China Sea (47 page)

“Respond,” he said at last. “But keep it brief.”

“This is USS
Oliver Gaddis.
Go ahead. Over,” the petty officer said. Some seconds passed while they listened to the shrimp.

“Your target bears…,” the voice said; then clicking and gurgling drowned it out. “… kilometers, over,” it ended.

“You are coming through garbled. Say again, over.”

After five repetitions through steadily increasing noise, they pieced together a complete transmission consisting of: “Your target bears 110 from you, range fifty-five kilometers.” The voice had an accent, but not a readily classifiable one.

Dan said, “Can he hear us better than we hear him? Or is it about the same?”

“Hard to tell, sir. Sound can take different channels going back.”

“Read it back. See if he rogers.” Dan got up and almost clapped Tosito on the shoulder before he remembered. “Take care of yourself, now. I want you to be in good shape to go up for senior chief.” Then he pushed through the curtain and hammered his half-Wellingtons up the ladder.

They hadn't seen the stars for days, but here in the northern end of the China Sea they had good electronic navigation, Loran-A sky wave coverage from Japanese chains, Loran-C ground wave from the Philippines, and the more modern and dependable Omega coverage from pair E-H. He laid off a dead reckoning line from their last fix and marked his estimated position as of ten minutes before, when the submarine transmission had begun, then ran another line out from that along 110 degrees true, found the kilometer scale on the chart, and put a half-circle fifty-five kilometers out. It occurred to him that it might be a good time to get Combat manned up and start trying to correlate that position with a contact.

“Who's got the conn?” he yelled into the darkness.

“I do, sir.”

“Oh, Bobbie, sorry I yelled.… How about bringing her around to 115 and slowing to five knots.” He didn't want to come crashing in at high speed before he was ready. “OOD!”

“Here, sir.”

“Pass the word to CIC to man up. Pass to the department heads that we have an estimated target position.”

After he had delivered all the orders he could think of, set the others running to prepare, he stood for a moment in the center of the bridge. Then said to Wedlake, “I'll be out on the wing.”

Leaning against the splinter shield, the wind in his face, he looked down into the darkness that plunged and roared ahead. It was time to put it all to the test, throw all he had on the table and roll the dice. A cliché, sure. But at that moment it captured the idea of the reckless gamble.

Standing there, bracing his body against the pitch and then the long, hard heave
Gaddis
had taken on with the added weight on her upper decks, he let the fear that had accompanied him for so long, across so many miles, out at last. Like a large cat, it hesitated at the opened door of its cage, then sidled out. As it came forward step by stealthy step, sweat broke on his arms and back, turned his skin icy, accelerated his breathing to a pant. He let it approach until its cold breath bathed his face like the precursor of a squall.

He admitted he was leading them into a trap, against a superior force, closer to enemy reinforcements than to any friendly support and assistance. He agreed that men would die tomorrow, that he himself might die. Death was cruel anywhere, but the sea had honed its techniques. A man could die in battle, fall perforated by shell splinters or with the life blown out of him by blast; die fast, screaming entombed by flame, or with hellish slowness, trapped in a flooding compartment or adrift without hope of rescue.

Gripping the saltgreasy steel, he heard again a sound he had not heard for years: the hopeless screams of dying men, howling in the North Atlantic blackness as a broken ship drifted burning and another, grim and gigantic and inescapable as death itself, completed its long turn and came back purposefully to smash and grind those survivors down forever and ever into the depths of the bitter sea amen.

Standing alone in the dark, he let the fear grow until it mastered him, till he could no longer breathe and his heart pattered in helpless terror. Until it crested and toppled and then like a dread tide gradually receded, dragging reluctance and hope and many other things behind. Leaving only a purged emptiness.

He was here to do a job. The rest was in other hands than his, and as he resigned it, his heart grew quiet at last.

When he looked at his watch it was 0200. He owed it to his men to catch a few hours' sleep, to gird up the resolution and judgment he would need when they came into the presence of the enemy.

Soaked with sweat and spray and rain, he turned from the dark sea and went below.

25

THE hateful buzzing went on and on as he groped for the source. The speaking tube, that curious survival of nineteenth-century technology down to the fag end of the twentieth. A hollowness of brass, its shiny cover unpolished these latter days of
Gaddis
's long decline, like the unshaven faces of her crew and the rusty flaking paint around her scuppers. He finally got it located about the time he remembered where and when he was and what the racked creaking fabric around him, complaining as it leaned to the rush of the sea, was racing toward. “Captain,” he grunted.

“Officer of the deck, sir. ESM reports a Skin Head radar bearing 010 true.”

His brain leaped toward alertness. “Any correlation with the radar picture?”

“Raytheon's not worth shit this morning, sir. Wind's picking up again. Too much sea return.”

He muttered something and clamped the tube closed. Blinked into the darkness as his body rushed from wanting to burrow back into the warm bunk to a sudden acceleration of the pulse, a deep-sucked breath, a nervous thrill along his limbs. He clicked the light on and reached for his trou.

He had to cease climbing and cling to the ladder as the metal world around him leaned far over in a prolonged roll to port.

Five-fifteen. Should be dawn, but the sky was as opaque as if it had been 0015. A cold, misty drizzle, dull silver like sprayed mercury, speckled the pilothouse windows between whining sweeps of the wipers, which were set on slow. He studied the typhoon chart, now engraved with new symbology showing the oncoming low-pressure areas, and sucked air through his teeth as he glanced at the barometer. It didn't take a cyclone to build up mountainous seas; in fact, in some ways the rapid passage and changing winds of a fast cyclone like Hercule militated against them. All it took was a strong, steady wind from the same quarter, operating over a few hundred miles' fetch. Just like what was shaping up out here now.

Engelhart joined him at the chart table, eyebrows gloomy as the weather, and Bobbie Wedlake stood by as the chief warrant laconically outlined the surface picture. Two tankers had passed during the night, both headed north at a speed that must have pushed their engines to the limit. Trying to make Macao or Guangzhou before it was too late, clawing their way around the oncoming weather. The ESM “racket,” or contact, had faded a few minutes before. “Faded or stopped?” Dan asked him.

“Stopped all at once. Turned off, my guess.”

“What have we got out there on radar?”

The little Raytheon, Engelhart told him, was handicapped by the building seas; they covered the screen with a speckle of informationless light. Dan chewed at the inside of his mouth, seeing everything headed down the tubes. The Shanghais would have to run for port soon, if they hadn't already left. The Katori would go with them, and he'd be left out here to battle the storm. He didn't think the crew would be with him after another like the last. He'd called again and again on their tenacity and perseverance, and he knew it was at an end.

Bobbie was thinking, too. Finally she lifted her head, and in the ashen morning radiance he saw the marks of time around her eyes, the fine hachure around her lips.

She said, “You've got to call them to you.”

“Call them to me. How?”

“Send an SOS. Like the
Titanic
. Say you're in trouble, sinking. Or no, not sinking, just say you need help. Let them come to you.”

Engelhart frowned. “You don't send a distress call when you're not in distress.”

“I'm past worrying about that, Ben,” Dan told him. “Come on; help us out on this. OK, Bobbie, you mean make us look like an easy target, a crippled duck. So what are we going to say? That we're broken down?”

“No. Then we couldn't maneuver. We want to continue to close on this course, right?”

“Yeah, we got to get in as close as we can.”

“A fire? Flooding? Medical emergency?”

“I like flooding,” said Colosimo, who had joined them out of the gloom. “That could explain our lack of freeboard. A destroyer type sits lower in the water than a merchant. It might get us a couple hundred yards closer before they tumble to what we are.”

“Make us up a message, Dom. Put it out on International Maritime Distress. Give a position about ten nautical miles ahead of our actual running EP, though.”

“You don't want to give our actual position?”

“No, I want to hold back any surprise I can.”

They left him at the chart table. Dan stood irresolute again, staring out into the very gradually lightening dawn. Squalls surrounded them, turning the fine drizzle to heavy rain as they passed or as
Gaddis
passed beneath them. He shivered, remembering the Santarén Channel, a twelve-foot skiff with hull boards so rotten he could see between them. He'd never found out what had happened to the woman he'd shared it with and the boy. At least, fleeing Cuba, they hadn't had to worry about pirates. The kind of bloodsuckers who hovered now a few miles ahead.

*   *   *

BUT the message brought no response. Dan ordered it sent again at 0900, but again no one answered. The sea seemed empty.
Gaddis
churned on, swept by violent squallbursts and heavy rain. They were spaced closer together now, Dan noticed.

At 1020, Chief Tosito called up to report screw noises to the north. Confused and intermittent, he said, most likely because of the storm-driven mixing of the surface layer. Zabounian had the deck now. Dan listened as he quizzed the chief over the bitch box. No, he couldn't say what type of ships they were. No, he could not give an estimated range. “How about a zone, then?” the supply officer pressed. Tosito, sounding distant and listless, said they could be as close as ten miles and as far away as forty.

As soon as he went off, Doolan called asking for the skipper. Dan tapped the lever with his foot from his reclined position in the chair. “Lenson here.”

“Sir, Chick, down in CIC. I've been trying to put these indications together on the dead reckoning tracer. Could use some overarching intelligence.”

“Be right down.” He swung to the scuffed tile and told Zabounian where he was headed, told him to keep the lookouts sharp and to notify him instantly of anything out of the ordinary.

CIC was dim and hot, with fans and blowers racketing away to take the place of the broken-down air-conditioning. He worried briefly about the effect of ambient temperature on the electronics, then dismissed it. One way or the other, it would not be his problem. The OSes and fire control technicians were stripped to the waist and gleaming with sweat. Doolan had peeled his T-shirt off, too, and with the mat of hair on his broad chest he looked more than ever like the young Hemingway. Dan joined him at the belt-height table of the dead-reckoning tracer. Topped with glass, the DRT contained electric motors and gearing that drove a spot of light across the paper taped atop it. The projected spot represented
Gaddis.
When relative bearings and ranges to intercepts and radar contacts were plotted relative to that moving point, a true geographic plot gradually emerged.

“Like I said, I've been trying to put these together.” Chick swept a hand across the flat white surface that represented the open sea this iron morning. “Trying to correlate everything, sonar, ESM, what we know about the way they operate.”

“So you see 'em out here,” Dan said, leaning over what seemed to be where these various and fuzzy indicators pointed. “Say fifteen miles.”

“Can't pinpoint, but yeah, I'm getting a vague cut out here to the west. Maybe thirty, forty thousand yards, if they're holding the same course over the last hour or two.”

“Should we come left?”

“If they're tracking us, it'll look suspicious.”

“We still look like a merchie to them, turn count, radar characteristics.”

“Correct. At least, as far as we know.”

He was staring at the paper, trying to make a decision, when the 21MC above his head said, “Combat, Bridge: Skipper, problem on the mess decks.”

He reached above his head without looking. “Captain here. What kind of problem?”

“Sounds like a riot, sir,” Zabounian's voice said. Behind him, Dan could hear the whining slap of the windshield wipers and then the hollow roar of rain.

*   *   *

THEY were sitting on the deck, because all the plastic chairs were stacked and lashed along the bulkheads, secured for heavy seas. That was the first thing he noticed: the men sitting down. The second was the haze of cigarette smoke, and then, the smell of the whiskey. Dan saw that Compline was being held by two men just inside the scullery.

“Sorry, sir,” said the chief. Then he doubled forward as one of his captors grunted, “I told you to shut up,” and punched him in the stomach.

Dan raised his voice. “Who's the leader?”

“We don't have one,” said a voice behind him.

When he turned, four men grabbed his arms and hands. He did not bother struggling as they took his automatic from the holster. There were at least thirty men down here, half on their feet around him and Compline, the others sitting, passing bottles around.