China Sea (48 page)

He said, hearing his voice hoarse and angry, “OK, you've made your point. We won't resist. What do you want?”

It was Pistolesi, to Dan's regret, who stepped forward. The fireman looked ill at ease but determined. “Cap'n, sorry to tell you this. But we ain't manning up for GQ anymore, and we ain't going another mile north. Pick up that squealer, call the bridge, and tell 'em to shag ass for Subic.”

“You don't walk off the field in the middle of the play, guys. That's what this is, last quarter, last down.”

“Too bad, we're out. The boys voted for a strike.”

“There's another name for that in the Navy, Pistolesi. One none of you are gonna want on your record.”

“We're not stupid, Skipper. We been talking this over for a long time.”

“OK, I'll say it. Mutiny. Your ticket to Fort Leavenworth. You considered that?”

“You got to be on a USN ship to commit mutiny, Mr. Lenson. This hasn't been one for a long time. Anyway, you can call it whatever you want. We ain't doing shit till we're headed for Olongapo.”

Dan felt his heart sink. They couldn't take on an armed enemy with a third of the crew out of ranks. The mission was finished and so was he. All he could do now was minimize the damage. He took a deep breath, trying to keep his voice steady. “OK. I hear you. But there's still a lot of bad weather between us and the Philippines.”

“Then let's boogie south. We don't care; just get us out of Chinese waters.” Pistolesi glanced at the men behind him. “Hey, just so's you know, some of these assholes wanted to shoot all the officers and throw them overboard. I told them that wouldn't be cool, good as it sounded.”

“Thanks for that, Pistol.”

“Shut it, OK? Only reason why not, we ever get home, we don't want murder on the record. But there's still some wouldn't mind taking you back to the fantail.”

A seaman jerked the handset out of its retaining clips and held it out. Pistolesi snapped the dial to 01, Bridge, and said, “Go on. Tell 'em.”

“If I don't?”

He heard a click not far from his ear and turned his head to find himself looking into the black cavernous bore of the handgun.

Wedlake answered. “Bridge.”

Dan fought to keep his voice level. The rage and disappointment were like an obstruction in his trachea, making it hard even to breathe. “This is the … this is the captain. Give me Mr. Doolan, if he's up there. Otherwise the OOD.”

“Just a minute.” A click, then Zabounian's voice said, “OOD.”

“Lenson here.” The muzzle of the pistol moved nearer, pressed itself in a cold circle against the side of his head.

“Yessir. Everything cool down there?”

“Not really. I need you to come left. Carefully, because we're top-heavy. Time your swing through the trough to minimize roll. Steady on one-eight-zero true and click her up knot by knot to what she'll take without too much motion.”

“Sir, I don't advise that. I was about to pass the word for you. CIC advises ESM racket resumed, very loud, very close—”

Dan said angrily, knowing this was the wreck of everything and all he had hoped for, “Don't advise me; just do it. Come left to one-eight-zero. Increase your speed to fifteen knots if the seas permit, once you're on that course.”

A confused burst of sound from the bridge, the babble of several voices at once. He ignored it, slammed the handset back into its bracket. “There, I told him,” he said to the men around him. “He'll come around as soon as he sees a trough between the swells.”

For answer his hands were yanked around behind him and hard metal bit his wrists. A rasping click, and he realized when he tried to pull them around again that he couldn't. He was handcuffed, secured to a stanchion beside the long-empty soft ice-cream machine.

Then somebody coughed, and he looked up to a familiar pair of malevolent, swollen, heavy-lidded eyes.

“Sorry to see you fucked up like this, Cap'n.”

“I'm sure you are, Johnile.”

“You could be fucked up a lot worse.”

Pistolesi was nowhere in sight; he must have left right after Dan made the call. The other mutineers watched, some avid, others looking doubtful, but no one offering to interfere. Machias brought the knife up and put the point under his chin, against the soft flesh of his throat. He whispered, “You know I said I didn't like being locked up. Didn't make no never mind to you.”

“I told you I made a mistake. I apologized.”

“That ain't enough. You lorded it over us too long, you sorry motherfucker. You need to bleed.”

They were standing like that, face-to-face, when the crack and flash deafened them all. For a moment Dan couldn't move, as around him men dived for the dirty terrazzo. Then he squatted as a second, louder explosion slammed the metal around them, as if a bulldozer had been dropped onto the main deck from about eighty feet up. Fluorescent tubes quivered and burst, spraying a mist of glass and poisonous powder into the closed air of the mess decks.

Only in the ear-ringing aftersound did he hear, dimly, the electronic
bong
of the general alarm. Men scrambled up, some cradling the bottles like infants, others flinging them to smash on the deck. They scattered while he yelled into the pandemonium for somebody to unlock the handcuffs.

Then he was alone. The deck began to slant, not in a roll, but in a shuddering application of power that meant the screws were biting in with full force, 100 percent pitch, either full ahead or full astern. It seemed to be a crashback, all back emergency. He fought against the unyielding steel, twisting his hands until the pain lanced sharp and he sagged back, gasping.

“Open fire,” he yelled desperately, as if the bridge team could hear him through three levels of solid steel and a third of the length of the ship. “
Open fire
! Don't let them
board
!”

Instead a crashing boom, hollow and grinding, shook the ship. It seemed to come from forward, not a detonation but something slower and more prolonged. He had no idea what it was. He wrenched his wrists again, savagely, helplessly, against the metal, then gave up and hung, trying to quiet his thudding runaway heart as minutes crept past slowly as worms.

A husky-chested HT came running from aft, pounded past him, then braked and spun and gaped at him. Dan yelled, “We're being attacked! That was shellfire, hitting aft. Get me off here! Get Pistolesi; he's got the key.”

Instead the man wheeled and dashed in the opposite direction. Dan cursed him and all his tribe and surged against his restraints as the grinding came again from forward, the ship responding with a shudder through her length.

“Stand by to receive boarders, starboard side,” announced the 1MC in a voice he didn't recognize. Yes, he did. It was Topmark's, but raised an octave. A thunder of boots and a clatter as of dragged chain came from just overhead. Then silence as he wrenched again, feeling his skin abrading off.

The HT came back, lugging the Magic Key at port arms. “Lean back, sir; lemme see some slack,” he said. Dan sagged against the stanchion and thrust his arms out stiffly behind him. A moment later a clicking snap announced he was free, or at least that the steel chain that restrained him had parted.

He was heading forward when small-arms fire broke out on the deck above.

*   *   *

BY the time he got topside the shooting seemed to be nearly over. He gripped the rail in the blowing mist, peering into the unremitting wind on the midships flat. Taking in the hundred feet of light gray paint and wicked-looking automatic guns that lay a few yards off to starboard, rolling till it showed black boot topping and barnacles. A line slacked between them as the smaller craft swung in to smash violently into
Gaddis
's side, then ripped dripping up out of the green and suddenly drew bar-tight between them, slicing through the passing seas that crested and surged as the two hulls swung apart again. The rumble of engines penetrated his consciousness, along with the strangely muffled crack of shots.

He lowered his eyes to the crumpled bodies, huddled as if they'd died of cold in the corner of the boat deck. Weapons lay around them. Blood pooled in the scuppers, eddying with the roll. Another clatter of fire, and he looked up again, unable to piece sense for a moment out of what was happening.

A door slammed open suddenly on the low pilothouse opposite. It swung closed as the Shanghai-class gunboat surged upward, climbing a green-black mountain, then flopped open again, tolling a mournful note like a bell buoy. A moment later a body hurtled out. The Asian clung to the handrail, staring across at Dan. He looked surprised. Then his hands slowly loosened their grip, and he toppled down a ladder to the main deck. Dan could make out forms moving inside the pilothouse. Then one came out on the little wing platform and saw him watching.

It was Usmani, holding an M-16. He pumped it over his head like a fedayee, grinning, and then went running down the ladder. He vanished into a canvas shelter between the bridge and a smaller deckhouse that supported what looked like an antiaircraft mounting.

Pistolesi and four other
Gaddis
crewmen emerged from behind the superstructure and raced forward. They discovered a hatch in the deck, jerked it open, fired down. Casings spun, raining into the sea. The fireman pulled an object from his pocket, fiddled with it, and dropped it through the hatch. Black smoke gushed out, whipped away by the rising wind.

Dan jerked himself out of his astonishment and sprinted for the bridge.

Doolan and Colosimo whipped helmeted heads around as he burst in. Wedlake, who'd reached for the small of her back, paused. He said rapidly, “They had me restrained below. I heard explosions. What happened?”

Chick explained tersely that the Shanghai had come out of the mist and drizzle without warning. It had popped up on the radar, vanished, then appeared again inside two thousand yards. Inside of a minute later, coming in at high speed from upsea, it had begun firing. The first burst had ripped up the water ahead of the stem, obviously a signal to heave to. The bridge team, trying desperately to locate Dan, had maintained course and speed. The second burst had been the one he heard. Three shells from an automatic gun had penetrated the starboard side about Frame 130, one exploding in the chiefs' head and shower, the others in the mooring and towing gear locker on the main deck. That was when Zabounian had pulled the GQ alarm.

At that point, Juskoviac had ordered them to heave to. “I didn't want to, but I had no choice,” Colosimo said tightly. “He said he was next in command and ordered me to go to ‘all stop.' I didn't know where you were. So I obeyed him. Then they came alongside.”

“Where is he? You say he left the bridge?”

“Right, when he saw they intended to board. I don't know where he is now.”

Dan thought rapidly, staring into the radar screen. They were on 300 now, making about seven knots, maintaining steerageway against huge green seas from the starboard bow. The Shanghai had come in, not from the west, where Doolan had guessed the enemy group lay, but from the north. Downwind and downsea, which meant she could use her superior speed to close rapidly from a quarter already obscured by rain.

But if Chick's DRT plot was right, the Katori and perhaps the other gunboat were still out there.

“Bobbie,” he said slowly, “how did you say these people attacked the
Marker Eagle
?”

“Just like this. One came in from starboard, made us heave to, and boarded. The other came in from the opposite side. The big ship stayed about a mile away.”

Dan told Chick to get the lookouts on a close visual search to port. He jogged uphill to the wing as
Gaddis
rolled, cupping his face against a renewed volley of rain. To the east the sky was black as asphalt, and the wind was rising minute by minute. The seas were building, too, bulling in from the northeast. So high and with so much water in the air that the piloting radar could not pick up a solid contact only a couple thousand yards away.

But if that was true for them—

He ducked back inside and said tersely, “Did this guy alongside us ever get any message off? Call Radio. Check with CIC. See if they intercepted anything.” The reservist turned away to obey, and Dan asked Bobbie, “When this gunboat closed, when they were making up, tell me exactly what happened.”

“Like Dom said, they came alongside. We put down the jacob's ladder. It took a while because it's so rough. They were looking back over their shoulders and shouting to the men on the boat. Then when all of them were on board, I guess it was seven or eight of them, all of a sudden one yelled something. That was when the shooting started.”

Topmark said, “Pistolesi and them were waiting behind the RHIBs. The boys got the drop on them, just blew 'em all away. I don't think they even got to shoot back.”

Colosimo: “Sir, checking the times in the ESM logs against the deck log: A couple of transmissions while they must have been approaching us. No transmissions intercepted once contact began.”

“And then we boarded them back and took out the crew they left behind.”

They nodded, and he contemplated the near-incredible fact that the gunboat had closed, fired on, and at last even boarded them without detecting their masquerade. Hard to credit, but then he wasn't seeing a low-lying and unfamiliar ship between bursts of squall, from the deck of a pitching vessel much smaller and lower than his own. The containers, the gun covers, the nose job on the mack had done their work.

Now it was time to throw off the disguise, and reveal the predator within.

Dan looked back at the Shanghai, to see the dungaree-clad
Gaddis
seamen knotted on the bow, waving across to their compadres on the boat deck. They were carrying AK-47s slung over their shoulders, carrying pistols, some toting three or four weapons.