by David Poyer
When he bent to the bearing circle again, it was the same. Locked as if welded to the oncoming prow. “Range to Skunk papa,” he muttered.
The nav console began to peep, a shrill electronic warning he didn’t really need. “Range to new contact, twelve hundred yards and closing. Constant bearing, decreasing range … collision warning.”
“Passing three-five-zero.”
“Combat reports: range clear to port. Two-seven-zero is a good course.”
When he bent again the bearing had changed just the slightest bit. Drawing right. They should pass clear. Unless the merchant, startled by the sudden appearance of the cruiser dead ahead, had swung his own wheel right … in which case they would still collide. “Continue left to three-zero-zero,” he snapped to Van Gogh, beside him. “We’ll put our stern to him, then figure out what to do next.”
The ships drew together massively as colliding planets. Savo’s wake broke against the immovable reef of the containership’s side. They stood watching helplessly as the distance narrowed. The merchant didn’t seem to have changed its course at all. Probably astonished, Dan thought, at having a gray warship suddenly materialize ahead, then slam on power and spin away. He studied the stained rusty bow, the blunt cutwater, the indentation of the anchor well, only a hundred yards distant, until he could have drawn it from memory.
As Savo’s powerful turbines surged her ahead, the gap began to widen.
A minute passed. Another.
The distance kept increasing. The hull behind them paled as the fog pushed in.
Van Gogh cleared his throat. “Captain, about that right rudder order—”
Dan slumped against the bulwark. He clutched his binoculars, so no one would see his hands shaking. “Uh, we might have made it, Chief. But given the, um, circumstances, it wasn’t the most prudent response.”
“Steady on three-zero-zero,” the helmsman stated.
“Very well,” Dan called. “Let’s get well clear, make sure this is all sorted out. Then come back to—Quartermaster: new course.”
“Coming up with a new course, sir … zero-three-four looks good.”
Dan cocked his head into the corner of the pilothouse, gesturing the OOD aside. Their heads together, he murmured, “Don’t fucking apologize. Just tell me you understand what just happened.”
“I gave the wrong order. Sorry, Captain. I mean—”
Dan wondered how best to tell him. “It’s a little more than the wrong order. Ever heard of Reynolds Ryan?”
“The destroyer? That got cut in two by the carrier?”
“That’s the one. I was on the bridge. JOOD. Know how it happened? At a critical point, like today, the CO gave ‘left rudder’ instead of ‘right rudder.’ I don’t think he even realized, until it was too late.”
The little chief’s head was down. “I—I didn’t know.”
“Look, Teddy, you’re a decent officer of the deck. Conscientious. Alert. All I’m saying is, when you’re at an inflection point, that’s when you need to take that couple of extra seconds and make absolutely certain of the order you’re giving. That your brain, or your tongue, isn’t on automatic, or you’re replaying some old tape. So next time you’re faced with a big decision, one that can kill people … slow down. Make what you decide as right as you can make it. Understood?” The chief nodded. “Now take the conn and get us back on course.”
Dan clapped his shoulder and turned back to the pilothouse. The helmsman, quartermaster, phone talkers, instantly looked away. “This is the captain. Chief Van Gogh has the deck and the conn.”
He waited as each watchstander reported his status to the conning officer. Until the bridge, overhead lights snapping off, going to darkened status now, settled back into the somnolent routine of night watch. Until they were on course for the rendezvous, and he’d double-checked it, made triply sure it passed near no reefs or headlands or other hazards to navigation.
Then he strolled out onto the wing.
Alone at last, both hands claw-gripping the dew-coated, varnished teak of the bulwark, he let himself freak out.
The mist cooled his cheek like an open freezer after the heat of the day. No stars gleamed through the overcast. Even the channel behind them, stacked with the lights of incoming and outgoing ships, was only a glowing band, fuzzy as the Milky Way. And all around, above, ahead, lay darkness, into which Savo’s cutwater drove with a continuous roar, her bow wave waxing and waning as the cruiser rolled, creaming out coruscating and flashing into the dead and returnless velvet black.
The shaking eased off, leaving nausea, and a stabbing agony in his knotted neck. By any standard, that’d been too fucking close. Five seconds’ hesitation, a few screw-turns slower, or if he’d let Van Gogh’s erroneous rudder order take effect … they’d have collided. Sailors dead, maybe. For certain, Savo damaged, her mission unfulfilled. The billions of dollars and millions of man-hours invested in her lost, squandered, wasted.
The chief was doing the best he knew how. So were Cheryl, Ollie, Hermelinda, Max, even Amy Singhe, who after all was just trying to fix something that all too often seemed deeply broken. But no one could do his or her job alone. They needed each other, and Savo needed them all.
And at the top, solitary … Really, who was he to lead them? Most Navy careers, successful ones, ascended as gracefully and predictably as a curve of ballroom stairs. Winding upward to greater responsibility, greater honor, greater rank.
While his own had been tossed by downsucks and updrafts like a glider in the mountains, heading for the ground one minute, the sky the next. Questionable decisions. Courts of inquiry. Awards. Letters of reprimand. Dangerous assignments. Unexpected promotions. The one sure thing he could say was, he’d had an eventful career. Yeah, if experience came through bad judgment, he had it, all right. In spades.
But by all rights, he should be on the beach, living the dreary aftermath of an active career. An engineer at a shipyard, a consultant, real estate, insurance, dabbling in local politics or charity boards or docenting at museums. Knowing, all the while, that the apex of their lives lay behind them.
A tentative cough behind him. “Captain? Meeting on the mess decks. They’re standing by for you.”
A sardonic smile curved his lips. He nodded into the dark, thanking it, at least, for staying with him. Before turning away, back to his duty.
7
The Strait of Hormuz
“EMERGENCY breakaway,” Dan told Amy Singhe, and the pilothouse filled with shouting and the drone of the ship’s whistle. Five short blasts. The distance line was hustled in hand over hand. Aft and below, the refueling gang danced their intricate pavane. The boatswain tripped the pelican hook with a clank audible even high on the bridge wing. The heavy black hose through which Savo had sucked as at some massive teat withdrew up its supporting cable in spasms and starts. As the ships began to pull apart, the linehandlers paid out the inhaul line, faster and faster, as it snaked back to the departing oiler.
Two days after the near collision, late in the afternoon, he reclined in the leather chair on the port wing under a cloudy low sky. Ceiling two hundred feet, winds southwest, seas four to six feet. Engines 1A and 2B on the line, generators one and two, steering unit B. Singhe had taken the conn for the replenishment. She’d arrowed in too fast, making them all hinky as the massive swollen stern of USNS Kanawha had loomed too suddenly. At his cautionary murmur, though, she’d slowed, and dropped them into the refueling slot fifty yards off the oiler’s starboard side with seasoned aplomb.
He stole a glance at the strike lieutenant as she crouched, peeping through the bearing circle. “Watch your stern,” he cautioned. “She’s gonna swing fast if you put a hard rudder to her.” Every word sounded like a double entendre.
She spared him one cool glance, eyebrow lifted, full lips curved in an equivocal half smile, then bent to the pelorus again. “Come to course two-seven-zero. Engines ahead standard, indicate pitch and turns for fifteen knots.”
“My r
udder is right, coming to course two-seven-zero.” Dan’s gaze locked with the helmsman’s. Was that half a wink, as the seaman suppressed his own chuckle? “Engines ahead standard, fifteen knots.”
He leaned back, opening the focus of his attention as Savo’s fantail, with the outboard-slanted canisters of Harpoon launchers, cleared Kanawha’s bow. The whipped-cream white of her wake frothed a curving path on pristine sea.
A mile away, another leaden shadow lurked in the haze: nearly as large as Savo, but her profile less lofty, more rakish, radar panels set lower on her superstructure. USS Mitscher was an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer. Nine thousand tons full load, five hundred–plus feet long, with much the same sensors and weapons, but without Savo’s antiballistic capability. Slightly faster and more heavily armored, with a stealthier radar profile, Mitscher would be riding shotgun for him as CTG 151.7 penetrated the most heavily traveled, fiercely disputed strait in the world. Dan didn’t know her skipper, Frank “Stony” Stonecipher, but had downloaded his bio and discussed him with Jenn Roald on the “red phone,” point-to-point secure satcomm. Roald said he was a good guy, one Dan could depend on. “My N4 says HM&E and CS are both readiness status one. She has a full ordnance loadout and her Aegis is at 98 percent. If you have to fight your way in, you’re both as ready as we can make you. If, that is, nobody’s been gundecking his reports. Over.”
“No gundecking here, Commodore, but I could use some horsepower on those aux gen parts. Plus, we never heard back from Bethesda on assistance on those recurrent infections. Over.”
“You’re sure these aren’t just dust? I get a lot of reports of dust infections when we’re operating in the Gulf. Over.”
“No ma’am. People don’t die from dust. We need some expert advice. Over.”
She’d promised to buck the issue up the line, but said that if it was getting to be an operational issue, he should look to his local chop chain for help.
He’d ended the conversation with a sense of the growing distance between them. He belonged to Roald for spare parts and manning, but out here, his sailing orders came from Bahrain. Commander, Fifth Fleet, directed operations in the Gulf, Red Sea, and Arabian Sea. In theory, parts, manning, and administration followed you seamlessly, no matter who your operational commander was. But in practice, the farther from home port, the more interruptions and delays along the way.
He leaned back, taking advantage of a break before heading back to Combat to review what exactly they were sticking their heads into. The flurry of messages was getting overwhelming, just like before every major flap. He glanced out at Mitscher again. Both ships were coming to a course for the eastern entrance to Hormuz. The destroyer’s station during the first part of the transit would be one thousand yards to starboard of Savo Island. This would place her between the cruiser and the coast. Carrier Strike Group One, centered on Carl Vinson, and Strike Group Nine, with Abraham Lincoln, would take turns providing continuous air cover.
Just that morning, as if to ratchet things up another notch, the Iranians had announced five days of major naval maneuvers. Both sides had put out Notices to Mariners, so it was hard to believe any commercial skipper would sail unaware of the brewing confrontation.
“Captain?” Cheryl Staurulakis, with Mills behind her. “You asked us to scrub down the Fifth Fleet ROEs against our combat doctrine. Got the results, if you have thirty minutes. Or we can give you the thirty-thousand-foot overview, and just leave the marked-up copy.”
Dan accepted the document and relaxed back into the chair, digging at the tension in his neck and back. The sky ahead was smudged and obscured by the nearly invisible dust that in July and August rose from the deserts. The Iranians liked to pull the eagle’s tail. Test American resolve. If it ever flagged, the rickety, artificial structure of monarchies and emirates lining the west side of the Gulf, inherited from the British Empire, would crumble. Iran would control the Middle East, and the world would change.
“Okay,” he murmured. “Let’s get to it.”
* * *
THEY gathered over a chart laid out on the dead-reckoning tracer, in the antisubmarine plot area back of Combat. Staurulakis, Mills, Chief Van Gogh, and Bart Danenhower. Exec, operations, navigation, engineering. Maybe he should have invited Wenck, Singhe, and the ship’s senior cryppie, but he’d always felt the smaller a meeting was, the better. He shuddered in the frigid air and leaned over the paper chart with its soft blues and tans, sea and desert. “I want to hit our most exposed position no later than eleven hundred. I need daylight in the Knuckle, and through the hundred-mile transit.” He waved a hand over the deep Gulf of Oman, their current position; then swept it westward, into the Gulf.
Heading in, the Strait of Hormuz kinked left around the Omani Peninsula. The International Maritime Organization had set up two transit lanes, each a mile wide. The southern lane was for outbound ships, the northern for those inbound to the refineries and terminals of the Gulf. The Knuckle was only twenty miles wide, with the Iranian-garrisoned Qeshm Island to the north and the (more or less) friendly Oman to the south. Then it bent southwest toward Dubai.
Dan had navigated here before. It was another labyrinth, a twisting, obstacle-littered gut of shallow sea dotted with production facilities, pumping stations, onload facilities, desert islands, barely awash reefs, and abandoned, cut-down drill platforms that stuck up to within a few feet of the surface … not to mention a ship every six minutes heading in as a like number exited. Just navigating would be a challenge. Doing so at full alert would test crew and sensors to their limits.
He turned to Van Gogh. “Chief, first thing, make sure we have all the Notices to Mariners entered. Matt, I need the boundaries the Iranians promulgated for—what are they calling it?”
Mills said, “There are actually two exercises. The regular navy maneuvers are announced from the strait to the quote ‘northern part of Indian Ocean.’ Missile live fires and ASW free play. No geographic limits promulgated yet.”
“And the Pasdaran?” Staurulakis asked.
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced the ‘Velayat-e’ Exercises in the southern part of the Gulf. Here.” Mills straight-edged it in.
Dan leaned in. A rough rectangle about twenty miles wide by thirty in depth. But not at the Knuckle. Instead, lodged deep inside the strait, like a pebble in a windpipe. It began at the thirty-meter line off the Forur Shoal and extended seaward, cornered by four islands, all Iranian or Iranian-claimed: Forur, Sirri, Abu Musa, and Kuchek.
Dan swallowed. He knew these desolate sandy islands all too well.
“Right across the shipping lanes,” Van Gogh observed.
The operations officer said, “And they advise commercial traffic to stand clear.”
“Which effectively closes the strait.” Dan straightened, set his palms to his back, and stretched. “All right, that makes it simple. Plot us a course right through the square. We won’t be alone, with dedicated F/A-18 coverage from the carriers. Now … battle orders. This is the last chance we’ll have to look over them. So let’s make sure there are absolutely no holes.”
* * *
HE didn’t get much sleep that night. Traffic was heavy coming out, as if eager to beat a deadline. Tankers by the dozen, containerships, oceangoing tugs plodding along with rigs in tow, liquid natural gas tankers with bulbous white tanks, like floating bombs. He’d left word to be awakened when they passed 26 degrees north. But when the call came, he was already up and dressed, showered and shaved.
He met his own gaze in the mirror of the sea cabin. Whether he felt up to it or not, men and women would depend on him today. He’d have to make the right decisions. Reach beyond what he felt he could do, and then do even more.
He stared into tired gray eyes mitered by wrinkles. Then closed them, and asked for help.
* * *
0500. He stood flipping through the morning traffic on the bridge. Van Gogh had calculated local dawn at 0532, but already the east was brightening and the tempera
ture rising. The swells were gentling as they moved in between the ramparts of land. Mitscher was on station four hundred yards ahead. Oman was off to port, the terrifyingly vertiginous cliffs of the northern peninsula and islands jumping straight up out of the sea. One headland behind the other, they were still dark, but shortly would illuminate in hues of rose and ocher.
The 21MC announced, “Stand by for on top.” A growing roar drew him out on the bridge wing. Two black arrow shapes howled over, no more than three hundred yards up, tail cones glowing bright orange in the half light, and dwindled, peeling off toward the strait.
“I’ll be in Combat,” he told the pilothouse at large. As the door slammed behind him the boatswain announced, “Captain’s off the bridge.” Then the 1MC, also in Nuckols’s voice but much louder, said all over the ship, “Flight quarters, flight quarters! All hands man your flight quarters stations. Remove all covers topside. The smoking lamp is out on all weather decks. Muster the crash and salvage team with the team leader in the helo hangar. Now flight quarters.”
* * *
COMBAT was frigid, as usual. But this time, anticipating hours in the chair, he’d brought his foul-weather jacket and a pair of uniform gloves. Donnie Wenck waved; Petty Officer Terranova barely glanced up from her SPY-1 console. The rest of the stations were manned, and a murmuration of voices and a rattle of keyboards underlay the constant hiss of the ventilation.
He settled into his seat with a sigh, booted up, and ran through the priority traffic while keeping half an eye on Red Hawk’s launch, clicking to follow comms with the helo through his headset. Aegis was already tracking eighty contacts in the strait area, but he wanted the SH-60B out ahead. The Seahawk had night vision, onboard electronic eavesdropping, and a data link, extending his radar, and ESM horizon, and giving him the option of visual checks on any contacts that seemed threatening. He gave permission for a green deck.
“Helo away,” announced the 1MC. “All hands secure from flight quarters.”