China Sea

by David Poyer

  He wheeled suddenly and grabbed the man who was trying to edge past, making him clutch at his plate. It was Greg Juskoviac. Dan pulled him close and lifted the cup from his hand. The sweet solvent odor told him all he needed to know.

  The defrocked exec snapped his mouth closed, looking frightened and then, a moment later, angry.

  Dan tossed the liquor out onto the flight deck, put the cup back in Juskoviac’s hand, and shoved him away. He looked around, then noticed the one area on deck everyone had drifted away from as he’d entered. Everyone except Machias. The sleepy-looking petty officer was sitting cross-legged on a red-painted rescue-and-assistance gear box next to the barbecue grill. A cigarette dangled from his lips. Dan strode across the slanting deck and motioned him up. Machias glanced up, blinking, then hoisted his long body till he towered. Dan reached behind him and jerked the cover up.

  Rank on rank of flower-decorated bottles.

  Pistolesi came out of the crowd. “The captain’s cabin?” Dan asked him. The fireman scowled, arms folded. Dan braced his boot on the locker and eyed the distance to the deck edge.

  “You don’t want to do that, my man,” Machias said in a low, somnolent voice.

  When he turned his head, Dan saw all the men in the hangar were getting to their feet. The music played on, but the singing had stopped. The smoke from the cooking steaks writhed in eye-stinging clouds just beneath the floodlights.

  “Say again, Shi-hime?”

  Machias’s eyes were nearly closed. He looked down with a faint smile bending the thin mustache. He did not answer.

  Pistolesi plucked a fifth out of the box. He spun the cap off and held it out. “Jap whiskey, sir. That’s your bottle. The rest of these is ours.”

  “Navy ships are dry, Pistol.”

  Machias murmured, barely moving his lips, “News flash, Boss Man. You ain’t on no fucking Navy ship no more.”

  The eyes around him had turned opaque. They were all standing now. Dan looked at Pistolesi. “Don’t push this one, sir,” the fireman said in a low voice. “Roll with it. Take a drink.”

  “An’ how about the split-tail?” said another man, staggering across the deck as it pitched violently. “Little dried up, but not bad-looking. See’f she wants to come out an’ have a drink with us—”

  Instead of taking the proffered bottle, Dan turned his head and yelled, “Juskoviac!”

  The XO flinched. His narrow, balding pate searched around. Then he put his plate down on the deck and trotted over reluctantly.

  At the same moment, Machias reached behind his back.

  His hand came out holding a hunting-style blade, still pointed downward as it had slicked out of the sheath or maybe just from riding tucked into the small of his back. It seemed to Dan to move very slowly. By then he was moving, too, circling slowly to his right, toward where the steaks smoked on hot metal. The men around them shuffled their boots, falling back to form a cleared space in the center of the hangar.

  “You fucked everything up since you come aboard,” Machias said. “You know that? Fucked up with the Pakis. Fucked up with fucking Vorenkamp. Fucked us up all the way out to ass end a noplace.”

  “Your point?” Dan said.

  “My point. Man want to know, do I got a point. I got one, all right. You ain’t gon’ like it when you get it, either.”

  The knife turned slowly in the long, dark hand, tip wheeling upward.

  Dan flicked the serving fork up, three feet of sturdy U.S. government-issue stainless-steel servingware ending in two icepick-sharp tines aimed right at Machias’s windpipe.

  For a moment neither of them moved.

  “Take his knife, somebody. Before I turn Shi-hime here into shish kebab.”

  “Shit, Johnile—”

  The electrician had lost his sleepy expression. He stared down with undisguised hatred.

  When the knife was in custody Dan tossed the fork back to the gaping barbecue chef, then bent. He hauled four bottles out and handed them to Pistolesi, so that he had five now, with the one he’d offered, and his arms were full. Dan turned to face the men. It took an effort of will to put his back to the motionless Machias, like a matador turning away from an unreliable bull.

  “Shi-hime tells me we aren’t on a Navy ship anymore,” he yelled into the monsoon wind and the crackle of charcoal. “There’s something to that. But we’re still on a ship I command.”

  Silence.

  “What Pistol’s got in his arms right now’s enough to light everybody up. I don’t have any problem with a party. If I still drank, I’d have a shot with you. But this is it for today. We could run into a major confrontation at any time. XO, take the rest of this down to Supply and lock it up. Decide on a fair ration and issue it daily.”

  Juskoviac opened his mouth, seemed to think it over, then closed it again. From the men, silence still. Dan eyed Machias once more. The sleepy look was back, the arms crossed, the cigarette dangling. Dan turned from him again and said to the supply petty officer, “OK, I’ll take that steak now.”

  * * *

  HE stopped again outside sick bay on the way back to the bridge. Wanting to go in, but not sure he should. Wanting to ask Neilsen for something for his own nerves, goddamn it. His knees were shaking. He couldn’t believe the rebelliousness he’d seen in the hangar. He couldn’t believe he’d had to face down a man with a knife. The crew was coming apart at the seams. He had no exec, hardly any midgrade petty officer structure to stiffen discipline. In sailing ship days, a captain at sea had a squad of marines with bayonets to keep order when the chips were down. All he had to lean on was Mellows and his masters-at-arms.

  And now he had to plan around Bobbie Wedlake’s presence. He was glad she was alive, but having her aboard complicated things. Not just because of the killer, though God knew that was dangerous enough. But he had a slew of bad actors aboard now, lads like Machias. If anyone got out of hand, it could be ugly. Some men lost all control when they drank.

  You should know, he told himself. For an unsettling moment, the old craving had coaxed him to take a mouthful. It had reminded him of the relief from tension and worry alcohol had always brought. But he knew he couldn’t stop with one. If he’d so much as tipped that bottle Pistolesi had offered, he’d end up stinking oblivious, useless to the ship and to himself.

  Still, he’d barely been able to walk away.

  Rung by rung, he and Gaddis were descending the ladder.

  He had to decide what they were going to do. He couldn’t put it off any longer. A prudent mariner would dodge south, get out of the vicinity of the storm, then come back when it was past. A responsible commander would take Gaddis into Subic permission or no, decline whatever game the gods were playing with her. Not stay out here, looking down the barrel of a typhoon, with a ship that was falling apart and a crew three millimeters from mutiny.

  He decided to give it one more day.

  But when he got back up to the bridge he found Compline standing at the storm chart, pouchy face ashen. Robidoux was crouched forward, etching in a position. “What’s up, Roy? What you got, Louis?” Dan said, already feeling the knife edge of dread.

  The QM said, “The tracking reports got sent twice.”

  “Give me the bad news, guys. It doesn’t improve with age.”

  The radioman chief said that one of the position reports had been retransmitted without being updated. Hercule had not been hovering stationary over Luzon, as they had thought. “It must have a real strong subtropical high pushing it along. It’s been roaring west at twenty-two knots for eight hours, while we thought it was in park.”

  Dan bent to the chart as the bow dropped away into a trough, leaving his head floating and his gut dragging along somewhere behind. The sky to the east was turning a dead, woolly dark that made his mouth go dry in sheer physical fear. It was black as a coal face, laced with hot platinum wires of lightning. The red X Robidoux had just lifted his grease pencil off showed the typhoon 150 nautical miles west of Cape Bolinao and
starting to hook north.

  He’d lingered too long, trying to make up his mind. They were pinned against the China coast, trapped, and they were going to have to do exactly what he’d feared most: go through the right-hand dangerous semicircle.

  The bow slammed down, foam and green water spurting up through the bullnose, and the shock of salt sea against steel shook the pilothouse with a deep strumming boom like a dropped piano. He raised his eyes to see every member of the bridge team staring at him, some with terror in their eyes. And through his own fear, for he had seen tropical cyclones and knew what they could do, he had to smile reassuringly and pump confidence into his voice. He had to. Nobody else.

  He was in command.

  21

  HE was nodding out in his seat, buckled tight, when in the heaving, plunging darkness someone shook him. “Sir, Dave Zabounian here. The SPS-10’s out again.”

  Dan grunted an acknowledgment, blinking as his mind reeled from uneasy dream back to the real world, or what passed for it: this lightning-grayed rain-streaked obscurity that surrounded them, the stagger and shock as Gaddis blocked and wove and counterpunched the screaming wind and mountainous seas of an oncoming typhoon.

  For the last day and night they’d steamed north, then northeast, fighting to keep the wind on the starboard bow when the seas let them. Usually they didn’t. In all that time the swells had grown, harried and maddened hour after hour by a roaring blast varied only by battering gusts that had hauled steadily around as the storm hurtled toward them. His apprehension rose as the bottom fell out of the barometer. Hercule was obviously a fast-moving storm. They shouldn’t have to fight it for long. But the winds were passing sixty knots now, gusting to eighty, and they would be higher, much higher, as the wall of the eye neared.

  Despite the fouled-up transmission, he couldn’t help feeling he was at fault. He’d had plenty of time to get clear. He’d stayed north of fifteen degrees and north of the Xishas, despite advice from his officers. He remembered a story he’d read once about a captain too stupid or too stubborn to evade a typhoon when he could and who’d barely survived. But it was too late for second thoughts or beating himself up. He’d made his decision, and now everyone aboard was going to be royally screwed for it.

  No, he thought, half-listening in the flickering darkness as the supply officer’s voice brought Chick Doolan up-to-date on wind and sea and the engineering plant lineup. It wasn’t really the ship he was worried about. He’d seen some horrific storms before. The hurricane in the Santarén Channel, bailing his butt off for two days and nights in a leaky skiff with a Cuban kid and a pregnant woman. Or the weeks-long Arctic hell north of Iceland in winter, the endless hammering before Reynolds Ryan had finally turned south. Unless something went very, very wrong, Gaddis could take heavy weather. It was her crew that really worried him.

  Zabounian interrupted his musings. “Captain, Mr. Doolan has the deck and the conn.”

  “Sir, I have the deck and the conn. I’m going to break Chief Mellows here in as JOOD, since Chief Tosito’s hard down.”

  Dan told them, “Very well,” and added a couple of encouraging words to Zabounian. Dave said, “Yessir, well, it’s my first big storm as OOD.”

  “You’re doing a super job, Dave. You and Roy go below and try to get your heads down. We’re going to be in this awhile.”

  The jaygee hesitated, gauging the motion of the deck, then let go Dan’s chair and slid the length of the pilothouse, ending up at the ladder. Then he was gone, and Doolan said, “Jim seems to be doing OK with that diesel fuel.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t have wanted to go into this with empty tanks. Dave tell you about the radar?”

  “I don’t like having the ten and the forty both down.”

  “Engelhart’s doing the best he can, given the weather and parts situations. I told him I didn’t want anybody aloft on the mack with this much wind. We still have the Raytheon. Not as much range, but it’ll let you know if there’s somebody else really dumb out here. Make sure Mellows knows how to keep it tuned and we ought to be OK.”

  “Well, I got it. You ought to pack it in; you look like hell. Sir.”

  Dan said reluctantly, “Maybe for a little while. The wind and seas may stay about like this. They may increase. Depends on how far away the storm center passes.” He passed a few more cautions. Doolan listened patiently, smiling a little, as if humoring Dan, who found this infuriating. When he was done his department head nodded slowly, looking out at a huge sea that swept in, like a slowly approaching tennis court set on end, and the bow climbed to meet it and suddenly knifed it apart, bursting upward in an explosion of glowing foam.

  Doolan murmured, “You know that time in Fayal you saw me with that girl?”

  Dan said, surprised, it was so out of left field, “Uh … the dark-haired girl? The one from, uh, Portugal?”

  “Yeah. Lavina. Well, I wanted to say something about that.”

  “You don’t owe me any explanations, Chick.”

  “I know, but I’m gonna make one anyway, all right? It’s about Jill.”

  Dan remembered Tughril’s commissioning party, a twisted, child-tiny woman in a wheelchair. He said uncomfortably, “You don’t need to tell me this, Chick.”

  “I don’t need to tell you? Then you understand?”

  “I don’t know if I ‘understand,’ but I don’t need to. Your sex life is your own damn private business as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Well, you know, you respect somebody, you want to get things straight. I don’t know why I care what you think, but I do. All I want to say is, Jill knows. All right? She knows and it’s all right with her.”

  Dan cleared his throat. The husky lieutenant seemed to want some kind of forgiveness or at least comprehension. The skipper as father confessor. But instead of absolution or sympathy or whatever Doolan was asking for, all Dan’s suspicions about him suddenly reenergized. If Doolan was the one they dreaded, lying about the state of his marriage was a negligible offense in comparison with his other acts.

  Dan said in a low voice, “I hear you, Chick. Anything else you want to get off your chest?”

  “No, that’s it. Just wanted to let you know I wasn’t sneaking around behind her back. I love my wife. I’m not proud of this. But it’s all out in the open.”

  “I hear you,” Dan said again after a moment. So that was it, then; Doolan wasn’t going to confess anything else.

  They stood together without speaking for a long time, while the storm boomed and rushed against the echoing steel box they were surrounded by, protected by, and caged by, halfway round the world from home.

  * * *

  HE woke suddenly at the axis of black night, suddenly and fully, as if some obscure never-sleeping nexus in his brain had all at once concluded from its patient monitoring that he was in mortal danger. He sat up, body tense, staring into the dark.

  He’d hit his rack at 0400, figuring on two or three hours before dawn broke. Lashed himself in with his bunk strap and a rolled-up blanket to wedge himself in. So this creaking, seesawing, darkness surrounding him must be his cabin; this sensation of leaping and bounding along through the air was Gaddis, pitching and surging to an even heavier sea. Closer to the eye, then, but he didn’t think they’d have to go through it. The way the wind had veered before midnight told him the center would pass to the south. Unless, of course, it hooked again.… His ear tuned to a chain-rattle from somewhere far away, conducted through the metal to his ear. Then he realized what was so strange about the dark. Aboard ship, no silence was ever completely silent, and no darkness ever completely black. Light filtered through perforations in joiner bulkheads, shone from power-on lights, trickled scarlet as blood from the meshed ventilation gratings that opened on the passageway.

  But around him now was the utter black of a cave, and as he swung stocking feet down to cold tile, heart picking up speed, he realized what else was missing: the thousand mechanical sounds that formed the backdrop and warp against which
the sounds of the ship in motion existed; a susurrating obbligato as much or as little present to his consciousness as the chirp of crickets and hiccup of frogs were of a summer night. His groping fingertips found his trousers, hung from the speaking tube by his ear, and he got them on and slipped on his Klax and opened the door.

  Darkness, except for the yellow glow at the end of the corridor. An emergency lantern, the relay-operated type that only came on when ship’s power failed.

  He leaned back in and pulled his khaki jacket over his T-shirt, then headed for the bridge as the buzzer sounded behind him. His flashlight sent a red oval dancing ahead. He double-timed up the ladder, grabbing for a handhold as the ship began a roll. In any ship, losing electrical power was a major problem. But in the fast frigates, it could turn very rapidly into a disaster.

  The pilothouse was relatively bright with the crossed beams of four emergency lanterns. Chief Compline clung to the gyro. Dan looked for the OOD. The helmsman was standing back from the console, staring at it in consternation. Dan timed himself, lurched forward. He grabbed the hand line a moment before he crashed into Dom Colosimo.

  “Just buzzed your cabin, sir. Guess you were on your way up.” The reservist’s face gleamed with sweat despite the cold, and Dan knew why.