China Sea (51 page)

Then they were beam to beam, and the tracers burned their way through the gathering dark in both directions. An enemy shell screamed low over the forecastle, so close he seemed to catch a confused glimpse of it, although he knew that was impossible, maybe just the trail it made through the smoke and mist. The five-inch belched out globes of yellow fire, then black fumes, catapulting out empty casings to roll down the crazily slanting deck. A heavy, deck-shaking slam just below the bridge, and all the lights and remotes went out and the helmsman stepped back, holding his hands up in token he had lost control, at the same moment a white flash occulted all vision and smashed him backward against the chart table.

*   *   *

HE lay for an immeasurable soaring time watching sheets of white fire shatter and rearrange themselves. He couldn't see past the white fire, or only in glimpses, as if between the cars of a passing train made of incandescent steel. He kept trying to get up again and at last did, or at least imagined that he had; he wasn't quite sure. In one of the fiery between-glimpses he seemed to see a body, nearly headless, wires dangling from ripped-apart flesh. In the next flash frame it spun, groping out a blind hand, then pitched over suddenly and collapsed, pumping jets of bright red across the black rubber matting behind
Gaddis
's lee helm. The matting had tiny parallel ribs running along its surface. He saw this very vividly and distinctly, while registering only a blurred impression of everything else, of an unending clamor of exploding shells, firing guns, screaming mouths.

Then for the second time that day the cold detachment took him and he turned his back on the corpse, staring through the white lightning that came slightly less often now, maybe he wasn't going to be blind, directly across the heaving foamstreaked waste of black sea at a dark mass studded with flashes and the black puffs of bursting high-explosive as the twenties and forties stitched downward into the hull, just as he had ordered. He clung staring, unable to so much as blink as the terrifying spectacle went on and on, neither
Gaddis
nor the other seeming to move, time occurring now not on a human scale but in the millisecond-by-millisecond recounting of detonating primers and wheeling masses of violently accelerated metal.

A brutal jolt battered at the windows, cracking all those to port and shattering several. Flames and smoke streamed in, heavy white smoke, he didn't know where from, but it was strangling. He gagged, too stunned still to even think of his gas mask. His hand when he explored his temple came away coated with blood. Without thought, he ripped his helmet off and threw it through one of the gaping window sockets through which rain and spray streamed in, borne by a shrieking wind. As his vision cleared still more, he saw other bodies scattered on the deck. The JA phone talker was crouched behind the metal bulk of the helm console. Dan blinked again and saw no one behind it; the helmsman and lee helmsman, Topmark, too, lay grotesquely twisted on the bloody tile. Dan stepped across them, tore off a set of phones, and put their blood-slick wetness over his own ringing ears. “After steering, Bridge.” His voice, Christ, he couldn't hear his own voice.

“After steering, aye.”

“Lost helm control on the bridge. Give me left ten degrees rudder.”

“Taking control aft. Testing rudder. I have control. Left ten degrees rudder, no course given.”

Bobbie Wedlake at his side, he had no idea from where, had not thought of her or really of anyone else, either, only of
Gaddis
and how to fight and preserve her. Bobbie was shouting something about broken fuel lines, a major fire in the boiler spaces. But he already knew that. He couldn't say how, only that he and the shattered bleeding fabric that surrounded and bore them were one now, one and the same, he and she. He felt every blow to her reeling hull like a hook to his own ribs. He fought every stagger and reel as she battled the storm with his own muscles, grunting and jerking as if he could force her back upright against the seas that swept her forecastle and starboard lifelines as she came around to the manually controlled rudder, bracing her beam to the seas as downwind of her the Chinese cruiser came around, too, both wounded warships grappled now in a tail-chasing spiral downwind, each fighting to keep its guns bearing without exposing its own length to the steel and fire of the other. Boatswain Topmark struggling to his feet, blinking at the unmanned helm; another crewman, stepping off the ladder from below, looking down in horror at the slaughterhouse pool around his boots. The radios suddenly hissed, numbers flickered on the fathometer, the binnacle light glowed back on in the dusky gloom. Emergency power.

He wrenched his attention back to the maelstrom outside, where the wind was shearing the tops off the waves and laying lashes of spray across the heaving glossy backs of the swells. The sky was the same black as the sea, sinister, lightless, light-absorbing, so that the ship across from him seemed to glow with some pallid internal radiance. Her stern tipped down to an oncoming sea, and the snowy foam shot upward as it struck and covered what looked like minelaying rails and swept on to crest and break around the after mount like surf over a half-submerged rock. He stared at the aft turret, waiting for the next gun-flash with his hands crimped so tightly on the mouthpiece of the phone his fingers dug deep into the rubber.
Gaddis
was losing way. She was losing steam, losing power, losing the ability to maneuver. Once he lost mobility, this battle was over. The other ship would take position on her stern and sledgehammer him to pieces.

Then he noticed something strange.

The Katori wasn't firing anymore. No more bursts of light flickered from the dark pyramid. No more dangling wires of tracer probed from her upper decks. She was rolling slowly, sluggishly, wallowing as the swells passed over and under her.

Gaddis
's five-inch fired again, and the forties resumed slamming away. Dan stared, seeing the rounds' red-hot flight end as they plunged point-blank into the dark mass that he saw now was streaming smoke from end to end. He hadn't made it out before because it was blowing downwind, away from him, and the smoke was the same color as the storm and the sea and the mist.

Then, before his fixed and disbelieving eyes, the long, slim, smoldering ruin tilted with enormous deliberation over to port.

Zabounian, stepping out onto the bridge from his GQ station in Combat, gaped at the carnage. Dan grabbed him. “Stop!” he yelled. “Stop it! Cease fire!”

“No, we can't do that—”

“
Cease fire
, I said!”

The other ship hesitated for a long time on the edge of going over, and the sea foamed and seethed up over its stern with an obscene and impatient craving. Staring, he could imagine the panic onboard: the struggle for ladders and escape trunks, men trampled and fighting and falling. The most rigid discipline could give way at such moments. The last moments, for all too many, of their lives. He knew. He'd been there, on a dying ship, and not the faintest spark of glee or triumph or even relief penetrated the blank horror he felt now, watching it happen to other men.

She was nearly beam on to the storm seas now, and if she struggled to rise the repeated blows of the swells kept driving her down. Dan watched, seeing not just her but
Gaddis
as she'd struggled helplessly in the typhoon. Each time she lifted, a little less of her fantail was visible; the sea crept up her strakes till at last steam burst at her crosstrees, and faintly through the wailing wind came a despairing, nearly human shriek.

Then she capsized. The sheer strake came up and beneath it the long black length of her, bilge keels thrust up like stubby fins. The screws, still ticking over, beat in slow futility at the turbulent sprayfilled air.
Gaddis
was still coming around, moving on her momentum, and he saw holes in the cruiser's bottom where the armor-piercing projectiles had gone clear through, plunging downward. A visible stream of spray and smoke blew from each, a dying breath exhaled from the now rapidly compressing atmosphere within the sinking hull. The sea surged, and for a moment nothing showed above the roiling foam. Then, like a surfacing whale, still blowing from multiple rents, it resurfaced, yet now only a few feet projected above the triumphant sea.

As they watched, each clinging to some handhold in total silence, the bow began to rise. It came up with terrible slowness, then paused, hanging in the gray air. The rest of the doomed ship had disappeared beneath a greasy black-gray froth, dotted with spumy geysers of smoke and spray and oil and air. Raked and sharp, anchor chains thundering free as it pointed straight up, it aimed itself into the stormy sky for what seemed a last, long, straining effort, the final, dying struggle of a living creature.

Then, with an indescribable combination of grace and horror, it slipped slowly beneath the maelstrom that surged and boiled still where it had disappeared.

Lenson stared, unable to move or think. Faintly he heard someone shouting orders; saw
Gaddis
's own prow dip as if in salute, no, simply a plunge to an overtaking sea, and then swing hard right. Then the deck beneath him went over so savagely he was pinned against the coaming by his own weight. The jagged white shapes laced his vision again, and he became conscious of an immense pain in his head.

Bobbie Wedlake's voice in his ear, her hand on his arm. “Come inside the pilothouse. I'm getting Neilsen up here to look at you.”

“Forget that. Have him take care of the wounded.”

“News flash: That includes you. There's blood all over your face. Your leg, too.”

“Find out what's happening down below. Call Jim; fight the fire. If we don't get power back, we're not going to come through this storm—”

She didn't answer, just half-led, half-dragged him inside. He collapsed just inside the knee knocker, and she eased him down in a practiced way that made him wonder remotely where she'd learned it. Her wiry frame was stronger than it looked.

Then he went away for a while.

When he came to he was slumped against the bulkhead. He sat motionless, frowning. Someone was exploring his scalp with his fingers. But that wasn't it.

For a moment he'd heard screaming, far away, on the wind.

No, he thought. Not again. Not the eternal dead who had shipped with him on every cruise since
Reynolds Ryan.
He had not heard their cries for years. He shook his head, denying them, and someone said sharply, “Hold still.”

But then it came again, louder, and closer, and he realized with a shuddering breath that it was not in his mind.

He struggled upward, pushing the corpsman away. Grabbed the dogging bar for support, then staggered out on the wing.

Clinging to the gyro repeater, he stared down at the passing sea.

Oil slicked the waves, gentling them into ghosts of themselves. Limp, unmoving bodies, life jackets, debris, rose and fell on the anointed sea.

And among them, creatures who waved at the ship that drifted slowly past, who gestured helplessly, some in defiance, others in imploring surrender, yet others who simply regarded him silently, rising and falling with the swells as he looked down. His mind skittered madly, like an operating system hunting here and there on a hard disk for a program it could not find.

Zabounian, beside him, tentatively. “We could put a few of the life rafts over.”

“Yeah, I—no. We can't.”

“Why not?”

“They've got U.S. markings on them.”

A knot of Chinese moved down
Gaddis
's side, about thirty yards off. An easy toss with a heaving line. Their keening came through even the howl of the wind. Dan swallowed. They reached blackened oil-smeared arms up in supplication. They were the damned in hell, he looking down like the saints in heaven. They were holding up their arms to
him—

Bobbie said from behind him, “To hell with them.”

Dan glanced at her set white lips. “If I don't help, they'll all drown,” he said. Barely able to speak, because looking out, he was one with them. He'd known that same shock and hopelessness, not once but twice; in the chill water of the North Atlantic and in the warm shark-prowled Gulf. Now he looked out on it again and grasped from another angle the suffering and waste of battle. He licked his lips and tried once more. “You don't understand. The storm—”

“Too fucking bad,” she said coldly. “They killed everybody aboard when they attacked us. How many others do you think they've murdered out here?”

“What do you think, Louis? Can we pick them up?”

“They're pirates, sir,” said the quartermaster “Their hands against every man and every man's hand against them. We don't have anyplace to put them anyway.”

Dan limped out on the wing again, gripping his thigh as if he could hold back the growing pain. He couldn't seem to make up his mind. He wasn't even sure he had a mind anymore. Everything seemed suffused with light. He must have lost a lot of blood. Finally he said, “All right, get BM1 Topmark up here.”

He ordered the boatswain to station a man at each abandon ship station, instructed to stand by to trigger half the ship's life rafts.
Gaddis
carried inflatable rafts sealed inside fiberglass capsules that lined the rails. Hydrostatic pistols released them if the ship went down, but they could be triggered manually as well. “Half of them—every other one. That'll leave enough for us; we don't have half our rated crew anyway.”

To his surprise, they didn't protest, even looked relieved, as if redeemed from their own vengefulness. Topmark left, and Dan told the OOD to use whatever waning engine power they had left to steer upwind of the drifting survivors.

Still it would not save them all. Some had already slipped beneath the angry sea. Others would die in overloaded rafts, or of exposure, or of wounds that, tended, might not have proven fatal.