China Sea (17 page)

Uddin said, “That is not quite correct. The provisions for termination, I do not recall the exact terminology, but they state that the material involved may revert only for certain reasons, such as the U.S. needing the ship in case of war or the receiving country not meeting the lease payment. Which case is it, Captain Sasko? War or nonperformance? And why
now
? I am sure you have known about our nuclear programs for years, with your wonderful satellites.”

“I would say noncompliance with the nonproliferation pact.”

“Which no nation bordered by China and India could dare take seriously. We have invested several million dollars in acquiring this ship and the others scheduled to follow her. This is extremely offensive to my government. However, in the interests of continuing a defense relationship that has been of value to both sides for many years, I have been directed by my service to acquiesce in
Tughril
's temporary relinquishment. Contrary to my own instincts in the matter. We insist, however, that we retain title, and if this matter is not resolved in a reasonable period of time, we will pursue restitution in the appropriate diplomatic venues and in U.S. and international courts.”

Dan waited as heavy silence larded the too-warm air. Finally he cleared his throat. “Uh, maybe I misunderstood, but you mentioned something about off-loading ammunition.”

Uddin barely turned his head. “The ship herself may have been leased, but the ordnance aboard was clearly purchased outright. We own it, and our personnel are setting up to off-load it now.”

“You're not taking my ammunition!”

Three four-stripers glared at him simultaneously. Khashar succeeded in getting the first word out. “You see. This is the sort of ‘cooperation' I have had to put up with.”

“Relax, Lieutenant Commander,” Sasko said warningly, extending a hand as if to hold the others back from physically attacking Dan. “This will all be settled at a higher level than ours.”

Dan set his teeth, forcing himself back into his chair. They were retaliating for losing the ship by taking every round of ammo aboard. “Well—I understand that, but look; you've got to leave me something for self-defense. Fifty-cal, at the very least. Some of the twenty-mil.”

No one answered him. The attaché said, looking away, “It's unpleasant for all concerned. But the bottom line: As the senior officer on scene, I have verbal direction for Commander Lenson to assume duties as OIC, receive an additional draft of augmentees, and get under way at once. You will not permit your men to go into town, Lenson. Anti-American sentiment is very high at the moment.”

“Meaning, they would be torn apart,” Uddin said, as if he felt a certain satisfaction at the prospect.

*   *   *

GRAY GMC trucks showed up half an hour later, and the Pakistanis began shifting ammunition to them. Dan made sure Doolan was on deck enforcing safety precautions, then went down to his stateroom and started punching the pubs to put together the reports he had to make. He kept glancing at the phone, expecting a call from Khashar. Despite their differences, he expected some sort of turnover, even if frosty. But it never came. When he gave up at last and phoned the CO's cabin, no one picked up.

He got his cap and went out on the main deck. Tosito and Zabounian were watching the last of the forty-mil going over in cases, two sailors to a case. Troops watched stone-faced from the pier, automatic rifles slung ready to hand. “You seen the captain?” Dan asked them.

“Aren't you him?” said Zabounian.

“I mean Khashar.”

“Special K left with the chief of staff. Took the log with him, too. I started a fresh one. One question: What's our name now?
Gaddis
or
Tughril
?”

“Make it
Gaddis
again,” said Dan.

“They leaving us any ammo at all, Skipper?” Tosito asked him.

“We might have a couple of clips left for the quarterdeck pistols.”

“You serious, sir?”

“Well, not quite. The small-arms ammunition and the pyrotechnics are still ours, but that's it. I tried to talk them out of a self-defense allotment of the heavier stuff, but there wasn't any give. Dave, I put together a draft logistics request message. Check it out and add what else we need; give it to Captain Sasko in the wardroom.” He took a breath, tried to shake himself into something resembling an in-charge mode. “We better get hot. They mentioned augmentees, but we can't wait. They want us out of here ASAP. I'll call Jim and make sure he has a steaming watch. If you can take the bridge and Chick the deck gang—”

“There's somebody coming,” said Tosito.

A bus was trundling down the pier, weaving through the departing ordnance trucks. The troops flagged it down, climbed aboard, then waved it through. Men in civvies, white and black but unmistakably American from their size and clothes and the way they carried themselves. They filed up the brow, lugging seabags and suitcases.

A familiar voice from behind him. Juskoviac, in khakis now, rendering a reluctant salute. Dan returned it with the same lack of enthusiasm.

“I didn't volunteer for this,” were the first words out of his ex-exec's mouth.

“I didn't either, Greg. But here we are. Are you listening?”

Sullenly: “I'm listening.”

“You know these men? Where they came from?”

“Whoever didn't want 'em, far as I know.”

“I see. Well, get them into their berthing areas. Get 'em into uniform. Pass the word: under way in three hours. Tell Jim to fuel as quickly as possible. Have Chick inventory every round we have left. Dave, see what consumables you can scare up and get that logistics request off. Muster everybody on the fantail at eleven hundred for word.”

At 1100 the crew, or what he had for one, fell in for muster, instruction, and inspection. Dan looked them over, noting the paucity of officers and chiefs. He had Chick Doolan, Jim Armey, Dave Zabounian. Engelhart, with his melancholy visage. And now Juskoviac, already looking cheerful and aggressive again, which meant absolutely zip. He had Compline, Tosito, and Mellows. Sansone, too. It was time to fleet him up to chief and damn the paperwork. Not a heavy command structure and a damn light crew to go to sea with.

He took five minutes to welcome the new men. He made sure they had bunks and were assigned to divisions. Once they got to sea he'd promulgate a watch, quarter, and station bill, set up watch sections, and shake things down into steaming order. He went on to the tasking that Sasko had passed verbally, with the promise of official orders from CINCPAC—Commander in Chief, Pacific—to follow shortly.

He said dryly, pitching his voice to carry over the creak of seagulls and the talking that would not stop in the ranks, “Since the withdrawal of deployed forces for Desert Shield started, piracy has flared up in the Singapore area. Cargo ships, tankers, and yachts have been boarded, crews killed, cargoes and even ships stolen. In the most recent incident, a Dutch captain and Filipino first officer were shot on the bridge by pirates who emptied a tanker's safe.

“Local nations thought they had a handle on the situation by leaning on Jakarta, resulting in twenty Indonesians being shot. And it did stop, for a while. But now that most of the Seventh Fleet has deployed to the Gulf, it's broken out again, and now the gangs are more ruthless and better-organized.

“Right now State and UN authorities are trying to coordinate combined action against the pirates. But what's left of the Pac Fleet has to stick close to Korea, in case things heat up there.

“That leaves us as the only readily available force for antipirate work. So we are getting under way in one hour, first stop: Singapore. Detailed directions will follow, but it is most likely we will take our place in an ad hoc task force made up from those states that border the China Sea and Malacca Straits area.

“Are there any questions?”

The men stared back at him, the new drafts wearing the tough, unimpressed faces sailors shipped when they joined a new command. He nodded to Juskoviac. “Take charge and dismiss the men. Sea detail at noon sharp.”

Sixty minutes later, he stood on the bridge and looked around slowly, still unable to believe it. Then he pressed the switch on the 21MC. “Main control, bridge.”

“Main control aye.”

“Ready up, Jim?”

“Ready to answer all bells, Skipper.” Armey sounded relieved, too. “But you know, they wouldn't furnish fuel. We're down to fifty-two percent.”

“We've still got diesel we can burn, right? For the motor generators?”

“Yeah, we still got that.”

“And you know, I can't blame them. It really was their ship.”

“Well, it's ours again now.” For the first time since Dan had known him, the engineer sounded almost relaxed.

Dan clicked the button twice and went out on the wing. The line handlers on the pier were gone. The tug was gone, too. The Pakis weren't making anything easy. Well, he could understand that, too.

“Take in all lines!” he yelled down, and Topmark began shouting orders. The last dripping line snaked up through the fairleads, and yellow water burbled as the screw began to revolve. The pier fell away, and the ship that was now his again slowly wheeled, pointing her bow toward the flat blue edge beyond Manora Point as from the mast, once more, the Stars and Stripes blazed out like white smoke and red fire in a steady wind from the sea.

III

TNTF

12

01° 09' N, 103° 51' E: THE STRAITS OF SINGAPORE

THE humid air was in the high eighties. Rain that smelled of petroleum smoke and decaying vegetation was pouring out of a gray sky, drumming and whooshing on
Gaddis
's forecastle and windshields as if she were cycling through a Robo Wash. Dan stood irresolute at the chart table, having penciled in a course curling in around Sentosa Island to the pilot pickup point.

He felt wrung out and groggy, not just from the tropic heat some seventy miles from the equator but also from having been awake for two days and nights. The trek south along the coast of India, then east past Sri Lanka and across to the Nicobars had been routine till then. But a cracked bilge pump casing followed by a night passage of the Strait of Malacca didn't make for calm nerves.

A cracked casing could ruin a skipper's sleep all by itself, since if it gave way it could flood the engine room in a matter of minutes; but the nighttime run through the strait had been the capper. The traffic separation scheme required westbound traffic to hug the Malaysian side of the deepwater channel and eastbound ships the coast of Sumatra, to the south. He could deal with weirdly lighted local fishing craft, crossing traffic, strong tidal currents, and numerous shoals and sandbanks. But around 0200, a huge contact had detached itself from the glowworm-green parade across the scope and cut due south, into the eastbound lane. The effect was like a tractor-trailer plowing across a median into oncoming rush-hour traffic, except that heavily laden tankers and containerships have no brakes. Ships had backed and veered in all directions, and from a frictionless flow shipping had splintered into chaos for hours, rammed even tighter by the still-incoming pressure at either end of the strait. At one point a huge supertanker had come barreling down on
Gaddis
as she hugged the ten-fathom curve against Bengkalis Island. Somehow they'd missed each other, the frigate crowded into water so shallow Armey had called up telling him they were sucking mud into the intakes and they'd have silted exchanger tubes if he didn't get into deeper water. And Dan shouting back to get everybody topside fast if he heard the collision alarm. But somehow they'd squeezed past each other, the tanker towering over them in the dark, then gradually fading to a shrinking stern light. And after some hours of the Vessel Traffic Information Service manager shouting himself hoarse over Channel 73, the scattering of shiplights, like confused and wandering stars, had finally resumed their steady plod east and west, welding Asia and Europe and the Americas with a bridge of floating steel.

And now dawn and heat and the monsoon wind pushing black clouds trailing rain like the stinging tentacles of Portuguese men-of-war across the blue-green hills of Sumatra. The prickly scatter of island returns on the radar and ahead the tip of Malaysia and the city-state where he hoped for fuel and parts and ammo. Without them, he wasn't going anywhere. And orders; he needed orders and a chat with the local authorities.

Ah, the joys of command. This was what he'd wanted, wasn't it?

The funny thing: despite it all, it was.

Scrubbing his face hard with his palms, he forced himself to concentrate once again.

*   *   *

BY noon they were clipped into a back pocket of the world's second busiest port, moored outboard of a worn-out breakbulk whose rusty indented sides looked down on
Gaddis'
s pilothouse. When he was satisfied the lines were right, he passed “secure the engines” down to Main Control. The rain had let up temporarily, trailing its skirts inland, and he looked across the south basin at a shining mass of glass and steel rising from a jumble of particolored roofs. To seaward spread a second city of anchored ships, scores of them riding the dark green surface. Beyond Singapore low hills rolled into the distance, the deep light-sucking hue of rain forest and jungle. Dan remembered how the Japanese had bicycled down out of them in 1941 to take the “impregnable” fortress from the rear. Not Western imperialism's finest moment.

The squealer, while he was musing on history. He snatched it off the bulkhead. “Captain.”

“Sir, Chick here, on the quarterdeck. Fella down here in a boat says he's the consul.”

“Great, great! Just the boy I was going to try to find. Take him to my stateroom. Tell Usmani coffee and cake, if we have any.”

*   *   *