China Sea (39 page)

The jaygee hesitated, gauging the motion of the deck, then let go Dan's chair and slid the length of the pilothouse, ending up at the ladder. Then he was gone, and Doolan said, “Jim seems to be doing OK with that diesel fuel.”

“Yeah, I wouldn't have wanted to go into this with empty tanks. Dave tell you about the radar?”

“I don't like having the ten and the forty both down.”

“Engelhart's doing the best he can, given the weather and parts situations. I told him I didn't want anybody aloft on the mack with this much wind. We still have the Raytheon. Not as much range, but it'll let you know if there's somebody else really dumb out here. Make sure Mellows knows how to keep it tuned and we ought to be OK.”

“Well, I got it. You ought to pack it in; you look like hell. Sir.”

Dan said reluctantly, “Maybe for a little while. The wind and seas may stay about like this. They may increase. Depends on how far away the storm center passes.” He passed a few more cautions. Doolan listened patiently, smiling a little, as if humoring Dan, who found this infuriating. When he was done his department head nodded slowly, looking out at a huge sea that swept in, like a slowly approaching tennis court set on end, and the bow climbed to meet it and suddenly knifed it apart, bursting upward in an explosion of glowing foam.

Doolan murmured, “You know that time in Fayal you saw me with that girl?”

Dan said, surprised, it was so out of left field, “Uh … the dark-haired girl? The one from, uh, Portugal?”

“Yeah. Lavina. Well, I wanted to say something about that.”

“You don't owe me any explanations, Chick.”

“I know, but I'm gonna make one anyway, all right? It's about Jill.”

Dan remembered
Tughril
's commissioning party, a twisted, child-tiny woman in a wheelchair. He said uncomfortably, “You don't need to tell me this, Chick.”

“I don't need to tell you? Then you understand?”

“I don't know if I ‘understand,' but I don't need to. Your sex life is your own damn private business as far as I'm concerned.”

“Well, you know, you respect somebody, you want to get things straight. I don't know why I care what you think, but I do. All I want to say is, Jill knows. All right? She knows and it's all right with her.”

Dan cleared his throat. The husky lieutenant seemed to want some kind of forgiveness or at least comprehension. The skipper as father confessor. But instead of absolution or sympathy or whatever Doolan was asking for, all Dan's suspicions about him suddenly reenergized. If Doolan was the one they dreaded, lying about the state of his marriage was a negligible offense in comparison with his other acts.

Dan said in a low voice, “I hear you, Chick. Anything else you want to get off your chest?”

“No, that's it. Just wanted to let you know I wasn't sneaking around behind her back. I love my wife. I'm not proud of this. But it's all out in the open.”

“I hear you,” Dan said again after a moment. So that was it, then; Doolan wasn't going to confess anything else.

They stood together without speaking for a long time, while the storm boomed and rushed against the echoing steel box they were surrounded by, protected by, and caged by, halfway round the world from home.

*   *   *

HE woke suddenly at the axis of black night, suddenly and fully, as if some obscure never-sleeping nexus in his brain had all at once concluded from its patient monitoring that he was in mortal danger. He sat up, body tense, staring into the dark.

He'd hit his rack at 0400, figuring on two or three hours before dawn broke. Lashed himself in with his bunk strap and a rolled-up blanket to wedge himself in. So this creaking, seesawing, darkness surrounding him must be his cabin; this sensation of leaping and bounding along through the air was
Gaddis
, pitching and surging to an even heavier sea. Closer to the eye, then, but he didn't think they'd have to go through it. The way the wind had veered before midnight told him the center would pass to the south. Unless, of course, it hooked again.… His ear tuned to a chain-rattle from somewhere far away, conducted through the metal to his ear. Then he realized what was so strange about the dark. Aboard ship, no silence was ever completely silent, and no darkness ever completely black. Light filtered through perforations in joiner bulkheads, shone from power-on lights, trickled scarlet as blood from the meshed ventilation gratings that opened on the passageway.

But around him now was the utter black of a cave, and as he swung stocking feet down to cold tile, heart picking up speed, he realized what else was missing: the thousand mechanical sounds that formed the backdrop and warp against which the sounds of the ship in motion existed; a susurrating obbligato as much or as little present to his consciousness as the chirp of crickets and hiccup of frogs were of a summer night. His groping fingertips found his trousers, hung from the speaking tube by his ear, and he got them on and slipped on his Klax and opened the door.

Darkness, except for the yellow glow at the end of the corridor. An emergency lantern, the relay-operated type that only came on when ship's power failed.

He leaned back in and pulled his khaki jacket over his T-shirt, then headed for the bridge as the buzzer sounded behind him. His flashlight sent a red oval dancing ahead. He double-timed up the ladder, grabbing for a handhold as the ship began a roll. In any ship, losing electrical power was a major problem. But in the fast frigates, it could turn very rapidly into a disaster.

The pilothouse was relatively bright with the crossed beams of four emergency lanterns. Chief Compline clung to the gyro. Dan looked for the OOD. The helmsman was standing back from the console, staring at it in consternation. Dan timed himself, lurched forward. He grabbed the hand line a moment before he crashed into Dom Colosimo.

“Just buzzed your cabin, sir. Guess you were on your way up.” The reservist's face gleamed with sweat despite the cold, and Dan knew why.

Knox-class frigates ran on power generated by three steam-powered turbogenerators, 750 kilowatts each, any one of which could handle the normal electrical load. Their sixty-cycle, 450-volt three-phase output was stepped down to 115 volts for hotel services and lighting and stepped up by a motor-generator set to 400 hertz to run the radios, radars, and the other electronic equipment. But that wasn't all you needed power for on this ship.

“What's up?” Dan said quietly.

Colosimo told him their first indication of trouble had been a current reversal in one of the switchboards. At that point they had #2 and #3 ship's service turbogenerators on the line. Apparently the automatic bus transfer had failed, dropping the load.

“Emergency power?” Dan said, pulling the sound-powered handset out of its clip.

“Hasn't come on line for some reason. We've lost steering and—”

At the same moment a light flickered back in the nav shack. Then the radios hissed on, the helm console hummed. The fathometer beeped, and neon numbers flickered too fast to read as it re-initialized. The helmsman whipped the wheel right and left, then cried, “I have control back!”

Colosimo pressed the switch on the reenergized 21MC and began an exchange with Main Control. Dan hoisted himself into his chair, but two sentences into the exchange every pilot light on the bridge suddenly brightened, going intensely hot as if jammed with lightning, then went off again. This time the darkness lasted for about a second and a half before power returned. Dan started to sweat. Surges and outages were not good for equipment. He pulled out the handset in front of the CO's chair, clicked the dial to the forward switchboard, gave the crank a spin.

“Machias, main switchboard.”

“Captain, Shi-hime. The hell's going on down there?”

“We were standing by to shift over to number three generator. It didn't take and now voltage is jumping around all over the place. I slammed in the main bus transfer to give you juice up there on the steering. You got it back?”

“We had a couple intermittents, but it's on right now. If we lose rudder control in these seas it's gonna be nasty. How about the other emergency loads? Fire control, radar, mounts?”

Machias said they'd try to keep those, and Dan said no, cut them off. “The only vital loads we got tonight are steering and blower fans. If those fans go, the boilers will snuff out. You know that. Then we'll really be screwed.”

The electrician's mate hesitated. “You want me to cut 'em off, you got it. But shouldn't Mr. Armey be passin' these orders?”

“Right, yeah, I'll call Main Control. Give me a second, then request permission to secure the nonvital loads.”

Machias rogered that and hung up. Dan threw a look around the bridge, then through the windshield. The faint red light from the pilothouse penetrated the Plexiglas just far enough to show him windshield wipers flailing away underwater. Beyond that was just heaving black. He bent and whipped the crank again, this time clicking to Main Control.

“Skipper?”

“Here, Jim. Main switchboard call in, about securing power to the mounts, and so forth?”

“I think that's Johnile on the bitch box—yeah.”

“What's going on down there? We're getting surges; then it cuts off.”

“Best I can figure, we skipped the warmup procedure when we were putting number three SSTG on the line. Overload, overspeed, speed variation, voltage all over the place.”

To the accompaniment of cries of alarm, the steering console and lights and radios and the light on the gyro binnacle went out again. “Ca-rap,” Armey said. “We're losing it down here.”

“We're black dark up here, too, Jim. How about the diesel generators? We've got to have power or we'll broach.”

“Lemme get on this; call you right back.” The handset on the other end rattled down.

Dan glanced to where Colosimo and Compline stood centerline, staring ahead. Then the power came back on, inside and out. At the same moment, the roar of rain slacked off. A white seethe from outside snatched at his eye, and he glanced out through the window, then leaned closer, appalled at what the flickering radiance of the reilluminated forward running light had suddenly pulled from the surrounding night.

The sea surface was covered with long patches of beaten foam. They glowed incandescent silver in the pale rolling light. In the black hours the seas had grown from twelve-to-fifteen-footers, heavy but no real threat to the ship, into deep-troughed monsters that had to be forty feet high. As he watched, one crashed down over the gun mount, burying it till only the mount captain's bubble on top swam above the boiling froth, and berserked aft as if for him personally and tore itself apart around the ASROC launcher. He could see it shaking on its steel pedestal. Then the spray flew up solid and smacked the windows, covering them, and for a few seconds it was as if
Gaddis
were already vanquished and buried, plunging on her last voyage bottomward.

His hands tightened on the radar repeater, fighting both terror and a sudden and unexpected hate. The fear because without power a sea like this could destroy them. Like most destroyer types, the Knoxes had more “sail area,” more wind-catching superstructure, forward than aft. Without power her head would fall off, the pressure of wind and sea driving her bow around till she was beam on to the oncoming breakers. The sea would have them, and it had no mercy. It would capsize a ship and bludgeon it down without thought and without regret. Would batter and submerge whatever survivors fought free, till at last they slipped below, to eternal peace beneath the raging storm.

The hate was new. He'd never felt that for the sea before. The thought bewildered him for a moment before he pushed it aside.

His head jerked around as he heard someone say, “Abandon,” or maybe only thought he did. Remembering the Pakistani crew. He waited through several wild rolls and plunges till she floated almost level for a moment, then slid down and headed across the deck toward the typhoon chart. The surface beneath his feet began tilting again as he neared, and he ran the last few steps up a steep slope. He grabbed the table and hung on as
Gaddis
howled over the top of a sea and rolled like a horse trying to shake off its rider before trampling him to death.

Compline panted, “Sir, I was coming over to brief you, after I saw where it plotted—”

“That's OK, Chief. What's it doing?” He aimed the red spot of his flashlight as the chart table light flickered again, off, then on.

Colosimo: “Looks like it's tracking west again now.”

The ship crashed down so hard every plate and beam flexed. The wipers stopped dead before starting again. Dan's knees sagged under the abrupt increase in his weight. He heard retching from the far end of the pilothouse: the phone talker, doubled over an inverted battle helmet.

“We're only getting updates every eight hours. It could be looping and wobbling all over the chart.” He swallowed; in the heaving darkness, the violent, visually unreferenced motion, even the best sailors got queasy. “I guess I screwed up, getting us into this.”

“Forget it, sir. If we went south, it'd 've come after us there, too.”

Compline read the rest of the message out. Hong Kong predicted hundred-knot winds near the eye, with gusts to a hundred and fifty. He grabbed for the safety line, a steel cable tensioned athwartships above their heads, as
Gaddis
heeled farther over.

Robidoux lurched out of the chart room. For a second Dan wondered if the quartermaster was drunk as he zigzagged over the deck, but it was just ship's motion. He joined them at the chart table. “Sir, I'd recommend we come about and put the seas on our quarter.”

“That would reduce this slamming,” Colosimo said.

“I'll keep that recommendation in mind, gentlemen. But if we do that in the dangerous semicircle, it's going to blow us right into the eye.”