The Command (57 page)

Unweighted now by the heavy breathing apparatus, she kept floating upward, to bump the back of her skull into the steel above. There was only about four inches of air space between the surface and the cables and valves that hung down. She pushed away quickly, afraid of snagging her coveralls. She was floating above the lower-level walkway. She pulled herself toward the engine. She'd left the OBA hanging back on the handrail. She'd better not get turned around. No matter how dark it was, or how confusing. This was for real, and nobody could help her if she fucked up.

Her kicking steel-toes slammed into rounded metal domes. The coa-lescers, with only a narrow air space above them. A tide of fuel-covered water slid out of the darkness and covered her face. She clawed oil out of her eyes as they started to burn. She strained to lift her head but hit steel again. No room to go over the coalescers. If she got snagged she'd panic, she was barely hanging on as it was. The fuel was really starting to hurt even with her eyes squeezed shut. So she dog-paddled to the right, and twisted around the coalescers and her outstretched fingers brushed the rough steel webbing that held up the main engine.

She was under it now. Her face was crammed right up against its foundations. Her searching fingertips felt the fire-pump manifold where it rose out of the water. She felt the sea currenting up around her kicking legs. This was where it was coming in, right below her. She opened her eyes a second, moaning with the pain, and saw yellow at the level of her face. She scissored her lantern between her legs, grabbed the handwheel with both hands, and cranked around on it.

It didn't move. She tried again, but couldn't brace herself. All she was doing was twisting her own floating body instead of turning the wheel.

No, she thought. It's not working. And she only had a couple of breaths left. Fuel was leaking around her clamped teeth, a sickening nauseating taste. She yanked angrily at the wheel but anger didn't work either. It just wasn't gonna turn, that was all.

Okay, but this wasn't the only valve … and the yellow one wasn't the most important one, either. The red one, on the sea chest, was the one that really absolutely had to be closed. That was where the sea was coming in from. The water she felt cold under her legs, reaching up under her coveralls. That valve was below her. Under the water. Under the deckplate. Open to the sea.

She was thinking about that when the air stopped. All at once. She'd figured on getting some kind of warning, but there wasn't any. Just suddenly … no more. She sucked so hard pain knifed her chest, and got maybe a quarter lungful.

So that was that. She opened her teeth and let it slip out. Time to go back and try to find her OBA, before the Halon got to her. She just might make it.

But then the ship'd go down.

Her ship. That she was supposed to be down here saving. Her. Cobie Kasson.

So that instead of going back, knowing that doing this she might not make it back, she duck-dived under the water and started pulling herself down.

Into black black darkness. No, there was a glow… her lantern, where it'd fallen from between her knees when she was wrestling with the firemain valve. It lay on the deck plates. Yellow light parabolaed the finned cylinder of the fire pump. She pulled herself down to it and got her hand on the fire pump and pulled herself the rest of the way down.

She couldn't see. Her eyes were going. But she knew where that deck plate was. Right at the base of the fire pump. Which she had her right hand tight on. She groped out with her left and felt over the diamond patterns in the metal till her fingers hooked in the lift hole. The plate came up slow-motion under water, and she pushed it away to clang somewhere off in the dark, and reached down till she felt the smooth cold rim of the handwheel.

She was out of air. Time to go up. But there was no air up there to breathe. And she had her hands on the wheel now. So she drew her knees up under her and bent over the valve and said in her mind
Left to loose, right to tight,
and put her shoulders into it hard and broke it free. Shifted her grip and got it over another quarter turn and then another. Closing it. Closing off the ruthless inflooding sea. Thinking: Kait-lyn. Remember me. Your mom did what she had to do.

Stars shooting away from the edge of her vision. She couldn't see anything, only those stars. But she kept turning the wheel, until all her strength would turn it no more.

D
AN was still at the damage control board hours later, when word came up at last that flooding was under control in Main One. The water level was dropping around the submersible pumps that had been lowered down the escape scuttle.

“What about the people?” he asked harshly.

“Nothing yet, sir. We searched down to the internal waterline.” Another voice on the far end of the line; then the first one, the repair party talker, came back on. “Sir, just got the word we have firemain pressure back. Rigging the portable eductors.”

“Dewater fast as you can. Check for any air pockets.” But he knew as he took the phones off there probably wouldn't be any.

He slumped, rubbing his eyes with utter weariness and near despair even though that last news was good. They'd fought flooding and fire all this time and for many hours it had looked like they'd lose. If any of the bulkheads had ruptured, it would have been over. With Main One starting to dewater maybe they'd turned the corner at last. But he couldn't stop thinking of the helo crew, the Gold Team, the guys who'd been topside when the blast hit. The investigators and repair party people he'd sent down into the spaces, who'd never made it back up.

Porter came off the phones. “Starting from forward going aft: Flooding in Main One under control, commencing dewater. Dewatering complete in Aux One and Two, starting cleanup. Main Two, water cleared, smoke cleared. Shaft alley, three feet of water left, but lube oil restored to main shaft bearings. Port shaft seal checked and cleared for one-third power. Permission to light off main propulsion engines one-alfa and one-bravo. Permission to restart gas turbine generator number two.”

“Granted.”

“And test the engines?”

“Check with Commander Hotchkiss first, in Combat. Then come ahead slow with the port shaft and check the stern tube seal for leaks.”

She passed that word and he watched her profile for a few seconds. Then called Combat himself.

“XO here. Are we gonna float, sir?”

“I think so. So far anyway. Anything yet from Bill Brinegar?”

“We just got him. Get this: on a secure compartmented-intelligence net. The Evinrude guys tinkered it up and got a message out. I passed our position. He was already on his way; his sonar guys reported the explosion and he wondered why we dropped off the net and didn't answer his calls. He passed our status to Sixth Fleet. Orders are to head for Crete if we can, Port Said if we can't.”

“Copy that.”

“The chief corpsman says you have to get off your feet and on your back. Are you gonna do that? Or do I have to relieve you of command?”

“Lin says we might have steerageway in a couple of minutes. I'm going to tell after steering to put us into the wind and start the washdown system, start decontaminating from the bullnose aft. Pass that to Bill. When he gets here, we're gonna want to borrow his decon guys, damage control teams, and some of his hose and patching kits. We'll have to use his boats, ours are gone.”

He signed off and went over to the propulsion control panel and stood watching as the engineers started the main propulsion engines. One-bravo lit off. One-alfa wouldn't start. But even one engine would give them steerageway and they already had enough generators to run the vital load. When the second engine lit off, he told them good job. Then undogged the door and went forward.

But after a few steps he had to stop. His neck felt warm. The tingling in his legs was worse. He had to lie down. Sick bay. No. His at-sea cabin. Just a couple of ladders.

He leaned against a fire station, alone in the passageway, and closed his eyes.

It had been very close. A lot of his people had died, been hurt, taken doses of radiation. But they'd come through. The guys, the girls, every one of them. He was so fucking proud of them. It looked like they'd saved her.

And having that bomb go off out here at sea, not where it had been intended, had probably saved a lot of other lives.

The trawler had been headed for Tel Aviv With a tremendously fallout-enhanced nuclear device of some sort. Probably enough, if the
wind was right, to contaminate most of Israel. Where had it come from? Who'd been behind it?

He didn't know. But he looked forward to finding out.

A sailor came from aft, bedraggled and wet. Their eyes met. “Gonna make it, Captain?”

“I'll make it.”

“How about the ship, sir? She gonna make it, too?”

“We're hurt. But I think we're going to come through. Thanks to our shipmates.”

“That's good, sir,” the seaman said. He hesitated, then reached out and slapped his arm. “You doin' good, my man.”

He went on forward, leaving wet tracks on the deck. But Dan stood there still as the lights came back on, the ventilation kicked on, as far beneath him he felt the first rumbling vibration of the turning screw. As he felt the sting of loss, and the exaltation of survival, and the cold certainty of revenge. As around him, like him, hurt but still afloat, wounded but because of that even more dangerous, USS
Horn
came slowly back to life.

THE ship came home under an autumn overcast. Her starboard side was dished in between her stringers. Here and there sheet-steel patches were welded on. Her antennas were bent and some were still missing. She moved, not under her own power, but at the end of a long wire from a stubby tug.

Her crew had flown back ahead of her weeks before. She was still too hot for round-the-clock manning. The weapon in the intercepted trawler had been modified in some as-yet-unclear way to generate an enormous fallout plume of radioactive cobalt 60, enough to contaminate hundreds of square miles. The plan had been ruthless but artfully conceived, one of the techs flown out to meet them in Soudha Bay had told him. Detonated off the coast, dispersed by the prevailing winds, the isotope would contaminate air and drinking water, making Israel—the presumed target—uninhabitable for years. The current population would have had to evacuate to Europe, North America, Latin America. And once resettled, how likely was it, speaking realistically, that they would ever be allowed to return?

As to the ship, her sea life was over. Once home, she'd be left to cool in some shipyard backwater for years, then scrapped. But still she moved with the deliberate grace of a cared-for thing. She was like a living being, though she was not alive. She was something more and something less; enduring only so long as those who had loved her lived, but for that period of time granted an individuality of her own.

Almost, a soul.

She'd left the country that had built her, to defend that country. Now she returned. But she'd never be the same.

Like every creature who voyages, she'd undergone the sea change.

The man who stood on the tug's fantail, fingering a neck brace as he watched her plodding submissively astern, had tried to define exactly
what that change was. Most of it he couldn't put in words. Some he'd probably never understand, because it was not given to men to understand all about their lives, or even, perhaps, the deepest things about their lives.

But he had some idea. For one, that his hopes about young American men and women had been justified. The counsels of fear and intolerance had been proven wrong. That maybe it was purely and only that— the willingness to accept change—that set his country apart from so many that preferred the certainties of the past to the possibilities of the future.

He also suspected, to his astonishment, that he was beginning to answer a question he'd always asked of himself.

He'd always questioned authority. Distrusted those above him. Searched for a standard he didn't have to believe in because it was handed down, or inherited, or imposed; but only and simply because it was the truth. Now, to his surprise, he was beginning to suspect he didn't need someone else to tell him what was right. That his own anchors, when the strain came, would hold against the storm wind.

He didn't feel wise. He certainly didn't feel infallible. But something had stood up in him that hadn't been there before. He couldn't say what it was, or where it had come from. Maybe just from being tested, and coming through. But in some mysterious way, he'd left the fear behind.

Ahead rose the upperworks of other ships, the shattered, shifting glitter of the sun on the river as the overcast thinned away. The jut of the piers, and visible on the nearest, as he raised his binoculars, the colors and flags of a waiting crowd. Blair would be there, fresh from what she saw as a victory: Following congressional lifting of the ban on women's assignments, the secretary of defense had directed the services to open virtually every career path to them except direct ground combat and submarines. And with a house in Arlington she wanted to show him. To take up a life together at last.

But
was
this home? Or was home the battered metal astern? His family, the men and women he served with?

He smiled at the realization he was questioning again. Doubting. And probably, always would.

But maybe that wasn't a bad thing. Maybe it was only those who were most certain they were right who were guaranteed to be wrong. And that maybe, just maybe, those who questioned the most were in the end those who came closest to being wise.

Lowering the binoculars, he looked toward home.