by David Poyer
Something had changed about the Marker Eagle. She seemed to have elongated at one end, as if telescoping outward at her stern. For a moment, confused, his eye told him she was swinging her stern ramp outward. Then he blinked and understood.
What he was seeing wasn’t an extension of the merchant. It was the raked gray stem of a warship, emerging from behind the ro-ro. As he watched, the forecastle came into view and then the unmistakable silhouettes of turreted guns and directors, rising swiftly to a strange stepped pyramid of superstructure.
“Holy shit,” Zabounian muttered beside him. “That’s no fucking gunboat. What the hell is it?”
Suddenly other voices, other sounds penetrated the anechoic bubble around him, and he caught the dying whine from all around him as the power went down. The 21MC made a choked noise and went silent. The phone talkers and the QM were bent over Tosito. Blood was still jetting out of his shoulder. Some large, very sharp sushi blade had sliced him so deep Dan could see the raw pulsation of his lung. The Guatemalan gave him a steady despairing look. Dan almost knelt, then remembered: he had a ship to save, and a hundred men, and turned front again and tried to make sense out of what he was seeing.
The warship that had fired on them was still moving out from behind the merchant, a white bone growing at her strangely curved stem. Now he could see nearly her whole length. She was broken-decked, with very little sheer. Like a British Leander or Type Twelve, but he’d steamed with them in the Med and Caribbean; she wasn’t either of those. The single huge raked-aft funnel looked almost Japanese. It was followed by a long, low, almost featureless midships area, with two more turrets superposed aft and a straight transom stern.
“Son of a bitch, she’s big,” Zabounian breathed.
Dan stared, his mind churning through observation and reasoning to conclusions about ten times faster than it usually operated. He had no idea who this ship was, but her armament and size made one thing perfectly plain. The other, fleeing contacts might be gunboats. This was something more like a light cruiser, at least twice Gaddis’s displacement, and unless he did something very quickly those guns, already training slowly around his way, were going to sink him. But without ammunition for the forties and five-inch, and without power to run the mounts even if he had it, he was helpless. The gun crews could fire the fifties and twenties without power, but they’d just dent the plating on something like this. The other ship could stand off and shell them to pieces, or put more of the missiles into them.
Only great good luck that first salvo had detonated high, a mission kill in their mack and upperworks but still not a mortal wound. Not yet. Not if he could persuade—
He wheeled and grabbed up the black canister that sat just within the wing door, yanked off the tape that held its top on, and shouldered his way outside. He tore the tab off and upended the canister over the side. It lightened abruptly as the weight within dropped away. He yelled to the boatswain. “Pass the word to the lookouts, all the smoke floats! Over the side! Now!”
When he wheeled back to raise his glasses again, the other ship was fully unmasked, clear of the Marker Eagle and moving ahead with swiftly gathering speed through the choppy sea. He narrowed his eyes and squinted as over the three miles of water he suddenly saw clearly detail, shape, armament and superstructure arrangement, radars, and antenna.
“Large guns, and many portholes,” the fishermen on Dahakit Atoll had said. Dan had chuckled indulgently. Now here it was, the high freeboard of the forward hull dotted with dozens of the tiny circles.
Gaddis coasted forward, more and more slowly as the way came off her. The phone talkers and lookouts heaved the last of the smoke floats over the side. From midships, the one Dan had dropped burst into a brief flame, then began venting huge clouds of milling smoke the color of library paste. They were designed to be seen from miles away at sea or from the air, and now up around and behind the helpless frigate a great towering pillar built toward the hurtling sky.
Below him the boat crew, understanding suddenly, spun the lids off the red metal cans that held gasoline for the inboard-outboards. When the gas hit the water it spread, a silvery-blue sheen on the uneasy sea, before its edge reached one of the burning smoke floats and a sudden sheet of white-yellow flame roared up the side of the helplessly rolling frigate.
He didn’t really think it would work. But it was the only chance they had.
Ahead, the gray silhouette shortened, curving gently as she gathered speed toward her wallowing and helpless opponent. Dan screwed the glasses into his eyes, blinking sweat away, searching through the thickening smoke for some sign of its nationality. Now that it was closer, he saw how old it looked, like newsreels of ships from the thirties and forties. The portholes—no modern destroyer type had portholes, not in the hull—were each bearded with a russet streak of rust. She looked like the pictures of prewar cans he recalled from the history texts at Annapolis, the old—what were they called? He couldn’t remember. He lifted his glasses to search the mast again.
She flew no ensign.
Just as he flew none.
The bridge was dead silent around him. Gaddis surged back and forth as she slewed around beam on to the prevailing sea. He became aware that he hadn’t breathed for a long time and forced himself to draw a lungful. He was choking on mortal fear and helpless rage. Watching, through the field of the binoculars, for the first flash from the muzzles of those short, grim-looking barrels that aimed now directly across two thousand yards of heaving sea at the wallowing frigate.
Then her hull began to shorten.
He watched in astonishment, fighting to keep his knees from folding. It did not seem possible. But as bow and stern drew closer together, then collapsed to a stern quarter position angle, he couldn’t deny it, couldn’t understand it, but had to accept it nonetheless.
His unexpected antagonist was turning away, showing him the white toss and burble at her stern. He held his breath and refocused the glasses, fighting the tremor in his hands, the shaky blur it made of vision, hoping to make out something on her counter, some clue to who or what she was, but whatever had been there once, it had been painted out.
Just as Gaddis’s hull number had vanished, in Singapore.
“They’re running away,” somebody said. “Hauling ass.”
“Son of a bitch.”
Dan said nothing, sucking in breath after breath. Smoky air had never tasted sweeter. He’d expected to be swimming by now or fighting fires and flooding from armor-piercing projectiles. Gaddis’s own hull plating was only half an inch thick, barely enough to stop a rifle bullet.
The warship shrank steadily, moving off to the southwest. Dan got a bearing and best-guessed her course. Then he cranked the sound-powered phone and asked Armey when they were going to have the emergency generator started and how soon they could get way on again.
Doolan slammed a big blue book down in front of him. Jane’s, an old edition. Doolan flipped it open to an outline drawing. Dan stared, grinding his mouth with his knuckles.
“That what we just saw?”
“Sure looks like it. Without this top hamper here and those things aft of the stack—are those cranes?”
“Floatplane catapults.” The weapons officer lifted his hand, revealing the text. “Get this: Built for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Katori-class cruisers. Commissioned 1940 through ’41. Most of them lost in WW Two. One used as a test ship at Bikini. China got the last one afloat as reparations after the war. The Nationalists left it in Shanghai in ’49. This says it was laid up, going to be broken up.”
Neilsen, behind them: “We could use some help with this stretcher, sir.”
They grabbed the head end of the litter, helping to ease Tosito down the ladder on his way to sick bay, then came back to the chart table and stared down at the book. Dan was trying to wrap his mind around the concept of an ex-Japanese cruiser, a ghost from the Second World War, roaming the sea as a Chinese commerce raider. He couldn’t imagine a more intimidating one. “Obv
iously somebody decided not to scrap it. What kind of guns were those? Does it say?”
“Four six-inch fifty-cal and scads of AA. Range not given, but it’s got to be more than our five-inch.”
Suddenly all the radio remotes began to hiss, the radarscope cooling fans came on, pilot lights winked to life. Dan pushed buttons. “Main Control, Bridge: We have power back up here. When are we going to be able to move?”
Sansone said they were relighting one-alfa now and should have enough steam for steerageway in fifteen to twenty minutes. Dan considered, staring around the horizon. It was empty now, except for the hurtling clouds, the everlasting march of swells, and the white bulk of the Marker Eagle. He said to Doolan, “OK, call away the boarding party. Let’s see just how bad things are over there.”
* * *
THE boarding party radioed back that everyone aboard the merchant was dead. They had found the master on the bridge, shot through the head. The other crew members were either dead or missing, presumably lost overboard. Hundreds of spent 7.62 × 39 cartridge casings on the deck told the rest of the story. There had apparently been a hasty effort to scuttle, perhaps triggered by Gaddis’s sudden appearance on the horizon. The hull forward had been blown in either by a shell exploding close aboard or by some form of demolition charge. Dom Colosimo reported water coming in steadily, too much, in his judgment, to stanch with the men and gear they had available. He’d gotten enough watertight doors dogged to slow the flooding, but that was all they could do, postpone her final plunge for a few hours.
Dan stood on the bridge after he acknowledged, scratching his chin and thinking. Remembering the bluff captain who’d been so sure he could handle anything. His sparrowlike, vivacious American wife. Both dead.… And wondering how he was going to find, let alone attack, a ship that outgunned him four to one, that could range over a vast area of ocean, that operated in conjunction with fast patrol craft, that carried missiles he was helpless to retaliate against or counter.
A few minutes later, Dom called back to announce that their first report had been in error. There was one survivor. A woman who identified herself as Roberta Wedlake had barricaded herself in a laundry room behind the captain’s cabin with a revolver. She wanted to stay with the Marker Eagle and her husband. Dan said that was impossible. The ro-ro was going down. She’d have to gather what personal gear she needed and come back to Gaddis in the RHIB. Then he added, “Dom, I’m going to test your resourcefulness. Can you and Pistol locate any hose over there? Fire hose or maybe something down in the engine spaces? As large-diameter as you can handle. Something that looks like it’ll float.”
An hour later, with the white ship’s bow riding noticeably lower in the water, the reservist reported back that Pistolesi had things jury-rigged about as well as they could expect. Dan moved in then and put Gaddis as close alongside upwind as he dared. Both ships had been drifting downwind all this time, propelled by the steady monsoon. The huge sail area of the merchant drove her faster than the relatively low frigate. The deck gang fired over a shot line, followed by a nine-thread. They hauled back a heavy manila line with one of the merchant’s fire hoses slung beneath it. The snipes toiled cursing down on the main deck, spattered by surprisingly cold breaking seas, but at last reported they had a makeshift connection at the fuel riser. Dan told Colosimo to start the pumps when he was ready.
The two ships rode downwind coupled as if for a battlefield transfusion for an hour and a half, till Gaddis’s tanks were overflowing-full with diesel from the doomed merchant’s bunkers. It wasn’t Distillate Fuel, Marine, but Armey assured Dan they could adjust the sprayer plates and burners to accommodate it. After which Dan cast his end of the rig loose for the sinking ro-ro to take down with her, circled around to the lee side, and ordered the inflatables back aboard.
The RHIBs plowed slowly back, buffeted by seas driven higher by a rising wind. They were loaded deep with the food, grease, consumables, and spare parts he’d ordered them to ransack the sinking ship for. It wasn’t looting, exactly. Gaddis needed fuel and stores, and there was no point letting them go to the bottom. Behind them Marker Eagle was listing to starboard, down so far by the head now that her foredeck was awash in the breaking rollers.
When the boats were yet a couple of hundred yards off he could make out the woman’s face. It was pale as a patch of spume, cupped by short dark hair. She was gazing up at the frigate as Gaddis loomed closer, then towered over her as the boat slowed, heaving violently, the coxswain snatching a sea painter tossed down from the main deck. Dan waved at her from the bridge but couldn’t tell if she saw him, if she recalled him, if she recognized him; could not tell whether she was seeing, at that moment, anything at all.
20
THE next morning he stood in sick bay as the ship heaved and strained around them, feeling the delicate bones within Bobbie Wedlake’s motionless hand. She lay huddled beneath a sheet on the upper bunk, the reliefs of her spindly arms and legs reminding him of a fallen bird. Her face was colorless as wax. The manic energy he’d seen in Singapore was gone. The corpsman had given her some kind of tranquilizer, but she was awake enough to talk. She’d told Dan what she knew, what she’d seen and heard during the boarding. He’d told her Eric had died a hero; she could be proud of him. She squeezed her eyes shut and murmured, barely moving her lips, “If he hadn’t fought back, they’d have let us go.”
“You better not stay too much longer, Captain,” said Neilsen.
“I don’t think they would have, Bobbie. Not these guys.”
“I told him, ‘You’re not in the bloody Royal Navy anymore.’ I heard them shooting down below. He told me to go to the hidey-hole, bar the door, and stay away from it, and that’s what I did. He said he’d come back down and get me, when they left, not to open up for anybody till then.” She rolled her head on the pillow, then abruptly sat up. Clutched her temples, pulling the skin around her eyes back till he could see her skull beneath the flesh. “Oh, God. I feel so dizzy.”
The corpsman rushed over, putting his arm around her shoulder and giving Dan a warning glare. “You’re gonna be fine,” Nielsen said. “All you need is rest. Do you want another shot?”
“No, I don’t want any more fucking shots. And you get away from me.” She pushed him away and swung her legs over and slid down. Dan took her arm and she swayed there for a few seconds, fighting the ship’s motion, then sagged and collapsed back against the frame of the bunk. “Maybe I’ll try that again later,” she whispered.
Neilsen came back, silently disapproving, and together they lifted her back into the bunk. “You come up to the bridge whenever you feel up to it,” Dan told her. “Meantime, I’m going to be doing some thinking.”
Her eyelids fluttered closed, and a moment later her breathing smoothed out.
Lenson bent to check on Tosito, in the lower bunk. The sonarman chief was snoring stertorously, a plasma drip taped to his outboard arm. Dan crooked a finger at Neilsen. He asked for a prognosis in the passageway. Neilsen said the chief was stable; it seemed to be a clean wound; he was full of antibiotics and plasma. They just had to wait.
“OK, you seem to be coping. I just want to make sure you keep all accesses to sick bay locked at all times. If you need a piss break or want to go to chow, call Marsh Mellows and get one of his masters-at-arms down here to relieve you. Don’t leave her alone, and don’t let her leave.”
“She’s restricted to sick bay? Didn’t you just invite her to the bridge?”
“I changed my mind,” Dan told him. “I forgot we’ve still got somebody aboard who likes to kill people. Understand? Keep her here as long as you can. And don’t leave her alone for a second without a guard.”
* * *
THEY met in his sea cabin, Dan, Jim Armey, Chick Doolan, and Dom Colosimo. Dan hadn’t invited Juskoviac. Zabounian was on the bridge, holding her bow on into the increasingly heavy seas, and Englehart was still getting the missile damage repaired and the radars back up. The first thing Lenson told them,
after getting them down around the table that the heavy pitching had wiped clear, dumping everything off onto the deck, was, “This is a council of war.”
“We’re not at war, sir,” Armey said. He leaned back, his long, slim frame radiating fatigue and tension even as it relaxed slowly into the cushions of the settee.
“Yes, we are. Ask Chief Tosito. But first, how we doing with that diesel fuel?”
The chief engineer cleared his throat. “Well, what we got from the merchant tests real close to the JP-5 we use in the generators. So I changed out the burner barrels to a smaller orifice, to tune for the right air/fuel mixture. Then I checked for leaks on the burner front. The flash point for JP-5 and DFM is the same at 140 degrees, but the diesel’s a lot less viscous. You’ll burn white due to the air/fuel mix—”
“Burn white. More white smoke?”
“Correct.”
“Are we going to make as many RPMs?”
“I guess the short answer, we ain’t gonna make thirty-one knots anymore no matter what we burn. We’re using baling wire and Band-Aids down there, sir. And diesel burns hotter than regular fuel. More dangerous, less margin for error.” Armey hesitated. “What’s this typhoon doing?”
“Robidoux says it’s parked over Luzon for the moment. He’s watching it.”
“Did you look in on Tostito? I’ve been on the bridge,” Doolan said, tapping a pencil, his face withdrawn, watchful.
“Neilsen’s got him stabilized. Says the wound’s clean.”
“That’s good. OK. Why did you say we’re at war?”
Dan leaned back and laid out an abbreviated version of Bobbie Wedlake’s story.
She’d been on the bridge when the two gunboats appeared. Eric had been unconcerned at first. Then, as their shadowers drew nearer on converging courses, suddenly became agitated. He’d called all hands on deck and ordered them to man fire hoses. At that time he had sent the first distress message, the one Gaddis had intercepted ninety miles to the south.