by David Poyer
“I guess it could be,” the chief quartermaster said, still peering ahead. “But that’s not what I’m wondering about … huh.”
“What?” Dan glanced back into the pilothouse. Everyone was looking out ahead, except for the JOOD, who had his face submerged in the black rubber hood of the radar repeater.
When Dan looked back at the sea, a thin dark line extended from dead ahead off to the left and the right, seeming to taper, or vanish, at the edges of vision. As he blinked at it the line extended, swiftly running out and away in both directions until it bridged the horizon. Van Gogh snapped his glasses down, turned, and shouted into the pilothouse, “Slow to five knots. Steady as you go.”
“Collision alarm,” Dan told him. A moment later the triple electronic tone blasted out over the 1MC. The thing was swiftly growing darker and wider. Obviously closing in. When he lifted his own glasses he saw it was a surge of sea, capped here and there with white, the overcast sun glowing and flashing off its sullenly lifted planes. It looked like the mother of all big surfing waves.
BM1 Nuckols, on the shipwide circuit: “Now hear this! All hands, stand by for heavy seas. All hands topside lay within the skin of the ship immediately. Now set material condition Zebra throughout the ship. This is no drill.”
Doors began slamming, isolating each space from the next, subdividing the ship into hundreds of watertight compartments. The JOOD, head still down, began counting down the range as the phone talkers slammed the dogging levers on the wing doors. “Twelve hundred yards … one thousand … eight hundred yards.”
Dan lurched across the pilothouse and pressed the Transmit lever on the 21MC. “Main Control, bridge. Skipper here. We’ve got some kind of major wave system headed our way. Anything you need to do to minimize damage, keep the engines on line, do it.” Then pushed the button for Radio, and told them to put out a voice warning, alerting anyone in transmission range. “And a message to Fifth Fleet and Strike One, too, flash precedence,” he added.
“Four hundred yards.”
Now it was visible with the naked eye, and the lookouts were calling it in. The sea itself was lifting, as if some unseen force were peeling it up. Above it rolled a thick, pearlescent boiling, a heavy, ghostlike mist. The only thing he’d ever seen remotely like it had been the shock wave that had wrecked Horn, but this came on much more slowly.
He’d heard of seismic waves. “Tidal” waves, though they had nothing to do with the tides. Generated by subsea earthquakes, they could march across thousands of miles of ocean, and wreak massive destruction when they hit land. But he’d never expected to see one.
He leaned on his chair, fingers digging into leather and steel. The silence; that was scariest. The way it just came on, noiseless, implacable, steadily larger. A massive, hollow tube that might have lit up the jaded brain of a lifelong surfer, but that frightened him. Without radar, or at night, this thing could have taken them unawares. How many ships had vanished, lost at sea forever, for just that reason?
A warship was built to take heavy seas, and the usual way you met them was head-on. But naval architecture design parameters didn’t factor in one-offs, monster rogues, whatever this thing was. Any ship ever built, balanced just the right way, could break its back. A mine or a torpedo could snap a keel with a bubble of gas. What might one single, massive wave do? He racked his sick, tired brain. He’d warned Engineering, so they could be ready to reset whatever tripped off the line. Gotten a message off, to warn anyone else in range. The bow lookout was sprinting for the port break, shemagh fluttering, leaving headset and cord lying on the foredeck. The dit dit dit, dit dit dit of the collision alarm staccatoed on, shrill and galvanizing. “All hands brace for shock,” the 1MC announced.
“Three hundred yards.” The JOOD lifted his face. The murmuring died away as men and women wedged themselves between consoles, or grabbed the hand-worn steadying cable that stretched along the pilothouse’s overhead.
Another danger occurred to him. The sonar dome was “inflated” with twenty-four thousand gallons of pressurized water. If he took this thing head-on, it would compress and, most likely, collapse the dome. In effect, blowing out the ship’s eardrums.
He told Van Gogh, “Back down, Chief.”
“Sir? What was that?”
“All back full. Right now!”
The OOD and helmsman gaped, but when he repeated the order they obeyed. He gripped steel, trying to concentrate. Though the screws turned inboard and the rudders were small, a Ticonderoga’s hull dimensions and 80,000 shaft horsepower made her extremely responsive. But dead in the water, then going astern, the helmsman would lose steerageway as they lost wash across the rudders.
Savo Island shuddered and seemed to fishtail slightly. Then, seconds later, gathered way astern.
He clung to the overhead cable, eyeing the passing sea, then the oncoming monster. They wouldn’t get up totally to a full backing bell. But he’d need steerageway, in case they started to broach. His brain felt sluggish. As if thinking were a skill he’d never learned. But he couldn’t stand aside, not now.
“Two hundred yards.” The rising bluegreen all but filled the windscreen. It towered above the bullnose. He couldn’t guess how high this thing was, but the pilothouse of a Tico-class was sixty feet above the waterline. How many millions of tons of sea water did a wave sixty feet high contain? It would lift the bow first, then the midships, and last, the stern. The point of maximum stress would be midships, as bow and stern hung unsupported by sea. The condition was called “hogging,” and it had broken many ships before.
“One hundred yards,” the JOOD breathed.
“This is the captain,” Dan said, raising his voice. “I have the conn. Belay your reports.”
Gas turbines were vastly faster in response than the steam-powered ships he’d started his career on. Savo could accelerate from no-load to maximum power in thirty seconds. So he waited, until it felt like he couldn’t breathe. But power up too soon, and he’d hurl ten thousand tons of metal into a cliffside at thirty miles an hour. He had to catch this thing at just the right—
“All engines ahead flank three,” he snapped, and the helmsman repeated the order, no hesitation now. A second ticked away. Another. The turbines began to whine, spooling up rapidly, their song clearly audible on the bridge in the creepy stillness.
Savo slowed her retreat, wallowed, then began to gather way forward again.
A foreswell reached her and the bullnose began rising. But too slowly for the massive slope that lifted ahead of them. At the same time that uncanny mist closed in, like the worst fog he’d ever seen. The helmsman cursed, fighting the wheel. Dan waited, squinting, clinging to his handhold, and as the massive wave pried the bow upward he ordered, “Left hard rudder.”
The ship shuddered beneath them, heeling, bowing like a stressed girder as the immense wave pressed them skyward. He felt heavy, as in an ascending elevator, but the heel from his radical rudder order was counteracting the wave, which was trying to force her over to port. The sea crashed through the bullnose and cascaded up over the foredeck in a welter of deep green, turning white as it broke apart on ground tackle and gun mount and VLS hatches but still rising, hundreds of tons of it, thousands, and slammed into the flat forward face of the superstructure, shaking it like an earthquake. It whipsnapped the JOOD off the repeater, where he was still clinging, to stagger forward and slam his nose into the window. As he shook a bloody visage the whole superstructure groaned around them. Sharp cracks and bangs carried through the metal as through the bone of one’s own skull.
The wave was passing; time to straighten her out. “Right full rudder … port engine ahead full, starboard engine back full.” With this combination, the ship would pivot in place as the bow swung to starboard, ready for the follow-on waves he anticipated would emerge from the mist-murk at any moment. This fucking white stuff … it seethed ahead of the windscreen … if only he could see—
“Right full rudder, port ahead full, starboard
back full … Number one engine indicates off the line,” the helmsman said, voice tense.
“Christ,” Dan whispered. Exactly what he’d hoped wouldn’t happen.
He hesitated as Savo began to topple. He’d slewed her as the great sea burrowed beneath, to lessen the strain on the keel and the dome. Accepting the risk of broaching; figuring to use the engines, if she started to go, to twist her back. But Savo’s controls had betrayed her before, some intermittent, mysterious glitch having to do with the grounding of the back plane wiring in the machinery consoles. It could trip a turbine off the line or, worst case, cascade, and shut down power entirely. He’d hoped it wouldn’t bite him in the ass when he was most vulnerable.
But of course, it had.
The 21MC crackled on through the scream of buckling aluminum and the roar of heavy water raining down, spray from the breaking crest rattling down and, along with the silvery mist, obliterating all sight. “Number one back online … no … offline again.”
The wave passed on, under them, and Savo keeled over to starboard, slowly, like a mastodon toppling to die. Metal screeched and groaned as the sea surged up toward them, as she inclined farther and farther. He couldn’t see the next wave. Couldn’t tell if it was larger or smaller than the one just past.
In extremis, then, fuck the sonar dome. Twist her back to where, if the second wave was the killer, she’d meet it head-on. “Right hard rudder,” Dan said, fighting the urge to scream it out. “Port shaft ahead flank emergency, starboard back flank emergency.”
“Engine room … engine room answers, port ahead flank emergency, starboard back full…”
Dan clung to the chair, brain vacant now. Nothing else left to do. Only wait to go on over, capsize and break apart and go down. Trusting in the engineers who’d designed her, and the welders who’d built her, for their lives. Everyone on the bridge clung tight, some dangling like apes from the bronze cable, boots kicking in the air.
The second wave materialized from the mist. The stern dropped away, and with a screeching, exhausted cry Savo Island’s bow rose again, to point into the misty sky. She shuddered and quaked as the sea boiled around her.
Then, very slowly, she began to roll upright again. “Rudder amidships,” Dan bit off. “All ahead one-third.” She shook and snapped and groaned, yet straightened a few degrees more.
Shaking hundreds of tons of green sea off her decks, she nodded heavily from side to side. The clapper of the ship’s bell rang once, twice, and again. The mist thinned, the particles of spray coalescing and falling as a light rain that pattered across the windshield. A third wave, smaller than the first two, lifted and set them back down.
“Steady up on one-zero-zero. Damage reports,” Dan said. His knees were shaking so badly he had to grip the arm of the chair to stay upright. He coughed, head swimming, and again, kept hacking. Once started, he couldn’t stop, couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
“All compartments make damage reports to DC Central,” Nuckols grated into the 1MC.
“You all right, Skipper?”
“Yeah, Chief. Thanks. Good work there.” He controlled his coughing fit with an effort of will, tensing his chest muscles, and focused on the sea again, where another, lower line rose ahead.
A fourth, then a fifth swell, each smaller than its predecessor, rolled past. The water seethed, but it was gentling; patches of creamy spume rocked and swirled as far as he could see. “Seems to be it,” the quartermaster said tentatively.
“Do these things come in groups? Or what?”
Van Gogh mused, rubbing his mouth. “There’s not much in Bowditch, Captain, not that I recall. Mostly, you hear about tsunamis when they hit land. Cause a load of damage there. Low-lying ground, coastal areas … you know the drill.”
Dan nodded. He lifted his voice to include helmsman, lookouts, talkers, the JOOD. “Set condition Yoke. Boatswain, pass ‘secure from collision quarters.’ Engineering … have the Chief Snipe call me when he has a handle on that outage. And the damage-control officer, report when he knows what that did to us.”
He looked out at the sea once more, the unpredictable, dangerous sea. And summoning the very last ounce of energy he possessed, dragged himself up into his chair once more.
* * *
THE messages began to stream in while they were still cleaning up. Repairing the davits, recovering the starboard inflatable, which had gone by the board, and patching four new cracks that had opened in the aluminum superstructure.
A huge tsunami had hit the Maldives, the island chain southwest of India. Fleet had a P-3 on its way there from Masirah with an OASIS II/ASIP upgrade, an electro-optical camera in a ball turret in the nose and the ability to stream pictures by satcomm. Exercise Malabar was postponed until further notice. Savo and Mitscher were ordered to the capital, Male, to render assistance while Pittsburgh took station to northward. Dan would be the initial task group response commander. He closeted with Staurulakis and Mills, going over the humanitarian assistance tacmemo and what would be involved in crossing the chop line to PacFleet’s area of responsibility.
When he was sure everything was being done to get ready, he went below. Male was twelve hours’ steaming at reduced speed, with one engine still off the line for a thorough checkout of the wiring and fuel supply.
He had no doubt that when they got there, they would all be sorely tried.
13
Male, the Maldive Islands
A LOFT the next morning, he peered down as Red Hawk’s shadow crossed a muddy, littered beach. The seawalls had been overwhelmed and wrecked. A beach road was obliterated. Streets had been turned into streams. Water was even now still draining off, scum- and debris-encrusted whirlpools circling, shimmering with the rainbows of oil and gasoline slicks. Solid columns of inky smoke streamed up to the north. Fallen trees, beached, listing boats, smashed homes, appliances, wheelbarrows, barrels, overturned trucks, uprooted poles and power lines, lay strewn across a rocky, still wave-swept strand, where the receding sea had chewed, battered, torn apart, and discarded them.
From five hundred feet up he could grasp the island’s truly frightening lack of elevation. The wave had hit from the southeast, open sea, where no reefs or other barriers could break its force. For at least a mile inland, everything was gone. Houses, shops, waterfront hotels, had been smashed into a shoal of wreckage that stretched for miles, both on Male and on the other, lower islands that reached north to the horizon. A few buildings still burned; bright orange flames roasted the sky. A beachfront resort, semicircular swimming area strewn with wreckage, smoldered sullenly, one wing slumped in collapse. Puddles the size of ponds gleamed under the cloudy sky, riffled by a light wind. Where the sea had receded, the ground was a parti-color landscape that, as they descended, resolved into a panorama of shattered debris: furniture, wood, paper, metal, and here and there, limp shapes like bundles of discarded laundry.
When he lifted his gaze he could take in nearly the whole atoll, a necklace of reefs and low coral islands. According to the charts, none were more than six feet above sea level. Behind them, to the west, stretched the shallows and reefs of hundreds of square miles of lagoon.
It looked like Paradise after Armageddon. Ahead, on a slight rise, hundreds of tiny multicolored dots became human beings, milling like a disturbed hill of fire ants. “Central stadium,” Strafer said over the intercom, pointing to a soccer field a few hundred yards in from the leading edge of the damage.
The airframe jolted, then settled onto its struts. Dan peered out to find the helicopter the epicenter of a stampede of dark-skinned men in long pants and T-shirts, mouths open, screaming. “Keep the blades turning,” he yelled to the pilot, pulling off his cranial as the crewman dropped the exit steps. “Let’s go, Stony, Chief.”
He stepped down carefully, holding to the handgrips. Staggered as he lurched off, still weak; dizzy; panting. The chief corpsman and Mitscher’s CO followed. The choking stenches of smoke and water and rot closed his throat. He turned back
to help unload boxes of canned food and plastic gallon jugs of water, the first installment of what would be many tons of aid. But the bent backs of the helo crew blocked his way. “We got it, Skipper.” The door gunner waved him off. “Go do what you need to. We got this.”
The crowd didn’t look welcoming. Someone was shouting, over and over, “This is America’s fault. This is America’s fault.” Others murmured, or just looked sullen, only slowly clearing a path. Dan handed out the candy in his pockets, but the children took it doubtfully, gazes lowered. The men shuffled into a queue as the crewmen handed each an MRE and a gallon jug of water. Past them, bodies were piled like logs inside a goal net.
His Motorola beeped. “Captain,” Dan snapped, turning to look across the flattened land to where Savo and Mitscher rode at anchor, well offshore, just in case whatever subsidence had raised the massive waves hadn’t exhausted itself. Two miles down the coast, Tippecanoe was feeling her way in.
Pardees’s voice. “Sir, First Loo here. RHIB reports they’re starting to see bodies, all around.”
He’d put the boats in the water to patrol back and forth a mile from shore. Partially for security, but with a more grisly task as well. “Right, Noah. Collect, bring on board, be sure to treat with respect. Lay ’em out and cover ’em on the afterdeck. I’ll find out where they go. I’ll be sending the helo back. Maybe he can vector us to more.”
Crisis response had always been a Navy mission, but it called for different skill sets than combat. He was here, the day after the disaster, to evaluate and plan the relief effort, along with providing what support Mitscher and Savo could muster. There was discussion of diverting Vinson to support air operations. Nor would the Navy be alone. The Air Force was planning C-130 missions in from Diego Garcia; they would land at Male International Airport, bringing far more in the way of supplies than Dan had, though the ships would be valuable in other ways—as a source of potable water and as a means, with boats and helos, to transport medical and other personnel elsewhere in the island chain.