The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel (42 page)

He gave Ammermann one last tight smile, and patted his arm. Said, teeth bared in mock politeness, “Excuse me, Jars. Right now, I seem to have a battle to fight.”

20

AN
hour after dawn the lookouts reported black smoke far to the west. Dan made up on it cautiously, electronic ears pricked, studying what gradually rose into view over the sawtoothed horizon with gun cameras at full magnification. He kept calling, on international distress, bridge to bridge. And on what intel said was an Iranian navy freq like the old USN Fleet Common. No answer. Not a peep. The other attacker, the missile boat, had disappeared from radar.
Pittsburgh
’s periscope check had found scattered debris, nothing more. He asked her to clear to the south and stand by, just in case.

The battle proper, last night, had lasted for no more than twenty minutes. A close-in, all-out knife fight that at its height had forced him to switch Aegis into full-auto self-preservation mode. At near-supersonic speeds, with multiple incoming threats, human beings could no longer react swiftly enough to fight.

Gradually, decade by decade, war—like manufacturing—was becoming the province of the robot.

However, people were still doing the dying. He hove to a mile off and studied the hulk for a long time through his 7x50s, bracing his elbows on the varnish of the bridge coaming. The wind remained keenly cold, but the sky was brighter, if still overcast. Only an occasional flake of snow blew past. The situation brought back uncomfortable memories. Of another ship, in the South China Sea, doomed and sinking. Of oil-smeared, helpless arms raised for help; of desperate voices pleading, far away on the wind.

He shivered. And then came another, even deeper memory, nearly three decades back now: of the disastrous night a superannuated destroyer had died in the Irish Sea, when he himself had had to jump into a raging ocean; and no one had come to their rescue.

No. He wasn’t going to steam away again.

Mytsalo cleared his throat beside him. Under the helmet, chest bulky with flak jacket, the ensign didn’t look as pink-cheeked and boyish as at the start of their cruise. He was thinner, his cheeks sunken. Dan met his eyes, and didn’t like the haunting in them. God willing, he’d not impose on this boy what had been imposed on him.

He’d reported to Jen Roald on high-side chat around 0400. She’d made supportive noises, but so far, everyone above her was silent. No reaction yet. No official comment at all. Though he’d made sure to info absolutely everyone he could think of. They wouldn’t be able to reproach him for an attempted cover-up, at any rate.

He sucked a breath, let it out. In the face of what they looked out on, it seemed petty to worry about whether he’d be left in command, or summarily relieved. But still. “What you got, Max?”

“Captain, Radio’s picking up something on one-fifty-six five. Channel Ten.”

Dan took the offered handset. Looked across again to where the gray ship rolled, inky smoke still streaming up from aft, then thinning to a brazen haze against the lightening sky as it blew away downwind. He told the officer of the deck, “Man the portside thirties and fifties. No—both port and starboard. Sea Whiz in local control. But keep weapons tight.”

The frigate’s mast and antennas were wrecks, bent, twisted, scorched. Cables swung to a slow roll. Fragment-gashes gleamed here and there, and all the windows in her pilothouse were broken. At least one missile had guided in for a mission kill on her sensors. The other, or others, must’ve impacted farther aft. Including, Dan was pretty sure, at least one of the four 802s fired from Syria, but spoofed away from
Savo
and redirected by some electronic sleight-of-hand Donnie Wenck had explained twice, but Dan still didn’t fully understand. As they drifted downwind the changing angle was gradually revealing the Iranian’s stern. It looked as if she’d caught a missile there, too. An explosion had caved in the helo pad, and the hangar was still burning, streaming up that oily black smoke that towered like a beacon above the sea-horizon. Threatening whatever fuel storage they had back there, no doubt.

Which explained, of course, both the lack of comms, and being dead in the water. But he didn’t see anyone fighting the fire, or really any activity at all. Lying doggo? Playing dead, to sucker him in close? He didn’t like to think in those terms, but he and this ship had encountered each other before. And he’d come close to dying then.

He angled the radio to his lips. “INS
Alborz,
this is USS
Savo Island, Savo Island
. Off your starboard beam. Over.” He snapped to the OOD, “Petty Officer Kaghazchi to the bridge, please.”

The blast of Nuckols’s pipe over the 1MC.
“Now Petty Officer Kaghazchi, lay to the pilothouse. On the double.”

Dan moved a few feet forward to give the M60 crew room. The gunner dropped the wing 7.62 onto its mount with a thunk. His assistant snapped open the loading gate and draped a belt of cartridges into it. The gunner racked the bolt and swiveled the muzzle to cover the slowly nearing, ominously deserted wreck as Dan depressed the transmit button again. “INS
Alborz,
INS
Alborz.
This is USS
Savo Island, Savo Island.
Over.”

The voice was scratchy, lagging, faint. “
This is
INS
Alborz. Over
.”

“This is USS
Savo Island
. U.S. Navy cruiser, off your starboard side. About a kilometer away. Do you require assistance?”

A short pause. Then, heavily accented,
“We … do not … ask help.”

Dan kept watching the bridge, but they were either under cover, or the pilothouse was abandoned. “This is
Savo
actual. This is the captain. Request speak to your commanding officer direct. If possible. Over.”

A new voice came up about a minute later.
“This is captain of … of Iranian ship. Do you require assistance? Over.”

“Ha-ha. Nice one,” said Mills, beside him. The TAO was in a green nylon foul-weather jacket, the collar snugged up. He held another coat out to Dan. “Thanks,” Dan said. He
was
getting chilled.

He shrugged into it as he considered how best to play this. When he glanced into his own pilothouse the petty officers were at the consoles that operated the 25mm chain guns, gripping the game-type toggles. Red lights and lit screens told him both guns were live. Down on the bow, the long tapered barrel of
Savo
’s forward five-inch rose and fell, correcting for the roll, pointed at the smoking wreck that now heaved slowly only a few hundred yards away. On the wing, the machine gunners were sharing a cigarette, hunkered below the coaming. They looked unconcerned, as if none of this was their business.

He said into the heavy little radio, “This is
Savo Island
. Thank you for your offer. We were attacked during the night by missiles from shore. I do not require assistance. However, I see you are fighting a fire. It is a tradition of the sea to offer help to other mariners in distress. Do
you
require assistance?”

Another long pause. Finally the other voice, a rough lagging one he assumed was her CO’s, came back.
“We too were attacked by missiles from the shore. They were Israeli. Assistance is not required. I repeat, not required. However, if you wish, close on my starboard side and help fight the fire.”

“He’s doing us a favor. Letting us help,” said Mills, straight-faced.

“Whatever,” Dan said. The guy was trying to save his ship and his men the best way he could, given a regime that was by all accounts ruthless with anyone who stepped over its fundamentalist, anti-American line. He straightened, noticing their own Iranian, or rather Iranian speaker, waiting just inside the wing door. Muster the damage-control teams aft. Fire hoses, laid out on the port quarter. He probably won’t let us board, but we can lay some A-triple-F into that smoke. Petty Officer Kaghazchi, just stand by, please; the other side seems to speak English.”

Dan let the ensign take her alongside. Mytsalo brought her in at a shallow angle until they were a quarter mile astern, then eased off to three knots. The frigate was beam to the seas, which meant
Savo
started to roll hard too as she lined up.

Mytsalo kept reducing power, until they were edging up at about half the speed of smell. Dan started to tell him to goose it, get on in there, and to use his screws to keep her twisted into the wind. But closed his teeth on it. The only way you learned shiphandling was by doing it. And too slow was better than too fast. What was that old tin-can saying … oh, yes. “Try to avoid situations that call for excellent shiphandling.”

He smiled and coughed into a fist as Nuckols lifted the stainless coffee urn and his eyebrows at the same time. Dan held up thumb and forefinger an inch apart, remembering when someone else coughed too that he’d promised to get back to Grissett about the men in sick bay. The results of the tests on Goodroe’s body … but now wasn’t the time. Not a hundred yards away from an enemy with whom they’d traded deadly blows.
Hard
blows. Keep your mind right, Lenson. Game’s not over yet.

They were sliding into the slot. Dan tensed. It looked awfully close. He started to say, “—”

“Engines stop,” Mytsalo called.

The helmsman: “Engines stop aye. Both engines stopped.”

Dan closed his mouth and went out on the wing again.

Looked down on from fifty yards away, the damage was much worse. The smoke blowing down on
Savo
smelled like a burning refinery. In the hangar the tail of a small helicopter lay twisted like a scrap of aluminum foil tossed into a recycle bin. He coughed again, scarred throat closing, and retreated into the pilothouse. Started to call for the XO, then remembered.

“Want the senior watch officer, sir?” Mills asked him.

“No, you can do it, Matt. Leave Cher in Combat.… Keep an eye on Max. He’s doing good, but we need somebody senior to an ensign in charge. Oh, and call Adam Ammermann up here. I want him to get eyes on this from close aboard.”

“Aye aye, sir. And you’ll be—?”

“I’m going aft, get some foam on that fire.”

*   *   *

THEY
were alongside for two hours, pumping fifteen thousand gallons of firefighting foam that smelled like curdled blood onto the hangar and helo deck. Meanwhile the wind blew steadily harder, laying streaks of foam like detergent suds across the wine-dark waves. Snow blew down now and then from clouds dark as cast lead. The frigate’s crew came out from behind the superstructure—where they had, apparently, been hiding—and resumed their own damage-control efforts. Perhaps they’d feared being machine-gunned as the cruiser approached. Dan offered the loan of portable pumps, a firefighting team, but was brusquely turned down. The Iranian commander had at last emerged into sight, and gazed stone-faced across from his bridge wing. By 09 local the fire was out, but he still didn’t see any sign of power being restored. Actually, you could hear whether a ship had power, and this one, clearly, still didn’t.

Savo
was slowly drifting away, the black disturbed water between them widening. Fifty yards. A couple minutes later, sixty. She’d done that all morning; her sail area was larger than the frigate’s, giving the wind more purchase. The increasingly violent seas didn’t help. He’d approached from downwind for that very reason—hadn’t wanted to be pinned against the other hull—but it necessitated continual screw and rudder orders, jockeying to stay close enough to fight the fire while not actually colliding.

“Noodge her in there again, Max,” Dan told Mytsalo. He snugged the foul-weather jacket to his neck, screwed on his combination cap, with the gold braid on the brim, more tightly, and went back out onto the wing.

The other captain was still at half attention, gripping his binoculars, pointedly looking away from
Savo
. Dan leaned against the coaming until they came abreast, then shouted across, “D’you have power yet?”

The Persian’s black eyebrows, so heavy they were one dark line, contracted. He shook his head slightly. In his forties, at a guess. Mustached, not exactly clean-shaven, but not bearded, either. The black stubble was trimmed around the jawline, as if to fit a gas mask. Above it, a hawk-beak of a nose. A dark, foreboding glare, sort of like a male Singhe’s. Dan figured him for a regular, most likely from the shah’s old navy, trained as an ensign in San Diego or Newport.

“Propulsion?”

Another negative wag. He lifted the binoculars and focused them somewhere past Dan. “We will take it soon, though.”

“Uh-huh. Where are you headed?”

No answer. “Syria?” Dan prompted. “Tartus?”

The faintest motion of the shoulders; otherwise, perfect immobility. A figure moved behind the commander, just inside one of the smashed-out windows, and Dan saw one reason why he might not be that forthcoming. Someone was listening, from inside. Holding out … a microphone? Was everything he said being recorded?

“We will regain powers very shortly,” the captain muttered through tight lips.

“Yeah? Well, look. Fleet Weather says this is gonna get ugly again. Forty-knot winds. Fifteen-foot seas. I don’t know how bad that port-side damage is, but you want to get into shelter before it puts too much stress on your hull girder. Right?”

“I will reach port,” the guy said. Obviously hating every word he had to exchange with this enemy, this foreigner, this infidel. Yet also thinking about how he was going to save his ship, and his men. Not a bad skipper. Probably a pretty good one. And if he was like the Iranian destroyerman Dan had faced in the Gulf a few years before, a competent and dogged seaman.

“I can put a line over,” Dan called over the rising wind. “Provide a tow. Get you part of the way there, at least. Until you get your shafts turning.”

The guy was obviously struggling with himself. “You will wait,” he said at last, and ducked into the pilothouse. Figures moved back and forth in the semidarkness. Dan couldn’t see what was going on, so he went to the radar and checked it, his boots sliding as
Savo
rolled. He called down to Staurulakis for an update and to make sure she was passing everything that was going on to Higher via chat.