by eye, sir, to come in astern of Gallery.”
“Okay. Boatswain! Call the mess decks, have them set up for early chow, sandwiches or whatever they got can be fixed quick.”
Shaker busied himself with the intercom. He told Guerra, in main control, to put all pumps on line and bring up another generator. He reviewed weapons and electronic readiness with Al Wise, the TAO. Then he joined Lenson and McQueen over the chart.
Dan, glancing at him, could hardly believe this was the same man he’d found slumped in his chair that morning. Shaker was grinning, eyes lit like strobes. “I’ll hold off GQ till the guys eat. Christ, I hope nobody up the line wimps out on that execute. What do you think, XO? Will the buggers come out and fight?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“They’ve got the ships. Sahand and Sabalan are inport Bushehr. They could intercept us. And there’s a fighter squadron there, too … those stupid bastards!” He battered his fist down on the tan coast of Asia. “That’s where we should hit! Not some fucking oil platform; that doesn’t do a thing but stir them up! Where the hell is Pensker?”
“Here, sir, behind you.”
Shaker and the black officer went out on the wing. Dan could hear them discussing the proper ammo with which to destroy an oil rig. Then their voices fell, borne away by the fresh wind as Van Zandt, rolling as the sea kicked up, sliced her way eastward, toward Iran.
* * *
Cardiff joined ten miles west of the hold point. Dan watched her slide into line ahead, a trim modern frigate in the lighter British battle gray. The White Ensign fluttered at her masthead, matching the cream her stem peeled off of a sea that grew greener with each mile. She fell in astern of Gallery, just ahead of Van Zandt.
The execute order reached them shortly thereafter. At the picket station, Nauman ordered a turn-in-sequence to the east. They corpened around, each warship turning in the swirl left by the previous one’s rudder. Under a burning sky, they increased speed gradually as Adams brought her boilers on line, and finally steadied at thirty.
The sea was empty. Not a dhow, not a craft of any kind showed on it or on their screens as they crossed the invisible line that marked Iranian-controlled sea. It looked the same on the far side, a sullen green with here and there a drifting slick, its edges refracting the dull sunlight into a thousand muted hues.
Shaker muttered, staring ahead through his binoculars, “Dan, you take CIC for this action. I’ll stay here.”
“Aye, sir.”
Combat was as ever, cold and blue-lit, but someone had taped a placard over the plotting table. It read: SO WHAT IF IRANIANS ARE SHORT, DARK, AND SMELLY. SCREW ’EM ALL.
He circled the room, checking each scope and position, and at last settled into the chair. Al Wise grinned at him. The operations officer looked excited and at the same time scared. Pale and thin, a detail man, he was devoted to his cats; he had three, named after Soviet radars, which he boarded with his fiancée during deployments. “Good times, hey, XO?” he said now.
“Good times?” said Dan. “Sorry, I’m a little slow today.”
“Never mind. You going to play TAO, or you want to second-guess me?”
“I’ll do it. You back me up.”
“Got it.” The ops boss screwed his head back into earphones. He was on Air Defense Net Alfa; if speedboats or planes showed up, that was how the OTC would coordinate the SAG’s defense.
Dan sat motionless, feeling the tension coil in his stomach, as if his guts had turned to springs. There was nothing to do now but wait.
* * *
An hour later, he could make out the field on radar. It looked like a glowing spiderweb. From each platform, glittering lines spun outward, pipelines to satellite wells. And each spider was itself woven, he knew, into the submerged pumping network back to Khārk. Pips moved within the web, service boats, probably guard boats, too; the new Boghammers that the Swedes—always happy to coin kroners from neutrality—had sold Khomeini in the face of an international embargo. Not that the Reagan administration could throw stones.… The range closed steadily. Down here he wouldn’t see much of the action. If Iran took up their challenge, though, this was where the battle would be fought from.
Nauman slowed the group when they were ten miles away, and sprinted ahead in Adams. A loose routine had evolved for platform attacks. The men on them, civilian workers and a few guards with rifles, got ten minutes warning in Farsi, French, and English before the destroyers went in. It seemed to take hours. The men in CIC didn’t fidget, didn’t move. They were glued to the screens.
At last Nauman’s signal came over PRITAC. Follow him in, and commence fire in turn.
Van Zandt accelerated instantly, heeling to hard rudder. Dan switched to the gunnery circuit as Wise said, “Adams has commenced firing.”
“Very well.”
Time crawled by. He stared at the screen. Occasionally, he could see speckles near the spider. Plumes of spray from ricochets and near misses. Wise, from the coordination net, announced who was firing.
At last, the captain’s voice came on the line. “Mount thirty-one, load fifty rounds point det to last station screw feeder.”
Terry Pensker, his voice hard and eager: “Fifty rounds PD loaded.”
Shaker: “Stand by … commence fire.”
Too bad they were last, he thought. Adams carried two five-inch mounts and was known in the fleet as a shooting ship. Gallery and Cardiff had taken their turns, too. No way Shaker would give up a chance, though. And the platforms, spiderweb frameworks of steel, were notoriously difficult to damage with shellfire.
The 76 slammed suddenly above them, making the plotting boards shudder. Three slow rounds followed, spotting rounds. He could hear the empty shell cases clang on the deck, and the whoosh of high-pressure air that cleared the bore. Then Pensker ordered rapid continuous and the firing began in earnest, as fast and steady as a good carpenter nails a wall, slam, slam, slam, till the ready magazine was empty.
A moment later the 1MC came on. “On the Van Zandt: This is the Captain speaking. For those of you below, we’ve just completed a firing run on an Iranian oil platform. It’s on fire. I count ten hits.… Now the lead ship in our group is hauling around. Looks like we’re going to make another pass. Petty officers, break off as many men as possible for a look-see. The fire is orange-red, hundreds of feet high. Loads of smoke, dense and black—”
Shaker went on talking, describing the flashes as the British ship’s shells hit, for all the world like a sports announcer. Dan sat motionless in the padded chair, pulling at his earlobe. He thought of going outside, watching the shells tear apart what American or Dutch engineers had built. But it didn’t tempt him. Not even Shaker thought this was the answer to the problems that had brought Van Zandt to the Gulf, or even a step toward them.
At least it was going smoothly. There’d been two boats near the platform, but they’d retreated eastward after picking up the crew. But if he were the Iranians—
“Tracks two-one-oh-one, two-one-oh-two, two-one-oh-three turning west.”
“Say again,” Dan said instantly to the man who was watching the air picture. “Al, better get on this.”
“Got them. Three aircraft over the coast. Turning our way.”
“Range?”
“Seventy miles, closing.”
He leaned over the petty officer’s chair. There they were, three hostile-designated contacts, detaching themselves from the Bushehr peninsula. They weren’t showing on radar yet. This data was digital, transmitted from the AWACs.
“Type?”
“F-4s, I think, sir,” called the EW operator.
Lenson watched them for a long moment. Phantoms. U.S.-made, supplied when Iran was the bulwark of the Nixon doctrine. Integral machin
e guns and cannon, and they could carry rockets, iron bombs, or TV-guided Mavericks.
They were making for Ardeshir, all right. They’d be overhead in ten minutes. It was almost like the encounter at Hormuz. Only this time there was no doubt as to what they were.
“Lieutenant Pensker. Your target: three bogeys at one-two-seven. Designate to STIR. Load Standard to the rail. Next round same.” He pressed the intercom. “Captain, CIC. Three fighters heading our way from the mainland.”
“Take good care of them, Dan. Does Nauman know about ’em?”
“He should, they’re coming over NTDS.”
“Call him, make sure. Keep me posted.”
“Aye, sir.” He snapped off and looked at Wise. The ops boss nodded, already relaying the alert to the flagship.
Now, as the TAO brought designation and tracking up, Dan backed off from the situation, forced himself to relax and think. Nauman would most likely designate the incoming aircraft to one of the frigates. Their missile systems and radars were newer than the 1960-era Adams. But Gallery was off to starboard. Sure enough, the speaker said then, “Comanche, this is Bounty Hunter. Your target, aircraft, track two-one-oh-one, oh-two, oh-three, bearing one-one-zero, range fifty miles.”
“Comanche” was Van Zandt. “Illuminate,” said Dan. Pensker, at the weapons console, acknowledged and called back: “Illuminating.… lock-on! Solid track, good solution on leading bogey.”
“Designate to Standard. This will be a three-round engagement with setup for immediate refire.”
“Designated.”
“Missile on.”
“First round, standing by to fire.”
“Bridge, Combat: To the captain: Group of three tight bogeys have been designated our target. We’re locked on, awaiting release authority for three-round engagement.”
Shaker, tersely: “You have my permission to fire when OTC orders.”
“Roger that … Sound fire-warning bell,” he told Pensker. No one was supposed to be near the launcher during GQ, but they might as well take the precaution.
Now he returned his attention to the screen. Turn back, he thought, trying to will the oncoming pilots to break off, to heed the warning the Mark 92 lock-on would be droning in their headphones. He remembered another man, far away and years ago, a man he’d had to kill with his bare hands. He didn’t like to kill. But he didn’t want his men to die, either. Turn back. Don’t make me fire.
The pips jumped another mile forward. “Altitude?” he asked crisply.
“Ten thousand.”
“Confirm IFF hostile.” Unlikely they’d be anything else, out of Bushehr in a V formation, but it was another check.
“Squawking mode two. They’re ragheads, all right, and military,” said Pensker.
“Standard commands and responses, Lieutenant.” He voiced the rebuke automatically. His mind was running independently now, like one of the computers around him. The range and altitude were within the missile envelope. They ought to fire soon, to allow for a second salvo in case the first missed.
He remembered another day when he’d waited for aircraft to come in, just like this. A stormy day in the Mediterranean. That time all he’d had were three-inch popguns, too slow to follow jets around, much less hit them. Now he had missiles, 76mm, Phalanx, multilayered defense. He had to admit, it felt a hell of a lot better.
“Thirty miles.”
“Hard paint,” said Pensker tightly. “We ought to fire now. Sir! We ought to—”
“Take it easy, Terry.”
“Comanche, Bounty Hunter: weapons free,” said the speaker. Dan paused for just a second. The moment he’d hoped would never come again was here.
He said, his voice devoid of all emotion, “Shoot.”
The deck plates vibrated to the bellow of a rocket engine. It receded, and he visualized the second round, thrust up too fast for eye to follow out of its magazine onto the rail, twin probes locking in for the data feed, then the launcher swinging it down at the same time it trained, fast as a striking viper. Another howl dwindled off. One thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. Four thousand. A third. “Missiles away,” shouted Pensker, his voice charged, happy.
Dan stared at the screen. Their targets could still escape. Turn tail and outrace the oncoming weapons … chaff wouldn’t decoy a Standard, even if they carried it … the symbols jumped forward again.
Twenty miles. “Standby,” said Pensker. “Intercept!”
The update came. There were only two symbols on the screen. At the next sweep, there was one.
“Bogey three’s outbound.”
“Combat, Bridge: We see smoke on the horizon. What’s the scoop?”
“Two bogeys off the scope, sir, presume splashed. The third one”—Pensker hung fire for a moment, straining his eyes into the fluorescent glow—“third one’s turned tail. Headed back for shore.”
Shaker’s voice again, boisterous as a boy’s at recess: “Nice work! Damn nice work! Teach them to fuck with the U.S. Navy!”
Dan stood by the plotting table while the room went noisy around him, men slapping each other on the back, laughing and yelling. Something brushed his face and he glanced up.
IRANIANS ARE SHORT, DARK, AND
His hand came up without thought, and the paper tore, half staying with the tape, the rest coming free in his fist. Crumpled, it bounced on the deck, rolled under a repeater.
“Hey, XO!”
“What’d you do that for, sir?”
He almost couldn’t speak through the sick feeling. “They were brave men. They died for their country.”
“They were ragheads, XO!”
“You can bet they were cheering, Commander, when they shot down Buck and Chunky,” put in another voice: Pensker’s.
Someone gripped his arm. It was Al Wise. “Sit down, Dan,” he murmured, steering him for the CO’s chair. “Maybe you’re right. But they don’t want to hear that now. Right now, they think they’ve won.”
* * *
Half an hour later, from the fantail, he looked back as Van Zandt, still last in line, hammered westward at flank speed.
Behind them the Gulf was burning. Flames guttered orange-red, licking upward along twisted steel. They writhed inside a cocoon of sooty smoke like snakes fighting to be born. And from them, welling and then slowly toppling to lie along the whole eastern horizon, was an implacable blackness, like an early and unnatural night.
He clung to the rail, and the weight of the helmet bent down his head.
Destruction! The sole and last communication possible between those who had defined each other as evil incarnate. Only the flight of weapons could cross the walls Iran and America had built between them. And like flames in oil, each act of revenge inflamed the other side to greater hate and greater vengeance.
If you are struck, you strike back twice as hard; this was the law every child learns on the playground, and the relationship among states. This time, America was lucky. This was a war fought at sea and in the air, where her technology, resources, and military skill gave her triumph after triumph. But her very success drove her enemy to the tactics of the weak: suicide craft, terrorism, hostage taking, the whole spectrum of “uncivilized” warfare.
But how could it ever end? How could the scales ever balance?
And now what horror would the other side commit?
* * *
“Now secure from general quarters. Set the condition two underway watch. On deck, watch section port, officers section port.”
He sat listlessly in the padded chair in Combat. They’d passed the twenty-eight-degree line, then. He hadn’t been up to the bridge to see. Now Wise groaned, got up, stretched. “What do you say, sir, grab some dinner?”
“I guess so.”
He shuffled below unenthusiastically. Sat with the other officers in the TV nook, none of them speaking, avoiding even each others’ eyes. Firzhak fiddled with the television. They could get a grainy black and white image of a man in a burnoose reading something, bu
t no communication penetrated the sand hiss of static. At last, he snapped it off and picked up the February Naval Engineers Journal. On the end table, stripped of its walnut veneer to bare metal, lay a sweat-stained fore-and-aft cap with scratched lieutenant’s bars. No one touched it, though they looked at it from time to time. It had been Schweinberg’s.
Have to write a letter, Dan thought through the numbness. Parents. Next of kin. The last he’d heard, a patrol boat was searching for the wreckage. He doubted they’d find anything. No, the rowdy young pilots were gone. Just … like … that.
“Bastards,” muttered Guerra. The engineer’s pitted face was poisonous. No one asked who he meant.
“Sir, we’re ready to serve,” said the steward, leaning over Dan.
He started and glanced around. “Anyone seen the captain?”
“Still on the bridge, I think, XO.”
He got up wearily and punched the bogen. Shaker answered. His voice dragged, too. They were all feeling it, Dan thought. He hung up. “He’ll be down in a second.”
The JOs took their positions around the table, standing behind their chairs. Shaker came in a few minutes later. “Sit down, guys.”
Dan ordered the salad. When it came, he was suddenly hungry. For a while there was no sound but the clink of silver, a muttered request for salt.
“Well,” said Shaker at last, clearing his throat. “Frank, Terry, your gear worked pretty good today.”
“Yessir.”
“I don’t know how we looked overall out there, though. The four of us must have fired a thousand rounds at that thing. Saw a hell of a lot of misses. Right through the trusswork, or under the platform.”
“I saw that,” said Bob Ekdahl. “But if it was a ship, sir, one of their gunboats, those would all have been hits.”
“Good point,” said Shaker, his face lightening. “But those are bum gun targets. Tell you what, tell the gunners to brush up on their demolition. Next time, we’ll just scare the Persians off it, send the whaleboat over, and blow it up.”
Dan didn’t say anything. He felt detached from this conversation, though he wasn’t sure why. Shaker turned to him next. “Nice work down in CIC, Dan, Al. And I mean nice. Blew them out of the air clean as a whistle. Two out of three.”
