by David Poyer
The voice was scratchy, lagging, faint. “This is INS Alborz. Over.”
“This is USS Savo Island. U.S. Navy cruiser, off your starboard side. About a kilometer away. Do you require assistance?”
A short pause. Then, heavily accented, “We … do not … ask help.”
Dan kept watching the bridge, but they were either under cover, or the pilothouse was abandoned. “This is Savo actual. This is the captain. Request speak to your commanding officer direct. If possible. Over.”
A new voice came up about a minute later. “This is captain of … of Iranian ship. Do you require assistance? Over.”
“Ha-ha. Nice one,” said Mills, beside him. The TAO was in a green nylon foul-weather jacket, the collar snugged up. He held another coat out to Dan. “Thanks,” Dan said. He was getting chilled.
He shrugged into it as he considered how best to play this. When he glanced into his own pilothouse the petty officers were at the consoles that operated the 25mm chain guns, gripping the game-type toggles. Red lights and lit screens told him both guns were live. Down on the bow, the long tapered barrel of Savo’s forward five-inch rose and fell, correcting for the roll, pointed at the smoking wreck that now heaved slowly only a few hundred yards away. On the wing, the machine gunners were sharing a cigarette, hunkered below the coaming. They looked unconcerned, as if none of this was their business.
He said into the heavy little radio, “This is Savo Island. Thank you for your offer. We were attacked during the night by missiles from shore. I do not require assistance. However, I see you are fighting a fire. It is a tradition of the sea to offer help to other mariners in distress. Do you require assistance?”
Another long pause. Finally the other voice, a rough lagging one he assumed was her CO’s, came back. “We too were attacked by missiles from the shore. They were Israeli. Assistance is not required. I repeat, not required. However, if you wish, close on my starboard side and help fight the fire.”
“He’s doing us a favor. Letting us help,” said Mills, straight-faced.
“Whatever,” Dan said. The guy was trying to save his ship and his men the best way he could, given a regime that was by all accounts ruthless with anyone who stepped over its fundamentalist, anti-American line. He straightened, noticing their own Iranian, or rather Iranian speaker, waiting just inside the wing door. Muster the damage-control teams aft. Fire hoses, laid out on the port quarter. He probably won’t let us board, but we can lay some A-triple-F into that smoke. Petty Officer Kaghazchi, just stand by, please; the other side seems to speak English.”
Dan let the ensign take her alongside. Mytsalo brought her in at a shallow angle until they were a quarter mile astern, then eased off to three knots. The frigate was beam to the seas, which meant Savo started to roll hard too as she lined up.
Mytsalo kept reducing power, until they were edging up at about half the speed of smell. Dan started to tell him to goose it, get on in there, and to use his screws to keep her twisted into the wind. But closed his teeth on it. The only way you learned shiphandling was by doing it. And too slow was better than too fast. What was that old tin-can saying … oh, yes. “Try to avoid situations that call for excellent shiphandling.”
He smiled and coughed into a fist as Nuckols lifted the stainless coffee urn and his eyebrows at the same time. Dan held up thumb and forefinger an inch apart, remembering when someone else coughed too that he’d promised to get back to Grissett about the men in sick bay. The results of the tests on Goodroe’s body … but now wasn’t the time. Not a hundred yards away from an enemy with whom they’d traded deadly blows. Hard blows. Keep your mind right, Lenson. Game’s not over yet.
They were sliding into the slot. Dan tensed. It looked awfully close. He started to say, “—”
“Engines stop,” Mytsalo called.
The helmsman: “Engines stop aye. Both engines stopped.”
Dan closed his mouth and went out on the wing again.
Looked down on from fifty yards away, the damage was much worse. The smoke blowing down on Savo smelled like a burning refinery. In the hangar the tail of a small helicopter lay twisted like a scrap of aluminum foil tossed into a recycle bin. He coughed again, scarred throat closing, and retreated into the pilothouse. Started to call for the XO, then remembered.
“Want the senior watch officer, sir?” Mills asked him.
“No, you can do it, Matt. Leave Cher in Combat.… Keep an eye on Max. He’s doing good, but we need somebody senior to an ensign in charge. Oh, and call Adam Ammermann up here. I want him to get eyes on this from close aboard.”
“Aye aye, sir. And you’ll be—?”
“I’m going aft, get some foam on that fire.”
* * *
THEY were alongside for two hours, pumping fifteen thousand gallons of firefighting foam that smelled like curdled blood onto the hangar and helo deck. Meanwhile the wind blew steadily harder, laying streaks of foam like detergent suds across the wine-dark waves. Snow blew down now and then from clouds dark as cast lead. The frigate’s crew came out from behind the superstructure—where they had, apparently, been hiding—and resumed their own damage-control efforts. Perhaps they’d feared being machine-gunned as the cruiser approached. Dan offered the loan of portable pumps, a firefighting team, but was brusquely turned down. The Iranian commander had at last emerged into sight, and gazed stone-faced across from his bridge wing. By 09 local the fire was out, but he still didn’t see any sign of power being restored. Actually, you could hear whether a ship had power, and this one, clearly, still didn’t.
Savo was slowly drifting away, the black disturbed water between them widening. Fifty yards. A couple minutes later, sixty. She’d done that all morning; her sail area was larger than the frigate’s, giving the wind more purchase. The increasingly violent seas didn’t help. He’d approached from downwind for that very reason—hadn’t wanted to be pinned against the other hull—but it necessitated continual screw and rudder orders, jockeying to stay close enough to fight the fire while not actually colliding.
“Noodge her in there again, Max,” Dan told Mytsalo. He snugged the foul-weather jacket to his neck, screwed on his combination cap, with the gold braid on the brim, more tightly, and went back out onto the wing.
The other captain was still at half attention, gripping his binoculars, pointedly looking away from Savo. Dan leaned against the coaming until they came abreast, then shouted across, “D’you have power yet?”
The Persian’s black eyebrows, so heavy they were one dark line, contracted. He shook his head slightly. In his forties, at a guess. Mustached, not exactly clean-shaven, but not bearded, either. The black stubble was trimmed around the jawline, as if to fit a gas mask. Above it, a hawk-beak of a nose. A dark, foreboding glare, sort of like a male Singhe’s. Dan figured him for a regular, most likely from the shah’s old navy, trained as an ensign in San Diego or Newport.
“Propulsion?”
Another negative wag. He lifted the binoculars and focused them somewhere past Dan. “We will take it soon, though.”
“Uh-huh. Where are you headed?”
No answer. “Syria?” Dan prompted. “Tartus?”
The faintest motion of the shoulders; otherwise, perfect immobility. A figure moved behind the commander, just inside one of the smashed-out windows, and Dan saw one reason why he might not be that forthcoming. Someone was listening, from inside. Holding out … a microphone? Was everything he said being recorded?
“We will regain powers very shortly,” the captain muttered through tight lips.
“Yeah? Well, look. Fleet Weather says this is gonna get ugly again. Forty-knot winds. Fifteen-foot seas. I don’t know how bad that port-side damage is, but you want to get into shelter before it puts too much stress on your hull girder. Right?”
“I will reach port,” the guy said. Obviously hating every word he had to exchange with this enemy, this foreigner, this infidel. Yet also thinking about how he was going to save his ship, and his men. N
ot a bad skipper. Probably a pretty good one. And if he was like the Iranian destroyerman Dan had faced in the Gulf a few years before, a competent and dogged seaman.
“I can put a line over,” Dan called over the rising wind. “Provide a tow. Get you part of the way there, at least. Until you get your shafts turning.”
The guy was obviously struggling with himself. “You will wait,” he said at last, and ducked into the pilothouse. Figures moved back and forth in the semidarkness. Dan couldn’t see what was going on, so he went to the radar and checked it, his boots sliding as Savo rolled. He called down to Staurulakis for an update and to make sure she was passing everything that was going on to Higher via chat.
When he socketed the J-phone Van Gogh said, “Sir, we can’t stay alongside much longer. We’re really starting to pick up motion, and this close—”
“Yeah, Chief, I know. Make sure it gets logged, that we offered a tow.”
“Logging it all, sir. From the minute we sighted them. Chief Grissett’s back on the signal bridge getting photos, too.”
Document everything—that was apparently going to be the Navy’s watchword from now on. Dan nodded and told him to lay out a course to Tartus. He paced to the starboard side, ran his eyes around the horizon, though the machine-gun crew and the junior officer of the deck were both out there, and paced back. Out to the port wing again.
“We will accept tow,” the other captain called, still not looking at him. “Until we have engine powers again. But no one comes aboard.”
Dan nodded. “Got it. How’s your hull damage?”
“We are keeping up,” he said, and Dan caught the unspoken message: It wasn’t good.
“Do you have a towing hawser? A special rope for towing?”
The other nodded. “Towing hawser. Yes.”
“I’ll need it bent onto twenty fathoms—sorry, forty meters—of your anchor chain. Make sure to rig chafing gear. Lock your propellers if you can. And put your rudder amidships.” The guy nodded, looking even more pissed off. Dan started to turn away, preoccupied already with the mechanics of towing eleven hundred tons in a heavy seaway, then pivoted back. “Tartus?”
The Iranian squinted, obviously hating what he had to do. But forced to answer. “Yes. Tartus.”
Dan was turning away once more, assuming the conversation was finished, when the man spoke again. “You are Lenson. Yes?”
“I’m sorry—I didn’t catch that?” Although he had, all too clearly; but he needed a second to process the question. Or rather, what the asking of it meant.
“Commander Lenson. The one who stole our submarine. And who sank our sister ship. I must … thank you for the assistance. But I hope we will meet again.”
Dan returned his saturnine stare, but could muster no appropriate response. Very suddenly, he felt deeply apprehensive. The Iranian’s smile seemed to say he knew something Dan didn’t, and wouldn’t like.
“Keep your forward gun turned aft,” he called over the widening sea to the Iranian, trying to make his own expression equally remorseless. “To protect it from damage, of course. But I just want you to know. If you turn it toward me, I will sink you.”
* * *
HE pondered that as he paced the bridge, that they knew him by name; then worried about the weather, which was a more immediate threat. Towing was never a routine evolution, and towing in heavy seas could be a bear—exacting, tiring. And, if you screwed up or got unlucky, dangerous.
It took a while to rig aft, then longer to reposition upwind and float a buoyed messenger line down. The Iranians, in green camo and bright red life preservers, lashed a heavier line to it, which Savo’s deck gang hauled back. Then came the towed ship’s hawser. This turned out to be brand-new twelve-strand polyester with a stout thimble. Savo’s deck seamen bolted the cruiser’s own hawser to the thimble, then paid both lines back out until they had a good two hundred fathoms catenaried between them, from chain through Savo’s stern pad eye to black-painted anchor chain dropped from the frigate’s bow chock.
When the first lieutenant reported they were rigged to tow, Dan passed the word aft to make fast and stand clear, but also to have a big guy standing by with a sledge in case they had to trip the pelican hook. By noon they were under way at five knots, plodding north, more or less crosswind. A hundred and thirty-two miles, Van Gogh said.
The wind kept increasing, howling in their antennas and snapping their flags. Dan couldn’t believe how cold it was getting. How long this front was lingering. The seas swept in from off the bow, burst against their sides, rolled Savo far over before she came back again. Belted into his command chair, he watched spray fly up, trail across the flat banks of hatches on the forecastle, blow aft and rattle against the pilothouse windows.
Savo screeched and groaned as she plunged and climbed, not nearly so violently as the ships he’d grown to manhood on—FRAM destroyers, Knox-class frigates, Perrys—but more ponderously. And, given her top-heaviness, sometimes frighteningly. Still, he felt confident in her. It would be a shame to have to leave her.
But he had to face the possibility.
Staurulakis checked in on the Hydra. Dan told her to stay at Condition Three. The Tomahawks they’d fired the night before had sent a message, but he wasn’t sure how the Syrians would react. As for further BMD missions, there was no point continuing to scan. Their magazines were empty of anything that would take out another Al-Husayn. “Anything on the chats about us, Cheryl? Any reaction at all yet to our after-action report? And that we’re towing this guy in?”
“An acknowledgment from ComSixthFleet. ‘Your message date-time-group yada-yada received.’ That’s all.”
Strange that Ogawa wouldn’t have provided orders. So the jury up at Higher was still out … or the hot potato was being bucked upstairs. Dan called sick bay to check on Zotcher. The sonarman was stable. Grissett had done a sonogram, located the bullet, and extracted it; it had missed the kidney; he sounded optimistic. Dan told him to tell Zotcher he’d called. “And tell him he probably saved all our lives in CIC. I’m putting him in for as high a decoration as I can swing.”
Next he called Ammermann and asked him to come up to the bridge. He made sure the staffer had seen the damage to the Iranian, and that he’d make a report too, including the results of the night action and the disappearance of the missile boat.
He went down to his sea cabin and checked his message file, checked a couple of chat rooms, and sent an e-mail to Blair.
He sighed and eyed his bunk, wavering to its siren call. But … no. Not while they were towing. Not still in range of the Syrians. He sighed and climbed slowly back up to the bridge. Each boot he lifted was strapped with heavy iron.
* * *
THEY towed through the afternoon as the wind built to thirty to thirty-five, gusts to forty. Alborz yawed occasionally, but her CO wasn’t taking Dan’s rudder-centerlining command literally; was seaman enough not to. She came back around and although the catenary dipped, making the first lieutenant clear the fantail, never put too much strain on the towline. Dan drowsed in his chair, snapping awake from time to time. Breathing fast, throat sore, sweat itching under his coveralls. He kept dreaming about the white thing. Each time he woke he checked with whoever was on watch, but they still hadn’t gotten any steaming orders by the time dark fell.
When Longley brought up a covered tray with Dan’s evening meal they were eighty miles off Tartus. Dan napped in his chair through the night. At 0109 a message came in directing him to drop the tow off the coast, and under no circumstances to enter Syrian territorial waters. This seemed wise, and he sent a brief acknowledgment, underlining his depleted magazines and fuel and asking for orders.
At dawn the purple mountains of the Levant glowed like backlit transparencies on the horizon. He shaded his eyes, watching those far peaks for a long time. The seas were still ten to twelve feet, rushing in hollowed and belligerent to collide with the bow like semi-truckloads of wet shining gravel. Savo bulled her way through them l
ike some armored cataphract through ranks of the Seleucid infantry Freya Stark had described in her book.
Back then, Syria had been a Roman colony, and one of the most loyal and civilized. A lot had changed in this corner of the world since. Including the lock-on a number of Russian-made fire-control radars had maintained on Savo Island for the last few hours. The mountains pushed upward slowly as they plodded on, growing sharper, darker against the climbing sun. Here and there plumes of thin smoke rose. Trash fires, or maybe burning off fields; they didn’t seem heavy enough to be signs of war.
Another message came in, giving him a rendezvous position with a tug at the head of what looked like the lead-in channel for the port. Van Gogh plotted it and they altered course gradually, dragging their charge around at the end of the towline. Making the last few miles directly into the prevailing sea, which made the wind seem twice as strong and converted their roll into a plunge and lift that set metal clanking around the bridge. The mountains kept growing, the land imperceptibly closing, until he could make out small settlements and villages through the binoculars. They passed no fishing boats, which didn’t surprise him. Not in winter, in seas this heavy.
Nuckols struck eight bells. 0800. Tartus crept into view, an open roadstead that at first didn’t look like it would offer much shelter, until long stone breakwaters gradually coalesced from the beach. Dan went up to the flying bridge to use the Big Eyes. He inspected the shore for a long time through the huge stand-mounted binoculars, and decided at last that if the tug didn’t show, he wasn’t going in. He’d drop the frigate at the outer anchorage, and let the Syrians and Iranians sort things out. But not long after, CIC reported a contact leaving the harbor. It hove into view as a speck, then slowly became a small craft. As the three ships labored toward a meeting, Dan passed the word to stand by to bring in the hawser.