China Sea (18 page)

THE consul was extremely meager and almost seven feet tall, an astonishing apparition whose head brushed the acoustic-tiled overhead of Dan's cabin. He wore a gray silk pin-striped suit and carried a calfskin briefcase and a furled umbrella. They shook hands. “Dan Lenson, commanding.”

“Pleased to meet you, Captain. Derek Kingon, U.S. consul to the Republic of Singapore. Our younger visitors call me ‘Klingon.' I really have no idea why.” Kingon had a Boston accent so pronounced and nasal that for a moment Dan's brain hesitated, trying to decode what he had just said. But at last it computed, and he waved Usmani in as the messman appeared at the door. The Pakistani set down coffee and a dish of crackers—supplies were getting short—and left, easing the door to. Dan drained his cup and poured another from the carafe, fighting to regain some alertness. Kingon eyed the crackers doubtfully, took a perfunctory sip at the coffee.

“Well, and how may I be of service? I can recommend some tour companies. Your crew will want to see Pasir Panjang and the Tiger Balm Gardens. All guides Tourist Promotion Board–certified. If you can give me some idea of how many—”

The squealer. Dan said, “Excuse me,” and grabbed it. “CO.”

“Fuel barge alongside, Skipper. They want to know how we're going to pay.”

“Tell him he can start pumping, I'm with the consul now and we're going to discuss that.” Dan hung up. “Sorry, Mr. Klingon, I mean, damn it,
Kingon
, you were saying…”

“Tours, about how many men you would be needing tickets for—”

“I'm sorry.” Dan suddenly felt apprehensive. “We can talk about tours later, but I'd hoped you'd have instructions for me. I've been making reports daily, asking for orders, but I haven't gotten any response. I left Karachi for here on verbal instructions. It would make me feel a lot better to get confirmation. We need to talk about how to charge our fuel and water and port fees, too.”

“How are your communications?”

“Not good. I'd like to send a cable or something back to Pensacola, if you could help me do that. For the last few days there didn't seem to be anyone on the circuit when we were ready to transmit. I've been sending my sitreps anyway, in case the problem's in my receiver, but I want to send some kind of land-line wake-up call.”

“I can take care of telegrams or telex, if you would like me to. As for your fuel and so forth, well, all I can say is that Navy ships often call here. The Regional Contracting Center arranges supplies, I believe. I'd contact them with any problems in that arena.” The consul waited, cup poised. “Anything else?”

“You really don't have anything for me? Have you checked at your office?”

Kingon smiled. “I'm sorry, Captain. I wish I did. All I can suggest is the regional Navy center, as I said—”

“You wouldn't have a number, would you?”

“Oh. Certainly!” Kingon brightened, taking out a notebook. He gave Dan two numbers, for admin and officer in charge, and a home number for the OIC as well.

Kingon moved on into what was apparently a set speech. Singapore was clean, efficient, and relatively free of corruption, but at the same time, it was not far from a police state in some respects. There was one party, the People's Action Party. Criticism of it or of the prime minister was not tolerated. Drugs, long hair on men, and any sort of public rowdiness would attract instant police attention. One could be fined up to five hundred dollars Singaporean for jaywalking outside the double yellow crossing lines, for failing to flush a public toilet, for smoking in a public place. “You might have heard about an American teenager, his parents are residents here, who was publicly caned for possession of marijuana. Mr. Lee Kuan Yew is very concerned about narcotics. Warn your crew that both possession and attempted purchase are illegal here. The punishments are quite draconian.”

Dan started to say he didn't have any drug activities aboard, but then he remembered how when he'd been an XO one of the hospitalmen on
Van Zandt
had not only been buying hash ashore and selling it to the crew, but had also been looting morphine from sick bay. The point being just now he had a lot of men aboard he didn't know very well.

That made him think of Usmani, and he said, “I'll make sure they know that, about the liberty environment. Another question. I discovered a stowaway on board after I left Karachi. Hiding under one of the RHIBs. The man who served us a moment ago, actually. He's a Pakistani national. If I might turn him over to you—”

Kingon grimaced and was shaking his head before Dan had gotten past the word
stowaway.
The consul absolutely could not take custody, had neither police powers to confine a man nor funds to send him home. “Nor will the Singaporean authorities accept him. Stowaways are a real headache. No one wants them, and yet the shipowner—I'm thinking merchant captains now, but you're under the same obligation—is required to afford them humanitarian treatment. I'm very much afraid he's going to be your problem for a while. There are two solutions. The legal one is to retain him aboard until you encounter a ship under the Pakistani flag, a warship, I guess—you said he was navy?—and turn him over to its commanding officer.”

“What's the illegal one?”

“Give him an opportunity to escape and look the other way. Only I'd wait till I was somewhere else than here; the island's so small and the authorities are so efficient, you'd have him back in hours.”

Dan said, “Well, he seems happy enough to be aboard, at least for the moment. Thanks for the warning, about the drug laws and so forth. I'll have my XO put it out to the men. And thanks for the offer to send the cable. I'll write that down right now and you can take it ashore with you.”

*   *   *

HE let the starboard watch go ashore at 1300, after warning them along the lines Kingon had laid out. As they trooped up the brow to cross the merchie, boisterous at the prospect of a few hours off the ship, Chief Compline reported that the phone connection was complete. Dan hunched over the little linoleum-surfaced desk in the port-side vestibule and listened to the phone burr at both numbers for the USN contact team. When he tried the home number, a Chinese-sounding female answered. She told him everyone was out. Dan left a brief message saying USS
Oliver Gaddis
was in port, asking someone to call back as soon as possible, but he wasn't totally certain the woman understood.

After which he went out on the fantail and stood irresolutely next to the 40mm tub, wondering if it was going to rain again, wondering what the hell he should do next. He was desperately sleepy but too wound up to turn in now. If he tried, he'd only stare at the overhead for hours. The only answer that suggested itself was to go ashore and get some things done and perhaps take a look around while he was at it. He called down and asked Jim Armey if he had any plans. The engineer said he wanted to visit a marine supply company that might have spare parts for the pump.

*   *   *

“BAN Leong Marine Supply,” Armey told the cabbie, who seemed to be Chinese, as, indeed, most of the people they had seen so far, walking down the pier and then checking in at the port captain's office, had been. He folded his bony length wearily back into the seat. “It's in Tuas Tech Park, if that helps.”

“Tuas Tech Park, Ban Leong, sure, we go there chop-chop,” said the driver. Dan wasn't sure if he was making fun of them or just speaking pidgin.

“She's sure as hell got built up,” Armey said, staring out at the enormous buildings at the city center. They were modern and featureless, geometric and inhuman as electronic components. But closer to ground level, as the cab navigated along painfully clean roads, was the surging life of millions of people crowded onto a tiny island. Their alert black eyes met Dan's as they edged through the street. He caught the glances of attractive Asian women, their features reminding him of Susan's. Then the battered but clean old Honda pulled out onto a modern expressway and headed west. And without any urging or anything on his part Armey suddenly started telling him about coming here in the early eighties, when he'd deployed to the Indian Ocean and Westpac aboard USS
Sterett
, CG-31. “I pulled my first liberties in Singapore and Hong Kong. I was just a kid. I did some stupid things.”

“Who doesn't?”

“I mean really stupid. Things that hurt people.”

Dan sat astonished. It was the first statement of a personal nature he'd heard out of his chief snipe. Finally he ventured, “I pulled mine in the Med. You're young, you screw up sometimes. What the hell, Jim—you learned from it, right?”

Armey didn't answer, and when he looked at the engineer's reflection where he had pressed his face against the glass Dan saw, to his amazement, that he was close to weeping.

When they were done at the chandler's the taxi dropped them back near the waterfront. Armey had clammed up again by then. He was headed to Arab Street to do some shopping. He'd most likely be there a while. Dan took the hint and said he'd check out Change Alley, have an early dinner, then head back to catch up on sleep. When he glanced back a moment later, Armey was lost in the crowd, gone, which seemed odd; he stood a head above nearly all the Singaporeans. He'd ducked down some side street or into some shopfront.

Suddenly Dan realized he was alone.

It was always a shock, after weeks or months at sea. The seaman, the officer, even the commander, who had more privacy than any other aboard, still lived surrounded by others, directed, informed, hemmed in both physically and by the manifold forms of duty. Maybe it was a spiritual discipline. Certainly it chastised the will, for good or ill, because from waking to sleep there need never be any question as to what you “wanted” to do. “You,” as an individual with individual desires, barely existed. Sailors even tended to go “on liberty”—revealing terminology—in conspecific groups, not as individuals, taking the ship with them in microcosm even when ashore. So that now, standing sweating in civilian slacks and light shirt on a street corner on Raffels Quay Road, he felt the same existential dread a marrow cell might, removed from the body and placed in a rich nutrient solution.

A shrine he entered increased his unease. It was thronged with Chinese in bright yellow T-shirts banging gongs and setting off firecrackers. Through the noise and heat and smoke, the smells of gunpowder and incense, joss sticks and sweat, a pudgy man was slicing his flesh with a pair of swords before a statue of a scarlet-faced, grinning god surrounded by a forest of flickering red candles. No one objected to Dan's presence, but he left hastily and headed back toward the waterfront, through twisting streets that became steadily narrower and more thronged. Till he reached the oldest section of town.

Change Alley was an irregular roadway lined on either side with shop houses, two or three merchants selling watches, cameras, boom boxes, small cabinetries, porcelain, carpets from the same open storefront. The streets were nearly impassable with human beings, spilling off the sidewalks into the roadway despite the rules. He priced some toys, thinking of Nan, then remembered: She was in junior high now. A diminutive saleswoman chattered to him in Dutch, tying brightly colored silk scarves around his wrists. After prolonged bargaining, he settled on a teak jewelry cabinet inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Then he stood with the wrapped gift under his arm, staring about at the black-haired river. The Singaporeans had obviously overcome any need for personal space between human bodies. Evening was arriving across the sea. Beyond expressways and the spindly inverted Ls of gantry cranes, standing like watchful herons above building sites, the sky was gradually darkening, the night stealing toward them out of the East like a black falcon spreading its wings over the earth.

*   *   *

HE was having dinner in a storefront restaurant in Little India, eating a flame-hearted curry off banana leaf, when a white-bearded man in a rumpled lightweight suit dropped at an adjoining table with a grunt. Pale blue eyes surrounded by sun wrinkles surveyed Dan and the package at his feet. Then the man muttered gruffly, almost unwillingly, as Dan wiped his fingers, “A brass bird cage is my guess. Arab Street.”

“Actually, it's a jewelry chest. For my daughter.”

“Sorry to interrupt. Shouldn't. Bad habit.”

“Not at all.”

“You're the skipper of that Yank tin can, are ye not?”

On his assent the other leaned forward, crimping his fingers in a hard salutation. “Eric Wedlake, master of MV
Marker Eagle.
I'm the white ro-ro just forward of you. Was inspecting my deck stowage as you slipped in this morning. Saw ye on your bridge. Have not seen your ship before, though, and I've spent a good deal of time out here. And where are you in from?”

Dan invited Wedlake to join him, and they fell into conversation. Wedlake advised him on the
murtaba
, and they ate companionably for a time, the Britisher alternating between asking him about
Gaddis
and telling him about himself. He'd been born in a small port in Somerset called Watchet-on-the-Mud, on the Bristol Channel, taking in esparto grass and pulp for a paper mill and exporting iron ore to South Wales. The very town, he said, on which Samuel Coleridge based “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

“You probably know how the antihero shot the albatross, et cetera, et cetera, and how he lived to retell the tale at a wedding at the ‘church on the kirk,' or something like that. When I was young, I used to sing in the choir of that same church. Then when I was a bit older Mum moved to the Pembroke Dock–Milford Haven area for a while. Had a stint in the Royal Navy, on submarines east of Suez. And then Mr. Eden decided we had no business here and left it to you. Which perhaps you haven't done all that badly, though Vietnam was unfortunate.” He stopped himself. “Perhaps I shouldn't say that, considering, no doubt, that you served there.”