by David Poyer
But no one seemed to know. He removed his helmet and scratched his head. It was good they had distress connectivity, if they kept taking water and couldn’t get ahead of the flames, or couldn’t get power back. But he couldn’t suck data, and issue commands, through a straw that narrow. He had to either transfer command, or …
“Red Hawk 202 reports on deck Sejong, awaiting orders,” the talker said.
“Good. Can we patch them to … no, we can’t. No power.” He paced the bridge port to starboard, glancing out each time he turned. The haze was still thickening. The fires were eating deeper into Savo’s guts. He coughed into his fist, then spat a dark wad into a bucket in the corner. Shit, he had to make a fucking decision. The rest of the task force could be under attack right now, somewhere else under this tranquil blue dawn.
Say he turned over command, since he couldn’t exercise it himself. But to whom? The only other flag officer out here was Min Jun Jung. He couldn’t turn over U.S. forces to a Korean, could he?
The truth was, he didn’t want to hand off the task force. Not just yet, and not to Jung. He couldn’t shake the memory of how, in the Taiwan Strait, the Korean had galloped straight for the guns, and almost taken them all to their doom. Dan had had to yank hard on the reins, and even then, the other admiral had nearly gotten away from him.
What if Jung decided to immolate Task Force 76 on the pyre of killing Chinese, or of his ambition, or of his desire to relive the exploits of some medieval admiral who’d defeated a fleet many times the size of his own? No. The guy was just too aggressive.
Well then, could he turn it over to the next senior captain, Tom Wescott on Hampton Roads? No. That would be a slap in the face Jung would never forgive.
Or was all this just Daniel V. Lenson, admiral for a day, rationalizing keeping command for himself? “Fuck,” he mumbled, and caught a glance from the helmsman. Everywhere he turned, it was Catch-22. But he had to do something.
“Red Hawk 202 calling again. Requesting orders,” the phone talker said.
Dan seized the seaman’s shoulder, shouting above the growing roar of the fire aft. “Tell him … is that Wilker?… tell him, return to home plate. For personnel transfer to Hampton Roads.”
Cheryl jerked her head up, almost rotating it like an owl to look back at him. “I’m shifting my flag,” he told her. “Bring 202 back in. Get the two—no, the three worst-wounded back to the flight deck.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Shifting my flag. I can’t fight from here.”
“You’re leaving us, Admiral?” Van Gogh said, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Dan turned away, suddenly furious. He wasn’t only responsible for Savo, but for the rest of the force too. Without sensors and comms, a task force commander was as useless as a rifleman without cartridges. “Going below, to get ready,” he snapped to Staurulakis. Then turned away, crossed to the door, and slid down the ladder, gripping the worn-smooth handrails to brake his descent.
Was that a disgruntled murmur behind him, as the door sealed? The inner voice that always questioned him formed it into words, though he probably hadn’t really heard them.
The big hero put us on the bull’s-eye. Now, when it gets too hot, he’s jumping ship.
* * *
FIFTEEN minutes later, on the flight deck. Savo was still without propulsion, though Staurulakis’s parting report said McMottie hoped to get #2B turbine and the port shaft in operation, and the #3 generator was being manual-started with bleed air. The rudder was still jammed, though. He’d promised to send help as soon as he figured out who was nearest. The ship had swung, slowly, the sail area of her forward superstructure catching the wind. Now she rode stern to the west, and morning shadows reached across the flight deck. The midships area was still on fire. A huge tower of black smoke leaned to the west, heading for Japan.
Dan gazed into an azure sea with a two-foot chop. Savo was down by the stern. Sinking, unless they could get power to the pumps. He remembered a day in the Persian Gulf, when a ship had slipped away under him, and finally gone down. Leaving two hundred men in the water, abandoned …
He shook the memory off, squinting up as 202 descended. The downblast from its rotors lashed spray off a ruffled sea. Strafer Wilker, the pilot, had done a slow orbit, checking out the damage, before lining up for his approach. He flared out, hovered, hanging there. Then dropped, planting the tires on the worn nonskid with a squeak and a thump.
First out on the flight deck were the casualty team, toting litters. Dunkie Ryan trotted alongside, holding up an IV bag. These perhaps might be saved with CAT scans and trauma surgery. With a hot refuel on Hampton Roads, Wilker could hopscotch east to the carriers, which had surgeons and operating rooms.
“Min Su, we ready?” Dan yelled to the reedy officer beside him. Hwang nodded. Others had offered to go too. Ron Gault, his self-appointed bodyguard. Captain Enzweiler. He’d refused them with a curt shake of the head. Just him, the ROKN liaison, and the wounded. The Korean clutched his briefcase and a carry bag.
Dan’s own baggage was even lighter. His notebook, and the clothes on his back. The damage-control leader had halted him in the passageway when he’d tried to reach his cabin. It had been in the blast area from one of the missiles. Thank God he’d been in CIC when the warheads blew through. More serious, though, was that the unit commander’s cabin was just forward of SPY Radar Room #3, where all signal processing took place. If that had been wiped out too, Savo would have been sidelined for months.
The last litter vanished inside the helo, and the LSO beckoned. Bending into the rotor blast, the two senior officers trotted toward the aircraft. Hwang climbed in ahead of Lenson. Dan accepted a cranial and an inflatable vest from the crewman, and hauled himself up and in as the door/boarding steps rose to seal and lock behind him.
The litters covered the bare aluminum deck. A crewman was attaching IV bags to the overhead. Mute in the engine noise, he pointed Dan and Hwang to fold-down seats behind the cockpit. Strafer and the copilot, a rangy smart-ass named “Storm” Differey, waved. Wilker pointed up, hoisted his eyebrows. Dan nodded. Go, he mouthed back.
The engine rose to a whining thunder. Red Hawk lifted, fast.
Dan leaned forward and twirled his finger. Wilker nodded, and the aircraft banked away to the right. Dan struggled against the seat belt to peer down through a small, only partially transparent window. From here the cruiser looked hollowed out as a rotten tooth. Her whole midships smoked and flamed. A slick of guttering fuel surrounded her like blood spilling from a mortal wound. The floating corpse he’d glimpsed from the bridge was nowhere in sight.
He pressed his fist to his mouth, fighting nausea. Not just at the damage, but at having to leave her. It felt like deserting a dying child. Like … fleeing. Had that been contempt, in the carefully noncommital expressions of the flight deck crew? They couldn’t really think that, could they? Not if he came back for them. Not if he kept fighting, just from a different ship.
Wilker pointed … northeast?… and Dan nodded, sitting back. He buried his face in his hands, trying to muffle a choked, agonized sob, maybe more of a muted scream, as Hwang, beside him, looked away.
The helo leveled and dropped. They sped over the azure sea perhaps two hundred feet up. Dan blotted his eyes and tried to straighten. His neck was pure agony, and his throat kept threatening to close. He glanced around for oxygen, just in case, but saw only the slim cylinder of a bailout bottle clamped to the bulkhead.
Hwang bent to his ear. Shouted, “What is your intention now, Admiral?”
“Shift flag to Hampton Roads. Get someone alongside Savo, either put those fires out or take the crew aboard. Then get the hell out of Dodge.”
The Korean looked puzzled at the reference to Dodge, but he sat back. Dan wanted to ask how much farther to the other cruiser, but forced himself to relax too. They’d be there soon enough.
The helicopter swayed. Probably hitting an air current.
; Then suddenly yawed violently, flinging them against the webbing. The litters slid scraping across the deck. Several bangs or thuds went off in quick succession. The sea wheeled up until they were looking straight down on it through the side window. No, not just a thermal. Dan grabbed for a handhold, but missed. Then the bank reversed, hauling over hard to the right. The litters halted their slide, reversed it, and cascaded toward him. Someone screamed as the IV lines went taut, then tore free to dangle, gleaming needles dancing on plastic tubing.
Through the frosted window he glimpsed a loop of white smoke in the air. He couldn’t see where it had come from, only the exhaust trail drawn against blue. A bright point of pure fire, describing a double-looped figure rather like a π.
The point of fire emerged from the last descending stroke near the water. Then rose again. Pointing, now, up at them.
A terrific bang and flash overhead deafened and blinded him. For a few seconds, whirling and falling in a jumbled, chaotic blur, he howled mindlessly, arms flung wide, but finding nothing to grip. Then another heavy shock jolted the fuselage.
Dazed, he found himself upside down, being rocked violently while hanging from the web restraints. The seat seemed to have collapsed around his ass. The ringing in his ears subsided, to the absence of engine noise. The silence swelled, then burst like a bubble.
He registered the chuckle and gurgle of water pouring in, and thumps and thrashings from the cockpit. He pried reluctant eyes open to dim light and a jumble of patients on litters dumped facedown. One of the wounded, conscious, was staring right at him. Even as Dan blinked, water surged to cover the man’s mouth, nose, hair. He struggled as a bloody froth rose, bubbles bursting on the still-rising water.
Dan scrabbled across his own waist, looking for the release. The straps fell away, and so did he, dropping out of the collapsed seat frame headfirst into a tumble of water and bodies on the overhead of the upside-down cabin. He rolled to his feet, legs splashing in knee-deep water, and tried to right the upended litters. Jammed together, they refused to budge, even when he braced his boots and yanked.
Okay, maybe he couldn’t help these men. Even if he could get them out, they were too badly wounded to swim. That left Hwang … Wilker … the flight crewman … Differey.
The window through which he’d glimpsed whatever had hit them bulged inward and split, releasing a gelid flood of sea. Water was flooding in from forward, too. The fuselage angled down, surging the sea to his waist. He wheeled in the near dark, and staggered back as Hwang fell out of his seat, nearly into Dan’s arms. They both lost their footing and collapsed back into the water.
Darkness, bubbles, his flailing hands hitting things floating about …
He came back up choking and spitting, to an even darker interior. Were they fucking sinking already? In the dunker egress training at Miramar, they’d been told that though most helicopters inverted after crashing, they’d have at least a few seconds before an SH-60 lost enough air to submerge. He could still hear the instructor’s voice. Locate a point of reference. Wait for violent motion to stop. Don’t inflate your vest until you’ve egressed the aircraft.
They were inverted, check. But already nose down, and water was pouring in fast through the shattered windows and windscreen. Both pilots sat slumped, helmeted heads lolling. Hwang was shouting something in Korean. Dan pointed to the pilots and splashed aft, groping for the crewman. His boots found something soft. He hauled it to the surface. Hwang’s fucking luggage. He dropped it and groped again, plunging his face into the cold sea. Caught cloth, and dragged it up.
The crewman’s head lolled. Puckered holes showed where something had penetrated one temple. Dan shook him, but got no response. His fingers, exploring the wound, came away pink with diluted blood.
The water was at his chin. Rising faster than ever. One more quick suck of breath, and it was over his head.
Underwater. Wavery blue light. A long, gangly form, silhouetted from behind. Hwang was kicking at the exit door. It resisted, then toppled open slowly. The liaison started to pull himself out, then turned back and reached in for something. A black object, with a strap.
Planting his boots in a yielding mass, hauling the limp weight of the crewman behind him, Dan pushed them both toward the light. But when he tried to lift his foot again, he couldn’t. His boot had plunged through the metal mesh of a litter. He tried to shake it free, then twist it out, but it wouldn’t move. And the litter, and what was on it, were too heavy to drag.
Discard it, then … jackknifing at the waist, he pulled the velcro tab loose and unzipped one boot, then the other. Finally free, he tried for the door again.
But he was out of breath now. The blue light seemed dimmer. Pressure leaned on his eardrums. The copter was sinking faster. He swallowed to buy a few more seconds and swam upward, lips reaching for an airspace to breathe from. But his skull boonged into aluminum without encountering one.
Everything was going black when his scrabbling fingers recognized a slim cylinder. He jerked it from its mounting. A regulator dangled on a stub of hose. He twisted the knurled knob and jammed the mouthpiece of the emergency escape bottle between his teeth. Cleared it, and tried a breath.
With air he immediately felt calmer, much more in control. Inhaling deeply, he hauled himself toward the blue light. Grabbing the sides of the door, he looked up.
A silvery mirror heaved far above. Golden rays searched down, playing over the tail boom, a ragged stump of shredded rotor. The turbine hung loose, stripped of sheathing, blasted nearly free of the airframe.
Then he halted, uncertain. A micro bottle like this wouldn’t hold much. Enough for nine or ten breaths.
But maybe he had enough time to get someone else out.
Inside the fuselage once again, he pushed and twisted like a moray in a coral head through the narrow opening leading into the cockpit.
Both pilots were still strapped in, slumped as if knocked unconscious. Curved chunks of the shattered canopy lay in their laps. The water was above their heads, around which blue-black tendrils of blood curled. Dan yanked at their restraints, then felt for the releases. A clack echoed through the water and Differey floated up. Dan shoved him toward the gap where the canopy had been, but the copilot snagged on some kind of comm wire. It took several more seconds to locate where it plugged in and disconnect it. He grabbed the lanyard on Differey’s life jacket and yanked it. The CO2 cartridge popped and he braced his back and kicked him through the windshield with both feet as the vest began inflating.
He got his hands on Wilker next. He was feeling around the pilot’s upper chest for the release, his own torso twisted awkwardly in the constricted space, when he realized each succeeding breath was coming harder.
The bailout was running empty. Time to bail, if he wanted to make it to the surface himself. Back to the exit door, or out through the windshield? Floating bodies one way. Jagged Perspex to snag on and hang him up, the other.
Wilker opened his eyes suddenly. Blood seeped from his nose and cuts on his face. One hand groped up, across his vest. The other locked into Lenson’s, gripping it with enormous force.
Dan saw what was wrong. The instrument panel had buckled onto Wilker’s legs, pinning him.
A sudden vertigo, a slippage around them. The glimmering surface receded and dimmed. The wrecked, inverted fuselage was rolling over again as it sank away. Dizzied, disoriented, Dan could no longer tell which way led up. He fought grimly with the pilot’s webbing. But it wouldn’t release. Wilker was struggling too, one hand clawing at his vest, the other trying, now, to push Dan away.
Colors flashed at the edge of his vision. Blackness flooded in behind them.
A lavender beam of light.
A double-looped π of smoke, scribed with incredible beauty against blue sea.
His newborn daughter’s blue-eyed gaze, meeting his for the first time.
He was walking beneath a shaded arbor. White flowers decorated it, hearted with bright yellow, and lush green waxy-
looking leaves among which fat bees slowly buzzed. The pavement was of small, richly patterned tile in complex geometric designs of carmine and jade and cream. The path ahead led to a turning, where the arbor’s shadow lay deeper, the bees’ buzzing louder, the scent of the white flowers with their golden hearts overpoweringly stronger. With each step he neared that turning. But he couldn’t see what lay past it.
Still struggling with the belt, pinned into the slowly rotating fuselage, he sank away helplessly into the black void of the sea.
21
The Philippine Sea
IN the darkness, noise. The stenches of fuel and seawater and close-cramped bodies, diarrhea and vomit and bilgewater. Sweat and bean-farts and sea-stink. Wet metal weeps overhead. The clink and scrape of equipment. The deafening roar of engines. Vibration, through the thin metal that surrounds them. The rush and clatter of spray. Beneath it all, the ragged breathing of burdened men and women.
The sickening, endless heave of a massive object in an ocean swell.
Night. Hector Ramos hunches crammed in the hull of an amphibious assault vehicle, an amtrac, elbow to elbow with twenty-four other marines. They’ve been here for seven hours now, boarding after a heavy evening meal as the machine squatted in the well of an air-cushion landing craft. The plan was to launch at midnight. But something delayed that, then delayed it again. Now they have to shit, to piss, but there’s nowhere to go and no room even to move.
“It can’t be long to sunrise,” someone mutters.
A tide of grumbling rises. “What’s taking so fucking long?”
“We’re gonna be hitting the beach at fucking daylight.”
“They gotta know we’re coming,” Troy Whipkey mutters, spooned next to Hector.
There’s barely room to inflate their lungs. The red interior light flickers as gear sways on the bulkheads. Someone nearby retches again. “They gotta see us on radar,” Troy adds. “This is gonna be a fucking slaughter.”
Hector’s afraid he’s right. But no point complaining. There’s no way not to go now, so he’s eager to get it over with. To find out what he’s made of, what going to war is like.
