The Gulf (35 page)

Above them, the prop began to sing, then faded slowly into the distance. Gordon located the buoy line, yellow against sepia, ducked his head, and began swimming down it.

There didn't seem to be a current. He cleared his ears twice as he dropped. The air hissed past his teeth and chilled his tongue. Something jangled in his tool bag and he shifted it around till it stopped.

He waved Maudit a hold-up signal at thirty feet. If it was a moored mine, it shouldn't be much deeper than this. He pulled out his buddy line, clipped a second one to that, and snapped the pair to the buoy line.

They swam in a twenty-foot circle without seeing anything. Maudit added his line and they made another, much wider circle. But still they found only the sea, darker, still seething with the fine soup of near-microscopic organisms. He wondered what they ate. Then he wondered what ate them. Probably the shrimp. Their clicking was louder now. He examined the darkness below, a drab, ominous green-brown.

He looked at the compass again. Their target, the metal thing that hadn't been here a year before, couldn't be far away. Maybe it was deeper. Maybe he was swimming just past it. Maybe it was off to the side.

At that moment, Gordon sensed something ahead of him.

He reached out to snag Maudit by the backpack. They hovered, and then, together, moved forward, very slowly indeed.

Through the seething murk something took shape, a presence darker than the surrounding sea. A shadow, looming up from the deep. A roundness, with points crowning its smooth curvature.

He knew what it was before there was time to think. He'd seen them the first time he'd gone through Mine Warfare School, twenty years before. He'd flash-carded this patient silhouette a thousand times.

A KMB-9. Old, but deadly still. It hung motionless in the gloom, a black sphere a meter across. Five hundred pounds of cast explosive, enough to snap the keel of anything up to a battleship.

He glanced at his depth gauge. Set at thirty-five feet, just right for a fully loaded tanker. A cable led down into the gloom, into the mad, shrill chorus of clicking and whistling, as if a million devils waited down there for him.

He signaled to his partner and approached the mine, sculling with his arms at a creeping pace. Foot by foot, it grew more distinct. Corrosion and slime coated the black body. He let himself rise a little and examined the horns. This was a contact mine. When they were pressed in, struck by a passing ship or tossed back into the hull as the bow wave passed, they shattered a glass capsule of acid, sending a current to the detonator.

It hung patiently in the gloom, silent, obsolete, simple, and deadly.

Okay, to deal with it. A contact mine could be rendered safe, but there was no point in disarming this one. They'd explode it in place. First, though, he had to make sure of one thing. He valved off a little air and sank, swam beneath it, past the cable, and came up the other side.

He circled it very slowly with his mask two feet away. He was looking not only for identification but for signs of tampering, new bolts or attachments.

Gordon couldn't help thinking just then of a pineapple mine, years before.

There was a scratch in the paint of the bottom hemisphere. A few barnacles had already attached themselves to the shiny metal. He decided it was accidental, dinged when unknown hands had shoved it off the stern of a dhow or coaster.

He realized then he'd been holding his breath. He inhaled and exhaled several times, flushing his lungs, and checked the oxygen readout. It glowed a reassuring green.

Okay? Maudit, holding up the copacetic sign, with his eyebrows raised behind tempered glass.

Okay. He backed off, fumbled in his bag, came up with a yellow Nikonos.

When he was done taking pictures, he motioned the other man forward and took the haversack from him. He pulled a bungee cord from his belt. This would be the dangerous part. And thinking this, he signaled clumsily in alphabet code:
Tell them mine.
And he pointed up.

His partner nodded and began finning sunward. When he was out of sight, Gordon took several slow breaths, flushing his lungs again.

When he felt better, he slung the haversack over his shoulder and took the bungee in both hands. Moving very slowly, like a man trying to rope a squirrel, he edged up on the sphere from below. It was supposed to take a hefty impact to crush the ampuls, but the wires leading into them could corrode. Then a bump would set them off. After all, these things were fifty, sixty years old, some of them. He hoped they weren't too fragile. He was going to bump it around some. Right now.

His hands brushed it. The first time he'd actually touched it. The metal was cold and rough.

Gordon attached one of the bungee hooks to one of the grommets in the haversack, then held the charge in his left hand while he reached around the mine with his right. He pulled the elastic taut and made the other hook fast on the far side. Then, holding the haversack against it, he reached round the mine, keeping the bungee taut, and hooked it up over a padeye.

He let go and backed away. He began breathing again, then noticed that his oxygen light was blinking. Time to valve off. He retreated to twelve feet just for good practice, purged bubbles into the sea, and waited till the light glowed solid again. Then, hand extended for the dangling sling of the haversack, he went in again.

Maudit reappeared above, dropping toward him out of the light like a descending angel. The far-above sun sprayed topaz rays from his black silhouette. Gordon hesitated for a long moment with the strap, then dropped its loop over a horn. He was careful not to touch the prong itself. It settled into place and he backed off again.

It looked good. The bungee held the olive-drab pack against the curved black belly, about where Australia would be on a globe. Then he recalled he hadn't gotten the det cord. Stupid. He unbuttoned the haversack and pulled out the coil of explosive cord. Maudit came around the mine—he'd been checking the placement—and Gordon handed it to him.

There. He backpedaled another three feet and breathed again, surveying his work one last time. The mine spun on its cable, disturbed, but already damping out as the horns swayed leisurely through the water. He glanced at Maudit; the other diver's eye closed in a wink behind the mask.

Gordon gave him a thumbs-up.

The pale thread spun out behind them as they ascended. When they broke surface, he thrust back his mask, blinking as salt water splashed into his eyes. Then he kicked himself high, craning around for the boat. He caught it four or five hundred yards off. A faint shout came across the water. He raised his arm and signaled them in.

“What was it?” Everett asked as he pulled them in.

“KMB-9. Russian. Got the popper set?”

“Almost ready.” Burgee lifted the plastic float to show him, then resumed work. Maudit handed him the bitter end of the det cord. He carefully divided it and attached the blasting cap and time fuze. He held it up and looked at Gordon, who nodded.

“Want to pull it?”

“Live dangerous, Clint.”

The electrician grinned. There was a double crack, a puff of white smoke, and the fuzes began hissing. He pitched the float over the side. “Fire in the hole!”

The ship grew much more slowly, it seemed to him, than it had receded. Burgee had the engine all out and they skipped over the waves. Finally, they reached the minesweeper. They tossed gear up to the deck, scrambled up, catching splinters on the wooden hull, and hauled the raft up after them as the MSO gathered way. The Z-bird seemed a hell of a lot lighter now. Adrenaline, Gordon thought.

“Time yet, John?”

He checked his watch. “About a minute more.”

There was a familiar, sour voice above him. He looked up to see Kearn leaning on the rail on the next deck, looking down at them. “Back already?” he sneered. “I heard there was a mine. But I didn't hear no bang.”

For answer, Gordon straightened. The sweep second on his watch pressed on, on, and came up on the mark he'd set when Burgee popped the primer.

“Right … about … now,” he breathed.

A mile behind them a water plume suddenly appeared. The deck under them jumped, then shuddered as the energy of the explosion bounced from surface to bottom and back again. The thunder arrived a few seconds later, a rumble like a falling mountain. All this time, the white pyramid had been rising, incredibly slowly, till it towered now into the smoky sky.

They all stared at it, their mouths open. The thunder rolled past them, and the pyramid began slowly to unbuild itself, collapsing back into a welter of foam and tossing sea.

“Imagine what that would do to a ship,” he heard Maudit say. And Lem Everett, almost under his breath: “It's beautiful. Like an iceberg, or a mountain, seen at a million years a second.”

The last rumble of its collapse shuddered away past them, out over the calm sea, out to the four corners of the earth, out to where, as they ran their eyes tentatively around the once more flat and lusterless horizon, something enormous and dark stained the air, black as a thunderhead, in the first beginnings of a hot and hissing wind.

19

U.S.S.
Turner Van Zandt

THE little night-light burned dim as an icon candle over the bogen. If he looked hard, he could make out the outline of a door beside it, limned in the deep red radiance from the corridor. Aside from that, it was dark around him—dark, but not silent.

Dan lay awake, listening to the ship.

Here in the upper Gulf, the seas were choppy, piled low and quick in the short fetch by the northwest
shamal.
It had started late yesterday, darkening the sky. He could hear the scratch of sand-laden wind on the outer hull, next to his ear. Like a beast with a million claws, scrabbling to get in.

But louder than that was the ship. The vast gray life-support system that enclosed, protected, informed, and nourished him and two hundred others. His ear drifted from the hiss of cooled air to the creak of flexing steel to the murmur of distant voices in CIC. Teletypes rattled faintly down the passageway in Radio, a sporadic punctuation to the steady throb of pumps, the tremolo of turbines, the endless double jingle of the fathometer.

When he'd finally snapped off his bunk lamp, at 0230, his body had craved nothing more than sleep. Not sex, not food, just nirvanic unconsciousness. For three days, since Point Orange, he and Shaker had alternated port and starboard on the bridge and CIC. Six hours on, six off, and the time off consumed in navigation, inspections, underway routine.

Like most Navymen, he'd learned to cope with at-sea schedules. He'd gone three, four, even five days without sleep. The body adapted. But with age it became more difficult. He was only thirty-five, but he had more sympathy now for the older men he'd served under. Now he knew what a toll it took, just staying awake.

At last, out on his feet, he'd told Guerra he'd go over the maintenance package later. Minutes later he'd been fathoms past the level of dream. Then, some indeterminable time later, something had jerked him upward again.

Now his mind ran on and on and would not stop. He tried the little drill he used instead of counting sheep: tracing systems. Reviewing in his head the recirculating duct work on the 02 level, or tracing chill water lines through compartments and pumps and valves. Then he'd throw in various leaks or battle damage, and try to figure out the best places for cutouts and repairs.

This time, it didn't work. So finally, he just fixed his eyes on the night-light and let go. Released his mind, dropped its string and watched to see where it went.

It moved in zigzags at first. To the last time he saw Nan. She was thirteen now, willowy and snide. They'd played tennis at her stepfather's club. She'd whomped him. Tall like me, he thought. But the golden skin, the glossy dark hair, those were Susan's.

It surprised him sometimes that he so seldom thought about his ex-wife. They'd been together five years. Not long for a civilian marriage, but a good run for a Navy one. After the hostage situation in Syria, she'd decided she wanted out. He'd fought to keep her. Fought with all he had, because he loved her more than he'd ever loved anyone, even himself. But it came down to a single choice: either he left the Navy or she was through.

It hadn't been an easy decision, but he'd made it. If it was that kind of choice, after all, he'd lost her already. And now, looking back, he couldn't regret the way things had turned out.

All is for the best.
Wasn't that what Alan Evlin had told him as
Reynolds Ryan
fought thirty-foot Arctic seas, the old destroyer foredoomed to a fiery death, and Evlin doomed with her? Dan had been fresh out of the Academy then,
Ryan
his first ship. Odd, how he still felt that somewhere, somehow, the gentle lieutenant who believed all men were worth loving still wished him well.

After the divorce, he'd gone, in a way, insane. It was a common craziness in those crazy years, with the heady prospect of sex with every woman you met. Instant intimacy, if thrusting yourself within another's body was intimacy. Driven by resentment and self-hatred, he'd raided and left woman after woman. And that was when he started to drink, nearly every night, glass after glass of neat scotch or gin till the bottle slipped from his hand.

Dan closed his eyes in the dark, remembering an artist he'd met at a party. She was drunk as he was, her breasts falling out of her dress. They did it an hour later in the garden, against a trellis that shook, raining down the wilted petals of late roses. He'd seen her ten or eleven times that fall. Around her futon in her loft, her paintings, angular and stylized, conveyed alienation and fear, like those of a battered child. And then she'd said she loved him. He'd left her that same night.

Once he'd been proud of his conquests. Now he was ashamed. He'd always tried to do what was right, as he understood it, except in his relationships with women. To them, he'd lied, behaved badly, hurt them. Now he was sorry, but it was too late. For the last couple of years, he'd lived alone. And, of course, he spent a lot of time at sea.