China Sea (35 page)

Doolan, beside him. The weapons officer had one earphone clamped to one ear, the other dangling free. He said, “General Quarters set throughout the ship.”

“Very well. That was fast.”

“Minute and a half. New record. I'm going to let Dave take the deck. I might hold Chief Tosito here, too, unless you think we need him in Sonar.”

Dave Zabounian, saluting: “Sir, I have the watch as General Quarters JOOD.”

“Very well.… That sounds good, Mr. Doolan. This is when you notice a serious shortage of junior officers.” Dan lifted his glasses again, checking the already noticeably nearer shape ahead.
Gaddis
was covering nearly a thousand yards with every passing minute. So far, he saw no evidence anyone had detected them. Sheer good luck that the ro-ro had ended up on their side, masking their approach from whatever was alongside. Her high superstructure even cast a radar shadow behind it, screening the hell-for-leather approach of the cavalry.

Zabounian, from the radar: “Contact ahead separating.”

“Say again.”

“Two smaller contacts separating from the centroid pip.”

The gunboats whose search radars ESM had detected, no doubt. They had to be on the other side; that was why Dan hadn't seen them. But they'd reacted too slowly. They would be in
Gaddis
's line of fire as soon as she cleared the bow of the ro-ro. At the speed he was traveling, there was no way they were going to escape being in range.

Beside him Doolan was saying into the sound-powered mike, “Your target, two small surface craft, bearing zero-zero-five relative, masked by white merchant vessel, range thirteen thousand yards.”

“Remind them batteries tight, Chick. I don't want any more loose rounds out there.”

“I'd sure as hell like to have the forties and the five-inch operational, sir.”

“I would, too, but twenty-millimeters should be sufficient,” Dan said. “These contacts are small; they're probably trawler-size. A couple of twin thirty-sevens, without director control. A burst across the bow, point the forward mount at them, and they'll realize resistance is futile.”

“I hope so,” said Doolan, but he didn't sound intimidated. He looked happy, eager for a fight, and Dan studied him for a second, unsure whether to leave him in that state or bring him down to earth. Any eagerness he himself might have had once for combat had disappeared the first time he'd seen the butchery an exploding shell made of human bodies.

But it was obvious that the prospect of action kicked the mustached lieutenant into turbo mode. And suddenly a suspicion glowed to life. Was it combat that excited Doolan or danger itself? And if danger turned him on, what was more dangerous, unpredictable, fatal, and thrilling than murder?

“Captain. Captain! Signal Bridge wants to know what flag to hoist. You want the battle ensign or—”

Dan jerked his mind back and almost said, “The battle ensign, of course,” then stopped. Did he want to hoist the oversize Stars and Stripes it was traditional to fly into battle?

Wasn't that the whole point?

“Hoist no flag,” he said at last.

“Sir? You want the battle flag?”

“No. No! I said no flag at all. I want bare halliards, understand? Get the U.S. ensign down.”

They gaped as if he'd gone crazy, and maybe he had. But he screwed the binoculars back into his eye sockets and after a moment Doolan yelled, “You heard him! Bare poles. ASAP, you son of a bitch!”

“Don't curse at the men, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, sir. Got excited.”

“I need you to stay cool, Chick. Let's buckle down and stay focused.”

But then everything went to hell and his battle plan with it. The 21MC said, “Bridge, Combat: ESM reports X-band fire control radar activated bearing three-zero-five.”

Dan hesitated, mouth open to speak and brain racing to supply content. But none came.

Patrol craft didn't carry X-band radar.

A white flare rose slowly from the deck of the ro-ro. Wedlake was signaling, apparently. Dan frowned at it, gripping his binoculars half-raised. It didn't peak, then gradually fall, though, like a signal flare ought to. It kept climbing, straight up, leaving a thick white cone of smoke below it. A second and then a third flare appeared, rising lazily toward the gray clouds.

“Chaff!” he screamed, understanding all at once. Simultaneously Doolan jumped across the bridge, grabbed the pivoting key that fired the RBOC, and yanked it over. A warning bell cut on.

Above the freighter, the cones of white-hot flame and swiftly shredding smoke began to tip downward.

They weren't flares, and they hadn't been climbing vertically.

They were missiles of some kind, and they were headed straight for the onrushing
Gaddis.
They arched down over the drifting freighter and swung left, then right, hunting to and fro before steadying the weapons themselves visible now as dark hearts to the cones of flame, coming fast and straight down their throat.

Six sharp thuds came from aft, and Dan heard screams along with them. He clenched the barrels of the glasses, staring up at the incoming weapons, knowing that the chaff canisters took at least ten seconds to travel far enough from the ship to detonate into a milling midge-cloud of radar-reflective foil. The version
Gaddis
carried had an infrared decoy, too, but it took even longer for the heat source to ignite. It was designed to divert and confuse an incoming Styx or Silkworm. But for whatever was coming at them, smaller and faster and at a deadly short range, it did not look to him as if it would be effective soon enough.

The paralysis snapped and he loped across the pilothouse, shoved the boatswain aside as Topmark stared petrified out the window, and yelled into the 1MC, “Missile incoming, starboard bow!” He dropped the mike, wheeled, and searched a suddenly empty mind for another action to take. The first incoming round hovered, moving almost imperceptibly against the hurtling clouds, then plunged with the terrible grace of a diving hawk.

“… the deck!” somebody yelled, as in the last ending seconds a clatter of .50-cal fire burst out on the upper deck, a despairing skyward burst, a last futile gesture of defiance as the smoke trail plunged down at near-supersonic velocity.

The blast snapped the deck away under their faces, and an instant later a rain of fragments clattered across the overhead. A second whip-cracked behind it, fast and deafening as stringed firecrackers going off a yard from one's ear. Bulletlike shards whipped through the open port wing door and whined about the interior of the pilothouse. As if by some magic, Chief Tosito's shirt suddenly turned bloody. Dan crouched, taking partial cover behind the heavy aluminum casing of the repeater, though his back and side were still exposed. He waited for the third explosion, but it didn't come.
Gaddis
plunged on, shaking off smoke and the remains of fire scattered about her boat deck.

Up again, and amid the strange soundless ringing aftersilence Dan stepped to one of the cracked windows, peering ahead. To his enormous relief, there didn't seem to be any more missiles on the way. After a moment he raised his binoculars, which he discovered were still around his neck.

Something had changed about the
Marker Eagle.
She seemed to have elongated at one end, as if telescoping outward at her stern. For a moment, confused, his eye told him she was swinging her stern ramp outward. Then he blinked and understood.

What he was seeing wasn't an extension of the merchant. It was the raked gray stem of a warship, emerging from behind the ro-ro. As he watched, the forecastle came into view and then the unmistakable silhouettes of turreted guns and directors, rising swiftly to a strange stepped pyramid of superstructure.

“Holy shit,” Zabounian muttered beside him. “That's no fucking gunboat. What the hell
is
it?”

Suddenly other voices, other sounds penetrated the anechoic bubble around him, and he caught the dying whine from all around him as the power went down. The 21MC made a choked noise and went silent. The phone talkers and the QM were bent over Tosito. Blood was still jetting out of his shoulder. Some large, very sharp sushi blade had sliced him so deep Dan could see the raw pulsation of his lung. The Guatemalan gave him a steady despairing look. Dan almost knelt, then remembered: he had a ship to save, and a hundred men, and turned front again and tried to make sense out of what he was seeing.

The warship that had fired on them was still moving out from behind the merchant, a white bone growing at her strangely curved stem. Now he could see nearly her whole length. She was broken-decked, with very little sheer. Like a British
Leander
or Type Twelve, but he'd steamed with them in the Med and Caribbean; she wasn't either of those. The single huge raked-aft funnel looked almost Japanese. It was followed by a long, low, almost featureless midships area, with two more turrets superposed aft and a straight transom stern.

“Son of a bitch, she's big,” Zabounian breathed.

Dan stared, his mind churning through observation and reasoning to conclusions about ten times faster than it usually operated. He had no idea who this ship was, but her armament and size made one thing perfectly plain. The other, fleeing contacts might be gunboats. This was something more like a light cruiser, at least twice
Gaddis
's displacement, and unless he did something very quickly those guns, already training slowly around his way, were going to sink him. But without ammunition for the forties and five-inch, and without power to run the mounts even if he had it, he was helpless. The gun crews could fire the fifties and twenties without power, but they'd just dent the plating on something like this. The other ship could stand off and shell them to pieces, or put more of the missiles into them.

Only great good luck that first salvo had detonated high, a mission kill in their mack and upperworks but still not a mortal wound. Not yet. Not if he could persuade—

He wheeled and grabbed up the black canister that sat just within the wing door, yanked off the tape that held its top on, and shouldered his way outside. He tore the tab off and upended the canister over the side. It lightened abruptly as the weight within dropped away. He yelled to the boatswain. “Pass the word to the lookouts, all the smoke floats! Over the side!
Now!
”

When he wheeled back to raise his glasses again, the other ship was fully unmasked, clear of the
Marker Eagle
and moving ahead with swiftly gathering speed through the choppy sea. He narrowed his eyes and squinted as over the three miles of water he suddenly saw clearly detail, shape, armament and superstructure arrangement, radars, and antenna.

“Large guns, and many portholes,” the fishermen on Dahakit Atoll had said. Dan had chuckled indulgently. Now here it was, the high freeboard of the forward hull dotted with dozens of the tiny circles.

Gaddis
coasted forward, more and more slowly as the way came off her. The phone talkers and lookouts heaved the last of the smoke floats over the side. From midships, the one Dan had dropped burst into a brief flame, then began venting huge clouds of milling smoke the color of library paste. They were designed to be seen from miles away at sea or from the air, and now up around and behind the helpless frigate a great towering pillar built toward the hurtling sky.

Below him the boat crew, understanding suddenly, spun the lids off the red metal cans that held gasoline for the inboard-outboards. When the gas hit the water it spread, a silvery-blue sheen on the uneasy sea, before its edge reached one of the burning smoke floats and a sudden sheet of white-yellow flame roared up the side of the helplessly rolling frigate.

He didn't really think it would work. But it was the only chance they had.

Ahead, the gray silhouette shortened, curving gently as she gathered speed toward her wallowing and helpless opponent. Dan screwed the glasses into his eyes, blinking sweat away, searching through the thickening smoke for some sign of its nationality. Now that it was closer, he saw how old it looked, like newsreels of ships from the thirties and forties. The portholes—no modern destroyer type had
portholes
, not in the
hull
—were each bearded with a russet streak of rust. She looked like the pictures of prewar cans he recalled from the history texts at Annapolis, the old—what were they called? He couldn't remember. He lifted his glasses to search the mast again.

She flew no ensign.

Just as he flew none.

The bridge was dead silent around him.
Gaddis
surged back and forth as she slewed around beam on to the prevailing sea. He became aware that he hadn't breathed for a long time and forced himself to draw a lungful. He was choking on mortal fear and helpless rage. Watching, through the field of the binoculars, for the first flash from the muzzles of those short, grim-looking barrels that aimed now directly across two thousand yards of heaving sea at the wallowing frigate.

Then her hull began to shorten.

He watched in astonishment, fighting to keep his knees from folding. It did not seem possible. But as bow and stern drew closer together, then collapsed to a stern quarter position angle, he couldn't deny it, couldn't understand it, but had to accept it nonetheless.

His unexpected antagonist was turning away, showing him the white toss and burble at her stern. He held his breath and refocused the glasses, fighting the tremor in his hands, the shaky blur it made of vision, hoping to make out something on her counter, some clue to who or what she was, but whatever had been there once, it had been painted out.

Just as
Gaddis
's hull number had vanished, in Singapore.

“They're running away,” somebody said. “Hauling ass.”

“Son of a bitch.”

Dan said nothing, sucking in breath after breath. Smoky air had never tasted sweeter. He'd expected to be swimming by now or fighting fires and flooding from armor-piercing projectiles.
Gaddis
's own hull plating was only half an inch thick, barely enough to stop a rifle bullet.