The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel (43 page)

When he socketed the J-phone Van Gogh said, “Sir, we can’t stay alongside much longer. We’re really starting to pick up motion, and this close—”

“Yeah, Chief, I know. Make sure it gets logged, that we offered a tow.”

“Logging it all, sir. From the minute we sighted them. Chief Grissett’s back on the signal bridge getting photos, too.”

Document everything—that was apparently going to be the Navy’s watchword from now on. Dan nodded and told him to lay out a course to Tartus. He paced to the starboard side, ran his eyes around the horizon, though the machine-gun crew and the junior officer of the deck were both out there, and paced back. Out to the port wing again.

“We will accept tow,” the other captain called, still not looking at him. “Until we have engine powers again. But no one comes aboard.”

Dan nodded. “Got it. How’s your hull damage?”

“We are keeping up,” he said, and Dan caught the unspoken message: It wasn’t good.

“Do you have a towing hawser? A special rope for towing?”

The other nodded. “Towing hawser. Yes.”

“I’ll need it bent onto twenty fathoms—sorry, forty meters—of your anchor chain. Make sure to rig chafing gear. Lock your propellers if you can. And put your rudder amidships.” The guy nodded, looking even more pissed off. Dan started to turn away, preoccupied already with the mechanics of towing eleven hundred tons in a heavy seaway, then pivoted back. “Tartus?”

The Iranian squinted, obviously hating what he had to do. But forced to answer. “Yes. Tartus.”

Dan was turning away once more, assuming the conversation was finished, when the man spoke again. “You are Lenson. Yes?”

“I’m sorry—I didn’t catch that?” Although he had, all too clearly; but he needed a second to process the question. Or rather, what the asking of it meant.

“Commander Lenson. The one who stole our submarine. And who sank our sister ship. I must … thank you for the assistance. But I hope we will meet again.”

Dan returned his saturnine stare, but could muster no appropriate response. Very suddenly, he felt deeply apprehensive. The Iranian’s smile seemed to say he knew something Dan didn’t, and wouldn’t like.

“Keep your forward gun turned aft,” he called over the widening sea to the Iranian, trying to make his own expression equally remorseless. “To protect it from damage, of course. But I just want you to know. If you turn it toward me, I will sink you.”

*   *   *

HE
pondered that as he paced the bridge, that they knew him by name; then worried about the weather, which was a more immediate threat. Towing was never a routine evolution, and towing in heavy seas could be a bear—exacting, tiring. And, if you screwed up or got unlucky, dangerous.

It took a while to rig aft, then longer to reposition upwind and float a buoyed messenger line down. The Iranians, in green camo and bright red life preservers, lashed a heavier line to it, which
Savo
’s deck gang hauled back. Then came the towed ship’s hawser. This turned out to be brand-new twelve-strand polyester with a stout thimble.
Savo
’s deck seamen bolted the cruiser’s own hawser to the thimble, then paid both lines back out until they had a good two hundred fathoms catenaried between them, from chain through
Savo
’s stern pad eye to black-painted anchor chain dropped from the frigate’s bow chock.

When the first lieutenant reported they were rigged to tow, Dan passed the word aft to make fast and stand clear, but also to have a big guy standing by with a sledge in case they had to trip the pelican hook. By noon they were under way at five knots, plodding north, more or less crosswind. A hundred and thirty-two miles, Van Gogh said.

The wind kept increasing, howling in their antennas and snapping their flags. Dan couldn’t believe how cold it was getting. How long this front was lingering. The seas swept in from off the bow, burst against their sides, rolled
Savo
far over before she came back again. Belted into his command chair, he watched spray fly up, trail across the flat banks of hatches on the forecastle, blow aft and rattle against the pilothouse windows.

Savo
screeched and groaned as she plunged and climbed, not nearly so violently as the ships he’d grown to manhood on—FRAM destroyers, Knox-class frigates, Perrys—but more ponderously. And, given her top-heaviness, sometimes frighteningly. Still, he felt confident in her. It would be a shame to have to leave her.

But he had to face the possibility.

Staurulakis checked in on the Hydra. Dan told her to stay at Condition Three. The Tomahawks they’d fired the night before had sent a message, but he wasn’t sure how the Syrians would react. As for further BMD missions, there was no point continuing to scan. Their magazines were empty of anything that would take out another Al-Husayn. “Anything on the chats about us, Cheryl? Any reaction at all yet to our after-action report? And that we’re towing this guy in?”

“An acknowledgment from ComSixthFleet. ‘Your message date-time-group yada-yada received.’ That’s all.”

Strange that Ogawa wouldn’t have provided orders. So the jury up at Higher was still out … or the hot potato was being bucked upstairs. Dan called sick bay to check on Zotcher. The sonarman was stable. Grissett had done a sonogram, located the bullet, and extracted it; it had missed the kidney; he sounded optimistic. Dan told him to tell Zotcher he’d called. “And tell him he probably saved all our lives in CIC. I’m putting him in for as high a decoration as I can swing.”

Next he called Ammermann and asked him to come up to the bridge. He made sure the staffer had seen the damage to the Iranian, and that he’d make a report too, including the results of the night action and the disappearance of the missile boat.

He went down to his sea cabin and checked his message file, checked a couple of chat rooms, and sent an e-mail to Blair.

He sighed and eyed his bunk, wavering to its siren call. But … no. Not while they were towing. Not still in range of the Syrians. He sighed and climbed slowly back up to the bridge. Each boot he lifted was strapped with heavy iron.

*   *   *

THEY
towed through the afternoon as the wind built to thirty to thirty-five, gusts to forty.
Alborz
yawed occasionally, but her CO wasn’t taking Dan’s rudder-centerlining command literally; was seaman enough not to. She came back around and although the catenary dipped, making the first lieutenant clear the fantail, never put too much strain on the towline. Dan drowsed in his chair, snapping awake from time to time. Breathing fast, throat sore, sweat itching under his coveralls. He kept dreaming about the white thing. Each time he woke he checked with whoever was on watch, but they still hadn’t gotten any steaming orders by the time dark fell.

When Longley brought up a covered tray with Dan’s evening meal they were eighty miles off Tartus. Dan napped in his chair through the night. At 0109 a message came in directing him to drop the tow off the coast, and under no circumstances to enter Syrian territorial waters. This seemed wise, and he sent a brief acknowledgment, underlining his depleted magazines and fuel and asking for orders.

At dawn the purple mountains of the Levant glowed like backlit transparencies on the horizon. He shaded his eyes, watching those far peaks for a long time. The seas were still ten to twelve feet, rushing in hollowed and belligerent to collide with the bow like semi-truckloads of wet shining gravel.
Savo
bulled her way through them like some armored cataphract through ranks of the Seleucid infantry Freya Stark had described in her book.

Back then, Syria had been a Roman colony, and one of the most loyal and civilized. A lot had changed in this corner of the world since. Including the lock-on a number of Russian-made fire-control radars had maintained on
Savo Island
for the last few hours. The mountains pushed upward slowly as they plodded on, growing sharper, darker against the climbing sun. Here and there plumes of thin smoke rose. Trash fires, or maybe burning off fields; they didn’t seem heavy enough to be signs of war.

Another message came in, giving him a rendezvous position with a tug at the head of what looked like the lead-in channel for the port. Van Gogh plotted it and they altered course gradually, dragging their charge around at the end of the towline. Making the last few miles directly into the prevailing sea, which made the wind seem twice as strong and converted their roll into a plunge and lift that set metal clanking around the bridge. The mountains kept growing, the land imperceptibly closing, until he could make out small settlements and villages through the binoculars. They passed no fishing boats, which didn’t surprise him. Not in winter, in seas this heavy.

Nuckols struck eight bells. 0800. Tartus crept into view, an open roadstead that at first didn’t look like it would offer much shelter, until long stone breakwaters gradually coalesced from the beach. Dan went up to the flying bridge to use the Big Eyes. He inspected the shore for a long time through the huge stand-mounted binoculars, and decided at last that if the tug didn’t show, he wasn’t going in. He’d drop the frigate at the outer anchorage, and let the Syrians and Iranians sort things out. But not long after, CIC reported a contact leaving the harbor. It hove into view as a speck, then slowly became a small craft. As the three ships labored toward a meeting, Dan passed the word to stand by to bring in the hawser.

The tug ranged alongside, unexpectedly small, more like a harbor tug than a salvage type, low, battered, with rusty patches like red lichen along her dented-in sides. Waves broke over her rear deck, which hardly showed, at times, above them. But the crew knew what they were doing. A gun cracked. A bright green projectile angled across, curving in the wind, and draped a line fluttering down across their bow. First Division hustled it aft and pulled across a heavier line, this one bent to the end shackle of the frigate’s hawser. The boatswains on the three ships seemed to be doing fine with hand signals, so Dan left them to it. He kept looking aft, studying the pilothouse with his binoculars, but didn’t see the Iranian captain again.

A whistle shrilled. The tug hoisted the black diamond shape that meant craft in tow. The phone talker said, “Fantail reports: Dropped the tow, sir.”

“Very well.” It looked like a damn small tug to handle something as large as that frigate, but it wasn’t his responsibility any longer. They still didn’t have any orders as to where to go from here, but this wasn’t a good place to linger. “Restow all gear and secure. OOD, let’s go to two-six-zero and fifteen, get clear of Syrian waters.”

They didn’t get a message responding to their after-action report until that afternoon. Iron Sky directed them back to a rendezvous with the main body of Task Force 60. A Naval Criminal Investigative Service team would be on its way shortly by helo. On rendezvous, Dan would crossdeck to
Theodore Roosevelt,
to appear before Admiral Ogawa. A senior O-6 from Ogawa’s staff would take temporary command of
Savo Island.

Almost as an afterthought, it mentioned that defense counsel had been appointed for Captain Daniel V. Lenson, USN.

The Afterimage: USS
Theodore Roosevelt
,
CVN-71

IT
felt all too familiar. Being led like a sacrifice through labyrinthine corridors smelling of latex paint and lubricating oil and stale refrigerated air. Stepping over an endless recession of knee-knockers, the oval openings of frame doors stretching away as if reflected in endlessly fleeing mirrors. The snapping to attention of flawlessly turned-out Marines in dress Charlies and white cap covers, complete with aiguillettes and holstered pistols. Then being ushered into a low-overheaded flag wardroom, cleared for the occasion of dishes and cutlery and idle junior officers. But the familiarity didn’t make him feel any less nauseated.

Oh, yeah. He’d been here before.

A court of inquiry. The faces that turned toward him, then quickly away, from a knot of service dress blue at the far end of the space told him that much. As had his counsel, a young woman also in dress blues. Dan himself was still in three-days-unwashed khakis, the best uniform he could muster. Her advice had been singularly unhelpful. Be forthcoming. Lay it all out. Tell the truth. It’s not a trial, just an inquiry.

Nothing he hadn’t heard before. Not that it had helped much then.

He drifted to the sideboard and found coffee. When the cup clattered as he poured, he leaned against the bulkhead, closing his eyes. He kneaded the bone and flesh around them until phosphenes coruscated digital patterns in the twin displays of his optic nerves. When he released the pressure a deep scarlet rushed around him, like a whirlpool of blood. When he opened his eyes the whirlwind was still there, just not completely red. The murmurs from the far end of the wardroom continued. No one came his way, no one approached to welcome or condole.

His mouth twisted in a crooked, humorless smile. He remembered a corridor floored in Italian marble, and a shaken-looking man with silver at his temples like the chromium eagles on his collar. And a bleak thousand-yard stare. The previous CO of USS
Savo Island
.

They needed a scapegoat. Make sure you’re not the next one.

Now he stood in the shoes of the dishonored captain he’d relieved. A strange turnabout, a full-circle return.

If he went out in the passageway, started opening doors, would his own relief look up, startled and abashed at being discovered, waiting in another room?

*   *   *

BUT
half an hour passed. The moment stretched, stretched out. He finished that cup of joe and had another. He kept wondering how Chief Zotcher was doing, down in the carrier’s operating suite. How
Savo
’s crew were taking the loss of their second captain in a row.

He breathed deep and slow, trying to put regret, and a sorrow almost like losing a loved one, behind him. For Dan Lenson, USS
Savo Island
was history. Let it fall astern in the wake, grow tiny, rising on the last swell between him and the horizon. And vanish forever … At least he’d saved some lives. He tried to comfort himself with that. Enemy lives, Iraqi civilians, but saved nonetheless. It helped about as much as a maintenance aspirin on an amputation.