The Gulf (68 page)

A hundred yards away, the light flickered off the waves. The engine rumbled, creeping toward them. He lifted his voice cautiously. “Keep your heads down. Play dead. Pass it on.”

The muttered warning moved away in a widening circle and was lost in the growing burble. Over it, he could hear voices in Farsi. And the clank of a breech block feeding rounds.

The waves turned from blackness to a glittering cobalt. The wavering circle of light moved toward him, and he felt it on his neck like a blade as he put his face down, willing his body to stillness. For twenty or thirty seconds, he undulated limply, counting his heartbeats as the round green brilliance, like a huge all-seeing eye, hovered above him. But he couldn't stand it, waiting for the firing to begin.

He turned his head, putting one eye above the water, to watch death bear down on him in a thirty-foot boat. It grew at the edge of his sight, then suddenly became not a shadow but a hull, a curved nothingness blocking out the heavens. The waves knocked hollowly against fiberglass. In his submerged ear, the propeller whined a high note with a metallic edge, like a wire poked into an electric fan.

“Kasy as anha mebeny?”

“Faghat mordha.”

There was a sodden thud as the bow struck flesh. Dan heard it gasp; the Iranians apparently didn't. The motionless bundle slid along the hull and in the backwash from the light, he saw it spinning in the wake.

The propeller increased its tempo. The boat moved past them. The light lifted and moved ahead. He raised his nose for a breath, and heard the same sigh around him.

The boat moved over the curve of sea and out of sight. They were alone again under the stars.

He sculled gently, trying to master the terror that had purged his bowels. Deep breaths, three, four. There were other things to think about now. So let's think about them, Lenson. Such as what? Such as Shaker. And Pensker.

No. He grabbed his mind like the wheel of a truck and turned it into a different road. All that was past. Benjamin Shaker had paid his forfeit. He was beyond punishment or revenge. Nor had the black lieutenant answered up to their verbal muster. For the rest of the night, he had only one thing to think about. And that was, how to save as many of the men around him as he could.

“Chief McQueen,” he called.

“Here, sir.”

“Swim over here, Mac, we got to talk.”

It took the older man a while. Dan worried: Was he failing already? But his voice sounded strong when he got to him. “Yessir.”

They went over the situation. High-tide slack had been at 0130. That meant—he lifted his arm, 0347—they were into the ebb now.

Like any body connected to the sea, the Gulf went through the tidal cycle. It had peaked early that morning and now it was going out, a billion tons of water walking sluggishly out into the Indian Ocean through Hormuz. The chief quartermaster remembered max ebb around Abu Musa at two knots, bearing east by northeast. Dan liked the direction but thought three knots was more accurate. They compromised at two and a half.

A wave hit them and he sputtered, grasping the back of McQueen's life jacket. It felt like one of the kapok models, great for the first few hours, but with a bad rep for waterlogging. He hoped there weren't too many of those out here. “Okay, but isn't there a counterclockwise current, too? I think I saw something like that in the
Sailing Directions.
That'd swing us left, toward Iran—”

“Nosir. Wrong month.”

“Okay.” He tried to picture it; realized too late he should have brought a chart down from the bridge with him. Well, paper wasn't much good after a couple hours in the water. But still he felt guilty. He closed his eyes and concentrated.

Fifty miles off Dhubai, but the tide was setting them parallel to, rather than toward, the coast. The Gulf looked crowded on an NTDS display, twenty miles to the inch. To men in the water it took on a different scale. It was at least seventy-five miles to the Strait. At two and a half knots, that'd be what, thirty hours.

No, damn it, his mind wasn't working. They wouldn't drift that way for thirty hours, or even ten. The tide would just slide them northeast for six hours, then start sliding back. Except for whatever component the wind introduced to their motion vector, ten hours from now they'd find themselves back in the Abu Musa anchorage. At one in the afternoon.

McQueen had reasoned to the same conclusions. They agreed that the best strategy was to get the group moving south. The Mubarek oil terminal lay in that direction, as did the Dhubai merchant traffic. The wind would help, too. If they could make five or six miles by noon, then they'd be out of view of the island.

Dan didn't like it. The wounded couldn't swim. They had to be towed. That would slow the group down. The only other thing to do was leave them. And he wouldn't do that. Should he sink the last rafts, make them harder to see? That would mean putting wounded, bleeding men in the water. He decided to wait till dawn before making that decision.

Dan looked up at the stars for a while.

Then he passed the word to start swimming.

*   *   *

The first peach tint of day showed him heads around him. To the west they were lost in darkness. It was still night back there. But where the oily, gently heaving surface absorbed the first light, he could see black dots, like drifting coconuts.

Like them all, he was swimming, counting dully in his head. His arms moved mechanically, grabbing water and shoving it behind him, like a tiredly digging dog. And like the rest, he made very little way.

They'd tied themselves together around the rafts. They had five left, two inflated, the others with only a breath or bubble remaining. These the men simply towed, using their lashings, keeping them for the water and supplies; there was no one in them.

He'd looked forward for weary hours to the sun. For one thing, it would make it easier to swim in the right direction. The unwieldy organism around him had a hundred legs, a hundred arms, and when he got tired or confused among the stars, it drifted off course and then, when he tried to reorient it, stopped dead.

But when the bloody ball heaved itself into view he realized he'd been wrong. Even the first red paring, suddenly popping over the curved edge of sea, burned his salt-tenderized skin. Above it, he noted the wispy lines of contrails. Aircraft or missiles.

It was going to be another hot one.

“XO.”

Proginelli. The familiar face was puffy and the eyes reddened. Dan slacked a little to let him catch up, and also to rest.

“Sir, the corpsman, he asked me to tell you three of the wounded died during the night. One of them was Rick Guerra.”

Lenson grunted wordlessly. He'd miss the stocky, closemouthed engineer.

“What are we doing, sir?”

“Swimming, Tad, just swimming south.”

“What's down that way? Shouldn't we go for the strait? Where are our ships? We ought to head for our ships.”

Patiently, Dan explained it to him. Raising his voice, knowing the others would swim better if they knew. The men weren't talking much. Just an occasional word. They all looked worn.

He called a halt at 0600. They gathered around the rafts and the corpsman shared out water, crackers, and a piece of chewing gum to each man.

Dan pulled himself up and stood briefly, his feet sinking into the soft unsteady floor. Some of the wounded cried softly, like pigeons. Others lay unmoving. They all had bandages and some had writing on their foreheads. Apparently Phelan was doing his job. Dan glanced at him; he was tipping water into the little cup, frowning over it as if it were liquid silver. His hands were shaking but he didn't spill any.

The scene reminded him suddenly, incongruously, of a painting he'd seen once. Naked men on a wooden raft, and in the distance, a ship.

There was no ship here, though. He shaded his eyes and recalled himself. To the west, sure enough, the island. Maybe twelve miles away. Through the morning shimmer, he could make out Jabal Halwa, its outline changed from the night before. To north, east, south … he searched long and carefully but found only weird garbled mirages, shimmering and running together like dark mercury. Too bad; he'd hoped to see something over toward Mubarek, if only the tops of the flare-off towers.

He squatted then, and waited till they had their gum unwrapped and in their mouths. Then he lifted his hand, and they quieted, looking up at him, a gently jostling seethe of inflamed conjunctiva, stubbled cheeks, twitching or chewing lips. There was something like hatred in a few of those eyes. Here was disbelief, there emptiness, there delirium. Most of them, though, held only suffering and a trust that made it hard for him not to turn away.

Was it worth it, this pain, this madness? Men destroyed and were destroyed, for … for what? Oil, religion, patriotism … but no one who died won anything. He raised his eyes to the empty sky, blurry and vague but immensely far and high. Suddenly it all seemed insane, purposeless, and absurd.

But when he looked down again their eyes were still on him.

“Okay guys,
Van Zandt
's still together, and we're still alive. I'd hoped by now there'd be people out looking for us. But it looks like we'll have to wait a while yet for that.”

The corners of his mouth were cracked. Each word hurt. But he made himself go on. They needed to hear him. Especially this next. “It's a little past max ebb now, but we'll be going east with the current for another couple hours yet. Then it'll start moving us back toward Abu Musa.”

Several voices exclaimed. He went on, raising his: “That's right, right back where we started. So you see why we got to keep swimming. As soon as we see a plane or a friendly ship, we'll fire a flare. But there's one place on earth we don't want to go back to. So we got to swim like hell for the next few hours.”

Nobody disagreed. Dan asked them to join him in the Lord's Prayer. When it trailed off into the disagreement of Protestant and Catholic he stood up again, looked around, and then swung himself back down into the water. This time it felt cool, after the quickly heating air.

*   *   *

The sun lit the inside of his skull even through closed eyelids. The heat grew steadily as it rose. The sea heaved and around him he heard men being sick. From time to time, someone would lose control, and wailing or despairing, weak curses would live for a moment in the heated air before it too ebbed back into silence and the slow splash of many hands.

His arms felt like wet wool, and he could barely pull himself from group to group. The membranes of his nose and throat burned and his tongue was swelling. The bitter water submerged his head every so often as he swam, stinging like iodine. His skin was raw where his clothes rubbed. He'd given McQueen his ball cap. The older man's bare scalp was already blistering.

The swells were heavier now. The wind had come up with dawn. That was good. What he feared was a calm. They'd be broiled alive. The more wind, the more southing. If they weren't so close to the island, he'd hoist a sail on the raft.

Once again, for the hundredth time, he searched horizon and sky. Where were the ships? The planes? The helicopters?

Had
Van Zandt
and her crew been forgotten?

Was the United States Navy still in the Gulf?

*   *   *

Around eleven the wind veered, slackened, then died entirely. When the sun was at its height he called a halt. The crawling mass of men, barely inching for hours now, drifted to a stop. They rolled on their backs. Few spoke, and those only in dry, harsh notes like ravens.

Dan waited till last for his drink. It made no impression on the desert in his throat. He tried to think of something else. How long should they rest? They needed rest. He decided twenty minutes would be okay.

Leaning his head back on the vest, he fell into a doze. The swell jostled him gently up and down and bumped him from time to time against other bobbing bodies. Only his head, covered now by his skivvy shirt, protruded above the water. The tropical sun blazed above the ocean, but by dousing the cloth occasionally, someone had discovered you could stay cool.

Some time later, he was awakened by a voice not yet too tired to be terrified. “Shark. Shark!”

He jerked the cloth from his sight, heart battering suddenly into his first real terror. He'd feared a bullet, the tearing shock of a machine-gun slug. But somehow this seemed more horrible.

“Where away?” he shouted. Extended hands showed him nothing. He hoped for a moment they were imagining it.

Then he, too, saw it, rising between two crests. Not in the curving dive of a porpoise. This fin simply rose, glided along atop an indigo darkness, and then sank again.

He saw a second fin and felt his bones freeze. He remembered what had happened to the crew of the
Indianapolis.
“Close up,” he shouted. Other voices, McQueen's, Stanko's, were shouting it already. The men, who had drifted apart during the rest period, grouped again, splashing and yelling hoarsely.

“Stay together … link your arms, face out … kick at 'em when they get close.”

The rafts rocked lazily on a glutinous sea. The sun glittered from a million waves, shimmered and sparkled. Far to the west, the black mass of the island seemed to draw them back toward it, like an immense magnet.

The dorsals slipped sinuously through the chop, drawing rapid glittering wakes behind them. In the waiting silence he could hear the ripple. Beyond them, a single cloud gleamed like spun fiberglass.

A man cried out at the edge of the group. The linked line bucked. “Kick it!” “Kick his fuckin' head in, Tony!”

“What we going to do, sir? Just let them eat us?”

Dan knew what he wanted. He moved back to the raft, every cell of his frightened flesh wanting to get out of the water. God, how safe he'd feel up there! But he had to dangle his legs like bait, waiting for teeth in them, and croak, “Doc, get the bodies ready to go over.”