China Sea (10 page)

The cuisine reminded him of Bahrain. Lamb and rice in a baked
biryani
. Hot nan bread. A tray of sweet hand-molded items and fruits. The officers ate with tableware, though he'd seen the enlisted men, on the mess decks, dipping in with their right hands. There wasn't much talking at first, till Khashar, wiping his mustache with a napkin, said, “
Alhamdulilah
.” The others murmured and sat back as the steward served out sweet tea white with milk.

Khashar turned to Dan. “I was watching you up on the bow this morning. Communing with nature?”

“Something like that.” They discussed the buildup, Desert Shield, the increase in U.S. forces Bush had announced just before they sailed. Dan was cautious about his opinions, but they seemed unanimous in their protests that Saddam had to be put down, that he was as much a menace to the Arab world as he was to the West.

*   *   *

AT 1300 he pressed the buzzer outside Radio. A face appeared at the grating; the door clicked and unlocked.

The little room was walled by gear racks, but most were empty. Power cables and antenna feeds dangled like tied-off arteries. The main transmitters had been left aboard, but all the cryptographic gear had been stripped out and jumpers plugged in to make the system work without them. Radioman Chief Compline was one of the new gains. He was short and rotund, and something was wrong with one of his legs, making him lurch when he walked. Dan sat and began going over the daily situation report. Paragraph 1 gave their noon position and whether they were ahead or behind planned progress. It gave percentages for potable water, feed water, fuel, and the rate of consumption. Para. 2 was a training update. Para. 3 was materiel status and casualty reports, including parts or circuit cards they'd need en route. Para. 4 was personnel issues, and Para 5 was any comments or concerns he had as the officer in charge.

“Look all right, sir?” said Compline.

“Send it out.” He handed it to the chief, who swiveled around and pulled a key toward him. Dan watched fascinated as he dot-dashed it out. High-frequency CW, same as the
Titanic
had sent as she went down, in an age of computers talking to each other in thirty-two-bit code.

*   *   *

THE deck was rolling too hard to go for a run, so he drifted through the spaces. The very air smelled different. She was turning into a Pakistani ship already.

At 1500 General Quarters sounded. He knew the schedule, so he was on the bridge wing when the alarm went. The high-pitched electronic bonging was unchanged, but the excited Urdu that followed it over the 1MC struck his ear strangely. The thunder of boots and the slamming of watertight doors, the clang of dogging wrenches, were reassuringly the same. He was tucking his pants cuffs into his socks when Khashar and one of the junior officers undogged the door and came out to join him.

Khashar ignored him, speaking rapidly to the OOD. Dan slid away to give them room, steadying himself against the signal-light stanchion as
Tughril
rolled. The seas were growing. Toward midocean a tongue poked down from the stationary low that parked itself south of Iceland. He wouldn't be surprised if they hit some heavy weather.

Behind him a rushing roar spooled upward. Brown smoke shot out, unscrolling across the pearly sky.
Tughril
accelerated smoothly, roll diminishing as her speed increased. Peering into the pilothouse, he saw the handles of the lee helm at flank. Dan noted the time. Khashar was the boss, but with five tons of fuel an hour going up the stack, he might benefit from a reminder if he left the pedal down too long.

Below and aft of him Dan could look down now directly onto the boat deck, where the crew was pulling the rubberized gun covers off the forty-millimeter.

He'd never seen one in active service, but he recalled these long barrels with their wraparound springs and cone-shaped flash hiders from World War II movies. They'd been manufactured for the big push on Japan and then greased and laid away in some cavernous government warehouse to sleep the decades away. Now oiled steel gleamed in the dull sea light as the trainer spun furiously at a handwheel. A crewman in flash gear and heavy gloves hoisted a curved clip of the fixed shells, looking for all the world like oversize rifle cartridges. From above him came a yell and a clatter, and looking up, he saw the twenty-millimeter swing to the same bearing.

Hammered together from fruit crates, shoring lumber, and empty drums, a spindly shape bobbed in the smoothed road of
Tughril
's wake. Then it began to sway, picking up the rhythm of the waves. The ship plowed on, at full speed now, throwing out a hissing arc of spray each time the bow guillotined down into a sea.

Khashar swung himself up into his seat on the starboard wing, crossing his short legs jauntily. Dan leaned over the splinter shield, shading his eyes as the frigate leaned into a snap turn. A paint can darted from some hidden nook and launched itself over the side like an old-fashioned depth charge. It hit the sea and was immediately overwhelmed and obliterated in the tearing surf
Tughril
now dragged behind her.

He took Khashar's intent. Drop the target; run straight for a mile or two; then execute two ninety-degree turns, till you were headed back parallel to your original course but offset a thousand yards from it. The target was out of sight now, behind the superstructure as
Tughril
began to roll beam on. He leaned in to check the radar for any passing traffic.

Another hard right at flank speed. Khashar liked to maneuver fast and with a lot of resultant motion. The wind thrummed in the signal halliards, pressing itself against his face.

Dan got his ear protectors out of the little vial on his belt. The clamor of wind and sea retreated, replaced by the thump of his heart. He focused on the target, rolling violently half a mile away.

The sound made him flinch, the whip crack of the twenties above, the rivet hammer of the fifties. The five-inch unleashed a blast that rattled the gratings under his boots, and a choking cloud of brown powder smoke swept back on the wind. Below him the forty fired with alternate balls of instantaneous flame, succeeded by puffs of burnt propellant sucked instantly aft as the ship bulled forward. Wave spray broke in a cold glowing spatter across his face. Brass clink-tinkled across nonskid.

A thousand yards away, ivory spray hearted with black high-explosive smoke suddenly sutured the water, some well short of the target, others far over. He opened his mouth to the captain, then closed it. If they'd been firing at a real ship, some of those overshots would be superstructure hits. Some of the short rounds would ricochet up off the water.

And it really, really wasn't his concern anymore.

*   *   *

LATE that night he was carrying a towel under his arm, headed aft in his worn gray sweats for the weight room, when the counterbalanced door to the escape trunk at Frame 100 slammed open in front of him and sailors rushed out yelling into the narrow passageway. He caught “
Chaloy jaldi jaldi
,” or words to that effect. Flattened against the bulkhead, he grabbed at one of them. “What is it? What happened?” but was thrown off. “
Jaldi Jahaz say bahar niklo
!”

As soon as the trunk was clear he jerked the door open and stared down.

The stink of burning oil hit his face, and with it shouts muffled by steel. At the same moment the GQ alarm went. He stuck his head into the passageway, but all he saw were rapidly retreating backs. He grabbed the ladder and swung himself out.

The emergency escape trunk was a square steel well, closed off from the spaces through which it passed by watertight access doors. Its vertical walls were set with welded-on handholds. Some anonymous artisan had put in innumerable hours wrapping each rung with marline work, not just for decoration but also to improve the grip for desperate greasy hands. As he climbed rapidly downward, another wave of shouting sailors surged up. He swung into the corner, catching a boot in the neck as they clambered over him, then kicked himself free and dropped. His running shoes rang on the inner bottom. He jerked the door open that led into the lower level of the engine room.

Scorching hot air hit his face. He was looking aft and thwartships, at the space-filling bulk of the low-pressure turbines and the main reduction gear. To his left were an electrical panel and a vacant log desk. The telephone pendulumed at the end of its cord. His ear tuned through the tremendous hum of the gears, the multitudinous vibrations of pumps and turbines. He didn't hear anything out of the ordinary. The only hints of danger were the haze that filled the slanting brightly lit air and the unmistakable smell of burning petrochemicals.

More excited voices on the 1MC. Someone slammed the door open at the top of the trunk. Letting go the bottom door, Dan grabbed an emergency escape breathing kit off a rack. If the smoke thickened, it would give him a few minutes. Then he moved cautiously out into the space, slipping across the slick gratings beneath which oil-sheened water eddied. His eye snagged on a CO
2
extinguisher. He flipped the clamps free and dragged it after him, staying low to avoid the smoke. He couldn't stay long. He had no safety line, no backup man to get him out if he lost consciousness. Maybe the best thing to do was retreat, get out, and trip the Halon flood. But if anybody was still down here, unconscious or hurt, he'd be smothered by the inert gas.

The smoke rippled up on a current of heated air above the huge gray bulk of the reduction gear casing, disappearing through the gratings into the upper level. He couldn't see where it was coming from till he crouched between the lube oil service pumps. He dropped to his knees and peered beneath the gray sheer sides of the casing, down through perforated metal into the shadowy recesses of the bilge. Only it wasn't shadowy now. It glowed with smoky orange flame. The flame danced quickly over a darkly gleaming surface, turning an ebony pool to a lake of fire.

He glanced behind him, to see Al Sansone and Jim Armey stepping out of the trunk. Dan pointed, voice useless in the clamor of the turbines.

The first-class took off running, plunging past Dan into the smoke down the aisle between the main gear and main condenser. Armey took a more direct route up, leaping onto the condenser intake and hammering a grating loose from below with the heel of his hand. Suddenly alone again, Dan jumped back as a meter-long tongue of smoky red flame licked up between his Nikes. He jerked the cylinder around, gripped the release lever, then hesitated. In this closed space, if he started pumping out carbon dioxide, what were they going to breathe? Pushing that thought aside, he jerked the pin out and aimed the nozzle, vision dissolving from the rapidly growing heat.

*   *   *

THEY had the fire out in less than ten minutes, working together just the way they'd all drilled over and over for a Class Bravo fire in a main space: Sansone coming down the ladder from the fire-hose rack, Armey feeding slack off the reel. Dan had circled the sump tank, driving the flames back with roaring jets of cold white gas, till Sansone reached him. Then he'd dropped the extinguisher and fallen in as number two man, helping the boilerman control the suddenly rigid hose as Armey spun the valve open. Sansone braced his boots on the grating and pulled the bail back to Mist. Suddenly the smoke vanished, the water bloom cutting through the haze. The flames retreated as the mist advanced, the blast of seawater fog not so much quenching the flames as sucking heat from them till they could no longer sustain ignition. They circled the casing, Sansone bending to send the mist probing and swirling into the bilge, chasing and exterminating a final lunge of the flames.

Then it was out. The boiler tech laid the hose carefully out in the aisle, and they took a break, wheezing, clutching their knees.

Armey came down the ladder with a flashlight. He pulled up a grating and disappeared beneath it. He emerged from under the lube oil purifier, forearms and chest smeared with oil and soot. “It's out!” he bawled, over a clamor Dan realized was lessening, winding down.

He recalled himself then, remembering the haste and terror with which the engine-room watch had shoved past him, and sprinted to the log desk and grabbed the handset. No one answered. He tried the 21MC next and finally raised a voice that switched only reluctantly to English. “We abandon the ship,” it said. “Get on deck. Help us put boats in water.”

“You're
what
? Listen. I'm in the engine room. The fire's out. Get the steaming watch back down here. We need the repair party, need a blower rigged for desmoking.” He had to argue for some time before he was sure the message had gotten across.

“What's going on up there?” Armey said, coming up, wiping at his eyes with a bright blue bandanna.

“Apparently they were trying to launch the boats.”

The engineer gaped. “For a li'l lube oil fire like that?”

Sansone said, “That's the way it's been down here since day one, sir. Anything goes wrong, it's the will of Allah. No point doing anything about it. I figure we watch over 'em every second, it's even money we get to Karachi before it all goes to shit in a real serious way.”

Dan nodded slowly. He looked around the space, then looked at his hands. Armey offered his bandanna. Silently Dan took it.

7

THE AZORES

THE land was a black barrier, mountaintops erased by the low overcast. They'd been volcanoes in the dim past, the spiny outcroppings of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The sea heaved uneasily, deep blue as an old watch cap, still dimpled by rain from the low steel clouds. When Dan lifted his binoculars he could make out the humpy peninsula that screened the old city and, past it, straggling up the mountain, the glowing whitewashed buildings of Horta, capital of the Azores and the largest city on the island of Fayal.

For a week after the fire they'd steamed east by southeast, angling toward an imaginary point well south of Fayal. In all that time the seas had grown, harried and maddened hour after hour by a roaring wind that had backed around, opposing itself to all progress eastward. Fleet Weather reversed its original recommendation after forty-eight hours, advising ships in the central Atlantic to stay north of forty degrees north latitude. Too late for them, of course; they'd doglegged south following the meteorologists' earlier advice and had to pay for it in two days of thirty-foot seas and seventy-knot winds.